James Bond

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James Bond Gets a Search Engine.

Here's a handy tip on how to ensure your phone is tapped, just make lots of mobile phone calls making frequent mention of the words Project Echelon, sprinkling your conversation with a few CIAs and NSAs.

Why? Because your ever inquisitive spook community now have their own internet search engine.

It's been long known that the intelligence community snoop on most phone calls, their mainframes listening for dodgy key-words like 'assassination' before creating transcripts of suspect conversations, later flagged to human operators to follow up.

Now Project Echelon has extended this snooping to the wacky world of search engines.

A number of webmasters have reported their sites been scanned by a very aggressive 'spider' which refuses to obey the normal protocols of search engine spidering.

Most web sites have a file which specifies their server's preferences with regard to search engines (the robot dot exclusion standard).

This allows the site owner to tell the search engine which parts of the web site are fair game for indexing, and which parts should remain private and hidden. It also allows it to suggest a fair speed for downloading the pages of a web site into the search engine's own database.

But this mysterious new search engine actively seeks out the private areas on the web and some site owners have reported the spider to possess the ability to bypass password security systems where they exist.

This is a trick you won't find AltaVista or its humble brethren being able to do without the complicity of the site owner, who needs to provide a password to a search engine to guarantee indexing protected content (Wall Street Journal online operates in this way, for instance).

When webmasters try and track down the offending spider, to complain to its owner about the very high speed at which the search engine is sucking down pages (equivalent to having a couple of hundred users descending on your a site in the same second in a total click-frenzy), they are discovering the trail leads back to an almost certainly spoofed IP address in South America.

The webmaster community has accordingly nicknamed the sneaky spook search engine Gonzales (as in Speedy).

Miffed webmasters are now taking their revenge upon the rude search engine by Gonzales baiting - loading up hidden pages containing references to terrorism, arms dealing, drug running, espionage etc in an attempt to spam the agency into an information-overload submission.

Aye Carumba. Who says the US intelligence service has no sense of humour !

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