I know we'd all like to think there are ways to protect our privacy online, but there really aren't any - at least, any we have access to. And as long as Congress is too afraid of seeming "soft on terror," it's unlikely that legislation protecting our privacy will be passed. From Democracy Now!:

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Josh. Explain what they’re doing in Iran and then how the same technology is being used here.

JOSH SILVER: Well, yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Iranian government had secured this system from a German and Finnish company that will look through everything, both land line telephones, mobile telephones, email, websites, looking for keywords and actually monitoring the entire traffic going through one chokepoint in Iran. It’s been disputed by the European company, but the validity of the report seems solid.

What’s scary about this is that this technology that monitors everything that goes through the internet is something that works, it’s readily available, and there’s no legislation in the United States that prevents the US government from employing it. And that’s what’s really the cautionary tale here.

AMY GOODMAN: Your report is called “Deep Packet Inspection: The End of the Internet as We Know It.” Why does it threaten the internet, overall?

JOSH SILVER: Well, the problem is, is that, you know, if you look back to the 1930s, when telephone service became ubiquitous around the United States, lawmakers realized then that there was this new communications infrastructure and there needed to be consumer protections so that the government and others could not unlawfully or unethically monitor and listen in to the private conversations of American citizens. They established laws that prevented that from happening. In those laws, it made it so that the government requires a legitimate warrant, issued by a judge, that lets them do such monitoring.

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