The Government tracks Blogs

[Paradox]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1471&ncid=1471&e=4&u=/ibd/20040427/bs_ibd_ibd/2004427tech

I can kind of see why they'd do this, but still... wtf?
Blogs don't threaten "national security"

[moocow]

*deletes all existence of her blog* :p

[Dart Zaidyer]

Big deal. The government is tracking this very message. But is it dangerous? Heck no.

Besides, if you post information on the internet, you'd be stupid NOT to expect somebody to get their hands on it.

[moocow]

It honestly doesn't bother me. If it did, I wouldn't have an online journal where ANYONE can read it :p

[Riku]

It doesnt bother me, it's not like I ever threaten national security anyways.

[Rainman]

Bah, they can't really prosecute you for having an opinion. They'll most likely only use this if they know someone could possibly be a terrorist/spy/snowman/whatever.

[AtmaWeapon]

OH NO!!! The government is potentially monitoring information that is placed in a format that is publicly visible to the entire world! It's a good thing I made sure they put tin foil around the server my blog is on.

[SixTen]

Blogs are pointless. Who cares if the government can see them? They can see everything else as well. It's not a big deal.

[Menokh]

So? Who really cares?
The government also tracks porn. What does it matter?

The government can read whatever public comments they want. Blogs are public. What bothers me is when the government wants access to private things, like my computer or instant messaging.

[Ich]

I remember seeing this thing on the news about six government employees who have to surf porn all day, looking for kiddie porn. There are six people in the same room, but I bet they're allowed "bathroom breaks" pretty often.

Monitoring blogs and whatnot would be pretty boring, although I can't say I wouldn't want a job of sitting at a computer and surfing the net all day.

[Ibis, God of Magicks]

That brings up a good point, how much are we the tax payer, paying officals to serf the web looking for that kinda stuff?

[theplustwo]

The only reason you would care is if you are a pedophile.

[AtmaWeapon]

You are paying precisely the cost of altering the current system that monitors emails.

I think the single stupidest point I've heard conspiracy theorists make is that the taxpayer is wasting money on all this extra staff that the NSA and CIA spend on monitoring emails and cell phone conversations. Yes, they do monitor emails. (http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040406.gtterror06/BNStory/Technology/) If you are wanting to plan some form of illegal act, you should know that the internet is the stupidest way you could transfer information about it because you leave a paper trail and you have no idea how many people snagged your message while on its way. Without encryption, you may as well just use public television to plan your activities.

Anyway, the way it works is it is a computer. See, computers are these neat machines the government has that can read hundreds of thousands of emails in a matter of minutes. They don't get bored and they work for just the cost of electricity! These computer machines can look for suspicious words like "bomb" and "Super Bowl" and possibly entire sentences like "We need more plutonium for the bomb we will detonate at the Super Bowl". When these computer machines turn up many of these suspicious phrases from similar sources, it makes a screen that looks like this:
ALERT ALERT ALERT
ALERT ALERT ALERT
ALERT ALERT ALERT and makes a really annoying "BBBEEEEPPPP BOOOOPPP BEEEPPPP" until someone checks out the emails in question. When this one person is done checking these 4 or 5 messages out of a few million, they decide whether an investigation is necessary. It is at this point that significant man power is devoted, but also at this point the NSA or CIA has reasonable suspicion that they can make an arrest based on the messages. So, you have a choice with this system. Email can be unmonitored and the NSA and CIA can keep relying on exhaustive investigation and guesswork and luck to catch terrorists, or you can accept this system that helps them devote attention to people that need to be spanked.

I would imagine they already have google-like spiders that crawl web pages. Why is it such a surprise that the computer machines can scan a blog?

You can be cute and start writing stuff like "I'M PLANTING A BOMB ON A SCHOOL BUS TOMORROW!!!!11" in your blog to "protest this activity and make it less effective", but think about it. In doing so, you make the system less effective, which means if they get a false positive, you just wasted the tax dollars that are so precious to you because a high-salaried man had to read the entirety of your blog because you tricked a low-cost computer program into thinking you were a terrorist. Personally, I don't do anything the NSA would find interesting or suspicious, so they can just scan away! I hate computer machines, so it's justice that they have to spend 0.000012 seconds reading my e/n blog posts.

BTW, you "surf" the web. A serf would be a feudal servant. Kind of like the relationship between the games "King of the Hill" and "Serf of the Pool".

*Edit* This post is going to disappear because the JEWS CONTROL THE MEDIA :mad:

[theplustwo]

Atma: tl;dr.

Also: computer machines? internet?