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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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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!
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!
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?
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
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)'
Why does everyone here get all worked up about the governement watching us if they truely have nothing to hide?
You've got it backwards. The question should be:
Why is the government all worked up about watching us if we're not criminals?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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...
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.
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
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
Conclusion obvious: Because it's plainly obvious that this will not locate terrorists, the logical conclusion is that finding terrorists is not why they want to implement this.
No. I want the govt to do its fucking job, and maybe INVESTAGATE SOME LEADS instead of reading my e-mail.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Use IPsec for security, maybe over an L2TP tunnel if NATs are involved. Then they can only map connections on the IP layer...
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