FBI gets more invasive and pervasive online

THE FBI IS using an invasive Internet surveillance technique to collects far more data on innocent Americans than it actually needs.

When the FBI has a court order but an ISP can't isolate the particular person or IP address it takes and records all the ISP information. It then searches through the data, while at the same time gathering lots of other information on people who just happen to be the same customer as the target.

The technique, which is broader and more intrusive than the FBI's controversial Carnivore snooping system, looks at the activities of thousands of Internet users and builds them into huge databases.

Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section told ZDNet that the technique has become federal agents' Internet spying tool of choice.

Agents intercept first and use whatever filtering, data mining to get at the information about the person they are trying to monitor. µ