Do you think its possible that the Gov’t is monitoring certain websites and gathering information on everyone that clicks on them?
ex.
There are certain websites out there that seem to be dedicated to the lives of people that the Gov’t may see as being “socially dangerous” People like
Adolf Hitler
Joseph Stalin
Momar Kadaffi
Fidel Castro
Osama Bin Ladin
Malcolm X
Idi Amin…ect (You get the picture)
Now, do you think that it “might” be possible that the FBI places flags on some of these sites in order to help them track people that it feels may be followers of worshipers of people like this. (or their cause). Like, every time someone clicks on these type of websites, their e-mail address is automatically traced and downloaded onto a seperate file that the FBI keeps in their records.
Lets say for example, some guy constantly goes to sites pertaining to Adolph Hitler or the Holacaust over and over again, then a few months later, some nut living in his vicinity starts going around attacking Jewish Politicians and bombing synagauges . The FBI would want to catch this nut fast, so right away they would resort to this list of people that have been researching these Pro-Hitler sites to start investigating as possible suspects.
Another example
Say some person constantly goes to Porn sites “especially key sites that center on children” and keeps going there over and over and over again. Then all of a sudden , a rash of rapes and child abductions break out in the area his e-mail address has him listed to. With his e-mail address on file, the police can right away start looking into this guys background and start an investigation to see if he’s the one comitting these crimes.
What I’ve typed above is all based on sheer theory (no cites and no evidence), but do you think it’s possible that the Gov’t has people watching everything we do on the web regardless of what sites we choose to go to…Do you think they might be watching all of us right now? :eek:
I know there was a lot of talk about a message board a while back where there seemed to be a lot of (professed) Muslim extremists, posting generally congratulatory/celebratory comments about acts of terrorism; it was theorised that they whole site was a trap set by the FBI, but how could you prove such a thing?
I pretty much assume any device capable of two-way communication is being used to monitor me in some way. The cable company is tracking what I watch to determine ad rates. A bevy of software companies are trying to maliciously install programs on my computer to invade my privacy. Spammers, telemarketers, and mass mailers are buying information on my spending habits from my bank and credit card company. So I see no reason to think the government isn’t rooting through log files on back bone servers to see what I’m browsing to, especially with a loon like Ashcroft at the wheel.
Let’s put it this way. Look at what Google is able to accomplish with their resources. They crawl through a very large fraction of the internet to do their indexing. So it is easy to imagine a government service that tracks website hits somehow, intercepts and reads everyone’s email, and reads every message board post. The trouble is what to do with that data. OK, you have thousands of terabytes of data. How do you sort that into useful information? Yes, if they are interested in a certain person it would seem to be pretty easy for the government to track every website they visit and every email they send. Even if the FBI’s hackers are thumb-fingered, they can always get a warrant for a keystroke logger to be installed secretly on your computer, and if they do that then no amount of encryption is going to protect the suspect.
But what is the NSA/FBI/CIA/NRO going to do with their copies of every email sent for the last 15 years? They can’t read the damn stuff, there’s too much. They’re going to have to filter. OK, only keep emails with keywords: “president”, “Allah” “assassinate”, “drugs”, “jew” “FBI”, “terrorism”, etc. But then you’ve got to include various misspellings, typos and 1337 speak, otherwise you’ll never get the illiterate hicks and/or h4><0rz who want to “asorsenite teh pr3zidant”. Think of the ways spammers try to get past spam filters. And then think of all the damn spam emails their automation is reading, at least half of all web traffic now is spam. And then think about how much communication can be accomplished with emails that just say something like: “go ahead with what we discussed that one time”, even without explicit codes.
So I imagine that yes, there are spooks out there trying to compile useful intelligence out of all this. But it can’t be easy. And even if the FBI is tracking your visits to porn sites, what are they going to do with that information? They can’t use it in court against you without revealing that they are tracking everyone’s porn visits. It seems the best use they could get would be to compile an “investigate” list of people who need to be checked out more thoroughly. But I doubt that would do them much more good than a list of people who are members of Mosques, the NRA, Operation Rescue, or PETA. How many cops will the FBI need if they are going to watch the porn-surfing habits of 250 million people?
So yes, the spy agencies can probably thoroughly track any one particular person they single out for investigation. But generating leads from internet traffic seems mostly like a giant nest of wasted time and dead ends.
I would be surprised if they aren’t. I also wouldn’t be surprised to discover that some of these sites have been set up by the authorities and record IP @ and other info for all visitors. The government has a lot of technological capabilities, many of which are not known by the general populace.