In honour of this excellent askme thread, let's hear the stories you like to tell over and over again!→[More:]

Here's mine: I worked at a museum (and let me go off on a tangent here and say that mygothlaundry should go ahead and have that sit-down with that board member) and would often correspond with my friends in Palestine and read Palestinian news sites during my small amount of goofing off on the web time.

I was friends with the classic hacker BOFH net admin, and he was as much of a lefty as me, so did this with aplomb and no concern.

One day I got called into the office of my boss, The head of security was there and said that a friend of his at the dept of Homeland Security had said a computer with MY NAME ON IT had been flagged as terrorist activity.

I'd babysat the kids of the head of security and drank many a beer with him, and bitched about work, I was shocked.

I was really freaked out for about a month, but I was not sacked, and nothing came of it. I learned that this informal comment from dhs to the head of security at my job was way in violation of the PATRIOT act anyway. I talked to a head of the aclu in the city, and to a lawyer, and to the left wing media about it. Most of all I avoided the head of security, who told me one day as we were shutting the museum after an event, that his friend had expected me to get sacked.

I was an active palestine solidarity campaigner and an outspoken socialist, occasionally visible in the media. I did not stop this work. I started to learn about computer security and about the encroaching police state.

Months went by. And then, one day, the head of security was sacked for a HUGE breach of the rules. It was all I could do not to sing, 'ding dong, the witch is dead.'

There is a Japanese proverb for this: If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.

Thinking back on this story, the trauma of this experience probably goes a long way to explaining my current problems with work.

But the reason I tell it once in a while is to comfort people, to explain that people can be reasonable, and if you stick to your guns you can win through the subtle social pressure and censorship that is the leading edge of the police state. In my campaigning work I often work with people who encounter security forces or just random threats-once-removed, like I had. It's so important to stick to the facts and to be calm and to instill confidence.