In a recent blog post by Alex Bisceglie, he references an article in the New York Times that suggests that there is a room that exists inside of AT&T in which intelligence agents from the NSA are monitoring all data flowing through their networks. While it is unclear from the article how true this actually is, I would suspect that it is not merely rumor. In this post, Alex suggests that it is less dangerous to have the government monitoring such information then members of the private sector. Initially, I disagreed. However, I can see his point. Our government is notoriously incapable of handling relevant intelligence information, let alone loads of possibly irrelevant data. In either case, I came to the conclusion that its probably all the same. The government is basically owned by large private corporation anyway. My initial thinking was that governments, in general, yield more power over individual people then corporations do and thus their obtaining of personal/private information and communications, and their ability to utilize such information for censorship purposes, illegal imprisonment, etc., is more dangerous. But I think the assumption that most of what they obtain is being filtered through inhuman robots is probably correct. The problem is, sometimes what a government perceives to be a threat is actually not and given the agenda and intelligence level of the people determining the context of 'threat' in most governmental intelligence agencies, I think it is still very scary.