I'll concede that a government agency using persistant cookies might be a tad unethical, but ILLEGAL? Methinks not.

uhm, using cookies doesn't mean that they can spy on your other internet activity either...that would require a serious hack and most of the IE versions of that flaw have been patched.

for fuck's sake people, everyone uses cookies for client-side session state.

^^ Yeah, what he said!!! Only with less technical language.

Cookies are overwhelmingly common. They're probably being used -- if they're being used at all -- to find out which paths users take as they click through the site. If users tend to click through 5 pages to get to the same piece of information, that piece of information might get moved up front, so that people can get to it more easily.

This is the Government we're talking about Vasudeva. That would make WAY too much sense.

You can also set your browser to, like, not accept cookies.

javascript:void(alert(document.cookie))

Paste that in to your address bar and hit enter. I'd say we have a conspiracy going on here