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U.S. Proposes Centralized Internet Surveillance
Mr.Intel writes "The Times is reporting that President Bush is 'planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.' The recommendation is part of a report entitled 'The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace'. It is due to be published early next year."
AOL already does this!
That I live in Canada!
Even we didn't spy on our citizens this much!
Why watch "Big Brother" the stupid show on tv when you can have it as part of your internet experience!!
Communism:
IN SOVIET RUSSIA the Internet reads YOU for information.
Capitalism:
IN US of AMERICA the YOU re....
Never mind....
My Kettle
I think this sounds like a great idea. Sincerely, Satan
The international and unregulated nature of the internet has, up until now, enabled communication that was completely untappable. This should do more for solving that problem, at least for law enforcement authorities (no hackers tracking my traffic please ;) ), giving criminals and terrorists alike nowhere to hide. I for one welcome these measures, as I don't wish to see another 9/11, and presumably neither do the rest of you.
Actually, my first thought was *shrug*. My second thought is "Go Freenet!".
Well.. I'd write something critical of the plan here ... BUT THEY MIGHT BE LISTENING!
I am not a US citizen. If they are monitoring everything on the net, how would they know that I am British and not American. If they do build up a profile of foreign populations, does this classify as espionage?
In my case, Blair sucks up to bush anyway, but what if I was chinese or something?
"Internet service providers" and "centralized" are mutually exclusive...
It's sad to see what is happening to the once "land of freedom". I am worried also about the consequences. The problem is that the effect of this anti-democratic evolution of the US will spread through all the world too...
how far is this war on terror going to go? i want to be safe to, but thease legnths are just nuts! I know he woulden't want to be spyed on. whats next, telescreens, like in orwell's "1984" I hope that i am dead in the ground when this happiens!
This is double-plus-ungood.
This is from the same person that asked, "Will the highways on the Internet become more few?" (Dubya, January 29, 2000, Slate.) Be afraid. Be very afraid.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
This Wired article notes that states are rapidly passing legislation that locally prohibits much of the federal gov't activities outlined in the Patriot Act.
We have found the enemy and he is us. - Pogo
I think it's time to use that freedom we have to "bare arms" and stock up on anything you can find. It seems to me that the same thing is happening here that happened in England. And history shows us if we fight for what we believe in we will prevail.
Maybe the recent sniper attacks were helping fight the citizens war on government terrorism.
REUTERS -- The Internet is planning to propose requiring the Bush administration to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the White House, and, potentially, surveillance of its cabinet.
The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National Strategy to Secure the Bush Administration," set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the theft of the 2000 election.
-- Hey, turnabout's fair play!
The RIAA, and MPAA will want to "watch" the internet through this network and nab any Tom dick and Harry who pass music files.
Of course, independant music won't be distinguished in order to make thier stats look better "43 trillion music files were traded last year, and our revenue only increased by 2 billion. If we make each of those users pay every time they trade a file, we could make gazillion's (to quote jk) more. Of course we'd give 1 million to the governemnt for letting us use their network for our own commercial gain.
Folks, the internet is dying because it became the true meaning of free speech, communication and information. Corporations are slowly killing the net, which requires Goverments to get their hands in on regulating things.
I don't use the net as much as I did because of all the popups, spam and corporate cluelessness.
If anyone knows of a protected Sub-net (encrypted, anonymous use) please let me know to restore my faith.
Thank you.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Just read alt.terrorists.currentplans and that will keep you up to date. Do NOT get it confused with alt.binaries.terrorists.erotica or you will be really sorry.
It figures. Our government has been trying for years to figure out ways to undermine our constitution and the protections afforded to citizens in it. You're reading the warning here... If you want freedom, a right to privacy, and laws protecting you from an increasing tyrannical government, move to Europe.
Oh wait, wasn't it once upon a time? Never mind ...
Wearing pants should always be optional.
..finally someone does something that will result in widespread use of IPSEC. About darn time.
:)
Thanks bush
This is looking at the whole Internet.
Well, the Volkssicherheitsministerium will have a hard time to peek into, e.g. European research networks. It's unlikely that they would export flow data (or something else) to the U.S.
Yeah, this sounds like a perfect way for congress to write off its time surfing porn as in "the interest of National Security."
Isn't this already happening by virtue of Echelon?
--
Phil
"Mr President, there seems to be a large flow in identical messages"
"Ah, must be terrorist code. Let me see it"
It says "Increase your penis size."
or
"Mr President, thousands of americans are visiting this web site every day, www.goatse.cx".....
The FBI
The CIA
The NSA
and all the other folks in the black helicopters keeping an eye on everything you DO. If you want us to or not.
Don't worry, we'll find out one way or another.
What, Carnivore isn't good enough?
I had thought that it was pretty clear. TERRORIST DON'T USE E-MAIL
The internet is so open and not private that it doesn't make a good form of secure communication with out a lot of effort. And it should be pretty obvious when those methods are used since encrypted traffic looks, well, encrypted (DUH).
How can the ability to track every persons usage of the interent help with finding and fighting terrorism. How about convincing people that anger, killing and destruction may get attention but they don't solve problems.
Alric The Mad
The National Cyberspace Security Strategy, also known as "The National Cyberspace SS".
This is like, so 1984. Crazy.
Damn, if the Bush Administration want to look at porn, why don't they just do it themselves? Thats most of what they will see in the internet traffic...
Instead they will view it via this ruse of "monitoring the internet".....uhhhh huh, sure you are *wink*
Laura and Barbara Bush: "What are you boys doing in there?"
The 2 Georges: "Maintaining national security! Don't come in!!!!"
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
If your government is trying to undermine your constitution then is it doing it on its own behalf, or the corporations that own it?
How is Internet or any TCP comnmunication different than a real phone, or a letter ? As far as I can tell to watch over and tap your phone or letter authroity need a special judge writing. So why suddenly Internet which is only another form of communication , is soooo different that it need to be surveyed in real time ?
Second, any terrorist communicating message not encrypted over, hidden in picture or other data, or using a code word system is already a dead or arrested terrorist. How THIS system is supposed to rpeevtn another 9/11 when the FAILURE of theuautorithy was to INTERPRET THE DATA and NOT get the data ?
Call me a paranoid , but if you control the communication between people, you control the people too. It looks more like population control than terrorism fight.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It's kind of sad.
Bush administration makes alot of noise that they're doing something serious to deal with Internet Security, and *gasp* all they're up to is just cajoling private industry to get their act together. The slackers!
A half year goes by, and again, more noise. This time they're doing something real -- central monitoring, accountability, mandatory support for legal interception, and *gasp* all they're up to is stealing control of private property to further their own nefarious goals. The nazis!
I'm not sure what people want. I'm not sure what I want. The only thing I am sure of is we'll not be happy with whatever we get.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
People...Come on...listen to yourselves babbling on about "Freedom of Speech"...etc....wasn't it Scott McNealy who mentioned something about Privacy already being dead in regards to protection of it(privacy) online? Seriously, these Surveillance measures are to rake out the people who seriously realize that freedom of communication to them means they can covertly plot, plan, organize, share kiddie pron, whatever...THEY ARE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF WHAT WE WANT SO BADLY...FREEDOM....Thus, our self-instated Police Force (whom I happen to really respect) realize that the only method for combatting these freaks of nature is to "monitor" all of us as a whole...Human Rationalization is still alive and well enough to act as our "checks and balances" system in order to not allow us to slip into an Orwellian state of being, so fear not...THIS IS FOR OUR OWN GOOD...WE NEED THIS....Wake up...It's not the government we must fear...it's that nice little old lady down the street...or the young man who bags groceries at the grocery store......you get where I am going with this?...be aware, be awake...
It seems to me like they are simply preparing for the IAO; They already had it planned, they're just breaking it down for some reason. Probably to make people think they're different tasks with different goals.
No, Beowulf clusters can't imagine in Soviet Russia.
Time for Bush to be kicked out of office! In the 1950's everyone was suspected of being a communist. Now it's everyone is a terrorist or at least your neighbor on the block might be one.
He has now shifted the cost of Homeland Defense onto the ISP and is forcing them to be the wirtetap. They will have to write and maintain the software, the people and then be the "judge and jury" as to whether you are violating some Bush policy he doesn't like you to be doing. There will be no trial anymore as "innocent until proven guilty". You'll be guilty by being associated with and labeled a terrorist. Therfore, the new e-econmy will be e-police state. Thus, all the data from these ISP's will be fed into the central DBMS machine that Homeland Security will build. The only way around this is to get a modem and do direct dialing to the computer you want to communicate with and thus bypass the internet. I'm sure this is what the terrorists do now so that they can't be monitored that easily unless the government gets a wiretap from the courts.
What in the world is the US changing into? It is very scary as to the basic rights every American has is being trounced on by an egotistical maniac prez who wants to write and go down in history.
Only two more years of this. This is to long to wait.
match all the ac postings to the users real ID (shudder)...
So the name 'The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace' is a contractiction.
Just my 2 eurocents,
Alex.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
It's really disgusting how the US governement is abusing the 9/11 attacks to take away the rights of the US citizens. The victims must be spinning in their graves.
Something like this might be just what's needed to make non-geeks use things like Freenet and encryption. Or at least it'd be a good reason for it. Of course then Freenet might become illegal, with the resulting developments in steganography...
I don't think that anything good will come out of this. Hopefully people will wake up before we all end living in a totalitarian state.
as massive and blundering as our gov't is do you really think they could pull it off? I mean the INS sent visa extentions to two of the hijackers post-mortem. Plus this raises serious free speech issues. This is comperable to a 24 hour tap on all phones in the WORLD with no warrant. I doubt the aclu or the EFF will let this get by without a fight. If some candidates ran under a privacy and civil liberties platform, I would think these days, they could get elected, however with education so slashed and backward, the majority of the US is to apathetic or stupid to understand the issues at hand, they wont even listen. As long as they have "Must see TV" and some deep fat fried greasy something to shove down their gullet, they will do/belive whatever you tell them.
-- Insert wisdom here:
National... broad monitoring of the Internet... National... broad monitoring of the Internet...
Is this yet another example of American Imperialism?
In my country (somewhere in Europe, thanks to my forefathers) we have quite extensive privacy legislature; could I sue the US if they would gather data on me and if they refuse to remove it on my request?
Sombody send Bush an AOL CD-ROM.
So instead of securing vulnerable and critical systems, we're going to monitor THE WHOLE INTERNET. Okay... That sounds like a plan...
Setting the civil liberties nightmare aside for a second, and even assuming the terrorist threat to the computing infrastructure is real and justifies this level of response, this approach is just bad policy. This is yet another expression of our Cowboy President's locker-room-towel-snapping "let's go get them bad dudes" mentality. Any IT security professional will tell you this aproach is precisely backwards.
Why do we have a PlayStation2 controller for the 'Your Rights Online' icon? Bring back the harmonica guy!
Honestly, does anyone believe that the Feds could actually get through all the data? Sure natural language processing could analyze some of the data, but all of it? And really, do we believe that terrorists really so stupid as to put "Attack this Thusday at Place X--Bring Explosives" in their subject lines?
Apart from the practical nature of the collecting and analyzing data, are we just a little too nutty about wanting to feel safe? Homeland Security, watching our neighbors, analyzing what sites I surf, will that really keep terrorists out of the US? Is this all just a bunch of fear motivated policies that will keep us placated while we go about our day, at least until the next event.
Sure we need to be prepared and all, but at least lets demand a little intelligence and thought.
My little rant.
"Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, said yesterday that the proposal, which includes a national network operations center, was still in flux. She said the proposed methods did not necessarily require gathering data that would allow monitoring at an individual user level." [Emphasis added]
Just another chip off the mantle of Lady Liberty.
I would believe that most companies can handle their own surveillance needs and if need be, contact authorities.
It seems expensive, and probably not very efficient in stopping terror attacks. Perhaps the Federal government should consider issuing guidelines, just as they do for roads and railroads as to how a national ISPs network should be built for proper de-centralization so that a lights-out situation doesn't affect the whole nation?
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Hi Bob. Welcome to the department of internet survaillence. Um, lets see, your assignment, um... I have it here somewhere... Oh yes, theres something called USENET. Your job is to keep an eye on USENET and let us know what is going on. OK, heres your cube.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
I run a small website for news and discusion. Last month I had 15,000 visits and served up over 500,000 pages.
How many visits does slashdot get? How many page views? Ebay? MSNBC? Weatherchannel? Tom's Hardware?
Does anyone here actually understand the magnitude of pages, sites, and information that they are proposing on watching and filtering?
The number is mind boggling.
We have folks comparing this to another step twords 1984. In readiong their comments, I wonder if they've even read the book?
All this "surveillance" of the web will accomplish is a useless oversized database with statistics that will take people years to get a grasp on. It'll be a case of "too much information" that won't be easily collated - and hence , pretty useless.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
L0L [google.com] 10 [trustworthycomputing.com] [ Reply to This ]
I'll take care of these governemt swine, and return the gun when I'm done with it.
Also, if you ever want to shoot anyone, shoot them below the waiste, it will be less of a crime.
Also, if you ever shoot anyone, HIDE YOUR GUN. Even if you're in the RIGHT, they will take it from you, and you'll never get it back.
Too bad Terminator 3 is just a movie...
...all they'll see is "hot transgender midget interracial teen hardcore asian bukkake!!" That's fine. Bush and Ashcroft are passing laws that are so ridiculous I can't really care any more. I only hope that there are some judges or politicians that have balls enough to take a stand on this. After all, that's what they're supposedly there for. Either I throw up my hands and laugh or I drive myself nuts watching these assholes.
Suck my cock, Bush.
I STRONGLY suggest people read The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom? before drawing conclusions about surveillance technologies
Here's the publisher's blurb:
The Transparent Society
Will Technology Force Us To Choose Between Privacy And Freedom?
In New York and Baltimore, police cameras scan public areas twenty-four hours a day. Huge commercial databases track you finances and sell that information to anyone willing to pay. Host sites on the World Wide Web record every page you view, and "smart" toll roads know where you drive. Every day, new technology nibbles at our privacy.Does that make you nervous?
David Brin is worried, but not just about privacy. He fears that society will overreact to these technologies by restricting the flow of information, frantically enforcing a reign of secrecy. Such measures, he warns, won't really preserve our privacy. Governments, the wealthy, criminals, and the techno-elite will still find ways to watch us. But we'll have fewer ways to watch them. We'll lose the key to a free society: accountability.The Transparent Society is a call for "reciprocal transparency." If police cameras watch us, shouldn't we be able to watch police stations? If credit bureaus sell our data, shouldn't we know who buys it?
Rather than cling to an illusion of anonymity-a historical anomaly, given our origins in close-knit villages-we should focus on guarding the most important forms of privacy and preserving mutual accountability. The biggest threat to our freedom, Brin warns, is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people, now by too many.A society of glass houses may seem too fragile. Fearing technology-aided crime, governments seek to restrict online anonymity; fearing technology-aided tyranny, citizens call for encrypting all data.
Brins shows how, contrary to both approaches, windows offer us much better protection than walls; after all, the strongest deterrent against snooping has always been the fear of being spotted. Furthermore, Brin argues, Western culture now encourages eccentricity-we're programmed to rebel! That gives our society a natural protection against error and wrong-doing, like a body's immune system. But "social T-cells" need openness to spot trouble and get the word out.
The Transparent Society is full of such provocative and far-reaching analysis.The inescapable rush of technology is forcing us to make new choices about how we want to live. This daring book reminds us that an open society is more robust and flexible than one where secrecy reigns. In an era of gnat-sized cameras, universal databases, and clothes-penetrating radar, it will be more vital than ever for us to be able to watch the watchers. With reciprocal transparency we can detect dangers early and expose wrong-doers. We can gauge the credibility of pundits and politicians. We can share technological advances and news. But all of these benefits depend on the free, two-way flow of information.
In The Transparent Society, award-winning author David Brin details the startling argument that privacy, far from being a right, hampers the real foundation of a civil society: accountability. Using examples as disparate as security cameras in Scotland and Gay Pride events in Tucson, Brin shows that openness is far more liberating than secrecy and advocates for a society in which everyone (not just the government and not just the rich) could look over everyone else's shoulders.
The biggest threat to our society, he warns, is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people not by too many.
David Brin has a Ph.D. in physics, but is best known for his science fiction. His books include the New York Times bestseller The Uplift War, Hugo Award-winner Startide Rising, and The Postman. He lives in Encinitas, California.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Does Slashdot get paid for linking to Times articles?
Sure looks like it when you see one article that says "we don't link to sites that require registration" but then all these stories with links to the Times.
At least be consistent in your hypocrisy.
In moderately long but thoughtful piece A Year of Loss: Reexamining Civil Liberties Since September 11, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights notes that Ashcroft said in his confirmation testimony:
"Appropriate public access to governmental records is an important check on arbitrary government action. If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed as Attorney General, I will fully and faithfully enforce the Freedom of Information Act and ensure that the Department of Justice does the same."
"A government operating in the shadow of secrecy stands in complete opposition to the society envisioned by the Framers of our Constitution." - Judge Damon J. Keith, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
We have found the enemy and he is us. - Pogo
The difference with a phone or a letter is the billboard or library functionality the internet provides. You can publish any information public to the entire world... Phonecalls end and a letters arrive, but some information on the internet will stay...
Anyway, I think scanning all accessible information - especcialy if we are talking about emails and chat sessions - would be a major violation of privacy laws.
Second, what does this mean for sites or forms of communication which are restricted to certain users/members? I mean if one is a member, by payment, by job or whatever other means of a site or mailinglist providing religious, pr0n0graphic, research or even terrorsit information what right do they have to scan these 'private areas'. I mean, hey, the CIA, FBI nor ATF have anything to do with the amount of beer I keep in my java & web enabled refrigidator...
And at last I cannot image how anyone would accomplish such a task. I mean to monitor the all work being published would - I guess - take one 'spy' on each six or so people publishing. Perhaps the US government just wants their own people to turn each other in... Something similar to the system used in eastern Germany while it still was a communist country...
Perhaps publishing under DMCA would... No, fuck that.
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
After all, nothing assures freedom like constant, unchecked surveillance.
As far as I can tell to watch over and tap your phone or letter authroity need a special judge writing.
Although this isn't really an English sentence, I'll respond. You missed it. Several laws have been enacted in the past few months so that law enforcement people don't even need a warrant (aka: "special judge writing"). They can already listen to/watch anything we say/do without any kind of warrant or even reason. Orwell's 1984 arrived several months ago, they're just tidying up the details now.
Suck me off and swallow, Ashcroft.
Excerpt: ....Neither the Product nor the underlying
information or technology may be downloaded or otherwise exported
or re-exported (i) to Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan,
Syria, the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, and United States of America....
You get SHOT for centralizing internet surveillance!
What really gets me is that the governments (UK and US are equally bad with regards to this) think that because your online activity can be tracked it should be. They seem to think that 'digital rights' count for less than ordinary ones. Can you imagine the uproar if the government made everyone wear a GPS/mobile thing. That recorded every conversation you had and everywhere you went. That would be unacceptable to jo public so why should this be treated with any lesser contempt.
The regulation of investigtory powers act (RIP act) in the uk is trying to achieve the same thing. But no one has worked out who is going to pay for it yet. I can imagine an 'online security' tax being added to my ISP bill. So I pay to be spied on. Great.
How long do you think it will be before you have to show ID before you log on at an internet café
In fact in today's news there is an article about the phone companies being flooded with request for information on mobile calls and locations. Half a million in a year. Over 1% of phone users in the UK would have been checked up.
This will not stop terrorism, it will just mean that the terrorists will have to find some other way to communicate, or a more sneaky way of doing it online.
I still can't help but wonder when the fight against x has ever been about anything but population control. That's kind of what governments do.
this was a feature of Kazaa. It is called Gator.
I've skimmed the entire proposal document and read the first third completely (killing a small forest by printing out the pdf document).
I'm not going to cite details as I don't currently have the block of paper in front of me.
However, I do feel I have to comment. This document is based in fear, not hope. It is not a workable proposition in the United States of America, but would have been very well accepted in the former East Germany or in almost any coldwar eastern block nation.
Under the proposals all persons accessing information or making transactions electronically, or having transactions made for them, would be monitored, recorded and archived at all times for later retrieval under unstated conditions, by unstated persons, for vague purposes of security.
Stalin would have loved it.
The next step beyond this would be to outlaw any and all transactions that were deliberately masked to try and hide from the evesdroppers the origin, content, or time of the communication, because if you feel the need to hide, you must have something to hide, and you are assumed to be a criminal.
I can't speak for everyone, but I do know that I felt safer on September 12th 2001 than I will on September 12th 2005 if all this continues.
The article notes that such a plan would require Congressional and regulatory approval.
So with this on our radar, privacy advocates and reasonable-minded citizens can practice good ol' democracy, and stop this thing in its tracks.
It's worked before (c.f. Clipper Chip), and can work again.
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
I'm going to start e-mailing naked pictures of my ugly ass to known terrorists. Cruel and unusual? Maybe. But,
1. Terrorists deserve the torture
2. So does any asshat listening in
... I'll point everyone again to a slightly unrealistic idea I had over 2 years ago:
http://webpages.charter.net/ezahurak/idea.html
But ya never know, it could work.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
If you're a terrorist/criminal and you aren't using strong encryption, you're asking to have your plan foiled as it is.
The only thing this will facilitate is the spying on private citizens by the government. When is someone going to give a lesson in technology to the people who come up with this garbage?
The Los Angeles Times? Seattle Times? London Times? High Times? ;-)
It's good to remember that the New York Times, although a very good newspaper, isn't the only "Times" and that not everyone is fixated on the East Coast.
People are so brainwashed and comforted by consumerism, they don't know what revolution is.
Soon the government will be requiring modchipping of your brain, yet slashdot moderators will still mod down anyone who says 'time for revolution'.
Wake Up people, your time is running out.
Nice song on the radio. Kill the president, kill ...
:-)
;-)
Hey, who's breaking down my door screaming "FREEZE FBI !!!"?
Thought it was just a proposal
Btw: If the time comes, it won't cost that much, they'll just have to legalize Echelon
someone go and tell him he's already got Echelon running?
China II
That Bush is doing all this just so he can find the best places to download "The Two Towers"?
If I were genuinely concerned about being watched, this is what I'd do:
/dev/random, all of which would be sent to random IPs and ports, especially to nations that are considered hostile to the US.
The best way to prevent surveillance from interfering with your life is to make it useless information. One way to do this is by creating more noise data, which makes the signal data harder to retrieve.
There is one really easy way to do this with the Internet particularly, and that is to create an application, which can be run voluntarily or propogated the same way Nimda and Melissa were. That running application would then spread random false alarms at such a high rate that nobody can keep up with them, thereby throwing the profile of a terrorist way off. This junk data can be trigger phrases from a dictionary, or it can just be faked PGP encrypted data from
If you wanted to take that a step further and screw with Echelon, you could create a virus that gained control of various corporations' PBX servers, then randomly dial numbers in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Everytime a connection is made, you could have an audio file play various trigger phrases, thereby adding noise to that medium.
In the real world, the solution is to make yourself appear as a terrorist even if you're not. Check out "How to Build a Nuclear Weapon" and the Koran from your local library. Use your credit card to buy dual-use products that you need. If everyone is suspicious, then the data is useless.
Now, the problem is, that I, as Joe American, can think of this, which means that the real terrorists can certainly think of even more effective ways to cripple surveillance tools. The sad part is that the government agencies still think that they are able to find a signal in complete white noise. The only people that are going to be effectively watched are the ones that don't need to be.
A large part of the issue here is that US Goverment is OPENLY proposing that it monitors the communications of ALL people, not just its own citizens.
What does George Bush claim gives him this right ?
The only way this would be semi-valid would be if it was a proposal of the UN and maintained and monitored by an independent judiciary and analysis organisation.
Or of course you could act like a total bigot and claim that everyone else in the world should be answerable to the US.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
But there are definitely things they *can* do. Some examples:
- They could mark some sites as being interesting to terrorists (eg. containing information on making bombs, or containing maps of buildings). People who regularly visit such sites (especially multiple sites of those types) would automatically be suspect. It is the same as having a subscription to Soldier of Fortune, which automatically gets you secret service attention in the (European) country where I live.
- You can create a graph of who is communicating with who using email. If any one of the persons in that graph becomes a suspect for *anything*, the graph provides clues who his friends are. You do not even need to look at message content for this. Just keep building the graph, and as soon as you are interested in someone just lift the required data. In my case they'd find 40-50 people - a managable number.
- The most dangerous, because it has major political implications: if the powers that be wanted to discredit a person, what is easier than doing it using his surfing behavior? "Person X seems to make a valid point here, but secretly he has been downloading tons of porn from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.fetish. What does that say about his character?".
that politicians are pure "opportunistic" organisms. They sniff out the weaknesses of the body politic for their own survival. Bush & Co. are just a reflection of the ostrich like tendencies of us, the American public. We don't want to have to take a hard look at ourselves in the mirror and maybe think about anything deeper than the next purchase of "stuff". Personally my defining moment was when shortly after 9/11 Bush told the American public to "take that vacation, buy that new car". So this is the supreme value held dear by America now? What happened to the ideas laid out in the Bill of Rights?
It took a long time for the Roman Empire to fall from the rot within. It wasn't the politicians. It was the popular demand for "bread & circuses".
And the rest is silence..............
... please tell me, which one of you voted that warmongering idiotic prick into the whitehouse? Come on, own up, who was it?
If I were genuinely concerned about being watched, this is what I'd do:
/dev/random, all of which would be sent to random IPs and ports, especially to nations that are considered hostile to the US.
The best way to prevent surveillance from interfering with your life is to make it useless information. One way to do this is by creating more noise data, which makes the signal data harder to retrieve.
There is one really easy way to do this with the Internet particularly, and that is to create an application, which can be run voluntarily or
propogated the same way Nimda and Melissa were. That running application would then spread random false alarms at such a high rate that nobody can
keep up with them, thereby throwing the profile of a terrorist way off. This junk data can be trigger phrases from a dictionary, or it can just be faked PGP encrypted data from
If you wanted to take that a step further and screw with Echelon, you could create a virus that gained control of various corporations' PBX
servers, then randomly dial numbers in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Everytime a connection is made, you could have an audio file play various
trigger phrases, thereby adding noise to that medium.
In the real world, the solution is to make yourself appear as a terrorist even if you're not. Check out "How to Build a Nuclear Weapon" and the
Koran from your local library. Use your credit card to buy dual-use products that you need. If everyone is suspicious, then the data
is useless.
Now, the problem is, that I, as Joe American, can think of this, which means that the real terrorists can certainly think of even more effective ways to cripple surveillance tools. The sad part is that the government agencies still think that they are able to find a signal in complete white noise. The only people that are going to be effectively watched are the ones that don't need to be.
that politicians are pure "opportunistic" organisms. They sniff out the weaknesses of the body politic for their own survival. Bush & Co. are just a reflection of the ostrich like tendencies of us, the American public. We don't want to have to take a hard look at ourselves in the mirror and maybe think about anything deeper than the next purchase of "stuff". Personally my defining moment was when shortly after 9/11 Bush told the American public to "take that vacation, buy that new car". So this is the supreme value held dear by America now? What happened to the ideas laid out in the Bill of Rights?
It took a long time for the Roman Empire to fall from the rot within. It wasn't the politicians. It was the popular demand for "bread & circuses".
Nope, wasn't funny the second time around, either.
I think it took me a total of about 8 seconds to think of a workaround to network data gathering.
Find an aspiring country that doesn't give a shit about President Bush beating his chest wanting data and set up a VPN tunnel through their network.
Problem solved.
It seems to me it is our responsibility as those in the know to inform those not in the know that stupid ideas like this are just that and nothing more.
We did it with Circuit City and DivX. We can do it again.
Posted to the submitters Journal entry
This effect was in a documentry in 1969!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
stopid Republicans.
Sounds like a tax of sorts on ISPs. Serves those guys right for giving more money to Democrats!
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
bomb, explosive, nuclear, terrorist, encryption
Just kidding, Dubya!!
Oh yes because this is the World of Deus Ex and we all remember what happens at the end of that.
The WHOLE point of the internet was a DEcentralised infrastructure. A central monitoring point becomes a central point of vulnerablity. Also how they propose to filter and handle that amount of data? The NSA tried tapping an undersea cable once, yes they could tap it alright but the flow of data was so high it slashdotted their monitoring equipment.
Add into this the fact that the internet is NOT a purely American structure, if there are terrorist they'll be probably encrypted and plotting their plots outside of America. I certainly can't see the EU or Russia cooperating in this.
These guys couldn't code their way out of a for loop let alone coordinate this. Nice idea George B but it's unfeasable.
So essentialy this plan means another taxation of internet acces while it also means (as ussual) loss of some privacy and (as ussual) higher potential for abuse for (as ussual) not that big increase in safety (if any increase at all) for (not just, as ussual) US tax payers.
(By "ussual" I mean "as was alredy reported on ./ with regards to some other attempts". Or at least I hope those were mainly attempts.)
hany
you want to know how?
i have one word google
as if they're really going to disclose whatever methods they come up with. does anybody know how the previous systems worked? i doubt it.
one poster said that most people don't know what they want, nor did he know what he wanted (in regard to issues like this). it's hard to know the approach that should be used to bring some form of increased security to the internet. i think it's safe to say that we all feel a need for more security, but i think most would agree that it should be in the aspects of data transmission and encryption (for credit cards, important info, etc), not surveillence. there should be some collective effort to educate as many as possbile about the important aspects of computing and the internet: security, viruses, hackers, proper use. no more tutorials on how to make greeting cards.
when it really comes down to it, no one likes the idea that someone else may know what data you're sending/receiving especially since we'd be unaware of its occurrence.
in regard to email/instant messaging: how can any external person not involved in discussions accurately judge the demeanor of those in the discussion? it sounds like i'll have to be much more careful of what i say even in private! will this be the death of sarcasm?
The real problem is one-sided transparency: if the government has all the knowledge, the government is all powerful: it can use its knowledge for blackmail, for constructing "secret evidence" to be used in trials, etc., and ordinary citizens have no way of fighting that.
Take speed traps as an example. As long as the police does not release detailed information on who gets caught where and when, you can argue until you are blue in the face in front of a judge--if a policeman stands up and says you speeded, you will get convicted. If, on the other hand, all related data is available, you might well be able to prove that the policeman didn't calibrate the radar gun, that they are engaging in selective enforcement, that the speed limit at that location is deliberately too low, that the location is being used for "revenue enhancement", etc.
The Bush administration is one of the most secretive governments we have had in a long time. People like Poindexter don't want transparency, they want a large differential in the amount of information available to the government and corporations vs. the amount of information available to individuals. And they want that as a means of control.
That Russia gets more Democratic while America gets more Communistic.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
The Times is printed in London. It's not called the London Times. It's not called the City Times. It's just called the Times. Now the New York Times may be referred to as the Times by some Americans, more cosmopolitan Americans and world wide slashdotters recognise it as NY Times, NYTimes or The New York Times.
Wow. Who was surprised? Anyone?
Maybe one day you can tell your children what it was like to be a free person.
-... ---
I'd apologize for the dupe, but I'm applying for a Slashdot editor position.
In the future you will need to get into only ONE SYSTEM to monitor everyone.
Yeah, centralized monitoring is a really *great* idea.
Great,
The worlds most pathalogically lying creeps with no other interest in mind then their own screwed up world domination complots are going to check on us to make the world a better place...
Geez, I do actually feel a lot safer now.
Kyokushin - ultimate truth from within.
Everybody, especially Slashdotters, tend to be such critics. Doesn't anybody think that an open discussion (including the merits of the proposal) on the topic is best for all of us? Doesn't it make sense to have a system in place where authorities can track Internet communications of an individual or organization if there is strong evidence that such tracking is justified? Sure, sure "Big Brother is watching us" blah blah, but isn't he always going to be? Isn't one of the best solutions to make it illegal for the feds to perform this kind of monitoring unless they have strong evidence that from a court that it should be performed and then allow them to put this sort of system in place? Why not treat it more mail or the phone system or like a search warrant?
Every American here over the age of 18 needs to stop complaining here and complain where it counts...the election booths. And no crap about "Well look at Florida, it doesn't count to vote" because that was an isolated incident. If everyone in the online community that is appauled by the very suggestion of monitoring gets out and casts their vote appropriately, this proposal will never see the light of day. If you don't vote, don't complain.
Has it ever occurred to you that there are actually people in the world who have _different opinions to you_? But I suppose it's a lot easier to cry "troll" than accept that painful fact and open your mind...
Maybe if the goverment whent through with such a plan , ordinary people would start to use heavy duty encryption and offshore anonymizing proxies for web browsing. This would probably render this plan useless untill Bush & Ashcroft make encryption illegal.
Bush told me to try it again.
You didn't need them anyway...
Slashdot, have you no pride?
This may be redundant already but what is the difference between this and China's great 'fire' wall? Can you see the similarities? We harass and harange China for their attempts to police knowledge, shutter the freedom of speech, and surveil every citizen and then we do the same thing. Hypocrites, the lot of us.
looks like its time to start investing in companies that develop cryptography solutions. also, with 802.11 becoming so widespread, if left open access in metro-areas to create blanket wireless networks it would be impossible to match users via IP, or account. large areas of boston already provide relativly consistent internet access to anyone with a laptop, whether on purpose or due to ignorance of security. on one corner I was able to establish seven different DHCP connections. As long as people dont use the airwaves maliciously or hog too much bandwidth these open access points will only grow in number.
Ordinary police search for criminals; the secret police designate who they are. -- Zarko Petan
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Where the cabbies have to pay royalties to listen to the radio. And the Gov't let the corporations get away with that.
Or how about the UK, where London is still the one of the most violent cities in the world, but has no guns.
Or you can go to France, where the government pretty much does what it pleases... and doesn't tell them about it.
Honestly, if this crap keeps up, we'll be just like Europe. Bush is just doing to US citizens what the rest of Europe has been doing to its citizens for years. Why are you surprised?
Now go vote, MMMMkay?
The U.S. are looking to control the internet in a centralized manner? I wish them a lot of luck, as there will be countries unwilling to cooperate (China, anyone?).
If the efforts would be successful enough, this would at most result in the internet being split up in 'sub-internets'. Doesn't sound very much like centralized control to me.
Unless *all* countries in the world cooperate, of course. That would require world peace first; so, I fully support this initiative!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Ever wonder how Nazi Germany came to be?
Wonder no more.
I am willing to bet that the information gleaned from such a system will be secret, and used only by various intelligence agencies.
So this has nothing to do with "transparent society". In order for this information to be useful in civil society it must be released in civil society.
This is just another way the government can gain more power over ordinary citizens.
There was an artist last week who spread 28 large black boxes painted with the word FEAR around Grand Central Station in New York. It shut down the terminal for 5 hours.
Bush et. al don't know what to do. The idea that disenfranchised individuals from a foreign nation might sacrifice themselves and find some domestic support for their cause has him baffled. Like anybody else when he is scared, he is doing anything he can think of, no matter how useless.
Homeland security seemed draconiun, redundant, but understandable considering what the Army/Navy/AF/Marines have been doing over the past few years. Then unlimited detention without arrest, INS prisions, refusing entry for stage performers, a dangerous smallpox vaccination program, a symbolic war with IRAQ, threats against North Korea...
Bush is scared, and helpless. He knows that the information was available to law enforcement before the attack, but he doesn't have enough finesse to understand that processing information is harder than gathering it. So, by the "Bigger is Better" American mentality, he is trying to fix America's intelligence agency by gathering tremendous amounts of basically irrelevant data. Not that this president sees the elegance of checks and balances: let's be honest, if he could get away with Ashcroft declaring him emperor, he would have done it a long time ago. But all that information and power will at some point be used wrongly. Not that it will be abused, but it will be used wrongly. History has proven that.
It's funny, but if the terrorists were attempting to shread American values and traditions, thus making it an unliveable country and reducing it's power on a world stage, then they have succeeded. And by not reappearing and therefore presenting an elusive target, the service their cause even further.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
-C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
DMCA will just be extended to not only make it illegal to "circumnavigate encryption controls" but to "use encryption controls to circumnavigate monitoring systems". Remember, our representitives do not represent us anymore.
Yours Sincerely
Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Scott McNealy.
PS And we need to buy more Islands, Ferraris and Houses.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
And why would you think now would be any different?
Sorry, my cynicism is showing today...
Anonymous coward wasn't signing his note "Bill." He was replying to Bill (Queelix).
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Cute. :)
The search-the-trash Q was settled a long long long time ago. There is no Fourth Amendment property if the trash is on public land, as it is considered to be discarded. The line has to be drawn somewhere -- could they search it after dumping it in the truck? At the city dump? At some point control is surrendered.
But you can't commit trespass to get the trash. It sounds like the police crossed that line here anyway wit the original suspect.
It seems that most of my sniper postings have been removed by the SlashDot staffers. It seems to me that it's okay to post something about this topic, but only if the staff likes what you post.
That's bullshit. I think if there were more snipers taking out just normal everyday "mom & pop" who chose to watch Television and Read the Newspaper and go to work and never give any thought to what's going on around them.
Why would they think? There is no need to think in America. So when some sniper starts thinking and doing something about it, he's wrong?
No! We fought England to get over here. We shot those f*ckers in the head! Why not do the same now to defend and take back what is ours?
If you delete this post again, I might happen to start visiting your residents and making sure things are free.
Sorry about the ANONYMOUS POSTS, but I don't give out my email to people who like to act like NAZI's.
They impose speed limits on the "Information Superhighway."
In the Soviet Union, they limited the number of long distance phone connections to the number of KGB agents available to monitor them.
With our mighty American technology, all traffic could be monitored by outlawing connections faster than 300 baud.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Where everyone is a suspect (except muslims).
"We've got your number."
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Since everything you write and create is copyrighed and since they'll have to outlaw encryption on transmissions across the Internet, they will have to make it illegal to encrypt copyrighted material. Should make the DMCA !circumvention provisions pretty moot WRT Internet downloads....
(OK I know they'll set it up so the "little people" get fucked while "trusted" big businesses can do whatever they want, but at least I tried to present what is IMO the logical outcome of this...)
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Most folks tend to think of Scalia/Thomas/Rehnquist as "states rights" because a lot of their early decisions could be read that way. That's wrong, as Bush v. Gore showed - they are literalists. While they used "equal protection" to write their opinion, I'd bet my last dollar that they were really motivated by the Article in the Constitution that states "electors shall be chosen as the Legislature...directs". Whatever your opinion of the 2000 FL recounts, they certainly were not "as the Legislature...directs". Ergo, the "right-wing" bloc in the USSC was going to overturn the FL Supreme Court. I know someone pretty high in the federal government, and I told him so before the decision came down...
The same is going to happen here - any state that gets in the way of the Feds - where the Feds have clear authority - is going to lose in this USSC.
If we don't like it - we get to vote next time around.
PS - if 5-4 decisions are bad, should we overturn Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Education?
I hate to sound old-fashioned, but please do not forget the traditional method of democratic control -- the ballot box.
:)
C'mon, I bet some of you complaining now did vote for Bush, and might even live in Florida. Your votes count. When you write to Congress, to the President, and so on, mention 2004 more often than the Constitution. They'll be much more impressed.
I'd love to say, oh, this will never go anywhere, but then I might have said that about the Patriot Act if I had had a chance to read it before it was passed, in record time. Who says Congress is slow?
+5 INSIGHTFUL
2780 people died and all that cunt bush can do is make more laws when they knew it was gonna happen last time,
well i got news, laws dont stop terrorists
and you wonder why the world hates USA ?
Let's face it.. ground mail and phone contact is far more efficient for malevolent forces to utilise than the net is.
If I were a terrorist lunatic, the LAST medium of communication I would be utilising right now would be the internet.
I'd revert to the old standbys.. passing notes in trash cans, microfiche, all that good shit that actually WORKED for both our boyz and the soviets during the cold war.
This is just a power grab ala 1984 on the part of our socalled 'caretakers'.
As geeks, we have the power to collectively say 'FUCK YOU!' and kill this puppy in its' cradle.
Anyone of an IT or scientific pedigree who willingly works towards the implementation of this nightmare of a future world is a flagrant traitor to this nation and its' citizens.
The potential consequences for such individuals are left as an exercise for the reader.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Similar talk here in the UK is being met with critisism from ISPs that it will be too expensive and time consuming to implement, potentially putting the smaller ISPs out of business unless the excersise is funded by the govenrment.
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
Other than Canada, where can a typical (only english speaking) US citzen move to and work with minimal ammounts of hassle, paperwork, etc.??
I jokingly said if GW won the first time I'd leave. If he wins another one (or gets installed in office like he did this time) I'm actualy going to do it.
Sadly, he'll hold off on his bullshit "war" with Iraq until his strategists say it'll peek his popularity right at election time....
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
If the feds are going to monitor us, we might as well use the tools we've got that can make the monitoring pretty much useless.
n ymizer.com
l
- charter.ht ml
Anonymous proxy services:
http://www.safeweb.com
http://www.ano
Anonymous remailers:
http://www.andrebacard.com/remail.htm
http://riot.eu.org/anon/
IPSEC:
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ipsec
http://www.freeswan.org
Onion routing:
http://www.onion-router.net
GPG:
http://www.gnupg.org
The beauty of it is, if they are proposing a technological measures to track us, we can use technological measures back. And the more people use them, the harder it is to harass all of them.
And don't think that they don't want to harrass us -- they arrested 500+ Iranians in Southern California yesterday. It happened to them, it can happen to us.
A. Stephen Beach
asb4@psu.edu (Get my GPG key at http://www.keyserver.net)
Fortunately when you live in the day where Bob Barr supports the ACLU, I don't think this'll get off the ground (or if it does, it'll be crippled or shot down shortly after).
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Before declaring U.S. in violation of U.N. Security Council
resolutions
CANADIANS TO LEAD WEAPONS INSPECTION TEAM INTO USA
November 21, 2002
(Toronto) - A coalition of Canadian peace groups today
announced their intention to send an international team of
volunteer weapons inspectors into the United States later
this winter. The coalition, Rooting Out Evil, are recruiting
inspectors through their newly launched website,
Routing Out Evil
"Our action has been inspired by none other than George W.
Bush," said Christy Ferguson, a spokesperson for the group.
"The Bush administration has repeatedly declared that the
most dangerous rogue nations are those that:
1) have massive stockpiles of chemical, biological, andnuclear weapons;
2) ignore due process at the United Nations;
3) refuse to sign and honour international treaties; and
4) have come to power through illegitimate means.
"On the basis of President Bush's guidelines, it is clear
that the current U.S. administration poses a great threat to
global security," said Ferguson. "We're following Bush's
lead and demanding that the U.S. grant our inspectors
immediate and unfettered access to any site in the country -
including all presidential compounds - so that we can
identify the weapons of mass destruction in this rogue
state," added David Langille.
Visitors to Rooting Out Evil's website are invited to sign
on as honorary members of the weapons inspection team.
Honorary inspectors can participate in the action, or they
can simply lend the support of their name as they would on a
petition. The actual inspection team that crosses the
border will be comprised of prominent individuals from
Canada and other countries.
The Rooting Out Evil coalition includes Greenpeace Canada,
the Centre for Social Justice, and the Toronto Committee
Against War and Sanctions on Iraq, and is supported by
American groups such as the National Network to End the War
Against Iraq, Global Exchange and the US section of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. They
oppose the development, storage, and use of weapons of mass
destruction by any state.--For information: David Langille or Christy Ferguson
info@rootingoutevil.org David Langille, Director of Public Affairs
CENTRE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE489 College Street, Suite 303Toronto, Ontario M6G 1A5
Tel: 416-927-0777 x225 Fax: 416-927-7771 Toll free: 1-888-803-8881
Email: langille@socialjustice.org Website: http://www.socialjustice.org
Not interested in a war against Iraq?
Become a Weapons Inspector
Cheers,
Woot
Wow... I suppose that this means that they just outlawed PGPMime, as well as any other type of encryption (IPSec, CIPE, etc.) for use over the internet?
Or is that not considered a "transaction"?
Could someone tell this vagabond president that my data is none of his business. Besides, the U.S. is not the only country in the world. And quit using terrorism as a fucking excuse.
I mean really, what are you going to be doing? Ripping log files appart on a MASSIVE scale, and Generating reports. Maybe they'll give Schwartz clemensy if he writes the system...
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
The ONLY reason for Homeland Security Inc. ETC. is
to repress political criticism.
In other news...
Before declaring U.S. in violation of U.N. Security Council
resolutions
CANADIANS TO LEAD WEAPONS INSPECTION TEAM INTO USA
November 21, 2002
(Toronto) - A coalition of Canadian peace groups today
announced their intention to send an international team of
volunteer weapons inspectors into the United States later
this winter. The coalition, Rooting Out Evil, are recruiting
inspectors through their newly launched website,
Routing Out Evil
"Our action has been inspired by none other than George W.
Bush," said Christy Ferguson, a spokesperson for the group.
"The Bush administration has repeatedly declared that the
most dangerous rogue nations are those that:
1) have massive stockpiles of chemical, biological, andnuclear weapons;
2) ignore due process at the United Nations;
3) refuse to sign and honour international treaties; and
4) have come to power through illegitimate means.
"On the basis of President Bush's guidelines, it is clear
that the current U.S. administration poses a great threat to
global security," said Ferguson. "We're following Bush's
lead and demanding that the U.S. grant our inspectors
immediate and unfettered access to any site in the country -
including all presidential compounds - so that we can
identify the weapons of mass destruction in this rogue
state," added David Langille.
Visitors to Rooting Out Evil's website are invited to sign
on as honorary members of the weapons inspection team.
Honorary inspectors can participate in the action, or they
can simply lend the support of their name as they would on a
petition. The actual inspection team that crosses the
border will be comprised of prominent individuals from
Canada and other countries.
The Rooting Out Evil coalition includes Greenpeace Canada,
the Centre for Social Justice, and the Toronto Committee
Against War and Sanctions on Iraq, and is supported by
American groups such as the National Network to End the War
Against Iraq, Global Exchange and the US section of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. They
oppose the development, storage, and use of weapons of mass
destruction by any state.--For information: David Langille or Christy Ferguson
info@rootingoutevil.org David Langille, Director of Public Affairs
CENTRE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE489 College Street, Suite 303Toronto, Ontario M6G 1A5
Tel: 416-927-0777 x225 Fax: 416-927-7771 Toll free: 1-888-803-8881
Email: langille@socialjustice.org Website: http://www.socialjustice.org
Not interested in a war against Iraq?
Become a Weapons Inspector
Cheers,
Woot
That sez it all
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Aren't we jumping a bit far to assume this needs to monitor data?
When I read the article, I see this as the ISPs being required to ping around their network, and then send those ping results back to governement servers in real time. This would be a burdensome hassle for the ISPs, but it wouldn't be any data that would compromise user privacy.
And this data could be very effective... if Google can't be pinged, it's the first alert of a DOS attack on a vital piece of 'net infrastructure. If all of Los Angeles goes dark, this would be first notificaition that something's gone very wrong...
Yes, and the proof-of-concept for centralized internet monitoring is already underway in China. The Bush administratio has only to follow their lead, an we too will be on track to be as free as China one day!
- US cracks down on encryption.
- Encryption work moves offshore.
- Washington realizes futility of its efforts.
- US recants.
All that was accomplished was to harm the US economy.When VPNs are outlawed, only outlaws have VPNs.
What about private networks? Will they be next? Will the become illegal?
after ONE major incident. Imagine what would happen after 2, 3, 4, 5 incidents. Imagine if it ever got like it is in other places where there are incidents every night. What kind of legislation would be passed then? Lets all pray hard that this man does not get not-voted in again.
"If I'm engaged in criminal conduct, perhaps I give up some of those privacy rights."
So much for presumed innocence.
The Civil War Reconstruction collapsed promptly, along with the federal military presence and really any effort to change conditions in the South. Segregatikon, Jim Crow, sharecropping, and so on followed propmtly and the federal gov't could not for decades develop consensus for even a federal anti-lynching law. States rights was the rejoinder
But the civil rights movement did (mostly) clobber "states rights" to defy federal authority. This was the last defense of so-called nullification. Remember President Eisenhower sending in paratroopers to integrate Little Rock High School? Ike was not too jazzed about integration, but he was certain what he thought of defiance of the national government and courts. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in multiple forms down to a local joint called Ollie's Barbeque, which lost its appeal to the Supreme Court. What was new was the Supreme Court's recognition of broad federal powers under the 14th A. and the Commerce Clause, which it never would have done before th New Deal.
The question here is whether states can impede legitimate (constitutional) federal law enforcement. The answer is (now) no. They have significance via the 10th A., and certain federal efforts to regulate have been deemed too intrusive, but the states are in no position to impose a stricter version of the 4th A. than the federal constitution already has.
The obvious problem with authority is that it be easily used or abused. That's why we have democratic control of our gov't. The question to ask is, who arounbd you does support this sort of national surveillance of "other people" on the off chance it might avert another 9/11? I think there are quite a few. I'm sympathetic, too, except I don't think many realize how impractical, expensive, and damaging this could be, like certain other national defense measures we're looking at....
Create a Bot that randomly connects to a list of well-formed URLs. Of course, this will increase net traffic significantly but it will make deciphering logs a lot harder for people spying on you.
there's no place like ~
In Soviet Russia, the Internet watches you.... ummm... oh wait!
My other OS is the MCP!
Al Qaeda released a statement that they would be hiding all future communiques in spam, hoping after the 10,000,000th copy of "Enlarge Your Penis By 8 Inches!" spam, that anyone watching would inevitably lose interest.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
It should actually be The National Strategy to Promote Encryption.
Read about it at Welcome To My Prison Camp
But at the other end of the spectrum of reaction, Mr. Vatis warned, "You end up without technology that could be very useful to combat terrorism, information warfare or some other harmful act."
Well that is precisely the problem Mr. Vatis. In the wake of 9/11/01 we have done away with surveillance restrictions and due process to combat terrorism. Now you are proposing that we take the first step toward doing the same to combat "some other harmful act". Presuming my guilt and keeping me under surveillance in case I engage in "some other harmful act" is not what our forefathers were fighting for.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
EXACTLY. I'm surprised at the sheer number of response comments that failed to get this. Sigh.
The terrorists just need to send their emails with the subject line "Lowest rate in 40 years !!!!!".
Seriously, the signal/noise ratio of spam is so low that if secret messages were embedded in spam, no one would ever find it.
But it would make life more painful for the terrorists, since they would have to turn off SpamAssasin and actually read all that spam. If it gets bad enough, maybe they'd repent of their evil ways just so they could stop reading Spam.
Which would be Brin's point. We should be demanding the system be made public-access, and usable by Joe Soap to track John Civil Servant.
so just because it's against "the law" you think that'll stop "them" from trying?
We cannot permit a monitoring gap!
The "Land of Freedom" ... yes ...
that was a great piece of propaganda, wasn't it?
And it still seems to work for some people. Simply amazing!
Whatever will the terrorists
do?
Seriously though, the advent of projects like Freenet makes this legislation a complete farce. ANY subversive and violent organization who wants to communicate securely and confidentially over the Internet can do so, in a myriad number of ways, with a little bit of research, and have a fairly high chance of escaping detection by a Carnivore-type system.
There's only two possible explanations for this bill: 1) Ignorance on the part of those drafting the legislation, and 2) Terrorism being used as a pretext to clamp down on other criminal activity that would otherwise be difficult to investigate and prosecute, due to Fourth Amendment restrictions.
I don't know which explanation worries and frightens me more.
I'm a man of wealth and taste,
I've been around for a long, long year,
Stole many a man's soul and faith.
Bush is such a Dumb-ass
Osama said he woukld take away America's freedoms.
He never dreamed Bush and Ashcroft would be of such great help.
BRAVO!
Beautiful post.
I'm normally a right winger, and despite the (few) misspellings, I'm totally in accordance with this d00d.
Bush and his crew (I mean EVERYBODY, even Colin.. look at the crap his son is on about) must GO!
I will *not* live in a police state. Period.
The second amendment affords us the measures needed to reconcile conflicts such as this. It's there for a reason. That reason is looming. Now.
Vote first. Make noise.
Believe in democracy, for what it's worth.
There may, however, come a time, when we, the concerned, must take this thing up into our own hands. The masses will not support us, as they are complacent.
We can shut the Net down. Easily.
We can take up the Gun! The masses will flee before us, leaving easy targets.. the PHB's, politicians, etc.
OOOh.. I'm babbling! Not Good(tm).
This is starting to sound nutty, but there are nuggets of sincerity in there.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Legally, the Federal government has jurisdiction over interstate commerce. That definitely includes the Internet.
That really depends on the legal definition of "commerce." If I host a web page that contains some information and I make no money off the web page, and someone in another state views the information on the web page, is that commerce? No money changed hands.
If two people communicate, using walkie-talkies, over state lines then is that also interstate commerce?
I'm trying to stimulate discussion. I'm not trying to be confrontational.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Bush Nominates Himself to Chair 9/11 Investigation
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday, 19 December, 2002
George W. Bush has tapped Thomas Kean to chair the independent investigation
into the attacks of September 11th. This nomination comes in the wake of the
choice of Henry Kissinger for that post, and his sudden departure. Kissinger,
considered a master of secrets and a war criminal to boot, was an odd pick for the
post to say the least. He resigned rather than give up the list of clients he has
served since leaving public life, as the 9/11 victims families had demanded and the
protocols of security clearance had required. One wonders what manner of
Kissinger clients could have caused a 'conflict of interest' in a terrorism
investigation, but that question will have to wait.
In a perfect world, Kean would be a standard-issue Republican. He is President
of Drew University. He served from 1982 through 1990 as Governor of New Jersey,
enjoying high popularity among his constituents and warm relations with labor
groups. He is the former chairman of the National Environmental Education and
Training Foundation; he is a board member of the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Center for Learning Disabilities,
and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Kean led the U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Education for All in
Thailand in 1990; he was vice chairman for the U.S. delegation to the Fourth U.N.
World Conference on Women in 1995; he served on the advisory board to the
President's Initiative on Race from 1997 to 1998; he is currently chairman of the
National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy; he served as a board member of
America's Promise, a foundation for improving America's youth created by
Presidents Clinton, Bush, Carter, Ford and Reagan (who was represented at the
group's inception by his wife, Nancy).
That is an impressive record.
Kean is also a director for the petroleum giant Amerada Hess, the food services
corporation Amarak, and the Pepsi Bottling Group. Kean is likewise a board member
of the Fiduciary Trust Company International. He is a former board member for the
CIT Group and UnitedHealth Group.
It is his association with Hess that has drawn concern from 9/11 victims groups,
because Hess has business agreements with Saudi Arabia and oil exploration
facilities in Indonesia and Malaysia. The latter countries are widely believed to be
home to al Qaeda terrorists, while the former has become notorious for its
association with Wahabbi fundamentalism, Osama bin Laden, and a majority of the
9/11 hijackers. Kristen Breitweister, the co-chairman of Sept. 11 Advocates who
lost her husband in the World Trade Center attacks, said of Kean's nomination: "I'm
collecting all the information so when we meet with all the commissioners we'll be
able to properly ask all the questions. I'm not even at a point where I'm considering
whether or not he would be good at it."
There can be no question that Kean's nomination is a quantum improvement
over Kissinger. However, it was a curious choice. Kean has been out of politics
since 1990, and is a virtual unknown on the national stage. It is clear that he enjoys
philanthropic work, but it is also clear that he has strong ties to some heavy hitters
in the business community and the petroleum industry. He has not the massive ego
of Kissinger, nor aspirations to high office, having gotten out twelve years ago after
deciding that the political rat race had become distasteful. He has virtually no
experience in foreign policy, intelligence, or national security matters.
In many ways, this was a non-nomination. Kean has much to lose and little to
gain from chairing this investigation. In the final analysis, it appears that Bush has
nominated someone who will be easily controlled by the administration. Kean does
not possess, by dint of experience, the wherewithal to ask the difficult questions
that must be pressed if this investigation is to be successful. His is not, and never
has been, the kind of boat-rocker that will be necessary to pry the truth from the
administration, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and the Department of Defense.
It is vital in this to remember that the Bush administration thwarted this
independent investigation for 18 months, until they got the two things they wanted.
What they wanted was a requirement that any subpoenas would be issued only
after six of the ten people on the commission voted for it. The commission is
comprised of five Democrats and five Republicans. If a particular subpoena seems
to cut too close to the political bone, the Republicans on the committee need only
stand shoulder to shoulder to stop it.
The other requirement the Bush administration demanded was the right to pick
the chairman of the commission. One need look no further than the first choice,
Henry Kissinger, to see the reasons for this. Ostensibly, this investigation has been
proposed so that nothing like 9/11 ever happens again. The Bush administration
chose Kissinger to see this mission through, demonstrating that they are far more
interested in keeping secrets than they are in getting to the bottom of this.
Now, we have Thomas Kane, a man with no training or background in any of the
areas necessary to the investigation, a man who does not appear capable of taking
on the intelligence community and the administration, much less the five other
Republicans who will have veto power over the issuance of subpoenas. It is difficult
to imagine Thomas Kean pushing hard for answers to questions like these:
* Why did George W. Bush order the dismantling of the Bin
Laden Task Force prior to 9/11?
* Was the Bush administration involved in negotiations with
the Taliban prior to 9/11 regarding a pipeline project to be
undertaken in Afghanistan by Unocal Petroleum and a
consortium of other corporations and nations, including Saudi
Arabia?
* Why were fighter interceptors not scrambled after it
became clear that commercial aircraft had been hijacked?
* Who made the decision to stop FBI Deputy Director John
O'Neill from investigation al Qaeda financial accounts? What
did Barbara Bodine, U.S. ambassador to Yemen, have to do
with pulling O'Neill off the case?
* Why were the Black Boxes and flight data recorders from
the hijacked aircraft never recovered?
* What was Saudi Arabia's involvement with the hijackers
and the 9/11 plot?
* Why were pointed warnings received from Israel, Egypt,
Germany and Russia, which detailed a plot to hijack aircraft
and use them to attack prominent American targets, virtually
ignored? Again, why were fighter jets not scrambled since this
warning was already in hand?
* What corporations are currently profiting from the War on
Terror? In particular, how much does the multinational
corporation The Carlyle Group, an entity steeped in petroleum
production and weapons sales, stand to make from the
conflict?
Yet these are the questions that must be answered. By nominating Thomas
Kean for this duty, George W. Bush has basically nominated himself. Kean holds
every appearance of being a good and decent man. One hopes the puppet strings
will not pain him too much.
-------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times bestselling author of two books - "War
On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter) available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest
Sedition is Silence," available in May 2003 from Pluto Press. He teaches high school
in Boston, MA.
Of this propopsal in action.
My company's IT policy clearly states "We're watching you 24/7; the computers you use are ours, as is all the data on them. We can rifle through your email, your 'personal' disk space, whatever and whenever we choose. And we do!"
In reality, however, enforcement rarely happens, due to the sheer amount of data that several thousands of people can produce in a single day. Most "enforcment actions" are due to gross system abuses- 100's of megs of pr0n, for example- or someone ratting another person out.
If private corporations, who own their computers in every definition, aren't really able to police their users (certainly not without massive expense and damage to business), what hope would our government have in monitoring the entire country?
Joe Terrorist will Never think of ENCRYPTING things.
He'll never think of using simple XOR one time pads created by running simple hashing functions on images posted on other well known web sites.
And if people in general get pissed off with the idea of being monitored, and more and more web sites use encryption, then how do they even guess what's worth spending time on breaking the encryption in order to monitor ?
D
Looks like this guy must be on to something...
I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls
Even so it is important to think of the level in the administration that this type of proposal comes from. This looks to me like something that the spooks have had on their shopping list for years and are simply putting it on the agenda now they smell that the administration will let them.
The news on Haliburton this morning makes this the first administration ever in which the President and Vice President were invesigated by the SEC for stock frauds. As if having the first President with a criminal conviction was not enough! It also means that there will be even more strenuous efforts to change the subject to Iraq, even if that means starting a war.
One thing to get really worried about is the lengths that the spooks may go to get their way. Peter Wright's autobigography 'Spycatcher' describes some of the dirty tricks that MI5 used against Harold Wilson's government. Given the character of the people in charge you have to wonder what additional information the spooks might have that they could use as leverage to get their way. After all this is what J. Edgar Hoover did and his name is still on the FBI HQ.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Where does it all end? Do I get accused of being a terrorist because I believe that George W. Bush and his administration are a bunch of fascist criminals who are wiping their ass with the Bill of Rights -- and dare to publish said information? Am I "encouraging terrorism" and thus a "person of interest" for saying such?!
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Doors often impede surveillance. Terrorists and criminals hide behind closed doors as they plot destruction, build bombs, sell drugs, plan murders. Think of how much safer you'll be after all of those irresponsible doors are removed, so that legitimate law enforcement can actively safeguard your freedoms without impediment.
It has been said before, but deserves to be repeated here:
"Four boxes to be used in the defence of liberty: Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo. Use in that order"
--Ed Howdershelt
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
score: 5 sarcastically funny for you... plus a -1: offtopic for me... oh well
i sell illegal drugs
Even smoke signals could be seen from afar.
* You may be a redneck if you put firemen's hats on the Three Wise Men in your outdoor nativity scene, "because it says in the Bible they came from a-fahr." *
All other potential problems aside, this opens a gigantic Barrel of Worms (as opposed to can). Just IMAGINE the huge amount of lawsuits that could come out of it.
;)
Think the deficit is bad now . . .
In all seriousness, this is the kind of plan made completely without the thought that it will affect actual people. Forgetting that usually leads to disaster.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Why go through all the trouble of setting this up ourselves? Why not just outsource from China? I hear they already have a pretty good system up and running.
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
"Id rather be a free man in my grave then live as a puppet or a slave." Jimmy Cliff
"Give me liberty or give me death!" Patrick Henry
WHat I want to know is when is everyone going to start the revolution?
Are you all going to sit there and bitch and moan?
Are you going to get up and do something?
It is our right to start a new government.
We are not helpless.
Think of it this way.
"The possible was once the impossible.
Once we understand this then the impossible becomes possible." Me
The central thesis of 1984 was that people will abuse the power they have. Once technology was developed to monitor your thoughts, thoughts would be monitored and any thought that might detract loyalty from the government would be outlawed. The term was thoughtcrime and it was related to sexcrime. Any means to achieve this state, including bombing your own people would be used and perpetual warfare was required to motivate the people and waste their efforts. We are very much on the way here in the US.
First, examine thoughtcrime. We already have laws against thoughts such as "hate crime" laws which gauge the intent of the criminal rather than actions and harm done. The federal government has long forbiden any group recieving federal funds from donating to "hate" groups. That's disturbing on it's own but much more so in a society where more than 1 in 4 $ of GDP are federal spending. Symbols are being outlawed, words and phrases are not far behind. These new monitoring plans are extensions of police "profiling" efforts and Carnivore. Now, thanks to Patriot and USA Act, domestic spying including inflitration of religious organizations, is legal. Illegal activities are being encouraged, with the understanding that it will lead to evidence that CAN be legaly used, and that is the spirit of these new laws. Today, your thoughts will get you monitored and blacklisted which involves a real loss of privalidge. Soon, those thoughts might get you raided and jailed. As the machinery of thought monitoring improves, more thoughts will become illegal. This new survailence system WILL be targeted, and hence very useful. Everybit as useful as the random checks of indviduals by two way televisions of 1984. The could be watching, so you have to behave, forever.
Now examine what the government is willing to do to achieve the above violation or your rights and expansion of it's power. I have yet to see reasonable proof of exactly who was responsible for 9/11, and so have not put the CIA or Israeli secret police off my list. Ossama was trained and supplied by the CIA when the struggle was against the Soviets. Any institution that has gained since then is suspect. There is no end to the "war against terror" A war against individual criminals is not a war, it's a police action, but that will have to do for now. Soon enough, we can get ourselves into a shooting war. Orwell predicted that all the centers of culture would be wiped out in order to make the new perpetual oligarchical states. I hope the folks willing to trade a little freedom for a little security are not also willing to trade a little prosperity for a little order.
And that is enough duckspeak for me today. File it, it will come in handy when The Book of rebelious thoughts is compiled to trap the disobedient. Oldthinkders unbellyfeel Ingsoc!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't think this helps anything, anyone who wants to "talk" on the internet is going to use SSL/SSH if they know what they are doing, so this means they would have to crack every single key and filter through everything is realtime, and have monkeys at terminals watching for anything suspicious. I don't think this is going to help anything, it is only a waste of tax dollars and abuse of the whole 9/11 tragedy. I don't think groups like the taliban uses the internet anyway.
"Privacy and Power"
o ve da/Database-Privacy%20FINAL%20VERSION.doc
Computer Databases and Metaphors for Information Privacy
Daniel J. Solove
October 17, 2000
http://law.shu.edu/faculty/fulltime_faculty/sol
Its obvious to me that Bush and his asslickers are on a powertrip of propostrous dimensions.. Attacking everyone who does not do as HE says and now add surveillance of the average man?... I hope and I wish for christmas, that bush goes to visit some of his own factory of mass destruction weapons.. and that he gets eaten alive.. preferrably very slowly.. by some american engineered bugs..
The federal government has for purposes of this discussion, unlimited money. And I'm not sure you realize the scale of what's possible with carte blanche funding.
Take a look at Google sometime to get a sense of the scale of what's possible just with some private investment, licensing and advertising revenues.
They can do it. It'll be about focusing, winnowing, and summarizing the datastream carefully at various stages.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo
:)
Actually I think the one after Jury is traditionally "Jail."
Well, this is no big surprise, however disappointing it is. Bush is obviously not the sharpest pin in the cushion; he doesn't understand the internet. Everybody is telling him that the internet is bad, so the only thing he can do is try to "contain" it. Nothing much will change. Your grandma's email will be readily available to them.
But I predict starkly contrasting changes will occur in the way you and I use the 'net. Chat and email programs will come with 128-bit or better encryption. PGP and similar programs will once again protect us from those who wish to protect us. We might use an SSL-enabled proxy in a "free-er" country to access web pages and encrypt them for transit to our "free" country.
This, of course, will bring back the debates of whether we should give big brother a key to our hope chests and diaries through back-doors and government keys. These efforts will be defeated. If they succeed, someone will hack the gov't key and reveal everyone's content to the world, and people will learn why gov't keys are a Bad Thing.
And the cycle will begin again. Peaks and troughs, peaks and troughs.
All we can continue to do is be vigilant in our struggle to contain this beast of a gov't that was started only a couple hundred years ago by a room full of good-intentioned men fighting taxation and abuse by their gov't.
Be strong.
Amazing how the great old free world thinks that it owns the internet. (wonder if Gore had something to do with this, since he invented it). How arrogant to believe that one govt can own something that doesn't really exist anywhere but on your PC..... because, what is the WWW other than a large LAN (very large). They are calling on ISP's to help do this, I don't see them helping... For one, if the customers find out, they'll raise hell and quit, then no more ISP's, then no more WWW... oh well, I prob should get out more anyways.... I don't see this sudden need for Bush and his Cab to know everything about everyone, since when did he become God. (Or Ra, or Allah, or Zeus, or whomever our relig supports)..
(In 1492 we set out on a voyage to find a land where we can practice our beliefs without persecution from the govt. --- In 2002 we are still looking for that land)
I smell a business oppertunity for an enterprising geek. Use a "small" computer loaded with all the encryption and routing, etc needed to secure a persons connection. Make it transparent to the user. Plug and Play. Sell it like one sells routers and other networking gear. Profit!!!
Screw reciprocity. I am 100% for surveiling those in government, although this will be more feasible for some than others.
Realistically, it will have to be 100% blanket surveillance of those we chose to be effective - every letter, fax, night vision the bedroom - the whole deal. Congressmen, and the President, for instance, will make many claims that this is outrageous, etc. but only one class of such complaints really moves me, which is that "matters of national security," etc. prevent the publishing of such surveillance. To this I propose spot reviews by n (5-15?) randomly selected members of opposition political partie(s) for asserting that a) no crime occurred, and b) making an embargo on the data for n years (5? 25?).
The accountability is long overdue, and they don't call it the public life for nothing. It sounds ridiculous at first, but it would work. It would drive a lot of the people you don't want out of politics virtually overnight. Public service in elected office (and I don't think just elected officials should be eligible for such a program) is a solemn duty with the heaviest responsibilities to the people. Both common logic and "reasonable suspicion" should compell us to take this step.
But I see no reason why this requires "reciprocity" for private citizens.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
The CIA already has a machine that sucks down every website out there so analysts can browse anonymously. It's called "Thunder River" and it can download and index 96% of the Internet once a week. The machine has custom built processors and the last I heard an OC-192 connection. You won't find details of it with a google search but all this executive order is meant to do is make ISPs allow the data pulled by Thunder River to include who goes where and does emails what. The other part of this Executive Order allows the NSA to use their custom dictionary search engines against this database. The DB currently resides on a multi-terabyte EMC array. There were plans in the works to move it to a flash memory array to increase the speed. It got killed due to budget cuts before Sept 11. I am pretty sure it will get reinstated. I hate what America is becoming and believe that we are walking down a slippery slope towards a complete loss of the Freedom our great nation was built on. The next step if it hasn't happened already will be to control what the press can and cannot say. Once that happens, our world as we know it will end. I don't fear what Bush may do now, I fear what a future megalomaniacal president may do in the future. Remember J. Edgar Hoover and how he managed to stay in power by collecting information on all those around him. We have given the Homeland Security director a blank check and carte blanche to do what he wills.
FUCK THIS SHIT. Seriously, how much are we going to bend over and let Big Brother fuck us up the ass???????????????????
And I have a feeling we're in good company.
I wish slashdot had more marketing types around. What we need are more good ideas for making privacy understandable to people who have enjoyed it all their lives and won't otherwise know why it's worth keeping until after it's gone.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
from the article: WASHINGTON, DC--Flanked by key members of Congress and his administration, President Bush approved Monday a streamlined version of the Bill of Rights that pares its 10 original amendments down to a "tight, no-nonsense" six.
Well,
Here we are "post 9/11" when very event in the news media appears to be propaganda for staunch conservates who tout they are "protecting our freedoms" by taking away our liberties, right to free speech, and implementing "guilty before innocent" line of thinking. Sure there are terrorists. How many did we create through our DISASTROUS foreign policy? We may/will be attacked again, if only because we attempt to subjugate other peoples of the earth to our economic and "moral" imperatives.
When will the people of the USA (the most homogeneous compendium of races on earth) rise up and fight this oppressive oligarchy. Because truly, we dont have a democracy, or even a republic. We have a system by which those with money and power can buy our government and impose it's will upon the rest of us.
REMEMBER NAZI GERMANY, FASCIST ITALY, STALIN...we are heading in that direction. It's a fine line between security and oppression, and moves such as this monitoring are crossing the barrier.
What does it take to stop all of this? Shoot our public officials in the head? (metaphorical for giving them a heads up about our feelings) BUSH IS A BASTARD SON OF SATAN, SURROUNDED BY HIS EVIL MINIONS. He has no brain in his head, as is obvious by the bullshit that comes from his mouth everyday.
We MUST stop them before we lose all of our freedoms we hold dear. Next step is a police state.
Enjoy all those who voted for him, you get what you deserve. (but WE DONT)
I'm just going to move to another planet.
Strength of numbers hasn't decided a battle since Gallipoli, numbnuts.
"No need to track the datagrams of the packet, just which lines are suddenly seeing an increase in usage for no good reason."
Well, there goes the Slashdot effect.
Oh, you forgot:
3.) SIEG HEIL!
=/
They're just doing this so we'll stop believing that it already exists in Echelon. Somehow, doing something horrendous in front of our eyes seems to work out better for the evildoers than doing it behind our backs.
The Internet That Logs On To YOU!
That's it - Bye-Bye Internet... A couple years after they monitor all the porn and political criticism, they will call for "regulation" of the Internet...
Hackers, better get those crypto P2P schemes up and running... And you better use codes, not crypto, because crypto will be banned and anything LOOKING like crypto going over the Net will be tracked and reported...
Wireless folks, better get that one nationwide, too...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
.... when they haven't even been able to secure their existing physical infrastructure? I mean, our military can't account for 25% of their expenditures (some $2.3 trillion). And even in a single case of domestic terrorism such as the Oklahoma City bombing, where the FBI lost 3000+ documents pertaining to the McVeigh case due to antiquated technology.
No, what I think we need are leaner bureaucracies that make better use of their existing resources. Improve what we got, then build upon it........ as the whole Linux-vs-Microsoft row has proven, you can't add just security to a shitty foundation -- you have to do it from the ground up. I'm of the mind that the same holds true for efficiency, where bureaucracies are concerned.
Not to point fingers here (especially considering that I am guilty as well), but instead of sitting around complaining, whining, and making sarcastic comments, why don't we actually do something? Day after day, I see a lot of really well thought out points made here. But exactly how many of them are pointed towards the people that need to hear them? (The President, Congress, etc.) Granted these people (esp. the president) rank among the most powerful in the world, so they don't fear much and sound reasoning obviously isn't their strong suit. But, we all know the one thing they really fear: Not Being Re-elected. Yes, Bush is obviously stubborn and hard headed, but I'm betting that even he wouldn't be able to ignore several thousand emails per day telling him to back off of us and go after the real bad guys. So, if we really want to have a chance at making a difference, don't just post all of this stuff here. Fire some of it at president@whitehouse.gov, too!
As with many of the new "security measures" we're currently swallowing, from most of the Patriot Act, to this, all the way to, perhaps, the coming war itself, no one seems to be able to make the case very well that any of them would have helped to prevent 9/11, or will help to prevent future attacks.
In fact, by tasking these agencies with vast new responsibilities in monitoring Americans, we can realistically expect worse performance when dealing with future terrorism.
Many citizens don't have the faculties or the will to recognize this fact, and many more who do stop themselves from asking why. But a man writing over 50 years ago gave us a few answers which I believe hit frighteningly close to the mark.
His name comes up so often now that he is in danger of becoming a cliche. But listen to his words:
"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the massses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed."
"What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war."
"The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact."
-George Orwell, 1984
I urge to read the whole book. In my opinion he was an excellent writer of fiction in adition to everything else. But if you skip it, I'll just add that "keeping the structure of society intact" is code for keeping those on top, on top.
We're on the road to Tycho.
This is nothing new. In the earlier days of
what became the internet, DARPA owned it all,
and the NSA watched it all. And the backbone
across the U.S. was tiny. Anyone remember
spook.el in emacs? Long ago, lots of people
used emacs to edit mail on UNIX boxes, folks
would just type M-x spook.el in emacs and
have inserted in their buffer a collection of
lines with keywords designed to light up the
keyword checking mechanisms at the NSA, to
"chaff" the NSA trunk trawler.
They'll be cleverer by far about data mining this
time, but that's an easy problem to solve.
The net's big now, even within U.S. boarders,
and to think that it can be monitored is just
naive and silly. Contemporary technology at
any point in history is unlikely to be able to
monitor more connections than it can facilitate.
The idea is DOA... again.
Don't these people ever learn?
Read through the technical specs for CALEA wiretaps. There have been some recent, wierd changes. Wiretap data used to be delivered over leased T1 lines, which at least meant that it was going to some well-defined place. Recently, dial-out wiretapping capability has been added to Nortel and Lucent switches, allowing the delivery of wiretapped calls to any phone.
I'm sure you and I will be the first ones tortured^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdetained for questioning in connection with disparaging government efforts to "stop terror."
("And a free trip to a Carribbean island? Great!")
In all seriousness, this christmas I'm giving copies of 1984 to a number of people, and I suggest others do the same if they're stuck for an idea, or just need something cheap to give a lot of people that will have the effect of (maybe) making them think.
I read it for the first time recently and found it quite eerie how similar some of the passages were to contemporary events.
Plus, for 12 bucks a pop, I've got gifts for christmas for several smart, "hard to buy for" people. Amazon is where I got the cool, hard-back edition I'm giving this year. I don't get anything from clicking on the link--so do so guilt free.
Who did what now?
A little sideways to the topic, but see also http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html Perhaps ISPs could formulate and post similar "technically legal warning signs". Perhaps a calendar marking all the dates that the FBI did NOT inspect their network.
IMO, there is little difference between libraries and the internet at large -- both are essentially public information access, merely via a different medium. What happens to one, be that surveillance, censorship, or other restrictions, sooner or later will happen to the other.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Hmmmm.... no-one here is willing to validate Amazon's dubious one-click patents, but now we're all happy with the monkier "President" for this puppet-clown?
Interesting how quickly people forget....
For practical purposes, not only unlimited money, but unlimited mainframes. People here talk like that string of Xeons represents the max available in data analysis, making it automatically impractical. And the gov't doesn't think in terms of "can we afford it?"
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The problem is that the rich men associated with the Skull and Bones did not foresee the internet when they made their plans for global domination. Now that they have a man in the White House, they are working to nail down the internet so that it serves there purposes only.
The government officials proposing this all have very clear memories of the Vietnam war and of the extent of domestic opposition to it. This opposition made it very difficult to prosecute that war - a fact not lost on Bush, Ashcroft, etc. They do not want to repeat the "mistakes" of the past.
Tracking the activities of dissenters allows more effective neutralization of their activities. Monitoring personal communications makes blackmail easier. It makes disrupting organized opposition activities easier, whether these are demonstrations or just running a peace candidate for office.
You all are aware that there is still mandatory registration for a military draft? During Vietnam, many folks managed to slip through the cracks and evade serving in that unpopular war. Not a chance this time around. You try to slip across the border to Canada, you will never get out of the country.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Let's organize a protest in Washington, D.C.
to protest this!
This may even increase advertising revenue on
Slashdot.
Sign below with your name OR Alias:
- Thanks in advance, Woot
This may be difficult - even impossible - but that's never stopped the government before (can you say "Star Wars"?) We cannot afford to dismiss this just because we don't think they can't pull it off.
In order to actually build a system like this, the government would have to spend billions on monitoring gear, supercomputers to analyse the data and a vast beauracracy to run everything. In order to raise this money they will shift as much financial burden as possible onto the ISPs, who will have to raise their rates to stay in business. I also suspect they would try to tax internet use (hey, if they have an infrastructure to monitor everyone than it would be easier to tax everyone while they're at it).
Finally, for the purposes of accomplishing its intended task (catching bad, evil terrorists), it will be nigh-impossible to get such a system to ever work correctly. BUT for the purposes of creating an atmosphere of fear and paranioa, along with de facto censorship on the 'net - the system never has to work correctly, it merely has to exist.
In my opinion terrorist organizations have already won their "war" on the USA (supposed land of the free). They wanted to destroy our freedom (the little that we actually have), our way of life (which could be criticized), and everything else that America was originally meant to stand for.
The terrorists are winning and we will only realize too late that our "democracy" went down the shit hole because the elitist power mongers in our country control our every breath and waking moment.
Benjamin Franklin said it best in 1759 with this possibly over used quote:
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Let's organize a protest in Washington, D.C.
to protest this!
This may even increase advertising revenue on
Slashdot.
Sign below with your name OR Alias:
- Thanks in advance, Woot
The last congress election has been a big victory for the republican party. So face it, most of your citizens either want to be surveilled, have unregulated capitalism or are too dumb to care about it.
;-(
It's the same thing here in Germany. Our established parties lie to us all the time, and while people are not happy, all they do is electing them again and again.
So, we all get the politicians we deserve. Simple, fact
Of course no one is going to sit and read that information. But if I use the works kill and (I don't want those words to be too close together or in the same sentence.) president within 5 words of each other, my name may appear on a list somewhere. It doesn't matter what the context was if a program is filtering based on that logic. That aggregated data on all of my net conversations can be perverted to mean anything that someone chooses. All I have to do is end up in the sights of some radical who wants to make life miserable for me (or all people who share my beliefs, habits, heritage, etc). Stay out of my private conversations unless you have a warrant specifically granting you permission. It's illegal for me to monitor George W.'s conversations over the internet and it is illegal when our government does it to us. It doesn't matter if the information is useless or not.
Man the poets down here don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be.
-Springsteen
Let's organize a protest in Washington, D.C.
to protest this!
This may even increase advertising revenue on
Slashdot.
Sign below with your name OR Alias:
- Thanks in advance, Woot
Get Your War On
"How George Stole Xmas"
Vocals start after a minute or so...
Monitoring the internet? Are you guys insane? What is this sh*t, 1984? The sad thing is that the average Joe is no smarter than the president of the "free" world, and this probably will happen anyway. In the past year it seems like everything that the USA stands for has absolutley, positivley gone down the CRAPPER. The founding fathers are vomiting in their graves. Funny thing is, why would they come out of their graves, just to be in a bigger box?
"The only way to make music that cannot be copied is to make music that cannot be heard." - Gene Kan
I disagree. And so do the copyrighters.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.sil ence/
Remember, this is the US saying it's going to monitor the entire Internet. So, how would it REALLY be done, and what would be the results? I foresee the following: 1) Engage in lengthy debate in Congress. Have several failed bills. When the final bill emerges, it addresses not only Internet security, but also the planting of genetically altered grapefruits in economically depressed regions with a high percentage of illegal immigrant migrant workers. 2) Create an oversight board to monitor the activity of the department created by the President's Bipartisan Commission on Genetically Altered Citrus Crops and Suspicious Internet Activity (PBCGACCSIA). 3) Staff oversight board and department with board members from failed megacorporations whose CEO's have already burned through their golden parachute funds. 4) Employ technical people who are capable of formulating, within 12 months, a 14,521 page document outlining methods of collecting and analyzing data from Internet activity of migrant workers picking brocolli in North Dakota. 5) Declare genetically altered fruit "illegal combatants" and issue sanctions against imported Kiwi fruit.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
For the love of all things holy... American OnLine? What happened to fact checking and proofreading in journalism. It makes me ill to see some of the blatent grammatical errors and incorrect facts that are to be found in "professional" journalism. If you missed it, re-read the article. They actually called AOL "American Online." Sorry for the rant, but I have been seeing crap like that all day.
I swear I thought it said:
a report entitled 'The National Strategery to Secure Cyberspace'.
(If he runs against Daschle, he can't loose.)
Corporations do not want the government to monitor their corporation.
The gov-internet-monitoring staff might sell their corporate secrets to another company. corpoate espionage.
no i dont fear that this will pass.
I fear when corporations will monitor us completely, decide, and execute their laws how the corporations seem fit.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
(Apologies go out to Trey and Matt for butchering something of theirs to make a point...)
See -- the current US Administration plan may or may not be making us safer from terrorism. But at what point will we have to "pretend" anything!?! -- last time I checked, we had free speech, we had the vote, we had a free press
Or was your last post just a mirage?
Someone should tell me what the mechanism is that I should be looking out for -- where these evil people will start to take away my right to freely express myself.
Otherwise I will be forced to conclude that this is just a new form of political correctness -- you disagree with your opponent so you claim they are secretly fascists intent on evil. Sloppy intellectual reasoning, if you ask me.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Something such as the following to keep all the
m in alMarijuanaHashishLSDEbolaAnthraxDengueFeverIVote
"security" flunkies employed:
Very Truly Yours,
Woot
-*-*
Echelon Keywords:
BushIsaMoronLSDCheneyIsAThiefKissingerIsaWarCri
Democrat
First I'll address the intenet monitoring.
YES IT CAN BE DONE!
The internet is a very dangerous tool of the people. The working classes.... Untill not the digital divide and kept most of the concerns of our and other governments out of or even off the internet. You see ideas are more powerful then gun, missles, plains and tanks. Collectivly we have power. Divided we have a mess of opposing ideas. I believe it was richard nixon that first coined the phrase "The silent majority". He used this as a justification for trying to keep his office of president. The idea was that... Sure everyone was shouting for his removal but there was a "Slient Majority" that wanted him to stay in office. History has shown that this "Majority" was only 35% of the population.
The Metaphor of War.
When I was 17 I joined the Army. I did this because it has been a family tradition that I thought was valuable experiance. I was a patriot joining to help defend our way of life and to attest my belief in the constitution of the united states. This country has been defended by 4 generations of Richardsons. When you join the Army you are asked to give a oath to uphold the constitution against enemies both foreign and domestic. I'm not making this up. So why does the powers that be want to remove personal freedoms?
Does anyone remember when the War on Drugs was started against the American people? Well It never affected me. All the people in public housing that have to concent to searches going in and out of there homes. After all there was a "Majority" of people that believed in it right? The war on drugs is just a Metaphor! There is no real war going on except against the american people. All the shooting in south america and other drug producing countries are by rebels that actually might have a good reason to take up arms against their governments. I don't live there... I only know whats going on from what I read on the internet. Well years later we are still fighting the war on drugs. Low and behold searching people in public housing was not enough. We need roving check points on our borders. We need survalance of everyone. We go after people that in most cases are not even stronge enough to commit a violent crime. All in the name of keeping america safe from the drug crazed elements in our world. It's even created whole new types of corperations. Prison corperations that live off of a steady stream of bodies that need to be warehoused.
Does anyone remember the first Metaphor war in this country. Correct me if I'm wronge but I believe it was "The War on Poverty" started by the carter adminstation. I have a personal belief that this war was not sexy enough for the republicans. Because we seemed to drop that pretty fast when the poor started to be viewed as Crazed Crack addicts. Now if we as a nation were going to take up a impossible war this is the one we should be fighting. I don't think anyone can disagree with this. But we don't... We funnel in millions to law enforcement to fight drug use in the form of locking up the users. Ask a cop if he feels good sending a 18 year old to jail for having drugs. I've known A+ students that served 10 years for drug charges. What service did we get from that. A really scary person that could have been something grand. I don't want dealers on the street and I DON'T want drugs legal.
Which brings me to the War on Terrorism. Hey I'm all for protecting the country/world against bad guys. But let me ask this question.... If we stoped pouring resources into a failing drug war based on locking up the users. And instead turned to actually tighting up our borders couldn't we maybe get more truck, ships and planes searched for both drugs and weapons?
Where is all this leading? Your focusing on a battle not the war. Your focusing on the symptoms not the root cause. You watch your government take more and more away from you and you sit in your homes and pretend that you are so aware that it makes you a better person. Well did you vote? you did? did you get someone that did not vote to vote? Did you write your congressman to show disaproval of the fact that they signed the Patriot act after only reading a 3 or 4 page summary? I know that NO ONE was there to say "Hey you can't search these people just because they live in public housing". And I bet no one will be there to stop this landslide that is taking over the nation. We need to be vocal with this failing form of government. It's not a democratecy if only 40% of the population votes.
As a nation we need to find the root cause of this encrochment of our person rights and freedoms. I believe the root cause to be the lack of respect for the constitution by our government leaders. They will sit and tell you that for your safety we do these things.... They are lying! They do these things because the benefit the people that got them into office. The corperations and special interest groups. So when you whine about your posts to the everquest board shouldnt' be monitored your kidding you self. They can do what they want because even with the internet we are not ready to band together under the banner of freedom outlined in the constitution of the united states of america. So when they start replacing internet routers with computers that log ever packet. All to be gathered and processed by a government contractor that will be using your tax money to read your e-mail to mom. When the police get information on what pron movie you purchase with your credit card. When the army comes knocking on your door to recruit your 17 year old son because their records show that he can follow orders in his online games. Don't Panic. Because its all in the name of your protection.
"Silence means security, Silence means approval". --REM
P.S. spelling and grammer errors left in due to the fact that I really don't have the time to type this in the first place.
Last one in jail is a fascist.
Just ask random people who they voted for, if they say, "Bush & Cheney! All the Way!", PUNCH THEM IN THE FUCKING THROAT!
But how does this help, you ask?
Well, it doesn't. Dumbfucks are still going to somehow manage to vote Republican, but at least you won't have to listen to their shitty, logicless arguments about how Bush is doing wonders for freedom, when he's really raping the American people!
"But you promised extra cash!" Sure!
When the fucking waste of skin Bush Voter is on the ground gasping for air, kick them in the face. Again. Then take their Big Business fattened wallet!
"Doesn't this violate their rights? Beating the piss out of Bush Voters?" Sure!
When aforementioned Bush Voter regains their feet and whistles, "Thissss isss terror...ism...", Punch them in the throat again! You're just striking out against random people! Just like Bush does when he arbitrarily declares war on the 'terrorists of the week'!
Don't forget to turn them in as terrorists! After you've punched them in the throat again. (Don't hold back! Follow through is important to get the job done! Just ask Bush! If you feel more punches to the throat are nessasary, go-to-fucking-town!)
With your help, we can have a Republican-free=(terrorist-free) world!
Things are pretty damn similar.
I don't think this helps anything, anyone who wants to "talk" on the internet is going to use SSL/SSH if they know what they are doing
Sure, and where are most people going to download these SSL/SSH clients from?
Anyone, with a little imagination, and reference to any other "war" (e.g. drugs,etc.) can clearly see that Terorism is the ultimate enimey. Terrorism which by deffinition can be ascribed to anyone who may upset the status quo is the perfect utility of control. Much better than witches, communists, and anyother caracachue used for control in the past.
Of the Times reporting RUMORS as though they were facts and a bunch of gullible people swallowing them whole and flying off the handle!
The Ghost of Valley Forge
(author unknown)
I had a dream, the other night I didn't understand, a figure walking through the mist, with a flintlock in his hand, his clothes were torn & dirty, as he stood there by my bed, he took off his three-cornered hat, & speaking low he said:
we fought a revolution to secure liberty, we wrote the Constitution, as a shield from tyranny. For future generations, this legacy we gave, in this, the land of the free & home of the brave.
The freedom was secured for you, we hoped you'd always keep, but tyrants labored endlessly, while your parents were asleep.
Your freedom gone - your courage lost - you've no more than a slave in this, the land of the free & the home of the brave.
You buy permits to travel & permits to own a gun, permits to start a business or to build a place for one.
On land that you believe you own, you pay a yearly rent, although you have no voice in choosing how the money's spent.
Your children must attend a school that doesn't educate, your moral values can't be taught, according to the State.
You read about the current "news" in a very biased press, you pay a tax you do not owe, to please the IRS.
Your money is no longer made of silver or of gold, you trade your wealth for paper, so life can be controlled.
You pay for crimes that make our Nation turn from G-d to shame, you've taken Satin's number, as you've traded in your name.
You've given government control to those who do harm, so they can padlock churches, & steal the family farm.
They keep our country deep in debt, put men of G-d in jail, harass your fellow countrymen while corrupted courts prevail.
Your public servants don't uphold the solemn oath they're sworn, your daughters visit doctors so children won't be born.
Your leaders ship artillery & guns to foreign shores & send your sons to slaughter, fighting other people's wars.
Can you regain your freedom for which we fought & died?
Or don't you have the courage or the faith to stand with pride?
Are there no more values for which you'll fight to save?
Or do you wish your children to live in fear & be a slave?
Sons of the Republic, arise & take a stand!
Defend the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land!
Preserve our Republic & each G-d given right!
And pray to G-d to keep the torch of freedom burning bright!
As I awoke he vanished, in the mist from whence he came, his words were true, we are not free & we have ourselves to blame.
For even now tyrants trample our G-d given rights, we only watch & tremble - too afraid to stand & fight.
If he stood by your bedside in a dream while you're asleep, & wonder what remains of your right he fought to keep.
What would be your answer if he called out from the grave?
Is this still, the land of the free & home of the brave?
That I still do post things as AC if I don't want the public to know, but don't mind if CowboyNeal and the government know.
In fact, if it were possible to block Timothy stories and keep track of responses to your posts without having an account I'd post everything as AC. But once I start tying views and details to a single account, that information already identifies me as uniquely as (in fact more than) my name.
The Internet Surfs You!!
"Uberwachung macht Frei"
or
"Surveillance is freedom"
Coming to an internment camp near you........
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
There is a third and more likely explanation. They are using this fake "war on terror" as an excuse to create a surveillance state for the sole purpose of controlling everyone, and destroying anyone who gets in their way. Period. It has nothing to do with stopping terrorism or crime, quite the opposite - it is designed so that they have the monopoloy on both.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
Thats why Montanta changed their speed limits. Contratry to popular belief MT changed the limit to whatever was safe and prudent, not infinity. A bunch of people from out of state ruined it for anyone by going 120 mph though the (realitivly) busy crowded areas and getting in serious accidents. The state changed the limits back on the grounds that out of state people are fucking morons.
P.S. I think the highest speed that was proven in court to be safe was a guy who got caught going 103 mph.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
I propose that should this system come into play, anyone who cares should use the following as their email signature:
Sincerely,
Mike
terrorism bomb chemical weapons storage nuclear power plant afghanistan jihad guns drugs sex usa government crack knives ak-47 sales airplane travel hijack wiretap (eat my shorts you fools!) marijuana cocain columbian drug czar mustard gas plague shotgun (haha!) nation of islam hussein rocks america is satan communist capitalist pig dogs
When will they figure out regulation can not be inforced on the 'net?
I'm not worried about this at all. If Bush and his cronies keep ignoring the economy here, there's no way he'll be back for a second term.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
I can see slashdot getting a visit in the near future for their server logs......
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
that's from the declaration of independence. now, if nothing else, the evil power-hungry money-grubbing world-domination-seeking republicans (and if you honestly believe the democrats are a better alternative..well...heh) have at least upheld the indivdual right to keep and bear arms...which was originally put into the constitution not for something as silly as the defense of the country, but to insure that the above quote was eternally valid - very much the "a man with a gun is a citizen, a man without a gun is a subject" mentality. so instead of bitching or trying to do some sort of fuzzy warm feel-ggod sit-in protest that isn't going to do jack squat, why not just pick up your guns and march on Washington? if everybody on slashdot who calims to be fed up with the US gov't actually had the cojones to do something about it, you could probably drum up 50-100,000 supporters and make an armed march on washington. the military probably wouldn't shoot back at you; if they did it would just whip up more support for your cause [the american public may be dumb cattle, but they'll notice if we start shooting our own citizens] - and then you can put in whatever form of government you want. yes, i honestly do believe it would work, and i also believe that in order for you to get the government to behave as you want them to, you need to have a rebellion. personally, i don't see a difference between republicans and democrats; at least the republicans are pragmatic and open with their plans for world domination...i plan to just see where things go over the next few years and then decide on my course of action...no matter what freedoms they take away, ashcroft is rabid about letting me keep my guns, so i always have that option to fall back on.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The one thing that no mentioned (at least Score:3 or above) is this:
If you Centralize the internet, IE: put it all in one easy to monitor place. Then you create the biggest terror target imaginable. If you really want to disrupt the day to day lives of Americans, then BLOW UP THE INTERNET! Which you can't do right now, because of its semi distributed nature. But if you "Centralize" the internet for easier monitoring, then you put all your eggs in a basket, and beg for someone to come kick the basket.
They have proven how resourceful they can be, what with the planes loaded with fuel and all, why give them such an easy target to affect a majority of americans? The internet has become a part of the fabric of peoples lives, and there for the pointy headed idiots in Washington to look at and consider all the information they can't monitor.
"Land of the free" may no longer be applicable, and even if it is so now, given the way the government is going it may not be so quickly enough.
anyone else notice that news.google.com considers slashdot a reliable news source?
Now YOU are a terrorist....
It was tried before. Remember the Civil War?
Irregardless of the evils of slavery,
I believe the South was justified in their cecession.
The same argument that the founding fathers used in their revolt against the crown applied there as well.
The basic argument is "My forefathers cannot give up my rights to self determination for all time to ANY government."
Lastly the Army WOULD shoot you, and you would be on the nightly news in a blurb such as
"And in other news today a terrorist attack on Washington was thwarted by regiments of the United States Army. It is unclear at this time how many terrorists were killed but White House officials commented that the group was linked to Al-queda."
And that would be that......
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Centralized Internet Surveillance for a deCentralized Internet world....
Your tax dollars at work.
FYI, most Iranians are -not- arabs. Common misconception.
Mmmm... I find that prospect to be significantly *less* likely. A vast conspiracy to turn the U.S. into a police state couldn't succeed, at least not without significant cultural and systemic changes. The problem for would-be oligarchs is that there are simply too many checks and balances in our system. Petty political feuding is the backbone of freedom, in that any overt attempt to significantly curtail civic freedoms would be quickly shot down -- not through popular uprising, but simply because for every John Ashcroft there is a Tom Daschle, eager to gain power and prestige by tapping into popular resentment.
What I fear far more is the slippery slope towards tyranny of the majority, greased by politicians attempting to maximize both their votes and their influence within the bureaucracy (e.g. the Justice Department). In such a state, reason and justice take a back seat to the howling of the mob. People are scared right now, and they're willing to let a few suffer for the illusion of safety and security. The worst thing to fear is not a shadowy government conspiracy -- it is the apathy and moral laziness of a people who have forgotten the principles upon which their country was founded.
In my experience, broad monitoring is best done at a singles bar. The internet is only good for pictures of broads, which is not really the same thing.
As someone who has been on-line for ages (since the old bitmet days), it always amazes me to see the same issues coming back time and again. This internet snooping one is a perenial favorite.
.signature files. The idea was to flood the system with too many false positives. Doing such things fell out of fashion after a while.
Many years ago, it became widely believed that the NSA were 'packet dipping' net traffic. This lead folks to start including all sorts of potential trigger phrases in their
There is a fundamental problem with the proposal that is being currently being made. To put it simply, there would just be too much information (I guess the spooks never read the works of Claude Shannon). Also, it is not hard for the bad guys to work out a simple code such that evil activities sound like a message from Grandma. Also, actually getting a system to work reliably would be a nightmare. TCP/IP is pretty robust, but it still breaks from time to time. It is also mcuh simpler and more limited than what is proposed here.
What I want to know is why do the folks in Washington think they can win political points with science fiction scenarios?
How is Internet or any TCP comnmunication different than a real phone, or a letter ? As far as I can tell to watch over and tap your phone or letter authroity need a special judge writing. So why suddenly Internet which is only another form of communication , is soooo different that it need to be surveyed in real time ?
;-)
Ahhh... but the phone is surveyed in real time
Well, yeah, you can stop this, and the Bush administration will back off it and claim that it's gone. A week later, it will be replaced with a new name and description, so all the work done by privacy advocates and such will be undone -- nobody will recognize the name of the new entity. That, at least, is what the Pentagon did with the now-infamous Office of Disinformation.
"Mother, should I run for President? Mother, should I trust the government?"
Yes, I said "nineteen fifty four," and not "nineteen eighty four."
...and you've got it about right.
The phrase of the day is "chilling effect," brought to you by the letters H, U, A, and C.
Or isn't anyone else thinking that TIA (and friends) is a little closer to the HUAC than Orwell's book? Just alias "Commies" to "terrorists," and it works just fine.
I mean this new plot is like, well, imagine -- naah, hold on, I have to say it -- imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Joe McCarthys...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Trying to assert centralized authority over a system that by its very nature strives to be decentralized!
There's no way that this CAN'T work!
hmmmm, now you have me thinking. So between your alternative and mine, which is worse? I suppose we could say since we are dealing with so many variables that all of the above is true. It is hard to argue though that people like Ridge, Ashcroft, Poindexter, Rumsfeld, Horowitz, and Cheney are not conspiring. Everything they do suggest that is exactly what they are doing - they want total global world domination. Even their Policy of the New American Century clearly outlines this agenda. And every move they make has been an agressive higly co-ordinated attack on our civil liberties.
If I were to systematically conspire to create a slave orwellian state, I can see no better way than what they are doing now. Their plan for total domination and control could not have been more brilliantly executed. Ask the average American from 3 year ago and they would be shocked at how far we have slid into facism.
www.enthea.org
For anyone who visited the Total Information Awareness website early on, you'll notice a major change. CNET is reporting that the site has shrunk drastically in recent weeks. It appears that the backlash from that announcement had an effect, tho perhaps only superficial.
We have found the enemy and he is us. - Pogo
Tower of Hypocrisy that we live with here in the USofA. Do as our leaders say, not as they do. It afflicts the government, the corps, and even the church.
All I can say is we need the OSS community to keep cranking out encryption stuff, because that is our only hope.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If you read the article carefully, it shows that NY Times has one or two leaks that the DOJ is "looking into" writing a "proposal" that would confront issues of cyber security.
From there on in it's all spin that Ashcroft is Big Brother. We've heard it all before.
The New York Times and the Washington Post have it in for the Bush administration. They never reveal their "whitehouse sources" and never disclose the "reports" and "proposals" these sources suposedly leak to them. Most of the time it seems like they bought an intern a beer and read his notebook of big ideas.
Most news readers are such sheep! If you went back and analyzed how many of these flash-in-pan big brother stories were "leaked" to the NY Times, and how many of them actually came to be, you'd notice the NY Times is FULL OF SH*T!
Anyone who believes this article is a stupid hippie more intent on thrills than facts.
The government is merely seeking a way to spend money, so that our leaders will get that money in return through votes and kickbacks.
Why else would Bush be proposing all of these mulit-billion dollar projects? Think about it, everything comes down to money and power.
There's something happening here.
What it is ain't exactly clear.
There's a man with a gun over there,
Telling me I got to beware.
I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound?
Everybody look what's going down.
Paranoia strikes deep,
Into your life it will creep,
It starts when you're always afraid,
You step out of line, the man come and take you away.
Lyrics from the song 'For What It's Worth' by Steven Stills and Buffalo Springfield. Written a few years ago, but appropriate now I think.
...to do, we should just say, "Go ahead and do it!"? Enslaving 250 million Americans must have seemed like a difficult task a generation ago, but that particular plan seems to be functioning like a very well-oiled machine to me. The biggest threat to World peace, stability and freedom is not a loser like Sadam Hussein or some other CIA-created dupe like Osama. The biggest threat is Rumsfeld, Cheney, Ashcroft et al. And the scariest thing is that there are still some Americans who, if given the chance, would still vote for them.
I recommend to not vote; unregister, revoke all of your signatures. I don't vote because I believe it is immoral to force my opinions on others. I am of kindness. I don't vote in any and all elections because I will support my own forein policy. I don't know about your status, I am sovereign, a privateer. I follow the actions of Jesus Christ. Politics is a mere signature of Satan's touch on this world; nothing will prosper using politics because everyone is different; everyone is their own denomination.
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
What PDF document did you "kill a small forest by printing out?" Can we have a link please?
Actually, they will have a lot of problems monitoring these stuff.
Let's just say - for the sake of the example - that they DID monitor everything. Where would they put it ? I don't believe any media could hold more than a few hours of all the transactions made in the US through the internet.
But, ok, let's assume they CAN actually store that. Then they would need 122547855232569851 (approx) men to analyze it. Ok, they can preprocess it through automatic keyword searches. So they would need only 12254133178 people and 22154478215 computers.
Let's face it, if you want to monitor 1,000,000 people, you need at least 100,000 people just to analyze the data. Too much data kill the information. And the NSA is already complaining that all the data they recieve is pretty much useless because of that.
They want to monitor EVERYTHING ? It's like monitoring nothing : Blank Noise vs. no signal
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Can't they do it like in the old USSR (I'm not going there) and keep it secret? I don't want to know about this stuff, especially when I can't do anything about it (and yes I voted and wrote my "representatives"). Sheesh they can't even get spying on their own people right.
You know that whole "They attacked us because of our freedoms," I think we better check Ashcroft and Bush and see if they're wearing masks because only
</end troll>
Ask Security Services in the US, UK, Indonesia (Bali) or anywhere for that matter, to deny this:
Internet surveillance, using Echelon, Carnivore or back doors in encryption, will not stop terrorists communicating by other means - most especially face to face or personal courier.
Terrorists will have to do that, or they will be caught!
Perhaps using mobile when absolutely essential, saying - "Meet you in the pub Monday" (human bomb to target A), or Tuesday (target B) or Sunday (abort).
The Internet has become a tool for government to snoop on their people - 24/7.
The terrorism argument is a dummy - total bull*.
INTERNET SURVEILLANCE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO STOP TERRORISTS - THAT IS SPIN AND PROPAGANDA
This propaganda is for several reasons, including: a) making you feel safer b) to say the government are doing something and c) the more malicious motive of privacy invasion.
Government say about surveillance - "you've nothing to fear - if you are not breaking the law"
This argument is made to pressure people into acquiescence - else appear guilty of hiding something illegal.
It does not address the real reason why they want this information (which they will deny) - they want a surveillance society.
They wish to invade your basic human right to privacy. This is like having somebody watching everything you do - all your personal thoughts, hopes and fears will be open to them.
This is everything - including phone calls and interactive TV. Quote from ZDNET: "Whether you're just accessing a Web site, placing a phone call, watching TV or developing a Web service, sometime in the not to distant future, virtually all such transactions will converge around Internet protocols."
"Why should I worry? I do not care if they know what I do in my own home", you may foolishly say. Or, just as dumbly, "They will not be interested in anything I do".
This information will be held about you until the authorities need it for anything at all. Like, for example, here in UK when government looked for dirt on individuals of Paddington crash survivors group. It was led by badly injured Pam Warren. She had over 20 operations after the 1999 rail crash (which killed 31 and injured many).
This group had fought for better and safer railways - all by legal means. By all accounts a group of fine outstanding people - with good intent.
So what was their crime, to deserve this investigation? It was just for showing up members of government to be the incompetents they were.
As usual, government tried to put a different spin on the story when they were found out. Even so, their intent was obvious - they wanted to use this information as propaganda - to smear the character of these good people.
Our honourable government would rather defile the character of its citizens - rather than address their reasonable concerns.
The government arrogantly presume this group of citizens would not worry about having their privacy invaded.
They can also check your outgoings match your income and that you are paying enough tax. What do you think all this privacy invasion is for? The War on Terrorism? You poor dupe. All your finances for them to scrutinize; heaven help you if you cannot account for every cent.
The authorities try make everything they say sound perfectly reasonable.
e.g. Officials from US Defence Department agency have said that they want, "the same level of accountability in cyberspace that we now have in the physical world".
Do government currently keep records of everything that you touch in the physical world to analyse?
No they do not - So then, is that the same level of accountability?
They wish to keep an electronic tag on you, like some kind of animal. Actually it is even worse than this - like some pervert sex offender - a child molester that they have to keep track of. Would any person of intelligence call that accountability?
Do not believe the lies of Government - even more of your money spent on these measures will not protect us from terrorists. Every argument they use is subterfuge - pure spin.
In UK, the RIP Act is unjust - dim-witted ill-informed MPs believed governments 'experts'. Remember - they will get everything about you, your phone calls, emails, TV viewing - everything. It would be like having a spy living in your house.
Americans - the Total Information Awareness plan, USA Patriot act and Homeland Defence - you are more technologically aware, are you really that easily misled?
I cannot stress enough - all your personal thoughts, hopes and fears will be open to them. I know from experience, as fact, they have no morals and will purposefully twist this information to use against you. I have documentary evidence of this - actual government agency case notes. Should government take legal action to deny that they pervert how personal information is used, then these documents may be viewed in a court of Law.
P.S. The United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization and the United States Department of Commerce are hiding the simple solution to trademark and domain name problem. The solution was ratified by honest attorneys. Please visit my site - not associated with United Nations WIPO.org. The United Nations WIPO deal with these conflicts - but are without honour and too cowardly to directly answer my easy questions (as are the US DoC).
...the Internet monitors YOU.
This violates article 12 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
I'm beginning to feel that the Federal government is starting to consider itself more of a marketing agency, than a political entity. After all, with both this AND the Poindexter database, imagine the money that could be made in a budget pinch on re-selling some of the info.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Thanks for destroying my ping times (as if they aren't bad enough already).
NOW, I have to spend more money to get access to a server on foreign soil, and have ALL my traffic run through an ssh tunnel to that machine before being routed to the actual destination.
The alternative is to have all the damn monitoring software slow it down through the normal routes, AND lose any semblance of privacy in the process.
Why does the United States Government feel obliged to try and control things they have no juristiction over? If they're going to do this, then they need to open and read every letter and document that goes through the post office as well... since terrorists will then go back to using paper mail (not enough manpower to open, read, reseal ALL of it) and, as usual, honest citizens will suffer.
Just like copy-protection, punish the honest people since criminals will find ways around it regardless...
As for me, I think it's time to use PGP or a related tool at all times. I've honestly been lazy about it. Time not to be.
sulli
RTFJ.
In other news, Slashdot users are 'planning to propose calling President Bush a moron'.
Suck me off and swallow, Ashcroft.
Then he'll have your DNA, too!
Only two types of people worry about surveillance...
1) The paranoid who derive an inflated sense of self esteem believing that someone would actually care enough about them to monitor their activities.
2) Those with criminally malfeasant intensions.
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/eth0
Got proof? Show us. Examples, not rhetoric or wild paranoid theories or analogies, please. The US is not Italy. It is not National Socialist Germany. Bzzt. Try again.
Otherwise, you're just a piss in the wind.
And try not to think too hard about the fact that the very system you hate and abhor allows you the best freedom in the world to criticize it; you might get dizzy.
Yeah, the moral questions are important. But I also wonder about the technical side.
If every packet on the internet is both going to its intended receiver and into a surveilence database, how much will that slow down the internet and/or increase its cost?
DARPA's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project is slowly shrinking from public view. According to a CNET story: "the TIA site shrank still more and some links ceased to work. Biographical information about the TIA project leaders, including retired Adm. John Poindexter, disappeared from the Defense Department's site last month."
.com bust was bad, wait until you have to prove that you're government friendly in order to get a job.
CNET goes on to report that, "the disappearing documents come as the TIA has become a lighting rod for criticism and as online activists have been turning the tables on Poindexter by reposting his personal information and home telephone number as widely as possible."
What has not changed is the Information Awareness Office's (IAO) commitment to TIA. The IAO "vision" clearly states:
"The most serious asymmetric threat facing the United States is terrorism, a threat characterized by collections of people loosely organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to identify and define. IAO plans to develop technology that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks, their plans, and potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats. To effectively and efficiently carry this out, we must promote sharing, collaborating and reasoning to convert nebulous data to knowledge and actionable options. IAO will accomplish this by pursuing the development of technologies, components, and applications to produce a proto-type system."
What is most interesting about the TIA project is the program strategy "focusing on the development of:
"1) architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database, for system elements associated with database population, and for integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools;
2) novel methods for populating the database from existing sources, create innovative new sources, and invent new algorithms for mining, combining, and refining information for subsequent inclusion into the database; and,
3) revolutionary new models, algorithms, methods, tools, and techniques for analyzing and correlating information in the database to derive actionable intelligence.
In short, the government wants free access to all of your personal data, including, but not limited to medical, financial, family history, and all public records.
I think we can safely say that George Orwell was right and McCarthyism is alive and well.
Anyone want to guess how many of your developer, coder, dba, Network Admin, Hacker friends will be "black-listed" after refusing to adhere to the coming government guidelines? Hmmm, and I thought the
As for G. W., I doubt that he's going to get voted in during the 2004 elections, since it's doubtless by now that he's going to have half the country nuked by screwing with Iraq.
... and I hope you weren't serious in evaluating Iraq as a serious nuclear threat to us.)
Yeah, Bush's horrible 65% approval rating really hurt the Republicans in this last election. Riiight.
(Oh!
Face it, the masses love this guy. There's nothing that he can do wrong so long as he keeps consolodating power in the background while waving the flag of fighting Iraq in the foreground. We're doomed to another 4 years of him, and there's nothing that we can do. Privacy issues? Corporate accountability? The environment? Corruption in government? No one cares anymore. No one but marginalized intellectuals care, and we aren't a significant voter base in this nation of happy and complacently uninformed consumers.
Hell, they don't even care that we still haven't gotten Osama bin Ladin yet, just like GWB's dad never got Sadaam Hussein. GWB started beating the Iraq war drums when it became evident that we weren't going to get him. As long as we've perpetually got some future military action to keep America distracted, he can do whatever he likes with a high approval rating. As long as Americans know that we'll never get mired in another Vietnam and we can sit back and plunk missles and bombs at disadvantaged enemies, they'll love any Republican President that gets us involved in a war, because Republicans know just what kinds of enemies get Americans riled up.
"Corrupt Somalians oppressing their people? Butchers in the Balkans performing 'ethnic cleansing?' Who cares? Get our boys back home!" As long as they can keep the masses scared, they'll ladel love and worship on any President who "stands up to" a country that would never ever defeat us in a straight-up war. Bush knows it. Clinton got us involved in wars in other nations based on issues and principles like opposing racist genocide without giving us a reason to fear the enemies. America hated it. The key to the love of the American people is fear of foreigners. As long as you can stoke up nationalism and fear of another nation, you can keep their hearts by doing something about the "problem."
It's disgusting. Real issues don't matter. Constitutional freedoms, civil liberties, and the accountability of those in power don't matter next to fighting Eastasia or Eurasia in our coming Orwellian nightmare. Welcome to at least four more years of Bush and four more years of the War against Terrorism where the words Freedom and Terrorism have lost all meaning.
Screw this. I'm voting Green in 2004. If whoever I vote for is destined to lose anyway, I want a chance for federal money to go to someone in 2008 who'll try to at least get issues in the public limelight without fear of "looking bad" like the Democrats will in the next election. I'll bet money that they'll soft-shoe their way through the next election without raising any issues like they did this year in the new Democrat / "Republicans Lite" fashion. At least in 2008, there's a chance the American people will have become tired of Bush after he has four years to run the nation into the ground without caring about getting reelected.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
that pushed against a national id card? Sounds dyslexic
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Nope, that's not good enough. I want a well documented proof in the public record. I want the guilty to stand trial and be convicted for all to see. You know, sworn testimony and all that. CNN film footage is not reasonable proof, even if it contains proportedly self incrimiating statements. I want the folks who made those statements caught and tried and proved guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Even self incrimination is not enough when you are dealing with suicide bombers!
You don't get that kind of proof from snooping on inocent people's email and business transactions. You get that kind of proof by examining witnesses and physical evidence AFTER a crime has been commited. Total Information Awareness will not prevent or solve terrorism any more than the universal police camera coverage in London has decreased crime or terrorism there. Total Information Awareness is simply a move towards tracking and harassing opposition. In the future it can be used to eliminate that opposition and it will be.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here's an article that is discussing capturing all traffic in the UK. From the BBC article
AOL's Director of Public Policy Camille de Stempel told MPs that it would cost it £25m just to implement the requirements and another £9m to maintain each year.
It would also require 360,000 CDs a year to store all the data.
It also emerged that ISPs would not be able to simply pass the CDs on to the police.
This would contradict rules in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which state that any requests for communications data must be proportional to the crime committed.
Instead ISPs would have to search for particular pieces of information, requiring an indexed and organised system which would push up the costs still further.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Or in simpler terms, Freedom and Liberty have no borders.
omicoo--
The Students for an Orwellian Society also stand in support of the realization of Orwell's great dream as set forth in his prophetic work in 1984. Unite to bring Orwell and Bush's dream of IngSoc to the Oceania people today!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"The Pope? How many divisions does he have?"
- Uncle Joe.
Why do people care about Brin's vision as anything other than a cool premise for a sci-fi novel?
And it has begun! George Orwell's vision is eventually going to become a reality, sooner than we though. If this thing passes and my ISP is required to spy on me 1) I will no longer vote republican and 2) I will no longer use the internet This is taking away all the things we hold dear for privacy in this nation. Bush is stupid to think that people in the middle east are using AMERICAN ISPs. Seriously. This won't even put a dint, nay a chip, in the problem. Thanks Mr. Bush but no thanks. You will lose my trust, my vote, and my faith in the things we hold so dear in America. Good bye free world, and good bye Republican party.
(I'm a U.S. Citizen who also finds this all very disturbing.)
;-) ).
I agree with you, they probably would bumble around for the first several years or decade. But the problem is that Government has inertia on its side. They would just keep plugging away at it until they finally got it working. In the mean time you would hear horror stories about normal people being wrongly accused of evil things (the victims of some bad SQL LEFT JOINS
You might think that these stories would cause a public outcry and cancel the project for good. I really hope this would be so, but I am too cynical to expect it. I think a much more likely scenario is that a bunch of people's live are made miserable as part of the beta stage and the our government roles ponderously on towards its goal of policing the world (and no, I don't like this).
I doubt the project would be cancelled, and if it were, the government would probably just try again a few years/decades later.
Thoughts, anyone?
---=+=---
"Now if I were a landing thruster, which one of these would I be?"
-- Londo in Babylon 5
Self Censorship.
This is really the trick behind any form of censorship.
The moment you know that suspicious activity is tagged, you will stop behaving "suspiciously". This again raises the profile of the few that does.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Must be something hallucigenic in that Potamic water ... They just announced $11+ billion to implement a star wars system that has not has significant experimental success yet.
What are the chances of creating IP v.12 where all data is encrypted? Would there be too much overhead in the encryption/decryption?
Here's a thought why don't we just ditch the Internet? Set up some kind of decentralized
:)
network using some sort of wireless transmission, develop some heavy encryption, set it up with commodity hardware GPL (or BSD) license the software side of things.
Or much easier just get BBSs back online, granted they can monitor the phone lines but some sort of protection could be worked out.
Or we can all just move to Canada
-troy
In Soviet Russia, the government spies on you! Oh wait, it also happens here in America?
I just simply wonder how can this be legal? I mean this is like having the US Postal Service keeping a record of who you send mail to. Then again, I'm saying this if it is only keeping a record of where packets come from and go to. If this includes checking their contents, then it will be equivalent to opening and reading each piece of mail you send.
I really haven't seen a worst gov than this one in my life. These guys have to be dumb, as dumb as it gets.
It is a known fact that the intel agencies are the ones at fault. If they would have done their job, 9/11 wouldn't have happened. And now, everyone is paying for this.
I sincerely cannot see this guy being re-elected again. Not only was 9/11 bad enough, but this is becoming 9/11, part 2.
Submit
3) those who have habits/conditions which they desire to keep private which can include things from porn to clinical depression etc.
This information while not illegal could be embarrassing and therefore useful for blackmail, boardroom coups, politics of personal destruction, discrimination.
you are terribly short sighted to forget #3
Sounds like familiar doublespeak. Perhaps you meant "Freedom is Slavery."
You know, I used to think all references to 1984 were over-the-top black helicopter crowd nonsense, but Bush has brought me around. Did you know he was born just a couple of years before the book came out? Maybe it was his bedtime reading as a toddler.
Remember when the White House proposed an office of disinformation -- and got driven back? Wouldn't they have done better with "Ministry of Truth"?
Remember:
* War Is Peace
* Freedom Is Slavery
* Ignorance Is Strength
* Big Brother Is Watching You
(The SOS site has other useful tips.)
There is another country where the government controls/monitors the internet usage of its citzens. The name of this country is China, a place that the US government loves to critize for their "human rights" record. When will Americans start realizing that with every step we take, we're becoming more and more like that.
Wouldn't it be funny/ironic/sad if in 2010 the citizens of China had greater personal freedom than people living in the great United States of America? You laugh now, but it's happening.
Protection from terrorism, yes. Giving up what makes us Americans, HELL NO!
"Never underestimate how much money can be blown for useless or nefarious purposes."
And never assume that all the brains lies in either the US government, or the US for that matter.
That's why export laws were relaxed on cryptographic devices and research.
So the remedy is to add requests for searches until it overloads.
At lease there's some consolation in knowing that this kind of thinking will be condemned by history and future generations will not look at all kindly on this kind of intrusion. Dubya will forever be associated with a horribly misguided witch hunt.
Lets just start an initiative to fill their new found databases with false information. They will be in a constant state of "upgrading" they will never have a chance to catch it all. ;D
.. or did I hear it wrong ?
I am sure it wasn't "Land of the Monitored, and Home of the Freaked Out", but I could be mistaken..
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
Overheard by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln said to haunt the halls of the White House in a thick Texas drawl, between fits of laughter:
"Hey, I know how we can make the eighth largest committee contributor*, the Music, Movies and TV Industry, happy and squash the first amendment at the same time! Wait 'till I tell John and Carl!"
Also interesting:
2002 giving by the RIAA PAC: here.
2000: here.
2000 Lobbying funds spent by the RIAA: here.
SIGNATURE REMOVED BY ORDER OF JOHN POINDEXTER following review by MSCoIntelPro2.0 filter running on House Unamerican Affairs servers (McCarthyME.gov).
I'm sure they have plenty experience in monitoring their Internet for subversive content.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Try "...centralized internet surveillance proposes U.S!"
"police state"
"police state"
"police state"
Liability laws holding businesses responsible in the civil sense for damage done to end users or other businesses using their computers and networks would clean up the "corporate idiots spreading [virus of the week]" problem, the insurance companies will force their customers to clean up their acts immediately.
Liability laws holding end users responsible the same way and a few high-profile lawsuits will have the same impact.
A "safe harbor" for "best practices" makes this fair. Perhaps ISPs could be required to distribute anti-viral software or firewall software that updates automatically with their installation, or to require their use via TOS.
If you're a home user:
Best practices for businesses depends largely on business size. Consensus can be created to provide explicit guidelines as to what businesses in X size range should be doing without limiting overly what businesses can use for servers and workstations. If a business wants to run IIS/XP, I think it stupid, but as long as they're competently managed, OK, the dangerous installations are the ones run right out of the box by people whose MSCE certificates are still drying anyway.
Cost to taxpayers? Pretty minimal, much of it would largely be recovered by court costs.
Effectiveness? If you are not a member of the Bush Administration, you know that about 99% of all malware depends on somebody leaving a gateway for trouble, patches not up to date, antivirus not up to date, or not bothering to read the articles that would tell the user not to click on file attachments from unknown people.
The stuff we need end users to do is NOT rocket science. The stuff businesses need to do can be done by any competent sysadmin. If they don't have one, what the hell are they doing on the Internet? They are no more entitled to dump bad packets on the Net than they are to dump their raw sewage into the people's drinking water.
The zero-day exploits we're mostly all vulnerable to, but they are also pretty rare.
So we have a simple and relatively cheap way to make people and businesses responsible for cleaning up their own acts.
Who says that this is impossible?
Why does the Bush Adminstration want to create a single monitoring point / single attack point for enemies? Answer that question for yourself. It isn't like there's no other choices for securing the Net.
I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish this as well, and I'd like to see some discussed.
Tech Public Policy stuff
fucking years!
Sorry, this story really got me mad, and since 600+ other comments have already been made, I will just reiterate the collaborative thought.
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" -- George Orwell
http://www.w3w3.com/Interview/PCIPB/RClarke.htm
4 33 5.html
Here are some of the players including TIFFANY OLSON, quoted in so many articles today... Also RICHARD CLARKE, the head of the group.
http://www.techinformer.com/english/crd_data_94
The plan is in a state of "flux". Translation, they're gaging how the american people will react so they know what to-and-what-not-to include before they release the final draft.
Beware of all of the propaganda posted on this thread, it's only there to scare, or change the mind of the uninformed. (Ex: Slurp)
To all of those people that think parsing so much information is impossible: With the processing ability of the average PC nowadays, and the amount of money that's being dumped into "anti-terrorism", you do the math... a machine on every US owned network segment, damn!
The Bush Administration says that the new Govt. plans don't don't call for serious snooping... HA, they already do, and have been doing it for a long time. What about all of the honey-websites: your favorite news site, tracking the popularity of certain news articles ; like to read porn?
The fact is that they are finally beginning to realize that they neglected the power of the internet when they got started with all of this. Righteous patriots have made a big difference in just the last few days with regards to "delaying" a decision on Iraq, you could hear it in Bush's voice when interviewed today, he's worn. They are realizing that they can't win, and the internet is helping make that a reality!!!
Give Pizza Chance,
Another phantom 802.11zen
As far as I understand, to have a complete IPv6 implementation, it is required that it be possible to choose to use IPSEC. Eventually crypto will become transparent to people... How then will they continue to monitor? It would be *highly* CPU intensive to do umpti-gazillion man-in-the-middle attacks, and those are easy to stop with a chain of trust anyway...
SSL Certificate
Here's a new suggestion for you to add to your list: try not breathing! It is immoral for you to consume air and oxygen.
I am a 76 year old Marine Corps vet of WW-2 and the Koean conflict and I did not go thru that era to be shawdowed by Bush Lite and his distruction of the US with secrecy in the White house, Isolationism from the world and a blossoming dictatorship by his party. In other words we have a deslexic moron who was given the Office that he thinks he holds by our partisin supreme court and his Daddies buddy's. He has not addressed the problems in our country and now he wants to look past our bedroom door and start a war in the name of terrorism. Bluntly he is a sickie.
Here's the link for the pdf file for those who didn't read the whitehouse page far enough to read the reference to it.
Internet is not USA.
What is Echelon doing by the way?? Are they telling now that there is no Echelon?
As not being in US, i don't like the idea of being spied nor by echelon nor by us, uk, any government at all.
What then? Seeing a copyrighted picture in a webpage illegally becomes persecutable?
The Government runs tcpdump -host YOU!
BT
GOATS. Having Sechs.
Goatfuckers.
America till recently was the 'land of the free', remember that ? But of late, especially the last few years, the American establishment (remember the anti-establishment Hippie movement, anti-war and all that ?) is hell bent on muzzling the 'free' and the pre-eminent of it the internet. In all likelyhood America is transforming into a villain as compared to the assidously built image of the hero of the 'free world'. The 'melting pot' is starting to melt!
This information while not illegal could be embarrassing and therefore useful for blackmail, boardroom coups, politics of personal destruction, discrimination.
This is, in fact, what J Edgar Hoover used the FBI for. His personal blackmail tool. Even he had something to hide, though..