Sybase Advertises 'PATRIOTcompliance' 158
xmtrx writes "While everyone is rabidly pouncing, pounding and going pundit on Palladium, little-to-no attention is being paid to enterprise-class spyware such as Sybase's PATRIOTcompliance Solution. Their ad includes such gems as "Non-compliance is not an option" and "...helps you satisfy the many integration requirements of the USA PATRIOT Act by... filtering your customers, employees and suppliers against known suspects, and then... continuously monitoring their future activities." No punchline." The laws passed which affect financial institutions are mostly opaque to Joe Citizen. Sybase's press release sheds a little bit of light on what is going on behind the scenes.
Re:Not So Bad (Score:2, Interesting)
Trying to avoid Godwin's here, but it's hard.
What are you smoking? The US government has a budget of over 2 trillion dollars a year. Do you have any concept of how much money that is?
If every byte on your hard disk were one dollar, it would be 2 terabytes.
If you wanted to count that much money, counting 1 dollar bill per second, it would take about 64 thousand years.
It's 2 million million dollars.
So year, they have enough resources to throw the whole IT industry in jail on a whim, or to say... throw all of any religion they don't like into jail.
Re:Not So Bad (Score:1, Interesting)
Give me a fucking break. We got attacked by: 1) 19 guys with boxcutters, whose "highly sophisticated coordination" consisted of buying plane tickets on Yahoo Travel and boarding with perfectly legal carryons; 2) A shoebomb guy who forgot to bring a working lighter for his cannon fuse, and 3) A dirty-bomb guy who had no bomb, no materials, no actual plan...what did he do again?
In response to 19 people with sharp objects and rudimentary piloting skills, we've bombed the crap out of Afghanistan and ousted a government. Entirely appropriate, imo. But now, because of those 19 guys, we're overturning the freedoms that hundreds of thousands of men have died to defend? What the fuck is wrong with us?