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Net Taps Without Warrants?
disappear writes "In the wake of yesterday's threats to cryptography, more ominous news: Wired News reports
that a bill permitting warrantless Internet surveilance has been passed by the Senate." This is just part of the expected and unfortunate backlash from tuesday. The terrorists are winning simply because the govt. can use their threat as a blank check to take away our rights. The worst part is that this will do no good whatsoever. Does the govt really think that crypto export restrictions have prevented terrorists from having strong crypto?
Yeah, so all new versions of encryption software are gonna have to include backdoors so government officials will be allowed access if they need it. Great idea, but uhm, who exactly is gonna make the terrorists all upgrade to the new version?
--It's Pimptastic!--
Yes, and each time the Supreme Court has ruled on them, they've been declared unconstitutional.
Sadly the acts that the terrorists took part in on Tuesday were very much conventional warfare, in that it was likely planned and executed through a cell-structure, and with conventional 'weapons' (ie non-NBC).
I wonder if the Internet was used heavily in this action, and if it would be used heavily by such groups in the future. we all know the security issues involved with using technology (and read that as a privacy issue as well). Its been reported that bin Lauden doesn't use cel phones or other wireless devices any more to keep the US from triangulating or tapping in on his communications. Much as I hate to admit it, these people arn't stupid. Tapping the internet without warrants won't keep them from communicating, they'll go to other methods less easy to tap.
Meanwhile we loose a bit more of our own liberty. There is the first lesson, and likely the terrorist's first victory.
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
Civil liberties are most affected at times like this - when the majority are affected by some sort of crisis or bloodshed. This move would work for a month or an year, till FBI or the Govt is successful in rooting out this evil. At the end of it they would claim Carnivore helped them bring these criminals to justice, the same way Patriot missiles were at first claimed to have a 90% success rate, where as later it was found that the success hits were much much below the previously claimed numbers.
Similarly FBI and the Govt would use Carnivore in a similar way, touting its use among the people without deriving anything valuable out of it. And when the war against Bin Laden is over, they would turn it on us, the people. By then, it would be too late. Any efforts to revoke Carnivore would never win, as the Govt would be quick in pointing out that its needed to prevent further bloodshed, and the Congress would happily send Carnivore on its way.
Civil Liberties have been trampled on the ground once again and theres nothing we can do about it right now. Lets stand on the sidelines and watch, for now.
Rapid Nirvana
Is any representative of the FBI or of Congress presenting any evidence at all that the Internet was an indispensible part of the attack on Tuesday?
I'm hoping that one of my USian friends put this in front of the right sets of eyes. Let freedon reign.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
A lazy man's paradise, right? You can just sit back, not worry about your Constitutional rights, because they'll all be protected for you.
That's dead wrong, and life does not just go on as usual for many people in the U.S.. You obviously need to brush up on your history, as an immediate example comes to mind: the Espionage Act of 1917. Passed in support of WW1, it horribly abridged freedom of speech. People were thrown in jail with extremely long sentences for such things as writing communist literature, and one man was beaten to death after being arrested under it. Here's the best web page I could find on it in short notice, but I recommend heading down to the library and finding a good history book.
Sadly, terrorism is the perfect threat for those who want to take liberties away. Liberties are always curtailed in wartime (read the Bill of Rights: writs of habeus corpus can be suspended during war) and everyone in Washington is saying that this is a war. But in a normal war there's a clear enemy, and some way of telling when the war is over. Fighting against terrorists, though, there is nothing but a mass of shadows. There's no way of telling when they've all been caught of have given up, so there's no way to tell that the fight is over. That means that there's no time when the liberties that are ignored in the interests of pursuing the war should be reinstated- so they likely never will be. We must fight to preserve them now or we can kiss them goodby forever.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Does the govt really think that crypto export restrictions have prevented terrorists from having strong crypto?
/. crowd is being fair with this one. The idea isn't to stop the criminals from using crypto; it's to make it a slightly faster process to DEcrpyt their stuff.
::flamesuit on:: Actually, that's probably not the reason the gov't wants to ban crypto. Think about it for a second:
Every day thousands of geeks and perhaps dozens of terrorists send back and forth messages that have been encrypted. The geek messages may be frivolous, just simple messages about life and groceries and the kids and other trivial things. Even if they have a right to, there's no real reason for geeks to encode these things. Big Brother doesn't give a rats ass about what you're writing.
Now, make it illegal to encrypt messages (example) and this flow of messages from the geeks will cut of SLIGHTLY. However slight, the decrease in the number of encrypted messages intercepted per day could drop, thus translating into fewer messages that need to be decrypted and thus translating into faster processing time for the NSA (or whoever).
Do I support this? No. But I don't think the
Give the gov't some credit. They're not stupid. Just misguided and corrupt.
student of animation and the fine arts
I haven't seen much coverage of this in the major US news sources, but both Globe and Mail and BBC have stories of senseless attacks on Arabs and Muslims in North America. One of my co-workers had to keep his kids from school because of bomb threats.
Sixty years ago, out of fear and anger, members of my family, along with thousands of other Canadians and Americans of Japanese descent were put in internment camps. I say this to remind people that, the road from finger pointing and mindless reprisals to invasion of privacy, censorship and suspension of individual freedom is very short indeed. With all the recent media comparisons to Pearl Harbor, I fear that history may be heading in a very disturbing direction.
Vigilance is paramount now, not in looking for scapegoats or suspects, but in watching for government abuses. Don't look back twenty years from now and think "I can't believe such an abuse of civil liberties happened in this country". It may be happening already.
Complacency contributed to this disaster. The couple of security exposures I can highlight immediately: 1) You don't have to go through a security checkpoint again when you get off a plane and board a new one. You should. 2) Procedures for pilots handling unruly passengers. Were pilots trained to hole up in the cockpit and land at the nearest airport (And possibly lower the cabin pressure to the point where everyone in the back passes out) when something like this is going on, this incident would never have happened. Cryptography is not the danger, complacency is.
The Internet is already years behind where it should be because the US Crypto Stance has pretty much eliminated the possibility of a commercial software package using cryptography on a large scale. Cryptography is vital for the authentication of identity on the net and this application has gone largely unimplemented. How many illegal stock manipulations would have been prevented if all companies PGP signed all their press releases, for instance? And spam could be all but eliminated if everyone encrypted their E-mail and refused messages not encrypted to their key. It seems to me that lawmakers want to put the genie back into the bottle not by eliminating all crypto software but by eliminating the Internet itself. This is just one of several increasingly unfriendly pieces of legislation introduced recently.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Kids today. Never teach 'em history.
Perhaps you ought to spend some time reading US history, focusing on government agencies who are supposed to be involved in law enforcement and the like.
During the time J Edgar Hoover headed the FBI, which was founded to focus on interstate crime, he refused to allow it to focus on the Mafia, and pronounced on more than one occasion that there was no such thing; all those high-profile Mafia busts of the thirties and forties were by the US IRS, or by State and Local police acting at the behest of District Attornies or Governors.
What did the FBI spend its time on? Un-American activities! The FBI spent most of the Fifties looking for "Communists" while ignoring the Mafia, and most of the Civil Rights era ignoring racial crimes while harrassing and trying to shut down Martin Luther King.
There's plenty of precedent to make you scared of the BFI getting more rights, because they're more likely to come after citizens exercising their democratic rights than criminals or terrorists.
For that matter, the NSA already have a bottomless budget, Echelon, and virtually no oversight. They have nearly limitless powers. Why didn't they notice this? Why would giving the BFI more power, like the NSA, help?
People are missing the other ramification of a mandated cryptographic backdoor.
I'll bet that within a week or two, the backdoor is cracked, even if there is some 'sealing technique' used in the software. After all, they cracked Microsoft's AARD, and that was pretty thoroughly protected. Within another week, organized crime, Drug Lords, and even terrorists will have access to it.
Once the backdoor is cracked, encryption is effectively worthless for anything but protection against other law-abiding citizens. But that's not the worst.
One of the most essential uses of crypto is SSH, OpenSSH, and the like, so we can administer the machines that make the Internet hum. Even WinNT/Win2k uses an encrypted channel for admin. Except now we're mandated to use only crypto with a backdoor, and the blackhats can open it, too.
No secure remote administration. No secure credit transactions. No Internet. No nuthin. It all falls apart.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Sigh. As soon as the shock wore off, I began to think: How long before Feinstein, Hatch and the other power-lusters in Congress would start dancing on the graves of Tuesday's victims in order to further their own poliical agendas?
Now I have an answer. Less than 72 hours.
Write your Representative and your Senator. Compose a well-reasoned letter and urge them to NOT trample on the freedoms of the People of America. This bill is simply a facade of terrorism detection plastered over a first step in the abolishment of the 4th Amendment. It will affect only the law-abiding citizens of this country instead of the ones it is being promoted to target. Funny how Hatch and Feinstein have a history of that, isn't it?
I live in Indianapolis, and I will spend a goodly amount of time this weekend composing a letter to Senator Richard Lugar. The Representative for my District is Julia Carson. I will also write to her as well, but she has spoken out against the Bill of Rights during her campaigning, so I am afraid I will be speaking to an enemy of the American people.
ANY law that is a blow against the freedoms of the people is a success for those who would destroy freedom, including terrorists.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
In Katz v. United States, Justice White sought to preserve for a future case the possibility that in 'national security cases' electronic surveillance upon the authorization of the President or the Attorney General could be permissible without prior judicial approval. The Executive Branch then asserted the power to wiretap and to 'bug' in two types of national security situations, against domestic subversion and against foreign intelligence operations, first basing its authority on a theory of 'inherent' presidential power and then in the Supreme Court withdrawing to the argument that such surveillance was a 'reasonable' search and seizure and therefore valid under the Fourth Amendment. Unanimously, the Court held that at least in cases of domestic subversive investigations, compliance with the warrant provisions of the Fourth Amendment was required. Whether or not a search was reasonable, wrote Justice Powell for the Court, was a question which derived much of its answer from the warrant clause; except in a few narrowly circumscribed classes of situations, only those searches conducted pursuant to warrants were reasonable. The Government's duty to preserve the national security did not override the gurarantee that before government could invade the privacy of its citizens it must present to a neutral magistrate evidence sufficient to support issuance of a warrant authorizing that invasion of privacy. This protection was even more needed in 'national security cases' than in cases of 'ordinary' crime, the Justice continued, inasmuch as the tendency of government so often is to regard opponents of its policies as a threat and hence to tread in areas protected by the First Amendment as well as by the Fourth. Rejected also was the argument that courts could not appreciate the intricacies of investigations in the area of national security nor preserve the secrecy which is required. The question of the scope of the President's constitutional powers, if any, remains judicially unsettled. Congress has acted, however, providing for a special court to hear requests for warrants for electronic surveillance in foreign intelligence situations, and permitting the President to authorize warrantless surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information provided that the communications to be monitored are exclusively between or among foreign powers and there is no substantial likelihood any 'United States person' will be overheard. (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/
Removing civil liberties to preserve American freedom is like fucking for chastity.
The enemy know where our weaknesses are. They have analized them carefully. Don't let them use political Akido to use our own force against ourselves.
The only way to preserve freedom is to grant it, and defend it.
KFG