Reply #7: There's an aspect to this that is almost totally ignored in all the furor over 'wiretapping.'

[TahitiNut]

There's a difference between tracking the FACT of a communication and the CONTENT of that communication. Based on my somewhat limited understanding of research work done during the 90's in indexing massive information bases, it appears that the primary focus of the intel community's massive data collection effort has been in creating a topological network index ... essentially a map of "who's talking to whom." I think of it as a "Degrees of Separation" index -- an information base that can depict associations between "persons of interest." Given massive amounts of data that merely capture the instances of who communicated with whom and the nature of that commuincation, including 'message drop' nodes such as internet forums and usenet newsgroups, the computer technology exists whereby an analysis of 'proximity' (in terms of communication) of one person (or entity) to another can be performed. Such an index can be presented visually, portraying clusters of people within which information is shared in a topological fashion ... with 'drill-down' functionality that can acquire whatever diads are recorded AND the 'content' of some of the connections where preserved.

Stated more simply, it offers a guide to the intel community for closer scrutiny. The potentials for abuse are extreme, particularly in economic and commercial ways.