A Query

AOL, Yahoo and MSN (the Evil Trio) have handed over your search queries to the US government. Under which context this was done is totally irrelevant. The fact is, they got the data, and they want the rest (Google).

What and Why?
All three of the evil companies say that they gave away no personal information. We don't know if they gave away IP addresses along with the queries. If they did, that may not be personal information, but it makes data mining much easier. Let's say they in fact did not give the justice department IP addresses. What can the US government, it's "intelligence" and spy agencies do with that data? Well, query timestamps are not personal information. But they can expose and identify you. How? Under the Echelon program, the NSA monitors pretty much everything that goes on on the Internets (yes, internets). The problem is the analysis and mining of such huge bulks of raw information.

How does one connect the dots from queries to everything you did on the net and who you are? Easy as pie if you have the data.

Let's say the US government wants to crack down on groups that oppose the war. They can use the raw net data from the NSA together with query data from the US justice department to easily intercept people that enter certain phrases in search engines. If they know the timestamp of a query, they know who entered it by simply taking that query + timestamp and searching those two items in the NSA's raw net data. The raw data will say IP 123.123.123.123 requested from "search.msn.com" URI "results.aspx?q=fack" at timestamp 1/1/06@10:10:03. Now that there's an IP address to work with, the spy agency can take over and query the net traffic that IP has made using the rest of the raw data logs.

In the spying world, there is no such thing as personal information.

Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...