Precedent for Warrantless Net Monitoring Set

highcon writes "According to this editorial from SecurityFocus, a recent case of a drug dog which pushed the limits of "reasonable search" may have implications for Internet communications in the U.S. This Supreme Court case establishes a precendent whereby "intelligent" packet filters may be deployed which, while scanning the contents of network traffic indiscriminently, only "bark" at communication indicative of illegal activity."

Comments

Thy don't understand tech, they use metaphors

[LostCluster]

The current rules on Internet snooping are based on the metaphor of an envelope... anybody can look at the addressing data on the outside of an envelope, but the contents within are private. This is a pretty nice metaphor, considering the possible options...

- Dog search metaphor: This is what the article is suggesting, a binary test can be used to see if the packet needs more inspecting. If the binary test comes back positive, it represents probible cause to break the seal.
- Postcard metaphor: An IP packet is really closer to a postcard, in that the datagram portion isn't really secured inside anything, it's out there for plain view.
- Shopping mall metaphor: The Internet is like a shopping mall. The government doesn't own the mall, but the owners might invite the police to establish a checkpoint at the door because any possible crime is bad for their business. Anything they see/hear from their perch there is fair game, especially if everybody sees that there are officers there.

Re:Thy don't understand tech, they use metaphors

[dourk]

When the post office re-seals your envelope, they put a nice sticker on it saying that it was opened.

If my packet is sniffed, and barked at, and later determined to be innocent (sometimes the dogs are wrong), will there be some nice header in my transmission letting me know they took a peek?

That'll be a big hint that I need to start using encryption.

Oh god no

[pHatidic]

from the only-bad-people-need-privacy dept.

I like this

Everyone who visited blackboxvoting.org before a year ago was supposedly put onto an FBI watchlist. There are more details on the website.

I say this because I know that this includes most slashdotters, and because it is on topic to the article. I'm not sure if is true, but I do know that recently I am 7/7 for getting frisked at airports. Perhaps it is possible that everyone who visited this website is now in the airline shit list database.

I don't mean to sound paranoid, but the issues here are very real whether people realize them or not.

Re:Oh god no

[cgenman]

For a year and a half I was traveling back and forth between Boston and Cali to see my long-distance girlfriend. I was "randomly" searched 18 times out of 18 possible. As they were "randomly" searching 1 out of 3 people, this had a probability of 1 out of 2.1 billion.

Yet the government was insisting that no black lists existed. That they weren't keeping track, and that it was totally random.

The only reasons that I can think of offhand to blacklist me is that I joined Calperg and the ACLU, and I saw Nader speak at a local college.

I'm betting the reason that our government lies about what it does is not because there is a vested interest in keeping terrorists from knowing that they may be blacklisted, but rather because how the government chooses who is potentially good and potentially bad is so stereotypical, shallow, and offensive that they would get run out of office if people knew what they were doing.

Re:What ever happened to the Constitution?

[ari_j]

The article is not even persuasive authority to a court. It's an amateur interpretation of a court decision that attempts to make an analogy. As you point out, the analogy is very weak. Since it is not even in a law review journal, nobody in the legal field is going to pay an iota of attention to it, and no court will care about it.

Now, if the courts did extend the analogy as the article makes it sound has already been done, it would be a real blow to the Constitution, notwithstanding the Anonymous Coward sibling to this comment. What that sibling fails to recognize is that deciding that Internet traffic is not among the "persons, houses, papers, and effects" made safe from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the Fourth Amendment is itself a blow to the Constitution, because it's the equivalent of saying that the Constitution is of little to no effect in the 21st century.

Personally, I don't see the Supreme Court making the leap that the article thinks it already has. The Rehnquist Court has gone back to the text of the Constitution more than any Court since 1937, when FDR scared the Court into acceding to his wishes and giving Congress and the Presidency more power than the Constitution allows (and then giving the Presidency much of Congress's power for good measure). They have been working their way backwards and, as Justice Scalia put it, have to tear the house that was built apart, piece by piece.

Next to impossible

[Cow007]

If the government were to try and sniff a large number of packets in the manner described they would be impossible to collect ones that are only illegal. They would have the same sort of situation I experienced when I installed snort and turned on everything. Spade was freaking out at me about once every 5 seconds, I was getting warnings about unicast ARP attacks and port-scans all over the place. How can you tell what constitutes a packet containing illicit transmissions? There would be so many false alarms that they wouldn't be able to do anything with that data. What if it was an encrypted communication? They can't just flag all encrypted stuff because legitimate transactions are encrypted all the time. A lot of people doing nothing wrong would be put under suspicion no matter what algorithm they were using. Therefore doing what is described is next to impossible.