This week, NOW reports on new evidence suggesting the existence of a secret government program that intercepts millions of private e-mails each day in the name of terrorist surveillance. News about the alleged program came to light when a former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, blew the whistle on what he believes to be a large-scale installation of secret Internet monitoring equipment deep inside AT&T's San Francisco office. The equipment, he contends, was created at the request of the U.S. government to spy on e-mail traffic across the entire Internet. Though the government and AT&T refuse to address the issue directly, Klein backs up his charges with internal company documents and personal photos.
This hub in SF, according to the show, itself, essentially keeps track of every bit of Internet traffic on the west coast of America. Now, some might argue that this data would be simply too voluminous to get anything useful from. The catch is, the USG can send in search algorythms that will seek out incriminating data. Those algorythms are flawed (they were written by humans, after all) and might result in false positives. In other words, they might bag someone like you just for talking about your pal Osama, whom you are only referring to in jest as your pal. Or are you? See what I mean? Sure, you may not go to jail, but think about the crimp in your social life an arrest would cause. Then, there is the privacy issue where government should not be allowed to look at your personal email despite the fact that it's technically legal for anyone else to do it. The idea here is to keep the people more powerful than the government. It seems like most people what it the other way around...
Orignal From: MORE ON EMAIL BIG BROTHERY BY USG
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