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FBI E-Mail Wiretaps - The Carnivore System
CharlieG writes "It seems the the FBI has been electronic wiretapping various e-mail accounts for a while now. First with a system called Omnivore, and now with a "More Selective" system called Carnivore. You can read about it on MSNBC.COM"
If the government has a technique that can decrease crime, prevent terrorism, and save lives, how can you be opposed to it?
Pol Pot and Yeng Sari had such highly successful techniques. Cambodja virtually had no crime. It also did not have any literate cittizens left and had 25% of the population killed.
Hitler also had such technique. The crime level in Nazi germany was very low. There were almost no pedofils left in Germany for example. So if broght now Hitler Germany would not have had any "child p0rn" problems as there were no consumers for "chid p0rn" left. He simply treated them like the jews. Actually jews had higher survival rates than pedos and gay in Nazi Germany and Stalin USSR.
Stalin and his followers also had such technique. The crime level in the ex-eastern block was never asv low as in nazi germany but it was mostly petty crime. Not shooting in the streets like now.
Are all these compelling reasons for us to restore anyone of these? Clone them maybe?
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Coming from a Canadian point of view here....
.in the US.. it is now a crime to have a scanner that can listen in on cellular calls (let alone actually doing it). However.. when the same was proposed in canada.. the crtc said this:
.. ENCRYPT.
It has long been viewed in north america (though the US changed it's law for some reason or other) that the public airwaves were just that; public. We regulated who could use what spectrum for what in order to make everybody happy. (if everyone fought, radio would be useless).
Then, one day.. along came the cellular telephone. Lo-and-behold, these phones used standard FM in their allocated bands. So.. people with radio scanners could listen to phone calls.
Now.
The airwaves are a public resource; they always have been and they always will be. The celluular providers had *NO REASONABLE EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY* for their calls. They were broadcasting in the clear.
Remember, regulation states who can broadcast, not who can listen.
So.. cellular providers deal with this up here by pushing digital.
How is the internet any different? You KNOW that you don't have control over your packets once they are out of your network. Perhaps your upstream has an agreement wiht you guaranteeing certain privacy.. but what about their upstream? What about everyone? By it's nature, the internet is not a single resource, but a vast collection of networks all hooked together, covering every juristiction and idology known to man.
Regardless of what the 'ignorant' public might think, there is *NO REASONABLE EXPECTATION* of privacy when putting packets on the internet, unless they are encrypted. Period.
I'm not saying the itnernet is a public resource, like the airwaves.... but you *know* you can't control where those packets go. So
Nah, too cumbersom. I think the whole problem is that TCP connections are not private. With SSH you can scramble any connection. So, why not scramble the traffic between mailservers? While we're at it, why not compress the data as well. I think encryption has to be built in to the network and not just added on to it. Basically any trafic to and from a PC can be read right now, unless you specifically choose to encrypt it. I would like to have it the other way around. Anything from chat sessions to ftp to X sessions I want encrypted.
Jilles
When Congress enacts this sort of program, they always give it a name like "The Freedom of Infants and Children Act" or the "Prevention of Violence to Puppies Act" with a rider that slips in the big-brother grants of power.
The FBI, on the other hand, gives it a name that can't help but encourage visions of a government run-amok eating its citizens. Which, come to think of it, is not too far from the truth.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This guy is right on the money. This isn't about targeting a suspect and confirming other evidence (as wiretapping is meant to be), but about trolling for suspects. Why should electronic communication be legally less protected than telephone communication?
I wouldn't much mind if this sort of thing required a warrant and if they were required to toss any data without a specific person's (or IP, at the outside) name/id on it. There's no need for this level of invasion. I also suspect, rather like the cybersensor filters, they're going to pick up more false hits than real crime, and wind up investigating and harassing uninvolved people.
Now here's an argument for better encryption.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
It's so double plus good to be alive and protected by the Ministry of the FBI!
----
Of course, they must have one.
...wait a sec...
*CLICK, CLICK*
There, my key is now 4096 bits, problem solved. ^_^
Seriously, I think PGP is too versatile to be cracked so easily. i.e. I have a 2048/1024 DH/DSS key with the CAST cypher, but I also have a 2048 bit RSA key with the IDEA cypher. You can also have custom key sizes, for example Will Price at PGP has a 4000 bit DH key.
Powerful and flexible.
I recommend looking up "PGPDisk." It's easier to use than the already dead-simple normal PGP. It creates a virtual disk volume that's encrypted, and can auto-unmount itself. It's good even when the PC crashes, too. (In tact, data saved until crash is still there when you reboot.)
...however I don't know if it's out for Linux.
warrant would reasonably limit privacy
invasions by any agency.
Until I found a website for an automated
search warrant request software package.
Like most of you, I don't do anything that anyone would be concerned about. I don't even keep copies of DeCss around, nor do I download metallica songs. And after seeing the anonymous family photo with the cucumber, the dog and what appears to be a small cheerleading squad, I haven't much interest in downloading Pr0n. With caffeine as my only drug, I'm not exactly worried...
I even pay my parking tickets and cable bill.
What is scary is the website I found (there are at least three packages for this)detailing software designed for automating search warrant requests (probable cause, non?) and capable of processing over 1100 search warrant requests per hour!
I found these sites by accident while looking for information on search engine technology in 1996. I won't list the URLS, but you can find them. One site talked about how much faster it would be when electronic authorization (EDI) interaction became available.
Imagine how low the threshold of probable cause will slip once some eager programmer decides that online email profiling data can go immediately into the search warrant request software, returning approval in under thirty seconds.
There are no laws saying that e-mail, packet scans and IP traffic logs cannot be held indefinately, or archived for the last 120 days. This didn't apply to telephone calls - while call logs could be accessed, recording the actual conversations required a warrant - so speech that occured before the warrant was safe, or left as hearsay evidence. With digital archiving of all traffic, the landscape has changed.
In the future, search warrants will effectively be *retroactive* - and can contain complete records of what you've done for months.
For most people, privacy is seen as a way to hide indiscretions from general knowledge, or as a way to "get away" with crime. It isn't - that's a small quirk that can be handled through our current legal system.
Privacy is really the way that we guarantee our right to stay at arm's length from our government (well, at least the individuals in it) and our ability to disagree and express that disagreement (without fear of punitive retaliation)to those in power, be they government officials, Microsoft or the MPAA.
As long as we have that, everything else in a democracy can work. We don't really want a truly libertarian state (Been to Moscow lately?), but a democracy that embraces responsibility and liberty like RSM embraces pizza and ego.
So Get off your dead asses
and write those letters now!
snicker.
BTW, how does wiretapping interact with encrypted data? What if they tap the email and discover that it's all PGP'ed? Can they brute-force it?
FBI sources were quoted as saying that among the first people targeted would be the people who put random Echelon keywords in their .sigs. "They all thought they were clever" Michaels said, "but it was just lame and annoying, and only a few hundred people ever did it, so it wasn't even effective. We were sitting around drinking one night and were like 'What the shit, let's test this on those guys!' and we've been following them ever since. Mostly it's just a bunch of guys talking about beard trimmers and PGP, it's kind of depressing."
sig:
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