"I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that."

Britney Spears, 2003

or maybe this:

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

Louis Dembitz Brandeis

We are either with Brit or against her. You decide.

The two problems with monitoring internet traffic are twofold:

1. Traffic on the internet routs around damage. Damage can be defined as inoperable hardware, censorship, or bad policy.

2. Encryption is too easy to implement to make monitoring worthwhile.

But I wonder how many of congress would oppose their internet traffic being monitored... No more porn, illegal campaign contributions, or lobbyist gifts for them. In the end this kind of invasion of privacy will hurt the middle class and poor more than anyone that actually counts.

Virtually no one in the media noticed that when Rumsfeld was prevented from going ahead with TIA, he actually came out and told the world that he was going ahead with it anyway, under a new name. Haven't heard much from John Poindexter lately, have we?

I think we can safely assume that the TIA is alive and well and the head office is somewhere in the Pentagon and has been since 2003 at the latest. Are we supposed to believe that a government that reserved for itself the right to violate the nation's privacy laws for telephone wiretaps would resist sucking down a far more readily available source of information; i.e., internet traffic?

I think we'll find that all the major ISPs have been in bed with the government for years, and if it's discovered, Harry Reid will fall all over himself to give those ISPs immunity for their massive lawbreaking and allow the programs to continue unabated.

Asking Congress for a law to allow it is just to make us think they're not doing it to us already.

I've assumed for years that the government reads every single word I type. As long as all I write is crackpot conspiracy rantings (even though true) to fringe culture webzines, I don't think I'm of much interest to them.

Monitoring of the internet will never catch the professional terrorist or spy. They have access to advanced cryptography, steganography, and a whole range of subtle, essentially undetectable methods of communication. The average joe has none of these tools or esoteric knowledge, it is he who is the target, not Bin Laden, who sends his messages by hand.

What it will do though, is allow the permanent government to monitor ordinary Americans, to watch, read, and to listen. In the coming perfect fascist world, the government will have a file on us all. They will know which party you support, what drugs you take, how your health is, if you are cheating on your spouse, stealing from your work, or just checking out giantjugs.com. And what does that mean? That means they will own you.

America is well on it's way to being a totalitarian state.

"Fine, don't come crying to me when Sudanese ninjas break the Internet just because you were too proud to let us read your IMs."

Okay, Mitch, you've got yourself a deal. You drop your Big Brother plans, and I'll refrain from crying to you about the Sudanese ninjas that will inevitably break the internet.

That seems fair, doesn't it?

Every single image on giantjugs.com could have an absolutely undetectable (and detailed) message embedded within it. There's nothing stopping anyone with a little tech skill from putting 10K of data into an innocent-looking JPG, from either a website or through Usenet, or through their own e-mail.

The only way we could catch terrorists by catching internet traffic is if they're terribly unsophisticated. No doubt some terrorists are unsophisticated, but those aren't the ones we should generally be worried about.

Is a handwritten fax if the endpoints aren't known ahead of time. There is near zero probability of having that decoded by any program in stream. The best you can do is copy the stream to an image and have an image processor make a guess. Well guess what, pick a non English language or better, a non Roman non Cyrillic alphabet and you've increased your chance of non detection by orders of magnitude.

Also anyone can get strong encryption for free, encryption that is sufficiently robust to add days/weeks onto the decrypt time by all known methods using the fastest machines known. Don't believe Television. Strong encryption is very hard to break. Very.

All this does is oppress the people who are already obeying the law. Criminals and such are ahead of the curve.

Man our government gets more awesome every day! I keep reading about things like this and I think my reaction sort of goes hand in hand with the rest of my fellow Americans' - just wait one more year, just one more year. Quietly, we chant this mantra, knowing that it doesn't matter which democrat will get elected, just that it's important that one does - to usher in a nightmare era of peace and civil liberty.

Wan't there some supposed web-crawling anti-terror program back in the Clinton years that was also supposed to make us all safde from baddies? And didn't it too come to nothing? I suspect that a handy-dandy plug-in terrorist catcher program is sort of like cold fusion -- great idea, but just technologically impossible for many reasons, some of which our excellent respondents have already posted here.

This is all about stopping pr0n! Insidious pr0n! After all, when the Bushies came to power, they set about draping cloth over statues and diverting funds from fighting terrorism to fighting pr0n! The Clinton Administration wanted to brief them on Al Queda and the Bushies said "No thanks, we have other priorities". Those priorities were pr0n!

Hurry Dubbya, somebody might see somebody nekkid! No wonder the Bushed are completely in the dark, that's how they were conceived.