“Wire tapping is conducted in nearly every country in the world,” Banisar wrote in a paper with the marvelous title of “Bug Off!” “It is frequently abused.” A 1992 State Department report, for example, told of governments and private organizations snooping away in dozens of countries. And it hadn’t happened just in the Third World. “There have been numerous cases in the United Kingdom which revealed that the British intelligence services monitor social activists, labor unions, and civil liberties groups,” Banisar said in a paper written for Privacy International.[6.32] What’s more, the Canadian Communications Security Establishment had shelled out more than $1.1 million to scan through millions of messages and pick out dangerous words and phrases.[6.33] Would the CCSE abuse the system and routinely compile dossiers on law-respecting people? And what about the FBI here in the States? Many Netfolks took it for granted that Louis Freeh’s people were keeping up with Usenet. “The FBI has the ability to police the Internet and, indeed, has been doing so,” David Nadler and Kendrick Fong, two tech-oriented lawyers, would write later on in _Computer Digest: The Journal of Professional Development for the Washington-Baltimore Technology Community_. “In fact, the FBI has been collecting Usenet postings since the late 1980s.” A formulaic condemnation of all FBI monitoring, however, would be unfair. I could hardly object to the Feds reading the public messages of egotistical nuts with a clear-cut predilection for violence. What better reason _not_ to censor Usenet and any audio and video equivalents that might follow? Let the kooks rant away, hour after hour, educating Louis Freeh about their plans. Usenet wasn’t anyone’s living room. Posting messages there was like publishing a book or speaking in a town square. Via the free Stanford Netnews Filtering Service, I could receive electronic mail messages whenever a specified word showed up in a major area of Usenet. Yes, I could track people by name. I could also choose words associated with a topic. That was the magic of the Net; it gave us small-fry many of the same tools available to the intelligence bureaucracies. The same kind of wizardry that might let Canadian cops snoop on citizens could allow me to track the utterances of Al Gore on the subject, say, of the Internet.