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

Backdoors.

[TheFlu]

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?

Re:Not as bad as it sounds

[shanek]

Yes, and each time the Supreme Court has ruled on them, they've been declared unconstitutional.

Conventional and Unconventional Wars

[Whyte Wolf]

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.

Any evidence?

[Baba Abhui]

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?

Re:Thats wyat the Supreme court is for

[startled]

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.

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.

FUD from Wired. Notice the "?" in the Headline.

[jazmataz23]

According to NPR, a much more reliable source of political information, this bill merely changes the regulatory jurisdiction of obtaining an electronic "wiretap". Previously, to "tap" an email, the prosecutors had to present the case for the warrant to every judge whose jurisdiction in which the the email passes. Meaning if I send an email from NC to NY judges in both my federal district and the federal district of the recient have to sign off on the warrant, as well as all those servers that pass the message on.

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

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,

Breeding Complacency

[Greyfox]

An unseen danger of this type of legislation is that it breeds complacency. Complacency on the part of the citizens who think they're being protected and complacency on the part of the law enforcement officials who think that all they have to do is sit back and let their automatic information collectors collect information. And this complacency will increase as it becomes more and more illegal to talk about security holes in software and physical processes.

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.

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?

If I might rephrase a saying of the 60s. . .

[kfg]

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

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...