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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.
But most evildoers are very stupid.
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?