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Verisign Offers Wiretapping Services
LinuxDeckard writes "According to this article at FindLaw, VeriSign will soon be offering its 'NetDiscovery' wire tapping services for a monthly fee. NetDiscovery will allow Telecoms to comply with court ordered wire taps." Verisign's press release is informative. This appears to be tapping of voice calls rather than internet usage. I assume it would work something like this: telecom company gets a wiretap notification from the FBI or local police; it routes all calls to/from $TARGET through a Verisign switch; Verisign does the tapping and reporting to the tappers. If you think this doesn't affect you, keep in mind that under the PATRIOT Act the barrier for wiretapping is set very low indeed.
The Patriot Act? That's great. The terrorists have won. Their purpose was to change our lives so we'd never be back to the way we were. We give them fame and glamour. A Patriot Act is just one more way we have proven how stupid we really are. The only way to beat the terrorists is to not let them phase us. Let's not talk about them, not care about them, and maybe they'll go away. Here we go, let's make some laws to restrict our own people. It's all bullshit.
That's whay I like to live in a small country and speaking a languange only 2 Million Popole speak - so come on FBI/CIA/NSA tap me, spend millions on translations and listen to all my boring phone calls to my girlfriend...
This is how the Patriot Act is explained if you follow the link: Expanded Surveillance With Reduced Checks and Balances
I wonder how long until Verisign offers this "service" to the business community at large. PI's, security firms, stalkers, and identity thieves will be jumping at the chance to fork over money to them.
That is precisly one reason why we need to be scared - and why the huge, convoluted body of law we have in this country needs to be cleaned out and thrown away. When everyone is a criminal, they can prosecute anyone they want. Ever lived in a small town and had a bad personal enmity with one of the cops? Heck, or even a big town? They can make your life miserable, because EVERYONE is a criminal. You probably do at least 5 illegal things every day - more than that if you drive.
Good explanation of the line which is plotted in this situation. Sure, people who aren't criminals don't have anything to worry about...yet. Perhaps the original poster can help us in speculating what would happen in the case that nobody was a criminal anymore. Do you think the FBI would just shut down? "Our work is done here, folks! You're welcome."
No.
There is a bioscientific concept of "The Red Queen Syndrome" which has been adopted by the cybernetics people and says that as a system evolves far enough to solve its problems, more problems are revealed. In this context, as fewer and fewer people broke the law, more laws would be undoubtedly be deemed necessary. What would US Congress do in a situation of low crime? Your City Council? Making spying on ones constituents easier is not even a slippery slope, it's an increase in the degree of slipperiness.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Don't blame Verisign, they're merely complying with tne new regulations as required.
If you ask me, this wiretapping business is little more than a measure to make us feel safe at the expense of our privacy with little hope of actually capturing terrorists.
Looking back to 9/11, the feds obviously don't have too much trouble getting a hold of our phone conversations. How do you think that all of those cell phone transcripts were made availabe so rapidly, or evan at all? Someone constantly has the record button on, regardless. We've all read in the news about just how close US agents actually were to these guys using only their previously available methods. Now the US agencies are looking for deniability so they blame "limitations" placed on them. The terrorists aren't stupid, and they obviously know better than to speak in more than vague terms when they are in the presence of a possible rat, including unencrypted communications on the internet and on the phone. They're not using this technology to catch anything but small fish.
Personally, I'm not afraid of terrorists. I don't think they could ever launch an attack powerful enough to topple the institution that our belief (if hypocritically administered, looking at foreign policy) in individual rights and freedom stand for. What I am afraid of is our paranoid fear in terrorists destroying those rights that have made the free world great. Once our freedoms are gone, we may as well have let the terrorists kill every one of us. Death would be preferable to 1984.
~Ben