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?

Comments

Bye, bye war on drugs

[asmithmd1]

Hello constant state of war. "We have to take these actions but only until we win the war."

"1984", author George Orwell, 1949, ISBN 0-679-41739-7

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

Benjamin Franklin said it best...

[GeneralEmergency]

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety."

- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.

Re:This is a bunch of CRAP.

[Once&FutureRocketman]

Already did it. Here's a generic version of the letter I am writing. It is intentionally short and non-specific -- customize it to discuss the issues that concern you.

Dear XYZ,

Like you, I am aggrieved at the tragic loss of life resulting from the horrendous events of Sept. 11. Every American has been touched by this trauma which will linger forever in the memory of our nation.

Though I want to see the perpetrators of these acts brought to justice, I must beg you not to compromise American civil liberties in your pursuit of justice. The loss of American citizens' ability to move and communicate freely would be a greater casualty than the thousands killed Tuesday morning.

Benjamin Franklin said that those who give up necessary liberties for security deserve neither security nor freedom. I must echo his sentiment. Do not allow our sacred rights of freedom of speech, association or movement to be abridged in the coming days of difficult choices. America's enemies hate us precisely because we are a free and open society, and they fear the potential that that represents. Do not give them the victory they cannot themselves win by destroying the core of our society, our beloved liberties.

God Bless America,

Who exactly

[roystgnr]

who exactly is gonna make the terrorists all upgrade to the new version?

Simple: The FBI is, when they knock on the terrorist doors.

If your computer is caught sending packets that are labeled (e.g. GPG headers) as encrypted, your computer will either be bugged to get your password or seized to search for plaintext secrets. In theory, this will allow terrorists to be subjected to legal scrutiny while they are still conspiring about acts of terrorism but before those acts are committed.

In reality, it won't work that way:

• Steganography will defeat this. Perfectly compressed data looks like white noise, and the amount of white noise speeding around the internet as pornography alone (where I have already seen it speculated that terrorist messages have been exchanged, in low order bits) is billions of times greater than the amount of data terrorists need to exchange. Will the government replace the internet by something that proxies every webserver , P2P network, and email with a watermark-scrambler?
• Codes will defeat this. Forget the "little black book" codes, where "picnic" => "New York City" and "ants" => September. Imagine codes where your choice of synonyms in an email supplies a bit or two per word, and a few CD-Rs of one time pad data (yes, I've heard terrorists occasionally meet face to face!) supply an effectively unlimited amount of unbreakable encryption even against those who figure out the synonym code.
• Those CD-Rs will make the steganographic watermarks undetectable, as well - maybe PGP output can be distinguished from random noise somehow, but a one-time pad's output can't.
• Let's not limit those face-to-face meetings to passing CD-Rs, either. There was nothing about this attack that was difficult, just unthinkable. They didn't need videoconferencing to pull it off, just a few conferences in rooms without hidden mikes!

In otherwords, we're giving the government authority to review every law abiding citizen's digital communications, without judicial oversight (the FBI had your email, and you're going to take their word for it that nobody, with or without official permission, looked at it?), and without impairing the ability for lawbreakers to engage in undetected low-bandwidth communications (and you don't exactly need to videoconference to plan a terrorist attack) at all.

Did I miss anything?

Re:Not as bad as it sounds

[Dr. Awktagon]

Circumstances that don't require court orders include an "immediate threat to the national security interests of the United States, (an) immediate threat to public health or safety or an attack on the integrity or availability of a protected computer."

I wonder if "an attack on the integrity of a protected computer" could conceivably include technological access controls on a copyrighted work?

The meat of the issue (for me)

[(H)elix1]

I posted on this last night, but I saw the debate on cspan. According to the only two folks who I saw mention "this might not be a good idea" - Ah, found it....

Mr. LEAHY.....
In here it says, on wiretapping, pen registers, trap and trace
devices, if the court finds that a State investigator or law
enforcement officer--it could just be an investigator; I don't know if
this means a private investigator, a licensed PI--if they certify to
the court that the information is relevant, if they just came in and
said: Your Honor, I certify this is going to be relevant; I am a State
investigator; I am the deputy sheriff of East Washtub--I apologize to
anybody if there is such a town, East Washtub. Let's say I am a deputy
sheriff on weekends and a mechanic the rest of the time, and I certify
we need this, a State officer. Does that mean a Federal judge is going
to stop things and give them the order?
I have worked with some very good deputy sheriffs in my time. I am
not sure that even with the best--some of them were darned good when I
was a prosecutor--any of them are going to go into Federal court and
say: I want to certify I need this wiretap or this pen register, trap
and trace.
I think we ought to at least know what that is, going into people's
computers because the local investigator says, "I want to." I am not
sure if the authorities, under normal going into court, asking for a
court order, having a hearing, can go into my computer; that is one
thing. But if somebody goes out there, for example, and sees me having
target practice outside my house--I have a pistol range out back of my
house--and they say: I wonder how many guns he has; I want to go into
his computer to find out just in case he has listed his ammunition
purchases. Should they be allowed to? I would think some of those who
are concerned about the rights of gun owners might be a little bit
concerned about this provision. I am a gun owner. I am concerned.
Authority to do wiretaps. It says here that we will redesignate
paragraph (p), as so redesignated by section 434(2) of the
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Public Law 104-
132; 110 Stat. 1274, as paragraph (r); and (2) by inserting after
paragraph (p) as so redesignated by section 201(3) of the Illegal
Immigration

[[Page S9376]]

Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, division C of Public
Law 104-208; 110 Stat. 3009-565, the following new paragraph:

(q) any criminal violations of sections 2332, 2332a, 2332b,
2332d, 2339A, or 2339B of this title (relating to terrorism).
. . .

Does anybody want to tell me what that means? I thought we were here
to give help to our law enforcement and our antiterrorist authority to
go after people. I thought we were here to try to finish up a bill that
the Senator from South Carolina and the Senator from New Hampshire have
worked on very closely--and the Senator from West Virginia and the
Senator from Alaska--that would give money to our law enforcement
agencies so we could go ahead and work and try to get the money which
the city of New York and the State of New York desperately need after
the horrific, murderous terrorist acts in that city. I thought that was
what we were here for.
I will not reread what I said, but to do something that nobody here
on the floor can understand or explain, including the people who
introduced the amendment.

Now maybe somewhere there is a press release in there. Why don't we
all send out a press release, a generic one that says we are against
terrorists? No Member of the Senate is for terrorists. Why don't we say
we are against murder? Of course we are. But then why don't we say what
we are doing here? We are going to amend our wiretap laws so we can
look into anybody's computers.
If we are going to change all these things, if we are going to direct
the Director of the CIA and, in effect, direct the President to change
the rules of the CIA, something the President could have them do just
like that, if the President really wants to--if we are going to do all
that here, with no hearing, what does this do to help the men and women
who were injured or killed in the Pentagon--and their families? What
does this do to help the men and women in New York and their families
and those children who were orphans in an instant, a horrible instant?
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children became orphans
instantaneously. What does that do for them?
Somewhere we ought to ask ourselves: Do we totally ignore the normal
ways of doing business in the Senate? If we do that, what is going to
happen when we get down to the really difficult questions?
Maybe the Senate wants to just go ahead and adopt new abilities to
wiretap our citizens. Maybe they want to adopt new abilities to go into
people's computers. Maybe that will make us feel safer. Maybe. And
maybe what the terrorists have done made us a little bit less safe.
Maybe they have increased Big Brother in this country.
If that is what the Senate wants, we can vote for it. But do we
really show respect to the American people by slapping something
together, something that nobody on the floor can explain, and say we
are changing the duties of the Attorney General, the Director of the
CIA, the U.S. attorneys, we are going to change your rights as
Americans, your rights to privacy? We are going to do it with no
hearings, no debate. We are going to do it with numbers on a page that
nobody can understand.

Still serving the purpose of democracy?

[Futurepower(tm)]

CmdrTaco: "Does the govt really think that crypto export restrictions have prevented terrorists from having strong crypto?"

This is such an obvious and sensible objection that it makes me wonder. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that a large part of the U.S. government no longer serves the purpose of democracy. The war may be, not on terrorists, but on the American people. My guess is that it is not conspiracy, but widespread government corruption.

That's the only conclusion that supports all the information. For example, the U.S. CIA trained Osama bin Laden. See the 1998 MSNBC article referenced in the first paragraph of What should be the response to violence? where I've tried to pull together some of the facts.

Whenever there is a problem, there seem to be two situations that go together: 1) The U.S. government intelligence agencies say they did not foresee the problem, and 2) the intelligence agencies had a years-long prior involvement with the person who caused the problem. Osama bin Laden is one example of this.

Another example is General Noriega of Panama who had a working relationship with the U.S. CIA for years before he was accused of drug trafficking. Was the exposure of Noriega caused by his not taking orders? A quick Google search on "Noriega General Panama CIA" gave a link to a chapter in a book by Noam Chomsky, The invasion of Panama. Chomsky's book is called What Uncle Sam Really Wants.

Another link on the first Google page was, The Real Drug Lords, A brief history of CIA involvement in the Drug Trade by William Blum.

I hope not

[einhverfr]

Back when DES was being developed, the NSA helped make it secure-- but under the condition that the key length was reduced from 64 bits to 56 bits (which the NSA at the time probably could crack through brute force if they REALLY had to).

The problem with backdoors is that the terrorists might get access to them too, or enemy nations, etc. Or even criminals. Just think, with these master keys, they could eavesdrop on e-commerce transactions protected with SSL and steal credt card numbers...