Slashdot Mirror
Carnegie Mellon Resists FBI Tapping Requirement
roach2002 writes "Carnegie Mellon University is fighting back against a requirement that taps on campus internet access must be quickly obtainable. The technology that would allow the FBI to monitor internet access, after a court order, "at the flip of a switch" would cost at least $450 per student. MIT is also covering the story." From the article: "'The Department of Justice wants 24/7 access, whenever they need it, and they want remote access. We find that too extremely burdensome in terms of money, staff, and technology,' said Maureen McFalls, Director of Government Relations for Carnegie Mellon and the coordinator of Carnegie Mellon's response to this issue. According to an ACE press release, the cost to universities could be upwards of $7 billion, or at least $450 extra on each student's tuition bill."
Can I have wire tap access to the Department of Justice's systems, 24/7 with remote access? You know, I just want to make sure that they're not doing anything that they shouldn't be.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
The claim is that it will cost 450 dollars per student to implement this scheme.
So what? If the government subsidizes this expenditure, are they willing to put it in? If not, then why the emphasis on cost?
Either they are defending the rights of the students or they would be in full compliance with the government *if only* they could scrape together the cash to do so. They can't be both.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Wow, for $450 a students you could buy each student a computer for that.
450$ per student? Is the DOD still using 5000$ hammers as well? This is just as simple as putting in a DSL line for the FBI and a VPN box.
You're dreamin' pal. There is no way it would be that simple to enable the FBI to monitor the activity of any user on schools network. Maybe that's all you need to VNC into YOUR home machine, but they're talking about a fairly complex system, because they must be 100% positive they are monitoring the right people and the system would also need to be very flexible in order for it to be widely deployed into the diverse permutations of networking environments found in institutions of higher learning throughout the united states.
nuff' said'
.
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
what? So you're going to let some outside unknown party go into your network, examine logs, mirror ports, capture data and export it??
Sorry, no. Besides the obvious security and privacy issues, a network as large as this is far too complex to hand off a network diagram and list of passwords and expect anyone to reasonably gather any info.
I've said this before and probably on slashdot. Privacy is dead. People are just now starting to smell the rotting corpse. This is further proof of that statement.
The trick with the $450 per student is the cost to design, implement, deploy and maintain a system that will allow the FBI to have what it wants without Joe Hacker having the same access. It's not as easy as it sounds until you deal with a highly mobile and high-turnover student population. I work for a major university. We have approximately 18,000 students. At any given semester (Spring, Summer, or Fall), 4000-5000 of them are leaving and being replaced with 4000-5000 new ones. That doesn't even count the ones that change dorms, move off campus, etc. Now, in addition to a campus ID, network accounts, dorm internet access, email accounts, etc., we're supposed to manage the FBI's wiretaps?????
ROFL. Item one, we don't have enough staff to really manage what we have. Now you want to throw an additional burden at us. Let's not forget that we're also subject to federal legisation that controls to who as well as how information on students can be released.
Wait until the subpoena for that comes across my desk. I can hear that conversation now..."Well, Your Honor, we don't have the equipment. We were told that it's not in the budget. We had to choose between having internet access or complying with the legisation." "No, Your Honor, we haven't deployed that. Perhaps if we let the entire email system for the campus die, we might have time for that." "Yes, Your Honor, we think that if the FBI wants the information, they should be willing to pay for it."
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Of ineffective and incompetent law enforcement getting legislation passed that allows them to function in today's world.
Perhaps the public should ask why the FBI thinks it is entitled to everything it asks for delivered on a silver platter instead of getting off its bureaucratic ass and actually doing something for itself.
Seriously folks, throwing a packet sniffer on a lan line isn't a feat of superhuman geekdom. I'm betting that 50% of you are sitting within 50 feet of the components necessary to create a system that you could use to throw a tap on a cat 5 line right now (although, to be fair, you might need to download some stuff) and that most of you could throw such a system together in less than an hour.
I'm not even going to go into the whole "government agency that has been utterly corrupted several times in the last century by people who used its resources pursue a personal agenda" thing.
Fuck you, your switch and the technically illiterate politicians who said you could have it.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
It seems reasonable for law enforcement to expect "cooperation" with investigations, I can get with that.
But it seems at this point they want everyone to cater to them, to make their jobs as easy as possible. "At the press of a button" - who do they think they are, George Jetson? Who's going to make MY job easier? And why do I have to pay to make THEIR job easier?
I seem to recall something in Britain a few hundred years ago, the Quartering Act I believe it was called. It said something to the effect that if asked, any citizen had to provide free room and board to soldiers of the British Army. Why? To keep the peace of course. What's different today? People being forced to spend time and money to make the police's jobs easier. It's just not a good enogh reason. The police have an important job, but it's not one that should have any special elevation above the rest and receive all this assistance and soforth.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ah don't you the love freedom.
1) It's not that easy.
2) If you can think of a cheap, easy way to do it - KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. kthxbye
3) See #1.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
I was referring to a previous article about UK police wanting to put people in jail for 90 days while they crack the suspects hard drive. No trial, just 3 months away from your friends and family. Granted, this particular article is about the United States' feds, but we don't need any new legislation to hold our citizens in jail without trial. We just need to call them a terrorist or emamy combatant or some other vile name and pack them off to Guantanamo for over 3 years (so far). This wiretap is just a way for the police state to get more power to abuse.
How does a 7-person democracy cut a pie? Into 4 pieces.
The right to revolution is guaranteed in the constitution it's the amendment that Americans never seem to be able to understand "The Right to Keep and Bear Arms"... that's not for personal protection (Which would be stupid) it's not for a feeling of power it's so citizens have the ability to overthrow an oppressive regime.
Something they don't have these days. Once again all the power is with the government and new forms of tyranny have the possibility of springing up.
Lets be reasonable, are terrorists likely conduct their business in plain text? This is not what it is for.
For the enormous cost to us, it will only be useful in spying on the average citizen. I expect it will be used to take peoples words or joking statements out of context in order to label them terrorists, in which case they can be dealt with outside of the law. I expect a lot more people will start to disappear if this process can be automated.
The people that need worrying about are going to be using heavy encryption, if not one time pads; to effectively combat such measures, someone will need to leave their desk and do some real work. Instead, they will sit back, content to spy on citizens, and simply claim that they are actually doing something.
Many of us have been saying the same since the revival of the New Right in the early 1990s. Trouble is, most societies that have been through a spell of affluence become reactionary when something occurs to disturb that complacency, and that is what we have seen in Britain (forget the fact that Blair belongs to the Labour Party, he's a Tory) the US (why Bush's electorate doesn't realise he's an evil moron, I don't know) and here in Australia (where we have an evil fascist from the Liberal Party, which means the opposite).
As for "How we've allowed our politicians to do this to us", that is what's ugly. We (or enough of us) have repeatedly allowed ourselves to be sucked in by their blatant deceit and suspend any pretence of critical thinking.
Attacking government facilities is an act of war, not terrorism. Otherwise the US government itself would be a terrorist organisation, for attacking the governments of Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq in recent years.
No one said they'd be buying the equipment every semester. No one said it would be an extra $450 for people who aren't yet students. The estimated cost per student, with today's numbers, is $450 each. No university would actually slap that onto every student bill today. They'd take out a loan to pay the cost, then parcel it out in smaller chunks to every student over the next (n) years. Did you read the article?
Also, they haven't had 10 years. They've had a matter of weeks at this point. The FCC only recently extended CALEA to apply to Higher Education. Did you read the article?
At this point Higher Ed is being given 18 months to comply, with no assistance or help from anyone. They're being told 'Do it, or else'. Imagine being told you had a year to build a mansion for the state governor, but weren't being paid to do it, and had no tools. You'd have to spend a lot of money in a short amount of time to get it done.
Oh, and the FBI doesn't just want a dump of the traffic, packed up and sent to them. They want the ability to access the University's network remotely, issue a command, and have all data on a network segment duplicated to them, not just captured and sent off in a file or whatnot. Oh, and we still have to obey FERPA and all the other federal guidelines that mean we have to make sure that unauthorized people don't get any of that data. We have to make systems that are as hackproof as possible, then make it so the FBI can hack us at the push of a button, without us being involved or even knowing about it. How do you make such a system so that it can't be compromised readily without you knowing about it?
Disclaimer: I happen to work for a small, young (50 yrs old) University that doesn't have the huge resources to spend millions of dollars casually. We would have to replace every switch on campus, in every building, an every network closet, to have the capability of mirroring traffic on one port to another, which is the only practical way of giving the FBI what they want without flooding them with a dump of our entire network (which we've also considered... sort that!). We've just finished a 3 year and several million dollar project to replace all the switches to supply power to our VoIP devices and our new campuswide wireless network.
Oh yeah, they want to be able to easily capture all the data sent to and from a student's wireless card as well. Remotely.
Don't forget also, while students live on campus, their dorm is legally their home, with all the same rights and privelages as your suburban houseowners.
And Universities and Colleges don't take money from the federal gov't. The Gov't chooses to give it to them in the form of student financial assistance, research funding, etc. Yes, it is up to the University to apply for it, but the Gov't chooses to give it to them, so don't start on Higher Ed. being a taxpayer vampire.
Trust me that the issue of cost is just the first salvo in this fight.
Did you read the article?
"Is this not a rare fellow, my lord? He's as good at any thing, and yet a fool." -from "As You Like It", Act 5,
Peer to peer wireless, anyone ?
How (physically) hackable is wireless, after all ?
"...enforcement of intellectual property law(s)"?
Sorry, but that can only be the outer layer of the "onion" of cover stories. The **AA already has enough resources to goosestep over everyone's privacy rights, from sueing grandmothers for hundreds of thousands of dollars. They don't really need this kind of access via the FBI to deal with p2p filesharing (think Sony DRM rootkit here, as well as poisoned/trojan files).
It has a lot more to do with some other fascist initiatives like MATRIX, which has far less to do with the "war on terrorism" and a lot more to do with control.
The FBI was ruled (along with a large chunk of the government) for 30 years by a man that had extensive files on virtually everyone. Remember the "File-Gate" fiasco during the Clinton administration, where all the neo(Con)artists were up in arms over the possibility that the Whitehouse was holding onto FBI dossiers of some political opponents?
This is nothing more than the Dubya regime's "over the top" response in kind. It makes the Nixon administration's "Watergate" break-in to the Democratic Party's campaign headquarters look like a bunch of amateurs and pikers. It isn't enough anymore for them to know what the opposition's political strategies are -- like the break-in to the Senate Democrats fileservers and leaking sensitive info to the press. By virtue of the US Patriot Act, they want to build dossiers (and whatever "dirt" they can find) on activists, the political opposition, and corporate officers. By cranking up the intel gathering beginning with teenagers and young adults attending college/university, that can exert control over who gets what job (faulty credit reports or some veiled hint of criminal behavior) as potential employers vett their applicants. Or when the appropriately compromised target obtains a position of power or influence, just what kind of leverage the government will have on them.
Does this smack of the type of fascism seen in the 1930's and 1940's, or of the nature of the control exerted by the communists over their subjects? -- Damn right it does! The USA is quickly shifting from having a government "of, by, and for the people" to one of "corporate interests". The term I have for this (albeit somewhat redundant), is "Corporate National Socialism".
Welcome to 1984 - the real deal, and just a bit behind the predicted schedule.
Why should they be allowed to tap into the intellectual centres of their country?
Because these centres are promoting radical beliefs such as Evolution, instead of Intelligent Design.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Since you seem to be such a "bold defender of the faith", let's see you take a job at the EFF or at a university. Try being the primary income for your family and think about risking that because someone else things you ought to defend them. Why can they not defend themselves? Where are the protesting students? Why must I be the one to stand up for you? Why is it that you cannot seem to do this for yourself? How did this become my personal mission? What's wrong with you, o critics, carrying the torch? "Do not seek to remove the mote from thy brother's eye when thou hast a beam in thine own eye."
Not a one of you has offered to come to work with me. Not a one of you has offered me alternative employment, should I be dismissed from my current job. All you have done is heap criticism on me, which confirms my initial impression. I must fend for myself and my family. I will not get any help. Since no help is forthcoming, I will deal with the situation as best I can.
It's all well and good for all of you sit back, point fingers, call names, and tell me that I should be the one to stand up. Other than flaming on slashdot, what do any of you do in the cause of freedom? Just because I don't particulary care to loose my job and go to jail for a bunch of flaming anonymous cowards, doesn't mean that I do my part to keep laws like this from getting passed in the first place.
As for me, I can assure that I am member of the EFF as well as several other groups that seek to work within the system for change. We fight legislation like this where it needs to be fought - either before it gets passed into law or in court. I also guarantee you that both of my state's senators, as well as the congress people for my state know me by name. I write them frequently about a variety of issues, most of which have to do with technology.
2 more cents,
Queen B
PS: When my plan for world domination succeeds, you're all in a LOT of trouble.....
HDGary secures my bank