I can confirm that the issue does occur on a Debian lenny (testing) laptop (Packard Bell BG45-U-300) with minimal packages installed.

This is easily fixed, however:
apt-get install acpi-support

I don't know how etch (the stable version) is affected, and/or whether the fix has been applied in updates to acpi-support, but it would be worth checking, since there are several pages documenting how to fix the issue when installing Debian etch on a laptop (e.g. here).

I would like to see a citation or an explanation for that allegation, or even an example. I'm pretty sure you're trolling, and it's rather depressing that you've been moderated so highly. "Innocent until proven guilty" is as much a tenet of the British legal system as the American one (more so, perhaps -- America has Guantanamo Bay...). The police are allowed to arrest people if they having convincing evidence that a crime has been committed, and bring them to trial, but they certainly cannot lock a person up for prolonged periods without passing him through the court system -- and, until he is found guilty, he is regarded as innocent in the eyes of the law.

The British government is mentioned in only a couple of sentences in the article. The amount of data that it plans to catalogue is certainly disturbing, but to accuse it of wishing to lock people up without trial (thus making them "guilty until proven innocent") is to distort the truth. The article is extremely speculative.