Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 10:00:40 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Barry L. Newton" <bnewton at ashcomp.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Urban Legend Info Request
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

Interestingly, Michael Walsh said:
>Microsoft has been accused of many, many things, but this is a new one.
> >From the usual friend of a friend . . . .
>
>"There is 'spyware' required by the government in all computers that
>keeps a list of every website you visit and it sends this information to
>Homeland Security.  It also takes regular 'images' of your harddrive
>contents and sends that to Homeland Security."
>
>Has anyone heard of this one?
>Does anyone know the origin of it?
>
>mjw

Never heard of this one, and while I don't doubt that they could install
such spyware in machines of people they were interested in, it just doesn't
compute (sorry!) when you try to extend it to the general public.  The
sheer volume of data would swamp any quantity of computing power you could
buy.  The website visits might just be manageable, if the government were
just screening against a (ever-growing) list of interesting web sites, but
taking regular dumps of everyone's hard drives--impossible.  For the folks
on telephone modems, just transmitting the data from a modern hard disk
would take several weeks.

Barry