Excellent points, Darkone.

Every word on the Internet flows through an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) like MAE East and MAE West.

What's an IXP? Think of it as an Internet "hub". IXPs handle the traffic between ISPs (Internet Service Providers). All routes on the Internet flow through an IXP at some point.

Who operates IXPs? The Department of Defense (DoD). They are strategic assets... heavily guarded, highly secure, with lots of redundancy in power and communications. Oh, and lots of spies, too. Hopefully good spies.

It is tempting to think that our email or IM conversations are "private", or that our financial info on bank and credit card sites is confidential. Paypal, Amazon, eBay, Google, stock trading, health care, insurance... if it is available on the Internet, then it is monitored and may be recorded.

The article you mentioned has a funny title, "Congress worries that .gov monitoring will spy on Americans". Haha! The Internet has been monitored since its very beginning. Most of us know that the Internet spawned from ARPANet which was created by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)... but how much do we know about what DARPA does?

DARPA's role; from a background doc on DARPA's web site:

DARPA’s primary mission is to foster advanced technologies and systems that create “revolutionary” advantages for the U.S. military. ...

So, yeah... Big Brother is here, and was already doing it's job long before 1984.

We can only hope that Big Brother's intentions are good. If that ever changes... then you'd better hope that the citizens are armed, because there will be civil war.

Speaking of civil war, I got a chuckle out of your comment about not wanting the job of collecting guns from citizens! Yeah, you would want to dress appropriately for that job... like in a tank! 🙂

I have known about the IXP's for a while. In my mind these are high value targets and hopefully are protected. Could you imagine the blackout of information we would have if the majority of those facilities were ever hit?

Well your IM and Emails are both considered non-secure communication and with a simple package sniffer I could show you. It would amaze some people the actual data you could attain from someone with some freeware tools and a IP address 🙂

The government with the 'Stored Communications Act (SCA)' could do whatever they wanted with emails as long as they weren't capturing them in transit. But recently a US district court ruled that it was breaking amendment 4 of the constitution so now they need a warrant to get this data.

Personally I think this data is still being gathered. Courts won the battle of the government using the SCA to prosecute you for a crime without a warrant.

Organizations like RIAA go after music downloaders like crazy, how do they do it? By basically using a packet sniffer to see what you are downloading and then taking your IP and reporting you to the ISP or authorities. Isn't that some type of invasion of privacy?

Now for Big Brother... I have no problem with with this concept as long as it is used to weed out criminals and people wanting to hurt a nations citizens. But I would have to agree if it gets to bad I could definitely see some civil unrest in the country that could elevate to violence.

And they say being a tax collector is a dangerous job... be the gun ban enforcer agent going from door to door 🙂

I do believe the Government does do some monitoring. However, I also think what they take and retain is something else, entirely. Considering how much info is flowing at one time, creating and maintaining files on any significant number of individuals would be herculean, at best. Despite what certain bureaucrats and elected officials seem to believe, our money is not infinite. The cost to create storage space, and pay employees to maintain the records and equipment for that would be prohibitive, I believe. They would have to prioritize, if they wanted to be able to gather and use any significant information in a timely manner. I've no doubt they can gather a lot in a short period of time, but, even with computers to sort and collate the info, they still need a human to determine the importance, and set the wheels in motion to act on it.

Very true, but it is amazing the technology there is out today where if you say certain keywords in email or on the phone, that your call or correspondence might get recorded and reviewed later.

I would agree with assessment of individuals of interest only being the ones focused on and not everyday civilians. But with our storage mediums growing all the time and programs and AI getting smarter. It will be a matter of time where the govt could parse through everything quickly.

hehe, SSC could be getting watched right now 🙂

Don't kid yourself, Darkone. SSC is being watched... along with everything else on the net.

The technology to parse and index the majority of Internet traffic already exists... how long does it take for you to find a page on Google? Google sells server farms -- with software, setup, and support -- as an Enterprise product. You can bet that Uncle Sam has at least one. Make that "at least TWO"; knowing Uncle Sam!

Web sites don't even have to be recorded ... they keep the record online by themselves.

It does not take an impossible amount of storage to store the world's email and IM traffic. Text is extremely compact, which means that HTML is compact, too. Until recently, Exchange Server's maximum database size was 16GB... heck, your next PC will probably have that much RAM!

Repeated messages, such as spam, are easy to record, too -- just save ONE copy and compress the variances in headers.

Weed out the spam, and the remaining traffic is "light" by enterprise storage standards.

Audio compresses pretty well, too. Have you ever wondered who invented the digital audio technology in every cell phone? If you said, "NSA", you would be right!

Images and video are more space-hungry but, if the Air Force can make ray guns, then anything is possible. 🙂

If all this is true how come home bred terrorists in the u.k get all there home made bomb making information from the internet??? like the ones who exploded their home made back pack bombs on the London under ground???was big brother was having a nap at that point?

They are not as clever as you would like to think. especially the British government! 😆 and young English/Pakistani youths parked in a McDonalds drive thru car park passing their mobiles around in the car watching cheering and laughing at American and British nationals being executed in Afghanistan and Iraq while munching burgers, all posted by extremists on the internet for them to download.

surely if it was being monitored they would not allow extremist websites ect. 😈

P.s not factual but i have had friends say they have witness these things ,and to be honest i believe them.

would also like to mention the fact that i am not racist!

actually now you mention it even typing this has worried me!

ooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh???? heavy stuff! back to the space ships if you please! 😯

Yes, it is heavy stuff, indeed, Gunny.

Some of the things that go on behind closed doors are more amazing (and, sometimes, more creepy or scary) than any sci-fi. I do not know what life will be like on Earth in 100 years, but it is certain that it will be very much different than today.

And it is inevitable that we will have problems before we fix them.

Government monitoring is not the same as government control. You can find almost any non-classified information on the Internet if you look hard enough and are willing to spend a few bucks. No single government can stop people from reading something, and they cannot even stop a determined person from posting whatever they want. The poster can simply get a web page in a different country.

If you want some insight into the determination of both the good guys and the bad guys in this never-ending struggle, check out Spooks. I believe that Spooks is produced by BBC, and it is an incredibly good TV series about MI-5.

People that get there kicks off of watching this stuff is truly missing something from their up bringing. No honest and moral person thinks that is acceptable behavior. I remember right around 9/11 when we started the war in Iraq all of the videos that you could find of the beheading of people. And regardless of your race, watching a innocent person be executed and taking pleasure in it is unacceptable.

The government if they wanted to could just capture all the IP addresses that have accessed those types of videos and log them and find out who the people are. Run checks on them and pick up anyone that sound suspicious.

If I could put myself in cryro and come back in a hundred years I would. I know with all the tensions growing all over the world and the larger countries building more arms, it is just a matter of time before a spark is lit and it grows into a fire. Maybe building my retirement home in on Antarctica might be a good thing 🙂

im a government employee. and im monotoring this website. by technicality, your conspiracy theory is true.

I knew I was being watched by the man. The way the gov't and most states in the USA is going its only a matter of time before all internet commerce is taxed. Nevermind the private websites that record your surfing to see which ads they need to serve to you.

i personally find Facebook most alarming. instead of the government, stalker, or Advertizing agency having to dig about to find out your personal info, track you, and what your doing. they can oh so easily just pop up your facebook. get your IP adress. heck most folk put there numbers on there FB, birthdays. and by using your family contacts, your mothers maden name can be aquired. ect. just too easy. ive recently pulled most of my personal info from my FB because of that. and im parniod that someday ill get blamed for a crime i didnt commit, and have to run, doing random mercinary jobs in the meantime. rather "them" not be able to find me. for the fast majority of the sheeple, its no big deal, go about your life, dont do anything illegal, and being tracked keeps you safe, unless someone wants to "get you"....

One of the ideas the clowns in the government came up with a couple of years ago was to tax everyone so they could make improvement to the internet infrastructure which is pretty bad in Britain.

IIRC it was either to be a one off tax or they were going to do it over a number of years, but you can bet that if they had gone ahead with it that tax would now be permanent one.