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Flying the Wiretapped Skies
An anonymous reader writes "The FBI is lobbying the FCC for the power to to quickly wiretap in-flight broadband services under CALEA. The feds are afraid terrorists will use the services to coordinate hijackings or remotely activate bombs, and they want to be able to interrupt or redirect a airplane's Internet access during a crisis, or to start sniffing packets within 10 minutes of identifying a suspicious passenger and getting court approval. Here is the FCC filing."
Their network, their rules.
Anyone who wouldn't think that every packet on such a network wouldn't be logged, needs to have their head examined - and is probably crazy enough that they should have their packet stream examined too.
Don't like it? Buy your own plane. Glue a Pringles can into a nicely-formed chunk of fiberglass, and glue the fiberglass onto the bottom of its fuselage. Paint the word "Experimental" near the cockpit. Your plane, your can, your network provider , your rules. (Of course, unless you own an offshore ISP, your provider is still subject to CALEA.)
But back to this article - if you board a taxpayer-subsidized airline's plane (let's be honest here, there are no private airlines in the strictest sense of the word), and you use that taxpayer-subsidized airline's network connectivity, then you surf by whatever rules your taxpayer-subsidized government chooses to impose on them.
There is something you *can* do, though, and that is to use an SSH tunnel to a server with a trusted key - for example, a server where you verified the keys' integrity in person. Then, when you're on the road, connect to the server with your laptop; if the key fingerprint you get doesn't match, assume someone's attempting a man-in-the-middle attack, and don't do anything. In particular, do not log in to the server, of course, in order to prevent leaking your credentials.
If the fingerprints *do* matched, log in to the server normally, then tunnel everything through the ssh connection, and your traffic should be unwatchable even when you're in a potentially hostile environment.
Of course, there are other precautions you may have to take if you want to be really secure overall, but as far as the pure traffic is concerned, this should be pretty foolproof.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
...guess this means that terrorists will have to revert to using such items as cell-phones or pagers to remote-detonate bombs and something all complicated like _watches_ to coordinate attacks (with a little planning ahead of time, of course).
I should shut up now, before the DHS bans all cell phones, pagers, and watches from US flights.
According to this Department of Justice terrorist manual, the terrorists are embedding themselves in normal life, and developing a code language indistinguishable from normal business conversation.
section 217 is one of the applicable sections.
EFF has a decent PATRIOT Act analysis. See especially heading 'cheif concerns' 1a.
Thomas has a listing of most of the USA PATRIOT Act, though a few things are missing. Notably, section 217 linked above.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.
c =130 D =12263&c=206
Take a look at:
http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=11054&
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?I
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
For that matter, when's the last time you remember the threat level dropping to Guarded? And what's with the colors, anyways?
Guarded? I've never heard of that one. There's a reason for the colors, and that's because the official terror alert levels are:
Green - Oscar
Blue - Cookie Monster
Yellow - Bert
Orange - Ernie
Red - Elmo
okay, yeah