Some of these senators, such as California's Diane Feinstein, who just lost my vote, have gone so far as to suggest that we should reconsider the First Amendment's ban on prior restraint of speech. These people haven't got a clue. They're not even close. Think about it. A newsgroup on the Internet is like a meeting where everybody looks the same and everybody's wearing a wire.
Infiltration is a snap.
Spreading disinformation or destablizing agitation is a no-brainer. Keying a Web crawler on certain phrases is a lazy way to automate a lot of surveillance. If I were a serious terrorist who really wanted to blow up something, the last thing I would mention would be the Internet or anything even remotely related to it. This may explain why at the recent Senate Internet terrorism hearings, the Department of Justice reported that no terrorist activities have been connected to Internet use. It didn't take much to set up a press and start a newspaper.