Considering the interest generated here regarding the USA Patriot Act, folks might be interested in visiting (or revisiting) the Electronic Frontier Foundation's excellent webpage on computer security and privacy.

And if you have kids using the computer either at home or school (especially university/college level, which appears will be targeted by the new bill), you might want to consider having them go the encrypted route for privacy and security in this "new era"--kids can be pretty naive when it comes to giving out private information on-line.

http://www.eff.org/Privacy/eff_privacy_top12.html