In general you do not need to worry about someone finding out what you are reading from a newsgroup server. While it is theoretically possible for, say, a law enforcement agency to specifically monitor a server, I wouldn't worry about it. Many newsgroup servers do have logging capability, but that data is not propagated to other newsgroup servers. Thus an ISP hosting a newsgroup server could examine it's log files in detail and find out what you've been doing, but an outside person or agency would have great difficulty in gaining access to those logs - even if they are being kept for very long.
Here are the facts according to one newsgroup administrator:
We know what groups are read and by how many. Logging is wonderful. NOTE: This does NOT mean we log everything you do on Usenet. We do have wonderful logs filled with information, HOWEVER, they are only used for generating usage statistics. These logs are parsed every night by a script for certain data. The old log is sent to /dev/null after processing (the trash) and human eyes never see the raw log.
No, the real danger to your privacy is that every posting that you do is traceable in some manner or another. If you examine the header of a message posted to a newsgroup you will find lots of interesting data including the TCP/IP address of the machine that posted the message. And even more importantly, these messages can remain available forever. Thus someone could relatively easily find out every posting that you have ever done to any newsgroup if he really wanted to.
If you want to cloak your message slightly, you can include the following line as the first line in your posting:
x-no-archive: yes
This causes Deja.Com to ignore the post and not include it in their massive index. I have not found this mentioned in other newsgroup services so it probably has not effect.
Of course, you can be much more stealthy than this if you want. You could create an account on Remarq.Com or Deja.Com under an assumed name, then use a service like Anonymizer.Com to mask your TCP/IP address. You can't get much more secure than that.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.