Haha, dryeo, you just converted me. I guess I, like most people, didn't believe in intelligent design before, because when talking about all of the billions of years of history/evolution of life on the planet, intelligent design is such bullshit. But the way you presented the evidence ("dogs and monsanto", 10000 years) made it is so clear. :-]

Now I'll be stuck in sarcasmo-ironic mode for the rest of the day. Maybe I'll convert someone at work to also believe in "ID". Hehe.

I once took a course in "Math philosophy" (a simple introduction course, with e.g. Gödel numbers, introduction to infinity, and things like that), and at the end of that course we were asked to write about something. I decided to ask friends about how they viewed numbers. To my surprise, everyone had pretty much their own unique way. I think I asked about 10 people. Some viewed numbers as colors ("the number 2 is of course blue" or something along that line), some viewed the numbers as on a traditional line, one guy thought of the numbers as being in a circle and you took one out as you wanted to use it and then had to put it back. Not everyone included the number zero (or negative numbers) in their explanation. My self, I see the natural numbers on a line, but the line has "angles" at the numbers 10 and 20. Perhaps this is because in my native language, the spoken words for 10..19 are not constructed in the same simple manner as 30..39, 40..49, and so on.

Nomatter what the technical details about this specific interception in Canada was, surveilance like this is most likely designed into the system, and something which today is automated.

It's pretty scary how not more people are complaining these days. Perhaps it has been a slow enough change, compared to other changes due to computers and the internet, that people in general don't notice. During the cold war, people calling out from the Eastern block knew that their phone calls were being monitored. Sometimes they could hear audible traces of this as well. When they sent or received snail-mail, there was a risk that the mail was being opened, read, and then closed again. This was detectable as well by the receiver. This non-free flow of information caused people to always have a "background fear", living in a police state controlling how they expressed themselves.

After the cold war, there was a feeling among many people that a victory had been won. "Never again" that kind of thought/expression control. Yay.

The difference between then and now is that in the digital world, you don't hear the clicks, and you don't see the edge of the envelope as being opened and read by someone else. This makes it so much more important that the governments or intelligence services, in the _few cases_ where they may have a just cause in intercepting something, are under scrutiny from some independent entity which reports on any transgressions they make. (Such as overly broad invasion of privacy, reporting on the number of people each month (or year) that were under surveilance, etc. Openly reporting on cases like the one in Canada, so that the public is aware about how many "false positives" that the system accuses each year, and what it costs.)