If you’re like me, you probably enjoyed the spectacle of Tom Matzzie live-tweeting an overheard off-the-record conversation between Ex NSA Director Michael Hayden and a reporter. The hilarity was terminated when a colleague of Hayden called him to warn of the eavesdropping.
I snickered at the irony but didn’t think much about it. Now Bruce Schneier remarks that what this really demonstrates is that the government is monitoring the Internet in real time. The tweets, of course, are public so it doesn’t rise to the level of abuse of the NSA’a extra-legal activities but it still shows that those public feeds are being monitored and in real time.
Schneier says that he doesn’t think that this means that the NSA is monitoring the Internet; he believes it more likely that some PR organization assisting the NSA with the Snowden revelations was monitoring social media for names connected to the NSA. I’m not so sanguine but it doesn’t really matter if it was the NSA or some other government-connected entity. The government should have better things to worry about. Getting healthcare.gov running would be a good start.