It usually starts in an innocent way: Suppose you have children, and you don't want them hitting any bad sites. You install (usuallly as a free download from your service provider) software that gives you "parental controls". Upon request most of these software packages give you a detailed list of what sites your child has visited, how long the child was there, and what links were chosen from that site. They also block out many perfectly acceptable searches that involve certain words such as "breasts", "sex", and other phrases that could be invoked in numerous "respectable" contexts. In a way that is rather frightening: Would you like it if you knew someone monitored your cyber-habits in such detail? Even if you aren't doing a Pete Townshend move and hitting all the kinky sites, even if all you do online is send a few e-mails and hit the serious news sites, you may find the idea that with the click of the mouse, somebody can know for example precisely what articles you read in every edition of the Financial Times during the last week, what time you read them, and whether you e-mailed them to anyone a bit "1984"-ish.
But Big Brother is there. The US government via the Patriot Act has authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to go into the e-mail reading business. It has often been advised that you should never write anything in the e-mail that you wouldn't say if you were at a microphone in front of a room full of people you don't like, people you don't know, and people you would like to impress. While that is still true, because of the "war on terror", now you must watch your words even more carefully. Satellite technology has been programmed to recognize use of certain words such as "explosives", "weapons", "attack", "Holy war", and similar expressions in e-mail. Using those words - no matter what the context - will cause your message to be sent automatically to a server at the NSA for possible perusal by an intelligence expert. Giving the vast and rising number of e-mails sent every day across the world, it is quite unlikely that some bureaucrat will actually take the time to read your messages, but they can, and as with all levels of authority delegated to bureaucrats, they may decide to invoke investigative necessities to satisfy their own banal curiosities.
