Electronic Surveillance: America's Secret Domestic Spying Apparatus - by Tom Burghardt http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24696

Once the tool is installed, Bureau snoops aver "it stay[s] persistent on the compromised computer and ... every time the computer connects to the Internet, [FBI] will capture the information associated with the PRTT [Pen Register/Trap & Trace Order]."The privacy watchdogs write that the Bureau "has been using the tool in domestic criminal investigations as well as in FISA cases, and the FISA Court appears to have questioned the propriety of the tool."This is particularly relevant, and troubling, considering that the FBI and other secret state agencies such as the CIA and NSA already possess formidable surveillance tools in their arsenals and that private security outfits such as HBGary and Palantir--

as well as hundreds of other firms--are busily concocting ever-more intrusive spyware for their state and private partners, as the massive disclosure of internal HBGary emails and documents by the cyber-guerrilla group Anonymous revealed. With all the hot air from Washington surrounding claims by the FBI and other secret state satrapies that they'll "go dark" unless Congress grants them authority to build secret backdoors into America's communications networks, EFF revealed that documents"show the FBI already has numerous tools available to surveil suspects directly, rather than through each of their communications service providers."

"One heavily redacted email notes that the FBI has other tools that 'provide the functionality of the CIPAV [text redacted] as well as provide other useful info that could help further the case'."What is clear from the latest document release is that it isn't the FBI that's "going dark" but the right of the American people to free speech and political organizing without the threat that government-sanctioned malware which remains "persistent" on a "compromised computer" becomes one more tool for building "national security" dossiers on dissidents.