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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!--
Many civil liberties are restricted during threats to "National Security." Ever heard of martial law and curfews?
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
I'm truly saddened to verify how much the Dubya adminstration is owned by Microsoft, but there's no escape from reality: Osama Bin Laden is Bill Gates in disguise. If you have any doubt, do this: open any Microsoft Word document, and type New York's initials in capital letters: NY, then change the font to "Wingdings". This is better done with a large font size, 24 point or larger.
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...
Anything that is truely our **rights** in a constitutional sense will be protected by the supreme court.
The congress will push, the courts will push back, and life wil lgo on as it has in the US.
I get the feeling a significant cross section of slashdot just likes to run around hystericly like the sky is falling.
MIT PGP Link: http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html
International PGP Link: http://www.pgpi.org/
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?
It seems that the idea here is that the network is different from other, more traditional communication networks (telephone, fax, mail, newspapers, etc). I don't see that much of a difference, and I would like our legislature to tell us why the net should be treated differently. Not that they will, but its a nice thought.
Which brings me to the next idea. Could a constitutional defense be brought up against this law? If you need a warrent to tap phones, and a warrent to open someone's mail, why should the networks be any different? While our lawmakers might not ask this question, a good lawyer might be able to make a judge ask them.
Until then, PGP and SSH. Encryption will save the day. The only problem is with protocols that don't have encryption (a lot of the IM's I use since that's what the majority of the people I communicate use, IRC (with some exceptions), simple webbrowsing, etc. There are hacks for some of these, but not all of them. The net is insecure, and the bullies out there include our government. What can we do to harden our defenses?
Write your senators. NOW.
List of Senators and Contact info
Don't Tread on Me
Sen. Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Levin (D-MI) are the only ones asking for restraint and thought before bulling forward with this amendment to the Commerce, State and Justice appropriations bill (which is sure to pass).
As I said the WTC attack will be used to usurp our rights. They only have to say i>"threat" and our rights are gone. At least with a judge, there is/was a safeguard.
Fight Spammers!
Even if those who support legislation like this don't have bad intentions, we end up getting hurt. The problem is that once something is available to the government without any checks in place, it becomes very easy to abuse.
This sort of thing has happened repeatedly throughout history, and it's one reason why the founders insisted on a Bill of Rights to explicitly protect citizens from the government.
"1984", author George Orwell, 1949, ISBN 0-679-41739-7
Free cell phone tracking
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
You call the judge up at 3AM, explain what you are doing, and have him fax it to you.
Or maybe you keep federal courthouses staffed with at least one judge with a security clearance 24x7, if its so important.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"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.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Government officials will use only lawful software, which has backdoors built in. And terrorists will use unlawful software to open the backdoors in the official software.
Write your senators. NOW.
I doubt you'll get much of an audience. I know in reality restricting encryption won't make any difference as encryption is widely available outside the US but after what happened, the so-called "intelligence" community has been perceived as having their dicks in the wind when this was going down. Now they are trying to save face. What they really need to concentrate on are the gaping holes in aviation security as well as more thorough scrutiny of those entering North America. Soliciting the cooperation of Canada and Mexico will be essential.
You're using her as bait, Master!
As the war on drugs and various other zero tolerance policies and similar idiocracies proved, the true enemy of the government are within. The citizens are the ones that are a target of every government in the world, be it the eastern or western block or the 3rd world countries or the middle east countries. Its same all over.
Even the terrorists get more respect and care from the government than their own citizens. Recent support of US for Chechna conflict that was supported by the same Osama bin Laden who is said to be behind the recent attacks and the same one who was trained by CIA for a terroristic actions against superpower (at the time Russia invading Afghanistan).
These terroristic attacks are merely an excuse of the government to leverage more laws in the war on its own citizens. Before you will think about oppresion, just think about the number of people who sit in the jail for completely harmless crimes. If smoking pot is so dangerous, why the tabaco smokers (much worse drug) are not serving even longer terms? I bet they would, if half of the legislators would not be heavy smokers of tabaco themselves.
The government will not prevent terrorists from having strong cryptography, but thats not the goal, they can always bomb them afterwards in the worst case. And these attacks help them get through more anti-citizen laws. (DMCA, SSSCA, anyone?) Its the citizens that need to be watched at every steps and no warrant wiretapping and backdoor in avg. Joe's crypto is exactly what every police state needs.
The internet is actually showing in last years how much is government trying to be in control and that there are not many differences between how US and Russia govt. operate after all. They need to do something about it FAST. Expect more soon. I can see the zero tolerance policy against any use of cryptography in near future.
If you have anything to hide, you are criminal!
Enjoy!
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
The foreign policy of the US is a mixture of cynicism, brutality and ... that's going to haunt us in terms of
irresponsibility. Washington has pursued a course that has inflamed
the hatred of large sections of the world's population, creating
an environment in which recruits can be found for bloody terrorist
operations. In rare moments of candor, foreign policy specialists have
acknowledged that the actions of the United States provoke hatred and
the desire for retribution. During the Balkan War, former Secretary of
State Lawrence Eagleburger stated: "We've presented to the
rest of the world a vision of the bully on the block who pushes a
button, people out there die, we don't pay anything except the
cost of a missile
trying to deal with the rest of the world in the years ahead."
This insight has not prevented the same Eagleburger from declaring
Tuesday night that the United States should respond to the destruction
of the World Trade Center by dropping bombs immediately on any country
that might have been involved.
The same media that is now screaming for blood has routinely applauded
the use of violence against whatever country or people are deemed to
be obstacles to US interests. Let us recall the words of New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who had this to say to the Serbian
people during the US bombing campaign in 1999: "It should be
lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, road and
war-related factory has to be hit.... [W]e will set your country back
by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We
can do 1389."
Given this bloody record, why should anyone be surprised that those
who have been targeted by the United States have sought to strike
back?
George W. Bush's address to the nation Tuesday evening
epitomized the arrogance and blindness of the American ruling class.
Far from America being "the brightest beacon for freedom and
opportunity in the world," the US is seen by tens of millions as
the main enemy of their human and democratic rights, and the main
source of their oppression. The American ruling elite, in its
insolence and cynicism, acts as if it can carry out its violent
enterprises around the world without creating the political conditions
for violent acts of retribution.
In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's attacks, US authorities
and the media are once again declaring that Osama bin Laden is
responsible. This is possible, although, as always, they present no
evidence to back up their claim.
But the charge that bin Laden is the culprit raises a host of
troubling questions. Given the fact that the US has declared this
individual to be the world's most deadly terrorist, whose every
move is tracked with the aid of the most technologically sophisticated
and massive intelligence apparatus, how could bin Laden organize such
an elaborate attack without being detected? An attack, moreover,
against the same New York skyscraper that was hit in 1993?
The devastating success of his assault would indicate that, from the
standpoint of the American government, the crusade against terrorism
has been far more a campaign of propaganda to justify US military
violence around the world than a conscientious effort to protect the
American people.
Moreover, both bin Laden and the Taliban mullahs, whom the US accuses
of harboring him, were financed and armed by the Reagan-Bush
administration to fight pro-Soviet regimes in Afghanistan in the
1980s. If they are involved in Tuesday's operations, then the
American CIA and political establishment are guilty of having nurtured
the very forces that carried out the bloodiest attack on American
civilians in US history.
The escalation of US militarism abroad will inevitably be accompanied
by intensified attacks on democratic rights at home. The first victims
of the war fever being whipped up are Arab-Americans, who are already
being subjected to death threats and other forms of harassment as a
result of the media hysteria.
The calls from both Republican and Democratic politicians for a
declaration of war foreshadow a more general crackdown on opponents of
American foreign policy. General Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded
American troops in the 1991 invasion of Iraq, spoke for much of the
political and military elite when he declared on television that the
war on alleged terrorist supporters should be conducted inside as well
as outside the borders of the US.
It is the policies pursued by the United States, driven by the
strategic and financial interests of the ruling elite, which laid the
foundations for the nightmare that unfolded on Tuesday. The actions
now being contemplated by the Bush administration--indicated by
the president's threat to make "no distinction between the
terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor
them"--will only set the stage for further catastrophes.
No.
The government thinks that they can discourage use of cryptography by the general public. Thus those using cryptography will stand out, and thus can be given greater scrutiny. There are much easier ways to find the contents of a message than breaking cryptography (for example, keystroke recorders).
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.
It is still very difficult to get a wiretap warrant, both for email and telephones; the burden of proof is extremely high. Now, I'm not saying illegal wiretaps are not done, but it's still just as difficult to get one legally. I'm not in law enforcement, but I'm also not a paranoiac. Mod me down for both acts of reason.:P
jaz
Death to Argument by Slogan!! (This post twice-encrypted with ROT-13. Replies not using same will be ignored)
It depends what you mean by "the government" I'm sure the Senators who passed the bill didn't have have any intention of creating "a giant evil spy machine." The problem is that once the mechanism is established, the potential for abuse is always there--all it would take is another president like Nixon. On the other hand, if there really are appropriate protections to keep this an emergency measure only, I would say that it's not so bad. The government not being allowed to read our mail was one of the basic principles behind the "no unreasonable search and seizure" but few would argue that post office workers don't have the right to call the bomb squad on a suspicious package.
...that www.aclu.org has been down for a while? I don't think it's hosted in NY, and it was up all day yesterday.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
This week, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire) called for restrictions on privacy-protecting encryption products, and Carnivore's use appears on the rise.
This is precisely what I was worried about when talking with my friends the other day. Already an anti-encryption rider has passed through Congress with the $40 billion worth of aid. Once we start to let the government take one small thing away from us in the realm of privacy, we are more likely to allow more.
There is much talk of installing facial recognition software (which many people have pointed out has many flaws resulting in false matches) at airport concourses, customs and gates. Even furthur, there are those who are planning to install such things at sporting events like the Olympics much like they did at the Super Bowl last year.
What really concerns me is that most people seem to be accepthing this without question. Again I ask, who will be using this data? For what ends? With what warrants? How will they know what to check?
Write your congressional representatives and ask these questions. If they can't answer them well enough then this should not be allowed.
Any loss of freedom is a loss for all freedom.
Chris
Its not my 5th Year of College - Its my Victory Lap
I think my overall views on things like this have changed over the last couple of days, but I don't see this as being all that bad. Given that this only applies to potential national security issues, I seriously doubt I'm going to get spied on by our government over a few mp3 files lying around...
/. news.
I have a hard time with the common view around here that:
- The government should stay out of our business
- Unless we happen to be Microsoft
Maybe I'll lose kharma over that, and maybe my views are skewed by the recent attacks, but I'm pretty sure the government has no wishes to read your email or spy on your telnet sessions. That's not what this is about. I actually think this is more along the lines of something I've heard a lot about on CNN lately, regarding making sure the authorities have no obstacles in their way of obtaining the information they need to prevent terrorist attacks and such. I think this is only a small part of that, but of course since it involves the internet and "privacy", it's
I'm all for constitutional rights, don't get me wrong. If someone is spied on without just cause, they should (and I think do?) have every right to pursue legal action; but as I heard quoted on CNN (I've been glued to it for 3 days now), "this is a new world". I do not think anyone is going to be spied on without good reason.
There are many things changing all of a sudden that might be a bit drastic; most of the new air port security standards would not have prevented Tuesday's attacks. But this particular issue doesn't sound to me like it will really affect any of us, unless the government have reason to believe there is a national security issue.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
The correct solution is to fight against such encroachment on our liberty, not leave.
Remember, after a war which resulted in several orders of magnitude more Americans dead on American soil (the U.S. Civil War) we did not give up our freedom in order to ensure security.
Surely 140 years has not dacayed our love of freedom so much that this relatively small (by Civil War standards) tragedy (by any standard) can cause us to falter! Aren't we a tad more patriotic than that? Don't we want to see the bastards LOSE more than that? Don't we want to be RIGHT more than that?
If so, we should have a lot more respect for the constitution than for our heat-of-the-moment blood-lust.
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
Dan Rather said it best when he said that one needs to be very careful with initial reports...
You're using her as bait, Master!
"Freedom is easier to protect, when there is less of it."
But really, I'm going to wait and see what happens before I condemn Congress for this.
For one thing, it seems the interference with civil liberties is well known even to the nightly news anchors, so it's not just a few of us geeks vs. everybody else. A lot of people are wise about these things and they'll get the message across.
Though if you want to mail your congressperson a letter, be sure to include a small paragraph or two describing basic RSA encryption, to demonstrate how simple it is to implement and how the algorithm could be easily memorized by anyone with advanced math skills.
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.
While I fully agree with the point they try to make, I really cannot imagine that it hasn't been made in the legislative bodies as well. Your aaverage politician really is not that stupid, even if it is trendy to claim otherwise.
So I'd like to request that instead someone who has talked to these people or who has read the proceedings of their meetings tells us exactly why this argument isn't being accepted, or why it is being overruled. No speculation and no "because their morons" statements, please. Just the facts.
Reiterating the same thing over and over in front of the same crowd of devoted followers is not going to change anything other than your /. karma. What really needs to be done, is to find (and then propagate) the proper reply to the reasons why the people who see things differently hold that opinion. Only then do we stand a chance of getting anywhere.
Linux user since early January 1992.
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?
...this in the amendment. Look under TitleVIII, terrorism.
Relevant clipped text:
"(a) IN GENERAL.--(1) Upon an application made under section 3122(a)(1) of this title, the court shall enter an ex parte order authorizing the installation and use of a pen register or trap and trace device if the court finds that the attorney for the Government has certified to the court that the information likely to be obtained by such installation and use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. The order shall, upon service of the order, apply to any entity providing wire or electronic communication service in the United States whose assistance is required by effectuate the order." My emphasis added.
This can be applied to much more than the 'net. I am glad to live in Utah, so I can NOT vote for the Honorable Sen. Hatch next election.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
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:
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?
(from the New York Times)
He then offered a broad criticism of the evolution of the C.I.A., saying it had moved too far away from "human intelligence," involving agents who infiltrate organizations, to relying on the Internet, bugs and satellites.
"Many of our human intelligence sources dried up" because of the risks, Mr. Bush said, noting that using people who are willing to betray their friends and their country was a "dirty business" filled with "unsavory" characters, but perhaps necessary.
He said the nation needed to "strengthen our intelligence," adding, "I think you're going to see a little effort to do that."
In other words, simply banning encryption isn't going to make the problem go away. Somebody is going to have to go out and get up close and personal with these scumbags.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Now, I'm NOT saying that I am in favor of this, or the backdoor encryption rules. But in the WTC/Petagon attack, the thugs were living in the US for a while. One can imagine that they were communicating and firming up plans.
By and large, if someone is going to strike at the US with a terrorist attack, they will communicate with someone in the US. Unless they are going to launch missiles at the US...and then we're back at the Missile Defense can of worms...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
We really need crypto to be easier to use, if we want to combat routine, unnecessary, unaccountable, and and secret privacy violations.
Today, I briefly considered how I could make so that when two of my machines happened to be exchanging mail with each other, they would do so through a crypto tunnel (at the transport level, not the message-body level), but after looking at the documentation, I realized that it would take me at least a week or two to get it working, if I'm lucky. And I just don't have the time.
The only way crypto is going to get used is if it's on by default.
We are so not there yet.
There's certain rules that regulate what the gov't can do with information it has. When a search warrant is issued, they can only take items related to the search warrant. It's the same with Carnivore and other items. They can't just search the logs to find 'bad' things, they've got to suspect something before they can search the logs. If they suspect me of terrorism, I authorize them to check my tcp/ip traffic. If they suspect me of wasting time at work reading /., I'd rather them look the other way. :P
If we can stop this madness from ever happening again without turning the US into a military state, I'm all for it. I don't just want action AFTER disaster strikes, I'd like action BEFORE this evil ever happens again.
There's ways to keep our Privacy (really, what do you have to hide? Not all of you are freedom-loving idealists!) and keep a grip on the wack-jobs out there.
Instead of those magic laws that solve all the world's problems, I suggest this: allow people to be free, but keep a technically competent, highly motivated, well paid, corps of crime fighters active at all times.
Who knows, this might save your house from being destroyed in a future attack because they intercepted an email from l33tTerrorist@hotmail.com outlining an attack. What are you gonna cry about more? Your "privacy" being slightly invaded or being homeless?
Yeah.. deporting all Americans of the Muslim faith might stop it from happening again too. Of course that's a little more outlandish, but where do you draw the line? Appearantly in WWII it was somewhere just near that line of putting American citizens, some of whom were war veterans themselves, into camps as if they were no longer fit for citizenship. I don't know. At the time appearantly that seemed like a reasonable freedom to give up, so once this starts, who will stop it.. You?
Abso-fuckin-lutely. Where I work, telnet is a very bad word. It's SSH or nothing.
:-)*
Do remember that SSH gives you other advantages than hiding your passwords, as important as that is.
Say you want to access a box behind a masquerading box. On the box behind the masquerader, you can run a reverse-tunnel (-R) to a box you already have access to. Then you can contact the box you normally have no access to through the box you tunnelled to. It comes in very handy when you have to support masqueraded boxes.
That kind of stuff, when you know how to do it, makes your bosses think you're some kind of god.
Maybe the idiots who post all of these trigger words (i.e. bomb, coup, iraq), really did screw up echelon. otherwise you think they would of caugh something like this. Maybe those arabs were using smoke signals? for those that don't know what echelon is:Echelon is perhaps the most powerful intelligence gathering organization in the world. Several credible reports suggest that this global electronic communications surveillance system presents an extreme threat to the privacy of people all over the world. According to these reports, ECHELON attempts to capture staggering volumes of satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic traffic, including communications to and from North America. This vast quantity of voice and data communications are then processed through sophisticated filtering technologies. This massive surveillance system apparently operates with little oversight. Moreover, the agencies that purportedly run ECHELON have provided few details as to the legal guidelines for the project. Because of this, there is no way of knowing if ECHELON is being used illegally to spy on private citizens HERE IS THE LINK: http://www.echelonwatch.org/
Now would be a good time to write your representative and push for a sunset clause to the House version of this bill. If they are going to let the emotion of the moment get the better of them, the least they can do is write an out in the bill. Let them vote on this again when cooler heads prevail.
try this
[What's this lameness filter message?
Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted ]
Who wins here? The terrorists. Now we get to live in a next to police state. JUst watch. First they take away crypto on the net, then they will allow phone taps, as well as cell phone taps. Then carnivore or some program like it will be required on teh net as well as some automated phone listening system. Then we can take away peoples right to go to the airport unless they are flying. They do it in India (I'm told from someone who would know). Then what?
We are at war on our own soil, with an enemy which we cannot see.
Personally, I don't have anything to really hide in "email" in the way of information. Of course this affects SSL so there goes the credit card online shopping....
Only 'flamers' flame!
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?
I'm pretty sure the government has no wishes to read your email or spy on your telnet sessions.
If by "the government", you mean President Bush, I agree completely. You'd probably be right about 99% of Congress, too. If the government was a monolithic hive-mind, we'd have no more worries.
But isn't the NSA part of the government? The FBI? The CIA? The Houston Police Department? The State Senator you've been helping a political campaign against? The FBI agent that Senator asked for wiretapping assistance, who thinks your Slashdot posts smack of communism? The sysadmin who set up that agent's computer, who thinks he can snag blackmail-worthy personal information with a ten line perl script? The script kiddie who found a computer left unpatched by that sysadmin over a 3-day weekend?
If I send an encrypted message from myself to my friend, then unless one of us gives it away or one of our computers has been compromised, our message is safely restricted to us. Do you think it's that easy to safely restrict that message to 3 people instead of 2? No. 300, maybe.
But this particular issue doesn't sound to me like it will really affect any of us
Not all of us. Everybody who never sends private information over the internet should be fine.
unless the government have reason to believe there is a national security issue.
When will the government not have reason to believe there is a national security issue, now? When terrorists around the world decide to work toward peace through song instead? Perhaps measures like this would be palatable if this were a real war (although if it was, wouldn't the last thing we want be civilians' "loose lips" flapping unencrypted?), but real wars end eventually. This threat will never end, and so anyone who suggests a "temporary" measure towards reducing it is trying to sell you a lie.
Of course not. But they will pretend that it is so, because it gives them a pretext which cannot easily be argued against in the present climate of public opinion (bomb the bastards etc.). The real motive has to do with the ruling elite's passionate desire to improve monitoring and control of citizens by the state. This is something I think is common to all governments unfortunately.
Ironic, isn't it. The one thing every democratic government fears is an informed and empowered electorate since that is the one thing that can remove them from their comfortable position. They can only remove the threat by centralizing control and keeping the public in the dark about what's really going on.
Under normal circumstances a democratic government can't get away with this easily (at least not in one fell swoop) but given a dire enough disaster they can blow it up into an national emergency and invoke all sorts of "special provisions" that were quietly sneaked onto the statute books but that most people never thought would see the light of day even if they knew.
What you are now beginning to see is the spooks coming out of the woodwork to seize what they no doubt see as a god-given opportunity before the sense of panic fades away and the people regain their senses.
It's not just the US either. Why do you think just about every other government jumped on the bandwagon? Most people in these countries are a bit shocked by the week's events but they're already used to terrorism much closer to home and an attack in New York is, well, thousands of miles away. Just something they saw on TV, like the civil war massacres and famines in Africa, the earthquake in India and so on. No, the reason these governments rushed to jump on Dubya's bandwagon is that they want a piece of the action too, so they can find a pretext to clamp down on their own populations.
I mean, there is Bush talking about an international collaboration to fight those prosecuting a war against "freedom and democracy" and yet even the Chinese government, author of the Tiannanmen massacre, is signing up for it.
Figure it out for yourself.
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.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I explained this to someone else today when asked why I am staunchly against a backdoor/etc in a crypto program.
A good crypto program is based on a function f[x] such that f[x1] = k, and you cannot find x1 if you know the function f[x] and the encrypted k. This, folks, is hardcore advanced mathematics!
To add in a regulation that there be some "backdoor" (eg: some function that will always take g[k] = x1 for an encrypted value k). Once that function g[x] is known by anyone (f[x] would have to be made in a way such that g[x] must exist btw.. it doesnt just happen) then the communications of everyone that uses that encryption algorithm is compromised.
Think of the problems -- no secure transactions (haulting "e-business"), no secure transmissions of trade secrets (look at france -- the companies just moved to a different country), and generally no information is secure.
Now.. to find a way to convince/explain this all in everyday words...
ideas?
Connected to the internet? The Sandia National Labs Red Team can break into your computer, right now. Deal with it.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Never hate too long, or too deeply, because we become what we hate.
So you mean you would not mind if the government comes over to your house and installs a tap on your phone, right? You do realize all the wires and switchboards that voice signal travels through? Or if they start opening and reading all of your mail? You do realize how many people have to handle that letter that you just sent out.
If you think the people handling that letter or handling the switchboards should stay the fuck away from the contents of the message traversing it, then why do you think that inet routers are any different?
Liberty in your lifetime
In the debate I witnessed on CSPAN, one of the opponents stated that the wording of the bill is loose enough that it allows a "wiretap" privledge to be given to anyone from an FBI agent down to a private investigator, for any reason, so long as they certify their request to a federal judge as being "relevant" to an investigation. Even then, the wording of the bill amendement says nothing to the effect that the judge makes a decision on the matter.
Here's the text, decide for yourself:
I don't see anything here about a burden of proof, however that may be part of the larger context.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Give me a break. The CIA and FBI have been tracing mail for decades, at least.
During the 60's I used to get mail from relatives abroad that was open and then reclosed with tape for crying out loud.
These days with modern forensics it's trivial.
Wo der Freiheit sich ein Zufluchtsort?
Das Jahrhundert ist im Sturm geschieden,
Und das neue oeffnet sich mit Mord.
...
In des Herzens heilig stille Raeume
Musst du fliehen aus des Lebens Drang!
Freiheit ist nur in dem Reich der Traeume,
Und das Schoene blueht nur im Gesang.
Anybody has a good English translation of the above? Sounds very relevant.
Yes, this is scary stuff. Pay attention to section (E) and you'll see that it only refers to those crimes which 18USC1030(c)(2)(C) applies. From that section:
Now, let's go looking at (a)(4), (a)(5)(A), (a)(5)(B), or (a)(7), for those of you with clean sheets (if you don't have one, you're hosed, as pretty much anything under 18USC1030 gets punished under (c)(2)(C) if you're a repeat offender, as the other portions of (c)(2)(C) point out):
Note that (a)(5)(C) was specificially excluded:
Subtle shading between (a)(5)(B) and (a)(5)(C), but the key is recklessly causing damage versus simply causing damage.
Essentially, going item by item, if you
then you're open to this, according to the law . Now, all the white hats, and an overwelming majority of the grey hats, can likely agree to these conditions. That being said.. There are enough loopholes here to drive a truck through, and I doubt that prosecutors will take the full time to research those specific sections of 18USC1030 which this newfound power would allow them to use. Three cheers to the first person who beats the "slam dunk" case because a prosecutor got a little too zealous in their wiretap and blows the chain of evidence right at the start.
Now, let's look at what this law does NOT cover from 18USC1030. Let's kick it first with (a)(2) and (a)(3).
Wait a second... You can hack (without the non-judicial wiretap, though you're still fux0red under existing law) BANKS, THE GOVERNMENT, AND ANYTHING ELSE, so long as you're not under (a)(4), (a)(5)(A), (a)(5)(B), or (a)(7) as well.
Even further, under (a)(6), also not covered under the Anti-Cyberterrorism amendment, you can keep trading passwords (without the non-judicial wiretap--again, you're fux0red under current law though).
In all, it's pretty bad, but they could've done worse. If you give ANYONE the legal authority to wiretap without judicial oversight, you're giving a monkey a loaded revolver. In this case, however, the monkey's more likely to shoot itself than it is to shoot you.
ObDisclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I play one on Slashdot.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
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/
However the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution places limits on what the government can do. If this measure indeed offers warrantless surveilance, the Supreme Court may well find that it contravenes the Fourth Amendment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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
Agggh!!! My eyes are burning!!! That's worse than telnet...
I suddenly remember when I was reading Cryptonomicon and very late in the book, the protagonist, who is ultra-paranoid and a crypto expert, actually telnets into a server. When I saw the telnet command, I almost threw the book at a wall. It was kind of like watching the funniest, most intelligent movie ever and then, near the end, it turned into "Freddy Got Fingered."
Fortunately, it explained a bit later that he was using a VPN, and my faith was restored... mostly. Depending on where the endpoint was (the machine itself, or a router somewhere in between), SSH is most likely more secure.
Then again, maybe I take it all too seriously. I type 'ssh' or 'scp' at least 100 times a day, on average (toooo many boxes...).
Going into Afghanistan and killing Bin Laden will not solve anything, and there will be a huge temptation to stop there. We risk turning him into a martyr for his cause, and prompting his supporters to attack again.
What's scary is how highly he is regarded by some. I watched an interview with one of his supporters a few weeks ago, long before the WTC incident, and one of the questions was how certain groups view bin Laden. The answer:
"How do Americans view Abraham Lincoln?"
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
governments all over are using this as a blank check. In a chicago suburb (Oak Lawn) there have been many peacful rallies. and now the village has delivered memos to all schools and public places that peaceful and unpeaceful assembly is illegal. i called them up and they said to write a letter and hung up.
Doesn't bother me in the least because I really dont have anything to hide.
This is the big debate when it comes to privacy. The assumption that "if you take steps to enhance/enforce your privacy, you must have something to hide" is an extremely dangerous one. The government will abuse this every chance they get, and I for one will not tolerate unwarranted breaches of my privacy. Heck, I even refuse to give my professors my SSN/SID# when they ask for it on assignments that are being handed in.
Something must be said for the "pro" side of this, however. As we are seeing with the WTC investigation, governmental interception of private communications can have its benefits, such as helping to identify those who are responsible for such a terrible incident. In a situation such as this, most everybody would want the government to do whatever needs to be done to track down those responsible.
But where do you draw the line? Do you just let the government have unlimited power to eavesdrop on anything, without regard to privacy (i.e. without regard to the Fourth Amendment)? Although this seems to be the way we're leaning, I as well as many many others would not be willing to take this. OTOH, do you strictly forbid any eavesdropping, or forbid any eavesdropping unless the government had a *very very good* reason? Perhaps this would be too restrictive towards the government.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Could the government really be so uninformed as to institute countermeasures that not only take away our civil liberties, but at the same time are completely useless?
The cynical answer is "yes, of course they are".
...but sometimes I wonder. You and I both realize that these supposed "countermeasures" are completely meaningless in terms of terrorism, because we're Informed. The general populous is Uninformed.
Let's assume for the moment that the government is Informed. The certainly have the resources, and they have people working for them that know "what's up".
The simplest explanation is that government opprotunists are simply using this as an excuse to take away our civil liberties, so they can more effectively control us.
And to think they could be doing something productive with our tax dollars.
My friend Rob is organizing meetings to "get the word out about the importance of civil liberties, and start the process of producing some credible and even-minded articles and letters to be sent to local newspapers, TV stations, and community groups. "
If you're in the Baltimore area please help out with flameless, populous minded articles on the current threat to our civil rights. If you cant get there - email.
What happened on Tuesday was and is an atrociuos act. In our response to this incident we cannot wear away at what originally and even now makes this nation great - our personal freedom. Don't let that be destroyed.
Redundant=2 Offtopic=3
And here's my reply (which you should also mod as offtopic and redundant, because it is offtopic and because the same idea was stated in the Slashdot article that was about encryption):
If instead of 100,000,000 people sending non-back-doored encrypted messages, only 500 people are sending them, how would you rate the FBI/NSA/CIA's relative ability to investigate these individuals for threats of terrorism? In scenario 2, when they see a message using unapproved encryption, they can choose to look into it.
Now to respond to the responses I am bound to get about this:
The U.S. can't control the world's communications, blah, blah, blah.
Yes, but the can pass laws (enforce? maybe...) about communications that enter or leave the country.
Big brother is out to get us...
My post was not intended to address this issue. You might want to post to the article on this subject to avoid getting modded as offtopic like this post is going to be.
Bin Laden doesn't even live in the U.S.
Yes, but many of his contacts and co-conspirators live in or visit the U.S. in the process of doing his work.
Yeah, but what about steganography, culling, or some other way of achieving confidentiality and hiding/avoiding encryption?
This is probably the most interesting sort of reply. However, you might consider posting it to
the article on the subject.
Now moderators, please do the right thing and mod us down.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
This surfaced on Declan McCullagh's Politechbot list this evening:
2 32 037638&rtmo=pUsM4USe&atmo=rrrrrrrq&pg=/01/9/14/do0 1.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02514.html
In an opinion column in the London Daily Telegraph, John Keegan calls
for a combined US/Russian/British invasion of Afghanistan:
http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk:80/dt?ac=006026
He then goes on to say, and I quote:
==========
"There are other current movements of which to take note, as yet
insubstantial but certain to gather concrete form. One is the retreat of
human rights lawyers from the forefront of public life. America in a war
mood will have no truck with tender concern for constitutional
safeguards of the liberty of its enemies. The other, which ordinary
Americans will have to learn to bear, is interference with their liberty
of instant electronic access to friends and services."
"The World Trade Centre outrage was co-ordinated on the internet,
without question. If Washington is serious in its determination to
eliminate terrorism, it will have to forbid internet providers to allow
the transmission of encrypted messages - now encoded by public key
ciphers that are unbreakable even by the National Security Agency's
computers - and close down any provider that refuses to comply."
"Uncompliant providers on foreign territory should expect their
buildings to be destroyed by cruise missiles. Once the internet is
implicated in the killing of Americans, its high-rolling days may be
reckoned to be over."
==========
The "Torygraph" is the most conservative of Britain's serious
newspapers, and is edited from (IIRC) the 30th floor of London's tallest
office tower, which overlooks London City Airport, from which STOL
planes take off pointing straight at the tower. I know, I've been there
myself, it scared me then. Their fear is excusable. Their
bloodthirstiness is understandable. Their stupidity is neither.
Ken Brown
Kidding! And really the OSI is just a model. Other than the fact that you have to get a CA to sign your certificate, you are really just looking at two different encryption algorithms(SSL vs. PGP). I'm not convinced you would get any better security using SSL for your mail - unless each party has certificates and it is important to you that you can verify the other party with certainty. It won't make your mail any more secure, but it will enable you to verify the person sending you mail. However, if you set up two machines that are mailing each other, you don't really need certificates(you already know the identity of each end). PGP should be just fine.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
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.
Bush's education improvements were
>This country has never had martial law declared.
Never over the *entire* country at the same time, but martial law was in effect all over the confederate states after they were conquered by the north.
For that matter, Lincoln felt completely free to pick and choose what parts of the Constitution he felt bound by (as did Jackson, Nixon, and several others over the years.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
..is fighting for our liberty against parts of our own government, in our own courts.
If the congress, acting in their usual ill-informed manner, imposes a requirement to use buggered cryptography only, I will continue to use strong crypto, and if need be I will go to court and defend my right to do so.
It may be expensive, it may cost me some time in prison, but it has to be done and I would consider it part of my duty to myself.
I've never taken an oath to do so, but I too will preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. I hope that won't include the Congress.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Not in a terrorism investigation. Such authorizations are granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Part of the sleight-of-hand executed by the intelligence/law enforcement world has been portraying warrants as difficult to get, while quietly operating a court that rubber stamps warrants.
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...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Aren't you kind of assuming we can tolerate the instability of an election in time of war?
BTW I did write my reps, Feinstein included.
IT IS ALL A LIE
Carnivore and Echelon will not work against terrorists.
Government even knew the dastardly attack was coming - so Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper reported.
People were complacent - because of this LIE.
They knew billions was being spent on Carnivore & Echelon for just this sort of problem.
Terrorists know they are being looked for by Carnivore and will get around it by other measures.
When not planning face to face - they would use personal couriers.
Perhaps give mobile for single message when required - just using message - go with plan a / b or abort.
I have always said - terrorism is just the excuse they use, the US to raise funds for Carnivore - the UK to justify R.I.P. bill - to spy on the people.
The "you've nothing to fear - if you are not breaking the law" argument is made to pressure people to acquiesce - else appear guilty.
It does not address the real reason, why they want this information. They want a surveillance society.
This is like having somebody watching everything you do - all your thoughts, hopes and fears will be open to them.
All your finances available for them to scrutinize - heaven help you if you cannot account for every cent when they check on your taxes.
Do not believe the lies of Government - even more money spent on Carnivore will not protect you - IT IS A LIE - TERRORISTS WILL GET AROUND IT.
You are a simple-minded dimwit if you believe different. What a big supprise it will be to you, when they use chemical or biological weapons to kill thousands.
Carnivore will not help you one bit. Government are immoral to use this excuse - especially at this time.
The authorities hide simple solution to trademark and domain name problem to abridge your free speech rights. The US Government violate the First Amendment - WIPO.org.uk
I understand why the US government did it, but like guns, it won't stop the criminals from using encryption.
These people didn't use guns, what makes you think they used encryption? Even if they did that they needed to...
Intelligent people are NOT against this because of what it would mean to criminals, they are against it because it could potentially make criminals out of decent law abiding citizens, and the obvious ideas of dignity, privacy and soveriegnty.
Also it probably won't mean much to organised paramilitary terrorists anyway. They can easily change their communication methods, assuming they are even using such high tech systems in the first place.
The people most likely to be hit by restrictions on encrypted communications are those using encryption to protect commercially sensitive communications.
Write "Abdul, please perform xxx terrorist act on xxx date. Signed, Osama." on the paper with the pen.
Might not even be that explicit. e.g. "Hi Joe, let's meet up at the World Trade Centre, Lucy's thinking of visiting Washington".
IF YOU'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING ILLEGAL THEN YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT!!!
The government is perfectly capable of railroading people into financial ruin, or even the gas chamber given the right circumstances.
Remember Richard Jewel? Or how about all the Japanese that were sent to concentration camps during WWII?
Or all those criminal cases in LA that were thrown out because of falsified evidence by police officers? Or the problems NJ has had with racial profiling? Or the use of the IRS by Nixon to harrass people?
The fact is you had better be DAMN careful about what powers you grant the government.
Your life means nothing if your freedoms no longer exist.
How can people not see that legislation like this is one of the goals of the terrorists? It will hardly impact them at all, because they have more reliable, cheaper methods available. But to reduce risk a little -- no, belay that. To appear to reduce risk a little, Congress as usual is willing to erode the basic freedoms and guaranties that the American Revolution was about, that have permitted the largest open society, that have led to all the other ancilliary benefits of being American.
I simply do not understand a need to bypass the courts. It is essentially handing the judicial power of the government over to the executive branch, and any major reshuffling of power is a dangerous thing.
The people who committed this outrage are looking to make us react. They cannot stand the existence of an open society governed by the rule of law, because it contradicts their own desparate need to believe only in the rule of force. Lacking legitimacy, they must seek to deny it to all others. And we, like idiots, will be happy to do it.
I mourn, with all Americans, for the victims and their families. I feel the rage and impotence of being a citizen of the most powerful country in history and still being unable to protect our own. I want to bring the clenched right fist of God down on those responsible and to utterly exterminate them and the sociopolitical virus that spawned them.
But I don't want to do so at the price of everything that makes this a country worth living in and dying for.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
From the article: "The Combating Terrorism Act also expands the list of criminal offenses for which traditional, court-ordered wiretaps can be sought to explicitly include terrorism and computer hacking. "
So, they're lumping together idito script kiddies who DOS a web server and megalomaniacal psychopaths who kill thousands of innocent civilians for no reason. Something seems very wrong with this.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Whenever we can say, "yes, our country was attacked by people of this ethnic group - this group of people that looks different from you and talks with an accent", people of those ethnic group are persecuted not only by the government, but by private citizens - we lose our right to freedom from bigotry.
/. are saying - anyone seen the "To Do" list? And I walk through the halls of my high school, and I see even scarier shit. Guys say that want to join up so they can kill every Arab they can.
Example: The day of the attacks, one of my high school French teachers went to a gas station. I don't know him myself, but people I do know and respect say he's a great guy. He's also an Arab. (Anyone see where I'm going with this?)
So this guy at the gas station asks the teacher "Hey, are you and Arab?" This teacher had only been in America a few months, so he did something that was pretty unwise and said that yes, he was. The gas station attendant start yelling at the teacher "You Arabs, you're responsible for this, you should all die" and so on.
I'd say look at the internment camps in WWII, but do I even need to bother? Suffice to say that I bet there's going to be a lot of pressure in congress for increases survailance of "suspicious" individuals. And what makes one supicious? Why, being an Arab, of course! Being a Muslim - we know all these guys are wacked-out fanatics, right? Speaking Arabic - how un-American!
I have to say, I am scared to death of what this is doing to the country, and what this is doing to me. For Chrissakes, I quoted Asimov for my Junior yearbook quote: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetant". Now, look at my sig - I truly wan the bastards dead! Look at what even some people on
Man, I've really strayed from the parent topic. Sorry. But, I just want all of you to realize - we need to worry about more than our right to encryption. For many Americans, their right to walk unmolested on the streets is at risk.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Actually, I'm considering running for office, simply because I'm tired of having no one represent my beliefs in voting against bad legislation.
The only problem is, IANAL, and in my district and state, all of my opponents are lawyers. I would get whomped in debate unless I emulate all the best politicians, and attempt to be just a down-home-folks kind of guy. Oh, and I'm young, just old enough to legally be eligible for campaigning for office.
If you're in North Carolina, let me know if you'd vote for a fellow-slashdotter, who desires to bring an technologically informed point of view to legislation.
Thank you.
Oh, this was not a troll, I am absolutely serious. contact me via email if you care to discuss it further.
To those who say the 128 bit encryption is avail overseas and it will do no good, maybe, but remember Enigma - almost nothing is impossible.
What about Enigma, breaking it took an awful lot of work and no small amount of luck. Also it was in use by a great many operators every day for years. Also cryptographers had at least some clue what the Y station intercepts might be about...
There is no evidence at all that, if this bill could stop terrorists from using strong cryptography (it won't, since the necessary algorithms have been published, some of them 20 years ago), it would have made any difference to this attack. Nor are the heightened security precautions at airports likely to make a difference -- you think there still won't be ways to smuggle through razor blades? How about ceramic-bladed knives?
What will make a difference is people on board willing to fight back. On flight 93, it sounds like the passengers _did_ finally take back the airplane, but then couldn't get someone qualified back in the pilot's seat before it hit the ground. If they'd fought initially, rather than letting 3 men with little knives take over the cockpit first... But the government would much rather have completely disarmed sheeple than citizens who might decide to stand up for their rights.
The attack could have been arranged without using any communications system more complex than plain old telephones, and without ever saying anything on the phone that wouldn't sound like ordinary family or business chatter. That is, you get the group together in some remote village in the Middle East, where CIA agents don't dare go because the locals know who doesn't belong. You agree on general plans, and a few simple and innocuous-sounding code words. Like, "The big meeting is set for 10:00 Sept 11. Get your tickets."
For an analogy: in 1941, the US Navy was decrypting practically everything the Japanese sent by coded radio, including instructions to their spies sent by diplomatic codes. We also knew that their gov't was getting very close to the point where they would _have_ to start a war with us, or else end their war in China, and probably kill themselves to apologize to the Japanese people for getting so far in over their heads. And we fully expected that they would start with a devastating surprise attack, just like in 1905.
What we didn't believe was that they would have to guts to strike so far away as Pearl Harbor. And so, three weeks before the attack when the Army and Navy sent out "war warning" messages, the general in charge of defending Hawaii "protected" his airplanes from possible sabotage by pulling them out of their camouflaged and somewhat protected shelters, lining them up in the middle of the airfield under guard, and de-fueled and de-armed them so if someone did manage to sneak in a bomb, the fire wouldn't spread. In other words, the planes were immobilized and lined up for easiest possible air attack. (For the record: there is NO evidence of traitorous action by any Japanese-American on American soil -- unlike the Germans and Italians.)
The Japanese Navy simply sent their carrier fleet to a remote location to practice for the strike, threw a cordon around so no one could leave, cut off all radio communications, allowed telephone calls (by land line inside Japan only) only for mission-critical needs and phrased so as not to give the mission away. Even if we had agents in the strike force itself (and this wasn't possible, for reasons which should be obvious), they wouldn't have been able to send a warning. Nor would a tap on the phone lines (also impossible) have revealed anything that wasn't already covered by the "war warnings."
Do a damn web search before you start insulting people, would you? It took me about two seconds for a Google search on "terrorists steganography pornography" to turn up, from ZDNet,
During the recent U.S. Embassy bombing case, several documents came to light that suggest Osama bin Laden and his associates have been using steganography to hide terrorist plans inside pornography and MP3 files that are freely distributed over the Internet.
They're referencing a USAToday story with more details, which you might read if for any reason you'd like to look like less of an ignorant twit tomorrow.
Me: Carnivore and Echelon will not work against terrorists.
Thee: Instead they are more likely to be used for commercial espionage[cut]
Agree - the European Union have evidence of this.
I am MOST ANGRY ABOUT:
the fact Government are using the deaths of these poor people and the worries of its citizens to spread more LIES.
The lie that Carnivore will protect you.
They just want it for a surveillance society.
For goodness sake - what are good American politicians doing by letting them get away with this lie?
By not telling American people the truth - they are being unpatriotic.
most of them think they're so damn important that the government will want to spy on them.
The FBI kept files on many completely innocent citizens during the '60s just because they went out in public to protest the Vietnam War.
Including me.
I was trying to condemn the bigotry, not condone it. I'm sorry if I was unclear.
I'm the stranger...posting to
As you know, other Congresscritters are already saying again it's time to have mandatory backdoors into encryption This will stop the terrorists because they won't be able to buy anything without a backdoor.
Right.
Bin Laden just sent a few people to pilot school for a year in preparation for a suicide mission. There's nothing keeping him from sending people to get computer science degrees specializing in cryptography and have in-house software development.