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[MineralMan]

61. Precisely. Right now, things like threats are investigated mainly

because someone reports them. Look at DU. Someone posts something that someone told them was posted on Twitter. If it's a threat, for example, half a dozen DUers report it to the FBI or the Secret Service, if it's a threat against the President.

Those all get looked at. It is the public nature of social media that gets things noticed and reported, not the accumulation of enormous piles of data that get sorted through by database algorithms.

DU, Free Republic, and other discussion forums are also public, and are monitored more by their users than by the government. A threat posted on any of those public discussion forums is more likely to be noticed because someone who reads those forums reported it than through data mining. Much more likely.

The goal of the NSA and CIA is not to screw around with the bulk of what goes on the Internet. They're interested in national security threats and issues. They're especially interested in what is NOT put on public forums and social media. That's what they're looking at, not people's general dissatisfaction with government. Nobody really cares about that.

If you put it on the Internet, even in what you think is private email, it's available to those agencies. If you do it under an assumed name or screen name, it will take about 30 seconds for any agency to find out who you are in RL. That is a certainty. Even if you're using some Internet anonymizer, consider whether you know who actually runs that service. Encrypting? Maybe. It might work, unless there's a back door in your encryption software. My assumption is that if the encryption software is from a company, it's likely that there's a back door into it. Things work like that.

The only preventive measure, if you're actually doing something the government might be interested in, which is unlikely, is to keep all communications off the internet, out of the mail, and off the telephone system. But, the government is very unlikely to be interested in you, anyhow. They have bigger fish to catch.