All of the following information, except the last paragraph, is from news stories run over the past two years. The NSA has a facility in England that has the capacity to listen to every phone conversation placed in the US. Until recently, they could only monitor conversations that went outside the borders of the country. With satellite bounces, they take that as leaving the US. No, they don't listen to every phone call. They do openly monitor all conversations overseas using tape and "sniffing" devices. When key words come up a human is assigned to check the call. They also openly place "sniff" programs at what they call "key points" of interchange on the internet in the same way and can and do monitor email that way. The NSA also runs "front" websites that deal with information that would attract people they are interested in tracking. Long before Internet Explorer was introduced, an NSA officer told me they were working with Microsoft to get a backdoor into internet usage. Since explorer allows a web site to read a visitor's disc, and even place hostile cookies that can destroy a drive, there is a good chance that was the system he was talking about. Unlike the java function in Netscape, this feature cannot be turned off in Explorer.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 12:57:42 PDT