Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if this MPSIMS thread raised some eyebrows at the FBI/Carnivore HQ, even if the title’s completely deceptive…
When I had my old Internet Radio show, I did a block of songs dedicated to the outcome of the 2000 Election, including “Vote With A Bullet” by C.O.C. The next day, some anonymous person in IRC chat tried to talk me into installing a “kewl program I wr0te” on my computer. He was just a random script kiddie, though…I think.
The real question that is relevant here is not whether the agencies can search the internet and gather inteligence about the use of certain “red flag” words, but rather the fact that once the computers have this information, it would take far too long for the data to be checked and interpretyed by human operatives. There are far better ways for the government to get this sort of information than by random internet searches, although i have no doubt that certain sites and message boards are watched extremely closely. In short, there is just too much ‘noise’ on the internet to make this sort of thing useful on a large scale.