U.S. intelligence wants our cute cat pictures!

A thought from My Heart's in Accra which started this ramble:

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

The Cute Cat Theory with notes on political activism and censorship found here.

Meanwhile according to CNet the U.S. intelligence community is not happy with the direction the Internet is taking.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.
Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence--and conceivably military--consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. "Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge," Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. "We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us."
Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

It seems that the mighty American security agencies would be bereft if they couldn't keep peeking at all those cute animal pictures (which are such an obvious front for urban terrorists and Taliban supporters) as they are being published on the Net.

Which begs the question of how subversive does the CIA or Homeland Security find the pic below?

Apologies to the dog's owner for making fun of such a sweet pic found at MSNBC News .