US Spying On Its Citizens 2208

You seem to know about trojans, viruses, keyloggers and worms that are capturing data which could be datamined for nefarious reasons. But it's the datamining itself which poses a threat to freedom. It's a powerful, powerful tool, and there is plenty of raw information that can be collected straight off the 'Net.

Yes. Then it would be quite easy to deliberately introduce such viruses-trojans-etc directly from your ISP, would it not? Spoofed headers, anyone?

All the agents have to do is wake up ol' Judge Simpson, tell him "We need to monitor a computer for reasons of national security," and it's a done deal. Federal agents have already done what they said they would never do: Abuse USA PATRIOT provisions to track domestic criminal suspects. Those are some pretty loose restrictions, and completely usurp provisions ing the Bill of Rights.

Maybe, maybe not. Show me some citations describing the need for this type of information.

Again, let's see some citations to back up these buttertions. Do you really know what is and is not getting people detained and-or convicted? The USA PATRIOT act does not require detainees to be accused of a crime in order to be indefinitely detained merely on the authority of federal agents. Detainees are not required to be provided with legal counsel, and their families will not be contacted. Their idenbreasties will be withheld. They will have "disappeared." This is all fully within the provisions of USA PATRIOT. No tinfoil hat required.

US intelligence agencies have unbelievable computing power at their disposal. Just how much computing power they have is clbuttified; but it is more than any other private or public insbreastution could ever buttemble in one place. The most powerful supercomputers in the world are owned by the NSA. They're sitting right on the Mae East router, with ungodly bandwidth. They are doing real-time datamining of significant amounts of Internet traffic using performance-tuned purpose-built algorithms. They won't catch everything; but they're casting a pretty wide net. Web crawling and datamining is used to narrow the field significantly, further increasing the likelihood of a "catch." Of course, even with all of this power and data mining technology, cryptographic techniques such as steganography are still presenting significant barriers. But that doesn't mean they aren't automatically building a file for you, based upon the mere fact that you post to Usenet political groups. You have a file. Believe it.

That's not what I've been reading. Let's see a cite for that.

They can't even reveal that they have been contacted by federal agents.

I'd be a lot happier if NSA was turning its computational power toward stopping these very real security threats, most of which are of foreign origin, instead of spying on Americans in this ridiculous witch hunt.

If the satellites aren't being used, then why are they up there? Your argument doesn't hold water.

Thanks to advances in AI-machine learning and datamining, combined with outrageous computer power, tracking millions of Internet users is not as impossible as you seem to think.

USA PATRIOT has swung the door wide open to allow domestic spying, and to allow innocent Americans to be detained indefinitely without being charged with a crime, without legal defense and without contact with their families. That consbreastutes a heinous hijacking of the Bill of Rights. This USA PATRIOT witch hunt should be abolished post haste, and we should start dealing with the very real "cyber threats" that do exist, most of them being of foreign origin.

R