Back in the spring of this year, I was remember reading an article in my
local newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer. The article was a sick story involving
a child rape on the internet. Here is the article:

RAPE CHARGES

Sex with child, 3, alleged

A Hamilton County grand jury indicted a 31-year-old Winton Hills man on a
17-count indictment that alleges he went into a Yahoo chat room and offered
to have sex with a 3-year-old girl live online if somebody else would do the
same. There were no takers before Hamilton County Sheriff’s Detective Rick
Sweeney arrested Paul Kraft March 9 after getting a tip from a Secret
Service agent monitoring the chat room where Kraft made the proposal.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said Kraft has raped the little girl
five times since the beginning of the year. Kraft, who is being held in the
Hamilton County Jail on $750,000 bond, was indicted on five charges of rape
and 12 charges of pandering sexually oriented matter involving a minor. If
convicted, Kraft could spend the rest of his life in prison without
possibility of parole.

Article

Link (NewsBank subscription required)

This story disgusts me. The fact that a man would be willing to do that to
his child is horrible. Incidentally, Paul Kraft is still awaiting trial and his
wife has also been charged in the crimes. The prosecutors office is seeking life
in prison without parole which to me is appropriate. This story is much more
detailed and disturbing then what I have posted here.

Now you may be asking what this story has to do with my usual political
rants. Keep on reading and you will find out.

One part of that story had struck me as very curious:

Rick Sweeney arrested Paul Kraft March 9 after getting a tip from a
Secret Service agent monitoring the chat room

I was wondering what a Secret Service agent was doing monitoring a chat room.
Subsequent articles have identified the chat room Kraft was doing this in as
being chat rooms geared towards child rape, which use to be a common place on
Yahoo until they were force to shut them down this past summer. Reading that I
started wondering if someone in the White House was going to these rooms or
what, so I looked up the actual mission statement of the Secret Service.

The United States Secret Service is mandated by statute and executive
order to carry out two significant missions: protection and criminal
investigations. The Secret Service protects the President and Vice
President, their families, heads of state, and other designated individuals;
investigates threats against these protectees; protects the White House,
Vice President’s Residence, Foreign Missions, and other buildings within
Washington, D.C.; and plans and implements security designs for designated
National Special Security Events. The Secret Service also investigates
violations of laws relating to counterfeiting of obligations and securities
of the United States; financial crimes that include, but are not limited to,
access device fraud, financial institution fraud, identity theft, computer
fraud; and computer-based attacks on our nation’s financial, banking, and
telecommunications infrastructure.

Article link.

So either there had to be some top government official in that room, or
possible crimes financial crimes. I really could not think of any reason why
they would be monitoring that chat room. Now I have my suspicions

In today’s New York Times, we get a deeper look into how the government has
been monitoring foreign calls and emails. I was seriously wondering how they
would be able to grab all emails leaving the country over the internet. There
are numerous routers and lines that connect this country to the rest of the
world and monitoring that enormous amount of data would be a major undertaking.
Even if they are using a computer program to scan the emails for keywords to
flag it, it is still something requiring advanced processing power.

Here is what today’s article said:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 – The National Security Agency has traced and
analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into
and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that
President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for
evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government
officials.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic
surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of
American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams
of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

The government’s collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic
have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials
familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications
growing out of the N.S.A.’s surveillance program, is whether the court has
legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass
through American-based telephonic “switches,” according to officials
familiar with the matter.

View complete article

here.

So it turns out that the government has been working with telecommunication
companies to retrieve this data. This leads one to wonder how the exact workings
of this system goes. Does all international data forward through NSA’s system to
get checked out or do the telecom companies have systems on there that if
triggered by certain content forwards it. Either way it means everything leaving
this country is monitored in one way or another.

Now going back to the original article I talked about. Why was that secret
service agent in that room? Here is one theory I now have.

The data was picked up through NSA’s monitoring system. It seriously troubled
someone, which it should have. The person who found out what was going on
decided to do something about it, but what. This is a secret Presidential
operation going on here and you just can’t call the police and tell them. Well
they decided to call the agency who does law enforcement and is closest to the
President. That agency of course is the Secret Service.

Now there is one problem with my theory. What would of flagged this activity
with the NSA? Unless there were key words going on in that chat room that
trigger the terror computers or there were possible terrorists in the room, NSA
would have no reason to monitor it, unless they are using this technology for
far greater reasons than just terrorism. If that is the case then this was some
good that came out of the program. That does not excuse the fact that Bush is
running this country in such a way that only J. Edgar Hoover could dream of.

I also wonder how many more stories we are going to hear come out like this.
We are just a week into the uncovering of what is possibly one of the biggest
scandals to hit our country. I am sure we will hear many more over the next few
months.