AP: You Are Guilty Until Proven Innocent

I was working on an article about making the distinction between Enterprise and Consumer Cloud Computing, in which I offered the viewpoint that the current issues involving the Enterprise Cloud are matters of implementation, while the main issue with Consumer Cloud is one of ideology.

Enterprise Cloud discussions are about public v private v hyrid, virtualization v real cloud, and what metrics are used to justify or reject a Cloud Computing initiative or strategy.

But the main Consumer Cloud discussion is whether we should do it all. Shall we turn over all of our personal information to a big corporation, which is very likely to cave into governmental "requests" to see that information?

Just after I finished the piece, I saw the breaking news about how a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed the latest snooping by the FBI, sometimes in concert with local law enforcement, to detect and prosecute criminal behavior. Facebook was prominently mentioned.

The Orwellian idea of Feds camped out on popular websites, trolling for double-plus ungood thoughts and actions, is chilling enough. But I think most of have grown to expect fascistic behavior on behalf of men and women with badges. Certainly, an intrusive, paranoid federal government didn't start or end with the George W. Bush administration. (After all, the FBI works out of the trans-cendant J. Edgar Hoover building.)

What really set me off was the headline for the Associated Press report on this story: "Break the law and your new 'friend' may be the FBI."

While this headline is factually correct, it obliterates the notion, which should be implicit in this story, that an FBI that trolls Facebook and other social networking sites will not necessarily be going after convicted criminals.

This genie, once out of its bottle, will consider anyone a suspect; or in the words of Ronald Reagans' Attorney General Ed Meese, "if you're not guilty, then you wouldn't be a suspect."

Nice to see the AP being so compliant with Newspeak 2.0. I look forward to its future reports on how war is peace and how we've always been at war with Eastasia.