Spying

So this isn't what you think... this isn't about the NSA. Though I have to say... they must be really annoyed that Obama and bomb sound so similar. Or else they've got sophisticated computers that can tell the difference. Either way, I'm sure this post will now get reviewed by them. Hello, boys (and girls?).

I'm pretty tame, honest.

Yes, I've searched for how to make a pressure cooker bomb on Google, but it was just out of curiosity. Of course, even mentioning that probably ratcheted this up a few notches. I do appreciate the work our intelligence agencies do, even if there's some merit to Benjamin Franklin's "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." (He's got some other great quotes on his wikipedia page.)

So now I've gone "full tangential" and I'm not going to write about what I originally intended to write about.

So instead, two other recent articles on hacking and spying that I've been pleased to read. First, there's a group out there (probably Turkish) that are infiltrating the computers of certain Americans and putting viruses on their computers. Recently a 21-year-old man was a victim of the virus. The virus locked his computer and told him that the FBI had detected illegal content (child pornography) on his computer and that he immediately needed to report to his local police station and pay a fine to avoid a criminal investigation. Of course, the minute he walked into the police station indicated why he was there, he was arrested. Yay, hackers. Read "'FBI warning' virus causes man to turn self in on child porn charges" on WLWT.com...

The second is the news that the "worlds biggest trafficker in child pornography" had been identified and efforts were being made to extradite him to the U.S. (he holds Irish and U.S. passports) was the result of a sophisticated hack that put beacons on the computers of anyone who visited sites created on one of the world's largest underground networks. The strong suspicion being that the FBI was the one doing the hacking (they're the ones requesting the extradition.) Read "Meet the New Hackers: Johnny Law" on InfoWorld.com...

So... my real post on "Spying"... that'll have to wait until tomorrow. Maybe I can get to it without getting side-tracked.