Ah, come on. Consider what it takes to create a Yahoo! user account. Almost nothing.
Yes, I was born on January 1, 1901
Yes, the CAPTCHA is HU3FR43O
When you're engaging in elaborate sock puppetry, ostensibly for evil deeds, you're going to create and dump accounts like water.
Let's say there's some evil super villain plotting to derail a train, and he needs to communicate with his henchmen. If he knows that the law will stop attempting to trace his secret e-mails to his henchmen, after reaching some magic number of say... 100,000 user accounts, then his evil plan needs to incorporate operations to create maybe 500,000 sock puppet accounts, to give his communiques a 1 in 5 chance of being intercepted.
Now, let's say you have special evil dedicated servers, capable of queuing and automating requests in real time, and funneling off the CAPTCHAs to warehouse filled with data entry sweatshop slaves, so that your henchmen have all of their dummy accounts prepped for use, once the plan is set to unfold. Because a lot of human intervention and human interaction can be removed from the creation of a yahoo! account, and thus automated, if our evil super villain were able to engineer a custom yahoo! account creation apparatus, it would be a mistake to assume that 40,000 accounts represents 40,000 people, much less 40,000 terr'ists, or even 40,000 'muricans.
So it's not like one can make any assumptions based on these kinds of numbers, when it comes to anything on the internet. But regardless, the reverse aspect to this unreality of "user accounts" on the internet is the worry. There's no way to know when government officials are being honest, and not taking advantage of their powers, to abuse them for personal gain, either to spy on a cheating spouse, or to accept bribes and do it for someone else.
If user accounts, as a rule are nebulous and pseudonymous, and there's no real limit on creating them, and thus only a fuzzy integrity to them, then how can there be a predefined limit on eavesdropping?
The only real limit on sock puppet accounts is a theoretical one, tied to the bandwidth consumed by the circuits crossing all international boundries. In theory, if it takes "X" amount of time for human intervention to create a user account, and we can estimate "T" amount of terr'ists worldwide, then, given "N" amount of time lapsed since TERR'ISM A.D., there might potentially be:
((N/X)*T) = terr'ist user accounts in the world
...then that's pretty much what 'murican law enforcement will entitle themselves to commandeer to fight "evil".
But even more absurd is the idea that a dragnet of all internet traffic will reveal any kind of terrorist communications at all. I would have imagined that human couriers and satellite phones were still the primary drugs of choice when it came to super villainy.
When you're engaging in elaborate sock puppetry, ostensibly for evil deeds, you're going to create and dump accounts like water.
Let's say there's some evil super villain plotting to derail a train, and he needs to communicate with his henchmen. If he knows that the law will stop attempting to trace his secret e-mails to his henchmen, after reaching some magic number of say... 100,000 user accounts, then his evil plan needs to incorporate operations to create maybe 500,000 sock puppet accounts, to give his communiques a 1 in 5 chance of being intercepted.
Now, let's say you have special evil dedicated servers, capable of queuing and automating requests in real time, and funneling off the CAPTCHAs to warehouse filled with data entry sweatshop slaves, so that your henchmen have all of their dummy accounts prepped for use, once the plan is set to unfold. Because a lot of human intervention and human interaction can be removed from the creation of a yahoo! account, and thus automated, if our evil super villain were able to engineer a custom yahoo! account creation apparatus, it would be a mistake to assume that 40,000 accounts represents 40,000 people, much less 40,000 terr'ists, or even 40,000 'muricans.
So it's not like one can make any assumptions based on these kinds of numbers, when it comes to anything on the internet. But regardless, the reverse aspect to this unreality of "user accounts" on the internet is the worry. There's no way to know when government officials are being honest, and not taking advantage of their powers, to abuse them for personal gain, either to spy on a cheating spouse, or to accept bribes and do it for someone else.
If user accounts, as a rule are nebulous and pseudonymous, and there's no real limit on creating them, and thus only a fuzzy integrity to them, then how can there be a predefined limit on eavesdropping?
The only real limit on sock puppet accounts is a theoretical one, tied to the bandwidth consumed by the circuits crossing all international boundries. In theory, if it takes "X" amount of time for human intervention to create a user account, and we can estimate "T" amount of terr'ists worldwide, then, given "N" amount of time lapsed since TERR'ISM A.D., there might potentially be:
...then that's pretty much what 'murican law enforcement will entitle themselves to commandeer to fight "evil".
But even more absurd is the idea that a dragnet of all internet traffic will reveal any kind of terrorist communications at all. I would have imagined that human couriers and satellite phones were still the primary drugs of choice when it came to super villainy.