I thought our internet use was monitored already. You know, the fight against terrorism / drugs / espionage / treason etc...
No?
i was under the same impression also that certain phrases or sentances were monitored! mabye someone who knows a bit more about this could ellaborate!!!
It was a bit more complex than that but that's pretty much the system that was used for telecommunications pre-internet. It's a reasonable assumption that it was extended to the internet.
The difference is that the quantity of electronic communication that's available now is gigantically bigger than it was pre-internet - also there are a lot of channels that are encrypted, and de-crypting and monitoring would push the processing 'cost' even higher; and some encryption isn't really hackable in real team. All in all there's probably too much to use the same system.
I would guess that they probably use the same system of monitoring that they were starting to use when encryption over the net and other telecommunications systems were starting to get really hard, which is more to look at the flow of data to look for suspicious points then target the more sophisticated processing once they find areas which are more likely to yield results.
Can you dumb your answer down a bit Jon. Are they motoring the average Joe or not.
probably not because I don't think even the Americans have the capacity. But if their NSA has been given enough money then they might do - but nobody looks at the data until it's suspicious even if they do - it's all analysed by computer programmes.
From Wiki
Transaction data mining
NSA is reported to use its computing capability to analyze "transactional" data that it regularly acquires from other government agencies, which gather it under their own jurisdictional authorities. As part of this effort, NSA now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions and travel and telephone records, according to current and former intelligence officials interviewed by the Wall Street Journal
This is the analysis they do - if they have the money they will also be doing it for international data. GCHQ is our version and they have less money and less computers, but that's also what they do - all the NATO countries share their data anyway.
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