Private comm monitoring is always a problem (Score 1)

Hi friends, here are 0.02 from someone who used to live in deep Communism (as a cub, of course). I think that monitoring private communications by *any* central authority is a bad idea, even if that authority had really good intentions. The problem is that an image you're receiving by monitoring private communication is incomplete by definition, and sometimes very far from reality. Many peaceful and quite normal people would look as madmen, terrorists, or perverts to you if the only way you know them is by reading their private mail. This would get fixed if you had a chance to meet them in real life, but that's hardly possible if you are monitoring hundreds of people. If you then need to decide which one of these hundreds is a terrorist, you are in very large risk of fatal error. (Remember that terrorists *know* about this and they will by intention build their communication so that they look 'normal', but the real normal people won't.) This gets far worse if the monitored people know they're monitored, because then many become a little paranoid and start to auto-censor or hide their communication subconsciously. The net effect is that you get a group of suspicious, neurotic and isolated persons, which is quite bad for social stability. I think that the possibility of abuse of the whole system is just a minor danger in comparison with its natural consequences.