Rough Stone Rolling

A curious thing happened with the blog yesterday. I was idly checking the visitor stats (they’re usually lean & mean as this is a really under-the-radar site) and noticed a major spike in traffic. Weird, I thought. Did a search engine suddenly grab some meta tags and give it a high position? Unlikely. Mormon blogs are about as unique as a surly deacon. Another thought was maybe someone discovered my blog and passed it on. Hey, it could happen. Turns out that wasn’t it, either. Not how I thought, anyway.

Last night I decided to review the visitors’ IP numbers and, sure enough, there were quite a few that spent time clicking around the whole blog. Interesting… I went to one of the IP-identifier sites and started plugging in the numbers with the most activity. The first one was the U.S. Department of Justice. Yikes. Just seeing that, I knew immediately what was going on.

The second most active IP belonged to Bonneville Comunications. Then there was BYU Idaho, a watchdog company called NextClick and a mysterious entity in Minnesota whose building houses several local & national government agencies, one of which I suspect is Homeland Security.

This is what happened: On October 19 I posted an entry about Joseph Ginat, an Israeli scholar of great influence who has relations with the Church. He also happens to specialize in Arab relations. I do know about organizations watchdogging the ‘Net, but it didn’t occur to me at the time that I’d pique the interest of our national security agencies, let alone the Church. I was terrified and thrilled at the same time. What do I tell my wife when the breaching team blows our front door off its hinges? Do I play it cool with a chuckle and say, “Go back to bed, honey, I know what this is about. Let’s go, gentlemen.” Or, “I am unarmed! You have my word!” like Jack Bauer. These were the kind of thoughts that escorted me into sleep last night.

I shared my new drama with a friend today who told me the government and the Church, each, probably have systems set up to catch certain terms online and I just happened to hit the mother lode. It makes one wonder… what kind of files are being compiled on me right now, and what lists am I on? I hope I don’t share any with Harry Reid.