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FBI Wants to Tap The Net
Majik was among the stream sof people submitting this story about the FBI wanting to
tap the net. Makes carnivore look like a baby monitor since this tracks all packets, and would be placed at key locations on the net.
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You know that's what they're after. Hoover left a more lasting legacy than we know...
I'm going to put the words anthrax, get the bomb, allah, and kill them all in every fucking packet. Let's see em sort through 800000 terabytes of crap a day.
Wouldn't this degrade the performance of the Internet in general? Tapping the 'net also has a few more drawbacks. It only examines packets enroute. That would tend to catch people doing legitimate things more than it would catch criminals. Meaning, they could see you sending and receiving traffic from some server that could possibly have illegal things on it (which is what? 90% of servers) and then swoop down and bust you for aiding a criminal or something stupid.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I always though the NSA was doing this already. So why worry?
Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Whoa, this is getting confusing!!! What happens if an FBI agent uses a Windows machine running some packet-catching/sniffing program to "tap the 'Net"? Wouldn't this be a crime since they'd be using a terrorist-harboring operating system (see last Slashdot article) to search for terrorists? Uggghhh...
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
These kinds of abuses have gone on long enough. Even if this doesn't pass, its the kind of gross abuse that is born when a certain segment of the population goes unheard. We have to untie, to make certain that our rights are not swept away. Follow the link in my sig, we are trying to make our voices heard in D.C.
-- When a fool hears of the Tao, he will laugh out loud.
The next thing you know, they'll want control of all major routers; It's just one more step to bring the Internet under US control. Welp folks, it's time we built our own network...
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
This is EXACTLY like having a snoop in every store, classroom, birthday party, adult video store. Now, it will be exceptionaly true that only those with money can run for office. How else to snow where you've REALLY been for the past 15 years? Who's your daddy, now?
Please, write your congressperson.
Please, write your congressperson.
They're just taking abuse of people's feelings, with all the things currently happening in the US. Extremists like the Taliban are actually not allowed to use the internet, because it's evil. It's the petty-kid-hacker that's gonna end up, or -paranoia, x-files tune- industrial/governmental spionage.
They can tap whatever they want. Can they PROVE, based on a few packets, who is sending the information?
Without stronger security/authentication in general, this will be useless for the purposes of stopping actual criminals.
Why does everyone here get all worked up about the governement watching us if they truely have nothing to hide? I mean, you guys are starting to sound like a bunch of criminals. Besides, its not like the FBI would actually be able to keep up with the firehose of traffic traveling over major backbones. Not even today's most advanced network hardware and storage technology would be able to keep pace with sniffing all the data coming across all the networks. Plus, it would be near impossible to sift through it all to discern some kind of pattern.
Is your company running tools written by ma
Has anyone told them that the Net is an international affair? It could be argued that the States dictating all and sundry to the rest of the world is what got them into this mess in the first place.
GNUPG!!! 1024-bit encryption at least!
come on, this is exactly what has been done with every mode of communication throughout history.
we all knew it was coming, and frankly, i thought it was quietly humming along already.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
Off by 17 years, no big deal...
...developing a new surveillance architecture that would concentrate Internet traffic in several key locations where all packets, not just e-mail, could be wiretapped.
Are they talking about routing all communications through their little tools??? I don't suppose this would cause a bottleneck or anything...
Just because I AM paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get me.
It's pretty clear that everyone is going to scream about how horrible this is for privacy. Granted, it will be frightening in its approximation of of Orwell's Big Brother but don't overlook that this will slow internet traffic down considerably. Imagine peeking in on every packet sent! Further, to accomodate this I have a feeling the cost will be passed down to you and I--the taxpaying public. I see farms of servers collecting and storing data, offices filled with high-paid IT staff and IT forensic specialists. So, to recap: bad for privacy, slows down the net, and we'll pay for the privilege of being spied on. I'll have say this isn't in our best interest...
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
And make this unfeasable for real production use.
Breaking 2048 bit DH compression on one packet or transmission is feasible, given time and a (very) powerful computer.
If the FBI were to have to crack even 2-5% of the billions of packets that went through their system, however, it would make this system completely unworkable.
Use PGP or GPG. Sign your messages. Let other people know that you prefer messages sent to you in encrypted formats. Surf and download from sites who use SSL. It's not that hard, and once you get in the habit of encrypting data, you'll feel safer and more secure.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
... does IPv6 have built in encryption? (or at least the ability to do encryption at the IP level?)
That could really put a dent in the ability to snoop (they still may crack it, but its going to cost a hell of a lot more processor cycles to do so).
Maybe this will cut down on illega music and software pirating too. I hope this effort is helped along by the RIAA and MPAA, as well.
So what? People have had the ability to listen in on network communications since the dawn of time (well, the dawn of networking, anyway :) If you have to transmit any sensitive or private information, encrypt it! Maybe this will finally get people to get off their asses and start using PGP/GPG like they should anyway.
What a useless waste of time on the government's part. I mean really, let's say they manage to tap the whole internet, that's what, 1, 2 billion using it? Okay, most of those people doing things like "hi how's it going emails". Let's say there's an equal distribution of 1 terrorist for ever 100 000 legitimate users. Oh yah, they're going catch them. What, doing a word search on the packets?
It would just slow the internet down and result in copious amounts of largely useless data. Like tapping every phone line, like anything usefull would come out of it. You'd never be able to keep up with the quantity of information.
Besides, if you have nothing to hide, where's the big deal. We haven't had "freedom" for a long time, what's the point in starting now.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Can't wait to see how this proposal flies with other nations that might have more strigent privacy laws. We might just end up with a USNet and an Internet (that includes everyone else but us). We're doing a real good job of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world tech community with things like this and things like the DMCA.
Hopefully this is all just talk that will get rationalized out. Then again, we are a nation in fear (don't let the red, white, and blue fool ya), and fearful people don't do rational things. How much further do we have to go before we get a big wake up call in the form of not being the #1 nation technologically?
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Even if they pick up every single packet sent over the Internet, they would have a very hard time picking up useful content.
There are roughly a billion computers on the Internet, and each one sends out a heavy stream of packets, which contain any number of encryption and steganographic schemes.
To actually stop would-be terrorists from using the internet to transmit thought crime or seditious materials, they would need a very very big computer that filters out various pieces of traffic. No matter how hard you try, this will increase network latency, and piss off the average user.
If a massive, unprovoked attack on our rights to privacy, freedom of expression and thought doesn't stir the people to action, imagine Joe Sixpack when he can't view streaming porn as quickly. He'll be calling his congressman immediately.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Why the fuck does the FBI think this is necessary? What in the name of Eris are they trying to accomplish with this? Who are the assholes at the FBI, the individual men, who think this is a good idea?
When you think about the FBI wanting to tap the entire internet, think about it this way: Would you be okay with the FBI wiretapping EVERY PHONE IN THE COUNTRY without getting a warrant for each one first? Because that's essentially what they are doing.
And they want to CENTRALIZE DATA as well! Yep, nevermind the whole idea of a distributed network (not that the backbone providers give a shit about that anyway), let's just put all the data on one server so that the FBI can easily listen in to every conversation in the country!
What a bunch of fucking bullshit. </rant>
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Carnivore *IS* a baby monitor. Just be glad there aren't video cameras all over the place like in London, that'll give you the Orwellian feeling you've been craving.
It shouldn't really be that shocking that a device like Carnivor exists, is used, and has analogs in other jurisdictions as well. The Canadian RCMP have something like that. They don't have an equivalent to Echelon, but then again Canadians are passive and wouldn't dream of plotting to overturn our ineffective government. No need to spend money on that, might as well setup more social assistance programs to help "refugees" setup a few more terror cells.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
One major problem exposed by this idea is that the Internet will suddenly have a single point of failure (and slowness) where all of the packets have to go through. Do you like your Internet slow and vulnerable?
We must win this war by any means necessary. The stakes are too high. Wire tap till you drop. Let's win this thing.
Fine. Let them get a warrant. I don't care who they tap, as long as they get the appropriate warrants first.
Oh, you mean they want to be able to tap anyone at will? Sorry, but there is absolutely no justification for that. Seriously, has anyone ever considered the possibility of pressing charges of treason against people who try to implement this? One of only two things the US government is allowed to consider treason is "making war on the United States": is not such an active assault on the rights of the people an act of war?
Oh, wait; you could throw most of Congress in for that, after the DMCA and USA acts. Can't have that, now can we?
Think about the measure of safety that this affords us. No longer will we have to look over our shoulders and wonder if that Arab guy standing behind us is carrying a bomb. We will have the Feds tracking them down and arresting them long before they can cause harm, because they were watching their internet traffic and found something very suspicious.
I don't know about you so called "privacy advocates" (which is, btw, such an outdated and irrational concept), but I prefer staying in one, unburned piece to the unthinkable alternative. So please, stop standing in the way of my safety.
Is your company running tools written by ma
I would also suggest organizing mock terrorist and organized crime cells. Have fun with the cops by sending logistics data back and forth between friends about assasinations, pipe bombs etc. Don't encrypt these, but make them sound serious. If they want to read our emails, then we should fuck with them.
This kind of stuff is especially serious for activists. Increasingly in Ontario at least, activists are being painted as terrorists. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty is being labled as a terrorist organization for its campaign to defeat the nasty provincial government. Police powers really scare me, because I organize direct action which could be construed as terrorism by authorities trying to keep dissent in check. The actions that I organize are all nonviolent, nobody ever gets hurt, nothing ever gets damaged, but my rights to dissent actively (ie. more than just letter writing) could quickly disappear in this climate.
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
I don't understand the utility in doing this anymore than the libertarian opposition to it.
I would assume that any self-respecting bad guy will be using good strong encryption to protect any sensitive data. That would make the resulting packets read like garbage until decoded, which would make sifting through the data stream very difficult indeed. So widespread, readily available encryption will make this of little use to the Feds.
And I don't really worry about the threat of 'big brother' watching me any more than I currently worry about crackers getting at my stuff. Afterall, the measures one should take to protect yourself today (using SSH instead of telnet for example), will also protect yourself from being snooped upon by the government. So there's nothing new here.
The big concern is the tax dollars will be wasted by the feds to put this in place.
here at our org already ... let me tell you, you will need A LOT OF STORAGE SPACE to save this stuff off
web traffic alone we see about 500G a day, just from 250k workstations surfing and such.
I think we're looking at 50-500TB per day, but prolly more. time to buy some hard drive stocks.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
for JavaScript to shine! How long before the "Punch The Monkey!" and "Free X-10 Webcam!" pop-ups clog up the FBI systems and render them usesless?
It's a paraphrase of Ben Franklin and the original quote was:
:)
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
For some reason this quote keeps coming up a lot lately. I wonder why
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
OK, so they are going to scan every packet that flies through. What exactly will they do with this? While some could be put together as valuable information, who's going to sort through all the packets?
Also, centralizing the email system (BAD IDEA) would give terrorists a handful of nice targets, gearing to further take down American economy.
Are we going to see the FBI strong-arming ISPs and businesses into doing this? Sounds like a mafia thing. "Re-route your packets, and the FBI will 'protect' you from IRS audits, SPA inspections, and other government agencies."
I highly doubt that the FBI could pull this off. First of all, the budget for something like this would be huge to say the least... Secondly, the FBI doesn't have the engineering staff to support something of this size. Your talking about putting huge clusters at all of the NAPS. Even then they won't get info that doesn't pass through that NAP. What's going to stop terrorists from using a VPN? This sounds like a major waste of money, and a flawed solution...
Um, this is my sig.
It would also break the 'route around damage' paradigm that has served the internet so well.
Not that this already isn't the case, thanks to consolidation by backbone providers, but...
Say that the internet in the US is routed through 20 or so central hubs. I think this is about how many DNS root servers we have, but feel free to correct me. Hitting any one of those hubs with a 'terrorist attack' could knock massive sections of the internet offline.
Who multihomes their website? There are maybe a double handful of ISP's who multihome, and only a very few commercial websites.
Internet consolodation is a very bad thing. Instead, let's get in the habit of using wireless connections.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I know everyone is going to whine and complain... and I'll probably get mod'd down for trolling, but here it goes...
I run a webserver (as a business) and have run shell servers in the past. I don't think ANY of these people who have been on the receiving end of a 2 day DDoS attack. Now, if such a system would be put into place, there would be other advantages than just searching for "key words" in text. It would most likely be a enterprise integrated intrusion detection system used to find and stop DDoS attacks and the such. If these systems could use formulas to determine a DDoS and black hole routes before it can cause thousands of dollars of damage to an ISP, then it would save LOTS of money!
At one provider, I was received a bill of a few grand of bandwidth charges when my shell box was hit with a DDoS for several hours... image what it would cost Yahoo! and such sites in lost revenue.
Also, the FBI isn't interested in your e-mail. Sure, it would allow them to look at it but it's no different than being able to tap your phone now. So what's the difference between tapping your phone and tapping your internet connection? Nothing. There is no difference. They'll need a wire-tapping order to do it, still.. And yes, someone will respond "but they won't need one to do this!" and you're right... they also don't need one to tap your phone, but it's illegal without it. Hence, we would be protected under the same laws as the current wiretapping law.
Stop and look around at who is supporting the FBI: Democrats and Republicans.
An obviously unconstitutional government organization, one that spends so much of our tax dollars but has done relatively little to help us (if at all).
If this isn't a reason to vote Libertarian and only Libertarian, and shut this group down, I don't know what is.
There is no need for an FBI. If a crime extends past state lines, there is nothing preventing the two police agencies from working together to solve it.
After the FBI comes knocking at my door asking me why I always play T.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Wow ... that's a good idea.
Cheers,
- RLJ
Just imagine all the copies of Nimda and CodeRed they'll have sitting on their servers now! They'll capture thousands per day! I wonder if the Feds will preach what they teach and not open attachments they steal... er... oversee.
today is spelling optional day.
It won't be long before they install monitoring systems at KFC and Micky D's so they can find out who's ordering the same fast food as the terrorists did.
"9 Filet-o-Fish sandwichs ordered at Drive-Thru. SWARM!! SWARM!!"
Without the ability to act private and say what we want, the corporate interests controlling the congress will enact more and more bad law, creating a behavioral minefield in our land of freedom.
Does a citizen have a right to hold a private conversation?
Perhaps the FBI can use its packet sniffing capability to identify pockets of resistance to the DMCA. Black helicopter forces can be dispatched to deal with said resistance.
Or, much scarier, they just might pass additional laws that make it illegal to conspire to defeat the DMCA. The packet sniffer will detect your illegal motions, even inside the room.
Distributed collection, perhaps distributed storage and forwarding of data over (possibly) private network. Collectors targeted to IPs under suspicion. All these means is more efficient data intercept orders with the sniffers already deployed. This would cost a helluva lot of money that should be spent on education or given back to the tax payers. Boxes that do this stuff aren't cheap.
Port mirroring or silimar tactics would be used to send copies of data to the collectors. Another big question raised by this is will these collectors be accessibly on public address space? How will they be secured? When (not "will") they become targets for crackers, info-terrorists, and hostile foreign governments?
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
FBI, CIA, NSA == secret police
Think the FBI can get jurisdiction to tap the foreign nets?
Might we see more point to point links between continents that DON'T involve the US?
He just might have been being sarcastic.
(Hint: So am I)
Friends, I think we need to ressurect the store-and-forward modem-based network. Otherwise, nothing that we say will ever escape government notice again. Remember that governments change, and sometimes not for the better. Even if you trust our government today, how do you know you will trust it in the future?
Dog is my co-pilot.
Doesn't this seem to imply a radical change to the architecture of the net? How far has the internet gotten away from its original ability to route around damage because there weren't any single locations that all packets had to travel through in order to get to their destinations? Isn't that what the FBI wants to do -- remove that ability to bypass damage so that all packets have to go through a few choice locations they regulate? And doesn't that imply that a very few terrorist acts against these traffic monitors could bring down the entire Internet?
Just curious...
All along, I've been thinking these carvnivore type systems are a total invasion of privacy and that they are un-called for, but after more thought... Are they that bad?
It's definately an invasion of privacy and that sucks, but we should be able to trust the FBI and know that our private information isn't going to get into the wrong hands.
I mean, what NEW information are they going to get on us? Our ISPs already know where we browse the web.
If there were some extreme control that could be put on this sort of project I don't know that I'd be intimidated by it.
For instance, if they had it in place everywhere but were only authorized to use it on a case by case basis after getting a warrant and having good reason, what bad could come from it?
If they catch a bunch of terrorists or a bunch of child molesters and don't interfere with my rights, more power too them.
I guess a lot of the slashdot crowd is worried about "hackers and crackers" being caught.
Well, I guess I'd be a little worried about them going overboard in that area. If they catch crackers, more power to them. Keep them out of my bank account please. However, I can see them abusing this power when it came to situations where people would stand up against the DMCA, etc.
What other real world situations prove that this truly is a bad idea?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Common sense tells us that unencrypted data is not secure, and encrypted data will attract attention and possibly unauthorized decryption.
What we need to do is establish firm limits as what the gov't can do with the intercepted data. I don't know how such limitations would work, but the events of Sept. 11 make it necessary to accept more government involvement in the Internet than any of us would like. Since 99.999% of us are not terrorists, we need to establish reasonable policies on network monitoring so that the authorities can go after the bad guys without having the FBI turn into the RIAA's counterinsurgency division.
It's unthinkable that terrorists would dare to target such a potent symbol of US power and authority.
No... wait... that was before September 11th.
This proposal is vile and ahborent in moral, technical and security terms. Three for three.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Man. Since this whole 9/11 thing went down, there has been so much stuff about how the guv'mint is gonna be looking over the shoulders of everyone in America, maybe someone should change "Your Rights Online" to "Today's Update on the Complete Annihilation of Your Rights Online."
/rant
It amazes me (only a little bit) that the Feds would jump so quickly at an excuse to clamp down on interpersonal communication. Makes a body wonder if there were people just drooling on their keyboards in some dark NSA/FBI/[acronym we don't even know about] office when they saw the towers collapse. "thith ith our chanth, you guyth. *wipe*"
bullcrap.
oh, and why does peter van sant think he knows that life is better than the alternative?
How will they know WHAT packets to search? How will they know they aren't taking something out of context, say from a Counterstrike game? How will they have enough computer power work all this? If somoene was going to send something bad, wouldn't they just encrypt it anywas? What about people outside the US? Doesn't this defy the constitution?
Just some thoughts.
The bomb has been planted
Liquid Gaming - Your daily dose of gaming news
A user in the USA can send mail with crypto, but other ISP traffic (irc, http, nntp, etc) might get ssh tunnelled to your ISP and then end up in the clear in the USA. I suppose it would end up being more private to ssh tunnel to a foreign ISP.
I can totally believe that the FBI would love to do this, given the chance. I just need a little more evidence before I am to go around saying that they *are* doing it.
"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"
So, are they going to go into court, and affirm that they need a warrant to tap the communications of 300 million people?
James Madison had reasons for writing this the way he did, and the biggest reason was that under the power of the General Warrant, officers of the crown were abusing their power. So much so, that we had to take down our rifles and overthrow the King.
Now, considering that the FBI still has the name of J. Edgar Hoover on their headquarters, and considering what that closet case did to Martin Luther King, I'm not too happy about giving them unlimited power to eavesdrop on our communications.
If they actually get this, then the damage Bin Laden would have inflicted on us will be far greater than the murders of September 11.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Menwith Hill in the UK could be one of these 'key locations'?
One thing to think about is that SSL may not be secure for the purpose of stopping this type of wire-tapping.
Normal SSL allows the server to send a hunk of bits to you. If they an get a key signed by one of the CA's that is installed in everyone's browsers, then they can fake you into believing that you are talking to the end customer.
From the end web-sites point of view, they would never know that a man-in-the-middle style attack is in progress, since 99.999% of SSL does not use client side certs.
As for them getting someone to sign their bogus key, a little pressure can go a long way. You might even expect to see the next Microsoft service pack to have a new CA that is a front for the "We are just looking for terrorists and anyone else who is doing something that the current regime does not approve of" folks from the FBI/CIA/NSA/...
Time to start using GPG with long keys to protect anything you really care about, since there YOU are the CA, not the folks that we know we can trust.
In short, SSL does not make it safe to download your k****e p0rn.
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
So when are we all just going to stop paying taxes? They can't lock us all away... Besides that I can think of alot of things I could be doing 24 hours a day in a jail cell. Wanna learn Gong Fu anyone?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can just see it now. Start sniffing on an ATM backbone and analyze those packets 48 bytes at a time. You go G-man!
ELINT has its uses but some perspective is needed here.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
I'm *REALLY* tired of not being able to trace packets back to their source.
What Im hoping for is a nice way to query a router and see from where a packet came. The abillity to do some sort of a reverse traceroute would be just plain sweet.
Any sysadmin who has had to deal with a DDos that's entirely made up of spoofed packets will know what I mean.
Scene: Windowless van parked next to the sidewalk under a streetlamp. Two slightly overweight first-year FBI agents sit in the van splitting a box of Crunch-n-Munch. The air smells like two slightly overweight first-year FBI agents eating Crunch-n-Munch.
Agent 1:"Turn on your monitor. The sniffer is receiving something."
Agent 2 wipes the crumbs off his hands against the leg of his jeans and flicks the switch on his flatscreen.
Agent 2:"It's coming in. It says: 'ALL...YOUR...BASE...ARE...BELONG...TO...US...' What the fuck does that mean?"
Agent 1:"I don't know, but add it to the MOVE ZIG and FOR GREAT JUSTICE files. I think we're onto something.
Meanwhile, down the street, a ten-year-old geek chortles and crawls under the covers.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
When you take a position in an elected, appointed, or law enforcement position with the government, you make a sworn oath to uphold and protect the Constitution.
The FBI agents and elected officials supporting them who are planning on implementing this overt violation of the IV Amendment of the Constitution either:
a. Didn't understand the oath they took. Which makes them very stupid, and are therefore unfit for their position.
or
b. Are knowingly violating their oath. Which makes the dishonest, and are therefore unfit for their position.
I leave it to you to decide which one applies.
-- Will program for bandwidth
It would be difficult if packets go through many different routes to get to a single location. My take (which could be completely incorrect) seems like they want to control more of the routing tables on the Internet to make it easier to tap communications.
That's a very good point. There's nothing as permanent or expandable as a strictly limited emergency measure.
And if his Bush "quote" doesn't throw off bells and alarms, I don't know what does.
After a while, these people will be rounded up and questioned, intimidated and possible detained. And if the current set of laws that just passed gets any worse, then you might even get jailed without due process, and incarcerated for life based on these information retrieval practices. Sound ominous so far? It should. This stuff is right in line with Nazi Germany too. Lets just hope they don't start lining us all up and shooting us because we are "terrorists, hackers, druggies", etc. Never forget that it was Orrin Hatch who called for the Death Penalty for anyone caught using drugs.
www.enthea.org
Damn, where are my MOD points when I need them?
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
According to the article:
"...the FBI has spent the last two years developing a new surveillance architecture that would concentrate Internet traffic in several key locations where all packets, not just e-mail, could be wiretapped."
Excuse me, but isn't one of the main goals of the Internet routing infrastructure precisely the prevention of this type of centralized control? It seems like this proposal would introduce much greater risk by increasing the Net's reliance on a smaller number of points of failure. The FBI can't have its way on this without destroying the Internet as we know it...
It really is. I'm not joking.
Law enforcement can now 'dictate' to data communication providers what types of functions their service MUST incoproate, in order to comply with the needs of law enforcement.
How does this NOT equate to the government telling you how to run your business?
IANAL, but this one won't hold up in court for a number of reasons, mostly it's a violation against the 4th Amendment -illegal search and seizure of private property.
The feds cannot tell an ISP how and where to route it's traffic. That's an illegal seizure. Never mind the privacy violations.
I can see (but not agre with) the government getting a court order to tap someone's e-mail, web traffic, etc,. but that's an entirely different matter. It's not hijacking every citizens private communications. But a blatant spying on our citizens is a no no and has been shot down by the Congres and Supreme Court many times. It won't happen.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
and until I actually start doing stuff that hurts someone the gov has no right to tap my lines
How is it different? It's extremely different! In case you didn't know, the FBI still needs a court to approve phone tapping, and it's only supposed to be done when there is reasonable suspicion that you're involved in serious crime.
The phone eqivalent of this proposal would be that the FBI taped every phone call ever made. It's like being in permanent arrest. Everything you say can be used against you, or anyone you may talk about.
And while it may save some people thousands, it will cost billions to do so, so it's probbaly not that great from that angle either.
nice knowing ya...
"they've already won."
It works on immature crackers, so why not apply it to the FBI as well?
There's no real way to catalogue every packet on the internet this without some sort of computerized searching technology. They may even call it 'AI', but what it will boil down to is an application looks for suspicious strings to flag for human eyes.
Therefore, it would be very possible to fool and overtax any kind of system like this by building a new kind of honeypot-style server.
Some Ideas:
Have this server connect to different IRC nodes bot style and create suspicious sounding chanels like '#BombUSA' or something similiar. Have it talk to itself Eliza style through IRC, but with terrorist keywords like 'Anthrax', 'Jihad', 'Hijack', etc... You could also substitute keywords for other kinds of illegal activity. Drugs, Pr0n, and other illegal/questionable vices all have keywords which would raise any LEO's eyebrows.
If two servers happen to meet on a chanel like this, they can exchange POP email addresses and start sending smtp packets to eachother with the same kind of information. Maybe throw in a few uuencoded attachments of the Osama and Bert poster.
One last thing. Have each server that does this engage in plaintext dialogue 4/5ths fo the time, and then, psuedo-random bitstreams the rest to simulate encryption. If/when they do try to crack those streams, it will use up their resources so that they can't as effectively be used against individuals who do have valid reasons to use crypto.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
- by default apache should use https instead of http
- fork the email protocol so it *only* uses PGP/GPG and retrieves the public key of the recipient
- telnetd and ftpd should be removed from all open source distros
Perhaps LUG's could even offer certificate signing. I really would like to have an parallel email protocol that only allowed signed and encrypted emails.You have to search The Daily
Telegraph for the above story because they
generate a unique URL for each browser hit.
Thanks and have a nice day
From www.thefreeworld.net:
"I'm a US citizen, but why would I care?
The DMCA is only enforced against criminals, right?
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945"
That is a bit from Rev. Martin Niemoller, a european Reverend who suffered under the Nazi oppression. Ever see a cartoon where a snowball rolling downhill gets bigger and bigger? The same thing happens when the government starts going after freedom. It has happened time and time again throughout history. It led to the horrible conditions of feudal Europe, where government progressed from:
Everyone own land, and elects some people to protect it and them.
Some people own land, and they chose who protected it and them.
One person owned the land, and decided to how to protect everyone on it.
One person owned the land, and everyone who lived on it.
Another example to look at would be african slavery. At first the tribes of Africa enslaved their wartime enemies, treating them like members of the tribe, but with no freedom to leave or choose work. It progressed to slaves being possessions. Eventually slaves could even be sold. After a while the Africans were selling each other to the people colonizing America and the Carribean, where the slaves were regularly raped, tortured and murdered.
What it all boils down to is simple: Never trust your leaders. The best way to keep America free is to remind our leaders that they are public servants, and to do so by whatever non-violent and constitional means are necessary. Bitching about it in online forums is doing little good.
If the FBI gets this, my EMC stock might be worth something again! Can you imagine the storage you would need for something like this?
What we need to do is establish firm limits as what the gov't can do with the intercepted data.
We've done better than that, we've established firm limits on how and when the government can "intercept" data in the first place.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
freeswan (linux-based IPsec) has experimental support for opportunistic encryption - every packet is encryped automatically when the other side of the link supports it, even if you don't know who you're talking to. This kind of thing would basically put near-end-to-end crypto on every packet out there if everyone used it.
--
grep "xercist"
I use SSL Apache to secure our troubleticket system in a public school environment. I didn't give a hang about proving I'm a trustworthy vendor. I just didn't want the kiddies sniffing my building techs and screwing up my database. I just generated a certificate. Sure the browsers put up a big scary message about the "untrustworthy" key but that is okay. I'm not collecting credit cards from my building techs, I'm just locking other parties out of some work-related http usage. The SSL version of Webmin also comes with an unsigned certificate.
In short, unsigned SSL certs are a great way to secure http communications where money is not involved. Let's get cracking throwing that little 's' in front of http. That should give those gubmint creepazoids something to play with.
"AMERICAN investigators are considering resorting to harsher interrogation techniques, including torture, after facing a wall of silence..."
The Times is one of the most respected, conservative papers in the UK. The FBI really are considering this abomination. Even Robert Blitzer, a former head of the FBI's counter-terrorism section, has criticized this in public!
Hey guess what, there are other countries outside the US!! wow, and they don't care that the American people have no more rights. :) lol
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Events such as Sept. 11 seem to bring to the forefront agendas which serve to transfer oversight, control, rights and responsibilities to an evermore intrusive central government. With only good intentions of course, but it's worth noting that the proposals come from the proposed recipients.
a tu re.html/page1.html
The fact is, our government had the infamous Mr. Atta in its grasp earlier this year and broke our own existing laws to give him a free pass. See the URL below if you want more info.
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2001-10-18/fe
Granted that these people had good intentions, too, but the transfer of rights and responsibilities to govenment isn't just words. It results in actions taken by people no more prescient than you or me, but with consequences on a much grander scale.
We all probably agree with the principle that choices should be made at the lowest level possible in a business organization, so why not apply that same wisdom to our country and society at large?
Speaking of business, I wonder if the business forces at work trying to transfer intelligence from the nodes of the net to a more centralized architecture like the FBI proposal?
Reports of my deaf have been greatly exaggerated.
From the article:
"The goal might be to get companies that use packet data to have those packets go to one place for purposes of wiretap and other intercept capabilities,"
Now terrorists can cripple our communication infrastructure by striking a single target! yay!
I'm already annoyed my packets are routed three states away to go down the street. This will just make latency horrific. Imagine trying to get a low quake ping when every single UDP packet has to sent to some Carnivore system in whoknowswhere.
feh
-AC
Well, here's what I wonder. What do they search for? You'd assume it's words like "bomb", "C4", "anthrax", "President", and so on.
But how many "false negatives" will this catch? Especially the word "Anthrax," with all of sudden paranoia about anthrax? I've mentioned the word three times in this post...
________________________________________________
suwain_2
This thing is going to track what?
I give it a week before the packets flood the data storage and crash the spying hardware.
I give it a day before it starts loosing data to keep up.
I give it an hour before someone figures how to bypass it
I give it 15 seconds before somebody finds a way to trigger a national alert that there are terrorists at a former employers location.
I give it a month before Microsoft realises the Windows in testing is crashing due to packet moddifications by FBI due to a minnor defect in FBI software. Blame the FBI Os.. retract when they discover it's Win 2K.. and clame the problem is still there when the FBI fixes it by switching to BSD... (Thought I was gona say Linux didn't ya?)
I don't actually exist.
I can imagine some fairly interesting possibilities though:
If the various three letter agencies actually attempted to log or filter all packet information they would have simply too much information to do any good with it. The information they would have would be less than insteresting though. All true terrorist communications would be encypted, encoded or hidden in such a way as to be missed by filters. The only thing left would be gigs of usenet and slashdot postings ranting about our government's pathetic attempts to catch terrorists (come on guys, there are much better ways that don't require so much time, money and invasion of liberty).
Microsoft will start to charge licensing fees for thier implementation of VPN, which will suddenly come into much wider use. I cannot imagine the FBI or NSA making much headway in filtering data from tunneled communications.
Stupid criminals who have not figured out how to use PGP and other privacy tools will be weeded out leaving a population of smarter super criminals to rule the net.
Seriously, this proposed tool could provide a serious threat to the privacy of all netizens, but it is not the ultimate threat. We need to worry much more about the possibility of our government becoming so fed up with thier own inaptitude that they outlaw encryption and anonymity. That would be a true disaster.
Systems like this have obvious value: they can be used to fight terrorism. They also have uses that most Slashdot users fear: tapping private communications between users that don't present any real danger to national security, and using that information against those users.
When would they do this? What if myself and several friends were to make a plan to engage in questionable, though not necessarly illegal, behavior, for instance, Critical mass? The FBI could use our plans to stop us even before we begin riding.
David Brin suggests, in The Transparent Society, that surviellence mechanisms such as this are on the rise, and our best hope of retaining our freedom is to "watch the watchers". We need to the ability to monitor what the FBI is monitoring. Granted, in cases like this, that would be difficult to do without making private communications public. But if we are to accept these intrusions (which, hopefully, we won't), we need a way to keep the monitoring agencies in check.
Now the FBI et al. can single out all those people with disenting opinions, and those who frequent web sites that are not in keeping with the american ideal. This would be great, we could stop terrorism at its source. After all, the best way to keep people from blowing stuff up, because they disagree with you, is to make sure they disappear first. It worked for Stalin, and we all know what a great leader he was. It worked for the Stasi in Soviet East Germany, and, of course, they always worked for the best interests of the East German people. Not to mention that the Stasi created jobs for about 1/3 of the East German people, it was a big job spying on the other 2/3! Let us not forget the Nazi SS while we're at it, they had a great spy network in WWII Europe. Even better, if we're going to follow thier footsteps, Hitler's Youth was a hell of an idea, get the young impressional kids to turn in thier parents. This all sounds great doesn't it?
Of course, one might say, "If you're not a criminal, you have nothing to worry about." And this, of course, is a falicy. How is this? Ok, history lesson time: Number of years back Russia was ruled by the Czars, and like most monarchies, they weren't very popular with the people. So, the people stormed the palace and gunned down the Czar and his family, and there was much rejoicing. Afterwards, a provisonal government was set up, and the people tried to figure out what to do; but it sucked and was put out on its ear. Enter Lenin, he had read this great little book called the Communist Manifisto (thank you Karl Marx). The ideas were great on paper, everyone works, everyone gets an equal share. Problem is: it just didn't work as advertised. So Lenin added a spice of capitalism to it, and we had Communism. And all in all, Lenin really did like the idea of the people living a better life, so as the above argument goes, "if you aren't a criminal, you have nothing to worry about". Now, as we all know, Lenin died, got stuffed, and put on display, some time later Stalin steps up to the top position of the USSR. Now here was a man with vision, he takes a well intentioned government, and begins spying on the people. Everybody repeat, "If you're not a criminal, you have nothing to worry about." Then he uses this information to eliminate any political opponents. (hmm, not exactly criminals.) He goes on to kill a huge amount of people before he gets old and dies, most of them for having disenting opinions.
Now, why does the idea of the FBI et al. spying on me scare the S#!^ out of me? Because even the most well intentioned of governments eventually become corrupt. And it becomes necessary to for the people to overthow that government. And the last thing we need is to have that government have easy access to the information needed to stop such an uprising. Don't get me wrong, I love America, and I don't think we are at that point yet. But, even our founding fathers knew that one day, we would need to do it.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Don't they already do this off the root servers? I thought this was employed a while back to track malicious DNS requests, and it could easily be expanded upon to track any name resolution if they haven't implemented it already .. i mean they almost always get hit on the 2nd phase of a lookup (on a properly configured system)
..
..
1) try local DNS
2) try a root server and get an authoritative reference (all controlled by Verisign)
3) go there and resolve the host
who says there's no bottlenecks in the internet
Comment removed based on user account deletion
of the Internet Architecture Board on enabling wiretapping
RFC2804
So now we have the group that defines internet standards saying that requirements to implement wiretapping should not be included in protocol design discussions. That does not mean that the FBI couldn't put a BIG HONKING device in a couple of places on the internet and globally adjust all routing tables so that packets went to it... but then there is something about too much information hidding the data
One thing that I really dont understand.. maybe I shouldn't im not a lawyer.. but anyway..
As far as I knew, if a law enforcement agency wanted to place a wiretap on your phone, they have to state who they will be taping, and what they are listening for..
With carnivore, the law enforcement agency has no way to tell who is actually sending an email out, they have no way to tell. They know it came from your computer, but other then that, it could be anyone. How does this make carnivore legal? My guess is that I am wrong when it comes to them having to have a specific target when it comes to wiretaps..
I mean, is it legal for them to snoop what my 10 year old kid is sending to his friends? Isn't there some sort of law that makes it so no one could collect info on anyone under the age of 13? It may not apply to this kind of info collecting, so im probably wrong there as well.
And another point.. if the FBI puts these supercarnivore boxes at all major points of the net, wont that slow things down a bit?
Zeno
Does the word 'Echelon' ring any bells?
I say fuck the FBI, I live in Europe and I my packets shall not be sniffed by some fat donut-eating yankee waving a fucking badge. Fuck them. May they all be bombed by Bin Laden's crew!
So according to this guy, the FBI thinks that they can not merely tap the backbone of the Internet, but redo the backbone of the Internet so that they can more thoroughly monitor traffic. Does anyone have any idea how much this would cost? It would severely impact the infrastructure of major companies. In fact it may very well substantially alter the way the Internet backbone works if they force backbone providers to combine their pipes.
Also, doing this would take massive amounts of hardware. It takes a ton of hardware to just be able to route traffic at the backbone level, much less actually thoroughly examine the traffic. (Anyone who has worked at a major ISP and played around with big Cisco rule lists has probably seen this first hand.)
Given the recent events, the question of America's legitimacy of government is trivial in comparison to current events. What is Gore going to do that Bush isn't. Worrying about who actually won is neurotic, the fact; we got stuck with two pigs, its time to start making ham sandwiches & sticking them up Bin Ladens nose (bin/Laden ?) you sure he ain't a Linus user? A friend of mine suggests he should be given life in a pig farm.I mean what do you get for the free mason that commited the sin that united the World.
Who are they going to tap? They can't possibly tap everything.. they don't do that now.
And where does their jurisdiction lie. Doesn't the FBI only have jurisdiction over State to State matters? If so:
If you have a packet that is sent to some other town in the same state, but has to hit a router in another state before it gets there, who has jurisdiction over it?
...and wouldn't the "tapping" be over lines that are *already* suspected? To tap everyone would be absolutly insane.
I think if they are wondering about Mr. Mafia in NY that is connected to Lightning.net they'll only concentrate on his/her IP's and not all of Lightning.net's traffic... Don't you think?
Hrm.
------------
Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
From what I'd heard reported in Wired Magazine and other places, this had already been accomplished, mere weeks after the 9/11 attack.
Legally, they may even have a leg to stand on; they can argue that people using email or browsing the web have no "expectation of privacy", and they'd be right. Any one of a score of ISPs or individuals could be monitoring your email or browsing habits right now, and most people shrug it off.
Further, if you rely on a court's ruling that people aren't allowed to spy on your messages or browser use, you're even more of a fool. Even if you aren't concerned about the police using the information and then simply never revealing it as evidence, what about nerfarious individuals monitoring you for purposes of identity theft or fraud?
There's only one real solution, and that's cryptography. Routine, casual public-key encryption on internet transactions. We have the megaflops to do it now; all we need are the protocols.
Yet another conspiracy story nobody in their right mind will care about. If you're data is so private memorize these words...
"GNU Privacy Guard"
Not only do they want to scan everything, all the time, regardless of just cause, they intend to physically restructure the internet to make it more convenient for them to do so. This is startling, as it would seem to represent an active rather than passive approach to intelligence gathering. AFAIK, it usually involves adopting strategies which adapt to monitor the subject matter; this represents altering the way we live to make it more convenient to monitor, at great expense and a loss of functionality. With a line of thought such as this, we won't be able to institute new protocols and innovations as they arise, on the grounds that they would be "security concerns" or somesuch nonsense because they wouldn't be easy to keep tabs on. Pffft.
/. story about whether the ban on taxing the 'net would be reinstated or not. Hey, go for it! While we're at it, we can tax Europe outright. Or what about Neptune? A place that size must represent awesome amounts of untapped tax potential. We'd be silly not to!
Secondly, the notion of tapping the entire internet, aside from the massive outlay of resources that would entail (which is a whole nother thread entirely) is simply ludicrous. The internet is by definition global; the internet traffic of Swiss citizens (for example) is none of the FBI's concern (or shouldn't be, at any rate). You want to talk about a lack of jurisdiction? This all-encompassing, manifest destiny approach is reminiscent of the recent
Seriously, the more I think about this the less it disturbs me. I find it unlikely that the other countries would volunteer to reengineer their networks to assist the U.S.'s FBI in monitoring their traffic. What bothers me is why, presumably knowing this, they're funding a project like this anyway. Perhaps they're just looking to bottleneck the U.S. traffic, in which case we'd be known as Lag Central to the rest of the world. Yup, that'll certainly help e-commerce. ("Oh, don't shop there, they're U.S.-based. Their pages always take forever to load.") I shudder to think what happens when the FBI's systems suffer occasional downtime; do they halt the country's traffic until they can get them up and running again? They'd have to. To do otherwise would be a security risk, and we can't have that.
3 tablespoons of Metamucil dissolved in 10 ounces of water. Stir it up real fast to dissolve it, then chug it right away. It tastes like Tang. Then drink another glass or two of water, beer, whatever. Within 24 hours you will have a very nice bowel movement.
The thing that is nice about Metamucil is that it always gives a nice soft but firm stool. It holds it's shape, but exits easily. When you are really constipated, 3 Ducalax tablets will get you going, but it comes out like toxic waste. Save the Ducalax for special occasions, and use the Metamucil for a nice firm stool that you can be proud of.
And at the Grocery Store they already installed a monitor for PITA bread and HUMMUS.
this doesn't seem like it could be done with any real consistency. most bandwidth bottlenecks are local now, but big routers work very hard just to PASS traffic -- and they are only reading the first few bytes. the money that the FBI would have to put into this just to read let alone decrypt all the traffic could be put to much better use (read: PCs in schools, universal broadband, etc).
sig
If legislators hear that their ass is gonna get canned the next time around if they don't vote a certain way on a bill, you'd better believe they're going to vote that way. I find it doubtful any legislator would take a stand "on principle" against people's privacy rights, and risk getting thrown out of office.
All you have to say is "I care about this issue and I vote, and if you pass this, the next time you're up for reelection I will vote for someone who gives a damn about the Bill of Rights"
The real problem with Slashdot is that while a lot of people read it, they're geographically diverse. I think even if every Slashdotter here wrote their reps about this, no one legislator would get a very much mail.
Next thing you know, that Netgear Router you got from Circuit City may be routing your email into the FBI's net.
They're just trying to make a buck like the rest of you. I don't see any
of you *programmers* writing patches to protect us newbies from the
terrors of javascript.Actually since Big Brother has been patrolling the net
alot of the script kiddies who have been grinding the net to a halt seem
to have dissappeared, even my provider has been thinking twice about those
unauthorized *drops*.Keep up the good work FBI & if you find me on a
web page using underage pr0n, let me know & I'll drop them from my
favorites list.
Not trying to troll here, I am simply amazed at all the people that are so concerned about what length's the government will goto to "invade their privacy". Give it a rest. Ask the 5000 people at the WTC if they would have minded if the FBI had their power expanded in order to prevent the 9-11 things from happening. That's right you can't because they are dead. Ask the people on the planes if they would have minded, that's right they're dead too. Try and imagine what it would have been like if the FBI or CIA would of had the extra bit of power to do the things they want to do now. They may or may not have been able to stop it from happening, but they definately won't be able to stop things in the future from happening without laws changing. I value my privacy and rights as much as every American does, but I am more than willing to give in on some things if it helps prevent future terrorist attacks. Besides, if you're not a criminal, you really have no worries.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
Have any of you people ever stopped to reason exactly what you're saying here?
When the tragic events of 11th September occurred, the finger was squarely pointed at the US intelligence services for failing to prevent the horror. It is now five weeks since that horrible day, and the stereotypical slashdot paranoia/anarchy has raised its ugly head once more.
How can you expect your intelligence agencies to do their jobs if you limit their powers over the tools of the terrorists? Sure, you may argue that any good terrorist would use crypto, but what about the one that doesn't (or forgets to)? Could that single interception save a life? Plus, they already intercept landlines, cellular, fax, telex and pager messages. Radio and satellite TV is picked apart for subliminal propaganda. Mail is opened and then re-sealed perfectly. For all of you who harp on about Echelon and how it invades your privacy - Apply for a job with ??? agency and go and see the truth. You'll be surprised at just how wrong you are!
If the installation of a few "privacy invaders" such as carnivore (etc etc) can save even ONE life, surely it is worth it? Would you stop someone listen to some random phone call to your gas board or would you rather see your next door neighbour's kids climb into a black limosine to trail behind a hearse because their mum/dad was killed in the latest bombing/crash/bio-attack?
This message will be modded as a troll or flamebait, but then again, isn't everything that doesn't subscribe to the "I use Linux and I'm a victim of persecution by the government" school of thought. I'm prepared to accept that there are valid issues in the protection of privacy, but none that can justify the loss of even one single life.
`
you do not deserve to live here. If the F'n government was doing its' job instead of screwing both US citizens and anyone elsewhere there WOULD BE NO PROBLEM. How about the 2 dozens reports of suspicios activity ONE WEEK PRIOR to the attack, why did the government do nothing then ?? Idiots like you deserve a facist government that tells you what to do and makes thinking outside the lines a crime....you soon will have what you want...and you won't have to do anything but sit back and whine just like you are....
Use IPsec for security, maybe over an L2TP tunnel if NATs are involved. Then they can only map connections on the IP layer...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I already have a single point of failure on the Internet. It's Comcast (my ISP). And no, I don't like it because it fails regularly.
that the NSA would never lie to us as US citizens, even when they think it is a matter of National Security ?? yeah right
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I am reminded of the NSA's escapade with taping the single fiberoptic line under the atlantic (one line tapped, of several in place). The flood of information was too much for them to do ANYTHING with.
For the FBI to pull this off, they would certainly need quantum computers... And what of speling myst-aches? This requires more computing power... Even Caeser cyphers become effective means of defeating these because of computational limits...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
As if anything that the government can do will give you more than the illusion of safety, right now. (Did you know that the guns the guardsmen are carrying at the airports are unloaded? Boy, I feel so safe now.) We will have to spill a lot of blood around the world before we will be even a little bit safer, and will end up even more hated anyway. (But hugely feared, which is what we want.) And if we don't follow a hard-line policy on terrorism and the states that sponsor it, then it will all happen again, with no hope of end. We need to learn from the example of Israel, and how they have dealt with their enemies in the face of constant threats to their very survival.
But this internal surveilance stuff has nothing to do with countering terrorism and everything to do with exploiting the crisis to further long-standing desires and plans by the national (political) police forces (yes, the FBI is a political police, just look at their history), to spy on potential dissident citizens for the benefit of the powers-that-be.
We will never see pre-9/11-type safety again in our lifetimes (it was an illusion anyway). Get over it.
The thing I really worry about, in posting rants like this, is: in 10-20 years, when we have no more freedom, and the religous right rule the Theocratic States of Amerika, will they be taking me out to be shot based on what I am saying now? Makes me really wonder about not posting anonymously - or at all.
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
As has been admitted, Echelon collects far more data than could ever be sorted and used in any effective manner.
History is about to repeat itself.
all they have to do is ask al gore he invented it anyways....
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
as a well educated person, i have never in my life seen a persuasive libertarian argument, and this is no start...
point 1:
In most localities, it is extremely difficult to get on the ballot unless your party got a certain % of the vote last time. But you can't get % of the electorate if you can't get on the ballot! Chicken and egg...
Okay, one thing i consistently hear from libertarians are arguments to the tune of 'well, no one is stopping you from doing [x], you're just too lazy to go out and do it...'
sorry if getting elected is such a big effort, but where exactly are the laws written saying that you can't go door to door and convince people to vote for your party via write-in votes?
Point 2:
Strategic voting, aka "I don't want to throw my vote away." The current "plurality vote" system allows someone that almost 2/3 of the voters did not want to win. (May the Best Man Lose. This encourages betraying your conscience to vote for the "lesser of two evils" to keep the worse guy out. There are alternatives, such as the Condorcet Method, which is essentially an improved IRV. If you don't have liberty of conscience...what do you have?
are you proposing a loose interpretation of the constitution? because last I heard voting laws were specified in the body of the constitution. I would say the same to your 3rd point.
if you want real answers as to why there is little/no libertarian representation in government, don't blame the electoral process or the voting public.
what do you want, government regulations to help out 3rd party candidates? that would be the height of irony. as would be caps on campaign donations.
i agree that just about anyone should be able to get on a ballot (within reason). however, you'll still lose as candidates that are willing to pass laws favoring big business get into office on the strength of those big business's campaign dollars. free market, people's choice - that's the libertarian ideal if i'm not mistake.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
this is designed to enforce socially acceptable behavior just like the camera's in GB. Not that every now and then a crime is not captured, but the majority of the use is to ensure you know that someone is watching you at ALL times.
They are using the fact that the american people is scared...
Yeah.. They thought knocking down the towers caused a bunch of economic turmoil.. Just wait until the location of said monitoring system becomes public knowledge(and it will, seeing as how you can't really lay down THAT much fat pipe without SOMEONE finding out). It'll take about five minutes for someone to drive a bus full of explosives into it or something.
Man, the 2$ crack must be going like hotcakes among slashdot moderators. A little consistancy, please!
You want forensics and crime labs? States and larger cities can and do have these, without needing to fuck the constitution. Small jusisdictions can get help from them. Not that the FBI is all that competent at running crime labs or keeping track of things - just look at the recent McVeigh snafu, and the the earlier lab mix-ups, etc.
The whole public justification for the FBI was based on J.Edgar Hoover's G-Man propaganda, but it's real power was based on the files he had on every politician in DC, and the leverage he could give to those who let him do what he wanted. He managed to turn a short-term presidential appointment into a life-time senecure and power base. Hell, if he hadn't been a closet gay, he might have made the post hereditary! And while the FBI has been curbed somewhat since then, it has proved too useful to the interests of the powers-that-be to ever disappear, despite it's egregarious and documented violations of civil liberties.
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
people say: if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.
I say that If I am not doing anything wrong, you have no reason to look.
and tapping the net will help stop snail mail virus contamination how ??
Win this thing ?? the War on Terrorism is as futile as the War on Drugs. 50 Billion later and things are THE SAME, only the DEA and the drug problem have gotten larger.
Lets attack the situation in a rational manner, what drives a normal human to sacrifice his or her life in a destructive manner, hate or love ??? There must be a HUGE volume of hate out there. Why ?!
We as American need to ensure that we know what our 'Illustrious' government is doing in our names, I think many people would be sickened by the things the US government has done in the name of FREEDOM. That said, GOD DAMN the individuals responsible for the WTC bombing.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Until guns are outlawed, all outlaws will have guns.
Please CmdrTaco, oh lord and master of slashdot, please start using SSL for every bit that is sent out from /. I'll start using SSL on my website, if we all use SSL imagine how much encrypted data the FBI would end up with, what are they going to do decrypt it all?? Of course with the current bills in congress soon we will all have to use encryption that has backdoors so all these laws can be tied together to tie us up and rape us all in the backdoor...
This sig just gets better and better...
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
the simple threat of a bomb or assassination of a public official is a crime, and it matters not whether you think you were serious or not, if they do you ARE GUILTY and deserve punishment.
I have to agree with everything ELSE you've said though...I regularly encrypt my email and I use an Echelon Friendly signature, which is DIFFERENT from fake threats but seeks the same end.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
You got rights because people who were not afraid to stand up for themselves against their own government did so. Sometimes you gotta risk safety for what is right and just and fair. Nevermind that, lets pretend that I am wrong on that subject. Let's pretend that the gov always knows what is best for us. EVEN STILL YOU ARE NOT "SAFE"
How many fuckin laws can you pass; how many liberties can you sacrifice before your realize that you aren't safe. You will never be safe.
Look at the Anthrax. Name 1 mother fuckin law that can prevent that. Name 1 asshole. I dare you. You know what? you fuckin can't.
How bout the war on drugs. We've sacrificed many many rights to prevent drug use in America. Has that fuckin worked. HEll NO.
You and people like you are going to be the sad whiny pussies who are first to be killed when the revolution happens. You won't have a gun, you won't have freedom of speech. You'll be searched and searched and yet your precious "my country right or wrong, mostly wrong" will not be there to protect you from the rest of us when all hell breaks loose.
You won't be the target. Big Brother will be. but after the freedom fighters, the rebels, the liberacionists are forced into the shadows you will be their source of food. And guess what. You'll be defenseless against them. And you're government will be too busy suspecting you to protect you.
I hope it happens in your life. I hope you live to hide in your fuckin mini-van praying to the god of hand gun control that the "terrorist hackers" will spare your sorry ass.
Why don't you join them instead. Fight for your rights dickhead. Grow some nuts. Forge a backbone out of the long yellow streak you have protruding from your neck.
Get a clue and then post back.
Flame bait coward;
For the record, I think you're bluffing to get responses like this.
In case you haven't noticed, THIS MORON IS A STUPID TROLL!!! Crack-smoking, gas-huffing idiot moderators STOP MODDING THIS CRAPFLOODER UP!!!
Ummm, dont ask how I know this I couldnt tell you If I wanted to , which I dont. they use a fiber isolation layer , the packets arent actually filtered through, think of it a spy sattelite taking 0m res pictures of all cars on a highway, does that slow down the expressway ? The existing systems are isolated BUT they fiber isolation subsystem emits a wonderfully loud and unique EM signal, Im trying to find someone with the same hardware to build a carnivore detector that can be placed in co-lo boxes at the same location. Anyone know where I can get my hands on one, I thought I had access to one but, turns out I dont.....
OK. So this will have all internet traffic travelling through centralized pipes so the FBI/other snoops can snoop it more easily. Brilliant! A new terrorist target! Let them take down the iNet easier. Of course, even now, they could probably just take down the Hancock building in Chicago (?) and take out a large chunk of the bandwidth available.
FBI wants to tap public communications...
<sarcasm>
Is this meant to be a news story?
</sarcasm>
/* This sig is disabled. Press CTRL-W to enable. Thankyou */
Way to fight the trolls and crapflooders, slashdot.
Duh....they have been doing this forever...this is just an attaempt to make it legal so they can use it in court.
Let's see what else is in their not-so-stellar record of trustworthyness: Waco, Ruby Ridge, Elian Gonzoles, the arrest of an innocent security guard at the Atlanta Olympics, the persecution of an employee at Lawrence Livermore for the crime of being Chinese (He's from _Taiwan_, he MUST be working for the Reds!) That's just what I can pull off the top of my head. You don't have to attribute malicious intentions to the FBI not to trust them, the fact that they're a bunch of notorious fuck-ups is reason enough!
And do nothing but talk. I see nothing more than our rights being stripped as they, the Owning class, continues to feed us this line of crap that we're free here in the good ol US of A. And the majority believe it. Until we can become class concious, nothing can be done. And the powers that be do everything in their power to keep that form happening, because once that happens, they are no longer the ones in power. I always see these types of articles on /. and in other readings. As a community as large as the /. community, and with as much influence and geographic spread as the /. community covers, we should be able to do more than talk. I am only a 19 year old college kid, but I would love to be a part of something that would eventually lead to some form of class conciousness. Because if we continue to do nothing...have fun watching your children and grandchildren grow up in a facist government.
-=Jim Lewis=-
-=Ktuluvic1@yahoo.com=-
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
Probably learn a lot more Butt Fu if what I've heard about being in jail is any indication... trust me, you don't want to spend time in jail. Those people aren't in there because they're happy-go-lucky, easy-going guys. Most of them are pretty mean assholes that were stupid enough to get caught.
Hey, I long as I make enough money to become a member of this "Owning class" of which you speak, I'm perfectly happy. I can't wait to start exploiting and oppressing clueless geeks like you!
me would be a blow to the economy.
As for myself, I find nothing wrong with a little friendly
oversight; nor do I find it unconstitutional
I believe the government has
foolishly hampered their own efforts at information
gathering insofar as they are only tracking active agents,
with the intent of prosecuting them. If I were
an FBI agent I would make a lot of *information only*
taps. The big problem is I don't think that one can
get a warrent to tap the lines of the stupid, gullible,
& the weak. These seem to be the quarry of the
big fish in the terrorist movement. Some jerky kid says
how much he admires the Evil One & the next thing you
know his pop has a financial reversal & the kid is
offered a chance to martyr himself & save the family.
Watching the jerks probably is just as good as watching for
the big deals.
Our society has lost sight of the law & prosecution as ,God tells the
discretionary. In the old testament
Jews that these laws are only guidelines; that no set
of rules is really valid because man is incapable of
knowing the consequences of any act so
what might be a crime to the law is most valuable
to the society. The rules however were made to give
life in greater abundance.In the choice between life & law the jews were
admonished to "choose life... lach hiam".
As my attorney puts it, "the law ought not
concern itself with minor matters". By being so picky,
law enforcment has undone their own powers.
Not trying to troll here, I am simply amazed at all the people that are so concerned about what length's the government will goto to "invade their privacy". Give it a rest. Ask the 5000 people at the WTC if they would have minded if the FBI had their power expanded in order to prevent the 9-11 things from happening.
Sure, if you make the breathtaking leap to presume that 'tapping' unencrypted internet traffic would have contributed anything worthwhile...especially given that Echelon was probably already doing it for all international traffic.
That's right you can't because they are dead . Ask the people on the planes if they would have minded, that's right they're dead too. Try and imagine what it would have been like if the FBI or CIA would of had the extra bit of power to do the things they want to do now.
Yes, and then let's imagine the United States in another 20 years, when it has become a tyrannical police state...
They may or may not have been able to stop it from happening, but they definately won't be able to stop things in the future from happening without laws changing.
Oh really? To what insight do you attribute this gem of logic?
I value my privacy and rights as much as every American does, but I am more than willing to give in on some things if it helps prevent future terrorist attacks.
I agree with Ben:
"Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
--Ben Franklin--
Besides, if you're not a criminal, you really have no worries.
I'd guess exactly the same thing was said to those that registered their guns in 1930's Nazi Germany. ;-)
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Some of my good friends are in the Israeli army (the IDF for those that are counting) working in the Intelligence unit. You know, spy stuff. My girlfriend served her service there. I have the inside scoop here and I would like to be the one that breaks this to you all: they are already tapping the net. They tap the land lines and they tap the cel phones. It's their job to know what is going on and who it is going with. This is old new.
:)
The article is more saying, yes, uhm, we'd like your permission, but we are going to do this anyways because that is what we do.
Submitted anonymously because I'd really rather not have my friends get in trouble.
By monitoring everyone's conversation, you can do sneaky things like finding people's weaknesses which you can use to have sex with lots of people... thats the only reason I can see evesdropping on people would be to see dirty secrets and blackmail people for money off the job through friends.
God spoke to me
Does this mean I should stop tryinhg to email people antrax?
I am posting as anon, because I used to work for a company (and apparently one other US firm alrady sells a product to do exactly this...)that has/is been developing a product to sniff networks (not for the govt) data packets of all types.
There is hardware on the market that you can buy to "tap" the data of just about any network, and see that is inside most (encrypted data excluded) networks.
the fbi would be dick, heads not to "invest", the main limitation is memory, processing grunt, and politics.......I bet the EU would sue - they have much stricter privacy laws over here....:)
Since A large amount of I-Net traffic from Canada and other countries is routed through the United States, Shouldn't the FBI be worried about breaking the privacy legislaton up here and of other countries? Why should the FBI have the right to Tap and slow down an international network?
Thanks for the nice example. That's what's most frightening about the recent events: You just have to tell the FBI that somebody did something they consider suspicious and the poor guy will be in deep trouble.
while you are at it, so that'll take care of the gun nuts, too
bash# ngrep -i bomb >>terrorist_bastards.txt
Wanna get high?
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, so I've got a little safe distance from many of these US issues (for now: Australia looks set to become a suburb of the US any day now...).
Anyway, I think the issue with FBI surveillance is not so much that we're concerned about Them spying on Us, and finding out all of Our secrets: after all, if that were the only problem, then some of you would be quite right, and we needn't worry if we're not doing anything wrong.
No, the worry is more about who's monitoring and what they're doing with it. Can the watchers, given this degree of access to our private communications, *really* be trusted to be as dispassionate and unbiased as we hope?
The problem with *any* abrogation of authority, surveillance, administrative or enforcement powers is that they then have the ability to use if for their purposes. Okay, rooting out terrorists is a worthy aim, but can we trust that they'll stick to that? Do we know that *Their* definition of "terrorist" matches *Ours*?
My definition of terrorist includes stuff like "blowing up as many people as possible". How do I know that theirs *doesn't* include stuff like "belongs to a subversive organisation like Amnesty International"?
Check this article on the work of the NSA during the cold war. I'm tempted to buy the book, depressing as it may be, but I'm not sure how much of it hasn't already been covered in the selection of Chomsky books on my shelves. The NSA *may* have been protecting what they thought of as American freedoms, but if those schemes were enacted, how many Americans (and others) would have suffered? Is *that* justifiable?
And as for the "who's a terrorist" question, well, how about the Reclaim the Streets crowd? How about Women in Black, recent nominees for a Nobel Peace Prize? When the definition of "terrorist" stretches that far, how many of us are innocent?
Given that there are at least 2 countries right now who are using the "War on Terrorism" excuse to launch a greater offensive against their enemies, I'm not overly confident that this surveillance would be used *solely* to find and bring to justice those guilty of the Spetember 11th bombing. Anyone criticising current US government policy could be considered a suspected terrorist. Anyone protesting the indefinite detention of material witnesses could be considered a terrorist. What then? Who's made any safer by this, and who suffers?
I thought that the NSA had already done this. Anyone remember Echelon? Maybe the FBI just wants permission to use it?
BlackGriffen
I was under the impression that one of the benefits of using IDEA (or the other PGP/GPG ciphers) over, say, XOR, is that hostile intercept of multiple encrypted messages (even with plaintext provided!) does not ease cryptanalysis. If they have one encrypted message of yours, they can try brute forcing a 128-bit keyspace to break it (or try brute forcing a 2048-bit keyspace of primes to get your public key). If they have 1000 encrypted messages of yours, well, they still have to do the same (universe-exhausting) brute force attack.
We'll send the goons over to your house then right now then to install cameras, shall we?
A good, upstanding citizen like you has nothing to fear. You aren't a terrorist, after all! --Still, you'd better not be downloading any porn, sir. Might look bad. In fact, you probably don't want to be looking at any websites which are not Thought Police approved. And be sure to only say positive things about the price of chocolate, which did NOT go up last week. . . (Only a dissident would complain about anything in this fine nation!)
Still don't think a reduction of freedoms can affect you?
Think again:
United Airlines recently banned a 19 year old caucasian, middle-American kid from ever flying on their airline again because he was reading a book with a picture of dynamite on the cover. Banned for life, because the average security person is a low I.Q. moron with too much power.
Read the story, if you're interested:
http://www.citypaper.net/articles/101801/news.god
It's a slippery slope, and guys like you by allowing yourself to be tricked into taking the first steps with reasonable sounding logic from the Right are the ones who will sell freedom down the drain.
Rhetoric about, "Not a Single Life!" is bullshit. People die all the damned time.
And in case you happen to have your eyes blinded by little American flags, you might want to consider the growing body of evidence which strongly suggests that the terrorist killings were actually allowed to happen by the very secret services which claim to not have had enough power to stop them.
That 'Eternal Vigilance,' mentioned as being the price of Freedom? Well, my friend, THIS is exactly what was being talked about. And it's time to pay up.
-Fantastic Lad
I was under the strong impression from everything I've read, that email and the like are already an open book to the Powers That Be. --Why else would the government be so pissed off about public access to encryption?
Heck, the reduction in how much the government now seems to care about encryption technology indicates to me that they've most likely found some way, either directly or indirectly, to overcome the problem of not being able to read a person's mail whenever and however they want.
-Fantastic Lad
I like FreeS/WAN. It anticipated this problem for a long time... From "Swan: Securing the Internet against Wiretapping": "My project for 1996 was to secure 5% of the Internet traffic against passive wiretapping. It didn't happen in 1996, so I'm still working on it in 1997, 1998, and 1999! If we get 5% in 1999 or 2000, we can secure 20% the next year, against both active and passive attacks; and 80% the following year. Soon the whole Internet will be private and secure."
This effort has taken a huge step forward with the recent introduction of "opportunistic encryption" mentioned by a previoius poster. From the From the FreeS/WAN Opportunism HOWTO:
Generally, we need to add records to the reverse-map DNS entries for the client machine and the Security Gateway machine. There are special cases that are exceptions.
A Security Gateway that is going to initiate an Opportunistic negotiation needs to provide a way for the Responding SG to find a public key for the Initiator to allow authentication. This is accomplished by putting the public key in a KEY record in the reverse-map of the Initiator. Conveniently, the KEY record can be generated by the ipsec_showhostkey(8) command. All you need to
do is copy the output of the command
ipsec showhostkey
into the zone information for the reverse-map. Here is an example, with many characters of the key itself left out:
; RSA 2048 bits xy.example.com Sat Apr 15 13:53:22 2000
xy.example.com. IN KEY 0x4200 4 1 AQOF8tZ2...+buFuFn/
Each client that is to be protected by oportunistic Encryption must include a special TXT record in its reverse-map. The ipsec_showhostkey(8) command is willing to do this too. Remember: this command must be run on the Security Gateway where the ipsec.secrets file resides. In this case, you must tell the command what IP address to in the TXT record:
ipsec showhostkey --txt 10.11.12.13
might produce the output:
; RSA 2048 bits xy.example.com Sat Apr 15 13:53:22 2000
IN TXT "X-IPsec-Server(10)=10.11.12.13 AQOF8tZ2...+buFuFn/"
- the quotes matter: this is a single string, as far as DNS is concerned
- the X-IPsec-Server is a prefix that signifies that the TXT record contains Opportunism configuration information
- the (10) specifies a precedence for this record. This is similar to MX record preferences. Lower numbers have stronger preference.
- 10.11.12.13 specifies the IP address of the Security Gateway for this machine.
- AQOF8tZ2...+buFuFn/ is the (shortened) encoding of the RSA Public key of the Security Gateway.
This output must be added to the zone information for the reverse-map for each client machine. This gets a bit dull and repetitive.
Read the rest in the FreeS/WAN Opportunism HOWTO.
I dont think they care honestly. Most traffic goes through the USA.
Why are the DEA on a beach in thailand every month for the annual "Full Moon Party". Beats me, its not their jurisdiction. But hey, they are there, doing their thing (you know, selling drugs and busting people selling drugs)
The world cop thing pisses me off so much I dont know what to say anymore.
Anyone else realize this was exactly what was happening in the first NetForce book? At the end the creator of NetForce was shutting down the routers that controlled the internet for the us to shut everything down. This seems to be exactly what these routers would enable.
It's not sedition. It's the slogan on my (NH) license plate. Apparently the Founders had balls in exactly the way that you don't, Chickenshiet.
Duh.
The only people who could tell you that with any authority are the people who work with and maintain Echelon. Do you honestly believe that they are going to give you an accurate analysis, or do you perhaps instead think they might not be eager to exercise a little Public Relations misdirection?
I would be very surprised if there weren't extremely efficient systems for sorting through and creating lists of 'hot' suspect numbers.
Keep in mind that Echelon isn't just a giant sniffer. It's a way of eavesdropping on any conversation happening anywhere, at any time. Who needs wire taps when you can do it from a central location?
I'd be wary of anybody telling me not to worry. Especially when I've just caught them out behind my house tampering with the phone jack with a pair of headphones and tweezers.
Come on now! Use your head!
-Fantastic Lad
If the government invented the internet, the government was going to claim a piece of its ownership sooner or later. Leaving terrorism prevention, aside, I want you to think about this:
It's too bad they'll waste a lot of resources sniffing everything, but being a secretive organization, the FBI won't release interesting research data that should be useful to dozens of universities, traffic investigations and route-balancing divisions of ISPs.
This kinda stuff started by the FBI will help the Internet in the long run, when they will hopefully stop being big brother and leave the sniffing to a government-funded company.
"Wireless : LAN
Wrong thread.
I must have wandered into Trolling for Dummies 101 by mistake. Pardon me. I'll just take my soap-box rhetoric and be out of your hair.
Nice Crayon-ing, by the way! I'm sure your mom will be happy to put that up on the fridge!
'Kay. Bye!
-Fantastic Lad
While you're at it, could you throw in a couple of "French-speaking bastards" jokes?
Like imawimp.org, letsnotbombduringramadan.org, ithinkthatallpeopleareniceontheinside.edu, stopawarbecauseallwarsarebadjustification.com, selfdefenseisnotanexcuse.org, and of course, imacollegeberkeleycafreakthatcantrealizethatthese
One benevolent /.er got it right, because your translation lost some of the points that old Benny said about ESSENTIAL liberties.
But how hard would it be to crack a 4096 DH/DSS key generated by PGP? If a message is delivered for a specific recipient and encrypted? Should one even bother? Or are there systems out there that could make a huge key like that a trivial crack?
I think the government is responsible enough to decide who they listen on and who they don't. just like phone taps. I can't see big brother watching over my back, since I don't commit crimes. I belive that this only affects people who commit computer crimes. Lets be honest, they should be put in jail. I don't like Ashcroft's broad definition of terrorism, however I think that people who write viruses to harm business gotta be guilty of something. I'll take this opportunity to say that I strongly oppose the DMCA, and the fact that it opposes research. I'm talking about "REAL" computer crimes.
-oZZ www.act6.org
The NSA allready does this, whats new if the FBI wants to ? Ask your local Army Intelligence guy and he'll tell you whats up.
Tier 1 ISPS and the like do this as well, they'll watch where alot of the traffic is going too, and sell the stats to advertisers, etc. Telus in Canada is notorious for this.
Yeah, right, because Israel's been doing such a bang-up job of preventing terrorism through their methods. Israel taught those terrorists a lesson back in 1967 and they've had no significant terrorist incidents since then.
It amazes me that the people who warn us not to cave in to terrorists are the same ones urging massive retaliation to teach them a lesson or to make sure they fear us enough to stop committing terrorist acts. Get this through your heads, folks. Massive retaliation is caving in to terrorists. It is exactly what they want us to do; read this article, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one for five very different pieces of the same puzzle. The bottom line is that massive retaliation is exactly what bin Laden wants and what terrorists want in general, since it makes them stronger. The empirical evidence is clear: Israeli policy has demonstrably led to increased terrorism. The theoretical evidence is clear: terrorists and their teachers, like the Brazilian writer cited in the first of the links above, themselves have stated quite clearly that they want massive retaliation because it will expose their enemies and unite their friends. The growing anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world, even amongst communities not directly targeted in the attacks on Afghanistan is evidence that the terrorists' plan is working. We are handing them what they want on a silver platter. And for those who are calling for a policy that will make the US "hugely feared" in the middle east, peep this: Islamic terrorists will never fear the US more than they fear Allah. Their leaders might, for a time, and most of the people in the region might, for a time, but if even .01% of the Muslim world still believes that Allah will reward them for killing Americans, that's 150,000 terrorists on the loose.
Finding and destroying the people responsible for the attacks on 9/11 is common sense, and that goal has my full support as an American and as a human being. But surely the greatest and most powerful nation in human history can find a way to crush a relatively tiny cult of ignorant thugs without driving half the world into their arms and to their defense.
if the FBI will end up tapping the US net, it will be a good thing, because all of you who are preaching to the chorus, blaming such-and-such, talking endlessly but rarely doing something active, will *finally* start moving on.
/dev/null
Let's try to be objective: if a politician or if the Congress pass laws that restrict privacy, it's not because they are old-closed minded people that don't understand how scary is Orwell's 1984. It's because the average US citizen wants it!
I don't think the politicians will talk in such a way, if there was nobody to follow them.
They created a public opinion about that, and now they are surfing on the top of this huge wave.
What do you want to do? Change everyone's mind to allow your "privacy"? That's dictatorship!
They want to tap the net? Good! So you'll start acrively fighting back. Use crypto. Use different routing paths. Remove the dust from your geekly brain, that have been idle too much, and start using it again!
Remember the old days? How many clever ideas were used to solve strict situations? Now isn't it time to start again?
Never mind about closed-minded politicians. If you want an easy life, join them and do what they tell. If you want to FIGHT for your freedom, well, who said it must be the easier path?
Being an european, also, I don't think why should I concern about laws effective in the US only. And if those laws were coming and applied to the EU, well, I will keep doing my business MY way. I can get caught and arrested because I used encryption - I don't care, I know what I'm doing, and I will keep doing it becaue I BELIEVE that it is right - and I'm not harming anybody with that.
...ok it's a rant..
you can moderate me but you cannot stop me thinking like that, unless you reply with a reasonable, objective and useful statement/thought.
I'm waiting for your suggestions.
no, not THAT kind of suggestions, those will >>
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
The collectors don't have to be addressed...They just have to passively view the data on the wire.
All those net monitor doesnt do jack if the terrorist encrypt message in a photo file or mp3 file. Even if a user send a message in a FAX file (TIFF) format and encrypt it lightly - I highly doubt the FBI has all the resource to descramble the message in time.
A while back I also read that the NSA has a warehouse full of data and not enough machine to extract the data - 10Gb/sec is a lot of data to monitor.
... if they put their monitoring things only in the us, it means a whole lot of servers will move out of the us and to other locations (probably asia or russia, for maybe europe will cooperate with us). when they are able to log the traffic at keypoints worldwide then i smell trouble
".Sig Stealer" was here
So the FBI want to monitor the internet. It's a big job and taxpayers are going to pay for it. Having J Edna Hoover in charge of something like that gives me the heebeejeebees but even so. As has been said before they cannot mandate to the routers because it is against the fourth amendment (not sure what that is but the person who said so sounded like they knew what they were talking about).
We are not terrorists. We don't have anything to be worried about. It may degrade the internet a little but probably not too noticeably.
What we do have to worry about is that the FBI will miss the real terrorists. How easy would it be to set up a new internet with no connection to the big internet. A few POPs in crucial places, several routers, readily available software and immediate dropout when intruders appear. A bit expensive but not excessively so. Replicate your net ten times and you can detect who compromised it if that ever happens. Inconvenient but not impossible.
Or if you want to use the internet proper. Take your message and translate it into, say, seven languages. Take the first word of the first language and then the second word of the second language. I don't like to add too many details because it is an effective way of defeating any encryption breaking tools.
The FBI is a strange organisation. Part cop, part spook and not quite either. I don't trust them as far as I can kick them but they are on our side.
So, they scare the terrorists by showing that they are looking at every packet (yeah right), but then they make their own job that much harder.
Ever see a little dog with a big bone? Jaws aren't quite big enough. Well this is a big dog with a brontosaurus bone. No danger just yet.
I couldn't agree more. If you don't like the law then vote it out. If the police don't follow the law then they are criminals.
As long as the US media only show US news then the US public will never know what is being done in their name.
A lot is good and a lot is bad. It is all done in the dark because the US citizen never hears about it.
The excuse of looking for terrorists was a lie - so they dropped it.
Nobody could explain how using carnivore, or putting in backdoors will stop terrorists communicating by other means e.g. personal courier and steganography.
Government say about surveillance - "you've nothing to fear - if you are not breaking the law"
This argument is made to pressure people into acquiesce - else appear guilty of hiding something.
It does not address the real reason, why they want this information - they want a surveillance society.
They wish to invade your basic human right to privacy.
This is like having somebody watching everything you do - all your thoughts, hopes and fears will be open to them.
All your finances 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 from terrorists.
Incidentally, the United States Department of Commerce and the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization know the solution to domain name and trademark problems.
You will find it at WIPO.org.uk.
When the government fears the people there is freedom, when the people fear the government there is tyrrany.
Which of these two scenarios do you think the FBI would rather see?
I fear the FBI far more than I fear terrorists, the Mafia, drug smugglers, kiddie pron traders, bank robbers, or any other group or entity the bureau uses to justify its existence.
What gets me is when I hear of members of congress justifying the passage of bills that undermine our rights on the basis that it is what the FBI wants. Last time I checked our representatives were supposed to be there to represent US, not the FBI. What the FBI wants or doesn't want is irrelevant when it goes against what we the people want. I can't think of anyone who wants the government peeking in our windows and looking over our shoulder out of fear that we might be some kind of criminal. There are people of course who are easily fooled into wanting just that because it is sold to them as a means of making the country safer. Crime is the favorite boogeyman of those who would enslave us. Fear of crime combined with the propaganda that the state can protect you better than you can yourself is what leads to things like this, along with attacks on the second amendment. It has long been said that those who would trade freedom for safety will have neither, and this is a very true statement. You want protection from criminals? Get a gun and learn to use it. In every state where legislation was passed making it easy to get a concealed carry permit the violent crime rate dropped significantly. Don't believe me, look up the stats yourself. Compare that to places like New York and Washington DC where it is for all practical purposes illegal to own a gun.
The FBI needs to be taken into hand and taught that it will not conduct a private war on the rights and freedoms of the american people. The best way I can think of to do this is cut its funding to the bone. If they don't have much in the way of funding, then they won't have the ability to be the wolf at the door.
Lee
P.S. For all you "liberals" out there I am not in fact a Republican. I'm proud to be a Libertarian.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I'm glad the US has such a hard line stance to take care of terrorism and the entities which harbor them, and I hope they drop the book on you if you ever do such a thing.
Such an immature statement equates with saying "Hey, lets call 911 from payphones all day with fake bomb and biohazard scares, that'll keep those bastards busy so I can still take my knife on the plane."
Grow up, and realize that the government isn't 100% bad. Sometime they're truly trying to protect citizens. Why don't you get together with the government and help them come up with a way to search the internet and hunt out terrorists without stepping all over your "personal freedoms" rather than conspire to assist terrorists. If everyone on /. is half as 1337 as they claim to be we should have a solution in a few days, heck, make the project open soure if it makes you happy.
Everything you do is already (c) the creator, under international copyright law. I guess you could add `(C) 2001 yourname` if it makes you feel better.
The FBI tapping (and therefore restricting) the internet, is no different from what the Taliban do with Music/TV/Popular culture in Afganistan. When is America gonna learn that it is not "the Land of the Free", only that they have been told this so much, that people believe it. America is no different from any other Fascist police state - the only difference being that it has a more sophisticated propaganda machine than other Fascist nations.
a) They have quantum computers and have cracked encryption.
b) They want to spy on the populace who they believe are too inept to use encryption.
c) They are about to make encryption illegal, so they want to detect when US citizens use it.
d) They want to re-configure the "internet" into a system which has single points of failure, or perhaps "single ports of entry".
While all of the above could be true, the most important one is (d). The biggest fear that big business and government has is that the internet is failure and censor proof. One of my favourite sigs here is:
Not any more.Do you guys honestly thing that these guys dont know about encryption? Look at everyone's reaction here: "Oh well it wont matter because I have encryption". That is exactly the attitude the FBI is counting on. Just carry on believing that you dont need to do anything about it because you have encryption. Then one day you wake up to find that your encrypted packets are all blocked, that any site that expresses pro-open source or pro-file sharing, or pro-encryption, or pro-constitution views is killed and anyone going there is identified, correlated and brought up on charges, forced to reveal private keys or face life imprisonment without trial (you are a TERRORIST) and then all your correspondents are found etc...
McCarthyism didnt happen here. McCarthyism didnt happen here. McCarthyism didnt happen here. McCarthyism didnt happen here. McCarthyism didnt happen here. McCarthyism didnt happen here. McCarthyism didnt happen here. McCarthyism didnt happen here. McCarthyism didnt happen here.
Just keep saying it.
Detainee: But i didn't do anything wrong.
FBI Agent: Acording to the data from our tracking systems, your toilet paper consumption rates, the number of gardening books you buy per year and the number of bad jokes about CmdrTaco that you post on Slashdot per week match those in our profile for "Higly Dangerous - Possible Megalomaniac Persons". To prevent any crimes from your part we are hereby detaining you for psychiatric treatment.
Get real here. The problem is that the federal government does NOT have the right to search people without due cause, process, and describing exactly what is to be searched. Read the fourth amendment.
I personally want to be able to view look at a politicial site and not be profiled by my government. I want to buy stuff on Amazon.com and not have the government look at it. I want to be able to use email to talk to my wife, my lawyer, my pastor, and my doctor without worrying that my messages are going to be searched, scrunitized, and read by people who don't have a time to get a warrent.
Being searched automatically, without notice or due cause, and having no private communications just sucks. Yes, it's going to cause problems, and yes people will die because of them. How can we though, in good concense take away the freedoms that so many others have died to protect?
And yes, privacy, AKA, the right to be left alone, is one of those rights. So is not being searched without cause and process. Lets talk about how what the government is doing is completly illegal, immoral, and just plain criminal. Unless of course, criticizing our government and asking questions of our leaders is a 'terrorist act'.
Pakistan harbors terrorists that strike against the Indian part of Kashmir. Ireland harbours the IRA. USA harbors abortion-clinic-bombers.
Without hipocracy and consistency, the real world would probably grind to a halt..
Stop the brainwash
A dedicated terrorist will use encryption. Duh. So what's the use in sniffing all our legal, unencrypted packets? It will NOT catch any terrorists.
This is yet another example of the feds trying to heartlessly profit from the ongoing tradegy. Just say no, folks! (Or start using https, ssh and ssl whenever possible)
Stop the brainwash
Has anyone noticed people claim to have some strange rights. I belive that humans have privacy rights. I think that commercial entities which are not gov't monops, should be able to do whatever a human agrees to as long as it does not infringe on civil liberties.
The FBI has been making some interesting claims on what are rights are, to give examples of how the balance of civil libs and security needs to be rethought. The most recent example i heard was the right not to be frisked when entering a supermarket. They claimed that if people started blowing themselfs up in supermarkets alot this right would disapear. This sounds more like Toull (Right is the correlative of duty, for, wherever one has a right due to him,some other must owe him a duty) which has nothing to do with civil rights (Civil rights are those which have no relation to the establishment, support, or management of the government. These consist in the power of acquiring and enjoying property, of exercising the paternal and marital powers, and the like. It will be observed that every one, unless deprived of them by a sen-tence of civil death, is in the enjoyment of his civil rights)
Hitler was elected democratically...
Does this surprise anyone else? If it does, shame on you for not being wary. You should know better; the NSA wasn't the end, ECHELON wasn't the end, Carnivore wasn't the end, and this won't be the end either. Anyway, I don't care if they put a box between my computer and the wall, because I use GPG for everything I don't want Big Brother to know.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
If they're askin' to do it, this means they've been doing for years. Rules of the games they play. Do it, get it down, then ask permission.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
The boys at the NSA have been doing this and more for years with ECHELON. Check out the links Link 1, Link 2
... for there is no system on this planet that can withstand the impact of being slashdotted. Especially when it relates to privacy, encryption and networking (in no particular order). They're gonna fall flat on their collective asses if they ever try to pull this off.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Sounds like the FBI has been reading Tom Clancy. This fits right in with his novel-series "Net Force".
To hear, one must be silent.
What do you gain by having all those minutae of freedom? A false peace of mind, knowing that at any moment you may be killed by terrorists because you've tied the hands of your government, but at least they're not reading your email... What difference does it make if someone reads your email to your wife without you knowing? How does that affect you?
The only logical thing I can derive from this is that you have something to hide. I'd have no problems with officials reading my email. There's notthing important in there. What do I care if they intercept my "Daily Slashdot Mailer" or my email to mom? None of them say "I'm going to destroy the airplane". I'm a law abiding citizen.
And you say people will die if we sacrifice some privacy for security? How do you come to that conclusion? Will they be innocent people, struck down by cowards while going about their daily work like those in the WTC? If sacrificing some technical details of privacy saved those people and allowed them to be alive with their families today, I'd sign today.
Everybody has something to hide... under the right circumstances.
These circumstances are bring dictated by people at whim. Are you aware that in many states (assuming you are a U.S. citizen) sodomy is illegal? If you send an email to your wife talking about the blowjob she gave you last night, and the feds (in a hypothetical, strung-out situation, yes, but this makes it totally possible) decide to actually *enforce* that law, well, they know where to pick you and your wife up.
Do you trust the government not to blackmail you with your political affiliations? What if you visited a communist-owned website to get your news this morning? What if you donated money to the Libertarian Party, and the Republicans don't like that? Maybe the Libertarians are now defined as a "terrorist organization" -- after all, they avow support for all Americans to keep and bear deadly firearms! They're obviously just waiting for the signal from their cell leader to take out government officials!
History has proven again and again that people in power will stop progressing, and instead turn more and more of their energy to keeping themselves in power and acquiring more of it. We don't have to make it any easier for them.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
See article about AC's self-censorship and DMCA.
They just want the O.K. so if they get caught they won't get in any trouble. Hell they would probably keep it quiet anyway, so who knows why they want it legal, it's not like it matters. A little OT here, but this is pissing me off. After they attacks in NYC they have tried to limit (or just take away) our freedoms to keep other people from dying. I would like to think that our country is so great compared to some of those little dinky terrorists countries that we wouldn't have to do such things.
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58.0% slashdot corrupt
"...a new surveillance architecture that would concentrate Internet traffic in several key locations..."
Just what we need, a few handy choke-points whose destruction can bring all US net traffic to a halt. A new low in strategically hadicapped thinking!