[Tenchiro]

U. Florida cops ask fiction writer for fingerprints, DNA

The university police at Gainesville's University of Florida have targeted a graduate student in the English program over his publication of a piece of horror fiction on his LiveJournal. The police have repeatedly visited the student and demanded that he submit his fingerprints and DNA to them so that they can compare the fictional murder he described in his story to evidence from any similar unsolved murders.

snip...

On May 12, detective Sanders of the University of Florida police left him a voicemail asking him to contact her. This began a series of meetings and calls with the University Police in which detectives repeatedly pressured him to allow them to fingerprint him, so that they could compare his prints to evidence from unsolved murders. They cited his publication of the horror fiction as the reason.

What kind of world do we live in where graduate student, majoring in English gets investigated for writing fiction?

Are university cops, actually real police?

 

[MudGrrl]

in a few years, everyone will be a cop.

 

[Ciaran]

What kind of world do we live in where graduate student, majoring in English gets investigated for writing fiction?

Are university cops, actually real police?

It's not the whole world, but it is the U.S. (As well as many other places but not the WHOLE world)

And IMO it's going to get worse. MudGrrl is right saying that eventually everyone will be cops. How much of a stretch is it going to be to REQUIRE people to report "terrorist activities"?

It's coming... mark my words.

 

[Tenchiro]

It's a figure of speech. But seriously, who hasn't strangeld a hobo or two?

 

[syadasti]

It's not the whole world, but it is the U.S. (As well as many other places but not the WHOLE world)

And IMO it's going to get worse. MudGrrl is right saying that eventually everyone will be cops. How much of a stretch is it going to be to REQUIRE people to report "terrorist activities"?

It's coming... mark my words.

Its already here (see page 3), Telecoms across the nation have the Narus STA 6400 installed in dozens of metropolitan Internet backbones across the nation.

Narus Product Page

That Narus STA 6400 is smoking fast:

Industry-leading packet processing performance that supports network speeds of up to OC-192 at layer 4 (TCP/UDP traffic) and OC-48 at layer 7 (application layer - telnet, FTP, SMTP, POP, etc traffic), enabling carriers to monitor traffic at either the edge of the network or at the core.

OC-192 = 10000 Mb/s - ie an internet backbone!
OC-48 = 2500 Mb/s - ie a regional internet backbone!

Internet = own3d!

 

[Echo]

Man would it ever suck to be Stephen King right now.