Slashdot Mirror
Carnivore Comes To India
pamri writes: "India is getting its own version of Carnivore. According to this Times of India article,'...after investigations have revealed that Mohammad, alias "Burger," who led the Parliament attack, was in constant touch with his counterparts in Pakistan as well as within India through email ... The Intelligence Bureau (IB) has prepared a list of new keywords that are to be used to intercept mails emanating from IP addresses in India.'"
This sounds like a supreme waste of time. The sad part is, people wont agree with me.
Firstly, it's been directly stated by terrorists themselves (watch the video!) that transmissions to the lower-level parties involved which *contain instructions* usually don't occur until mere hours before the terrorist act. It isn't as if the terrorists know that they'll be bombing a specific target for months, they find out shortly before. This means that any flagged transmissions will have to be analyzed, which I guarrentee takes a longer amount of time than it does for some terrorist to prepare, ready himself, and carry out the final attack.
Secondly, these things are going to be spammed or encrypted into oblivion. See point one about time constraints, and then realize that India has a large population. If you scan every email for content and come up with 5 million emails per day that are flagged by the server, how long will it take to process that data? How long do they have?
Yikes. They'd have better luck issueing a statement like, "Mr. Terrorist? Please stop it. We'll give you penguin dolls."
Natural language processing has come a long way in just the last couple of years. Astonishingly effective applications such as Sinope Summarizer are freely available; I can only imagine what an organization with the motivation and resources of the IB, NSA, FBI or CIA might have. I'd feel somewhat disappointed if their software weren't vastly superior to anything I've seen.
I'd imagine it might be based on Cyc or a similar dark project, and might achieve a 97% or better success rate at identifying questionable messages, with very few false negatives.
Assuming a billion emails a day, and five million of them being questionable, I'd suspect such a system could cull that number down to a few thousand—if the target messages were truly that few in number. As a matter of fact, I'd suggest that if sufficient computing power were available, to skip the keyword-scanning filter entirely, since such communications might be carried on with an alternate vocabulary substituted for hotbutton terms. Finding those messages requires more language processing intelligence than Carnivore would seem to have currently.
Goddammit, I am so fed up with these constant assassinations of Internet privacy anytime it is revealed that a terrorist group used email or cryptography to coordinate their attacks. I bet they also used telephones, cell phones, and snail mail to communicate as well. Why the fuck aren't these sodding politicians calling for monitoring of voice conversations and physical inspection of packages and letters? If they are serious about security why not go the whole nine yards? Speech recognition technology could surely make the former feasible. <sarcasm>After all, only those who are doing something wrong have something to hide.</sarcasm>
That bullshit never happens because most people, whether here in the US or over in India, wouldn't stand for such a blatant invasion of their privacy. Just because technology makes monitoring Internet communications an order of magnitude easier, doesn't fucking make it right! Whether it is listening in on a phone conversation, sniffing a packet, or tearing open a letter the intrusion is still the same.
It takes a nation of millions to wage war, but only a single man to commit terrorism. Until we address the factors that lead people to such desperation that they are willing to give their lives to cold-hearted violence, we will wage this war until we inevitably lose it.
We have always had the means to destroy ourselves - but terrorists have finally given us the motivation to do so. And like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, we are slowly selling out our treasured civil liberties for an illusion of security. And the day we lose this so-called War on Terror is when we have silently replaced the republics of the world with police states that hide behind masks of democracy and pay lip-service to freedom.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
I believe you are correct that most Indians will not even know about these measures and that they can do something about them (even if they aren't affected at this point in time) due to more basic issues such as survival.
:-)
;-)
Dude, we don't exactly live in caves here.
It is not like we are going to let our privacy be taken overnight. There are LUGs around the country which are also active in privacy issues.
But, at this moment, it is more important that we preserve our sovereignity and our integrity.
Benjamin Franklin's quote of those who compromise freedom for safety deserve neither sounds great, but when terrorists are out there waiting to wreck havoc, it isn't exactly that simple.
Democratic nations will preserve the interests of their people. There may be instances when it may seem otherwise, but ultimately the people will win. History has proved this to us, and Argentina is the latest example of this.
You said that a country pre-occupied with a war has little time for concern with such things as Internet privacy. True, but people are not going to keep quiet either. The amount of people involved in IT is *too* high in India to just ignore such troubles.
But anyways, they are not taking our rights just like that, not for now atleast
I do speak Malayalam. Colloquially speaking, it translates to : "Move along. Stop quarreling for fun.". The "fun" bit is added only because there isnt an exact translation of the idiom. Quarelling for the sake of quarelling is more like it.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.