It's funny you should mention the ability of the FBI, NSA, CIA, and Homeland Security to monitor Internet traffic. Let me tell you all a story from a few years back. Before I got into the laser business I was a communications engineer. I used to build telephone switching centers and data centers. My background in this particular arena was quite extensive. I held twelve industry certifications in networking and communications systems with a background in military communications systems. I was at one time recruited by the State Department to join a team of communications specialists who traveled around the world installing communications systems in US Embassies. But I digress. Anyway, the dotcom era was in full swing and I was recruited by a company to interview for a sales engineering position providing technical demonstration of a software package developed by a bunch of programmers and linguists.
So I head to the interview which turned out to be a whole day of activities. At one point they gave an unclassified demonstration of this software. I was blown away by it. One of the most difficult parts of intelligence is uncovering information that can be useful for forecasting potential enemy activity because of the sheer volume of information that must be analyzed before anything relevant is uncovered. Well this software simply did away with this limitation. It could read any text and determine the context of the communication based on its use within the communication. It didn't just flag a communication because it mentioned "bomb" for example. It understood, based on the entire communication, whether the use of the word "bomb" was actually a threat or used passively. It could take seemingly unrelated text and build a picture of what communications were really talking about.
What this meant is that this software could be installed on servers at major NAPs (Network Access Points) around the country and world, for that matter, and analyze communications across the Internet. Now with someone scanning newspapers from around the world into the system as wells as transcripts from audio, the software could build up an analysis of real threats versus benign chatter. It would then flag that information for human analysis. The software was absolutely amazing and the target clients were all the intelligence agencies. I never wanted a job more than this one but unfortunately I didn't have enough software background.
