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White House Chat Room Spy Program Disclosed

A senior White House official recently acknowledged the existence of a secret program of spying on domestic internet chat rooms and public forums. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information. According to the spokesperson, the goal of the program was to “flush out” those people who would “do harm” to the nation.

The covert program, dubbed Operation Provocateur, employed hundreds of agents who monitored the postings on thousands of internet chat room sites and other public forums. The agents concentrated their surveillance primarily on political chat rooms and would frequently post staunchly conservative viewpoints and then monitor the replies to their comments. Another tactic employed by the agents was to post “radical leftist” viewpoints and then keep tabs on those who endorsed their extremist positions.

The program, headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, is equipped with the latest government internet tracking software supercomputers. Agents often present themselves as “locals” on various regional chat rooms and forums. Extensive files were kept on regular posters to the chat rooms or forums, classifying each according to perceived “dangerousness”. Those believed to be the most dangerous would be identified by tracking their internet protocol (IP) address, then “aggressively targeted” through clandestine surveillance of their daily activities, e-mails, and associates.

When asked about the funding of Operation Provocateur, the White House official stated that he believed the money to support these activities came out of a previously unknown White House “Black-Ops” slush fund. The secret program was established in early 2004 and was the brain child of Dick Cheney, who argued vociferously for the program, stating, “There are many out there that would seek to do us grave harm and this program will help us to ‘flush them out of the woodwork’ before they can accomplish their goals of destroying the American way of life.

A spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that its organization had just learned of the existence of Operation Provocateur and vowed that the organization would do everything in its powers to stop this unprecedented government invasion of the rights of American citizens.
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What expectation of privacy is there in a public forum or blog? Surveillance of sites from jehadim sites to pedophile sites can expect no privacy. Nor, such sites such as porn, where jehadim use encryption posted porn pictures to send messages. To read e-mail originating in US requires warrent. President agreed to use FISA court for those.

As for determining your IP Address, there are free public sites to do that such as Spider-Monkey at http://sm.mobrien.com/.

Like I said: Carnivore and Echelon

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_gx5211/is_2004/ai_n19126386

"In the meantime, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) routinely employs the Carnivore program for Internet surveillance of individuals. Carnivore, whose use has been publicly acknowledged by the FBI since June 2000, is classified as a "high-speed packet sniffer" (a term explained below). It is part of a larger surveillance toolbox called the Dragonware Suite. Dragonware is comprised of three software tools: Carnivore, Packeteer, and Coolminer. No public information about Packeteer and Coolminer is available, but some experts assert that these programs organize the information collected by Carnivore and analyze it for various patterns (probably under the guidance of human users)."


http://home.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html

"The ECHELON system is fairly simple in design: position intercept stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic, and then process this information through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA, including advanced voice recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) programs, and look for code words or phrases (known as the ECHELON “Dictionary”) that will prompt the computers to flag the message for recording and transcribing for future analysis. Intelligence analysts at each of the respective “listening stations” maintain separate keyword lists for them to analyze any conversation or document flagged by the system, which is then forwarded to the respective intelligence agency headquarters that requested the intercept. "
Last edited by interventor
Interventor,

I'm sorry; I wasn't clear. I was asking PEACE BROTHER for a citation on the original post.

I just went with reply to avoid copying all of PB's original text. Your post went up a minute before mine, so I hadn't seen it yet while I was typing. The person my request was directed to seemed clearer before then. My fault.

Anyway, thanks for the sites.

-e-

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