PPOPP

Party Pooping Ontario Provincial Police. I have mixed feelings about this debacle. On the one hand, the internet is not private, it is a public sphere unlike any other the world has ever had. You can have your say and you can have it immediately but you will not have it anonymously, even if your username is 1100111. So posting pictures of the new tattoo on your tush or advertising your amazing bush party on the net may not be the smartest thing to do. The internet is not anonymous. Employers look at it. I know this because I found out this week that a colleague got busted for posting something on Facebook that she had no business doing and someone was looking. Now all her internet business is being analyzed and all her emails are being read. I put a tracker on my blog because I'm nerdy but I am getting hits from Italy, Venezuela, Mexico City and Atlanta. I am watching them watching me.

On the other hand, I am wondering why the police are not using the internet to track down the weirdos who are stalking the kids online. Maybe they are and we just don't know about it, because our knowing about it would impede the investigation's progress. And, hell, who hasn't gone to a bush party? Is high school really high school if you haven't spent a Friday night rubbing your friends back while she pukes up 2 litres of Purple Jesus, or didn't wake up the next day with mosquito bites all over your unmentionables? In my day, the police had to hike through the bushes to find us and usually they were too lazy to get out of the car. They'd just shine the light on us and we'd run like cockroaches, further into the bush. The internet makes surveillance easier and it really isn't fair. However, putting a bunch of laws and moderating the internet like China does isn't going to help the situation any. Appealing to the police to just let the kids be kids is an appeal that would fall on deaf ears. Besides, those kids are dumb. Even I figured out how to hide groups and events on Facebook that I didn't want other people to know about.