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DOJ Already Monitoring Cable Internet Traffic
According to this Wired News article, the Justice Department is already using its new powers under the USA Patriot Act to obtain subscribers' identities and other information from cable operators without judicial oversight under Section 211 of the new legislation. Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff also says that the act has allowed police to obtain IP addresses of cable subscribers and has enabled DOJ to obtain court orders for ISP logs outside a court's traditional jurisdiction. The Senate Judiciary Committee has convened hearings to review the impact of the Bush administration's actions on civil liberties, but A.G. Ashcroft is not scheduled to appear until December 6. One wonders what effect the upcoming cable failure will have on government surveilance of the potentially criminal citizenry.
The important, and difficult, job is to fight the temptation to give up, and keep on fighting for our rights.
Nurse! More coffee!
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Check out the Register article on anonymizing yourself...
And have your friends use Hushmail.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The people who don't have Internet connections are surely criminals. They must have something to hide, otherwise they would be gouged with outrageous prices and restrictions in order to be further monitored.
*waves at DOJ*
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Quite a few European countries have had problems with terrorosts for years. The UK with the IRA, the Spanish with the Basque (sp?) seperatists etc etc.
In these countries laws on human rights and free speach prevail. (Albeit precariously sometimes, I admit!)
The US, confronted with some of its first terrorist attacks imediatly goes into panic, ignoring the spirit of its consitution.
I can only hope that over the next few months things will calm down, and the US will realise the importance of human and civil rights laws.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
The fears of the informed seem to have come true. What remains is this question: will the informed be able to get the uninformed interested enough to rise up against this new police state? This is either the start of the real Third Reich (before you hit that flame-bait button, read on) coming to you in 25 years from now, or the last straw to make the people regain civil liberties from Corporatism and mis-guided politicians.
We will need to ring the bell louder, make more people aware. We have the obligation to do so because we know. If you let this go unchallenged, don't come complaining in 25 years time that your children have no rights, no liberties.
Should this sound absurd to you, read into some European history for the years 1900-1939, to read the reasons for WW I, WW II and what happend in the "interbellum". You may very well not like what you find. For WW I a single event was enough to set it off. For WW II the foundation was laid by a repressive reaction 'supported' by the 'people'. 2001-9-11 may very well be the one event, the repression of civil liberties in reaction to it may very well bring it on for real.
Again The waves are eating at the lime-stone, slowly but surely. In the end the rock _will_ fall.
Karma? What's that again?
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I have actually asked rooms full of people wether they think, even given the extremly long odds that they would ever be involed in a terror incedent, it is a god idea to give these controls to the goverment and let their rights to privacy, speech and fair trial be vacated. Most of them said yes they would give up a portion of the rights. One I explained to some that giving up these freedoms would only create the illusion of security, but in fact would not make them any more secure a few even said that that was ok too.(I almost started screaming at those folks)
I think it is now starting to get better, but some of it is to late. It is going to be very difficult to take away the powers that have been given to law enforcement.
I honestly don't know what to do about the situation. I try to talk to friends and family about it and even people in grocery store lines and such. But I have to admit I am worried that there is nothing to be done. And I am sadly glad that many Americans are armed and am now a left wing liberal who supports the NRA. Scary.
The sea of red white and blue made me nervous from the start.
The most disturbing suspension of civil liberties is the power the Bush administration has given itself to try suspected terrorists in secret military tribunals - all non-US citizens, even long time residents of the United States, can be tried and sentenced in secret military courts.
0 8_1.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/vvny/20011126/lo/301
If you're non-US citizen residing in the United States, you should be extremely worried.
If his goal was to destroy the American way of life, there is no doubt he has succeeded. Alas, our conduct in defending this nation has had the effect of making a nation less worthy of defending.
It would be more tolerable if these acts truly were focused in a good faith effort to stop terrorism. They are not -- just a naked broadening of executive and investigatory power, cynically and wrongfully executed simply because the "time was right." The selfishness of corporate "citizens" with their hands out for "patriotic" retroactive tax breaks only adds to the cynicism.
This is just selfishness wrapped up in a flag. It sucks.
Sorry to rub it in, but here in the Netherlands I can only laugh about the 'news' CNN is showing 24/7 when it comes to the tragedy of 11th of sept/binladen/afganistan etc. It's from 1 single POV: the patriotic USA-first government. When I compare it to our dutch news-agencies people in the USA miss a hell of a lot of information which is IMHO VITAL for making the right judgement about what's right and what's wrong.
For starters: the secret tribunals where pres. Bush will pick who's on trial and who's not is similar to every 3rd world dictatorship out there, yet I have to see 1 single message from mainstream USA newsstations critizising this IMHO shocking development. Thankfully the EU isn't co-operating with Bush on this: f.e. spain is not handing over al-quaida suspects.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Calm down everyone.
A couple of points:
1. There had to be legislation that dealt with government eavesdropping and the Internet sometime in history regardless of September 11 or not. The ACLU and others will press court cases that arise from abuses from these laws and some of these new powers will be curtailed. It's evolution, it's growing pains. It's law meets new technology and no one gets it perfect the first time around. A lot of people here laugh at the less technophilic portions of our society, the luddites who look at every new innovation with suspicion and distrust. Hey- guess what y'all sound like when it comes to this legislation? Legal luddites, to coin a phrase.
2. The police need to wire tap phones, they need to bounce lasers off glass windows, they need to spy on portions of society to protect us from the bad guys, ok? Yes Virginia, there are bad guys out there and you need some of this legislation to deal with them. That is a perfectly valid impulse. This is not Freemasons in smokey rooms plotting the destruction of your constitutional freedoms just for the fun of it. This is just good people trying to do some good from a bad situation. Imagine that! Of course there will be abuses- haven't there always been!? Have some simple faith please in the maturity of our society: the abuses will be curtailed. There are many ways it can be done. Maybe a future Rodney King of the Internet incident will happen and someone with the net traffic version of a camcorder will capture it all and cause an uproar. Or- brace yourself, a good judge on a bench somewhere will smack down the spooks who get out of line. Or, get this: has anyone here ever heard of the free press? Inconceivable! We're all going to hell in a handbasket... yeah right, give me a break.
3. We are in a very emotional time right now. We are all human, we overreact when someone jumps out from behind a tree at us. We are in knee-jerk reaction territory right now as a society: a nation at peace just had the equivalent of 3 ICBMs launched at it successfully, killing thousands of its citizens and destroying a major landmark, compliments of a bunch of religious fundamentalist lunatics. You can forgive a little backlash. It's been less than 3 months since September 11. Take a deep breath, wait a year, have the press run a few exposes on some rights abuses, and watch how the tide of popular opinion runs then. Forgive the tide of popular opinion at this particular point in time for running into the scary nether regions it seems to be running. Let everyone calm down and contemplate reality with a little distance between themselves and September 11, whenever that may be.
4. This a tempest in a teapot. Think about how much hot air will be wasted over these kinds of net tapping efforts when no one has really stopped to think about what kind of people we are really dealing with. Remember Star Wars of the Reagan era? Remember the missile defense shield of recent history? Billions of dollars spent on orbiting gigawatt lasers, and what the heck did that do? Less than 2 dozen guys board planes with box cutters fer chrissake and a few hours flight training. A lot of good all that tech did, or will do, if these guys ever get their hands on one of those 50 or so nuclear suitcases the Russians seem to have misplaced. And a lot of good all these Echelons and Magic Lanterns will do against the kind of enemy we are dealing with. Do you really wants to fight the Feds on their new net snooping initiatives? Forget about talking about fundamental rights- talk efficacy, talk utility, talk results- the Feds ain't gonna get any hanging around on the net. Tell them to go hang around the box cutter aisle at Home Depot instead if they want to catch terrorists- that is as high tech as the enemy seems to get.
6. And finally, forgive me for spreading some of my own FUD at this moment about nuclear suitcases and such, but there you go: I think that's where the FUD properly belongs. Think about it. These guys really hate us. They want to kill us. All of us. Why are you worried about your government? So blow hours of your life fretting over what your government is doing photographing you when you run a red light on your way to 7-11 at 3 am to buy some Cheetos... Go ahead, drive yourself crazy about the government knowing who everyone is on your AOL buddy list. Is that the real problem? These fruitcakes want to put ricin in your watersupply and smallpox in your local McDonalds. So go ahead, wail and bemoan that the feds can see your pr0n downloads... the terrorists could care less about the Internet and Microsoft versus Linux and the RIAA and your damn TiVo viewing records... the terrorists are over at the local dam, planting dynamite. Sure, this is FUD, but post-September 11, it is rather convincing FUD!
This post about cable Internet traffic tapping has very, very little to do with cyberspace, really... as I said before, if you really want to make a good point about trampling on our electronic rights to the Feds, tell them that they are just wasting their time looking for terrorists in cyberspace. Tell them to go hang out at the reservoir.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Most cable modem DHCP pools issue IP addresses based on the MAC address of the requesting device.
How to Set the MAC Address For Dummies:
[root@box]# ifdown eth0
[root@box]# ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:14:D9:AC:D3:12
[root@box]# ifup eth0
This should get you a new IP address on most cable modem services. Replace the MAC address (that string with 5 colons) with any similar string in the format
00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
..where each X is a value from 0-9 or A-F.
Write a script and set it as a cronjob. If your IP is changing every 15 minutes they're going to have a hell of a time keeping tabs on you. If thousands of cable users' IPs are changing every 15 minutes they're going to have a hell of a time keeping tabs on anyone.
...they might as well use the information they gather to set up a dating service. Think about it - the government spies on your every keystroke, but to make up for it they send the sexual partner(s) of your dreams to your door. How many people will still be complaining here after that. "Damn government helping me get laid... Oh well, gotta go, no time to bitch and moan about the complete erosion of civil liberties, I'm gonna get me some." It gives new meaning to the term "public relations..."
A simple IP address is not big deal. What would they do with that?
21:14 192.168.0.1 -> http www.2600.org
21:14 192.168.0.1 -> nntp news.premium.com
21:35 192.168.0.1 -> http astalavista.box.sk
21:40 192.168.0.1 -> http www.princeton.edu
21:42 192.168.0.1 -> http www.slashdot.org
21:43 192.168.0.1 -> http www.islamicjihad.com
21:44 192.168.0.1 -> http goatse.cx
21:45 192.168.0.1 -> irc irc.dalnet.net
21:50 192.168.0.1 -> http gnutellahosts.com
21:53 192.168.0.1 -> http dormroom.school.edu
.
.
.
Looks like probable cause for a search warrant for software piracy, terrorist activity, and obscene pornography to me. And I can already picture the prosecution detailing what's on each selectively chosen site, outlining your criminal state of mind for a jury. (Unless you're not a U.S. citizen, in which case you may well be before a military tribunal).
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
Let's look at what this prick has done in the last 2 months:
- Sped through the patriot act, which has us on the road to a police state, allowing for secret searches of property and seizure of information, urinating directly on the 4th amendment.
- Trashed our system of justice by authorizing secret trials, using secret evidence, and even allowing secret executinos. The "evidence"will not be avaiable for the accused to refute, with no opportunity for the accused to appeal. In doing so he has invoked the divine right of kings, not even asking for congress's approval.
- Carrying out acts of war without declaring war(declaring war against a tactic doesn't count, war is by definition a conflict between 2 nations, not some open ended crusade). Only congress can declare war(or approve a declaration of war), and so far it has not done so. In addition, he has justified all these invasions of civil liberties by claiming that we are indeed at war.
- Deciding which american citizens will be protected by the constitution, claiming, "you don't deserve protection if you are hiding and committing acts of terror"(Ed note: or are suspected of doing so)
I dunno about you, but this is a hell of a lot more serious than clinton getting his dick sucked by some slut and then lying about it.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?