The Surveillance State and DU - There is No Connection There.
Every once in a while, someone posts a worried-sounding thread about surveillance by our federal government of online communications and messaging. For some reason, people seem to believe that there is some enormous office somewhere that is full of people running down leads gleaned by a supercomputer that is filtering everything posted on the Internet.
There is such an office, and there are such supercomputers, no doubt, but given the sheer amount of new information posted daily on the Internet in all of its complexity, there are Boolean filters discarding almost everything found by those supercomputers, even if it contains keywords of interest to the government. The reason for that is that there simply are not enough human resources available to actually look at and investigate every person who has posted something mean about the government. The numbers make that completely impossible.
So, somewhere in the algorithms used by the NSA or whatever other organization is involved in peeking in on the Internet, there is the equivalent of this pseudocode Boolean operator:
IF messagesource = democraticunderground.com THEN DISCARD
DUers aren't that interesting, really. We aren't out there with guns and bombs and plots to overthrow anything. The DU TOS prohibits most postings that directly involve any sort of seditious actions. We mostly post one thing or another from some other source on the Internet and then engage in discussions of whatever is posted. We're just not dangerous, we DUers.
Now, there are some really, really ugly websites out there, with some truly threatening postings on them. Some of us have seen them, and they're not places like freerepublic.com or most of the usual places where people post ugly things and vague threats. There are plenty of websites we're not looking at or that we don't even know about for the supercomputer to lurk on. DU is not even close to being of interest.
Truly. We can go wherever we want on the Internet, read whatever we wish and post about it here without any concern that Agent Mike is somewhere spending his days poring over our collective output. It's simply not that interesting. Nobody's worried about DUers and what they think, because we pose no risk to anyone.
Simple logic will inform anyone that what is written above is true. There are simply not the human resources numerous enough to bother with the relatively innocent stuff posted on DU. It is simply not that important.
As you can see in my signature line, this post is nothing more than my opinion. Take it for what you think it is worth.
= new reply since forum marked as read
We are ancillary to said tasks.
Is this your online diary, MM? 
