U.S. snooping online

Is Big Brother watching your Internet activities and engaging in extensive data mining? Apparently so, or at least Uncle Sam is trying to keep a close eye on some of us. In an attempt to discover possible terrorist conspiracies, the U.S. government continues to cast a wide net over the Internet to collect and piece together bits of financial and personal data and activities, according to Economist.com.

But the magazine points out that such intelligence gathering efforts raise the possibility of criminalizing or constraining innocent people's legal behavior. In November 2002, news reports revealed the existence of a big, secret Pentagon program called Total Information Awareness that was aimed at identifying suspicious patterns of behavior by data mining. Protests resulted in Congress blocking funding for the project in 2003.

But the publication said six of TIA's seven components survived as secret stand-alone projects with classified funding. While civil libertarians are trying to stop data-mining from becoming a routine tool for the FBI to spy on ordinary Americans, they say the Bush administration is racing in its final months to formalize in law programs that will run solely under the authority from the White House and bypass Congress.

For more on U.S. spying:
- see this economist.com article