Department of Justice Crawling my Site

[LeighAnn]

In the visitor logs of my website there is a referral from a computer at
wdcsun15.usdoj.gov
making one visit, but perusing 102 pages and 1248 files.
Here is the website
http://www.vintagekansascity.com
Jolly fun reading, but I can't imagine a person being able to make it through 102 pages in one sitting, especially on the office computer. This seems to me like a spider crawling my pages for content.
Is this normal and legal behavior, does this spider crawl pages at random, or should I wonder if I, personally, am under investigation? I also own the somewhat anti-Bush website in the sig line.
Thank you for any insight.

[Syrinx]

1. Are You Being Spied On?

I wouldn't say it's normal for your website to be spidered like that, but I wouldn't really want to say it's abnormal either. I've spidered sites a time or two, while I slept, so that I could browse a site at super-broadband speeds later. (I'm on dialup.)

I have no way of knowing what is going on in your specific case, but of course there is no doubt that the government these days is placing all of us under scrutiny, especially those that are outspoken about the misdeeds of the administration.

I have posited here on DU a pet theory that one of the true purposes behind the creation of the internet, and specifically of the World Wide Web, was the collection of domestic intelligence -- to get us to, in effect, spy on our selves.

While that may sound at first to be an outrageous theory, if you think about it a little, it makes perfect diabolical sense. Whether it's actually true, I have no idea.

Don't even get me started on my theories about global satellite surveillance -- but think about the detail of the images from Google Earth, and wonder about how detailed the images are that the government secretly has access to.

I'm not sure what advice I would give you. Probably, you should just ignore it, unless you've written something somewhere that could be construed as a threat to the president, or something like that.

Or you could call the DOJ and ask for an explanation. And if they stonewall, there's always the Freedom Of Information Act... well, I shouldn't say "always."

There are no easy answers that I can think of, but hopefully someone else on here can offer you some good advice. Good luck and best wishes.