In his final State of the Union Address as US President, on Monday, George W. Bush tried a bipartisan approach when invoking subjects that range from the economy to the Iraq war.

Bush left out one subject that millions of Americans and many more around the world have been affected by. In his 53 minute speech, the President did not mention online gambling. His administration has, meanwhile, been pushing forward the Cyber Spy Initiative, an initiative that will enable the government to monitor online gambling.

In the address, Bush demanded that Congress and the Senate comply with his administration's controversial no-warrant eavesdropping program. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has yet to be revised to his liking, with stern opposition by representatives who find it a throw-back to the Watergate-era.

The law would allow the government to spy on people who conduct searches on the web too, including on The Google, as bush referred to the famous search engine.

Ironically, the State of the Union came exactly on the date that the international Data Privacy Day.

The price tag of the initiative is estimated at $6 billion. That will be the cost of building a secretive system protecting US communication networks. Who is it protecting the US from? Online gamblers!

While the Bush administration is designing cyber spying initiatives, the European Union is taking the polar stand. IMEGA reports that the EU is even considering having IP addresses, by which one can tell where the computer user is located, qualify as personal data, thus protected from such spying schemes.

Such a step would, however, hurt web companies, Google included, and other Web 2.0 services, who personalize their sites to users based on the IP addresses.

But right now the only address to concern web users in the US and elsewhere around the world is Bush’s address.