"Dark Alleys" on the Internet

nokilli writes "Sounding the alarmist tone many of us became used to in the early days of the web, The New York Times has a story that talks about "national security" concerns over the myriad ways in which two people (i.e., terrorists) can communicate using the Internet today [NYT=Kneel before Zod]. They're talking about monitoring chat rooms, email servers, etc. I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD."

Comments

sniff

[Tom]

I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD."

It's called sniffing.
Either on the wire, or if the MUD software encrypts traffic, on your end (via trojan) or the server end (via court-order).

My personal opinion

[SpooForBrains]

Anyone writing on technological matters in a popular publication should be required to have a modicum of a clue.

Call me old fashioned.

Re:My personal opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

> Anyone writing on technological matters in a popular publication should be required to have a modicum of a clue.

Why? It doesn't seem to apply to 'other' matters.

Data is not the same as intelligence.

[Jaywalk]

And what gives them the bright idea that they can eliminate "dark alleys" on the net any more than dark alleys can be eliminated in real space? And even if every dark alley were well lit, that doesn't mean that they're being effectively watched. The sheer volume of information being exchanged precludes effective review of that data.

It would make a lot more sense to focus on effectively handling the data available than simply adding to the flood of data already at hand.

Re:Data is not the same as intelligence.

[pete-classic]

And what gives them the bright idea that they can eliminate "dark alleys" on the net any more than dark alleys can be eliminated in real space?

This is going to sound like a paranoid rant. I guess it is. But then, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

What gives you the idea that "they" really believe the bullshit that they shovel? "They" always want a little more authority, so they can protect you from terrorists, or save your kids from drug pushers, or fight "the war on poverty."

Is it possible, just possible, that all of these things are nothing more than thinly veiled power-grabs?

Pierce the veil.

-Peter

I can still remember the times

[Timesprout]

when communication was considered a good thing.

Re:I can still remember the times

[zx75]

I remember when communism was considered a good thing.

Hint: no social or economic system is inherantly good or bad, some have advantages over others and vice versa. It is the leader who determines how a system is used that determines whether that instance of it is good or bad.

Futile

[teiresias]

To try and tap every conversation throughout the many internet communications outlets is as futile as trying to tap the hundreds of phone lines and overhearing conversations on streets (nevermind needing court orders). Big Brother is big but the populace is bigger. There is no way to create a large enough agency to not only collect but also analyze the data that would be collected.

It's a concern but not a very legitamate one.

Re:Futile

[TGK]

What you have hit upon is a concept in Political Science known as the Carceral (spelling may be off). Discueed at length by philosopher Michel Foucault (pronounced Foo-co) The basic concept is that, because you are always subject to monitoring and can not know when you are being watched, you will always behave like you're being watched.

The idea was first set forth as a method of perfectly controlling a factory. The premise was that a manager or observer would sit at some central station observing employees who he could see but who could not see him. As the employees could be under scrutiny at any given time, they had no choice but to assume that they were always under scrutiny.

The Carceral is a prison, not for the mind, but of the mind. Have you ever stopped at a red light when there was no one for miles? That's the classic example of the Carceral in action.

We see this all around us, every hour of every day. The RIAA uses it to deter file traders. The Federal Government uses it to deter tax cheats. Walmart uses it to prevent shoplifting.

The online world is a different place, however. Security and scrutiny are something the individual has as much power to prevent as the observer has to employ. Use of sophisticated encryption systems is within the grasp of many users. Moreover, the huge volume of traffic does make monitoring even a meaningful portion hugely difficult.

Remember, the challenge is not to monitor all the traffic on the Internet, but to monitor enough that people will assume that you can monitor it all. Just as the RIAA can't sue every file trader, the Feds can't monitor every bit and byte that flows over the wires. That said, the RIAA can monitor enough to make you think twice about loading up a P2P client, and the Feds might be able to monitor enough to make terrorist organizations choose a less convenient, less efficient, and less sophisticated method of communication. That in and of itself is a victory.

The consequences for the rest of us will be just another casualty in this war on terror. Chalk it up there with free speech, privacy, and equal protection under the law.

Re:Futile

[jc42]

Amazon.com does a pretty fucking good job of offering me other books I "might be interested in."

Well, I personally find myself often breaking out in laughter at some of the things they suggest for me. Granted, some of their suggestions are good. But others are truly bizarre, and I find myself wondering why they would link me to that.

Now, with amazon.com, I can just chuckle and go on to what I'm looking for. But when it comes to government investigators, such things aren't funny. You can end up in jail indefinitely without trial because of your "associations". Or, more subtly, you can be put on lists and locked out of things like potential good jobs because of the suspicion that you are linked to someone or something that the current administration doesn't like. And those links will be generated by software that's probably even flakier than amazon's.

Example: Some years back, when my wife was in grad school, she made friends with a Russian woman who was there (Boston University) on a scholarship. The woman discovered she was pregnant soon after coming to the school, and when delivery time came, my wife was handy and gave her a ride to the hospital. Even more fun, after the birth, my wife helped out a bit by doing things like picking up the baby pictures - and paying with a credit card.

Ever since then, we've been getting junk-mail catalogs for baby/children things, and the catalogs have followed the child's age. We mostly think this is funny, as do most of the people we tell about it.

But we are aware that there's a potential problem here. The databases show that we have a close personal connection to this Russian woman. Today that doesn't mean much. 30 years ago, it would have put us on some seriously-bad government lists. 20 years from now, who knows? Especially when you consider that, when the kid reaches 18 years, he will have a choice of which citizenship he wants to claim. Depending on how things go in Russia, he could well make the rational decision to be an American. Naturally, we'd welcome him and help him, though the clique in the White House then might not.

An even funnier part of the story is that we learned a year or so after the birth that the people at the hospital apparently had a bit of confusion. Since the mother was accompanied by another woman rather than a man, they put my wife's name in the "father/husband" slot. Her name could be a man's name, though it's usually female. And Boston-area medical people are known for their helpfulness towards people in "non-traditional" family arrangements. We've told some of our gay friends about this, and they think it's hilarious that my wife is "father to a Russian baby".

But we do have grounds to be nervous about what might happen when, say, Pat Robertson becomes president, and sets up a program to purge the nation of gays. Will the database say that we're part of the problem? I'd guess that they say this right now, though our current leader merely wants to prevent gays from getting married or insured, and isn't talking about jailing or killing them. And even if they figure out that the birth certificate is wrong, investigations would show that we do have gay friends.

If you look at the history of US government subversive lists, there's good grounds for worry here. Right now, we may think it's all funny. And it gives us lots of cred in "liberal" (and gay;-) circles. But we're both computer geeks, and know well how screwy databases can be. We've both worked on them and experienced the frustration of keeping the data sane. We understand how hopeless it is to expect government or corporate databases to contain only valid information. And we're following stories like this one ...

Definitions

[Richie1984]

What worries me is not government monitoring of the internet. We already know that this goes on to some extent and if we really want to communicate privately, using an unencrpyted email or an IRC chat room isnt the way to go about it. The majority of us are knowledgable enough to communicate with some degree of security.

My main concern is their definition of a 'terrorist'. I have no problems with law enforcement agencies going after real, or suspected terrorists, but I do disagree with the slow creep of the word to include people who have different opinions then the government.

Then again, I'm more paranoid than most. Probably nothing to worry about. Probably...

Re:impossible

[Norgus]

Its a stupid waste of resources, trying to monitor the entire internet(s?).
Terrorists and such will continue to communicate efficiently and every other net user will have no privacy, and have to put up with and inherant network strain placed by this spying crap.

Re:impossible

[hrieke]

Needle in the haystack issue. Too much communication happens online- certainly they can have boxes report back a copy of all of the traffic from some ISP, or even all of the traffic out of / into an ISP, but to give analysis of that data is not something I'd like to be tasked with.
And the real usefullness would be after the fact, and only when someone has told all that they know (and the goverment has all of the data recorded too).

Thinking back to the cold war, the most successful communciations that the Russians spies would do where out in the open- usually simple things like colored thumbtacks on public bulletin boards, which unless you knew what to look for and then what it ment, it was very easy to miss.

Re:What about

[Steve B]

Precisely -- hiding a message in spam also has the advantage of defeating traffic analysis (there's no way to tell which of the millions of recipients knows that the exact percentage on the "mortgage offer", or whatever, is a code).

More ominous than that...

[Blitzenn]

I think that the message here is much more ominous than what the surface story tells. The young man simply stated his great dislike for the United States government that is in place. He also made a flip comment about himself being a pilot of one 9/11 planes that crashed into the towers. I only see a crime here if he actually did the task. What are we becoming here in the US? It scares me to think that if I say that I hate GWBush with a passion that I will have the FBI crashing down my door. This smacks to me of totalitarianism (or however you spell that). Don't even THINK of hating us or we will take you down! It seems to me that this will go a long long way down the road of stopping anyone from questioning this government if they happen to think they are doing something wrong. Is the strong suggestion that your opinion of someones elses actions is wrong so wrong itself? I fear for the future of a people that are suppressed in this way. The scary part is that most of the people don't see it happening around them. They truely think this is a 'defensive' measure to secure 'their' lifestyle. What did this kid do to hurt anyone? NOTHING! He though something, spoke some words and went about his life as normal. There should not be a penalty for not agreeing with someone else and trying to change their position with words. Isn't that what the US is supposed to stand for?

Not about Intelligence. It's about Fear.

[Fantastic Lad]

The point is not to know what's going on with every man, woman and child on the face of the earth, but to limit and control the actions of every man, woman and child.

This is best done when fear is in place. --You don't have to be aware of accurate information on everybody. You just need instant access to accurate information on everybody. That way, you can make your quotas of public beatings and arrests without hassle. This, by itself, provides the impetus for the good sheep to stay good sheep.

Harvesting begins shortly. Please stand by.

-FL

When will we learn...

[Anonymous Custard]

This whole "war on terror" is misguided. Finding existing terrorists and listening to them talk online WILL NOT STOP TERRORISM.

You can't fight terror with force because as much as you may disagree with the terrorists' goals, to them and their followers they are freedom fighters. If you were a freedom fighter rebelling against what you thought was an unjust foreign force, would them invading your half of the world make you give up? No, you'd fight harder than ever and this time you'd recruit your friends. Would knowing that your communications might be intercepted stop you? No, you'd just find new ways to communicate.

I wonder what percentage of our "defense" budget goes toward lobbying politicians to try to make policies that don't piss off half the world. That'd do more against terrorism, and for our defense, than any war.

Re:Uhm

[tylernt]

But who's going to read all those logs? If there are 1 million people online at any given point of time, you're going to need about 1 million people reading logs. The task would be overwhelming.

Throw some nice 2048-bit RSA encryption in there, and the whole thing is impossible.

You know, it's stuff like this that the terrorists want. They want us to lose our freedoms to overzealous anti-terrorism laws, they want us to live in fear. Suggestions like this article must make Bin Laden smile.

Re:Realities. . .

[khrtt]

The question is, do you know why reality is shifting in that direction?

Every country, especially a large a powerful country, needs a fascist government every once in a while, just to teach the moron part of the population to value their freedom. US is long overdue:-)/.

Answer the problem itself

[Khuffie]

You know, instead of spending tremendous energy trying to monitor every single communications method, maybe its better to handle the problem itself?

The US government should switch its efforts to why all these 'terrorists' are targetting it. There's gotta be a reason, and the reason isn't because the US "is a shining beacon of freedom." (why aren't they targetting Holland? Sweden? Finland?).

Catching these terrorists isn't gonna solve the problem: more will popup immediately to take their place. But if the US started to address (and fix) why they're being targetted (their utter arrogance towards other nations), most of this will go away.

Re:Obviously the answer is simple...

[akadruid]

We should foil all their plots by going back to pre-80's technology levels.

Aye, pre-1880 levels. Let them try hijacking horse-pulled buggies and drive them into buildings!

Back then, terrorists were different. They won, and then they wrote the history books.

See: History of the United States (1776-1789)

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of the Internet?

Re:Internet caffe ?

[tlhIngan]

Actually, the most secure way of communicating is to simply appear normal. If you try to hide your communications, it sticks out in the normal flotsam and jetsam of data. But if your traffic looks more or less like Joe Sixpack's traffic, it's hard to tell.

E.g., consider two coffeeshops across the street from one another. One guy sits in one and has a cup of coffee, reads the paper, etc. The other sits in the other and does the same. If they see each other every day, no attack. If one is absent, *boom*. Given the way people work, it's a regular, repeatable event, and can be used to communicate data (albeit slowly) - perhaps the paper is folded slightly differently, or carried away vs. left on the table.

The real trick to hiding is to make it look like you have nothing to hide. And that is what makes it difficult.

that's it, exactly

[clsc]

>> You know, it's stuff like this that the terrorists want. They want us to lose our freedoms to overzealous anti-terrorism laws,
>> they want us to live in fear. Suggestions like this article must make Bin Laden smile.

What scares me is when it becomes normal for people to include "national security" in their vocabulary, especially people in government. To think that this is happening so few years after the wall finally broke down (you know, that concrete thingy that used to be somewhere in Europe) ... Sad thing is, these people probably don't even know it themselves, and would deny it if the thought ever occured to them. What, Pres. Bush and advisors doing it the communist way?! How's that for a statement?

What we really need is so basic: Freedom of speech, human rights, and free movement of people and goods. Not the opposite - we know what happens when you restrict any of that; history has taught us that lesson over and over again.

Re:Uhm

[1u3hr]

You know, it's stuff like this that the terrorists want. They want us to lose our freedoms to overzealous anti-terrorism laws, they want us to live in fear. Suggestions like this article must make Bin Laden smile.

Really, bin Laden could care less if you live in fear or spend all day high. All you infidels are going to hell anyway. What he wants is to affect American foreign policy. (Which is going to plan.)

As someone who RTFA...

[yetanothermike]

...I thought the most interesting points were those of communicating without sending messages across the internet. The monitoring of a bank account for a $20 ATM withdrawl and saving drafts in a webmail account that are never sent are examples.

The most troubling part of this to me is it comes from the angle that there is an expectation that all communications from "bad guys" can be monitored. If we operate under the expectation that all communications can intercepted we're just setting ourselves up for failure.

The simple act of sending a postcard, or a flag flown on a balcony at a specific time, or a stalled car at a specific point on the road with it's left turn signal on or...

Doesn't our own government use covert means of communication that they think can't be intercepted? If we have them, others do too. Focusing on high tech ways to monitor people who'll use low tech, or no tech, is another example of the arrogance of technology. We need to have many, many layers of security because none of them will work all the time. We can't check all the shipping containers, but we can control communications??

In Other News

[Grax]

It was revealed today that some terrorists had conversations in a private home, highlighting the near impossibility of monitoring everyone's communications at all times.

George Tenet could just as easily have noted how we do not yet know everything that everyone is thinking and we have not figured out how to prevent crimes by monitoring individual's brain waves for possible "dangerous" ideas. If we had this equipment we could eliminate all crime and free thought. Think of how secure we would be then.

Certainly in a free country having free unmonitored conversations isn't such a terrible thing. It isn't fair to just say the magic word "terrorists" and use that as an excuse to remove all privacy and freedoms.