It’s no secret that the FBI is listening in on the Internet activity of suspected criminals, but what might shock you is that they might also be listening in on you, too. CNet News.com reports on the FBI’s broad new wiretap method, in which they collect as much data as they possibly can from a large pool of network traffic to be sorted out later. This kind of eavesdropping, referred to as full-pipe recording, occurs when the agency is unable to isolate traffic from the specific computer they’ve targeted. Instead of risk losing data, agents simply record all of the network traffic coming from the general area of the suspect.
So what’s the problem here? Well, full-pipe recording raises a slew of privacy issues. Putting the practice into more traditional terms, full-pipe recording could be described as listening in on every telephone conversation in a neighborhood because one of its residents may be engaged in criminal activity.
From the CNet article:
“Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.”
