Omnivore is not a real related product, it was an open-source attempt at emulating the kind of distributed sniffing network the government has. Do that same search you recommend without the word omnivore, or better yet use the searches below. Otherwise what you said is entierly accurate, it is old old news that all sites are spidered. Don't get me started on a rant about searches for steg that DCS can do.

There WAS a product developed by the FBI (not the DEA) called Carnivore, which is essentially just a high-speed sniffer box that they can tell a major ISP backbone to put on their lines, to do digital keyword searches.

The Carnivore project got a lot of bad press and too many allegations of abuse of it were made (I wonder what happened to those alligations, btw) so it was scrapped.

Now instead of Carnivore, we have what is called DCS-1000. That is the Fed's new tool that makes Carnivore look weak, but notice the nice friendly name, DCS-1000 compared to Carnivore.

Now that it has a friendly name, nobody talks about it anymore. But go to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=dcs-1000+-link&btnG=Search and read about it.

I've digressed WAY too much in this thread, even more than in others, so I'm going to stop after one more comment - if you do not know what Echelon is, you do not know Big Brother, and you do not know paranoia. Echelon has been around for decades, and several of the nations participating in it with the USA are openly admitting it.

The ACLU has a page up called Echelonwatch - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=echelon+watch&btnG=Search

Simply put, Echelon is THE central nervous system of big brother. It ties all telephone lines, transatlantic cables, satellite communications, data links, etc in many countries together and allows central monitoring. This is an established fact, like I said many countries are pissed at the USA over their own participation in the Echelon project, because the USA has been using Echelon for private (national economic) gain for many years. In other words, industrial espionage. The USA has been spying on other nations scientific R&D - and consequently we have been world leaders.

Echelon and it's evil tenticles may well be the reason Americans' lives are as easy as they are now, compared to an African village where they walk two miles to get buckets of tainted water every day. America isn't #1 - our spy network is.

Check the links, since a lot of them are from government and reputable press sites, it should at least be enough to convince you that Echelon is very real, and that DCS-1000 is DEFIDENTLY scanning THIS post right here that I am typing - within a few hours of me hitting the Submit button, this very message will be physically read by a human employee of some government agency, because of the digital keywords that it contains.

On alt.drugs.chemistry we used to use what we called Spook files - that is, for our .sig file we would fill it with things like "MARK OPUS.TYMNET.COM GTD5 ESS5 EPHEDRINE REDUCTION OLLIE NORTH FREEMASONRY COCAINE PRESIDENTIAL ASSINATION" etcetc - anything we knew would get the attention of both the drug police and the hacking police (who were the Secret Service at the time).

Once again there is Potato's wisdom ringing in my ears, telling me that was pretty dumb stuff to be doing back then, and as an adult, I just couldn't bring myself to. It just isn't funny anymore, its downright scary.

And you know what? It shoudn't be. But it is.

BTW I am a STAUNCH believer in teaching people to fish rather than giving them a sandwich, so if anybody is interested in how things like keyword sniffing or Carnivore or DCS-1000 or certain parts of Echelon work, check out the free program Ethereal at http://www.ethereal.com (specifically from http://www.ethereal.com/distribution/win32/ )- install it on your PC and run it, then imagine it using all of the custom filter routines fine-tuned for certain things, and then imagine that on a MASSIVE supercomputing scale across all major voice and data pipes around the globe. You will see the significance immediately. I cannot stress enough how much you will learn about computer networking just by installing and running this single program. There are dozens of sniffers, but this one is easy to install and use, and it is free. Unless you are a network administrator or other computer technical person, this will be the most productive and educational thing you have ever done with your PC, at least regarding learning how a network like the Internet works. It'll take you less than an hour, and you'll go to bed tonight a lot more informed, so go ahead and bother - it is worth it.

Then you might start browsing the web for a free country to live in. I've already done that last part myself, and damnit, THIS is the best one of them! THIS US of A is where I want to be, after all this I've said. But I'll stop now, I know the BBS ops here must hate me for getting so far off topic.