A short while back, I reported on the lawsuit that was brought against the Department of Homeland Surveillance which uncovered the truth behind the Department’s training of analysts to track down dissenters and government critics on the internet.
Before that I reported about the 25 flyers that the FBI circulated to various industries, (including prepper and survival related businesses) and the pressures placed on food storage retailers to collect and turn over information about their customers to the DHS.
Now I’ve just learned that the FBI and DHS have been caught spying on survival and prepper websites, rerouting their visitors for the purpose of putting a long-lived cookie in their browser to track their online actions.
James Wesley, Rawles was tipped off that the government had been tracking users to his popular website: SurvivalBlog.com. Some web forensics work revealed that 4906 visitors ended up getting redirected through FBI servers.
It has come to my attention that from August of 2011 to November of 2011, the FBI secretly redirected the web traffic of more than 10% of SurvivalBlog’s US visitors through CJIS, their sprawling data center situated on 900 acres, 10 miles from Clarksburg, West Virginia. There, the Feebees surreptitiously collected the IP addresses of my site visitors. In all, 4,906 of 35,494 selected connections ended up going to or through the FBI servers. (Note that this happened several months before we moved our primary server to Sweden.) Furthermore, we discovered that the FBI attached a long-lived cookie that allowed them to track the sites that readers subsequently visited. I suspect that the FBI has done the same to hundreds of other web sites. I find this situation totally abhorrent, and contrary to the letter of 4th Amendment as well as the intent of our Founding Fathers.
I recognize that I am making this announcement at the risk of losing some readers. So be it. But I felt compelled to tell my readers immediately, because it was the honorable and forthright course of action.
After the announcement was made, many survival and prepper site owners discovered that they too had been monitored by Homeland Security.
Welcome to 1984… Would the last person who still believes that we’re not living in a surveillance state please turn the lights off before you go?
