FBI honeypot? Why bother, just cross reference your advertising shadow profiles with a few trackers of what you're interested in. Combine that with the scrape Canada is doing with all the download services, and the pre host intercepts to AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc... that the NSA is doing and you capture all the file transfers for all but the savviest of people. Operating TPB would expose them to potential liability at home. I highly doubt the MPAA/RIAA/etc... are not going to sue if they found out the FBI is directly responsible for disseminating 300K copies of frozen and Taylor Swift's album for free to capture the fairly useless proxied VPN of the uploaders. America and Canada have proven that they don't need to operate the hosts, they can capture all the data just fine without exposing themselves to the risk.
Regardless, assume the FBI/NSA/CSIS/MI-X/etc... are capturing everything you do including the comments on here, reddit, twitter, Facebook, 4-chan, torrent, tor, and really everywhere else. The can unravel that onion, so unless it's carefully encrypted, and it on the internet, assume the governments either have it or have access to it.
None of these tools are "capturing everything I do on the Internet". They could be used to target an individual in some sense. But not capturing everything that everyone is doing.
The problem with discussions about the NSA on HN is that sense, reasoning and rationality seem to go out the window.
>None of these tools are "capturing everything I do on the Internet". They could be used to target an individual in some sense. But not capturing everything that everyone is doing.
That claim contradicts what Glenn Greenwald says. Why is he wrong?
The capture everything done online and store it. They can wait until you become a person of interest then plug your email address and name into the system to get your Amazon, eBay purchases, Google searches, FB comments and likes, GPS data from your phone to see where you went, who you were with by cross referencing FB friends and their phones GPS data.
They are not looking at you specifically but they are keeping your data in case one day they do want to look at you.
Storing text data isn't nearly that costly. Audio as well. I think they have the capacity to easily store the audio contents of every phone call made in America. Video is another question.
Much of what they capture can be stored temporarily for filtering, saving what looks interesting and discarding what isn't.
Sure, we can concede that they aren't storing absolutely everything. The point is: they're storing a lot, and they're trying to store as much as they possibly can.
But add to it that they will look at every upclick, upvote, downvote, and comment of yours on Hacker News, Reddit, Ars Technica and other popular social media sites.
Theyll know you better than your own mother.
FBI TPB is possibly here to gather more filth to throw around normal people.
Regardless, assume the FBI/NSA/CSIS/MI-X/etc... are capturing everything you do including the comments on here, reddit, twitter, Facebook, 4-chan, torrent, tor, and really everywhere else. The can unravel that onion, so unless it's carefully encrypted, and it on the internet, assume the governments either have it or have access to it.