These past few posts are lolsome. All the tinfoil hat paranoia over hardware remote wake/shutdown, and nobody even cares that Intel AMT on Q-series chipsets also have hardware KVM?
The problem with using the "tinfoil hat card" is that it is overused. That card was used with all sorts of past things from economics to legal situations that only much later on blew up and became serious problems thus showing, albeit later, that the tinfoil hat card is typically used by the proverbial Ostrich sticking its head into the sand to avoid seeing something it doesn't like.
One thing that history shows us is that if something is possible, greedy people or businesses will try to obtain or maintain prosperity by abusing it as much as they can. Because something like that needs little foresight into the future, that is very much a truism easily realized and thus acknowledged by many.
Less obvious, but no less historically true are laws deliberately passed to have deliberately created (but plausibly deniable) unforeseen applications. A classic example is the No Child Left Behind Act which increased the median gap for the resultant product of the education system. On paper, it sounds good. On monetary payouts, both good schools and poor ones received more funding so that sounds good looking only at the finance aspect. But the actual product coming out meant the good schools turned out more and better students while the poor schools turned out students whose median education achievement was lower than before. Another situation arose when various beef producing usa companies were going to test 100% of their animals for "mad cow" prions. The bush republican administration told them no, but the companies were going to do it anyways, so the gov't then threatened to find/jail them because revealing statistics was going to create a panic that would damage the profitability of the beef industry. This reverse application of law was good for business profit, but bad for the citizens consuming the beef.
Do we have a government of the people? By the people? For the people? Do laws like the Patriot Act represent democracy or fascism? While there are other abused laws, there is also the ACTA treaty looming. ACTA will eventually be ratified by all founding members, but the EU is trying to use up the 18 month window before ratifying it since its society is more liberal about certain personal freedoms affected by ACTA than is the USA. The latest version technically creates a de facto situation where businesses can establish the de facto level of fines and de facto punishment levels. While direct wording doing that is not be allowable, cleverly worded requirements will allow de facto situations to exist. Thus, the only thing left to stop that would be that each country has to develop their own versions of laws to implement ACTA on their soil. It doesn't take much foresight to see that ACTA can easily be used to be an anti-porn law without any rewriting. That is because virtually every downloadable ecchi or hentai anime, manga, doujinshi is a copyright violation. Because ACTA empowers local police to enforce laws, localities that make most of their money from traffic speed traps will have a new lucrative method of making money by simply trolling the connections at the local ISPs (which have to cooperate or lose the more restrictive ACTA safe harbor) and finding people downloading copyrighted material. Since it would be the police doing it, the chain of evidence is strong and makes getting a warrant much easier. Once material such as MP3, scanlated print media, videos, fansubs, software programs, and hacking tools such as key generators are found in the search, fines can be levied for each which would profit the local government. Bush Senior and the republican party sponsored and passed various revisions to certain applications of bankruptcy law which makes declaring bankruptcy to avoid court-ordered payments hard to do. So it's possible these fines would force you into bankruptcy and then persist after bankruptcy. This is good for local gov'ts as it doesn't let scoundrels get away from treaty fines.
Etcetera. It may be a tinfoil hat right now, but the future will show more abuses as more laws become enacted in hardware. Who was it thinking inside the box that said laws can only be written on paper?
