I tried finding some of the old news stories in the online media which gave me the impression before posting here, in fact I think I even commented on a couple of them, but the search engines control so much of what we know today I simply cant find those old articles.

Edit: I should add, circa 2004/2005 I used to be able to cut and paste conversational posts from online chat forums like pistonheads and others, paste the post into Google and it would give me a list of other websites where the exact same conversation was taking place albeit with different avatars. Fast forward to 2011 and all becomes clear. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op... You cant do that now, Google has been updated.

The forum I used to post on, used techniques like using the image of a full stop (period) at the end of the sentence, which I spotted because broadband was slow so the placeholder for the image appeared before it got pulled down from a Canadian webserver. The 5 eyes are very real and they even have oversight of Tor contrary to popular belief.