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 ·RoadRunner Cable
| said by tomkb  :Why does anyone need this info? What value does it have? Terrorists aren't about to send their emails un-encrypted right?
Well, some of them probably do. And it's fine with me if law enforcement looks at emails of people suspected of being terrorists - if the police get a warrant, and the warrant is based on real evidence that the person has committed a crime. This is what the 4th Amendment requires, and parts of the Bush administration should be prosecuted for violating it (among other things).
Interception of email is analogous to conventional wiretapping - email is person-to-person communication and is good evidence of what they're up to.
The Web is different. The appropriate analogy in the pre-internet world is records of what books a person has checked out at the library or bought at a bookstore. And this is not appropriate for use as evidence.
Does looking at a pro-jihad website tend to show the person is a terrorist? Of course not. By that reasoning, I would be a communist because I read Marx, and a capitalist because I read Mises, and a doctor if I read JAMA, and an fool if I read supermarket tabloids - yeah, what a sensible form of reasoning (not).
So what is the point, then? It should be obvious what mass internet surveillance is good for. The purposes it can serve include:
•government harrassment of dissenters
•embarrassment of critics
•discouragement of reading "alternative" news sources
•snooping on political candidates
•data-mining for popular opinion to better tailor propaganda
•etc.
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