<Trajan get's out his checkbook and begins filling it in....>
Pay to the order of Growlti......
!Wait a minute...I smell somthing fishy about this. Is the FBI or CIA involved watching me as I write this?
<Trajan rips up the check and goes back to work.>
There is a product called "Overkill" that a chap at my former company developed. It is little more than a huge number of Harddrives run by a old low-rent pentium chip system that simply crawls the internet grunging all information it can find on information security, from BBS's chatting, web pages, and anything else it can find. It stores it all on those numerous harddrives then indexes it so that all of the information is searchable. Before I left the company the data was so enormous that it was unable to be indexed every day. I suspect that it has been upgraded by now though I bet it is still mostly unusable. The company had no idea what to do with it. We used it internally as a research tool but could never really productize it appropriately. THere were just far too many legitamitacy issues surrounding it. I know that when the FBi would come to our office seeking information on some particular hacker we would let them peruse the database to their hearts content.
Keep in mind that this thing only tracked Online conversation (of any form). Nothing on any persons home networks or desktop machine was ever captured. It was a cool tool, but utterly useless for anything other than research.
Cheers!
Trajan