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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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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?
NSA does not spy/eavesdrop on US citizens.
Read their charter; i'm pretty sure it's not classified. When I was a contractor at Ft Meade, I wrote a lot of extra code to specificially make sure of things like this for my project. I can't speak of the FBI, CIA, or DIA however...so draw your own conclusions people. Things may have changed in the last year, but as of a few years ago this was a top priority for each project I was on. If someone can convince me I'm wrong (project names, people, etc, not random web links), I'd love to know about it as I still talk to many friends at the agency (about unclassified things of course).
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
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.
Ah, but, unfortunately, we are not fully at 1984 yet. That is why some friends and I have formed the Students for an Orwellian Society (SOS). Because 2001 is 17 years too late.
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.
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 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?
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.Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
I disagree.
Torture takes effort - an FBI permitted to use torture would be physically unable to use it in the violation of the civil liberties of 300,000,000 Americans, simply because it'd take too long to work their way through the population, even if every FBI agent went berzerk and started torturing everyone they met for the sheer hell of it.
Passive electronic monitoring doesn't take effort - every citizen's right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure is violated the instant they flip the switch on the Mother Of All Carnivores.
Put another way - there's a reason why people get dozens of spams per day (sometimes per hour), while still only getting three or four telemarketing calls per week.