I recently found an article that included a simple theory on how to see whether or not your computer is being watched by the nsa. Ok so basically the background on this is that the nsa has been taking information out of AT&T's San Francisco's offices in a secret room. Now this sortof reminds me of the Zimmerman Telegram(if you dont know what that is you need to go re learn American History).
So here is what you do supposing your on a windows machine you simply load up your command prompt (by going to start, run, type in cmd and hit enter). Now type in this command
tracert nsa.gov
After that you should see something like this
C:\> tracert nsa.gov
1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 12.110.110.204
[...]
7 11 ms 14 ms 10 ms as-0-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.0.218]
8 13 12 19 ms ae-23-56.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.123.173]
9 18 ms 16 ms 16 ms 192.205.33.17
10 88 ms 92 ms 91 ms [B]tbr2-p012201.sffca.ip.att.net[/B] [12.123.13.186]
11 88 ms 90 ms 88 ms tbr1-cl2.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.10.41]
12 89 ms 97 ms 89 ms tbr1-cl4.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.10.29]
13 89 ms 88 ms 88 ms ar2-a3120s6.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.8.65]
14 102 ms 93 ms 112 ms 12.127.209.214
15 94 ms 94 ms 93 ms 12.110.110.13
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * *
if you see the entry in bold with the sffca.ip.att.net above or below a non att.net entry then your internet packets are being sent to room 641A and then illegaly taken by the nsa.
Now after this I would like to mention a great live cd for OpenBSD. This live cd is called anonym.OS and as you might of guessed it is meant to keep you anonymous on the internet. Basically it uses something called TOR (The Onion Router) to make your ip virtually untrackable now you can configure TOR on anything but anonym.OS comes preconfigured with it. Just so you dont run out and install this over your current OS this will not allow you to run at maximum bandwidth. Browsing will be fine but you wouldnt want to be playing online games (if even possible) or downloading big files on this. You can find out more about anonym.OS here http://kaos.to/cms/content/view/14/32/