Slashdot Mirror
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...
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?
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.
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?
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