After I posted that last section, I sat in my cabin thinking about a few things. I've been thinking a lot about the whole sequence of the Problem these past 18 months since the Problem actually hit.
So I sat there in my cabin living room, thinking. It was late in the afternoon. That day had been rather nice; the weather was pleasant, and I had gotten a good bit of my daily work done today. There's a lot of work involved in staying alive these days. You can't run down to the store to get supplies. You can't run off to McDonalds to get a double cheeseburger and a large chocolate shake. You can't zip over to Hilda's Bakery for some of their excellent oatmeal raisin cookies. You can't even run down to the Seven-Eleven for a quart of cold milk to go with the cookies. (Powdered milk, even when cold - and it doesn't get that cold even with my small solar-powered refrigerator - is not the same as what was available before the Problem.)
My daily routine is working in the garden, cutting and chopping wood for winter, checking the water supply pipes and intake, maintenance on the cabin, and taking a hike around the 'neighborhood' to check for two-legged critters (in addition to hunting for the four-legged variety, with the bow and arrow to keep a low profile). Mind you, I'm not complaining, considering the alternative that many people went through (or the ones that didn't survive). I've always been somewhat of a loner, anyway.
But during each day, I spend a lot of time thinking about things. Lately, I've been thinking about the whole sequence of how I (we) got to this point due to the Problem. I've been trying to get it all straight in my mind.
So, after that last post, I did a little review in my head. (Actually, some of it was talking out loud - it helps to hear a little noise around here other than the background nature sounds.)
The FBI (at least initially) was the original source of the delay/copy packets. They were using it to monitor - legally, but more often, illegally - data packets traveling around the Net. They initially targeted email, then got into all sort of data - financial, commerce - just about all the data that traveled around the Net.
This tracking really started exploding after that September 11th (sorry about the 'exploding') day. The US was caught with it's intelligence agency's pants down. They had very little advanced indication of the attack. They knew about the various terrorists groups, but they didn't see the type of attack that happened.
They realized that they would need to step up their monitoring of the bad guys. They would need to look at data throughout the Net. They would need to track not just email, but financial data. And they didn't have their monitoring software in enough systems.
In the aftermath of September 11th, the US President was a bit pissed (to put it mildly). As was the US Congress. And the citizens of the US. And the rest of the world. They wanted to track down the terrorists. And the US Congress, along with the rest of the world, was willing to give the intelligence agencies and investigators any tool that they needed, even if it resulted in a reduction of the privacy of the citizens and the Internet.
It didn't take long for the FBI's program to be installed in just about every major ISP's server (and some of the minor ISP's) on the Internet. They were careful about the extra traffic that the program generated; it was limited as much as possible. They started out monitoring just a few accounts (email and financial and others), then, as the investigation proceeded, they started increasing the number of accounts that they monitored. And the more agencies throughout the world that started using the program, the more accounts they monitored.