Self Protection

You people know that I don't normally get all paranoi, I may talk about it but rarely ever feel personally threatened. However, in light of the recent activity on the part of the department of justice I can't help but feel a little bit twitchy. Just check out this article on the Dept. of Justice actions relating to search engines over the past couple of weeks. I personally don't use any other search engine but google. However I know certain people use others such as yahoo or MSN. Now, the fact that these searche engines just sold out their customers, without even attempting to protect them from gov't prying, is abominable. And from what I can tell of google, I wouldn't want their database to fall into the wrong hands. They track EVERYTHING. They save EVERYTHING. There is some very sophisticated data mining software out there that can extrapolate frightening amounts of information from a database that large. That is why when I get home tonight I am going to download the software below. Never too late to start worrying about these things.

Tor: Overview: "Using Tor protects you against a common form of Internet surveillance known as 'traffic analysis.' Traffic analysis can be used to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. Knowing the source and destination of your Internet traffic allows others to track your behavior and interests. This can impact your checkbook if, for example, an e-commerce site uses price discrimination based on your country or institution of origin. It can even threaten your job and physical safety by revealing who and where you are."