Slashdot Mirror
Government Internet Surveillance Up
Harvey Manfrenjensenton writes "According to this story at Newhouse News Service, the assault on Americans' rights known as the Patriot Act, passed by Congress in October, has produced results that are as disturbing -- and rampant -- as could have been anticipated. Law enforcement used to need a court order to tap your phone, read your mail, etc. Now they just need a whim. ISP's and Telcos can barely keep up with the volume of requests by Feds wanting to read your email." EFF's analysis of the Patriot Act is good reading.
"USA PATRIOT" is an acronym, and a misnomer at that. Lowercasing it only hides this fact, the proper name is capitalized.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
America is the land of individualism and extremism. You can't just have a little, you want the whole enchilada, and who cares if anyone else goes hungry. So it's no suprise that the government, given a little power, immediately begins to abuse it. In America, we abuse everything -- food, drugs, the law, other people, etc. We lionize the "rogue cop who doesn't play by the rules," yet this is the guy grabbing us on the street and shaking us down for ID for no good reason. People think, hey I've got an important job to do, so it's OK if I stretch the rules. So of course the FBI and other law-enforcement types will do that. I remember reading an article about the cameras that they put all over England, and how the people who run them have a deep respect for the authority they are wielding and the limits they are supposed to respect. In the US, there's no way those guys would have any restraint. OK, so I'm ranting, but the point is, that the US culture does not lend itself to granting a great degree of unchecked power to any group, be it government, corporate, whatever.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
Because everybody has inherent human dignity. And part of that dignity is a right to keep your affairs your own. Also, I feel obligated to point out that the Bill of Rights and Constitution were written a *tad* before there was an internet. Oh, and let's not forget, a small group of people called the Supreme Court say we have a right to privacy. For some reason I trust them over an anonymous coward. If you fear terrorists so much that you'd let the government read your email, than truly you are a coward. We still live in an era where human life should have some meaning or value. Get used to it. Fascist. "Those who would sacrifice their liberty for safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." That's from your founding father. Why don't you read the Constitution before you start thumping it.
No, they still need a judge to issue a warrant in order to read your e-mail. The article is about things that do not need a warrant, which includes who is sending you mail and who you are sending mail.
The telephone companies and the post office have been giving out this information for decades without a warrant.
They have been able to push each and every pet policy of theirs in the name of "homeland security" and patriotism.
Quoting Samuel Johnson, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
S
Findlaw - Rights Retained by the People
(emphasis added)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Connect from host: departmentjustice02.erols.com/208.58.140.194 to TCP port: 21
I don't run an ftp server, never advertised one, never been into any sort of warez, just have a mail server. And I see that in my logs. What the fuck is going on?
Quoting Ambrose Bierce, "with respect to Mr. Johnson, I submit that it is the first."
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
That's an important point, there almost wasn't a Bill of Rights. When you make a list, even if you disclaim it with an entry that says that it isn't all inclusive, people will assume that the other rights just aren't as important. Part of the group that wrote the consitution didn't want a list, but the other part that eventually won, knew that if things were left to ambigous, it would be taken as license to do whatever the government wanted to do.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
A few things I found noteworthy...
The amount of subpoenas that carriers receive today is roughly doubling every month -- we're talking about hundreds of thousands of subpoenas for customer records
...HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS!!! There are hundreds of thousands of suspected terrorists or people with involvement in terrorist activities in the US each month??
"The war on terrorism is basically a war of intelligence," Scowcroft said. "Every time they move, every time they get money or spend money, there's a trace, somewhere. What we need to do is get as many of those traces as we can and put them together into a mosaic which will allow us to uncover the al-Qaida network."
It seems to me that the full power of the US intelligence community has had more than enough time to uncover terrorist organizations operating in the US. I understand that it is much, much more difficult to conduct investigations in other countries, but the domestic investigations are getting ridiculous. What is really disturbing, is the way that the "al-Qaida network" is turning into a real-life Immanuel Goldstein....and we must take any and all measures to find him, no matter what it takes.
Quoting from the article:
"The problem that law enforcement and intelligence agencies face is not insufficient information -- "they are choking on information," Dempsey said. The deficiency is in targeting and analysis. The Patriot Act was based on "the assumption if you pour more data into the system, then the picture would become clearer, and I think that's a false presumption," Dempsey said."
Not only are ISPs and others having a hard time dealing with the flood of requests, but it seems Uncle Sam doesn't have the resources to crunch the data it's currently getting. This might be good in so far as it may someday make law enforcement more selective of the information they collect, or perhaps we'll all just be on file indefinately. Someday when they dig up Indiana's Arc from the storage they'll find thousands of hard drives full of emails and chat sessions.
Just my $.02
At Truman State University there were fliers put up for a "town meeting" to discuss the then-new Patriat Act. I don't think I'll ever forget them. They said in large words:
CANADA
Looking better than ever...
I know that it is against the grain here at Slashdot, but how many people here have actually read the provisions in the USA PATRIOT act? After hearing everyone on here complain and complain about it, I was sure that it was going to be a crock when I actually started analyzing it. Personally, I like almost all of the changes that the Act introduced, and I have been amazed at the clarity that the bill has.
For example:
The computer tresspass statute. This statute says that law enforcement doesn't have to get a warrant to eavesdrop on a computer tresspasser if they have the permission of the owner of the computer (very generalized). Think about what the problem was here. Somebody calls the FBI and says that a hacker had broken into their computer. The FBI could not watch what the hacker did on the computer, even with the permission of the owner of the computer, because it was assumed that it violated the privacy of the hacker. Come on. You have to admit that is pretty silly. Do you want the FBI to have to take several hours to draft and get a warrant signed in a situation such as that?
Next, much of the changes in how email is handled was changed so that the laws are the same with email as it is with telephone. It is pretty easy for the FBI to find out who you are emailing. But it takes quite a bit more work for them to actually read your email. This is congruant to the ability of the FBI to get a Pen tap/trace on a telephone to find out who you are calling, compared to requiring a warrant to actually listen in on your calls.
It is amazing to note people's perception of the DoJ. The FBI and the US Attorneys are not some huge govt. agency listening in on everyones phone calls and reading everyones email. They are an overworked, underpaid agency doing its best to combat crime within a wierd, confusing legal system. Of course they overstep their bounds sometimes, but the amount of good work that they do with the miniscule resources and respect they have is amazing.
I for one say good job!
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
Anything named the "Patriot Act" has to be bad for you. I personally am frightened everytime I hear the term "Homeland Security" reminds me too much of being in Nazi Germany, or Oceania.
Has anyone else noticed this quote showing up a lot? I havn't
And this is only the edge of the iceberg!
I stole this Sig
Right now we are lucky... lucky because there is a giant imbalance between information and the means to process it.
But that gap is going to shrink... as more programmers and database analysts get hired and design methods for extracting the information given to them.
Do you really think the government's insatiable hunger for information is going to diminish? The key to finding terrorists is not in looking at their criminal history, racial profiling or by their favorite books.The key is in finding those who dissent against certain policies of the US and take a best guess at whether they are committed enough to lash out against them that they are willing to take their own life or other's lives in order to acheive attention for their cause.
So think about that the next time you complain about gun laws or taxes or the war on drugs or whether your speeding ticket was unfair. Because when the supply of information is dwarfed by the ability to interpret it, it may be your front door that gets kicked down at three in the morning.
Hammer of Truth
If they're sending so many subpoenas that ISPs can't keep up, then doesn't that make it harder for the really important requests to go through? I mean, if this keeps up, then won't it give real terrorists a "buffer zone" of time in which they can send unencrypted emails and act on them before the feds can even get the emails from the ISPs?
c-hack.com |
198.137.241.10 (resolves to e002.eop.gov)
198.137.241.11 (resolves to sseop102.eop.gov)
EOP is Executive Office of You-Know-Who, and I can only conjecture as to what the "SS" stands for. I don't have any political content on my website so I don't know why they'd be stopping by. All they requested was the index.
I've also had several hits from senate.gov, and one from 38.203.152.66 (ns1.dcitp.gov). A cursory glance at http://www.dcitp.gov (funny Flash intro!) reveals that DCITP is essentially the Fed's cybercrime training center. I don't know whether to be flattered or worried...
My firewall box has denied 35 _inbound_ packets today from a "Calypso Online" in Herndon, VA:Not major in and of itself, but this IP block was previously assigned to a company called "Cyveillance.com." Cyveillance's repeated inbound probes were what earned that IP block a spot in my firewall to begin with, and while the IPs now belong to Calypso, the new owner is up to the same tricks.
Cyveillance still exists; they've moved to 63.100.163.127 and are still as blatant as ever about what they do: "100 Percent Relevant Intelligence Mined Directly From the Internet - Cyveillance." I can't figure out who Calypso Online is, calypso.com is registered and seems a likely suspect; it resolves but isn't running a web server. Perhaps Cyveillance and Calypso are one in the same.
What does all this mean? Quite possibly nothing, but quite possibly something. All I know is I hate the idea of being monitored and I've been painting firewall rules with a broad brush lately.
Y o u c o u l d l i n k e v e r y c h a r a c t e r a n d h a v e l e f t o v e r s . . .
Surely the feds could quite easily gain some sort of access to put packet
sniffers on an isp's network and read anyones email, without the need to ask
the ISP's or Telco's.
Sure they could, however nothing they gathered would have been admissible in
court. In addition, if they were caught, it would lead to severe punishment
under the former laws. Illegal wiretapping and conducting an illegal
investigation used to be very strictly enforced, even if the prepatrator was
the FBI. Now, they can gather whatever they wish, use it in a court of law if
anything ever turns up and not have to prove that you did anything wrong to
get their attention in the first place. Whatever happens to us, remember, we
deserve it because we didn't stop it.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!