Slashdot Mirror
Federal Cyberspace Policy Draft Released
mh_cryptonomicon writes "The initial public draft of the National Strategy for Securing Cyberspace was released today. This document outlines the Administration's plan for ensuring that the Net remains a 'good neighborhood.' Following the release of the plan, the Administration's Cybersecurity team will take it on the road for discussions with the people about what can and should be done to protect and defend the net. More information (and the 65 page draft) can be downloaded from the White House's Critical Infrastructure Protection site. This draft is considerably smaller than the 3300 page monster it was reported as being. Commentary is starting to pop up everywhere, including www.cryptonomicon.net/blog/."
will it survive the ./ effect??
I hope this means they don't plan to do much about the Net...
Good article about it here. Don't worry, this is the printer friendly version, so you don't have to register.
"One of the most annoying features of Outlook Express is that it's default settings make it disgustingly easy for email to travel via email messages. "
who'd a thunk it?
Oh Boy !
http://nomoneydownnews.com/
Shouldn't any draft conserning the Internet have been influenced by the people that created it and maintain it? Hackers (white hats ofcourse), Admins, Colleges, and who else have you. Ofcouse we all know thats never going to happen. Hopefully it doesn't get to the point were every nation or union has their own rules and starts extradighting people for something they did online.
Carpe meam simiam!
This is how it works...
/. editor Timothy named terrorist #1. IT'S A SETUP!!!!
Slashdot users DoS whitehouse.gov to see the plans thay MAY quash internet freedom - government uses this as evidence to carry out these anti-terrorists prototection plans for the internet.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
Come on. No true thourough review will come from having "town meetings." This is just a public stunt to make people feel like they have input in drafting the policy. My bet is that this thing is already signed-sealed and delivered.
If they really wanted a quality review they'd submit it to 20-30 different universities, think tanks and businesses and individuals who are integral to studying the internet. By doing reviews in a "town meeting" format, they might as well just put it on a call in talk show and have the callers "draft" the policy.
I don't mean to put down the quality of input that ordinary "citizens" can add to this policy, a town hall is just not the way to do it.
hrumph.
tcd004
Read Richard Gere's Ass Zoo, really
Does this hurt or improve our chances of living in a technological anarchy manipulated by television stations?
As said in the article "...what can and should be done to protect and defend the net. "
Does this mean they will protect our free nudie sites better?
Karma: Pimp (mostly affected by your pimphood and your bitchin comments)
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
I realize that many, myself included believes the net should be completely free from censorship. After growing up a little and having children and responsibilities I think that this may not be the case. I personally advocate different levels of the net. Much like AOL vs the net. Where AOL is a very sheltered censored version of the net and the web being everything. There has to be some way to filter out the massive amounts of porn kiddie porn, and illegals. I admin a two offices and periodically check outgoing connection just to keep a tab on things and it amazes me how much people look at porn, and waste time lots of it. I know it's your right but damn. I would love to see the net segregated into tared domains. the first being child and educational environment friendly, the second enveloping commercial work, then the last tared no holds bard. This way parents employers have more control on content.
"One of the most annoying features of Outlook Express is that it's default settings make it disgustingly easy for email to travel via email messages."
That's under the blog links heading for spam and viruses. Otherwise a pretty good retread of what we already know, but like few will act on.
... of the Internet.
WTF is this a picture of anyway? There seem to be a lot of spooks like this in here.
People like their piracy and porn, the riaa/mpaa/whoever (er, I mean the government.) can't really stop it.
sir bard
"Everybody has to do his own thing to protect cyberspace," he said.
Excellent, a government guideline I can get behind!
I'll take my laptop down to the beach, get stoned out of my mind, and watch this high quality version of Attack of the Clones I finally downloaded, then take a nap.
Wake me up when I've made the net secure - and try and explain it slowly, this south american shit I got utterly destroys you. I'll be laughing at stains on the ceiling 'til new years, no lie.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
somebody wake up Gore!
It's just so 1995.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I did a search through the document and I don't see any provisions for eliminating trolls.
I should have picked out the nickname Demosthenes!Tecumseh.
Simple Solution: Use UDP and an application-level error correction algorithm, plus maybe packet sequence numbers.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
...ensuring that the Net remains a 'good neighborhood.'
Yeah, they'd better hurry up before we're inundated with spam, worms, trojans, and other unimaginable horrors. Oh, wait...
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Yeah, that was my impression, too:
"'Discussion'. Yeah. Right."
Still, from what I've heard of the plan, it's not too bad. Main points seem to be primarily relying on increased security awareness (come on, sysadmins of the clueless newbies, admit it: you've wished, at least once, that all new users of the chunk of the 'Net you control would have to get some decent training about what a virus is and how not to get one - well, that's about what they're advocating) and reliability rather than monitoring (not "scan all the traffic looking for something nasty" but "lock down the ports so nasty things don't happen" - i.e., prevention).
Gee, how are we going to police something that large? Are we only applying these rules to USA-borne servers and networks? What about networks that span international waters? I mean, there is only so much they can do. The government should worry about -its- network. If the government is that worried about there being instructions for mass terrorism or conversations between terrorists, then they should try and keep it at just an information level.. Secure the places where they can attack, and don't impinge on international, and almost other-worldly, rights.
/seem/ omnipresent in the net, but there are quite a bit of Canadians, Europeans.. you name it, they're all coming online, and they're all going to be out of the jurisdiction of this here United States of 'Merka. (that's Texan for 'America'. Look! I speak George Bush!).
I say other-worldly because the Internet is not bound by the traditional geographic laws. This nation may
Trying to regulate the internet is like trying to catch a fish with a bubble wand.
Yeah. It's not going to work.
It seems that for cyberspace, as for species, the best protection is in diversity. The email worms thrive not only because Outlook is flawed, but because outlook is everywhere. The same concept applies to hardware from chips to the backbone as well.
If anything, the Gov't should play a roll as a supporter of open standards, limited patent abuse and, for starters, fixing or flushing the DMCA
I read the words "good neighborhood" and started to seriously worry. All the "good neighborhood" attempts I've seen in the past were implemented by ruthless Neighborhood Associations, complete with Codes, Covenants and Restrictions (CC&R's) attached to the land. Buy a lot in the "neighborhood," you're legally obligated to follow the CC&R's. Most of which seem to have something to do with what color paint you can paint your house, whether you're allowed to have a basketball hoop out front, or whether the garage door can be open at times other than when you're actually moving a car in or out.
Do we really want the whole Internet to be one big anal-retentive "good neigborhood" controlled by an equally anal-retentive Neighborhood Association?
The reason for this approach is not only obvious, but it's the same reason CC&R's are created. Property values. CC&R's protect the property value, not the human values of living there. They elevate the property above the people. This sounds like the same thing to me, elevating the property values of commercial entities over the human values of the average person who is using the 'net.
personally I love the DNS name registration graph on the page before it, can you believe that "cyberspace" has grown almost 100% since 1991! What a load! Here is my question where would you register your IPv4 FQDN for the internet while on a dial-up BB with your c64? I'll give them one thing they are awefully SCARY looking graphs! Just the kind of thing you would need to create an emergency requiring new and drastic legislation!
A few days ago, I wrote an essay called, "Cyberwar: How Terrorists Could Defeat the U.S., and Why They Won't."
www.cryptogon.com/docs/cryptogon_cyberwar.pdf
It discusses physical threats to information infrastructures that are almost never mentioned publicly.
NOTE: Acrobat 5 is required to view the document.
WARNING: The information contained in this document is intended for educational purposes only. Anyone who attempts to undertake what is described in the "Possible Terrorist Scenario" section will be committing an act of war against the states involved. I am NOT encouraging anyone to carry out what is described in that section. I am exercising my First Amendment right to free speech to make people aware of the dangers posed to the global information infrastructure. Our society relies on these technologies, and an open discussion of the threats to these technologies is necessary in order to defend them.
Security suggestions are fine, content control (other then legally persued methods) arn't.
As far as I know the article doesn't deal with censorship or porn or anything like that.
And as far as that is concerned, I think censorship is dangerous. Putting one group in control of deciding what is and what is-not appropriate is just a Bad Idea. Tools are already available for you (as an admin, and a parent) to censor, watch, control, and report those areas. A requirement for that to be freely available (from the ISP?) is one thing, but requiring all content providers to be policed by one central group is another IMHO.
A news report that I saw yesterday, prior to the final document release, seemed to indicate that this report does not take insecure software makers to task for their role in the security crisis. If the final draft of the document keeps the kid gloves on like that, then I don't think this is going to be a very useful starting point for the government.
Probably the single best thing the government could do would be to set up strong security requirements for software used by any federal government branch, and enforce those requirements. Setting a high standard would force vendors to get a clue if they want to sell to the federal market, and as a by-product consumer and business software would get some help as well.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Well, despite all it's security holes, I'd gather this was pretty important from a design standpoint. :)
I wondered when this would finally start to kick off. There are many things that I have doubt about with this government and their obvious manipulations but due to lack of knowledge there is an element of doubt who is telling the truth. As a CCIE, networks are something I consider I know a bit about and this rings alarm bells.
There have been a few articles now in the press that state there could easily be a terrorist attack on the internet which I merly laughted at but it seems that average joe in the street thinks that a bunch of Afganistan cavemen could seriously achive this.
To me, this is an obvious attempt to censor the internet by using fear tactics which work due to peoples ignorance. I'm tired of this annoying propaganda and manipulation by what is meant to be a government of the people and for the people.
This site is very interesting and certainly worth seeing the other side of the story, maybe this is why censorship is so important?
Regardless, the net doesn't need this "protection" and I wonder if this "protection" is for my benifit in any case.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Actually I am with you 100% (and thanks for not blasting at my spelling error) I wouldn't have feared Gore being "guided" into doing the best thing for "Americans" by the people I don't trust. Since its Bush's show I am going to go buy MS stock in a hurry, who else was on that technology panel?
Direct actions would be:
- outlaw spam with serious penalties for offenders
- make all internet relay operators and sys admins legally liable for keeping their systems up to date and locked down.
- migrate AWAY from MS based systems. Security is an afterthought.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Al Gore had in creating this document.
Thank you very much.
Am I the only that found all that eye-candy and gee-whiz stuff in the PDF more than a little distracting? The government should concentrate more on publishing the information than on making a pretty wrapper for it.
The plan appears to give Microsoft a free pass - that is, Microsoft's software is riddled with security issues, yet the Feds seem to be singling them out as doing the right thing, or somthing...
Sorry for not being more specific, but it's in there.
What is up with that?
...for values of "the people" that equal Sony, Microsoft, and the RIAA.
Well, obviously the fist thing we need to do is get rid of that Megabyte character. Where are Bob, Dot, Matrix, AndrAia and Frisket (especially Firsket!), when you need them?
With the current babbler-in-chief resident in
The White House
Thanks and have a protest inspired weekend.
You're very brave, mh_cryptonomicon.
The BBC and News.com reports. News.com in depth multi page thang.
This looks like it was compiled after extensive consultations with commercial inter^w^w leading experts. The
recommendations appear to boil down to "1. Use Symantec[tm] and Network Associates[tm] Products;
2. Encourage commercial software more secure, then sell it to *everyone*;
3. Train more experts". Am I too cynical, or are they missing
"4. Profit!" ? (Symantec and NAI are apparently doing product
releases to cash in?!) Where does Free software figure in these expert
recommendations? Oh, and privacy concerns have been quietly shelved.
Although... perhaps the news that BGP (the Internet's backbone routing
protocol) has vulnerabilities is news outside NANOG-l?
Let's get this straight: here is one reason and actually one reason alone why the internet is as big a deal as it is. There is one thing that made it grow at the ridiculous rate it has. SEX. Period. Sure, it comes in handy for all kinds of things, (and yes I know it was ARPAnet and some guy in Bern ;) who made it happen) but the only reason the net has grown so fast and so large is pr0n. Only a couple of years back did regular businesses come into the picture. But only because the infrastructure was in place. And why is that? Because porn made it possible. Don't laugh, don't mod this 'funny'...it's true!
So what is this 'good neighborhood' crap? Just because you might be a hypocritical puritan doesn't mean you can deny the past.
BTW, I'm all for a better classification of the net; it's always baffled me that there isn't a TLD .sex or .xxx where all adult/erotic sites must reside by (inter)national law. That would have a direct impact, as censoring (by parents or employers) would be easier to implement...but something like that would be a too easy solution, wouldn't it. (yeah, I can see circumventions too, but that would be exceptions to the rule).
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
This document outlines the Administration's plan for ensuring that the Net remains a 'good neighborhood.' Translation: This document outlines the Administration's plan for ensuring that the Net is exactly what the Administration wants it to be.
OT but I just wonder if everytime someone uses the term "cyberspace" like this if William Gibson just wants to kill himself?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I much prefer the scientific term "Interweb."
Nothing, you have done more then enough already. . . . .
(just get the heck off the net already and leave us alone!)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
"* Do they take software makers to task for poor quality software and/or insecure software which create the majority of security expenses for industry and the government?
* Do they demand more accountability from software vendors for these flaws, including potentially requiring opening specs or even source code up for inspection before using the software in mission-critical systems?"
Feds: "Well, gee. Doesn't the DMCA do that already? What more do you want us to do?"
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/9/17 /232156.shtml
read www.newsmax.com
only truth is right bush is doing something good.
i skimmed through it, and to me it seems more like that new reality show "worst-case scenario".
hey, we might as well build bomb shelters in every populated area, because hey, what if some terrorists decide to make it rain nuclear bombs all over america.
hell, i would actually prefer that my city's computer regulated vital energy and resources be on a network blacked out from the internet. why would they need to be in the first place? personally i dont konw much about how everything works, but im pretty damn sure they should work without the internet being present.
i mean, what the hell would our electricity grid be doing connected to the internet? would it not have its own self-serving network to work from?
From cryptonomicon.org...
:-p
One of the most annoying features of Outlook Express is that it's default settings make it disgustingly easy for email to travel via email messages.
Well then...how the heck else is email supposed to travel
sign up you blithering moron!
Freaking busybodies...
I will put my router up on cinderblocks in my front yard if I damn well want to...
-- Terry
it's not the feds' job the secure the internet.... well, it wouldn't be if the united states government didn't, though it's contracts and programs, control everything from ip address allocations and tr1 ISPs to who has over-riding authority over the domain name space - which for most users, means total control over the public internet. the technology that powers the internet is driven largely by (US) commercial interest. if big brother wasn't there to hold my hand, i really don't know what i would do! thanks uncle sam.
It's not spelled "DRAFT", it is spelled "DAFT"
;)
get it right.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
R4-2 A public-private partnership should perfect and accelerate the adoption of more secure router technology and management, including out-of-band management. R4-3 Internet service providers, beginning with Tier 1 companies or R4-10 The private sector should consider including in near-term research and development priorities, programs for highly secure and trustworthy operating systems. If such systems are developed and successfully evaluated, the Federal government should accelerate procurement of such systems. in software code development, including processes and procedures that diminish the possibilities of erroneous code, malicious code, or trap doors that could be introduced during development. R4-17 The PCIPB s Awareness Committee, in cooperation with lead agencies,
They do realize that "trustworthy computing" name was originared by Microsoft, and has absolutely nothing to do with computer user's security and everything with software companies' "security" from the user, whoever he might be? Don't they?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
is just putting 'e-' before everything. now excuse me, i have to go take an ultra-modern e-shit.
he died yesterday too
Not to be politically incorrect, but the US has probably made some enemies who have a bit more backing (for example PRC, North Korea, organized crime, etc) and a lot more technical savvy. If you think that the only threats are from grass-eating starving cavemen too embroiled in their own local fights, then you're underrating the other players in the the game of global realpolitik.
Maybe most of these aren't directly terrorists (only supporting of same), but they certainly have intelligence aims and wouldn't mind causing the US economy some dislocations. Continuance of Foreign Policy or War by other means and all that jazz.
And organized crime might love to have access to a lot of wonderful law enforcement data, and lord knows they have the money to hire a few good (well, maybe not good but competent) hackers.
Now, I do agree that the US Gov't is taking advantage of the situation to clamp down on some other things - kinda like Canadian authorities using the invocation of the War Measures act at various times to deal with unrelated but annoying things like street-people, vagrants, etc.
But there IS a threat. Just because you're not getting kicked in the groin every day doesn't mean someone doesn't have it on their list of things to do.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Who reported that it was 3300 pages???? I saw Richard Clarke about 2 months ago, and he had a draft with him at the time. Nobody got to see it, but it was in an envelope and couldn't have been more than 80 pages... I don't think it was ever envisioned as being more than that.
Don't take this lightly; my university will take a boltcutter to their network before they risk their NSF and NIH funding. The White House can make it stick too. "D3-7 Should consideration be given to tying State or Federal funding to IHEs to compliance with certain cybersecurity benchmarks?"
I recall some posts about this on another site, I think it was Kuro5hin.org. Not sure, the older stuff search feature there is disabled at present. Several of the commenters decided on Belize. Apparently it has an immigration friendly policy - permanent residency or citizenship after 1 year residence. Also a wonderful climate. The problems are basically that it is a 3rd world country - i.e. no vibrant market for techie jobs.
> the "secure Computing" initation, TCPA, and
> Palladium are sprinkled generously throughout the
> document.
What page(s) are they mentioned on? I have the document and am reading it but didn't come across that yet. But its 65 pages long of course...
As you've probably noticed, you aren't worthy of a reply. This is all you get :)
Although I'm sure every slashdotter is going to hate to hear it, there is an easy solution to stop the majority of the problems...
/.ers won't like that. No incomming connections means more problems trying to use Gnutella/Kazaa, no IPSec for you. You couldn't really connect to your home system from elsewhere, unless you can tunnel to a port on a system with a globally valid IP address.
To prevent half-assed administrators from being susceptible to worms passed over the network, all basic home internet services should be on private IP addresses, via NAT.
No incomming connections so no worms canexploit services like IIS.
There will be no spoofing of IP addresses, so DoS attacks can be tracked down easilly.
ISPs could easilly monitor, trace down, and possibly block abusive machines/servers, so services like subseven would be detected, and can be blocked without stopping legitimate traffic.
Service prices could drop, since fewer addresses are needed.
Of course, there are many reasons that
Yes, e-mail viruses are still a problem... but it wouldn't allow anyone to get remote access to your system.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This is an exciting time we live in.
Are we really free?
Do we really have rights?
Are we entitled to privacy?
-Brenda Make
> "lock down the ports so nasty things don't happen"
Oh, I dunno about that. I've been getting email for the past 15 years or so on an mit.edu account where I get several virii each day, and so far none of them has done any harm at all. Of course, I use a plain-text mail reader on a FreeBSD system, so they can't do any damage. The messages that contain a virus are usually pretty obvious. If they grow to hundredss per day, it'll be a problem, but so far it's less of a bother than the Chinese "big5" spam messages.
The real public education should include pointing out that the "virus" problem is 99% due to Microsoft's insistence on delivering software that is susceptible to such things, despite the fact that we unix geeks knew how to prevent the damage before there was even a Microsoft.
Publicising the fact that viruses are almost entirely a Microsoft problem would go a long way toward getting the problem fixed. We should be asking the media and the National Strategy for Securing Cyberspace people why they aren't pointing this out.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
i wonder if this will allow barking cyberdogs protecting your data(ala system shock). it would be really a bummer tho when guagers would be top haxors.
:)
how about black ice..implement into every computer along with drm a device to give electric shocks to the user.. orsomething.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I think that this is important because the problem areas I had with the previous proposals (national databases, etc.) and I think that although the federal government should be more incolved in CERT and other security organizations, I think the Administration is right that this is best accomplished by public-private partnerships.
The initial idea if a national network operations center would have created an interesting target, which could have been compromised as well, and the appoitntment of a privacy czar might have added legitimacy to the dubious effort, so I am glad to see the whole thing dropped.
All and all, I like this draft.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Of course they do...
What if the US Calvary charged in to save the besieged settlers and instead of breathless thanks, they were greeted by a veteran settlers who simply replied "Thanks. We've got it covered."
In most of the traditional forms of security, the US Government tends to lead in expertise. The Government understands law. It understands espionage, counter-espionage and intelligence. It understands military issues. And it understands police forces. But information security is something new. It has lagged behind the civilian sector in this field. And no amount of wild hyperbole or cold-war era terminology will help.
This new policy simply demonstrates the issue even more. There is nothing new here. It is all very standard concepts from an industry that has been on the "front lines" of infosec for decades before the US Government decided to take an interest. By now, they have things fairly well covered.
That's not to say the US Government can't be of any help. They can add an air of legitimacy toward infosec issues for those who are foolish enough to ignore the current situation without a nod from the Government. They can support existing infosec infrastructure (and ensure that those programs they already run remain running). They can support further development of security applications and research.
But they can't lead the charge.
Want to increase cyber security?
The Fed. isnt really serious about security, to many companies are making money of inherantly insecure software.
I said that cuz I want to say some insanities .. /. is the right place to say insnities , isn't it?
And u bastard don't make me sick with ur stupid post!
I AM A TROLL AND PROUD OF IT!
You encourage me to write an essay called "How people that write essays on the latest, uncompatible closed format could defeat the internet, and why they won't"
Richard Clarke, the head of this whole deal, said "We're not creating regulation, not creating mandates...We want to do this through market forces."
I'm wondering if anyone can come up with even one example of systems being made more secure by market forces?
Actually, it's not signed, sealed, and delivered just yet. There's a lot more input from govt. contractors coming in. While that may sound like a far cry from an "open process," many of the contractors are guys who worked on the early (D)ARPA internetworking projects.
Another thing to consider is that everything in the strategy for the private sector is optional. Rumor is that there was verbage in the strategy that would had "required" ISPs to distribute packet filtering firewall software to subscribers. That was taken out when Earthlink complained. So... if you ask me, it's not really a document to tell or mandate action from the general public. It looks more like a document that describes what the feds are going to do WRT information assurance on the net, and they want to go around and "raise awareness" in the program.
I will be interested to see what sort of spin gets put on these IA and data security in these town hall meetings. Will it be "Hey, this is what your government is doing, aren't we clever." or is it going to be "Hey, this is what we're doing, but all you peons are going to muck it up; you should let us legislate security features on your machine." I like to think that it's going to be the former, but if its the latter, then maybe EFF or CPSR or someone could start a campaign. Fortunately, I believe that there's a fair amount of consensus in DC that security technology moves too fast to be legislated in any way other than the most general terms. And, if we investigate general terms frequently used in legislation, we find that it's not prescriptive...
Step one:
Make all systems, routers, switches "trustworthy".
Step two:
Infiltrate MS and hit the "revoke all" button.
...I originally thought the title of this article said Federal Cyberspace Policy Daft .
Murphy was an optimist.
The rumor is that there was some sort of verbage about this in earlier drafts, but was removed at the behest of the software development community. I have been a TCF system developer for about 12 years now, and have always been depressed by the level of support for security features included in most consumer software.
However, NIST and NSA are starting to make some headway with the NIAP and other initiatives. At some point we'll probably need a security feature checklist and evaluation manual... Something much more detailed than what is found in the CC, and certainly more than what will ever be included in the NSSC.
The open source community is no better than Microsoft and other closed source vendors when it comes to releasing insecure software. The open source community needs to get its act together and use type-safe languages. Continuing to use C and C++ for security-critical software is just plain irresponsible.
Don't give me any of that bologna about good programmers never leaving holes in their software. OpenSSL was audited and still had an exploitable buffer overflow bug. Apache has had a number of security holes. Virtually every major open source program has had multiple security holes.
So what if the open source community patches their software quickly? A patch doesn't negate the fact that a buffer overflow bug never should have happened in the first place. Besides, some of those buggy programs will continue to be in use years from now.
We are liable to be in a war soon. The people in Washington want to have something going on, even if they can't quite start a war before the elections. Anything - threats, patrols going in, bombing. Just enough to cause the nation to fall behind the President in time of war. Arms inspections only give America the chance to shout from the go: "They won't let me see anything. Bring on the tanks!"
Outfits like the FBI then will be impervious to complaints of false arrest, criticism in some newspapers, opposition by citizens' groups and the few politicians. This is wartime.
The great dream of conservatives, censorship, some kind of censorship, any kind at all just to start it off, would be pursued relentlessly. That fight would be with the newspapers and magazines. Television would be no problem at all. The owners couldn't wait to make life easier by allowing the government to bring you the news the government knows you should see.
What the public doesn't understand is that the suspects who bring them the news wouldn't be harmed at all. Reporters could get civil service vacations and sick leave and the right to take cars from the Coast Guard motor pool.
And rather than be protected fully against terrorism, the public will be tormented by the FBI and other federal agencies.
From Jimmy Breslin's column, http://www.newsday.com/mainnews/breslin0.htm (NY Newsday, !blah-di-blah)
There is language in Patriot that I have already cited that does what I stated. Look it up.
Anyway, one of the reasons that I hate laws such as this is because I've already been a victim of them once. I have an arrest for theft. *sighs* I was living with someone that made off with two $5 library books that I got, and she left with them. Unforuntately, I didn't realize this, so 2.5 years later, I was arrested, handcuffed and could have spent a few days in jail for this. But I chickened out and payed the $350 in accumulated fines because I wanted to sleep in my own bed, plus I couldn't either afford the time, or the money to defend myself. If I had *known* that I hadn't returned $10 worth of library materials, I would have promptly paid up for replacements. Happily. Anyone that steals from a public library...ought to be tought a lesson.
But this wasn't in the cards. Now I have an offical arrest for "theft" and will always come up on things like background checks. Never can I hold a gaming liscence, when a significant part of my income was generated from having one. And there are quite a few other things that can be skewed this way too, as I'm finding out.
It's easy to say that "You should have fought it, gotten a laywer, etc", but when you have to work the next day or else and can't afford to either miss work or defend yourself... You're screwed.
That's why I do investigate laws like these to see how the maximum wording of the law can be applied.
Because, if it can be applied in a certain way, it eventually will.
Ahhhh, I've been trolled again....
The two sections of USA PATRIOT which you cite are discussed at length in the discussion attached to the journal entry I linked to above.
What they do is add another category (`organized terrorism') to the list of categories (including `organized crime/racketeering' and `espionage') for which wiretap applications can be made to the FISA court. This in no way changes the supervision of such wiretaps, merely changes the venue in which they are applied for.
As for the arrest you refer to, there are plenty of organizations, such as the Institute for Justice which can help you if your rights were violated -- as it sounds like they may have been.
But as you say, this happened two and a half years ago, so it doesn't help your claim that you've lost rights since September 11.
CNN ECKS SPURTS
I can't believe these CNN experts think the GOVERNMENT needs to do MORE for internet security. Frankly, I'm glad that they are just raising awareness. I don't want the government coming and mucking around with my computer to make it "secure for viewing gov't approved material only". But who understands computer-related anything more than our slow Big Brother? That's, right. Just about anyone.