So, it looks like the Pentagon has been engaged in a massive project to scrape content posted to the internet by ordinary citizens all over the world. The project is known to have been active between 2009 and 2015, but its current status is apparently unclear. In that time period, the Pentagon apparently contracted a third party to gather up a massive amount of content, including posts to comment threads and user forums on a wide variety of sites. The intent was presumably to look for chatter related to security threats. However, the effort gathered at least 1.8 billion posts over 8 years, many of them casual remarks or complaints made in the course of conversation on general interest sites.
This was discovered because security researcher Chris Vickery found the data lying about in an unsecured Amazon AWS repository. The vendor that was collecting the data stored it in a AWS bucket that was accessible to anyone with a free AWS account. Vickery, who has made a kind of cottage industry out of finding unsecured data online, describes the findings in detail here: Dark Cloud: Inside The Pentagon's Leaked Internet Surveillance Archive | UpGuard.
With all the, uh, open and energetic political talk here on the SDMB, I can only imagine that some of it got sucked up in this data collection effort.
Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.
Back around 2000,all this was thought to be relevant. It was imagined that all the forum posts were too much for the sub-infinite number of monkeys to individually read, so they filtered for code words like kill, president, bomb, pentagon, etc. So those of us helpfully created signature blocks containing those words, to help them search.
This was a thing long before around 2000. Way back in the 1980’s, in the heyday of telephone-linked Usenet, people were creating sigs full of keywords like that.
