[9788] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Drafting Legislation [Yes, He *Is* a Bit Spooky]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John [Francis] Stracke)
Fri Jan 21 12:28:09 1994
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 1994 11:45:02 +0500
From: francis@avalle.insoft.com (John [Francis] Stracke)
To: com-priv@psi.com, cosndisc@yukon.cren.org
In-Reply-To: "David Rothman"'s message of Thu, 20 Jan 94 21:59:04 -0400 <2968204711.1.p00997@psilink.com>
>"We're not looking at the Internet as a way to gather intelligence," he
>said. "The Internet is not viewed as a source of information for us."
>
>Nonsense. There I'd agree with Robert Steele. In fact, I have trouble
>thinking that the CIA isn't systematically monitoring the 'Net already.
This would be iffy; the CIA has no authority to spy domestically, and
a huge fraction of the traffic on the Net originates from the US. (I
don't know if that makes listening to it domestic spying, but it
should; if it doesn't, that means the CIA could put up a spy satellite
& point it at us--no real difference.)
The *NSA*, on the other hand, faces no such limitations (since they
have no charter); I'd be surprised if they don't monitor at least some
of the traffic, though I'd have a hard time believing they monitor
*everything*--they'd have to have systems capable of parsing keywords
out of streams flying by at T3 speeds. Then again, let's see--6Mb/s,
784KB/s, average word about 7 characters (quick "wc -cw" on my mail
directory)--yeah, you could probably buy an off-the-shelf system to
handle that (it'd be really susceptible to multiprocessing, since you
could separate the word parsing from the word recognition). Shit.
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