Cnet News reports:
The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.
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. . . .
“What they’re doing is even worse than Carnivore,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. . . “What they’re doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets.”
. . . [Bankston said] the FBI is “collecting and apparently storing indefinitely the communications of thousands–if not hundreds of thousands–of innocent Americans in violation of the Wiretap Act and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.”
