Does the goverement monitor these boards?

It's nice to see what people actually in the professions think of these topics.

Windows has NSA garbage in it and yes Echelon is watching. Proxies are good, especially if they don't keep logs (no law requires it....).

As for folks poking around here, well you could make their life difficult by blocking access for them (simple IP filter) for the NSA/CIA etc. but it would not stop them if they really want to poke around - they go home or IP spoof. We did this to our competitors (blocked them) when I ran an IT shop and you can even get creative and watch the logs to bag their home IP's since most routers these days have their location listed in their name - sneaky fun....