Gary Buell's fine
Covert History site brings up an intriguing little mystery:
For several months now I have used Sitemeter to keep track of how many people look at this blog. I don't look at the results every day but often enough to notice some regular visitors. One daily visitor is shown as being from a site in Stone Mountain, Georgia and is listed as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Yesterday I had 8 visits from this domain, the first at 5:05 am; the last at 7:19 pm. Seven of these visits were of zero seconds duration. One was of one second duration. Not long enough to read anything.This seems a bit odd to me. The only explanation I can figure out is that this is some sort of software "bot", presumably working for the government, but not necessarily for the CDC.
Nothing of that sort has shown up on my own stats. However, Buell's tale does parallel a new story in the Moonie Times about the
CIA's increased interest in blogs:
The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.
"A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we're getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to ... people putting information on there that doesn't exist anywhere else," Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.
I've nothing against scooping up unclassified information. But why do I get the nagging feeling that they may be spying
on us rather than
for us?
2 comments:
One measure of the legitimacy of a government is how much it spies on its citizenry. History indicates that, generally speaking, the more paranoid a government is about subversives out to overthrow it, the the less legitimate it is.
It is also a good indication that the government is in trouble.
There may be a completely innocent explanation for this but darned if I can think of it. Perhaps a coincidence but today only one visit from the "CDC" so far, and the duration was 26 minutes and 46 seconds. Odd after numerous visits of zero seconds. All governmental and intelligence agencies are of course more than welcome to read my blog.
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