John Markoff and John Schwartz write:
The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.
A government official, speaking anonymously to the Times reporters,
compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap system used by the F.B.I., saying: ‘Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it’s 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet.’
Does anyone in the government remember about search warrants?