|
Sinergy -> RE: Yes, they really are monitoring all internet traffic, emails, website visits, postings... (6/20/2007 12:12:25 PM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: farglebargle
quote:
ORIGINAL: stef
Settle down, Chicken Little. The sky is just fine. They're not watching all traffic, they don't have the resources or means to.
~stef
So, you didn't read either the article, or the court filings in EFF v. AT&T?
Because they have THE ADVERTISING LITERATURE AND SPEC SHEET OF THE ROUTER TAPS WHICH DO IT.
You can buy it off the shelf.
To respond to what stef wrote, the key word which stef left off the end of your sentence is "yet."
As far as what farglebargle is pointing out, yes, it is in the nature of digital traffic that it probably is all recorded. If I am a router, and I get a packet, I add my router header information to the router and send it upstream/downstream to the next router in my look-up tables. Additionally, I keep CRC information about the packet and record it and the packet until it expires based on a value set up by the router / server administrator. This is because I might get a message upstream which tells me to resend the information.
The short answer is "yes," every bit of traffic is recorded.
The real answer is that the data is fed through computers to find words like Al Qaeda, assassination, global warming, Teletubbies, Liberal, Democrat, global warming, etc., which are then flagged and the information is then sent to data mining computers who try to figure out the context those words are found in. These data mining computers then determine how serious the information is and flag it to monitor the IP and username, flag the message to send to an actual human to look at, flag it to have the NSA people show up and Gitmoize you the user, etc.
The reason I make the point about "yet" is that our computing power is not yet sufficient to fully examine the vast amount of digital traffic.
I do not encrypt my computer. There is a trade off between performance of a computer and level of security. The way I look at it is that I do not put anything relevant to anything on any computer (even if Microsquish says my credit card info is safe in their database) that is connected by wire to the outside world. On the other hand, I do encrypt my phone conversations with other verizon users.
But then I come from a high security background, network security, and have some familiarity with the methods used.
While the NSA / CIA / FBI / etc., talk endlessly about the threat of foreign powers, it is really corporations who are pushing the envelope on computer security. They are the ones who convinced Congress to allow 128 bit encryption back in the NT days. At the time it was determined that it would take 10,000 years to decrypt it based on that technology. Of course, computer speed increases exponentially so we have 256 and higher. It is only a matter of time.
Sinergy
|
|
|
|
