Quote Originally Posted by Cliff Rohrabacher View Post
Who has that sort of capability, to record and keep such useless material and to do what they did with it?
Is that a rhetorical question?

First guess would be "No Such Agency"



Back when ISP's still disconnected end user internet connections when there was no activity, even DSL (which was in its infancy), I think the Pres, or Vice Pres, (or something big), came here to the Portland area. A local ISP provided internet service to the office space the FBI had set up for the event (maybe it was secret service).
This was 15 years ago
The FBI kept calling the ISP because their connection kept dropping. The ISP explained that if there is no activity on the connection for a period of time, the connection would drop... and they would have to re-establish the connection
The FBI explained that they were using the connection regularly and it is still kicking them
the ISP examined the activity for the connection and confirmed there was no data transfer taking place, so this is why the connection was dropping.
The FBI agent said something along the lines of "Trust us, there is data. We need your system to stop dropping the connection"

This comes directly from a friend of mine that worked at the ISP in middle management, so it is a reliable source.
The two of us discussed this over lunch one day and neither of us could figure out how they could possible be passing stealth packet streams across the connection.
Conversation ended with us agreeing it was pretty "spooky" and a weee bit concerning.

In any case, I think the suggested or previously used terms is nice. It helps you use terms that have been used before and likely are going to be successful.
I think the way it drills through the database as you type is called Boolean searching