This is no more than shining a flashlight through your windows and taking pictures. It should be treated as the privacy violation that it is.

A good friend is a sysop on a local government site. He is bewildered by an entire network sending very small packets to China.com, a communication ISP. The traffic is continuous, is difficult to distinguish, uses port 80 and the packets originate from his 130+ machines which run a variety of OS's; some without much of an OS. When I look at the sophistication of this process, combined with the massive load it places on the receiving server(s), I come up with a government entity with an agenda.