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Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 10:11:00 MDT
From:         The Shadow <THESHADO@CORRAL.UWYO.EDU>
Subject:      Re: cia and soapboxes

>Here it may not be obvious how much of a following a poster has.  But
>it is easy to search for content.  Internet mail, on route to its
>destination in your emailbox, gets scanned by government software for
>certain keywords (such as drugs, revolution, assassination...) and any
>posts that contain these words get dumped into a file to be read by
>government agents.

Annie, you don't really believe this, do you?  That is simply ridiculous.
I will concede that, with the cooperation of the administrators of an
individual machine, it would be possible to scan for certain keywords
in the mail flow of one specific machine, but even that is kind of a
difficult proposition.  The quantity of mail that goes through a
general use university machine is immense, and there would have to be a
very good reason for something like this before anyone would bother with
it.  Most systems do have facilities for monitoring, to some extent, the
activities of individual users, but if one is receiving that kind of
attention, one has probably done something to deserve it, and one would
be advised to keep one's activities on the side of legality.
All that aside, the mere idea that the government is scanning internet
e-mail (why just internet e-mail, why not BITNET e-mail, of Fidonet
e-mail, or....) is absurd.  It simply can't happen with the current
architecture of the net.
A)  The net is QUITE an international entity, comprising machines from
every continent.  There simply does not exist any point that the
Govmn't could use to access any significan percentage of the net.traffic.

B)  The amount of information that travels through the net each day is
simply astounding.  The processing power that would be required to
transparently sift (it has to be transparent, as if it weren't, someone
would get curious, and then the govmn't would have a national media
scandal on their hands) through JUST the internet's traffic would have
$$$$$$$$$ costs WAAAAAAYYYY beyond any foreseeable gains.

C)  How do they scan for such words as "Revolution"?  Convert everything
to uppercase so that one doesn't have to deal with the differing character
codes of upper and lowercase letters?  What if the text is not in ASCII,
but in EBIDIC?  Okay, make a check for that and translate that -- it can
be done.  What if people abbreviate?  Scan a library of abbreviations.
What if the communication is in a language other than English?  Scan
for equivalent words to revolution for the other languages. What if...
THere are so many what-if's to such surveillance that would make
effective application of it impossible.

>Don't think it doesn't happen!  Remember that it is the military
>budget that maintains these free computer networks!  And they don't
>even have to shove you off a sopbox anymore.  They could *audit* you!
>horrors!

The military budget maintains these free computer networks, eh?
(*laugh*)

A)  These netoworks got their original start from defense department
work with networking, but those networks are now only a miniscule
portion of the sum total of the internet and networks reachable from
the internet.

B)  A large percentage of the cost of these "free computer networks" is
paid for by by the institutions utilizing the net.  The universities
pay many many dollars for a connection to the internet.  For the most
part, individuals don't have actual connections to the net because the
cost is SO high.  (although individuals may be able to get net access
at a payble rate by going through another institution, such as a
university, that is already on the net)

>In fact, since I have some of those very words in this post, I am sure
>the CIA is listening in right now.  Hiya, Uncle Sam!

Conspiracy theories are interesting and all, but this is just plain
silly, if you have any clue as to the topology of the network, and how
it all really works, and if you bother to think about it for two
seconds.


Kirk Haines
theshado@outlaw.uwyo.edu
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU