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FBI Adds to Wiretap Wish List
WorkEmail writes "A far-reaching proposal from the FBI, made public Friday, would require all broadband Internet providers, including cable modem and DSL companies, to rewire their networks to support easy wiretapping by police. The FBI's request to the Federal Communications Commission aims to give police ready access to any form of Internet-based communications. If approved as drafted, the proposal could dramatically expand the scope of the agency's wiretap powers, raise costs for cable broadband companies and complicate Internet product development."
Bottom line: The FBI can go piss on itself. Fuck the system.
fp
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
Invest in encryption products.
Wait, what about us who still have dial-up? (yes we do still exist) It says nothing about it in the article from what I saw.
Next, they will come for your encryption. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow... but soon.
Hypothesis:
Carless wire tapping will some how turn into a corpate espionage tool. Give yer brother bill whos a cop a couple bucks, get access to the competitions phone wires, walla!! corpate espionage.
can i use the word "walla" in a hypothesis?
Makes you wonder when we're all going to be forced to use high-grade encryption for all connections across the Internet....
if they can't, then whats the point. anyone who's doing anything illegal & knows the FBI can listen in, will just encrypt.
Big waste of time
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
Regardless, this is pretty intrusive on the FBI's part. Even though it isn't a blatant intrusion into our private lines located within our home, it may as well be, since our direct line to the internet for 99.9% of the population runs through commercial ISP's. I hope someone cries foul on this proposal in support for the protection of privacy. However, with the state of most American's line of thinking, such a hope is far-fetched.
ISP's are obliged by law to install wiretapping devices and provide internet connectivity to police to use these wiretapping devices. There's no warrant necessary to wiretap. Best of all, all encryption standards (except GOST, which comes from the government) are outlawed, so you can get hard time for using PGP. I haven't heard about anyone getting sued for using strong crypto, though, so it looks like these laws are not enfoced.
All my commmunication will have to have GW is Double-Plus Good as the header :) Using words such as Terrorism, Nader for President, and Same-Sex Marriage will merit an immediate termination.
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
Well at least if your using Mac OS X 10.3 Mail.app
I used this tutorial on how to certify my email adress so the one receiving my email will know that's it me. Also when the receiver and the sender got a certified email adress you can encrypt your email adress.
Yes I know about PGP but this is much easier since Mail automatically adds the senders key for you when you get a mail that's signed.
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
I can't imagine something like this actually happening.. But with all these other absurd patents, copyrights being approved I wouldn't be surpised to see this a few years down the line. Absurd.
Buckethead
Either way, the consumer ends up paying, be it in the form of increased access fees or a tax hike or, most likely with our govt, just tacking it on to the deficit. Bottom line: The FBI can go piss on itself. Fuck the system
Amen
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
Yeah. Do so but invest in encryption outside the U.S. because the next step will be to ban encryption on the U.S. part of the internet. Ok, this will severely interfer with all kinds of online payment but how much sense would it make for the FBI if they are allowed to wiretap you but can't read what you type?
To avoid any potentially deadly misunderstandings, I'd advise you not to play a Counter-Strike "terrorist."
Some visionary should write a book about a future dystopia and call it 2040. Then Apple can come out with a cool new commercial in 2040, with a dubbed over voice saying, "god damn it. it's happened.", and have a gunshot fire with the sound of a body falling to the ground. right?
The FBI seeks to appoint a senior AOL linguist. The successful candidate will form a 1337 team able to translate AOL to American English in real-time as part of a stimulating new FBI initiative...
If you boil a frog, it doesn't know that it's in trouble until its legs are paralyzed and can't escape. Yup.
This is probably more for the "VoIP" segment of the universe than "XBox Live", this is a perfect reason to enable IPSEC over VoIP.
Too often the open source community thinks of the unreasonable approaches before the reasonable, and that's only because you have to fight fire with fire. In this case, you have to have as much reason as a politician will -- and yes, that sometimes means being as evil as they can be -- that is to say, with transparent encryption, it makes it unreasonable for a state agency to tap because it would mean confiscating servers and disrupting business (the state, in the US, must have a compelling state interest to do just about anything). This can have two effects: (1) Hosts increasingly require unreasonable agreements (CYA). (2) The disruption of business is so much that is becomes a burden for politicians to support.
My point being: look guys, we're Slashdotters, and we administrate public networks, and we're smarter than them, and with no disrespect, we can make prior art out of whatever aged notions of data security they have. That's what open source is about; the gathering of the people above those with green and power.
We should assume our data is being intercepted in the first place -- that's why you provide data security. Thou shalt encrypt.
ALSO SEE: Due Process, Fourth Amendment.
Seriously. It's nice (esp since I just got cable), but once it becomes Yet Another Intrusive Tool, I -for one- will go back to reading and ordering cds through catalogs or buying them in person.
The internet isn't a necessity, particularly if survellience becomes unavoidable.
Seriously though, this will stir a fair bit of controversy; on one side you will have the civil libertarians bitching about how this is a 'massive breach of human rights', on the other you will have the people who spout that 'it could save your life one day'. I don't actually know where i stand as of yet, but im in Australia so it's all good - we probably wont get the technology for another 25 years.
ON the other hand, if the government pays for the upgrades, it will be with tax dollars, so either way the consumer/citizen gets screwed. And, actually, if you look at the number of court cases that are successfully prosecuted nationwide using legitimately-garnered wiretap evidence, it's more like forcing 99.99999% of the people to pay for something the FBI needs only .000001% of the time, or worse. Ridiculous on the face of it: all the numbers I've been able to find simply don't justify this ongoing crusade for advanced wiretapping capabilities. Those boys just hate like hell to have anything kept from them. The problem, as I see it, is that the ease with which the FBI (and the Federal Government in general) was able to grab new powers in the wake of 9/11 has simply encouraged them to go for more of the same, although they've been trying for a national wiretap center for a long time prior to that. This is much like the FBI excesses decades ago, under Hoover, that resulted in Congressionally-mandated restraints upon its' behavior. Back then, of course, wiretapping was a relatively simple affair involving a lineman's handset and a pair of clip leads. Times have changed, and in the modern world the costs of allowing them to run in this open-loop fashion for very long are going to be significant, both in terms of money (tax dollars or on your Internet bill, take your pick) as well as civil-liberty abuse. Congress is the only entity that has the power to reign these people in, and I don't see a lot of effort being expended there on our behalf.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Next they'll bill the suspect for being investigated and failing to produce justification for an arrest warent.
Improves law enforcment and cuts the budget.. What could be wrong?
Oh right.. paying for being innocent.
I don't actually exist.
everyone should download anything and everything they can think of. Delete it when it is done and then initiate a new down load.
Bottom line: Saturate your download bandwidth.
If Everyone did this, it would likely hamper any monitoring capability.
I hate to advocat this this type of protest, but the bottom line is fuck you, get a warranat if you want to monitor my shit.
From this day forward, my download bandwidth will be saturated.
Like the SBC commercial in CA. "I'm gonna download the whole internet"!
Hopefully this will overload their ability to attempt to monitor anything.
This might be a good time to buy stock in harddrive manufacturers.
Who will guard the guards?
I'm right there with you, but I'm afraid we can't get there without crashing and burning first.
think our Congressmen, Representatives and top-level government administrators have forgotten that they are servants of the people! They should be honored to have such a job!
They certainly carry the attitude that we're lucky to have such generous people in charge.
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
Perhaps Freeswan went into retirement a bit too soon. Freeswan offered ubiquitous encryption throughout the internet where computers would negotiate secure transport mechanisms with each other on an opportunistic rather than pre defined basis.
I am thinking more a kerberos solution. Literal streaming encryption.
Even so, they know as well as any tech geeks do that its a smokescreen, a feel-good, a deliberate overextension so that when its denied, less extreme but still invasive suggestions look fine by comparison.
We all need to install internet cameras in our tolits...with a direct feed to the FBI.
I can't believe the government is actually considering putting a backdoor in every cable modem. Karnivore, while of debatable, legitimacy, is at the very least, secure because its physical components are kept very far away from crackers (in secured buildings of Tier one providers). Thus, it works on a fairly good premise of obscurity and limited access.
If this type of backdoor was inside the cable/DSL modem next to your computer, imagine how quickly both the obscurity and limited access factors disappear. You can kiss any type of sibilance of security on the internet goodbye because, in no time, every script kiddie running windows will be able to packet sniff your computer.
Sometimes, I really wonder how highly funded groups like the FBI can ignore common sense problems. If there's ONE thing I think we've all learned in the past twenty years in regards to computer security is: if it's even minutely possible for them to do so, they (geeks) will figure it out. If you put an encryption scheme on every DVD drive in the world, they will figure it out. If you don't address a security bug in a prominent piece of software, they will figure it out. And if you put some uber-packet sniffing device on every cable/DSL modem in the country, they will figure it out with probably an extra sense of haste.
So if this does come to pass, how long do you think it'll take for it to be cracked? My guess is a week. *sigh* Your hard earned tax dollars at work.
-Grym
...among many other opportunities, to use the sharp minds many here claim to have and contact your congresscritters...in writing. on paper. that will always bear more attention than an email (or even a phone call).
People really need to stop bitching about this stuff in web fora and actually try to interface with the people that can put a stop to some of these intrusive inanities.
ISP's have been forced to install tapping devices since december 1998. Accroding to the Dutch Telecommunications Act 1998. http://www.ez.nl/english/docs/tweng.pdf
Wouldn't worry about this.
1. The FBI is only "asking" the FCC which, anyway, lacks jurisdiction to tell IRC programmers how to program.
2. The Internet is becoming more decentralzed (e.g. anonymous wireless LANS,P2P networks, etc.) so there will be too many small time non compliant ISPs to go after. And the government, not for want of trying, has so far shown only futile attempts at regulating the Internet.
3. The only people for this are the FBI and a few conservative politicians. They're going up against the communications giants and equipment manufacuters -- financially secure industries with campaign contributions, lobby groups, and lots of lawyers.
4. Besides all that, they just don't get it. Any two connected nodes communicating by pulses (ones and zeros) can always encrypt their conversation. Language is a secret handshake.
We (a large Dutch ISP) have it set up in such a way that on each router which has customers connected to it, either on a switched network or directly on an UBR there is one interface configured for tapping. This inteface will mirror all the data coming from the customer interface, which then is filtered out by an dedicated tapping/sniffer box so only the targets data gets stored.
I am pretty sure that the majority of Internet users have nothing to hide, and are involved in no illegal activities, or at least no such activies that would be of interest to the anti-terror force that is the FBI, but privacy is one of the most basic principles of a free society, and making broadband users pay more so that the perverse desires of some unknown FBI agent "searching for terrorists" can be fulfilled is, in my opinion, outraging. The FBI already has some power when it comes to eavesdropping on the Internet, but breaching the privacy of the gigantic Broadband userbase of the USA, when they only need to track a few individuals, is I think horribly exaggarating.
What have the Broadband ISPs said about this? They stick to revolting against delivering confidential information of their heavily downloading clients, but they don't even try to stick a word in when their whole userbase's privacy is at risk?
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
Besides the privacy, police-state implications that I'm sure other people will point out, here are several points:
Firstly, if there is a easily available backdoor for everything, what's to stop criminals and terrorists from using it as well? People don't seriously think that they are not going to be able to get the technical information easily. Especially if *every* software program that allows communication the way they describe requires these backdoors. There's no-way you can keep all those civilian mouths shut. These backdoors will be built-in security holes. Just like mandating only low-level encryption may mean that it is easier for the US government to break into your data, but it also makes it easier for criminals to do so as well. The likely ease with which the technical information will spread will mean that hackers will probably make versions of the programs w/o the backdoors and spread them through the underground. Real (smart) criminals and terrorists will use these backdoorless programs leaving the American government to spy on harmless citizens and the inept.
Secondly, I can see governments like China rejecting any protocol or programs which has these backdoors installed. They are already paranoid enough about rumoured backdoors. If they are sure they exist (say through a FCC mandate) they are going to drop American software like a hot stone. While the Chinese government is a police state and would love the ability to spy on their *own* people, the last thing they want is to allow the American government to spy on *them*. Other countries, like the EU, UK might have a few qualms of letting the US government spy on *them*, though I wouldn't put it past them (esp. the UK ie. Blunkett) to start thinking of mandating their own spyware for their citizens....Say goodbye to the American software export industry...
I also wonder how these things would work in conjunction with Trusted Computing?
The last thing is, I presume that all rules and regulations will apply to open source software as well. So I guess all open source developers of the mentioned program types will have to submit their programs to the US government for approval before they can release it. And how does this affect the open source nature of development if you need government oversight *every* time you want to release any sort of new code?
I disagree. Social programs have been decimated in the past four years. The Great Society has been destroyed in favor of corporations and the wealthy. Defense spending has been astronomical and does not need to get any bigger. If greater power is given for wiretapping we will be running headlong into a police state. At this point the government already has too much power and needs to cut money out of programs that only serve to arm the government to the teeth, only to attack its own citizens and other nations unilateraly. If we need anything right now it's programs that will get the people of this country back on their feet.
Time makes more converts than reason
I don't think he meant to say bring the system down, because that's pretty stupid and we don't have a backup plan (rip it down to put it back up WTH?)....
ANYWAY He is agitated like I am at the FBI for their complete incompetence, we already eroded our right for them and they still FUCK UP. The track record of the FBI is they consistently do more harm then good (anyone heard of them going after the guys who wrote Louie Louie for subversion?).
The secret to getting modded up is to allways say i've got karma to burn in your sig..
For government insititutions, yes. Government-owned corporations may only use certified encryption technology, and only GOST is certified. (It's not a bad standard for strong private-key encryption, but not very popular either.)
It is not clear if the specified regulations actually apply to private citizens or to private-owned companies, but there is no article in Penal Code about illegal use of encryption. It is clear that this law (as well as many other evil laws) was never actually enforced. (Thank God!) The fact that everybody, including government, uses SSL in daily practice due to using existing OS and browser software incorporating it is quietly ignored.
In real life, unless you actually find anyone getting busted for this, you should ignore the rumors and use crypto if you feel you need it. Practice is much more of a criterion than written law in this country. For example, there's no law prohibiting the usage of GPS devices for purposes other than construction work, but people do get in trouble for using them anyway, on the grounds of misinterpretation of the existing regulations - like the absurd notion that all geographical coordinates more precise than 200 meters are classified.
In Soviet Russia... RUSSIANS comment on YOU.
Won't keep me from encrypting my phone calls when use VoIP. I'll just make sure I give people my public key along with my phone number!
If approved as drafted, the proposal could dramatically expand the scope of the agency's wiretap powers, raise costs for cable broadband companies and complicate Internet product development .. what about the US turning into a police state. I'd say that's quite a bit more disturbing than paying a few bucks.
I've had a detective show up twice at my ISP and ask to see records for IP addresses regarding a criminal investigation (eBay fraud, as it turned out). He was amazed that we didn't have *all* traffic, like logs of the actual content of e-mails, from several months earlier. I tried to explain that something like that would require storage that we couldn't afford, and he said "well, AOL saves all e-mails." Rigghht, of course they do. Hell, it would be trivial for us to sniff and archive every single e-mail for a year.
Freaking morons.
Or better yet- keep the much needded social projects and drop a few less bombs next year.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You might net the Martha Stewarts of the world with wiretaps, but with most criminals you'll have better luck just siezing all their gear and reading their hard drives anyway. For domestic terrorists, conventional surveilance methods seem to fall short anyway, so in either case I'd have a hard time justifying the added cost of being able to tap their internet communications.
I think the best way of defeating terrorists may be education. Convince the people who tend to turn a blind eye to suspicious activities out of misguided loyalty that ignoring those activities is not beneficial to their community or cause. Take Iraq for instance. Terrorists there are merrily targetting Iraqi citizens at least as much as they are American troops. A lot of the people there blame the USA for "not providing enough security," but how many of those same people are letting those same terrorists crash at their houses, or know someone who is? As long as those people tolerate it, the problem will not go away.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I give it 37 minutes. Tops.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
According to Charles Stross, the CIA has a cache of alien portals that they use to travel to other planets, and the Russians are keeping Cthulhu in a bunker near the Baltic Sea.
What was your point?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Of course the FBI should get whatever they want. They're doing such a great job, moving from strength to strength. I trust them more than ever, and I grew up with J. Edgar Hoover.
--
make install -not war
You sound kinda outta control, and some people might say thats counter productive. But your comments made me realize what's been missing. RAGE. It was there in the Viet Nam protests, it was there in the civil rights movement, where is it now? Something has effectively castrated/pacifed the American people. Video games, VCR's, internet porn, etc. We now have so many escape mechanisms to hide inside, we can't seem to stay mad past the weekend.
On a side note, does anyone notice a kind of resignation to laws like the Patriot Act now? Like we're waiting for after the election, we're assuming that it'll go away then? I have and it bothers me. There should actually be a massive campaign to FIRE EACH AND EVERY ENCUMBENT FROM EVERY OFFICE IN THE COUNTRY if the Patriot Act isn't completely repealed BEFORE the elections.
Hmph. A campaign like that would probably be labeled a terrorist act or extortion or something. I've no faith left.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
into your net connection, then doesn't it make it easier for a script kiddie to tap into your net connection also and intercept what you're doing?
Or spyware for that matter.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Stop being so politically correct. The fact of the matter is that this is a holy war waged by a bunch of religious fanatics. They WANT to die so they may be blessed by Alah and a hundred virgins in the afterlife.
If they won't listen to reason, then they will have to answer by our might. Sorry to spell out the sick sad truth. No one ever said war was pretty, just a fact of life that has been part of Human history...and perhaps into the future as well.
Remember, we are all animals. Some just happen to be more civilized then others.
Life is not for the lazy.
Rage is a good thing :)
:)
I'm actually a nice guy and i'm not out of control. I'm just becoming more defensive and vocal about what i think is happening to our country.
I think i'm more inspired, than out of control. Because i will listen to all points of views.
Despite my "Fuck George Bush" rant... I'm not a party guy. There are good republicans... The problem is whats happening now and the leadership must be held accountable.
I think things like the patriot act will continue to evolve into more intrusive forms. Which is why i'm so pissed.
I'm not against the government trying to protect us. But the question is at what cost?
Most of us are computer expert users. I'm a 3d artist and director. I've grown up with computers since the vic20, c64s, atari home computers etc. The point is most of us know that there is no absolute security. All systems have their flaws and weaknesses.
Our government is in pursuit of the absolute security device. There is no such thing. All we are doing is hurting our foundation as a free country.
We have an administration that beleives in absolute control.
And i simply do not feel like being controlled by them. They disagree with just about everything i do. I do not want their god in my life, nor do i want them amending the constitution to prevent gay marriage. I'm not gay, neither is george bush... why does it matter to us?! It matters to gay folks who love each other. The government is forcing themselves into their lives based on some religious morality! Then theres the security issues, the invasive nature, the lack of prosumption of innocence in this world, they're against STEM CELL RESEARCH FOLKS!!!.. come on.. these guys are insane.
I do not like at all what is happening. And if that causes rage.. so be it.
Like you said, people tend to get worked up and then sleep it off over the weekend. It passes.
I cant let that happen. Its what being alive is about. Being inspired, not being bored and mundane.
Come on.. You all saw Office Space!!!
Its too easy to go down with the ship. Its much harder to pick up a bucket and bail the water like a madman in hopes of living.
People have been crashing airplanes into things in order to destroy them for sixty years. Even in the terrorist world, this idea predates Debt of Honor; an Algerian terrorist group hijacked a French airliner with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower in 1994, the same year that the book was released. Fortunately, they stopped for fuel and negotiations, and the plane was raided before they could take off. Planning operations like that takes time, so it's very doubtful it was inspired by the book.
I have never heard anything that indicates Clancy has special sources into the military and intelligence community. Hunt for Red October caused a tizzy in the Navy because it was so accurate about various things, but it was discovered that he simply did a hell of a lot of research using public sources. Unfortunately, his later books have slid rather downhill.
The idea that the NSA has a quantum computer powerful enough to be used to crack cryptography while private researchers are struggling to make ones that can factor the number 15 is ridiculous. Working for the NSA does not automatically turn you into a Grade A genius, so their genius population is necessarily limited and proportionate to the level found in the private sector.
I know that it's fun and exciting to believe that the NSA, CIA, and FBI are these amazing, magical places where things can be done that can't be done in the regular work-a-day world, and certainly this image is constantly perpetuated by books and movies, but reality is more mundane. They are government bureaucracies like all others, which happen to work in a certain area and are reasonably good at getting their job done. They are populated by people; inexperienced new guys, career politicians, mediocre middle managers, etc.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Legal experts said the 85-page filing includes language that could be interpreted as forcing companies to build back doors into everything from instant messaging and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) programs to Microsoft's Xbox Live game service. The introduction of new services that did not support a back door for police would be outlawed, and companies would be given 15 months to make sure that existing services comply.
I am going to keep in mind that this is seen through the filter of cnet, which tends to be somewhat Slashdottish -- kind of liberal, pro-tech, anti-regulation. I really need to see the "85-page document" to decide.
That being said, this is possibly the most disturbing thing I have heard proposed from the federal government yet. Besides the obvious issues of holding back innovation, I find the privacy issues unacceptable. If you want to wiretap someone, fine. Go to wherever they are, and use a parabolic mic or physical bug or something similar. Yes, it doesn't let you tap the population en-masse. There is no justifiable reason for this request. The only thing it does is make cheap, easy, and hard-to-detect-abuse-of wiretapping much more feasible and tempting. I *want* it to be a pain in the ass to wiretap people. It's worked well for hundreds of years, and I see no reason to change this.
I also want to make it clear that I will not follow any such directives requiring programs to including monitoring backdoors. If I have to, I will develop anonymously, through Freenet or similar (no, I'm not brave enough to do something like this openly as a protest and get hammered for it), but I will not begin inserting backdoors into the software I work on.
I am absolutely appalled that something like this would be suggested. It is the sort of thing that people that I considered "tin foil hatters" were worrying about for a long time. I would like to see an EFF analysis of this. If this is as bad as the article makes it out to be, this will be the thing that tips me over the edge to sending money to the EFF.
I would like to know what evidence cnet has for claiming that the Bush administration backs this. If they really are, they are going well beyond even what I thought Ashcroft's most tyrannical police-state aspirations were.
Among other things, I claim that this will:
* Limit innovation. This is a *real* issue, not a "we can't bundle Internet Explorer and now innovation is being suppressed" whine. Putting backdoors in protocols is a serious issue.
* Damage US credibility internationally when it comes to secure software. The cryptographic export restrictions did a phenomenal amount of damage to the US computer security industry, and let foreigners take over the market. When you want smartcard systems, you don't go to a US company. This is absolutely unacceptable, as computer security is becoming ever more important as more and more people are using it.
* Provide an impediment to international software projects. The United States is not the world, nor is it even "effectively universal" on the Internet. If you ban something like development of a VoIP system without key escrow, development will simply move overseas. Sure, you could make *using* software without escrow a federal offense (thank you Britain, which has set the path for this wonderfully stupid approach). It will do *nothing* to stop propagation of software. The last time the FBI tried to meddle with the Internet via legislation like this was when they arrested Mr. Zimmerman for releasing PGP. It *didn't work*, and wouldn't have protected their ability to snoop on people. We have come up with many approaches to deal with US laws limiting computer security, and can be used again in this case.
* Is stunningly short-sighted. You can't make a single effective law like this. What if I ssh to a system and use an IM system there to talk to someone else on the same system (and I *have* sshed in and used talk or phone on a Unix or VMS system before).
May we never see th
I want those fucking Islamic extremists killed on the spot.
I suspect many of them would like to see people like you wiped out on the spot for suppressing their religion, intimidating and screwing with their country and economy, etc.
9/11 al Queda members didn't wake up one day and decide, for no reason at all, to spend their own lives to try to hurt people they saw as oppressors. There was a reason that they feel the way they do, and I doubt that trying to use force and intimidation is going to work all that well. It didn't work for the Soviets (and they could be awfully brutal). It just makes more people that hate you enough to die to hurt you.
But, whatever. Bush doesn't need to solve the terrorist problem to get votes. He needs to make people feel good to get votes. And beating the crap out of someone makes people feel good.
May we never see th
This is ludacris. Doesn't the FBI have better things to do than raise prices of Broadband so they can spy on us? This is all for home intruision. Not only will they just moniter internet traffic, Downloads, Uploads So this will make it easier for them to run to the RIAA like a little kid telling on someone.
$>man woman
$>Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Oh, and before you thought this was just something typical of the American government and all the Europeans were laughing at you; we've had this kind of monitoring here in the Netherlands for some time now. To the extent that ISP's are not allowed to offer encrypted services such as IMAP over SSL.
Diplomatic communications between embassies and the homeland are encrypted. And to make sure they're not vulnerable to decryption, information is continuously transferred. However, when there is no information to be transmitted, random garbage is sent.
So, what we need to do is to flood the Internet with random garbage; let the FBI sift through that!!!
Oh, wait! This system already exists: it's called USENET!!!!
1. The FBI is only "asking" the FCC which, anyway, lacks jurisdiction to tell IRC programmers how to program.
Currently, this is the case. I think that no matter what, there will be pragmatic issues. However, the FCC's role in regulating Internet-based things is very much up in the air, and conflicting opinions have been taken.
The Clinton administration, barring a few moves, took a very federal-hands-off approach to the Internet (taxes, especially, were a big sticking point). Bush largely continued that. At some point, though, it's a good bet that someone's going to try regulating the Internet in various ways, and the FCC is the most obvious choice to designate as a starting point.
2. The Internet is becoming more decentralzed (e.g. anonymous wireless LANS,P2P networks, etc.) so there will be too many small time non compliant ISPs to go after. And the government, not for want of trying, has so far shown only futile attempts at regulating the Internet.
Not necessarily. For certain major systems, like VoIP, there will likely be a few large ones due to network effect. Think of AIM and ICQ today. If you don't play by the rules, you can't interoperate. These services are centralized, so it's easy to monitor and pick up on noncompliant systems.
3. The only people for this are the FBI and a few conservative politicians. They're going up against the communications giants and equipment manufacuters -- financially secure industries with campaign contributions, lobby groups, and lots of lawyers.
Now this is a damn good point, but I can think of a couple of legitimate counterarguments. The first is that telcos are scared of the VoIP. It breaks down barriers to entry that have existed for a long time to nothing. They have a *lot* of overhead and costs that have cropped up over years, and they're looking for a way out. If VoIP systems required key escrow and *federal approval* before they can be rolled out, it makes for a *very* nice barrier to entry. You just have to donate some money to the appropriate politicians, and you've good a good reason for companies to want to play along.
4. Besides all that, they just don't get it. Any two connected nodes communicating by pulses (ones and zeros) can always encrypt their conversation. Language is a secret handshake.
In theory, yes. In practice, there are only so many easy-to-use mass-market clients out there. It would be difficult but feasible to go after noncompliant types. For techies, this is a non-issue, since it's easy to whip something else new up each day. For Joe Blow, this is very effective.
I first realized the "Joe Blow"-"techie" separation when the Feds stopped going after Zimmerman for PGP. It didn't *matter* that a couple of security nuts with the dedication to get gpg and a wrapper and mutt set up. There aren't many people who were willing to copy and paste text in and out of Eudora each thime they wanted to encrypt or decrypt a message. As a result, the masses did not use PGP, so PGP was not a huge issue. The hard-core security nuts and cryptographers are kept shut up, because they *can* set up PGP, and the Fed is happy because the masses *don't* use PGP.
However, with VoIP, the issue came up again. Email is generally read on a computer, where you can add PGP on, and hence software vendors don't bundle PGP support. However, if you start selling VoIP embedded devices, you probably need to bundle native encryption support for it to be used. It will be easy-to-use and probably automatic. This is unacceptable, because the masses will start *using* end-to-end encryption.
The thing is, I can't work up much dislike by the FBI, because they're getting displaced by the OHS, which is ever so much more nasty and has ever so much less oversight. At this point, the FBI is the lesser of two evils -- by a long, long, long shot.
May we never see th
Broadband providers say the FBI's request would, for the first time, force cable providers that sell broadband to come under the jurisdiction of 1994's Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which further defined the already existing statutory obligations of telecommunications carriers to help police conduct electronic surveillance. Telephone companies that use their networks to sell broadband have already been following CALEA rules.
Ok, fair enough I suppose. But the fact however, as has been pointed out here, is that not all programs are being written in the US. To make IM, VoIP, IRC, and or whatever other type of program that allows communication over IP have backdoors is bad enough. But to expect that every program on the planet has one is just downright silly. But, thats not really the bad part...
Under CALEA, police must still follow legal procedures when wiretapping Internet communications. Depending on the situation, such wiretaps do not always require court approval, in part because of expanded wiretapping powers put in place by the USA Patriot Act.
Bad, bad, bad. Is it so much to ask for due process here? I mean it's part of our own set of friggen laws. Is it so much to ask that the Feds follow the laws before they make new ones?
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I trust that timing the announcement of this proposal on the day after the Madrid terrorist bombings is just an unfortunate coincidence. Not that it would affect the public's sentiment one way or the other, right? And we can be confident that Congress will study it rationally and objectively, as demonstrated by their carefully considered passage of the Patriot Act, passed almost unanimously before any single human could even read all 800 pages of it, much less grasp its scope.
The sick thing about all Internet wiretapping is that when asked why this is required, the cops always just say "child pornography", and everybody rolls over; the media has created the impression that about every second byte transmitted has something to do with child porn. Between our War on Terrorism (With an Occasional Aside for Oil) and child porn Internet hysteria, we have two beautiful excuses to slowly rip up the Bill of Rights, piece by piece.
Here comes the next shred.
Agreed: "The Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress have used the tragedy of 9/11 to spread fear among Americans, and are using that fear to gain control of all three branches of government - legislative, executive and judicial. If we don't stop allowing the right-wing factions in this country to consolidate their power by taking away our freedoms one by one we won't have a country worth saving."
The U.S. government is rapidly becoming more corrupt. Here are just a few examples, which were posted before to another story:
Killing people and destroying their property:
N.Y. Times editorial
"... Americans paid Ahmad Chalabi to gull them into a war that is costing them a billion a week and a precious human cost."
Lying about scientific facts:
"The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals..."
N.Y. Times
The Guardian
Wired News
Union of Concerned Scientists
The present terrorism against the U.S. people is partly the result of the U.S. government's secret violence:
About a year ago, I hastily put together a short, incomplete history that shows what has happened: History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories.
If you don't like it, vote accordingly.
I've got a shitlist here:
China: Repressive government with deep love for monitoring citizens and harsh penalties for political dissent.
Australia: Extremely socially conservative government with love for censoring Internet.
Britain: Anti-gun, laws forcing people to hand over passwords/keys upon request, leader has mouth firmly glued to Bush's cock.
Netherlands: Apparently anti-encryption government?
Man, I wish some hacker would grab email from a couple of important figures in the Netherlands and post said data all over.
This worked nicely in the United States when protesting "trash rights". Theoretically, when you throw something out, you no longer lay claim to it, and it isn't yours. That means that anyone (even without a warrant) can come along and root through your trash for interesting information. The police force of some town busted someone for marijuana-growing or something after monitoring their garbage for a long time without a warrant. The local paper ran an editorial criticizing them. The mayor and police chief both bashed the editor of the paper, saying that the paper didn't know what it was talking about and should shut up. The police chief sent a letter in to the paper saying that the ability to monitor garbage wasn't an invasion of privacy and was perfectly acceptable. The editors of the paper ran out and collected the *mayor's* and *police chief's* trash for two weeks (using the same argument of legality that the police chief used), then published a rather embarassing dossier on each.
May we never see th
The Great Society is a socialist state. We need less government, less welfare, less projects, less help. The government does not exist to help people. It exists to protect people. But protection, in my opinion, does not mean protection from the realities of life.
If you blog it...
The problem isn't in allowing LEA access to what they want. It's making sure there's a process they have to go through to get them, which prevents them from getting the information when they shouldn't be.
We have one. It's called "the current system", where if you want to tap someone's VoIP connection you have to stick someone out by their house with a parabolic mic or plant a bug in their house. This makes for a wonderful check on the system -- LEAs simply can't *afford* to monitor each and every person, do fishing expeditions, or do the sort of thing the French claim in the form of Echelon. I rather like this system. It means that if the police *really* want to bug someone, like a mob boss, they can, but they can't just wildly run out and monitor huge swaths of society.
May we never see th
In principle I have no objection to altering the existing wiretap laws to account for new technologies such as VoIP. However, make no mistake that once this occurs, the next thing on the chopping block are encryption products. The argument will be "We cannot effectively monitor terrorists and child pornographers because strong encryption has become commonplace."
We'll be back to either mandating weaker forms of encryption or requiring backdoors be installed at the encrypted tunnel layer. SSL/TLS, IPSec and SSH all come to mind (key escrow, anybody?). By designating the tunnel endpoints as "service providers" (they ARE in fact providing some sort of service or else you wouldn't be communicating with them), they could require a backdoor be installed at the endpoint.
Shape of things to come...
ask our russian hacker friends how did they manage when KGB had similar powers.
Here were no modems and no PC before about 1990, the computer culture was based on mainframes, minicomputers, drum printers and on transport of 1/2 inch tapes. And the last peak of KGB powers was before 1985, during Andropov's rule.
They've only got 8 more months to do this shit. I'm a fiscally conservative (and social moderate) Republican, but IF I vote it'll be for Kerry. I want this asshole Bush out of office before kids have to learn to goosestep and wear brown shirts in kindergarten. The religious right must've spooged in their shorts when the supreme court handed the Presidency to Bush, but it's set back democracy 100 years. I guess I'll have to deal with that Massachusetts asshat Kerry raising my taxes and giving welfare mothers more of my money for 4 years, but it's better than the fascist fucks in office right now.
what next? required video camera on every computer monitor or you will be forced to face charges of treason and be tried as a terrorist for defying the us government? it's getting close.. europe has made a few hundred steps backward a few days ago with this act:
n .s html
http://www.ipjustice.org/CODE/release20040309_e
which allows european AND american companies to do whatever the fuck they want to european citizens. raid their houses, force isp's to give personal information, allow them to have access to prvate government records about people (so they can extort people) give them the freedom to do whatever they want to people... freeze their assets, basically, treat them worse than terrorists.
what's scary is that we're about one step away from that.. that bill did every thing the US government would love to do. and will do within the next few years.
this stuff is scary.
time for some new politicians.
That may have been true a few years ago, but fortunately we now have an administration with the will and wisdom to make our children and grandchildren pay instead. So live it up and just hope you die before the bill shows up!
So the thing to do would be to use a P2P service like Mute, where nobody can track any of the traffic, not even a node on the network.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Some people simply aren't going to work. I've seen it, I've lived with it. It's not a matter of a lot of people getting the help they need to get back into a job. Some people just don't want a job. They are perfectly content to get their welfare check, sit at home, watch tv, drink/smoke pot, whatever, so long as it doesn't involve their getting employment. Obviously, there are people who are dependent upon the system who genuinely need the assistance to pick themselves up. However, I have seen more than my fair share of people who fought harder to keep their welfare checks than they did to secure a job.
The civil libertarians realize what none of the tin-foil hat paranoiacs on
Obviously, the first step in defending our rights and freedoms is vigilance. Everyone give yourself a pat on the back for vigilance.
The next and essential step is actually identifying the real problem. Here the problem is not that the proposal will "dramatically expand the scope of the agency's wiretap powers," because it can't. First, no law specifically authorizes the FBI's wiretap powers, but the gov'ts. Second, the FCC has NO AUTHORITY WHATSOEVER to define when law enforcement can or cannot tap someone's communications. Third, it it was such a realistic threat, it would have already happened, as such laws and regulations have been implemented in the past.
To protect your rights, you must know your rights and understand the system, so that you know when you're really threatened and how and where to direct your energy. Read before you (continue to) rant:
1. Things like this are already required as explained in this summary of this law (remember CALEA from 1994?)!
2. The authority to wiretap anyone's communication is governed not by the FCC but by this amendment to the Constitution (with informative analysis) and this statute.
This is a threat to your ISP service bill and the quality of the services and software, not your constitutional rights. I don't want to live in a market where all communications products have legally mandated back doors, either. But not because I'm afraid the FBI (or NSA or MS or anyone) will then be able to eavesdrop on everything I do. They lack the resources, the skills, and the authority to do that whether the FCC accepts this proposal or not.
I think you're missing the point -- most pro-P2P'ers still want the authors to be compensated for their work.
I don't know Mute, but I'm assuming that it's some sort of anonymous P2P? If so, then it's also at odds with the idea of compensating authors within a new system that embraces P2P.
Again, my point is that we generally like the idea of privacy, but in the effort to legitimize P2P, those who traditionally stump for privacy (ie EFF) are now pushing for a new pseudo government agency to track what we do on the Internet.
But because everybody loves to hate the RIAA, nobody seems to pay attention to details like this.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
In a democracy, the govt does want you want it to do. If I want a Great Society or a dog-eat-dog authoritarian state, then that's up to me at the ballot box. Of course, if you're stuffing these ideas down my throat, well, don't expect to be called freedom-loving at the end of it.
Bugging on such a large scale always comes up against the "little elves" problem - you have more data than you can possibly sift. The real question is, do you want to fund what amounts to a giant needle-in-the-haystack search which will be less efficient - and more expensive - than what you've got now. Of course, being emporer of those little elves will be fun and powerful; I'm just waiting for a J Edgar Hoover figure too step-to and start flashing all this data at the right people. Of course, he should have the dresses to match...
At the end of the day, the FBI problems are *social problems* and the only way to do that is to talk to people. No amount of electronics. Ooops. This is slashdot, my bad.
h.
Sigs? We don't need no steenkin sigs!
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
You mean the Johnson administration? That was more than a few years ago.
If you think deficit spending started "a few years ago" or with the current administration, you're sadly deluded.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Canada has far more social systems in place than the US. Until the early 1990s, you could argue the Canadian government was more authoritarian than life in the US, especially given the higher tax burden. Since the past 10 years, however, I think you'd be a fool to make that argument.
I've never heard of the US called "The Great Society", but if you think things like education, healthcare, social security, and pensions are the makings of an authoritarian regime, then you really need to reconsider your perspective in a worldwide context.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Am I the only one who thinks it's no coincidence that the Feds sprung this on us right after the bombings in Madrid?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
I suspect many of them would like to see people like you wiped out on the spot for suppressing their religion, intimidating and screwing with their country and economy, etc.
9/11 al Queda members didn't wake up one day and decide, for no reason at all, to spend their own lives to try to hurt people they saw as oppressors. There was a reason that they feel the way they do[...]
Sure they have reasons for what they do. That doesn't make those reasons legitimate, or compatible with what the rest of the world wants. Violent political islamists like al-Queda want the west to go away because it's corrupting their youth and an embarrasement to the idea that the way for the arab world to regain its lost glory is by looking backward and turing to ever-stricter forms of Islam.
It would actually be possible to give them what they want, and they would probably go away, or at least focus on the fact that their homelands aren't nearly as pious as they'd like...but, it'd me much less inconvenient to western civilization to just blow them off the face of the earth.
and I doubt that trying to use force and intimidation is going to work all that well. It didn't work for the Soviets (and they could be awfully brutal). It just makes more people that hate you enough to die to hurt you.
The Soviets actually wanted to do what Noam Chomsky and friends accuse the US of doing; traditional imperialism, taking over and enslaving the locals to extract resources (rather than just buying the resources from them, and yes there is a difference). The US funding the local opposition against the Soviets couldn't have helped their cause either.
The US is being reasonably careful at not killing people that aren't trying to destroy the west. Avoiding Soviet-style brutality makes us more effective, not less.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
This is just part of the natural progression of total control and monitoring of the public.
This will pass, and people will accept it since it 'protects me'..
Eventually we will get to ongoing monitoring of all activities, regardless of any suspicion.. Even in your own home...
Don't laugh, if you don't see it coming, then you are a fool.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
- Ashcroft will sneak these provisions into Patriot Act III.
- Bush will use his patrotic propaganda to ensure its safe passage.
- It will become law right under the feet of many clueless individuals.
- Bush will ensure it remains with his "You must be a terrorist if you want to weaken our security forces" rhetoric.
It is a hope of mine that one day, the idiots in the government will come to realize that the Internet is supposed to be beyond any government's control. Unfortunately, I doubt the powermongers will ever let that happen.The religious right must've spooged in their shorts when the supreme court handed the Presidency to Bush
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "religious right", but I think I fit that description (Christian, pro-life, opposed to gay marriage, etc.) and I hate this administration. I despise Bush the retard, Cheney the evil money man, and Ashcroft the tyrant fascist.
I guess my point is to be careful painting people with such a broad brush...
We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked.
Does China even have something this nasty? In some ways I'd prefer a nationwide firewall to this.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
However, the consumers will end up paying for the wiretapping regadless, whether the ISP's are forced to do the upgrade themselves, or if the FBI funds since the FBI is funded with everyone American's dollars.
Yes, but if government pays, the cost is distributed much wider than if your ISP pays (where you pay much larger share). If the 260 million want to enjoy the "benefits" of the FBI's snooping into my computer, then 260 million ought to pay for it, not just me and my ISP.
Can't have it both ways. If the WTC was an act of war, then all the people being held without trial in guantanimo (sp) bay should be prisoners of war and subject to the geneva convention, instead of being "enemy combatants" and tortured.
Why if you vote? Get out and do it! Make a difference.
I guess I'll have to deal with that Massachusetts asshat Kerry raising my taxes and giving welfare mothers more of my money for 4 years, but it's better than the fascist fucks in office right now.
I'd suspect that you see better budgets and smaller deficts with Kerry in office then Dubya. The Republicans don't get to claim they are the party of fiscal responsibility anymore. Clinton managed to balance the budget -- Reagan and Dubya tanked it in the name of defense spending.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Actually you are wrong. If you take actions outside of the realm of a normal solider then under the Geneva convention you are considered a spy and subject to execution if caught.
During the Battle of the Bulge the Germans sent English speaking special operations forces behind allied lines dressed in American uniforms to disrupt communications. When these forces were caught they were summarily executed by the allies.
If you want the Geneva convention to apply to you then I suggest you put on a uniform and face us on the field of battle. It doesn't apply if you fly airliners into our buildings.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Social programs have been decimated in the past four years. The Great Society has been destroyed in favor of corporations and the wealthy. Defense spending has been astronomical and does not need to get any bigger. If greater power is given for wiretapping we will be running headlong into a police state. At this point the government already has too much power and needs to cut money out of programs that only serve to arm the government to the teeth, only to attack its own citizens and other nations unilateraly. If we need anything right now it's programs that will get the people of this country back on their feet.
Well, for a start, the federal government has a constitutional mandate to provide for a common defense. It doesn't have any constitutional authority to take money away from Party A to spend on benefits for Party B. But I'd certainly agree that the government's military/intelligence activities are far in excess of anything that could be legitimately called "defense".
Both of them are a symptom of the same problem, namely, that our government has long ago slipped off of the leash the Constitution was intended to be.
Now, we have to figure out how to get the leash back on....
Social welfare accounts for approximately 50 billion dollars in taxpayer money a year. Corporate welfare accounts for approximately 150 billion of our hard-earned dollars a year, which the corporations take and then say "Sayanara! We're moving to China!"
If you need a site, I'll be happy to dig one up for you.
You want to complain about welfare? Start making noise about corporate welfare!
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
It was an act of war. Just because they don't wear uniforms and don't act like soldiers doesn't mean it isn't an act of war. If the Japanese had sabotaged the fleet at Pearl Harbor using intelligence officers instead of airplanes would that have meant it wasn't an act of war?
My whole point is that in a war (declared or not) if you don't wear a uniform and don't obey the Geneva Convention yourself then don't expect us to do the same if we capture you because we are under no obligation to do so.
I didn't catch your "torture" comment in the first line either. Do you really think we are torturing those people? Maybe some physiological warfare (sleep deprivation) but I highly doubt we are cutting off genitals or using electro-shock to get the information we want. In any case they are being treated a hellva lot nicer then they would have treated any Americans they captured. Care to remember Daniel Pearl or Johnny Spann?
Terrorists and those that support them deserve their fates. I'll start worrying about the Geneva Convention when the cowards have the balls to face us on an actual battlefield instead of blowing up our civilians. And don't give me the "It's the only way they have to fight" bullshit -- we managed to achieve our independence from the most powerful empire in the World (the British) without blowing up women and children in downtown London.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It's not a war because there's no other side. At least with the Japanese there is a definite enemy, and you can win the war when they formally surrender. You can't declare war on an idea.
When I said torture I was refering to sleep deprivation. Sure, there are worse things you could do to someone, but how long have they been there now, a year or more?
The real problem is when you look at things in black and white, good and evil terms you never stop to examine the evil you may be doing yourself (not that you're personally responsible, it's your society, but that's another issue).
Painting terrorists as "evildoers" implies that they live just to perpetrate evil acts. Therefore, since America is good, they attack America simply for that reason. When you think like that you never stop to realize that these are real people with real concerns.
Terrorism is wrong, it's self defeating and it's not at all a good way to solve the injustices in the world. However, simply declaring war on terror does nothing to solve the underlying problems. On 9/11 2001 ~3000 Americans died. On any given day ~30,000 children starve to death. If 1% of the attention given to the Americans who died on 9/11 was given to improving infrastructure worldwide we'd be living in a much better world.
Yeah, I've met people like that too. They're definitely a small percentage of society, but they do exist. But there are a few points I'd like to raise:
1 - I have a problem with this Puritan idea that work is a moral obligation. "Work" should be something you do to solve a problem: If there's not enough food, you grow more food. If there's a hole in the roof, you fix the hole. If people are dying of disease, you make a vaccine. Our society has reached a point where there aren't enough of those problems to keep everyone employed; so what do we do? We create problems where there weren't any before. 20 years ago, were people truly suffering from the lack of GameBoys?
2 - As a former manager in a small business, I can tell you that I wouldn't want those slackers working for me. I don't want employees who are forced to work for me; I want employees who do the work because they find it interesting, or because they like their co-workers, etc. If I have to give up 0.2 % of my paycheck to keep these lazy fucks out of my hair, I consider that a worthwhile investment.
3 - If we do accept the above-mentioned Puritan work ethic, then we should apply it equally to all. What about the hereditary billionaires who never did a day's work in their lives? If they were forced to work for a living, it might keep them out of mischief. Like running for office.
> They are getting off lightly compared to the pain and injustice they inflicted.
"They" (the illegally detained people in Guatamalla) are not the people who flew a plane into a couple of your corporate buildings. Those people are dead. These detainees have not even been given a trial so no one who claims to believe in the USA's ideals of 'justice' can say that these people are guilty.
> If they want those concerns addressed they should talk to us about them.
This is either an extremely sarcastic joke, or you are not familiar with your country's track-record when it gomes to dealing with foreign countries. "Talking" to the USA is possibly the worst thing that a nation can do to try to get them to stop doing something... it shows that you're not in complete obedience.
I can't give you the specific details on this example but I do remember hearing on the news a couple days after the attack on the WTC that a Saudi prince offered New York a million dollars if it would meet and talk rationally about reforming its policies in the middle east. Mayor Julliani refused.
another excellent example is what your country did to Nicaragua. The US was attacking this country and funding militant groups in the country in their efforts. Nicaragua was actually pretty clever here - they did not ask the United States to "please stop terrorizing and killing us" because they saw what happens to other nations when they do this. They brought their case to the United Nations.
The World Court declared that the United States was guilty of War Crimes in this case and ordered them to pay reperations. The US ignored the ruling and stepped up the bombing, eventually killing tens to hundreds of thousands of people.
Outside of the United States, your country is well known to be the leading source of terrorist attacks and a huge supporter of terrorists. I implore you to research this yourself and not disregard it with an idiotic statement like "we're jealous of your freedom".
Look up talks or texts by Noam Chomsky (http://chomsky.info), as an example - he is a great researcher and reporter on the US's foreign and domestic policies. A lot of "right-wing" people claim that he just outright lies about most of his facts, but that's just a cowardly way to disregard the truth. If he was a perpetual liar in his thousands of speeches and over 50 books he would not have been kept on as a professor at MIT for the past 30-40 years.
> We'll be living in a much better world when OBL and Mullah Omar are seen hanging from lightposts in downtown Kabul.
This type of logic does not always work. History has shown us that when a man has nothing left, brutally displaying the corpse of someone who was caught will not deter them from trying the same.
Don't misinterpret me as a "Saddam sympithiser" or someone who in any ways is justifying the death of 3,000+ civilians during the '9/11' attacks. I believe that the perpretrators should be hunted down (rationally), put on trial, and, if found guilty, punished to the full extend that you desire.
Rest assured though that no matter how much money you pump into wars on concepts or innatimate ideas, and no matter how many rights your country takes away from it's own citizens, you will continue to face these types of attacks and related problems as long as you stubbornly refuse to analyze or deal with the "motive" of these attacks.
"WinTel Server 10 Times Less Expensive to Operate Than Linux Mainframe" http://www.microsoft.com/canada/getthefacts
Yes, Johnson wisely knew that Americans would only support a senseless war as long as they weren't made to pay for it. That's how deep even the most strident patriotism runs sometimes.
And I remember the aftermath in the 70s, too: simultaneously soaring interest rates and unemployment. Look for more of the same as the Bushies continue to follow Argentina's example...