Those busily debating whether Facebook's CEO personally values your privacy generally don't realize that unless you go to some great lengths, privacy on the Internet really doesn't exist in the first place -- and hasn't for a long time. Your every conversation and Internet action is tracked by a vast ocean of surveillance apparatus, from Echelon to AT&T's direct data dumps to the NSA. For years ISPs have also sold your clickstream data and other information to third parties.

With that in mind, Forbes has an interesting article on a government contractor named Project Vigilant. Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday claiming they were recruiting for their work as essentially outsourced domestic surveillance and intelligence. The group either buys or directly monitors data from at least twelve ISPs (it's not clear about which, nor are the ISPs named), using said data to offer intelligence reports to government. According to the group, ISP EULAs make this all a-ok:The group appears to be a very bizarre entity, wanting to be a serious security agency but coming off as a bunch of crackpots. On first read you brush them off as some kind of bad fiction, though several outlets are claiming the group is stocked with former Homeland Security officials (Kevin Manson), NSA officials (Ira Winkler), former security bosses at the NYSE (Suzanne Gorman) and an official formerly in charge of DOJ cybercrime (Mark Rasch). Of course just because the group is staffed with some government officials doesn't mean they still aren't simply a bunch of crackpots, and there appears to be some legitimate privacy questions here if what the group is claiming is true.

Also see: Wired, the San Francsico Examiner and Salon.

Update: Richard Bejtlich has an interesting blog post at Tao Security arguing that Project Vigilant is little more than a PR stunt by a collection of "wanna be" security consultants. Bejtlich still has this to say about the group's ISP data collection efforts: