Today’s Tech

FBI to start monitoring online chats next year

The government seems to take a liking to keeping an eye on what we do online.

Currently, they don’t have the legal support to monitor one-on-one Internet chats. But, if they get their way, this will not be true for much longer.

According to the agency’s chief lawyer, the current system of requesting a court’s approval before starting to bug someone’s Internet traffic is antiquated.

With technology advancing, more and more illegal activities are taking place online, and it’s becoming too much work and hassle to make numerous individual requests. The system of retrieving archived Internet conversations won’t do, according to the FBI’s legal team.

Instead, they are anticipating a change in the legal codes that would allow the FBI to monitor all Internet chat traffic. With this power, the FBI would use this new collection of data to screen for code words for future investigation.

One issue with such a system being implemented would be the number of false-positive results that would lead federal investigators to delve into matters that are of normal, everyday life and not large interstate crime syndicates.

The fact that government entities are beginning to dip their feet into the waters of private data is showing that privacy is becoming more and more of an ideal and less of a tangible item.