Wiretapping is so 20th century. In the Internet age of IMing, email and blogs, why bother with such cumbersome things as wiretaps? Want to know what the dissidents and troublemakers are really up to? Route email through Carnivore and set bots to monitor the goings on at "suspicious" web sites. You just never know if you might catch a suspected Al Qaida operative posting on say, the
LANL blog set up by Los Alamos National Laboratories employees upset over the multi million dollar boondoggles and wasteful use of taxpayer monies---set up because their letters to the Laboratory official publication just never seemed to get published
Doug Roberts, creator of the the Real Story blog spotted the activity and posted the story on the blog 01-06-06.
We have an extremely interested visitor
Starting at 11:04 yesterday morning, I noticed what appears to be an extremely interested visitor to this blog. As of this afternoon, they have made 475 visits. Why, do you suppose, is the Federal Judiciary suddenly so interested in what is going on here? It looks as if a bot has been set up to check in on us every three minutes.
Indeed, why would the Federal Judiciary be so concerned that the LANL folks would be questioning the competence of rewarding the University of California for its stunningly inept leadership by handing it a new contract simply because it added some muscular defense contractors to the team? Commenter "b-ohica" offered the more than snakcastic suggestion:
I would bet that the feds are looking to see who is posting, what they have to say and examining if the content of this blog contains any legal ground to shut it down in order to make sure "the people" never hear about what is really going on, or understand where their tax dollars are being spent.
b-ohica is probably onto something. The blog has been a thorn in the side of the University of California ever since Roberts established it (in part) to call into question the wisdom of spending multi-million taxpayer dollars to stand down highly paid scientists for weeks over a security breach concerning missing removable media that never existed in the first place. Indeed the blog is often attributed as the reason for former laboratory director Pete Nanos' resignation.
BTW, anybody keep track of just who visits the Daily Kos?