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?

Comments

What is the point here?

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

A difficult balance....

[rootrot]

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

Bin Laden's people "using cybercafes in Pakistan"

[JPMH]

Interesting piece in today's Sunday Telegraph on how Bin Laden is set up in Afghanistan, written by one of the BBC's most senior reporters, John Simpson, from the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The full article is at
http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml= /news/2001/09/16/wbin116.xml

Extract:

Forget those earnest statements from Taliban spokesmen that bin Laden is under house arrest in Kandahar or that his communications equipment has been confiscated. These things are said to deceive the simple-minded, and to distance the Taliban from his activities.
...

Bin Laden has one of the most sophisticated communications systems in the region. A communications vehicle is stationed at a distance from him, and his calls are routed through it. That way, if they are intercepted, he won't be hit by some smart weapon fired from a distance.

But he makes few calls anyway; instead, when he wants to speak to people in Pakistan, he sends his Afghan spokesman quietly across the border. No amount of international eavesdropping can detect that.

Other bin Laden agents make for the internet cafes that have sprung up in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar. They use the most common service providers, all of them American, and refer to each other and to bin Laden himself by their first names. In the welter of e-mail traffic their messages go unnoticed. If approval for the World Trade Centre operation came from bin Laden, then this is how it would have been done.

Re:For some reason..

[fmaxwell]

..I don't think Osama used America Online...

Maybe he did. That could explain why he hates America.

slighty OT- social -vs- military conflict -

[rootrot]

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

Re:slighty OT- social -vs- military conflict -

[Tim]

"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."

Exactly right. I have been more than a little bothered by the rhetoric from our leaders that would suggest this attack was "an attack on democracy," or "an attack on our way of life."

This attack was an attack on American political and ideological hegemony, plain and simple. Fundamentalists may or may not be "fanatical" (I don't like to paint with such a broad brush), but it seems pretty clear that the people who did this were not attacking our way of life, specifically. They were attacking our tendency to impose our way of life on nations and cultures around the planet.

I will never suggest that this justifies the taking of thousands of innocent lives, because it doesn't. But, we can only expect these types of disasters to continue as long as our leaders fail to recognize the underlying causes and continue with their own chest-beating, flag-waving version of patroitic fundamentalism.

Not quite the real problem

[UberOogie]

Two of the largest ISPs in the country executing court-backed survalence orders while not installing Carnivore is not the largest threat to civil liberties right now.

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.

Real issue: national database and dossiers

[joneshenry]

In my opinion, "victory" for the United States can be defined to be a narrow achievable objective: Victory is the prevention of another massive terrorist attack on United States soil led by foreign nationals from Middle Eastern countries. It remains to be seen whether the people of the US are prepared to pay the price.

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.