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BBC: AOL, Earthlink Are 'Cooperating' With FBI
braddock writes: "The BBC is now reporting that 'The FBI is scouring e-mail accounts for clues as to who might have been behind the terror attacks' and that AOL and Earthlink have confirmed that they are cooperating with investigators. Earthlink maintains 'We're co-operating, but we're not installing any surveillance equipment on our networks.' AOL and Earthlink together have approximatey 36 million accounts. Scary how fast privacy can be compromised when the bulk of a country's e-mail services are centralized." I wonder which ISPs really are installing Carnivore, if not the two largest in the country. Maybe this means it's already in place?
If we all used GPG for our email transmissions, this wouldn't be a problem, would it? That is until a few months goes by and a new amendment to the constitution prohibits encryption tools of any kind... Think I'm crazy? We'll see.
It sounds like the FBI is presenting ISPs with subpeonas, and the ISPs are not fighting them in court but are cooperating. Is this wrong in some way? If it were a case where someone had evidence that this was countervaling established precident or I'd be concerned. Buth there seems to be little evidence that there is any abuse at present.
Much more of a concern would be the call by Att. Gen. Ashcroft to rewrite wiretap laws.
It is easy to throw away the 4th Amend. in a state of fear and/or rage. It remains my hope that rational minds will prevail...sadly, while the individual may be rational, the mob tends to act with passion.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-Benjamin Franklin
Overall, it is worth keeping in mind that it was hate and revenge that created this tragedy and that to give way to hate and revenge is to let this tragedy demean and lessen us. Understanding something this massive and monstrous will take a long time, and the dialogue we will engage in about this will, eventually, be healthy and worthwhile. The trick is to not fall into the trap of knee-jerk "reactive" action.
/rr
That said, work on the assumption that you are being observed. If you want to encrypt data, do so - you may have reason to. If you want to use gpg for email, you probably have good reason to do that as well.
Its going to be at least a year until society really and actually starts thinking about civil liberties again - right now you can forget about it.
From what I've heard, at best the FBI's infamous surveillance equipment is an x86 system, and most likely won't have more than 8 cpus in it (if that).
The kind of firepower that a major ISP can throw at a problem of this nature can include 64-cpu Sun Enterprise class computers with gigabit ethernet cards connected to every mail network that the ISP has.
If said ISP is commited to not having other people's machines connected to it's internal networks, the ISP can provide a lot heavier duty monitoring firepower than anyone else.
The full article is at= /news/2001/09/16/wbin116.xml
http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml
Extract:
The system guys behind these large ISP's are *gasp* slashdotters too.
No one wants carnivore on their system. From the information I know (loosely collected from over the internet and slashdot posts), the concerns are that it could too easily gain information from other users. To me carnivore sounds like an overglorified packet sniifer. (Of course we will really never know until the code is released to those who can make an honest assessment)
Earthlink cooperates with the FBI all of the time on warrants. Earthlink has its own software that will serve the needs of the FBI. Thus there is no need for carnivore. So in the end, the FBI's information is gleaned and those communications of customers not cited in the warrant are kept private.
No one is saying, come in, sniff the network for those Arab bastards. Alot of people share the same values as yourselfs.
This is not the end of civil liberties.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
..I don't think Osama used America Online...
Maybe he did. That could explain why he hates America.
There are broader issues at risk here too...a writer friend of mine, Harvey Ardman, just sent the following and I thought it was worth sharing:
Who are the combatants in this war?
On the one side, you have the secular, multi-ethnic Western nations, dedicated to progress, as they define it, embracing technology and change, extolling prosperity and materialism, tolerating differences, promoting freedom of speech and freedom of choice, and bent on imposing their forms of commerce, government, philosophy and even religion on the rest of the world--all in a spirit of good will, of course.
On the other, you have fundamentalist religion, most particularly Islam fundamentalism but not limited to it. These people despise what the Western nations stand for and fear that their beliefs and their world cannot survive the secular tsunami. Let me say this again: they believe their spiritual survival is at stake.
When Osama Ben Laden saw American troops operating in Saudi Arabia, his homeland, during the Gulf War, he was not only furious, he was afraid--afraid for his culture, his religion, his social beliefs. He saw this degraded culture, this wave of infidels, from his point of view, threatening everything that he loved and believed in.
This, by the way, is why the Arabs continue to attack Israel, and to speak of it with loathing. It is a secular state in a fundamentalist world. It is a western bastion, even a Trojan horse. This is why the Arabs have NEVER attacked any Israeli religious targets. It is not the religion that bothers them. It is the lack of religion. It is the secular Israel that offends, not the Jewish one.
There is a key difference between the combatants. The secular westerners believe, in a vague and comfortable way, that their way of life is desirable and superior to the lives and values of the fundamentalists. They are intellectually and philosophically committed to their beliefs. The fundamentalists, on the other hand, believe in their cause with every molecule of their bodies. Ours is a reasoned, reasonable belief. Theirs is fanatic.
How can we prevail over this level of belief, especially since we cannot match it. How can we outlast such passion? Well, I don't believe that we can win the battle militarily, although we might be able to strip the terrorists of most of their power, at least for awhile.
What's needed here, I believe, is both a military and a social war. The military war must be fought against identifiable terrorists. The social war must be fought against poverty, inequality and famine--for these are the seeds of fundamentalism, this is the food of fanaticism.
It is not much of a sacrifice for us to fight that military war. We're good at that. We secretly enjoy it. To fight the social war, however, we must find new reserves within us. We must make genuine sacrifices, sacrifices to which we are unaccustomed. We must give not as we gave during World War II, but as we gave afterward. I'm talking about the Marshall Plan, which resurrected Europe from the ashes of war.
On the surface, the Marshall plan--billions in relief for Europe--was a generous act. But of course self interest was involved, in at least three ways. First, we were desperate to keep Western Europe out of Soviet control. Second, we had pressing economic reasons to make sure Europe became strong and prosperous again. The people of Europe were our best customers. Finally, the values of Western Europe were the same as ours. Supporting them strengthened us.
We have a self-interest in undertaking similar programs for the 3rd world. It is the only way we can keep these people from fanatic fundamentalism. It is the only way we can hope to once and for all defeat terrorism. We must reduce the difference between the haves and the have-nots. We must end abject poverty at the very least.
Here's what makes the socialwar so difficult: We will be sorely tempted--because we strongly believe in our values---to attempt to impose them on those we aid. We will demand they embrace democracy?. We will demand they allow freedom of speech and yes, religion? Will we insist that they become as secular as we are? And if we do, will we just be creating more Osama Ben Ladens?
I don't know the answers to these questions. I do know that the social war is much more complicated than the military one. And it is also more important, because no military victory is forever, in the long run of history. No conversion at the point of a gun is a genuine one. Vengeance always leads to revenge.
We need to change minds more than we need to kill terrorists. It will not be easy. I hope we have the stomach for it.
/rr
The biggest threat we face right now is the civil rights of Americans of Arab descent in the United States.
One of the goals of the terrorist activities is to make the Western Democracies strike out against Arabs and make it a clear us vs. them scenario by which they can gain more support in the Middle East.
By using deep cover agents, they have made a real step towards that goal. Now every Arab in the United States can be considered a potential suspect. Anti-Arab sentiment and violence is already on a serious rise as it is.
And either through violence, or harassment, or over-scrutinization by the count-ordered emergency measures above, it is going to be a very hard time for this portion of the US population. The footage from Chicago, for example, was just chilling.
We all need to remember that we are Americans, and as Americans, we are all the targets of this terrorism. The suicide bombers did not check to see if there were any Muslims in the WTC before they attacked it. We are all in this together, and the worst--and most likel--thing we can do to help them win is turn on ourselves.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
In fact, this has probably increased society's paranoia about "hackers/crackers", the internet, and electronic commerce. It certainly hasn't. If it had, people would be against encryption restrictions, instead of suddenly supporting them. One of the most serious negative effects of encryption restrictions is that it harms computer security. Primarily by making secure authentication impossible.
Just up on Ananova:m enu=news.usterrorattacks
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_400036.html?
The willingness of the terrorists to die in the commission of their attacks isn't a strength, it's a weakness. The willingness to die restricts potential recruits to a relatively small segment of the population. As far as detection goes, the situation is far better than in the 70s when people who looked like Japanese tourists could suddenly pull automatic weapons out of their bags as happened at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport in May 1972 at the cost of 24 lives. Radical Marxism backed by covert support from Easter bloc intelligence agencies is no longer turning out as many terrorists with different nationalities as Germany did with Baader-Meinhof or Venezuela did with Carlos the Jackal. Furthermore in the 1970s members of attacking terrorist teams often were female such as Leila Khaled.
Trying to track the terrorists back to their native lands is the United States weakness and their strength. On the other hand, their operating on United States soil should be their weakness and our strength. The suspicious eyes and mouths willing to inform the authorities of any suspicious activity should accompany them wherever they go.
Suicide attackers have to be kept in a constant state of psychological preparedness. They have to travel together in at least pairs because they have to have reinforcement of the need for them to die. Often their support comes from the only people they can trust, relatives.
In short, suicide attackers who are foreign nationals from a distinct ethnic group are the perfect targets for proactive profiling. The question is whether the people, the intelligence agencies, the leadership, and the judicial system of the United States are going to be willing to make the necessary painful decisions. To easily separate suspects from nonsuspects, reducing the amount of work by two orders of magnitude, the people will have to accept a comprehensive national database with easy means of checking attributes such as fingerprints, voice, DNA, photographs. The United States does have a population of millions of loyal citizens of Middle Eastern descent. (No suspected hijackers or accomplices born in the United States have been identified so far.) Some means must be found to quickly distinguish them from foreign nationals so that they can efficiently exercise their rights as citizens.
Intelligence agencies must find the means to share information and break the bonds of bureaucratic inertia. Analyses such as Alexander B. Calahan's apply far beyond how to organize assassination teams, they apply equally to how to organize terrorism prevention teams. It is becoming clear that United States intelligence agencies had all the clues needed to prevent the attack. The WTC had been a previous target by the same groups, there had been an earlier plot to hijack a large number of airplanes, two hijackers were under watch by the FBI. What are needed are anti-terrorism units organized like special forces units who are allowed the initiative and the time to follow-up leads and build complete dossiers on suspects and the people they interact with.
Of course for this to happen the leadership and especially the courts have to get out of the way. The courts have to recognize that there has to be a distinction between the rights of citizens and the rights of foreign nationals, especially when there is a clearly demonstrated danger that a segment of foreign nationals is plotting to inflict massive terrorist attacks on the nation.
Carnivore, Echelon are simply manifestations of the truth that supply will increase to meet demand. We are no longer talking about hypotheticals. Foreign nationals are now plotting acts of mass terrorism on United States soil that have the potential to claim 50,000+ lives a strike. Something has to be done and something will be done.