Who needs a second life when...?

There is perhaps a rule somewhere (or there soon will be) that all virtuali worlds are doomed to become caricatures of the real one.  At the end of the day all governments are scared that someone might be talking about them behind their backs.  It therefore should be no surprise that the US military have suddenly identified Second Life as a new  'Big Threat'.  Of course what governments really don't like is strong encryption, or rather strong encryption that they don't control.

This paranoia leads to such legal absurdities as the extension of the UK's RIP Act to make it an imprisonable offence to refuse to, or not be able to disclose the password for an encrypted file on your computer.  Quite why someone hiding evidence of terrorist activity, using encryption, would choose to reveal the key rather than take the two year rap is hard to fathom.  Furthermore if someone who didn't like you was to plant a file of random data on your hard disk (which is what strong encryption looks like) how exactly would you go about proving that it wasn't a terrorist manual for which you knew the password?

On further consideration it is perhaps not just the denizens of SL which are struggling with the nature of reality.