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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."
Here's something I never understood about the liberals on this site. They're all for making technological advancements that improve productivity and make things faster and easier for everyone, but then they complain when the feds wants to use this technology to make THEIR jobs faster and easier.
Why is it such a bad thing that they should be able to go to a court and get wiretapping authorization, then be able to do the tap in less than 10 minutes? I'm sure there will be lots of "big brother is after me" comments in this story, but why? Is the FBI supposed to just sit back and chisel everything in stone?
Call me crazy, but if the FBI needs 10 minute wiretapping on a WIFI setup to keep my plane from being blown up by a bunch of Islamic radicals, then so be it. It's better to be a live chump who's email was intercepted by the feds than a dead one who's viagra spam remained a secret.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Some kind of crypto is in order. I'm sure the fasttracked wiretapping will be a massive help when faced with terrorists using a VPN or other means to obscure what they're doing.
OK, so aside from assigning away all of our freedoms and rights to privacy, I have to wonder just how the Dept of Homeland Security plans on assimilating all of the data that they are desperately trying to get legal access to. This is the basic problem behind much of the remote sensing communities ability to surveil targets of interest from airborne/space platforms. Automating much of this surveillance is one of the holy grails of the intelligence community. For instance, I knew a guy who at the peak of the cold war, specialized in runway lengths. All he did was look at remote sensing imagery and examined runway lengths to determine the capacity and capability of aircraft and logistics at differing airbases. It is fairly simple to automate that sort of thing now, but many other aspects of determination of what is important data from what is not important is very difficult to automate.
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Terrorists have found ways to hijack planes for the last 30 years without in-flight broadband. This proposal will fix nothing. The most effective defense against hijacking, and the reason why another one has not been attempted since 9/11, is vigilant passengers that will no longer cooperate with a hijacker.
Well, you know all that liberty and freedom stuff they keep talking about on TV. Originally it ment freedom and liberty from your own government. Most of us just don't remember that since we live in relatively free times.
If it was only ever used in case of emergency, or in the investigation of a federal crime, then I doubt us "liberals" would have a problem with it. However, as the Indymedia server siezures (amongst many other things) show, this power is systematically and flagrantly abused to further politcal agenda.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Why is it such a bad thing that they should be able to go to a court and get wiretapping authorization, then be able to do the tap in less than 10 minutes?
It's not a bad thing. What's bad is when they use this plus provisions in the PATRIOT act to allow them to tap it without that ever-important authorization. I don't have anything against Law Enforcement doing their job. What I disagree with is when they have the legal ability to spy on people just in case.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I want a court looking after the FBI. They should answer to someone other than themselves. That's the idea of checks and balances. If a judge approves it, I'll accept it.
Would you support this if the FBI didn't require any authorization? If it was "we check everybody" or could be?
You can't send any bits over the internet without the possibility of them being watched in transit. They're carried over networks you can't trust.
If you value your privacy that highly, use SSL to an anonymizing proxy. Other than that, assume that the feds and anybody else is watching your packets, whether you're on an airplane or not.
That said, whether the FBI can or cannot quickly tap in-flight wifi is a different question. Given they're getting court approval, why is this a bad idea? If they can't do it quickly, the point is moot. If they can't do it arbitrarily at whim, our rights are not being trampled upon.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Wasn't that about someone bragging about committing a crime on Indymedia and the police confiscated the servers because Indymedia wouldn't yield the identity of that one particular poster as requested? I fail to see any problem with that.
The owls are not what they seem
With the focus and $$$ being spent on anti-terror being the atmosphere in the executive branch of the US feds, these are the type of ideas that get you promoted, gets noticed and gives you a reputation as a go-getter and get'r'doner. Forget how practical or realistic it is or how easy to circumvent - just whatever you can come up with to fight the baddies makes you look good to the boss.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Yes, because the ability to carry out a wiretap obtained legally via due process in the courts within a useful timeframe is definitely an awful, horrible infringement upon my liberty and freedom by the government /end sarcasm
If they had the ability to carry out a 10-minute tap on anyone whenever they pleased, we'd have issues; as it is now they need to walk it past a judge still, and should not be able to indiscriminately tap people for no reason.
Whether or not the judges are competent in their positions or pushovers who'll sign every wiretap order they're handed regardless of merits is an entirely different problem, of course, tangentially related to the conversation at hand.
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A wise and well-trained group will use the time-old technique of publicly accessed itinerary and flight plotting sites, combined with a local calculator on their permitted laptops to estimate location, and reading easily plotted alert info available to the general public.
...
Hacking inter-group messages won't detect or deter such a group and they'll still accomplish their mission objectives, provided they don't need to survive the mission - which by definition, they won't.
Sigh. Always assuming the enemy is stupid and ill-trained is half of why we have no effective defenses. They train, they adapt, and they are willing to go beyond the bounds of what acceptable risks are considered to be.
To defeat such an enemy first you have to understand how they think - and black and white Us Good They Bad And Stupid thinking won't work.
But, hey, what do I know from my counter-terrorism ops and training anyway, or my field combat engineer experiences
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What good is sniffing packets? Have terrorists not heard of ssh? I can see the argument being made for keeping track of destination ip's but even that can be proxied. The whole sniffing packets/echelon weltanschung seems like a lot of money to spend on something that is trivial for the "real bad guys" to get around at no cost to themselves.
Judges are a very serious concern related to the problem though. All the FBI has to do is say that the person they want a tap on is a strongly suspected terrorist. What judge wants to be the first one to deny such a request if it later turns out to be true and a wiretap could have prevented an attack?
Seriously. I am one who is all for more stringent measures to protect the national infrastructure, but this kind of initiative goes into the realm of absurdity (is that even a word!) They are afraid terrorists will use the in-flight service to coordinate or remotely detonate bombs. Well considering I could do the same thing with a pager or a cell phone what is the big deal here. Lets stop with the spread of FUD and focus in on measures that are meaningful. Putting Internet service on planes is not going to supremely facilitate the terrorists planning and coordination effort. Hell we better not allow Internet on other forms of transportation as well if we are that scared. I'm for protecting the country as much as the next person, but we need to start focusing on more realistic threats and stop trying to control these small inconsequential things.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
How it will work with a one-time-pad set of coded messages is something else again.
I can't decide whether I'm more disturbed by my government's attempts to get more power over honest citizens or over their apparent dependence on the Bad Guys all having IQs in the room temperature range. Celsius.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
If the terrorists want to kill you at 30k feet... ... then you die. Seriously, do you really believe terrorists won't be using strong encryption, knowing their data packets are probably being sniffed by the feds. This isn't going to stop a single terrorist--all it will do is allow greater snooping with less oversight on regular civilians going about their lives, who happen to take a commercial flight and use the net at the same time.
Here's something I never understood about the liberals on this site. They're all for making technological advancements that improve productivity and make things faster and easier for everyone, but then they complain when the feds wants to use this technology to make THEIR jobs faster and easier.
Here's something I never understood about the humanitarians on this site. They're all for making technological advancements that improve health, safety, and quality of life, but then they complain when the feds want to use this technology to improve THEIR ability to kill en masse.
See the flaw in your reasoning?
People object because technology, like everything else, is a double edged sword. It can improve people's lives, add to our quality of living, and empower us. It can also be used as a tool for unprecidented oppression. Most of us support and are working hard for the former, and vehemently decry steps toward the latter.
That having been said, in this particular case, there is no expectation of privacy on board a public, commercial aircraft (private aircraft are another story, and should be treated like private automobiles or homes), so I don't really have a problem with the feds (or anyone else) tapping communications on board a commercial airliner. You don't conduct private business on a busy street corner with dozens of (probably evesdropping) bystanders, nor would any sensible person do so in a public aircraft. But one can make credible, even compelling, arguments that this sort of laxidasical attitude toward authority evesdropping on private conversations in any context, be it a public street, a commercial flight, or a private residence, amounts to the same level of inappropriate intrusion by government into private life, particularly when infrastructure makes such capabilities the default, and court oversight becomes more and more a rubber stamp for letting the feds do whatever they like, whenever they like, often with little or no real justification.
Finally, your characterization of people encouraging what they see as a good use of technology and decrying what they see as a bad use of the same technology is disingenuous. Most people (myself included) don't embrace technology for technology's sake--we embrace it insofar as it enhances our lives and our freedoms, and reject its use when we see it being exploited to do the opposite.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What exactly would the FBI be able to do with their 'wiretap' to stop a terrorist that is already onboard the plane. If the FBI is concerned enough to ask the courts for an in flight wiretap of a specific passenger, it begs the question: Why didn't the FBI do something to prevent the passenger from boarding the plane in the first place? One of the senarios that was suggested was that the terrorist might use his laptop to remotely detonate a bomb on board the plane. If the FBI were able to distrupt this activity in time, wouldn't the terrorist probably resort to a more dirastic method of destorying the plane? It seems like abuse of authority is more likey than actaully terrorism prevention.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -Hunter S. Thompson
The real problem with this is that once a secure connection with a trusted outside machine (for example, an SSH server) has been established, you cannot sniff it anymore. You *might* be able to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack if you start *before* the connection is established, but even then, you probably won't - the public key fingerprint you present to the hijacker (in the airplane) won't match the one in his key database, so unless he's stupid, he simply won't connect at all and the attack (or at least the coordination) won't happen.
Of course, that would be a success in itself (at least if the actual attack is stopped as opposed to the mere coordination of different attacks), but it requires something much stronger than a court warrant that allows you to target a specific suspect individual - you'd have to actively monitor (and route through your application-level gateway) *each and every* single packet that's being sent or received. For everyone in the plane. On every flight. Always.
Suddenly, things don't sound so good anymore, do they? You might still say that you'd rather be a live chump without a right to free speech [1] and so on than a dead one that still has the right, but not everyone'd prefer to live in a 1984-like world. Would you?
Of course, total surveillance of everyone 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, without any privacy at all, in a world where cryptography and private communication is outlawed, would probably make you safer from hijackings and the like, but is that the kind of world you'd want to live in?
Getting back to the original point, the problem with this is not so much that the FBI will or should be allowed to place a wiretap within ten minutes if they get a court warrant allowing them to. As far as I am concerned, they could start wiretapping one second after the OK - there's nothing wrong with that.
What *is* a problem is the fact that this is probably going to be sold as a security improvement, when in reality it is not. A false sense of security does not help anyone - just like blind and unjustified fear does not help, either.
So it's probably still a good idea to remain skeptical for now.
1. Note that the right to free speech includes not only the legal right, but also being able to actually use that right without fear of repression and/or repercussions.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Honestly, sometimes I think these guys have about as much intelligence gathering savvy as Sgt. Schultz.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
What happened to not letting 'terrorists' win and 'getting on with business as usual'? Doesn't sound that way to me. Quite honestly, it sounds like western govts are running shit scared because they -refuse- to even consider the fact that their own -foreign policy- is helping to promote these horrible acts.
Sadly, IMHO, it boils down to the all too familiar "testosterone over brains" mentality once again. Though I hope otherwise, I think if we don't change our ways, it will be the downfall of what we know.
As an aside, Ben Franklin anyone?
As someone I'm sure you would consider "liberal", let me say I agree with you. As long as they have the court order I don't care if they begin the tap in 5 seconds or 5 days. What I don't like is some of the current efforts to not require court orders (just needing "administrativer approval"). This to me just seems like common sense. If they have court approval, than I see no problem.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
"What judge wants to be the first one to deny such a request if it later turns out to be true and a wiretap could have prevented an attack?"
The judge thats doing his job and asks for collaborating evidence that meets the structures for wiretapping (which I don't know offhand, but have been in place for some time)? The judge thats not a patsy to the FBI and respects our Constitutional rights?
As I said, its tangential to the issue at hand, but is a larger issue in and of itself, that I mainly mention due to the recent lack of intelligence shown by our nation's highest court. Judge's should be held accountable when they fail in their job, whether its giving away private property to advance commercial interests, or giving away free wiretaps to a buddy at the FBI without due process.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
The problem is that there has been such a massive overreaction to 9/11. Today we're expected to give up freedoms and face all kinds of scrutiny the moment they words "terrorist" or "war on terror" are uttered.
The judge that wants to uphold the constitution and bill of rights?
That's the idea of course but I have serious doubts about that though when the Supreme Court says it's okay for the government to take away your property and give it to whoever pleases them - for the public good, of course.
To catch someone before they do something, you need to violate their freedom before they do it.
Where do we draw the line though? At what point do these violations of rights become wrong? Currently, they can only violate your privacy completely. What's next, detainment? "Well we're pretty sure this guy is a terrorist so let's hold him indefinetly while we investigate his entire life and interrogate him." "Oops turns out we were wrong but we're going to keep a wiretap on all your communications forever and regularly checkup on you, just to be sure."
Well, if by liberal you mean someone who favors small government that stays out of my personal affairs...
/. liberal. And as far as I'm concerned, the feds are welcome to interrupt my internet access on a plane or sniff my packets that go across the internet (whilst coming from a plane). So long as they get a court order to do so (which the article indicates they will). Except for the fact that I think this is just something that makes people "feel better," not something that will actually save one single life.
Then I would be a
Now, a bit of insight into why other measures the government has taken in the past four years...
The bottom line is that none of them work. For example, the rainbow of terror. When is the last time you remember the threat level dropping to Low? For that matter, when's the last time you remember the threat level dropping to Guarded? And what's with the colors, anyways?
And what's with the government being able to sniff out what kind of books I read? Am I the only one who realizes that in order to have a free press, you have to have a populace with the freedom to read what the "free" press writes?
What about the increased "security" at airports? Am I the only one who realizes that the increase in security at airports is unnecessary because passengers are unwilling to be used as a giant bomb against their fellow citizens of the planet Earth? The reason that 9/11 was successful (from a terrorist point of view) was because people expected that the plane had been hijacked, they would sit complacent and would be taken to Abu Dabi, at which point they would deplane. But as the plane that went down in PA shows, people aren't idiots. And they're not willing to sit there and be used as cannon fodder against their fellow humans.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
The terrorists used high tech weapons: a box cutters and intimidation to highjack the plane. Sure the FBI could get a 10 minute injunction but it most probably will be after the potentially deadly commands were sent.
I live and work in NYC and experinced the 9/11 event first hand. Why are so many people who live in areas that will never be affected by team Osama so incredibly paranoid about terror? Is is a "me too, I'm important also" kind of thing?
Regardless of what checks and balances we have in place, the potential for a terrorist attack to occor will be present. So lets stop worring and start some proactive intelligence gathering.Are you the one who thinks that those WTC photos where someone photoshopped in some missiles are real?
Where were you when the voynix came?
I wonder if the people who fought for the independence of the US would be considered 'terrorists' by todays definition. Or perhaps they would simply be 'insurgents'?
;-)
There's two sides to every coin. What's right to one is bound to be wrong to another.
--Clusterbomb Charlie
To: hajjar.kabib@comcast.net
From: kumar@crazyasshabib.com
Subject: How are you mom?
Dear mom,
Oh my, how long has it been?
I haven't talked to you in forever!
Talk to me over the phone this weekend
!!!! Love you !!!!!
Why is the FBI even asking for this? The terrorists aren't going to use something like this. Let's look at what happened on 9/11. A group of Saudis hijacked some planes with fricken box-cutters. They didn't use any high-tech emailing or chat system or anything else to coordinate the attacks. It was as basic a plan that they could come up with...and the rehearsed it over and over and over until everything was right and nothing was left to chance. No technology...other than the guys learning how to pilot the airliner.
<sarcasm>So what is the FBI asking for? A "just in case" type deal? Well, they should then ask for all forms of communications then, have free reign on the postal system too in case the terrorists resort to writing a letter or two. Have microphones set up everywhere in every home just in case terrorists may want to gather in a house and coordinate an attack! OH MY GOD!</sarcasm>
It's because this country is in a state of fear still. I honestly don't think the FBI is out to get us all and wants to take away everyones freedom nor control people. Heck, I even have a friend that's in the FBI...he's a nice guy. But I think that they are as scared as everyone else is and they don't want to get caught with their pants down again. I believe they honestly want to try to prevent and protect the citizens of the US...it's just they're methods may be a bit zealous at times.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Dude, I think you are way too paranoid, and I'm more paranoid
than most.
However this is all pretty pointless unless they can get in
the cockpit to control the plane. No pilot will open that
door no matter how many people are being offed in the main
cabin.
I suppose a w-fi enabled pda could be used to remotely trigger
a bomb, but it would need to be in the main cabin and not in
the baggage. Given that Al Queda has had 15 years to blow up
planes it most not be that easy to get one on the plane,
Ramsey Yousef's one attempt not withstanding.
And simple and reliable are also preferred over convenient
but problematic. A traditional time or barometric fuse
are the way to go. Mr. Terroris doesn't want to get the
NO ROUTE TO HOST message.
First of all, there will NEVER be another passenger aircraft hijacking again. The age of "Be cool, do what they say, and everything will be fine" ended at about 8:50 or so on September 11, 2001. Now, as soon as some schmuck stands up in a plane and says, "Okay, everybody this is a hija--," everyone within reach of him will try to tear him apart. Hell, even guys who get drunk and rowdy on a flight are rather enthusiastically subdued by passengers these days.
Furthermore, the fact that the Fibbies even think this is necessary is IMHO a very public no-confidence vote in the TSA and all the crap they make us go through to even get near a plane, much less on it.
~Philly
What's next, detainment? "Well we're pretty sure this guy is a terrorist so let's hold him indefinetly while we investigate his entire life and interrogate him." "Oops turns out we were wrong but we're going to keep a wiretap on all your communications forever and regularly checkup on you, just to be sure."
OMG! Are you the guy that wrote the Patriot Act? That's the exact plan.
Somewhere there needs to be a line, but it can't be in the form of random indicators or heresay. That's where it gets scary. At some point I may have looked at a web site or ordered a book that has been deemed a flag for suspicious behavior. Now all of a sudden I get a SWAT team at my front door and they lock me away for 19 months until I either admit I am a terrorist or somehow prove that I'm not. It's a lot like the Salem witch ordeal.
Now, if you are being watched because you just ordered 500 tons of fertilizer to be delivered to a silo built under a volcano, there is probably good reason to investigate.
/. ++
How soon people forget. Forget about encryption, just use simple code word communication.
"Mr. Smith: Confirming our meeting at 30120 Altitude lane. I'll be there in 2:15 from now. Looks like the plane is serving "cold cuts" a few minutes from now. I'm reading the "red" folder the office gave me. Buh Bye. Best from Allah, Ackmed
All the wire tapes and sniffers in the world won't be able to determine if that's code or just regular dribble.
People are so stupid to think that only the good guys can be clever.
Seems ridiculous to me. Moreover, we're not going to see another 9/11. Passenger psychology changed that day; no longer does anyone believe that sitting quietly in your seat is the best way to survive.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Really. They may hate us no matter what we do, but they won't committ suicide trying to kill us just because we let women vote. It's more because we've interfered with their countries for about 50 years.
More laws and regulation haphazardly isn't the answer. Reviewing all laws pertaining to this stuff, revising them appropriately, and enforcing them is what needs to happen. We need appeals processes for those who do get restricted by laws or profiling, in case they have been accidently placed on a list. We need common sense.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That's really the problem. It's how it's used. The Patriot Act "sneak an peak" provision have been used +1,600 times and not one of them has been turned down by a judge. (Come on, the government is not that perfect)
I have a friend who is an American Citizen, born here, white as can be. He's a private pilot in his late 20's. He bought a 1 way ticket in advance to get home after flying for work. He had an Air Marshal sitting next to him because he was one of the highest risk passangers for that day. (And it happens a lot) Folks, that's what we are spending money on.
What is tapping WiFi really going to give someone? Are they plannign to detonate a bomb in the cargo hold via Wifi? Why couldn't they just use a timer or Altemiter to detonate? What else, coordinate with other terrorists? Why can't they use raido and code words worked out beforehand. Or simply fly the plane low over a city and use random passanger's cell phones. (Yes they work)
I wish GOP backers would actually consider how these laws are actually put into practice, and how they are combined with other provisions to make them even worse.
Call me crazy, but if the FBI needs 10 minute wiretapping on a WIFI setup to keep my plane from being blown up by a bunch of Islamic radicals, then so be it.
Your faith in the FBI's ability to do anything with such information is what's allowing the FBI et al. to increase their ability to spy. If the FBI finds something suspicious they can not send superman to come save you. The best they can do is alert the pilot to lock his door and land immediately, which will most likely cause a lot of unneeded havoc due to many false alarms, and do little to prevent a bomb in the cabin from going off. Furthermore, even with supercomuters at their disposal, the FBI will not be able to crack the encryption that the terrorist (and many law abiding citzens like myself) are using within a meanful amount of time.
The end result is the FBI spying on us with no real affect on flight safety. If a terrorist tries to take over any plane I'm on I'm going to do my best to kick their ass. It's time to start taking responsiblity for our own safety and stop relying on big brother to protect us all the time (obviously the govt does have a role in safety, but that doesn't negate our own role), and stop letting them take our freedoms that so many people have died to protect.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
If you have no expectation of privacy, then they wouldn't even need a warrant, would they?
Please note that "expectation of privacy" is a specific legal term, not just a statement of angsty desire.
Departing briefly from the legal arena, I personally have no expectation that my packets cannot be inspected by any random BOFH after they leave my house, which is why I encrypt them as much as possible. I suspect I am not alone in this manner of thinking.
For the FBI's other worries: that terrorists will communicate with each other and a device on the plane, the extremely techno-savvy terrorists that they believe might be out there, could just as well use an Ad Hoc network between their wireless laptops for intra-plane communication.
Then again, it's just silly to think that these wiretap measures are very useful to stopping a highjacking or a bomb. The real problem would have to be the weapons that must be on board for them to hijack or blow up a freaking plane.
--Excyl
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
All this high tech stuff is futile, the terrorists aren't using it. The fact that the FBI are chasing it says to me that they don't understand the nature of the threat or they're after something else.
I've seen this response a few times in this thread, and I think this is crazy. Low-tech terrorism can have a disastrous impact (see 9/11, 7/7). But it's not the only game in the book, and every year the likelihood of a high-tech terrorist attack will increase.
I have issues with the FBI, but just because the FBI realizes how disastrous a smart, high-tech terrorist operation could be DOES NOT MEAN they don't understand the nature of the threat. I would tend to think it means that you don't understand the nature of the threat we're facing.
Look, the truth is calling this "terrorism" is disingenuous. When I say "terrorist", you and everyone else in the world thinks "Islamic radical". That focus is going to inherently weaken our ability to deal with other threats - which do exist. Just because the Islamic radicals aren't *currently* high-tech doesn't mean there aren't high-tech threats right now.