what if they were just interested and happened to work for the city. So what, paranoia hurts the movement

Sorry, 1love, but this is not quite like sitting at your desk surfing the net using a search engine like Google ..

From Wikipedia: A web crawler (also known as a Web spider or Web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms (Kobayashi and Takeda, 2000).

This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

A Web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies.

Deal with it. Information on the web is public. Police and the FBI have been known to monitor even the most moderate of activists. If you want to communicate in a secure manner, without government snooping, create some sort of encrypted forum (a bbs running on an https server or irc over ssl, or gpg encrypted emails, or gaim-encrypton or gaim-otr instant messages)