Vermont Catches the New Hampshire No Way No Who Flu?

Sen. Patrick Leahy, (D-Vt.), today called for the U.S. Congress and President George Bush to convene a conference on privacy... a call, of course, which the Honorable Senator made public. There's nothing wrong with that.

This piece itself out of Computerworld never uses the dreaded acronym RFID but it's there in abundance between the lines, squished in with a mix of other privacy matters on people's minds these days. You'll recall New Hampshire has an initiative afoot that would practically ban the sale of tiny nameplate license plates for kids' bikes. New hampshire and Vermont being neighbors, I figure this bugaboo crossed over the border and has now infected the imagination of the Live Free and Pay a Ton of Taxes State.

Without a new direction from the government, the U.S. is in danger of turning into a "micromonitoring" state, where the everyday actions of normal citizens are routinely tracked, Leahy said at the Association for Computing Machinery's Life, Liberty and Digital Rights conference in Washington... If this continues, it won't be long before we think of privacy as a quaint 20th century idea," said Leahy...

Sort of the way some people think of the Senate these days?

But this was my favorite line in the whole report: "Let the American people be part of this dialogue," he said.

Really? Like anyone could get a word in edgewise? Is there that much air left in Washington?