Not only do they want to know every single phone call you've ever made, they also want to know every single webpage you've ever visited:
The Justice Department is asking Internet companies to keep records on the Web-surfing activities of their customers to aid law enforcement, and may propose legislation to force them to do so.
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales held a meeting in Washington last Friday where they offered a general proposal on record-keeping to a group of senior executives from Internet companies, said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department. The meeting included representatives from America Online, Microsoft, Google, Verizon and Comcast.
The attorney general has appointed a task force of department officials to explore the issue, and that group is holding another meeting with a broader group of Internet executives today, Mr. Roehrkasse said.
Hey, why stop there? Let's put devices on TVs so they can know every TV program we watch. How much is enough, for crying out loud?
- Log in to post comments
I suppose this clears things up a bit on that washington internet gambling thing.
I guess we know how my wonderful state of Washington intends to enforce its shiny new ban on internet gambling.... Whatever happened to "the left coast"?
Books, we gotta track books, that's where most of the trouble starts, innit?
I can see where this is going: a cottage-industry of corrupt officials using people's Web-surfing activities to make them seem guilty until proven innocent. If they have a record of you looking at a porn or 9/11-conspiracy site, if only for a second, that makes you look like a wierdo, and you'll then be forced to prove you're not as "sick" as the sickest bit of whichever sites you've glimpsed, to whoever has that information.
It's a form of guilt by association: if _I_ think a certain site is "sick," and I know you once looked at it, then, in my mind, you're contaminated with the (imputed) sickness of the site.
Hell, why not go all the way and just put surveillance cameras in everyone's house. You don't have anything to hide do you?
Big Brother is here to protect you...
Clearly, the states must be required to issue with every new birth certificate a pad of FBI forms on which the new parents must list every book they read to their new child through age 12. The forms must be submitted to the FBI quarterly so it can be determined if future terrorists are being trained up by reading them subversive stories in the crib.
Surely no patriotic American who reads to his children nightly from the collected works of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell [as all patriotic parents do] would object. Those who do object, of course, will immediately be placed on the "no fly watch list."
Hey, come on. It's a post 9/11 world out there.
Osama Bin Laden et al can sit back and watch the western world do their jobs for them. Talk about return on investment btw......
Actually if you use any sort of set top based interface (DirecTv, Echostar, Tivo, IPTV, digital cable - other than a off air HD receiver) to your television, the capability to capture every button push is there already, and several of the larger programmers already do just that
I know, I build the systems
The technological ability to track our every move exists, as several have already pointed out. Capturing our phone calls, TV programs (via set top boxes of various stripes), web surfing, book buying (if charged), travels (via our EZ Pass transponders) is simple and can be done now. The challenge for GWB's stable of big-brother wannabes lies in how to process the enormous volume of data and extract something meaningful from it. Given their already demonstrated inability to process simple data, I don't think they'll get very far. But--and this is a very big but--they sure could mess with the lives of more than a few Americans and legal residents by just applying their paranoid fears to the data they do gather. I do think the political opposition, both Democrats and rational Republicans, need to put a stop to these political fishing expeditions before they get out of hand.
And you're worth watching. You do have such an exaggerated sense of the threat you pose to society. They'd be looking for keywords and keyphrases, not what you're saying. So you're chances of actually being visited by the gib (goons in beige) would only be increased if you posted things like, "child pornography". Or let somebody post it in your comments. (Aint I a stinker? :) )
That said, of course I'm against letting the Feds have a blanket okay on mining the Internet for tidbits. It's called "fishing for clues" and by law and precedent it's not allowed. You're supposed to have some idea of what you're looking for before you get that search warrant. Though a lot of time just a vague suspicion will suffice.
So post and comment on what interests you, and make sure to do back-ups.
Yeah, and now if you Google the words "ACLU involved with Mafia," this thread pops up as #1.
Hope that bogus meme never takes off, but if it does, people will cite Dispatches as the "source."