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More on Cisco Building Surveillance into Routers
An anonymous reader writes "The company recently published a proposal that describes how it plans to embed 'lawful interception' capability into its products. Among the highlights: Eavesdropping 'must be undetectable,' and multiple police agencies conducting simultaneous wiretaps must not learn of one another. If an Internet provider uses encryption to preserve its customers' privacy and has access to the encryption keys, it must turn over the intercepted communications to police in a descrambled form." See our earlier story and the RFC for background.
will they implement the evil bit?
Looks like just another opportunity to have our rights violated. I'm sure the Department of Homeland Insecurity is thrilled about this. Is this what Cisco means by "Empowering the Internet Generation"?
If you encrypt everything yourself, there's not much they can do about it, now is there?
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
As it says though, don't blame Cisco. If they didn't do it, sure as shootin' someone else would. Blame Ashcroft. Hopefully Cisco will find a way to build auditing tools into this to help promote responsible use.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
Is it just me, or is this another great reason to buy cheaper, better network equipment from someone else? If I were running Cisco, I would be a little more concerned with the market share being sucked up by newer companies than with adding the cost of undetectable snooping to the product line.
Now I certainly feel justified in moving my company off of Cisco's overpriced products.
Bummer...
im sure it will be propriorty like everything else they do so noone will be able to use it anyway. God knows they have never read a RFC
Cisco is just being an upstanding and Patriotic American(TM) under the all-American DMCA, CTEA, and PATRIOT Acts, lawfully passed by the Congress Corporation, and signed into American Best-Practices by Chairman Bush.
"Privacy is dead. Get over it." - Scott McNealy
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
Like I'd ever hand over my encryption keys to my ISP.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
If this is true, and Cisco does go forward with this, I will be sure not to buy anything Cisco. I will have to look for other devices to preform what is needed. Yeah, Cisco wont hurt by me not buying them, but if the word spreads, and people boycott Cisco for doing this, im sure they will change their mind unless Big Brother is giving them funds/tax breaks/whatever to get them to do this.
I suggest to you, poor people. :)
So what happens when a black hat gets in?
Answer: a completely open router that acts like none of his packets have the "evil bit" set.
Really, this is starting to worry me. If it's all undetectable, and is built in, how is this different from the telescreens in 1984? Big Brother is reading your packets!
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
I guess i can understand why Cisco is opting to build these types of technologies into their equipment, given the current U.S. political climate. But what about all the other nations of the planet that aren't reverting to McCarthy'ism? Will Cisco still be exporting non-backdoor-compliant hardware as well?
This doesn't seem to be that big a deal to me. If you're passing large amounts of data around that would attract the attention of people who could get a lawful intercept warrant, then I would assume you are smart enough to use SSH, IPSec, or some other similar secure communications technology that renders the capability of this system useless. I smell an attempt to get a law mandating that ISPs upgrade to this equipment, meaning they'll have to replace all their existing non-conforming equipment by some date. I imagine the post-dot-com networking market is taking a hurting now.
"They" can already get IP logs and such that reveal a lot even without access to the information contained in the packets. Traffic analysis is a very powerful tool. The only people who would really stand a lot to lose from this would be the music and/or warez traders. Warez isn't that big a deal, and music copying isn't a big criminal deal here in Canada.
*shrug* Another cash grab. Hope someone 0wns the system good and makes Cisco look stupid. Oh, wait, DMCA. Nevermind.
..don't panic
or the very stupid evildo-er.
/dev/random to all my comrades they will never EVER figure it out.
If I simply send everything encrypted AND send lots of fake packets... I.E. random sized files that consist of the contents of
It's called hiding in a sea of garbage. Now write a nice small program that is a P2P sharing app (or a plug-in for one) that sends around some of those random files to other users (small ones 1-100K in size then keep your files in that size range)
Screw with them as they screw with you.
so a freenet node will completely hose this "eavesdropping system"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"multiple police agencies conducting simultaneous wiretaps must not learn of one another" -- If the police cannot determine if a wiretap is running on the router, then what is to stop a malicious party from running one there without administrative knowledge?
"Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" -Juvenal
Just when you thought it was safe, you find out you cannot even go outside your own net.
Stuff like this is going to hasten a return to peer to peer dial-up services like we had in the early 90's. Stuff like this seriously gives me the creeps. Knowing that my business's and my private info can be tapped like that and by multiple agencies is just...
Say it all together now...
Evil.
War 1984...not...
What is the point of encryption if you have to give up the keys. I say its up the the spooks to have the capabilities to crack my encryption rather than force me to hand over the keys. Even then, I'd only hand over the keys in encrypted form, still forcing them to use their supper computers. Serriously, encryption is a black and white area... some grey, but mostly either a situation where you use it, or don't...
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
McCullagh makes an excellent point that US government agencies have a history of illegal surveillance. If protecting the public justifies building in eavesdropping capability, then it equally justifies building in accountability. Terrorists and civilian criminals aren't the only menaces to the public. Surveillance activity should be logged and sent to secure storage which can be accessed through well-defined legal channels.
You should absolutely Blame Cisco!
sulli
RTFJ.
Pine, a Dutch company already created such software.
Why don't you use your own?
I also never buy Cisco crap, not just for this recent reason, but also for their "assistance" to third-rate/world country's censorship efforts...
Since eavesdropping on quantum encrypted transmissions is always detectable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If they do start to implement such eavesdropping facilities, I imagine that a lot of people might switch to routers powered by open source (such as Linux, BSD) so they can really know what's under the hood. Remember that a low end Pentium running Linux can easily route 10/100 Mbps.
That being said, Cisco knows that companies that used to buy from them will still probably buy from them. So this can't be a huge risk to their company. But the 'new features' would firmly embed government eavesdropping facilities in major ISPs, banks, large companies, schools, universities, etc.
I am sure if you take the time visit your local rancher, he'll have something around his property to satisfy your urges. tksinfoyoroktksbye.
Drive home safely!
I get what you are saying, but this is not a new concept. I used to work for a big cell-phone maker, in the cellular software division. I saw preliminary information about a wiretap project that would allow the carrier to intercept, log, and reroute calls if told to do so by some authorized government agency. I have no doubts this is possible, because we were working on real-time systems. To do it would take a second or two at most. I don't know what ever happened to that project, it kind of faded away and our department didn't actually work on it. But this was back in '94, so I am sure something similar has been implemented somewhere.
This isn't new, we are just able to find out about things like this now because of the internet. As much as we don't want "our" technology mucked with by the government, I think it is going to be tough to prevent.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What do mean? This IS SLASHDOT you know!
...because the loss of privacy leads to victimisation.
Sure, you're not doing anything illegal. But Inspector Plod is watching you anyway, and hey, he sees you downloading an interesting piece of porn.
Oh! It turns out you like watching [insert odd sex act here]. He guesses that might mean you are a member of [potentially embarrassing minority group]. He then uses this evidence to make your life hell.
Political groups can use these increased surveillance powers to spy on their opponents. Everyone ends up feeling "watched" and suddenly no-one trusts anyone anymore.
Protect your privacy while you still can.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
The real problem I see here is that we are creating a methods by which a government member can know absolutely anything about anyone at any particular point. Now what if we (meaning the US) mistakenly elect government officials with very bad intentions? It HAS happened before in democratic countries, and I will neglect specific examples in order to avoid Godwin's Law. I don't necessarily fear what our current government will do with these technologies. I DO fear the prospect of a group of rogues using an infrastructure that we implemented for evil. I really believe that it is necessary in a free society to maintain some methods of secret communication. All revolutions which resulted in a better society required channels of secret communication that were unheard by 'Big Brother' as some may say.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
In case you haven't picked it up from the article, the designation for this new protocol is DPUG..Double Plus UnGood.
If you don't like the ramifications of using a Cisco product, then don't buy one. ( i know i wont purchase another )
Then, tell them why you wont buy their product and choose a competitor that hasn't vowed to violate their users privacy rights.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yay, another ignorant, there are certainly an abundance of people on slashdot who have the "I have nothing to hide" mentality.
You say pirate software, sure it's illegal. But what I visited web sites or downloaded materials related to religions? or sexuality? completly legal materials. And imagine an agent, who has his own moral views and decide he dosen't agree with what you are doing, even tho is completly legal, he can make your life a living hell, this goes for most everything, our privacy is the most important part of our freedom, because other people don't always share our views. Especially on very controversial issues.
I'll go ahead and assume you're just a youngin, because any adult in his/her right mind knows this, and knows that the ability to believe in what you want is the real freedom, without having people in power being able to discriminate.
Posting useless rant since 2003.
The only thing that surprises me is that they have been so slow to implement it. The government already has the equivalent of this for phone tapping:
Virtually all phone calls (cellular and land line) in America run through certain switches controlled by Verint and they are always used by law enforcement for wiretapping (and are constantly accused of abusing their authority). (Google for Comverse, the company's name before the recent change to Verint.)
Why do I h8 apple?
Because Cisco is purchasing Linksys.
'and multiple police agencies conducting simultaneous wiretaps must not learn of one another'
Because if they did then all they would do all day is send data to each other through the router about what doughnut, gun, and police force is best...
The funny thing is... I'm an army reserve and Auxiliary Police Officer which means I can make fun of myself!
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
So, the cops can packet sniff. Really, they could do that before, all this does is provide a better mechanism to do so. If we are talking about privacy, hardware is not the issue, the current laws are. If packet sniffing requires a courts approval, what does it matter if it is implemented in the hardware or not?
I guess, to me, this really isn't a huge deal, just an easier way for the cops to do their job.
So then Inspector Plod duly notes this. Later, when you speak out on a public issue unpopular with Inspector Plod's superiors, your affection for [insert odd sex act] is mysteriously leaked to the media.
You might want to ask Scott Ritter about a misdemeanor "sealed" arrest record that strangely became public knowledge after he publicly criticized recent Iraq policies.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
I tend to think that is what is being discussed here.
All hail encryption. All the more reason to encrypt everything.
Time to setup white list mail servers that only accept email from other white list mail servers where the keys have been shared via offline media.
These servers will interconnect via PPP over SSH connections (the keys will also be shared offline)
The filesystems on these machines will be encrypted also using keys stored on easy (and quickly) destroyable media (such as meltable USB memory sticks)
Just ideas...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Thats IT... I'm moving to Cuba they seem alot more free over there. Make room on the cot Elian.
So please get your heads out of the collective sand and realize that if your voice, VOIP or data traffic leaves your facilities its going to be picked up if someone wants to see it. So this is not new, nor is it news nor is it any different than what we already have in place.
I think the real motivation for the undetecatblilty by other snoopers clause is for this reason: if you were doing something illegal, and it were possible to detect a tap if you were also tapping, then it would make sense to tap your own connection, and you could determine if anyone else (the feds / police) were doing so
With all these new über DMCA bills being passed aroung the country and which make it look like firewalls, VPN, etc.... are going to be made illegal.
Its finally coming into focus. All these privacy measures aren't going to be illegal, but will probably have to be purchased through your carrier, who, by the way has a copy of the key (imagine that). This will allow them to tap into you 'secure' connection at will, as well as pass it along to whatever authorities request it.
The both the providers and feds/local authorities would love this arrangement. The providers get a captive audience, and laws would be in place to protect them, and keep them from getting dragged into court. And the feds get to tap whoever's 'secure' connection they like.
Just a guess, but given the strong arm tactics being used lately, it wouldn't surprise me.
So go with Sun or Linux for networking gear. IMNSHO Solaris and IPFilter makes the best firewall anyway. Linux has good support in other areas such as 802.1Q spanning tree bridging and other neat tidbits. If the technology is open there is no where to hide.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
With all that's going on.. gee RFID tags, Patriot
Act,.... pretty soon our DNA will be on file.
And if your DNA is on file, then you can be
framed for a crime you did not commit.
I can't think of a single decent managed switch that doesn't come with a spanning port. This isn't any different in practice--it's just a system that allows for particular LE situations to be handled correctly. And for christs' sake, what's wrong with a lawful warrant? They even have those in fucking Canada and France, so why does "lawful intercept" immediately turn into "Evil American Facism"?
Did it ever occur to any of the bitchers and moaners here that when the FBI or the cops need to intercept network communications, they're working in the dark much of the time? They have a legal obligation to collect only what their warrant specifies, and nothing further. This is difficult, to say the least. Carnivore (and Magic Lantern, or whatever they call it now) is just a sniffer that is optimized for being VERY SELECTIVE about what it captures.
Why? Because if the FBI has a warrant for Guido Gambino's net traffic, but they accidently pick up some of Tony Gambino's traffic, too, stuff outside the warrant is tainted. Any good defense attorney could make the Feds look like monkeys on something like that. These guys are generally heavily incentivized to NOT violate your rights. This isn't absolute, but thanks to criminal defense lawyers, it's pretty fucking close.
The point of Cisco pushing this draft is to start a discussion about how to let LE get what it needs (and what YOU want it) to get when investigating crimes, but without accidentally violating the rights of anyone outside the scope of its efforts.
There are some people around here (not nearly everybody, but some) who really ought to grow up and realize that the Net isn't Stephen Levy's little MIT-hacker-paradise anymore. Real people, who sometimes commit very real crimes, use it, too. Do you think they all ought to get a free pass just because they're "cool" enough to use email?
Then again, in the RIAA age anything is possible.
Does this mean that ISP's are also required to inform their customers when/if they are using equipment that could potentially be used to gather information on you?
not to debate the point (privacy is hugely important) but if you are doing things which you are ashamed of, maybe you should ask yourself a few questions.
In Scott Ritter's case, he was accused propositioned sex from (who he thought) an underage girl over the internet. In fact it was an undercover police officer.
Either the charges are true, or they aren't. If they are true, Ritter should go to prison. If they aren't, then his name is cleared. Otherwise, from your example, Inspector Plod could just make up any old charge he wanted to and "leak it to the media" anyway.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I'm not buying anymore cisco products.
All data passing through a Cisco switch or router can already be examined, observed, or archived. I've designed countless Cisco networks with intrusion detection in either hardware or IOS. If the government is demanding accountability for data traffic then something has to be added to the network to make that data available. Just as with external IDS this causes bottlenecks.
If companies are forced to comply with government and law-enforcement demands then they want a way to comply with the least disruption to their business. Remember we are talking about ISPs here. Your personal equipment is not going to have a jack that Ashcroft can plug into to get his kicks from reading your IMs.
This is reality now. It will do no good to direct your rage at Cisco. Exercise your rights, and your brain, by voting. Your fantasy that the market leader is going to take a stand for individual rights in the face of draconian Federal policy and change the course of history is laughable.
When will you guys learn? An RFC and an Internet Draft are *very* different. Go to www.ietf.org for some clue.
Thus its not like itsa new form of intrusion or the ersoion of a sacred right. Moreover we have an extensive legal system that already know how to walk an acceptable line between preserving public order and unlawful searches and seizures. yes there are flagrant abuses of course, but the basic level of public expectaion and legal machinery is inplace to deal with this
Thus the real question is if the ascroft era people will try to use this as an end-run around the existing legal machinery. I paraphrase a former missouri senator who said (about carnavor-like intrusion) "I dont put a phone jack on the outside of my house so the feds can listen in when they please, so I dont want a jack on my internet connection for the same purpose". Ironically that senator was the John ascroft before he lost hisz relection bid to a dead man and became the worst attourney general ever including edwin meese. Now he chafes at these restrictions and does indeed want such a jack and the pre-emptive authority to use it without a court order, probable cause, or a defined list of evidence to be gathered.
Thus I welcome the cisco method since it formalizes what is now a covert and thus unmonitored process. thus this may bring the light of public scrutiniy and invite the invocation of past legal precedent.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Boy, it sure looks like a lot of you guys have a great plan in place. "I will spew much encrypted garbage data along with encrypted real data!" "I will encrypt my own shit and not give up the key! If I have to give up the key, the key will be encrypted!!" I wonder: how long would you sit in jail, without parole or phone call, until you decide to give the keys up to the local police? Because those guys don't care how encrypted your shit is, and thanks to the current administration they don't have to.
If you're wondering why Cisco - who has enough money to buy just about anyone except for Microsoft or Motherfucking Fujitsu Heavy Industries - is bothering to implement this particular technology, consider the above.
"The most cigarettes."
i am curious what the performance of a router is going to look like with two agencies peering into it.
on the face of it this is going to look like a provider outage i am thinking. since its completely 'transparent' even with multiple big brothers or any blakc hat people that might have jumped on the router as well i am thinking.
if nothing is going to show up in the interface statistics and nothing in the cpu is going to account for the activity. but when you look at your csu/dsu (or equivlent) you will see the activity.
maybe the best way to deal with this is to forget using the real traffic, but rather use the rfc that they propose for actual communication since its invisible to the other peers. sounds like a stealth vpn to me of sorts.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
It's not like wiretapping is not possible right now, it's just that there is no standard way of doing it. I assure you, every reasonable ISP has taps in place, if not for the government, then for its own internal use - to be able to diagnose problems, track DOS's, etc.
The solution is what it always has been - you are responsible for your privacy. Use encryption - SSH, PGP, etc to protect yourself from eavesdropping.
Now if the government passed a law forbidding encryption, that would be a whole different story.
grisha.org
Physical limitations that provide what we today call "privacy" are already on the way out the door. In a hundred years, technology will be at the point where every private citizen will be able to see and hear just about anything anywhere.
Whether this is good or bad for society is another matter, but it's been suggested that we'll simply need to adapt. Arguably, using information obtained through "privacy-invading" means is just childish immaturity, when you look at the big picture. Maybe our society just needs to grow out of that?
Fighting change in this area of technology only delays the inevitable and keeps the abilities in the hands of the surreptitious and those who *would* use it solely for their own benefit.
Something to think about...
It's an Internet Draft, not an RFC. From RFC 2026 (slightly reformatted to placate the "lameness filter"):
> > about a misdemeanor "sealed" arrest
> he was accused propositioned sex from an underage girl
I don't have any first-hand knowledge of such laws, but I would think that that would be more than a misdemeanor, no? I would hope it is at least.
Sweet dreams are made of me!
Sail the oceans and the seven seas!
I am watch-ing you through a camera!
Christian, White, Male, 30 years old, $50K/year, Republican-Conservative.
Except for these changes:
Anti-Religion, Italian (close enough), Male, 29 years old, 180K/year (and rising), Democrat-Liberal.
Guess I'll have to buy a few politicians.
I live in a state where the people elect a Democratic Gov., Democratic Senate, Democratic House, and every national elected official is a Republican? How the fuck does that jive? If I hear one more dipshit say "I vote for the person, not the party." I'm going to lose it, these are the same people if you ask them 10 questions about the candidate they voted for they would be lucky to get more than 5 right (assuming they are true/false questions). Vote for the person my ass, more like vote for the better commercial.
I don't know if it is a felony or not, but I know of several folks who are doing BIG jail time for this. They would have been better off selling crack.
we still haven't gotten it after several thousand years.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
...equate to privacy being required? It seems to me that you're assuming it's a bad thing for an anti-porn person to discover someone watching porn. Maybe this would force them to talk, and to get a better understanding of each other. Maybe it would help the anti-porn people understand that sexual desires are normal and healthy, and maybe it would help the pro-porn people understand that there is a lot of exploitation in the porn industry. Maybe it would even lead to better regulation of porn to remove such problems. It seems to me that the major reason North America (maybe the world, I haven't travelled much) is so fucked up on a sexual level is that we don't talk about it enough, and as a result we don't have the faintest idea what normal is.
Yeah!
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Cisco is playing lab dog to the government but not its customers.
No. Cisco is trying to self-regulate so they can perform IP "wiretapping" on their own terms. The arrival of IP telephony tapping at your local ISP is inevitible; Cisco would be foolish to ignore it.
I work for a telecom equipment manufacturer. (yes, one of the few remaining..) My current project is testing the feature on our TDM switch that supports CALEA. (hence the anonymous post..) The capabilities of CALEA-compliant systems do not greatly expand on the old-fashioned method of physically tapping a suspect's copper line. They just simplify the telephone company's ability to administer taps. Basically, it just brings wiretapping to the digital age.
One thing to note is that the telephone companies, not the law enforcement agencies, are the people administering the taps. It is this separation that protects us from over-zealous police. Before the telco creates a tap, they must receive a court order. If they don't have a judge's signature, they tell to agency to blow smoke.
The FBI is scared $hitless about the convergence of circuit and packet-switched networks. IP telephony is much easier to secure than twisted-pair. But, just as people can buy a set of encrypting handsets for their regular telephones, people can add encryption on top of their IP voice call. Its generally only the crooks that do that, but the capability exists for anyone to do so. In fact, its significantly easier in IP, which is why the FBI is so scared.
I'm not worried about Cisco's RFC. I would rather the rules for how to tap IP telephony come from a knowledgable IP player than from the FBI. If Cisco doesn't write the RFC and get some semblance of a working system, Congress (through the FBI) will write it, and THAT would be a disaster. If Cisco does it right, you can expect the RFC to become law. And we should also expect an OSS implementation so ISPs can continue using Linux routers instead of having to buy Cisco just for the tapping ability.
In fact, I smell a potential business op^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H uh, never mind...
There are privacy nudists everywhere--the usual suspects who think it's perfectly fine to have the government's fingers in every corner of your life.
Slashdot just seems to have a large amount of them. You can always guarantee that when Taco puts up an article like this where privacy is being RAPED by corporate collusion with government, one of these nudists will immediatly come out and say "I don't have a problem with this" or "why is this a problem? I don't break the law so I have nothing to worry about!"
It's as certain as the "first post" idiots. In fact, I daresay the "i have no problem with it" people are starting to give the first posters a run for their money.
Privacy is a basic human right. Big Brother surveillance programs deny us that right.
How ya like dat?
dont bother implementing encryption .. its unnecessary.
NOT.
encrypt everything.
The Cisco DOCSIS CMTS has had this feature for quite some time. The command is called 'cable intercept'. It allows the Cable operator to forward all traffic to/from a particular MAC address to a specified IP and UDP port.
/ ca ble/bbccmref/bbcmts.htm#1130717
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product
" ... multiple police agencies conducting simultaneous wiretaps must not learn of one another ..."
...!
...
Hoo-boy, this is going to lead to some interesting cases of mistaken identity
Makes me think of PKD's A Scanner Darkly
-kgj
The good thing about this (if there is one) is that it is not a law. Yet. It says in the article that many providers are still insuring that they can recieve products without this feature so that they will not the legally required to enable it.
The bad thing is that some parts of the internet infrastructure, especially in other countries, are owned by goverments. This will lead to the governments having more oversight without making a official requests.
Imagine those communites in America that were so greatful that their municipal government stepped up and provided them with subsidized fiber access. Will they be so greatful when systems like these get employed so local law enforcement gets to observe them?
Makes me feel like when Verizon turned my records over to the RIAA.
What is to keep someone from starting an OpenIOS project? Software to run on a Cisco router. A couple years ago I actually registered openios.com/org (registering the domain, about as far as 90% of my projects get) thinking that surely this is possible, maybe now is the time for it to start? I don't have near the expertise to start a project such as this, but surely it is possible.
This doesn't bother me at all; it just brings the internet to the same level as the telephone system. As long as they need a court-order to tap it (in the US), I think this is a fine idea.
Yeah, someone else could break in, too. Someone else could tape your phone as well. As long as there's a judge who has to sign off on it, I'm fine with this; getting ridding of the bad aspects the Patriot Act and DMCA should be the priority, then we won't need the paranoia over obvious solutions like the one Cisco has put forward.
Yay, another ignorant, there are certainly an abundance of people on slashdot who have the "I have nothing to hide" mentality.
Translation: "You're stupid, just like all the other people that don't agree with me.".
You say pirate software, sure it's illegal. But what I visited web sites or downloaded materials related to religions? or sexuality? completly legal materials. And imagine an agent, who has his own moral views and decide he dosen't agree with what you are doing, even tho is completly legal, he can make your life a living hell, this goes for most everything, our privacy is the most important part of our freedom, because other people don't always share our views. Especially on very controversial issues.
Translation: "An authority exists which has the potential to abuse it's power, therefore this authority must be kept weak by other methods, particularly ignorance."
This argument can be applied to remove any law enforcement. Yes, officers with bad attitudes can harass people for any number of reasons, race, sexual preference, or maybe they just got cutoff by a different white Honda on the way to the station this morning. Each of the previous three examples is wrong (as any crime), will always happen (as any crime) and should be punished (as any crime). Trust in law enforcement is a cornerstone of our society and should exist without all of us covering our tracks in daily life like criminals.
I'll go ahead and assume you're just a youngin, because any adult in his/her right mind knows this, and knows that the ability to believe in what you want is the real freedom, without having people in power being able to discriminate.
Translation: "I couldn't come up with any better arguments so I'm going to resort to name calling again."
Look, I understand that power corrupts. I strongly support individual rights and personal freedoms. But I would prefer to have these freedoms not through the furtive actions of looking over my shoulder to make sure no one is watching, but by the pervasive understanding throughout our society that we respect and even support one another's freedoms. To paraphrase an earlier patriot, I may not agree with what you (legally) do, but I will defend to the death your right to do it!
Note: I will also defend your right to resort to name calling, though I similarly reserve the right to hold it up to public ridicule. Done and done.
Sometimes even if the crime is a felony, the DA may choose to prosecute for a lesser crime if it is much more likely to get a conviction.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Also note that this company is owned and operated by Israel. That country has one of the worst human rights records in the world.
I'd love to create some crypto traffic between my home box and work machine (besides the normal SSH, of course). The more white noise packets floating around out there, the better. TCP/IP spook fodder, if you will.
Better yet, is there an encrypted, routed "internet" I can plug into at will when I'm online, just to obfuscate my traffic a bit? Or is that what Freenet is about?
Method of processing duck feet
They sold monitoring and censorship technology to the Chinese government, and weren't punished for it by the marketplace. So the chickens now come home to roost.
This really isn't that big of a deal, and can nearly be accomplished today (except for the decryption part) in many of Cisco's products. For instance, a common deployment of Cisco equipment is to put a router on a switch blade. Switches have the ability to span a port, duplicating all the traffic that comes and goes from one port to another. This is how you sniff in the switch world.
I would be much more fearful of laws that require encryption key escrows or laws that make it illegal to encrypt something to begin with.
The technical landscape, and advance of science is nearly impossible to control, except through really silly laws.
Casca
Because it's none of the Feds business. If you aren't concerned with your privacy, why do you post as 'beee', rather than under your real name? If you're a conservative, you should be worried that the ultra-liberal feds will take offense at your racist /. sig and toss you in jail. If you're a liberal, you should be afraid that the neo-fascists will come by and arrest you for opposing Gulf War II. If you have nothing to hide, why not let everybody from every government agency eavesdrop on your phone calls, e-mail, and website postings? Why not let them bug your house, car, place of employment, and your clothes? What are you trying to hide?
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
We have some capabilities in some of our equipment that will allow you to take all the traffic that goes across an interface and send it to another interface. Right now that is used in some cases as a lawful interception technology.
When we first started talking, some engineers said, "Let's turn this on and use that." I said, "Heavens no, if we can narrow the range of information, let's do it."
CISCO Port SPAN. This is what he is refering to. They can currently trap all the packets. This new technology will allow them to select a smaller subset of packets to capture...
This is still scary stuff, and will lead to other new encrypted VOIP stuff that is not built around Cisco hardware, but sending packets themselves, encrypted...
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
Tomorrow, MS/Palladium.
Fuck you John Ashcroft. You are the evil that the founding fathers warned us about. Now where the hell did I put that musket?
Look at the some of the guys which were released from prison after being cleared [innocented] by DNA evidence, and still people think him guilty (there was a ncie article about the procurator still thinking his conduct is suspect and the neighbourghs shunning him but I can't find a link).
Public follow (wrongly IMO) the old adage "there isn't smoke without fire". Cleared or not your REPUTATION is MARRED.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Well then I'll just make sure I download scads of photographs that depict: viciously violating the nether orifices of secret police persons with red hot pokers, razor encrusted batons, and other obscene instruments of unimaginable torture.
products - can you imagine a foreign government willingly purchasing a product that the Dept. of Homelame Insecurity has a back door to? There is a huge market outside the US and companies like Nortel are probably cheering Cisco on at this point.
Translation: "You're stupid, just like all the other people that don't agree with me.".
Hey, you DID get it right...
Umm.. the part i don't get is how the hell will you get multiple connections to the same device without seeing any of the other invisible connections connections...
I'm assumign this will still have to work via tcp/ip.. and there are strict limitations to what can route to where.. or atleast last time i checked... I don't think subnetting is gonna change any..
Multiple gateways to the internet using OSPF.. find my packets now.. some are here.. others are there.. some over there..
plus.. if they were capturing data wouldn't you notice it.. most ISP's dont have HUGE pipes.. and bandwidth is $$$..
I just see industrial espionage getting a whole lot easier.... "oh company X is using a cisco eh? let me call up my buddy in the internet protection agency.. he owes me a few favors"
america's freedoms are goin in the crapper.. I'm moving to IRAQ.. atleast there is real freedom there.
Having not read the article the following just came to mind:
Cisco recently purchased Linksys...Linksys makes networking devices for home and small business.
What would be the possibility of Linksys/Cisco building this capability into your own home router, ande giving the feds instructions on how to access raw logs after loggin in with a 3,000,000 bit key to stop hackers from exploiting the same backdoor? Suddently this becomes less about watching everything going over your ISP's DS-3's and more about what pr0n sites you go to on your own ADSL line.
(shiver)
what? the dudes are in jail for proposing sex to supposed underage girls over the internet?
TG I don't live in such place... around here you can fsck underage girlies all you want,
as long as they want to be fscked... fuckin puritans... you make me sick.
This government of ours is acquiring ridiculous amounts of power and the freedom to do anything they want with it. This is simply unacceptable.
Real people, who sometimes commit very real crimes, use it, too
Fine. If that is the case, the cops can go get a fucking warrant and actually perform some effort finding evidence. Forcing people to help the feds hoover up potentially incriminating data about _everyone_ is insane. Absolutely nobody would think it a good idea to put master-key capability into locks or bank vaults that only our Beloved Leaders could use. This sort of all-pervasive surveillance combined with the sheer stupidity of current tech laws is a very, very bad combination. The laws cannot be accurately or totally enforced, so they'll be used only for political or corporate pissing matches like the DMCA has been.
Dyolf Knip
Actually, according to the article, Ritter is alleged to have "had a sexual discussion." This is not at all the same as propositioning.
Was he tried? Was he found guilty? The article doesn't say. What it does say is "The case was sealed, and Colonie officials declined to release the arrest records, explaining the matter was adjourned in local court in contemplation of dismissal."
In this country, a person is innocent until proven guilty. So accordng to the information provided, Ritter is currently innocent of the charges, and likely to remain that way.
There is no reason to release the arrest record, and in fact County officials refused to release the arrest record. In such cases its unethical and likely illegal to release the arrest record.
This leak sounds to me more like the tactics of a police state than a democracy that values freedom. Which is the greater crime; Ritter's alleged misdemeanor, or the leak? Do you think this leak will even be investigated? I'm not holding my breath.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
So that once the script kiddies or black hats get access to the eavesdropping features, nobody can hold them accountable. (not to mention watching the watchmen).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Does anyone else feel like their head is going to explode? Maybe it's just me then...
nSo much for the 'land of liberty'. Let's knock another chip off the old plymouth rock!
Hey, what does this button do? Woops....
Congratulations.
You get an award for the first truly intelligent, interesting post I've seen in this thread.
From the article... "The FBI unlawfully spied on Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic priests. During its dark days, the bureau used secret files and hidden microphones to blackmail the Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and influence presidential elections..." (emphasis added). Can someone tell me when the FBI's "Dark Days" ended? As far as I can tell, the FBI is distinguishing itself by "losing" laptops and weapons, failing to act on data related to 9/11 terrorists, punishing its employees when they call it out on its rotten practices, and getting seriously into bed with spies. Yeah, I trust them with my personal data.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
wow. your well spoken.
I am not.
But, If I am doing something legal, I dont want to even have to think Big brother may be watching.
Trust in law enforcement is not a cornerstone of this country. I wish it was. but at least where I live[south tx border of mexico], I trust law enforecment about as much as I trust that a polotitions only motivation is to make the world a better place for the children.
I dont think so.
Remember that a lot of times, law enforcement run on a "its beter to ask forgiveness than permission" approch to things. and I dont want to give them any more slack to invade my life than I have to.
Yes I want criminals off the street. But I dont want to have to drive though a checkpoint everyday on my way to work.
There must be a balance, and right now there is not. The individual, citizens are loosing more and more right, where corporations and governments are gaining power at an insane rate.
What if you're doing something wrong that shouldn't be wrong?
There are a lot of things in this world (I'm speaking more facetiously than about how filesharing shouldn't be wrong, or similar) that are illegal (sleeping in bathtubs, having anything other than missionary-position sex with a member of the opposite sex/gender) which shouldn't be illegal.
What if it's something you're doing in private that, whether or not it's illegal, only affects you and not someone else? (see above for examples)... presto, you have no privacy any more.
Do you really want that? You probably don't. A person with nothing to hide is not a person any more.
So is this why Cisco wants to buy Linksys?
So "they" can then monitor home users directly?
What about using a secure web proxy, like Anonymiser? It seems that a service like that would stop would-be snoopers from seeing any sort of transmitted data, be it routing info or web content itself.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Also, look at products like those offered by startups including CloudShield -www.cloudshield.com - these boxes when used with or within Cisco/Juniper/Avici/Procket/Caspian routers will make such 'intercepts' much more powerful. then all one needs is googling capabilities built in and voila.... sharks riding on elephants with frickiN laser beams on their heads....
Quote from Fred Baker, "There are two sides. One is that Cisco as a company needs to let its customers abide by the law. The other is the moral and ethical issues. There are two very separate questions."
First of all, this makes it sound like there was a law passed which specifies all routers must have this kind of capability. I sure have not heard about that.
It sounds like currently an ISP can be subpoenaed to find out what a particular person is sending. Currently, the ISP seems to provide complete logs and allows law enforcement to sort through it. This just sounds like bad practice of law. If we lived in John-Ashcroft's-wet-dream-land where every packet has a personal ID number on it which could not be forged or faked, sure you could ask for what a person sends. This is so far from the case that it is a joke. Even if I only use one computer and it has one IP address, what if someone else uses it? Even if the email has a name on it, what if it was forged? It would be laughably easy to plant evidence on, say, a business rival. Bottom line: computer are not very secure, in general. (Side note: sure, your computer may be very secure but visit, say, a law office. You may be surprised - even by very large law offices with nice wood panneling and mugs with the partner's names on them.)
If subpoenaed for John Q. Terrorist's internet activity, knowing what we know, we cannot hand anything over with a clean consience. If, on the other hand, all of IP address 64.22.xx.xx is subpoenaed, sure, we have to hand it over but we cannot say who did what with any great certainty.
Lastly, Mr. Baker seems to indicate providing a product is separate from morality. This is a very disjointed view of work - almost on the verge of: "what I do at work should be totally separate from morality." This is quite frightening. Perhaps this is too strong. He is clearly saying if the company follows the law, this is completely separate from morality. Again, this should be frightening: if you follow the law, morality is not at issue? The most obvious reaction is that if the law is wrong, in America, you have a responsibility to not follow it. Being part of a corporation does not absolve you of your duties as a citizen.
In my opinion, the workplace is where people are least moral (in my experience) and thus it is exactly where people need to be thinking of morality the most - certainly not separating it and arguing "we are just following the law".
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
I will never buy your bullshit products and never recomend them to anyone!
As a matter of fact, I build and sell products that directly compete with your products and outpreform them by an imeasurable factor.
And the price that I sell them at is so, so, so far below the price of your sorry products that people fall all over themselves to buy *MY* products, which by the way, is not hackable like your trash is..
FU Cisco..
DEATH to Orwellian Dictators!
However, if you don't like Freenet's large size and resource consumption, you should try Entropy which is basically the same as Freenet but it is written in C instead of Java.
Both projects are GPLed.
I guarantee you can't "fsck" "underage girlies" all you want. If there is a definition of "underage" then you are likely committing a serious crime, no matter what country you are in.
What defines "underage" varies greatly from country to country, and even in the US varies greatly from state to state.
If you are "fscking" 9-year old girls, then you are the one making me sick.
MORTAR COMBAT!
The hardware is designed to hide the sniffing so that you don't have to bother with the warrent. This is evil because it requires no extra equipment or programing, it's just there part of the ordinary equipment. Other things leave a trail. This leaves you and your ISP in the dark. It's in the spirit of Carnivore, USA-Patriot and all that. It's not what I pay my taxes for and it's unAmerican as all hell.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
just read the article and I cannot stop Laughing meh twisted little ass off. I mean ok this all looks good and well on paper for both cisco and the U.S. Goverment, But the thing that I am wondering if they have thought of and can't wait to see for my self is... WHAT DO THEY THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN THE NEXT BIG CISCO IOS EXPLOIT COMES OUT?!?! lol, I mean seriously, wtf are they thinking, every ISP in the country, and everyone of their customers will be at the mercy of legions of script kiddies, I mean am sorry credit info, login names and passwords, social security #, and all at the hands of any 15 year old with a gcc compiler and C script. They are making themselves targets for exactly the kind of thing they wanna prevent. Well... when it happens I will be sitting back with a sipping my drink and laughing my ass of at it --ph1zzle
It's neither a question of "things which you are ashamed of", or which are illegal, but of things which could be used against you by unscrupulous officials or others who gain access to such data.
It's not an RFC. RFCs have RFC numbers.
What's the RFC number for this document?
things which could be used against you
If I am neither ashamed of the activity, nor it is illegal, how can it be used against me?
unscrupulous officials or others who gain access to such data
Now we're getting somewhere. Now it seems like we are talking about someone stealing my credit card numbers or identity. There are existing laws to prosecute such activities.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Both are evil.
Yeah, that Motherfucking Fujitsu Heavy Industries is one unpredictable TV pilot. Did that show ever enter production? If so, can I get a "hookup" to go with these fourtees?
The previous sig has been removed due to
Trust in law enforcement is a cornerstone of our society and should exist without all of us covering our tracks in daily life like criminals.
Um, where are you from? Canada? Down here in the US I'd say that our constitutional freedoms were more important than any law enforcement agency's right to violate them. Law enforcement perhaps existed in a state where it could be trusted, but thanks to the Homeland Security Agency and the Patriot laws I doubt that anyone sane should trust them any longer. The 4th Amendment is dead, let's not beat the horse anymore than we have to shall we? Else I'll submit your name to the government about your secret terrorist sleeper cell you've been running and let them have you for a few months away from your wife and kids ;-)
Look, I understand that power corrupts. I strongly support individual rights and personal freedoms. But I would prefer to have these freedoms not through the furtive actions of looking over my shoulder to make sure no one is watching, but by the pervasive understanding throughout our society that we respect and even support one another's freedoms. To paraphrase an earlier patriot, I may not agree with what you (legally) do, but I will defend to the death your right to do it!
It's too late for that. The government has already passed enough laws to justify and enforce a police state, adding more hardware and writing better software to add to those powers is unjustified. Right now at this second all anyone has to do to strip anyone of their basic freedoms is say the word terrorist and there's nothing anyone can do. Do your Godwin word replacement therapy now everyone, and ask yourself if it shouldn't scare you...
Now the government is going to know why you are so mean to the guy with the big white face and grey body!
I figure they owe you a new cake.
This Like That - fun with words!
I hear a lot of clamor about the "Right to Privacy."
That right doesn't exist people - you share this planet with six billion other people.
If you interpret the antiquated documents our country is founded on to mean this then perhaps you are mistaken (and the documents misguided.)
You do not own the phone system or the components of the internet. You do not own the the space they occupy or the airwaves they transmit. You cannot dictate what should happen on them or how they should be administered.
To utilize these systems is a privilege, not a right. -DD
But I would prefer to have these freedoms not through the furtive actions of looking over my shoulder to make sure no one is watching, but by the pervasive understanding throughout our society that we respect and even support one another's freedoms.
You're living in a dream world. Hey, I agree with you, but hell will freeze over before we "respect and even support one another's freedoms." Don't go taking my privacy away based on some fantasy that it will bring about a wonderful revolution in attitude, where everyone is happy and the world is like a Care Bear movie.
Life doesn't work like that, unfortunately.
The examples given thus far have been tame. "Some cop will harass you because he doesn't agree with your views." Wait until you start doing serious research on, say, abortion. You post anonymous messages on forums because you've knocked your girlfriend up and need advice on how to abort. Someone with access to the monitoring equipment decides he doesn't like that, so he has the both of you killed.
Don't think it could happen? There are people on both sides of every major debate who will kill you to protect their interests. I believe the murdered abortion doctors are a testament to that.
No, I'm sorry, but your fantasy world doesn't exist, and it never will. You may defend my freedoms, but that doesn't mean my neighbor will. I may trust you, but when I have no privacy, I have to trust everyone - and society has shown time and time again that an awful lot of people aren't trustworthy.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Rich
We could build a box that would monitor packets in, with the packets out (transpearant bridge) and parse the diff. That way, we would know who is doing what and sending it where. (and target future Slashdot DDS)
The other thing is, the network (inet) is more or less public and decentralized, which is DIFFERENT from Telco service which is more or less private and centralized, which makes it (anti privacy measures) much more difficult to implement, as one could route around the wiretap.
No, the only way the Feds/NWO/xIAA/etc could effectively wiretap networks is through a transperant bridge in the middle (between two routers). And a good sys admin, should be able to spot the increase in delay of such a solution.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
my uncle died of an evil bit.
Ah, but that cuts both ways.
You might also wonder - particularly given the nature of the offence - just why a certain individual went from being a highly-regarded UN weapons inspector into being an ardent denier of the existence of WMD in Iraq and one of the Iraqi regime's most strident supporters.
You might wonder if it had anything to do with, say, visits involving inspections at Iraqi childrens' prisons and orphanages.
You might Google for the sexual practices of family members of a certain Iraqi dictator.
You might wonder about the propensity of a certain Iraqi dictator to employ large armies of people to act as "Inspector Plods" and perform counterintelligence work in order to pre-emptively compromise any potential threats.
You might even conclude that a certain former UN Weapons Inspector's leaked arrest record answers more questions than it raises.
Or you might not.
Has Cisco indicated they're going to be deploying the surveillance code to ALL routers or only ISP-class ones (6500's and up)?
I'm not sure what the point would be about implementing this in the smaller SME-targetted models, like the 2500 series.
At the very least they should have a non-US version available for those who don't operate in America.
Anti-Religion, Italian (close enough), Male, 29 years old, 180K/year (and rising), Democrat-Liberal.
Guess I'll have to buy a few politicians.
Sorry, as a mere human whose last name is not Gates you cannot afford to buy any politicians. Certainly not with a puny $180k per year income.
Vote for the person my ass, more like vote for the better commercial.
There are very real differences between many of the candidates on many of the issues. There are republicans that are quite liberal and democrats so conservative that they make Baby Bush look like a liberal. If you cannot be bothered to do the research and find out which is which, and instead vote along party planks and platforms, you are quite probably voting against your own views in more than one instance. This isn't Europe we're talking about, where strong party discipline and parliamentary divisions based upon party percentage rule the day, this is America, with all of its 2-party follies firmly in place
The problem we are really confronting is one which runs much deeper than liberal v. conservative, republicrat v. democan, and one which Libertarians (for all I disagree with their "capitalism ueber alles" mentality) are very correct in pointing out: there exists among both liberals and conservatives the notion that it is appropriate and good to use governmental power to coerce the other side into abiding by one's own personal views on what is right or wrong.
Until conservatives and liberals, republicans and democrats, both take a step back and begin to respect the constitution and the freedoms it is intended to insure more than their own personal economic, political, and social agendas, we will continue to have our most basic freedoms eroded, regardless of which party is in power. Indeed, if this doesn't stop, and quickly, we will find ourselves living in a police state to rival that of any stalinist regime, and it is a crap shoot as to whether that will be a police state run by corrupt democrats beholden to Disney and Time-Warner, or one run by corrupt republicans beholden to Esso, Exxon, and McDonald-Douglas, and while the outcome of this crap shoot may be of great interest to Disney, Time-Warner, Esso, Exxon, McDonald-Douglas, et. al., it will ultimately make little difference to the rest of us, condemned by our own impotence to living beneath such tyranny.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
You don't even have to go back far enough to invoke Godwin here. In this country COINTELPRO is the most egregious disrespect for privacy outside of say, East Germany.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
This will hasten a return to networks that are NOT on the internet...even ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks, formerly known as BBS'.
Still, if you don't like Cisco's decision, remember that they're not the ones doing the snooping. Cisco is responding to its customers' requests, and if they don't, other hardware vendors will. Cisco's Internet draft may be titled "lawful interception," but there's no guarantee that the capability will always be used legally. If you're looking for someone to blame, consider Attorney General John Ashcroft, who asked for and received sweeping surveillance powers in the USA Patriot Act, along with your elected representatives in Congress, who gave those powers to him with virtually no debate.
Wonderful, so I guess I shouldn't get pissed at microsoft since THEY aren't the ones using the security holes to hack systems?!
Like this?
Line 1: Sssh, I can hear something.
Line 2: Hey bob, we got something.
Line 1: It's them!
Line 2: They can hear us!! Quick, drop the hardline.
Line 1: They've gone, call downtown!
Downtown: Oops sorry, we forgot to update the IOS.
nb: laugh
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
Awesome, I'm totally against stuff like this but at the same time I know that Cisco/the Gov./the Admin won't secure this just like they don't secure a shitload of other stuff and the hackers will gain use of these new powers. This, could actually jump start a revolution, especially if these are placed in certain spots.
Wow. Mod parent for "cognitive dissonance". What abilities does Cisco's draft standard give to the Feds or cops that they don't already have, guy?
The Patriot, Patriot 2, and any other acts of the US or foreign governments that represent serious invasions of our privacy have nothing whatsoever to do with lawful intercept standards. If the government is sniffing you illegally or legally without good oversight, you're still getting fucked, anyway.
Remember Carnivore? That's actually a much, MUCH more invasive tool for lawful (or otherwise) intercept. A coherent standard, built into the router, would make Carnivore unnecessary and (probably) constitutionally impermissable as an over-broad surveillance tool.
Right now, if the FBI gets a warrant to sniff your Net traffic, they walk into your ISP's office with a warrant and plug their sniffer into a router. They'll probably use a filtering expression to just look at stuff heading to/from your IP address (as reported by the ISP), but maybe they won't. Maybe they'll capture raw traffic and parse it out later to get your packets, throwing out the rest.
For the ISP, this isn't really very fun. They have to give up control over their router to the Feds, because there isn't any developed protocol for describing lawful collection of data on a router. What if Special Agent Johnson doesn't know the Cisco 7600 series as well as he thinks? Whoops, there's some downtime for the ISP, and maybe a bill for a new router if something really gets fucked up.
And what if the tap has to stay in place for a while? Some wiretap orders persist for months. That means Agent Johnson will be hanging around and making you nervous at work for quite a while. He likes his coffee black with sugar, just so you know.
The new standard would allow an ISP or other company to look at a warrant, turn around to the router, and put the tap in place themselves. The FBI will ONLY see what they specify in the warrant, and the ISP gets to continue on serving up porn to the rest of us. No muss, no fuss, no incidental privacy violations.
Too late... I've already done things that are illegal and that I am ashamed of. Of course this was quite a while ago, but still, I should really keep my opinions to myself from now on. Never know when someone might dig up something from 20 years ago.
Free speech is a right only for those who have nothing to hide.
Of course, this means very few folks now actually have the right to free speech....
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
The 2nd amendment's next after the 1st and forth are gone.
I think he mentioned something about unseen beings having quite a good view of all our activities, and that we should not cause them offence.
Quite how one can wipe one's arse, or have a Tommy Tank, in such a situation, is beyond my feeble mind, but perhaps we need to look to the ways of the ancient sages for their advice in these uncertain times.
One thing's for certian, however: if we're going to be monitored by the government, then we need to be able to monitor their every activity also.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, after all.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Because there aren't any WMD in Iraq?
You might also wonder - particularly given the nature of the offence - just why a certain individual went from being a highly-regarded UN weapons inspector into being an ardent denier of the existence of WMD in Iraq and one of the Iraqi regime's most strident supporters.
You might wonder if it had anything to do with, say, visits involving inspections at Iraqi childrens' prisons and orphanages.
You might Google for the sexual practices of family members of a certain Iraqi dictator.
You might wonder about the propensity of a certain Iraqi dictator to employ large armies of people to act as "Inspector Plods" and perform counterintelligence work in order to pre-emptively compromise any potential threats.
You might even conclude that a certain former UN Weapons Inspector's leaked arrest record answers more questions than it raises
You might wonder whether the above constitutes slander and libel.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
How soon we forget. It has happened before and it happend right here in the good ol' USofA. Ignoring the obvious Watergate references, there was also the little matter of the 1960's COINTELPRO. This is why we have most of our (scant) existing privacy rules in the first place (the ones that Ashcroft and Co. are working so hard to get overturned).
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
IdleTime, you just exercised your right to free speech in the U.S. by posting on Slashdot.
Free speech is the right to speak freely. It is not the right to have anyone pay attention to you. Perhaps you have these two confused.
Now, as for your assertion that the death penalty and jail terms for failure to pay a traffic ticket means the U.S. is a police state, well... that's just so much naive nonsense. You may disagree about the death penalty, but its existence in the U.S. doesn't make the U.S. a police state, anymore than its existence in European nations made them police states until they outlawed it. But that fact certainly seems to have given some Europeans a severe of case of unwarranted moral supremacy.
The jail time for a traffic ticket seems attributable to a bureaucratic screwup, or flaming and obnoxious self-rightousness on the part of the person who was ticketed. (E.g., taking a ticket to court, swearing at the judge, and denying the court's jurisdiction will probably get you a few days in jail for contempt.)
Since you're apparently a guest in my country, next time you wish to air your lies in public, at least make a bit of an effort to make yourself credible.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
All your privacy are belong to John [Ashcroft, Chambers]
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
(and I'm about as opposed to accumulation of government power as anybody could ever want to be)
In this particular case there are repercussions which cannot be righted in a court of law. If you are harassed or blackballed as a result of some particular belief you privately hold or some personal practice of yours then perhaps you can sue the person who started the whole mess but that won't fix the problem.
Look at OJ Simpson. The court cleared him, but what is public opinion of him? Would suing anyone help him now? Does it matter whether he did it or not? The stigma, the bad press will always follow him, no matter the court's decision. If you're given such bad press, nevermind for what, you'll be followed by the same unshakeable curse.
Try clearing your credit after a case of identity theft and then tell me how convicting the criminal made all the problems go away.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
If you have a secure communication that you wish to remain secure then it is always best to manager your own public and private keys and encrypt the data yourself. That way, short of putting a keystroke logger physically inside your keyboard, which the FBI has been known to do that to overcome PGP and other types of encryption, one can be reasonably assured that any private communications will remain private. I do not believe that you can be forced to turn over the pass phrase to your PGP keys either since this would be tantamount to incriminating yourself and citizens of the United States are protected against this by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. They may be able to break my pass phrase key string by brute force, but that would take a while. The fact that all of this is even necessary is a sad commentary on the continuing erosion of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. The indiscriminate monitoring of Internet, voice, and other communications routinely used by ordinary citizens is reminiscent of the activities and duties of the secret police forces in the repressive former Soviet block nations such as East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. One should not be subjected to surveillance unless one has given the authorities probable cause to expect that one is engaged in criminal activities. The use of encryption is not by itself probable cause to suspect that someone is engaged in criminal activity. We don't hassle people for using security envelopes at the post office so why should we harass people who use freely available encryption technologies? I want the terrorists and the bad guys caught and punished just as much as the next law abiding citizen, but I don't want my freedoms to be squelched in the process.
Then, though I'm not a specialist, you CAN run some sort of internet service WITHOUT an ISP, right? From what I understood, my airport base station allows me to "PPP dial-in", which means I can connect to my home network through any telephone line, without an ISP. There probably are a lot of modems (all of them?) around that support dial-in and line pickup: you have a (slow) computer-to-computer connection with no ISP involved. Add SSH and crypto, and you have a "fairly secure" connection (unless, of course, the feds decide to wiretap phone connections as well, which is probably what is happening with projects such as Carnivore/TIA...)
OR, you could try moving to Europe, but do it quick before our own Beloved Leaders® figure out how they can use this brand new Cisco hardware.
"On another note", I wonder if all this is really intented to fight terrorists, criminals and druglords... Read this (article says that some narco kingpin in Colombia managed, in 1998, to deploy a wireless computer network that ranged "across the Caribbean and the upper half of South America.", and that could be accessed to with laptops, even in planes and boats) to see what I mean: evildoers (maybe not Al-Qaeda and such, but who knows?) probably use alternate methods for their most important communications. So why do they bother wiretapping ISP's? Wouldn't it be wiser to try and bust these alternate networks (if there still are)?
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
eeeeh d00d
underage = less than 18 years old
and we see girls having fun since 14 around here, but the thing is,
thats the girls choice, not ours or the government's.
9 yrs old is a bit rough, tough,dontcha think?
I would like an IP over IP system that uses valid, normal looking data to hide exactly what's happening regardess of the data being carried.
n d/
From CodeCon, Invisible IRC networks, IP steganography etc:
http://codecon.deor.org/program.html
Of relevance here is http://peek-a-booty.org/ a privacy enhancement system described as a distributed anti-censorship application.
Covert channels in the TCP/IP Protocol:
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_5/rowla
This discusses a means to use IP to hide outgoing data for nefarious purposes, this could also be used to hide your personal outgoing data which is becoming a nefarious activity.
Many more hits on the web that I don't need to post here. I can and do use encrypted pipes, SSH, SSL, PGP etc. In the CodeCon URL, which is very interesting, there are numerous mentions of privacy enhancing software and methods.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
A property of quantum crypto is the utter inability for people to eves drop on communications. At least at the physical layer anyways, there is no possibility of a man in the middle, or splice tap into the physical medium. At the network layer there is always the possibility, but the Cicso router hardly plays a hand in crypto in that space since it is only a data exchanger/switch/router. So the solution is to simply use SSL, IPsec, and SSH in conjunction of each other (aka crypto over crypto) on the public networks (the internet).
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Great comments.
Quite how one can wipe one's arse, or have a Tommy Tank, in such a situation, is beyond my feeble mind
In a world free of privacy, activities like this would need to be tolerated and respected. It gets to the point where it ceases to be a nasty curiosity and becomes another of those things you don't really care to think about.
if we're going to be monitored by the government, then we need to be able to monitor their every activity also.
A very excellent point! But it also has a hidden prerequisite: that the people watching the government understand why some seemingly strange or dangerous decisions may be necessary. Faith in one's leaders is very important. Complete transparency can be dangerous if we're allowing the general public to influence the informed decisions of someone at the center of it all.
Plus, if your government is transparent to its citizens, it's also transparent to its enemies. In an ideal world, nations wouldn't be working against each other, and this wouldn't matter.
We're still a long ways away from a world where these concepts would work.
Sure, but we've only had the computing power to uniformly and universally intercept all of those for a much, much smaller period of time. When it took two G-men to stakeout your house and check your garbage, government surveillance was much different than it taking two bored computer techs to intercept every single email in America with the words "bomb" and "Washington" in them. Now that the government has greater power and capability to infringe upon our rights, it needs more restrictions on it's use - not less. I particularly don't see why the public sector should make it easier to violate someone's rights, "We're only making it easier to go after criminals and terrorists" only works as long as you're not declared a terrorist I think.
Actually, that's the one thing I didn't wonder about - there's a world of difference between saying (1)"X happened", (2) "I believe X happened", (3) "I think X might have happened", and (4) "I wonder if X happened".
Assuming "X" didn't happen, then only statements of the form #1 are libel. #2 is a grey area.
Legally, I made sure my post was #4, and frankly, my honest opinion is somewhere between #3 and #4. #3 is even too strong - because I don't know.
Neither do you. Only Mr. Ritter and/or Iraqi intelligence can answer that question, and Ritter has right not to talk about it, and Iraqi intelligence ain't in a position to talk.
It is an observable fact that his opinion on Iraq changed pretty dramatically over a very short time period. It's also a known fact that the "honey trap" is a time-honored counterintelligence gambit employed by regimes both despotic and free alike.
It's IMO logical to question what sorts of things may have motivated such a change. You raise another possibility - that there were indeed no WMDs, or at least that Ritter honestly believed there were no WMDs.
But getting back to the original point - my main purpose in posting wasn't so much to cast aspersons on Mr. Ritter's character, but to point out that surveillance is a two-edged sword: Iraqi officials, had they known about Mr. Ritter's sexual peculiarities, had as much to gain from exploiting Ritter's natural desire to keep it hidden ("Drink this warm cup STFU on how we blocked your inspections, or we'll leak this to destroy your credibility!"), as US officials had to gain by leaking it ("He didn't take our warm cup of STFU on the way we think he was wrong on the WMD issue, so we'll... leak this to destroy his credibility").
Moral of the story: If you're in a politically-sensitive job, or think you might be, keep your frickin' nose clean. *G*
Back then the government didn't have computers that could sort through millions of letters daily. They didn't have the huge databases that we have today. This is just another step towards the direction of total control. Imagine if all those rich fatcats had a database with info on everyone and everything. Imagine what they could do. People like you need to wake up. You say what cisco is doing will formalize this currently unmonitored process. So, do you think you will have the ability to see who's been spying on you? Do you think your isp will help you to get this info? There was a time in this country that you could be harrassed/arrested just for reading about communism. Oh, you don't do anything that would cause them to come after you. Hey, maybe it won't matter if they spy on you. But guess what: you aren't the only person that matters in this world. I should be able to view unpopular information without having to worry about the FBI busting in my door. And that has happened before. They will just keep chipping away at our rights bit by bit. Once everyone is aware of what's happening it will be too late.
Now what if we (meaning the US) mistakenly elect government officials with very bad intentions?
Or what if some corrupt people rig an election? You don't even need the population to actually vote 'em in.
Not that it matters, though. As you point out: I will neglect specific examples in order to avoid Godwin's Law.
Note that the "maximum leader" of that specific example was WILDLY popular with the electorate - including some that he later sent to their deaths. The war-era and postwar propaganda makes him out to be very abrasive. But in fact he was a friendly and cuddly sort in most of his personal appearances. A real baby-kisser. Popular with the ladies. Charismatic. Animal rightist. Environmentalist. Body-beautiful. Rah-rah our oppressed country. Fight crime. Blah blah blah.
MOST dictators start out like that. And still seem like that to many of their constituents even at the height of their atrocities. Which is why the above unnamed leader won his last elected position by a considerable margin.
By the way:
Premise: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Crollary: "Godwin's Law is very convenent for neofascists."
It WILL be back. It's ALWAYS trying to come back. When it comes, it will be called ANYTHING but the names it was called before. But it will be the same old thing.
Remember: "History doesn't repeat. But it does rhyme."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It'd be really scary if you lived here and didn't know the fourth amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This is the basis of pretty much any ruling on privacy in the US. (Remember, this was written way, way before wiretapping.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Now, Cisco come to the rescue, with their magic interception product. Except it will require a new version of the software (IOS) on the router, which will cost $bomb. And it will require Cisco proprietary back-end software (costing $bomb) which will only be sold with a Cisco-supplied server (a rebadged Compaq, costing $bomb). And of course, the ISP will probably have to put the routers, back-end software, and server under a maintainance contract so that Cisco wont disown them when something breaks, the interception stops, and the LEA is threatening to charge the ISP with obstruction of justice. That'll cost $BOMB, per year, every year.
So, the LEA's will come yelling to the ISPs demanding interception capability on their networks. The LEA's will probably want the ISP to use the Magic Cisco Solution(TM) because thats What Everybody Else Uses, and depending on the country, may even be able to force them to use it. The ISP will get railroaded into spending a metric assload of money with Cisco, which will get them a carnivore box to call their own, and not a lot else. Quite an elegent little marketing strategy that Cisco has..
Just ask Pete Townsend
This guy is way out there
In fact, Britain's RIP act is an open invitation to throw anyone who uses a computer in jail for an indefinite period of time. Why? Well, all the act says is that you must turn over encryption keys to your data to the cops upon request, or be tossed in jail without trial. No-where does it require the cops to produce any evidence that the data is encrypted. And since you can get thrown in jail for telling your lawyer that they asked...
Bushcroft still has a lot to learn from Blair about how to exploit a terrorist attack into a civil rights feeding frenzy.
...an evil router?
I guess we'll all be relegated to using homebrew Linux boxen for our routers. What a shame. Of course, such an act might be construed doubleplusunpatriotic by bb.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Hehe, Last time i looked (last year or so) Cisco was having serious issues with not being able to support traffic-policing on high-speed connections. A DDOS could literally fry the CPU if the NOC had configured anti-DDOS features, at least in some circumstances.
free dom(inion) - free energy - free your mind - whee!
Supposing someone had fantasy of having Internet sex with an undercover police officer... what would the best way of fulfilling that fantasy?
Translation: "An authority exists which has the potential to abuse it's power, therefore this authority must be kept weak by other methods, particularly ignorance."
Hey, I wouldn't mind the government wiretapping me if I knew when it was going on. The thing is, they're taking away my privacy but not theirs. They want to keep ME ignorant of what exactly it is they're doing.
I'll show them mine if they show me theirs.
Hey, I wouldn't mind the government wiretapping me if I knew when it was going on. The thing is, they're taking away my privacy but not theirs. They want to keep ME ignorant of what exactly it is they're doing. I'll show them mine if they show me theirs.
Sounds good to me! Of course that's not much solace if you know you're being watched all the time ala 1984.
Cisco doesn't build backdoors into it. It'll be a command that gets configured if needed, and left off if not.
What's the panic? So this saves me putting a hub tap on a line.
mindslip
--the signed in laws called patriot act 1, homeland security, and the model states health powers emergency act? You obviously know about routers and switches and telco but know NOTHING about what passes for "law" now. DON'T GUESS, FIND OUT INSTEAD, THEN COMMENT.
/dev/null, so quit acting like it exists when it doesn't.
THEY DON'T NEED WARRANTS-EVER, IT'S GONE
THEY CAN BREAK INTO YOUR HOME, TAKE STUFF, HACK YOUR BOX, CHANGE FILES, ETC
YOU CAN BE DETAINED INDEFINETLY WITHOUT CHARGES, HELD IN SECRET, CHARGED, PROSECUTED AND HAVE SENTENCE PASSED ON YOU IN SECRET, INCLUDING THE DEATH PENALTY
IT IS ILLEGAL FOR ANYONE WHO KNOWS ABOUT YOUR "DETAINMENT" TO TELL ANYONE ELSE, IT'S A FELONY FOR THEM
IF YOU ARE LABELED A TERRORIST YOU ARE NO LONGER A LEGAL CITIZEN WITH BORN WITH RIGHTS
ANY MISDEMEANOR CAN BE BUMPED TO A FELONY AND THEY CAN THEN SAY YOU ARE A TERRORIST, ON THEIR SAY-SO, AND TERRORIST HAS A DEFINITION NOW, SEE ABOVE FOR WHAT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU
There's a lot more and YES I was yelling. Anyone who ain't FREAKED OUT lately over what is going down is NOT paying any attention, NONE, OR they SUPPORT what is going on and are TRAITORS.
GO READ THE FINE MANUALS FOR THESE LAWS before you spout off. You are absolutely CLUELESS. This ain't about vito and guido.
I am CLUELESS when it comes to the fine extreme nuances of a lot of IT tech. And I ADMIT IT. But I've RTFM on these "laws", they are long and detailed and NOT NICE. It's pure sieg heil land. The constitution is FUCKED, it's history,
And don't bother replying, I'm not going to reply to anything else on this thread, just you or anyone else who hasn't already --will you PLEASE JUST GO READ THE DAMN SHIT so you can REALLY get up to speed on what is being talked about, it'll take you many hours, it's THOUSANDS of pages. Then go read the leaked patriot act 2, that's the frosting on the cake.
I'm gonna post AC because I don't need the fascist regime trolls in my message inbox.
for the anti-christ to keep track of everyone once he comes to power and to deny anything to anyone who doesn't follow him.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
IF you have Cisco Routers [ and software / manuals necessary ? ] Do NOT throw them out as they age. they will still be useful to us , later on...and who knows...they may be worth something someday...? but honestly... don't toss them...
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Suppose they fabricate the evidence of something that you didn't do. Cisco routers are in so many networks around the world that they could almost be considered omnipotent about what information goes where. If Inspector Plod shows evidence of an IP transaction between your IP and a computer that hosts nothing but , then that's probably enough to be considered probable cause. This means they can get a warrant to turn your life inside out, and tell everyone what they're doing and why. If they think you're selling images/movies of , then they'll freeze your bank accounts and you won't be able to hire a lawyer worth shit.
So, there you are with no money, no lawyer, an awful nationwide reputation, and no proof you did anything wrong. While you might eventually get out from under it, being a pariah is no life.
>Now what if we (meaning the US) mistakenly
>elect government officials with very bad
>intentions?
You did it.
so the lesson is: don't trust any isp for your security. run true end to end level encryption and perhaps even spray across multiple isp's so the spooks can't easily reassemble the segments too easily. (oops - now I'm going to be in trouble...)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Sounds like you are thinking pretty hard on the political issues, but still need a nudge to come on over to the light side. :)
> one which Libertarians (for all I disagree with their
> "capitalism ueber alles" mentality) are very correct in
> pointing out: there exists among both liberals and
> conservatives the notion that it is appropriate and good
> to use governmental power to coerce the other side into
> abiding by one's own personal views on what is right or wrong.
Here you almost hit enlightenment, but shied away at the last moment. Embrace it! You admit that both major parties seek to use the power of government to coerce people to follow their moral code, see it is a bad thing but reject Libertarianism because they depend of capitalism. If the government is not going to regulate people, then what? Capitalism (not the mercantilism we are currently practicing) is nothing more or less than people settling their affairs peacably through the power of the free market.
> Liberals generally want to abridge the second amendment.
Agreed, but ask why they fear your gun but don't fear the same gun in the hand of one of their jack booted goons. Because they desire to control you, and because they fear you.
Both parties kowtow to hollywood, but for different reasons. Dems do so because of the money, pure and simple. Repubs do so because they think it is good for the economy. They might talk a good free market, but all too many are mercantilists who want a managed economy.
And on a side note, and at the risk of starting the mother of all flame wars.....
> Conservatives want to take away a woman's right to choose.
No they don't. Both sides are using misleading language tricks though.
It can't be about "Choice". It is a null argument because to allow the debate to be about a "woman's right to choose" presupposes that it isn't a person. And if we aren't talking about a person there really isn't much of a "Choice" to get all worked up about now is there?
The other side is just as bad. You can't accept their debating position of "Pro Life" without conceding that it IS a debate about killing a baby. At which point the end result is a given since there aren't going to be too many lining up on the "Anti-life" or "Pro Death" side of the fence.
The question both sides dance around; the question for society to answer, and answer it must, is when is a new "Citizen" created. Of course the first question is does the Federal Government have the right to decide that for the states? (I'd say no, which means Roe was a bad decision.) Should the Constituition be amended to codify a national consensus once/if one is reached?
Democrat delenda est
In Hawaii for example, underage is under 16. In Austria, underage is under 14. In Chile, underage is under 12. Tunisua, underage is under 20.
http://www.ageofconsent.com/
MORTAR COMBAT!
Clinton smoked dope. GWB snorted cocaine and drove drunk. Both stories were very public, both men became president.
Don't worry about the past. If your present is worth anything, most people won't worry about your past, either.
That said, there's no way I'm taking my wife to my high school reunion... she doesn't need to hear how much of a hopeless geek I was.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
Also from my limited knowledge of how encryption works, if they can record your key exchange, then it's as if you're not encrypting anything!
Actually this is not true. Although it is possible to design insecure key exchange algorithms, the secure ones are designed with eavesdroppers specifically in mind (i.e., eavesdroppers cannot learn anything). Otherwise there would be no need for the algorithm.
The real problem with key exchange is man-in-the-middle attacks, where Bob and Alice think they are exchanging keys with each other, but actually they are both exchanging keys with me, and I'm secretly decrypting and re-encrypting everything while monitoring it. A few extra steps in the key-exchange protocols can prevent even that.
You might want to check out Applied Cryptography. It demonstrates fairly well how these things work.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
- Moral of the story: If you're in a
- politically-sensitive job, or think you might
- be, keep your frickin' nose clean.
Like Bill Clinton?
Ritter's nose probably is clean. The whole deal sounds like a setup to me from the get-go, and not by the Iraqis.
As to his anti-US posture, it seems clear to me that much of what he has said is now being echoed to some degree by Hans Blix, i.e., that US intelligence on Iraqi weapons was "pathetic", that the US either made up or ignored the obviously faked nuclear evidence, and that it deliberately cut out the UN weapons inspectors because it was looking for a war for its own agenda.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
- Plus, if your government is transparent to its
- citizens, it's also transparent to its enemies.
This is relevant only in the very narrowly defined areas of active intelligence and active military operations. Virtually everything else CAN be transparent without harm.
Also, your point about people understanding government operations. The point should be that in a transparent government, the reasons for those actions are in fact the items being made transparent, and the reason WHY you need transparent government.
But it will never happen because virtually every American doesn't care what the government does as long as he gets his Big Mac, his Slurpee at the 7-11, his Coors Light, his Monday Night Football, and his WWF Raw - until the government throws him or his kid in jail or gets one (or both) of them killed.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
No, I can blame you - because you voted.
You can't blame me - I didn't vote. I am in no way responsible for authorizing anybody to do anything in (supposedly) my name.
In fact, I spent over eight years in prison because I took up a gun to destroy these assholes.
The only thing you can blame me for is failing to do it. And I don't need your blame - I've got enough of my own.
Now I'm working to get the money and the technology to do the job right next time...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Now who posted this?
Bill Gates?
John Ashcroft?
George Bush?
Saddam Hussein?
Or just some asshole with the same attitude...
You think you are the one granting the "privilege"? Or are you just too gutless to accept that you exist "by privilege"?
Punks like this are a dime a dozen in this country. Suck up to the powers that be and act like they're one of them. I've got news for you - you're just another punk to George Bush and John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld and they'll ream your butt just like any other gutless "American" when they get the chance. And like every other gutless American, you'll take it and babble about how you like it and approve of it - just like you just did.
Punk.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
While it is easy (and reasonable, in some ways) to get bent out of shape about this, it really is not much of a story. Why? Because all voice switching equipment already has to have backdoors for electronic wiretaps. The requirements are known as CALEA: Communications Access for Law Enforcement Agencies, or some such. All access under CALEA has to be authorized by court order, at least in theory. Cisco is, at least in part, responding to a symmetric need. The thing to worry about is NOT whether/how this is implemented at the engineering level, but how the court orders are implemented.
I recall, and here am digging into memories AND am out of my depth, that St. John Ashcroft, the beloved, has eroded the levels of permission needed to get wiretaps. Now, if true, THAT's something to lose sleep about.
Wouldn't being forced to give over encryption keys violate our right to remain silent? Anyway, I'd prefer to destroy my encryption key and THEN answer the doorbell. Oh, I'm so sorry, the disk that had it on it accidentally fell under my 30-pound magnet. I'm truly sorry.
The original comment was very wrong about the status of the document by Fred Baker. It is currently an Internet-Draft, which is a type of document /anyone/ can write and submit (though Fred is definitely not just anyone). An I-D can then be advanced to RFC status, after the apropriate Area Director forwards it to the IESG for consideration. Only after the IESG approves it, and it has made it past the RFC Editor is it considered a product of the IETF and has any real standardization status.
Check out www.accuris.ie and dont trust those bastards
Your idea of "white noise" is one that I've been using for a long time, under the presumption that if they're monitoring all my packets, the more packets I send the less capable they'll be of archiving and decoding each one. Here are some suggestions - and this is for anyone, not just you.
:)
1. Run a Peer2Peer filesharing application at all times. I have a LAN sitting behind a cable modem. One of my machines, which doesn't normally do much, runs BearShare 24/7/365 unless there's a power outage. This means that at all times, there are packets containing god-knows-what streaming in and out of my connection from random hosts on random ports. I don't share any files, nor do I download them. Running P2P is simply a method of generating background noise on my connection.
2. Some time ago I wrote a little web spider in Perl. Basically it acts like a super-recursive wget. I point it at a starting URL, and it walks links - sleeping 1 second between fetches - until it can't find anymore. At present, it's been running since my last reboot (48 days ago) and hasn't run out of links yet. This creates a ton of backchannel traffic to remote hosts on port 80, so realistically anyone watching my connection can't tell whether I'm actually browsing a site or whether it's something the spider found. There are so many random webpages being fetched by the spider at all hours, it would be next to impossible to prove that I physically browsed to an "unapproved by the Bush Reich" site.
3. If you IRC, only IRC on servers which support SSL connections. irc.distributed.net, for example, lets you connect securely (through stunnel) to port 443. You're allowed to create your own channel there for your own use. Encourage your IRC buddies to dump undernet or whatever and meet up on irc.distributed.net. Their traffic might not be encrypted, but who cares. Yours is, and it's constantly generating whitenoise, useless, SSL-ized packets for the spooks to sniff at.
4. Regardless of whether you IRC or not, install an eggdrop (or 5) and point it/them towards a heavily-trafficked channel(s) on one of the major IRC nets. eggdrop runs nicely in the background, doing jack unless you tell it otherwise, but because it's connected, it will receive all the chatter that comes from the monitored channel. Yet more background traffic "the man" has to filter out if they want to find the good nugs.
5. It's easy to write a perl script to send packets containing random garbage to random hosts at random ports. Randomizing the ports, here, is key; as if the spooks are looking for something particular (or trying to filter out something particular) port numbers is where they'll start.
Have phun. Jam Echelon!
This is relevant only in the very narrowly defined areas of active intelligence and active military operations.
And public safety. The patrol routes of domestic police, the response strategies for certain types of attacks or crimes, etc. (Though with a loss of privacy in many respects, perhaps domestic problems where this information is valuable simply wouldn't occur?)
Good point, though.
the reasons for those actions are in fact the items being made transparent, and the reason WHY you need transparent government.
And I might suggest that some areas still may need to be kept from the public, at least until certain events pass. Things that might incite a mob panic, for example.
I think this could be a very good idea, though. Perhaps the areas (like, as you suggest, active military and intelligence) that are "exempt" from the transparency should be made that way only through oversight of related branches? (I.e., in the US, amend the Constitution so that it requires transparency in all government activities where that transparency does not expose a demonstrable risk to life. The legislature can, through legislation, allow certain activities to become less-than-transparent, and judicial oversight can ensure that that follows the spirit of the amendment..)
This sounds like a good exercise for a sociology class.
That's solid right there, exactly what I meant.
I trust people who earn my trust, the way he sees it, he wants us to be forced (by law mind you) to trust everyone. And like you say, time and time again, the corrupt will take the upper hand.
Posting useless rant since 2003.
CISCO routers or for that matter most other intermediate pieces of equipment will not be able to descramble traffic that is encrypted end-to-end. So most people really intent on "EVIL" will just use clever encryption at the end points and lay to waste all the pesos CISCO and the rest of the lawful-intercept crowd is spending. However some unsuspecting dude will be liable to blackmail by "Authorities" becuase he likes something weird.
There is of course the wildcard that NSA et.al. already have (computers and ways) to break commonly available end-to-end encryption schemes, in which case all the intermediaries will have to do is to intercept.
Trust in law enforcement is a cornerstone of our society and should exist without all of us covering our tracks in daily life like criminals.
Which is why we need privacy. Doh!
It's Cisco software, it won't work for at least fifteen revisions. Until then the machine it runs on will crash randomly. Your data is safer now than it was before they made this announcement.
Carpe Deez
"California Lawyer", June 1997, p 39-41 article entitled "Hacker's Secrets"
Kevin found FISA wiretaps to the Israeli, PRC, and South African enbassies. Also a bunch of lines going to the building housing the ACLU.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
I'm not a lawyer here, but I think if he was convicted, it would be public.
When you are accused of something like that, if there is no conviction the records are supposed to be sealed. It's a bunch of B.S. The person that leaked that should be tried and convicted.