My government at work, watching me...

[Andilinks]

On Thursday Apr. 3, I decided to research some internet security sites and post some of the links on my site.

Very next day, this appears in my logs:

[04/Apr/2003:03:56:16 -0500] "GET /new.htm HTTP/1.0" 200 40780 "http://sseop101.eop.gov/HOMSEC/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp?record=894174"

eop.gov is "Executive Office of the President," the IP comes back "Not Found," and sseop I would guess, is the Secret Service.

Now I assume it was the security links I posted because all the political posting I've been doing has been quite supportive of the President.

What really made my hair stand on end though was that URL... yikes! suspect, watchlists... not very subtle for a gumshoe. If I really were a subversive I'd be packing up my bags now.

Andi

[Deb]

Possibly...but also note that it is quite simple to 'spoof' that information. I could just as easily visit your site and deliver the same URL to your logs, meaning it may be a "joke" of sorts by someone else who has witnessed your recent postings...

Deb
- It is the Internet afterall 8}

[ryount]

I have a big brother story as well. I got a survey in the mail from the Department of Transportation. The letter said something about them capturing license tag numbers and then sending out surveys to the registered owners. It said something like a car registered to someone at this address was observed driving down x road. Please fill out this anonymous survey about your trip to help us better serve motorists. It asked where the trip began, where it ended, was it business related, how often do you make this trip, etc. Kinda creepy.

[TVB]

A number of months ago, I was simply surfing and ended up on a website about commercial aircraft and safety considerations. About 10 minutes after looking at it, my firewall started to get slammed. When I checked the source of the intrusion attempts it was the FAA. It really got me to wondering...

Dear John Ashcroft,

Your Patriot Act is a bad bad thing. Your revised Patriot Act II is even worse.

Betsy

[JoeRT]

There's a good chance Deb is right. I've been previously contacted by people from the EOP's Intranet department about the use of weather images (or at least they said they were with the EOP, and the e-mail address and 202 area code looked like it was valid). However, I never saw in my logs any domain that was obviously from the EOP, which I didn't really expect to find anyway.


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Joe Torsitano
www.weatherforyou.com