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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."
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.
I think I speak for all of us when I say...
"Flip THIS."
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?
Washington University in St. Louis isn't either. It made the front page of our school's newspaper - though, admittedly, that's not entirely hard... "Student gets hit by pie" was a front page headline too.
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.
So what's the price for non-compliance? Never seen any mention of that.
Big deal already! I mean seriously, isn't the issue here the privacy concerns of the students? I'm not trying to make a point and say that the FBI should get OUT of there (though I do believe that to be true)...but what's with the emphasis on money? Everyone's talking about the people in charge...won't someone think of the children?!
I don't even have that kind of remote access to the boxes I administer (and I work in the wireless communications industry)! The best I have is SSLdump, and If I want to run TCPdump on a server (from home), I have to dump to a local disk, then tar zcf it, then scp/rcync back to my home PC (servers are gigE, and I'm 3Mbit cable).
Why can't the universities say, "Sure, just tell us when you're going to buy us the equipment"?
BBH
Somehow I don't think they're looking for general internet access. It seems more likely they want complete access to every student/faculty/department/etc's machine, you know - just in case.
I only need the Preview button when I haven't used the Preview button.
Terrorism seems to be any act against the U.S. Government, half the population already disagrees with the policy of that government.
Why should they be allowed to tap into the intellectual centres of their country?
Universities are the places where revolution has historically started, curtailing student influence merely stops one of the free checks and balances on the system.
What happens to the FBI request for fast access when the students begin using encryption?
CMU's student body president, Flip, has been quoted that "as an incentive, the FBI has offered all participating students infinite beer at the flip of a switch. However, the University is against that." Associate student body secretary, Josie, could not be reached for comment. She was last seen saying jibberish while holding a Heineken.
Why would DOJ want access to student internet, at the flip of a switch? Simple - tired of searching for their own free porn, the DOJ have decided to use colleges and students across the country as a giant, hand-searching web-crawling porn cartographer!
Thumb tacks and N'Sync.
Wow, for $450 a students you could buy each student a computer for that.
Not neccesarily.
It's an easier argument to make in court.
If they're then given the money to do it, then they may (hopefully) move onto the privacy arguments.
You think they want access to ensure national security?
-or-
some other reason. hmmm... Feds want to snoop into students computers/data traffic. To find budding terrorists? or perhaps p2p traffic?
Hmmm... didn't Attorney General just a few weeks ago state one of their significant goals is enforcement of intellectual property law?
seems feds are a bit lost from the path.
450$ 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.
clearly itemize the "FBI Surveilance Surcharge" on the tuition, and see how quickly the outrage happens.
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
The FBI has a whole Web site about CALEA, including details about cost recovery. It looks like they set aside $500M to cover the cost; I guess the money has all been spent by now, so the universities are left with an unfunded mandate.
You're assuming the government can't crack your encryption. *tinfoil hat on* between speaking with professors that have had DoD contracts, and several friends who were previously employed, you might be suprised at just how much they can crack.
It seems reasonable for law enforcement to expect "cooperation" with investigations, I can get with that.
But it seems at this point they want everyone to cater to them, to make their jobs as easy as possible. "At the press of a button" - who do they think they are, George Jetson? Who's going to make MY job easier? And why do I have to pay to make THEIR job easier?
I seem to recall something in Britain a few hundred years ago, the Quartering Act I believe it was called. It said something to the effect that if asked, any citizen had to provide free room and board to soldiers of the British Army. Why? To keep the peace of course. What's different today? People being forced to spend time and money to make the police's jobs easier. It's just not a good enogh reason. The police have an important job, but it's not one that should have any special elevation above the rest and receive all this assistance and soforth.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
To get a bit philosophical who is the terrorist? The crazy guy with a fixation 7500 miles away or the government that burdens you under the guise of "security"? I'll tell you one thing, you americans have to calm the fuck down. Try this experiment. Try being in Canadian, American and European airports within the same week. Notice some differences? :-)
How they figure it could cost 7 billion a year is beyond me. A trivial capture method is to just bridge your upstream net connection. A linux box [or set for each upstream] with two NICs could do this transparently.
Hell, I did this as part of my IPsec testing work at my former job. For all of 450$ we built a PC capable of bridging two lans [in order to pick out ESP/AH packets and send them to the offload engine].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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!
they were on the ball. The question is, why were their supervisor's telling them to stfu and hunt down some 12 year olds downloading "copyrighted works". *tinfoil hat again*
And how fast can they crack my 4096-bit encryption scheme?
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Whatever happened to the government that was supposed to represent what the people thought? Am I missing something here or was I misinformed in my fucking history class.
Why is there a bunch of BS that people disagree with that is still passed? This pisses me off, a lot.
I need to drop all YRO articles or something, I feel so helpless with the current progression of society leading to the hell of 1984 or something.
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
Probably in a few hours if you invented it.
/tinfoilhat on
/tinfoilhat off
well... if you figure most of the systems they've been buying would put the "supercomputer top 100" to shame... about an hour?
I honestly can't say, as I was alluding to, after all the clearance they've gone through, they still don't get to actually see any real numbers, or real machines, they just get to work on one piece, and get to take guesses from that one piece. I'm not going to try and sit here and claim it's all fact by any means. That being said, I'd be utterly shocked if they couldn't easily double the best supercomputer on the list. And I think given the level of genious of most of these prof's and even underling friends, I imagine they can make pretty good guestimates.
I know tuition costs are skyrocketing like crazy... so what's $450 really? Just make it incremental or something. Add $50 per year for a number of years in the name of the system.
Not saying that I want this, but as someone paying full fare at $40,000 a year, I see a university play the cost card... I'm not buyin' it.
And now, for a sig that's a complete copout.
Some of those computers are laptops that roam from wired connection to AP 1 to another AP in a different city, but still on the institution's network. Our example roaming gnome with laptop also has access to 47 different UNIX systems and a couple of Windows terminal servers, where his communications could originate (and there are 5000 other people who have access to the same systems.
Now, you are a central net admin. You now receive a subpoena requiring all traffic generated by user A on the network. Anywhere on the network.
Complying with that order sure as hell isn't as simple as "a linux box with two NICs could do this transparently." It requires a huge amount of infrastructure, especially since CALEA requires them to do this without notice to the user, so there's no running to his office and dropping another box in front of his, not to mention that you don't want to give the FBI all the traffic from those multiple-user UNIX systems and Windows terminal servers -- only the traffic this "person of interest" is generating.
All of these numbers are reasonably close to actual for my employer, the University of Minnesota, who I sure as hell do *not* speak for in this or any other post to /. It's not a joke, and it's not an exaggeration. The problem is that big, and that expensive.
-30-
Yeah, that's right in the Constitution beside the section on the Supreme Court and Congress I think... :-/ I don't think this is Carnegie Mellon resisting anything. They're sticking their hand out saying "More money please." The government's response will probably run along the lines of "STFU. Raise your tuitions."
...we thought it was funny when the FSB (former KGB) demanded ISPs install equipment
1 25102.asp
specifically to allow this kind of monitoring (in 1998)- I guess its not so funny now.
For background, check out
http://www.rferl.org/features/1998/08/f.ru.980820
or just search on "SORM-2".
Does this seem incredibly stupid to anyone else but me? If someone were to use an encrypted proxy, does that not effectively nullify the benefits of the tap? $450 dollars per student seems like a lot of money for a University to shell out, especially considering the tap can be defeated easily (please correct me if I'm wrong).
24/7 remote surveillance of college students!?
The land of the free!?
Sounds to me like the US is turning into another North Korea.
And you slimy amoeba have the nerve complaining about China!
Clean up your own mess before you ever open your mouth again.
The US is heading rapidly towards becoming a police state. It's as simple as that.
Other countries are no better --- for example the UK is a nanny state gone mad, and is rapidly turning into a police state too. New mandatory IDs, new CCTV everywhere, new 3-month detention without process, etc etc.
How we've allowed our politicians to do this to us I don't know. But something is going to have to change, or things will get very ugly.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
in volunteering to give up your privacy, you pay much more than just the cost of setting something like this up
Ha! My encryption uses 4097 bits!
That's interesting, The Third Amendment (To the US Constitution, Bill of Rights) was specifically added to prevent the Quartering Act from recurring:
I wonder to what extent some of the modern attempts at increasing police powers can be likened to an affront on the third ammendment. By requiring built-in-surveillance everywhere, they are essentially making each citizen walk around with a monkey on their back and foot the bill for the government to spy on them in the same way the British made the colonists house and feed their own oppressors. I do not want soldiers or police or cameras or anything of the sort in my home, work place or educational institution. I want to live in peace and be left alone.
Personally, I would rather take my chances with someone trying to drop a plane on my head (relatively rare) than empower further government corruption (relatively common) and being forced to be host to it is just salt in the wounds.
Remember, they don't have to actually crack the encryption if there's a flaw in your protocol. Better hope you didn't screw it up!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
no,no, no. the technology that would allow the FBI to monitor internet access, after a court order, "at the flip of a switch" is nerve gas that flows out of a specified ethernet port - the DOD then comes into the room, pushes the user aside and scrolls through their browser history. That kind of plumbing ain't cheap.
ôó
Right..... Before, they would have to get off their asses at HQ, send someone out to splice into the line and set up a box to sniff the packets going over a strand of cat 5. Now they want a magical dial-in box. This can be cheap and easy, they just apparantly feel that they shouldn't have to, you know, do any work.
Of course, this would also allow them to secretly monitor connections. Hoover, McCarthy and the other corrupt people who abused the power of the FBI in the past would of have loved this power.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
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.
No; campuses is correct in English. However, if you want to treat it as a Latin word, it'd be campus (singular) and campi (plural).
fuck em fuck em fuck em
rinse repeat, vote third party god dam it.
If the government wants to invade my privacy and monitor university internet traffic, fine. I'm no terrorist and I believe that some good can come from monitoring.
Slow down there tex. You can give up your right to privacy but you think for one fucking minute you can give up mine.
This is just as simple as putting in a DSL line for the FBI and a VPN box.
That made me laugh... out loud... for a while.
Just another example of yet another intuitive response from the "I live in my Mom's basement and have absolutely no clue about how big, complex, dynamic networks really work, but I've read about them on Slashdot" crowd.
Cluelessness doesn't even begin to describe it.... and it gets modded INSIGHTFUL!
LOL!
$0.02 (CDN)
"at least $450 extra on each student's tuition bill."
Bullshit.
The equipment doesn't have to be purchased and installed every semester.
They had 10 years to do this, didn't say anything while the law has been on the books for that long and ocntinued to take moeny from the federal government. "It's inconvenient" won't fly. "Right to privacy" above that of any citizen who is in a home or office won't fly.
The law is the law and nothing was said for 10 years. Complaining about the cost won't change the law. What will their response be when questioned as to why they did nothing while taking Federal funding (ahem, money taken from my wallet and that of every other taxpayer)? They won't have anything to support their complaints. Personally, I went to the University of Illinois, home of the NCSA. What are they going to say, they can't figure out how to make this work efficiently? Pfff. The schools who are complaining about this don't comprehend they are telling the world their IT departments are worthless.
straight to the ways of the Eastern Europe Block back on the days of Cold War. I mean come on, not a single other western country would even dream of adopting something like this. Oh, of course they'll do that after you've done it first, because most of our politicians are just drones that take your ideas and implement it here. All for the sake of "interoperatibility in laws" or some such nonsense.
But then again, I might be wrong. Maybe every single western country is headed this way on it's own fucked up logic. 80-100 years in the future they'll say that these acts were the proof that the terrorist won. They certainly cannot take away our freedoms on their own, but they give our goverments the reason to do so, for the sake of security. Next step: Police States all around.
[Texas Accent] America is The Best country in the world![/Texas Accent]
:)
[Nelson Muntz]Ha ! Ha ![/Nelson Muntz]
The US now has its very own Gestapo, oh woops was that a thought crime? Oh well
BB! BB!
As a former PBX Administrator for a private university, I can say with some certanity that making sure that ensuring that they're getting the right information and monitoring the right person is not as easy as it seems. About five years ago, we had a situation where one of the janitors was downloading child pr0n onto campus computers. The Feebies brought their "Carnivore" system in, then we set up the proper configuration on the cisco gear. They asked us to change the disks daily, and they sent a courier to pick the Zip disks up every evening.
I have also had instances where drug task force officers have 'stormed in' to the switch room and demanded the information of someone who called a campus extension. These requests were met with resistance on my part (they never had a warrant), until they left -- university policy was if we were asked for something specific we were to look it up without their presence, then forward the information to the legal department who would turn it over if a search warrant or subponea was issued for the information. Law enforcement also attempted to pressure the university into letting them wiretap all of the public phones on campus (again, to try to curb drug-related activity), however, the university resisted and finally they gave up on trying to get such a broad scope of phones wiretapped (they did manage to get one phone wiretapped for a month; the interesting factoid of that was that the phone was only used 4 times that month, all dialing campus security to help them get back into their locked car -- the law enforcement types were quite livid at the end of their wiretap and they didn't have anything)
I can see where CMU has issues with this (isn't their campus network totally fiber-optic gigE? that will run the cost up), and I can also see where the professional side of me would want more university insight to make sure that the law enforcement types are doing this on the up-and-up.
I disable sigs...do you?
Are universities special in some way that allows the FBI free reign to invade peoples privacy ?? Universities/Colleges are made-up of mostly adults iirc.. and they're citizens of the country for the most part. Have they given up some sort of constitutional right because they're enrolled in a 4 year program ?!
Why isn't the FBI asking consumer-level isp's to install backdoor software on their customers ? College student or an isp subscriber, whats the diff...
I hope colleges do itemize the "Surveilance Surcharge" cost on students receipts when they register for classes. They would be outraged at the $450 they have to pay as well as the possible privacy issues involved. Here is how it might look on their receipt:
FBI Surveilance Surcharge ........... $450.00
An earlier comment on Slashdot made by Deliveranc3 reflects a more important concern than just money. He said this:
Universities are the places where revolution has historically started, curtailing student influence merely stops one of the free checks and balances on the system.
I agree with what he said and historically that is true. During the Vietnam war students held large anti-war protests at colleges and universities. There was what was called the "generation gap" where most older adults dissagreed with young peoples views on issues such as the war, the sexual revolution, wearing long hair and "rock and roll" music. Parents complained stongly about how they hated "Rock and Roll" and guys with long hair. There was a popular sloan back then that said "never trust anyone over 30."
That seems to be true in other countries as well. Students and other young people are frequenty the ones who openly protest against government policies. That happened in China when students and other young people we killed in Tiannimun Square (or however you spell it). It also happened in Burma the army slaughtered large numbers of students and other young people. Our government was created with various carefully designed checks and balances such as the three seperate branches of government, freedom of speeh, freedom of the press, and the right to bear arms. Those were carefully designed to prevent any one group of government officials from seizing power. Being able to carefully monitor student communication is contrary to the spirit of those checks and ballances. Is the main goal actually for government authorities to be able to keep students in line during troubled times in the future?
The thing is, if use of encryption becomes widespread - and I'd expect at an institution like CM it would be - the signal:noise ratio would be high enough that even with top equipment and good luck, it would be impossible to decrypt even a fraction of the traffic within a meaningful timeframe. Needle in the haystack type deal.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Peer to peer wireless, anyone ?
How (physically) hackable is wireless, after all ?
I ponder, is information obtained through spying be tainted for use in anything but terrorism? Should we the people amend the law to exclude any information obtained through spy technology in use of any case except terrorism. Should the spyware be used to catch you downloading music? Porn? Kiddy Porn? How about harrassing someone? How about plotting a theft? A murder? Talking dirty on IM to your friends? Where should the line be drawn?
Does the constitution state that the government has the right to spy on everyone. Isn't there some phrase about people having the right to not incriminate themselves? The laws have twisted human rights to water them down.
I applaud the university system in fighting back on this one. There is a revolution in our future - the only question is does it start here, or will it take another 10 to 30 years. This generation of college kids don't seem to care. Hopefully the US revolution starts next November, when a change of water at the federal level can start things moving peacefully. We the people already decided - last november - to make the supreme court lean heavy to the conservative side - and some balance in the other two branches of government will be required.
Assuming they need to crack it without you knowing (since a competent questioner would probably take all of 10 seconds to get your password and location of private key if they didn't already have it), they probably are not going to brute force it. They will either find where you stupidly left an electronic copy of your password (say.../proc/kcore or your unencrypted swapfile) or they will exploit a known (to them) vulnerability in whatever software you used to do the encryption.
But if they really want to charge you with something, all they really have to do is claim they decrypted it and show a jury what they "found". How do you intend to mout a defense against that? Consider that the jury will probably assume encryption == guilt to being with, they certainly are not going to believe you over the FBI.
When you think about it, using encryption gives them an easy, almost full proof way to plant evidence. All random data can become illegal, given the correct one time pad, which they just "happened" to stumble across.
Finkployd
the DOD then comes into the room, pushes the user aside and scrolls through their browser history.
Unless, as we've seen in previous stories, you're running Firefox.
Then you get detained in who-knows-whereistan.
80-100 years from now, there will have never been a war on terror. We will be at war with East Asia, and we will have always been at war with East Asia. Long live BB!
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 remind me of the folks who probably stay up all night wondering how come all those engineers at NASA never tought about installing wipers on the rovers' solar panels.
No sig
I am still so amazed that it's the Republicans that seem to be leading the charge on privacy, altho' a good number of Democrats are in cahoots. And it's all so unfocused... why bother to be able to wiretap students? Threats to natl security by way of downloading, I guess. But I was in the military also and just can't see why this is happening. I mean, this is being done by the people I voted for in 2000 to safeguard my civil liberties. Guess I'm a major chump. But I also changed my party affiliation.
What are those?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Well, there anonymous coward, at least I put my name on things. Furthermore, if there is a law and I have choice between complying and going to jail guess what's going to happen? We'll comply.
Thank goodness our Founding Fathers had more balls than the average /.-er.
So, what if I leave the room and keep my computer on and don't have it password protected, and my roommate decides to use my computer, or my roommte brings some friends over and they mess around with my computer? Will I take the blame?
And how will they know if you're using a computer in a computer lab? You don't generally log into those.
If something like this were to happen at my university, unfortunately I think the implementation of the system would be rather easy. Students are assigned IP addresses by MAC addresses, all of which are connected to one's bursar account, since they charge us if we use any more than 2GB of off-campus-network bandwidth per month, so they can see every exchange over the internet we make.
Oh my, time to break out my tin foil hat.
wants these keystone kops snooping on what students do on the Net? Maybe if the FBI quit being such a corrupt gang of ineffectual, lying cronies, it would make sense to give a shit about what they want. But they don't, and it doesn't.
Nor is this likely to change; witness the nomination of a Scalia-clone to the Supreme Court.
However, an argument based upon cost just might gain a sympathic ear from a Judge. And goodness knows, the Justice Department doesn't want to bear the cost of this. Nor do they want to have to ask Congress for the money, where the Educational System does have influence via lobbying.
The big problem with this type of argument is that the cost of the technology gets cheaper every year. At some point in the not-too-distant future it will reach $4.50 per student to implement, not $450. Then it will be harder to fight against.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
just on the cost :(
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Just don't pay your "tap bill", and the FBI will turn off the taps, just like what happened with your whole telephone. When they break out charges like this, you can afford to be selective!
--
make install -not war
well the good news for all this is that it seems we now must have relative privacy. the fbi wouldn't be making a fuss and wouldn't need help to establish their police state if they already had it.
if the fbi could at this moment tap into your computer they wouldn't be attempting to force others to let them in. i think this shows what the fbi is currently capable of and all we need are some "ineffective" networks admins at college campuses to keep this from working.
i.e. saying it will cost too much b/c they don't want to implement the fbi's spying on students
so we have an fbi that can't watch us without help and universities that are unwilling to help, all seems well right now, hopefully that won't change.
IMHO
We've all heard that the FBI is under increasing pressure from large intellectual property owners to crack down on theft. If they can get the American government to crack down on these cesspools of file sharing (colleges) that will save them the time, effort, and considerable cost of tracking these culprits down and bringing them to justice.
If they can't tack on a "File Sharing Fee" to tuitions all of the colleges ($450 sounds about right), if they can't threaten them all into coughing up the identity of "SuprSharER" at IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, the next step is to get the FBI to do it for them. If the colleges object, just say it'll help track down terrorists.
(I love conspiracy theories.)
450$ 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
In a way this guy is right, the error everyone is making is in thinking about this in a technical way instead of in a lawerly (is that a real word? ) way
the solution does not have to work, it just has to comply with whatever law is being used and a DSL line and VPN box probably would. It would be up to the FBI to prove to a (probably) technically illiterate judge as to why it wouldn't
or why the resultant information supplied is useless to them
nettdata: Tell me how I can one day be as cool as you. There's a difference between monitoring internet access and monitoring every packet on the network. The internet access typically comes into a single point, usually over a fiber optic line for larger facilities. It is easy enough to monitor incoming packets and tell their destinations. Ports on the switches at the end of the line terminate in the student's room. There's your finger pointing to who's going where. You can log the ARP cache and tie MAC addresses to indivdial PCs. Wireless may add some complexity to it but you still have MAC addresses. Hell even if they keep changing network cards you can dust the cards for fingerprints.
Posting to confirm what nettdata said, you are an idiot.
That is a risk - and unfortunately, as you suggest - very high risk.
joke (noun): a thing that someone says to cause amusement or laughter, esp. a story with a funny punchline : she was in a mood to tell jokes.
Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah!
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign also had an article in the local paper. http://www.news-gazette.com/localnews/story.cfm?Nu mber=19284
but she is NOT going to realize that by us judging her to death.
Queen B, some people need to toe the line to survive, others have nothing to lose. I don't know if you have a family to feed or not, but a wo/man is nothing if they sacrifice their family for some "greater" cause. Don't go there.
And remember the four boxes of freedom: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
It was one thing for the government to take are freedoms using systems that didn't cost you a dime because they were already in place. Now that the government is trying to make you pay to have your rights subverted people will rebel. This is a real cost people will be able to see. Although I don't think colleges have the lobbying power, they have an aversion to maintaining a staff solely for the purpose of that one day the FBI needs that one wire tap. Schools are expected to pay up front millions of dollars for a few taps.
People will find the idea of a wire tap IT staff very troublesome and dangerous. Will the school want to employ such a staff? To justify the need for such a staff the FBI would want to keep them busy with constant taps. Possibly those secret taps without disclosure to the public.
Euphemism, what is that a euphemism for something.
There's nothing a government hates more than people that think for themselves.
I hear what is being said about "costs". I feel the pain. The price tag on this is what we are willing to forfeit in civil liberties. Liberties that have been fought for, bled for, and died for...it's a price I am not willing to pay because the resources/motives to defend our liberties belong to all us. We are all stewards of liberty. Freedom has been hard fought for, with high prices that are irrelevant to "money". I don't care about costs in dollars...I care about the costs to our personal liberties. I do care when money can be better used to help fund clean, renewable energy sources. Will we be slaves to oil forever? Will we neglect the pursuit of liberty because it is something that we think we will always have? "Privacy" is dead if our voices our silenced by the demands of some that "need" access to this information to "defend" out liberty. There is an array of contradiction that I cannot begin to fathom. Why do they need this information "at the flip of switch"? What/who are they protecting? Self interests? Ideologies that say the government knows what is best for me when it comes to my liberty? Our liberties (one of those is privacy) cost much more than anything as silly as money. We, many in higher education, are bending to the will of government that is "protecting" us from unseen enemies. They want access to our libraries and now they want unrestricted access to ALL of the information that flows into and out of our instituions? Why do they need to know who has checked out "Catcher in the Rye" or the "Communist Manifesto"? I question this authority. I believe it is in the best interests of all "Americans" to question the need for access to types of information that I consider to personal information. We are approaching a slippery slope. Where will it take us? Will they next need to know about all of the information that flows into/out of my own home (castle)? I appreciate the efforts of some to protect the safety of Americans and the American ideals of liberty against "terrorists" (how are we lableing "terrorists" anyway?) - what is a "terrorist"? Will I be a "terrorist" if I disagree witht the agenda (whatever it is) of the "right wing"? Is a "terrorist" anyone who threatens "America"? Who are we as "Americans"? What is most dear to us? Our fancy cars and our money? Or the simple rights that are necessary for a human being to be who they are as themselves without fear from repercussion from oppression. I am not willing to pay the price for what they ask and further, it's not mine to give. Liberty (which includes privacy) and freedom belong to all of us.
You are wrong on so many of your assumptions. You are still thinking in a single switched LAN mentality. And all this without you seeing the requirements that are being provided.
;)
For starters, many larger facilities have multiple Internet feeds, with many large network segments that are, for the most part, autonomous. Fibre optic has nothing to do with it... my desktop machine has fibre... doesn't speak squat about bandwidth or capacity. These network segments probably consist of many routers and countless switches, making your statement "it is easy enough to monitor incoming packets" laughable. Oh, I can make my MAC address anything I want... it's useless, unless tied into some sort of low level authentication and authorization scheme. Monitoring networks like this is anything but trivial, except for SIMPLE performance numbers. I've got 3 software companies, one of which is based on distributed systems monitoring software that I wrote years ago, designed to monitor this type of stuff... so I have real work experience in large Government, military, banking, etc., networks.
From your attempt at trying to explain your monitoring scenario, it is pretty plain to me that you have limited exposure to anything other than a simple network environment.
And, it's got nothing to do with being as "cool as me". It's about being exposed to real world situations.
Right now, I'd bet that you are only describing a network topology as YOU WOULD THINK IT WOULD EXIST... not one that you've been exposed to that would adequately reflect this kind of situation that is being discussed. Your description, in and of itself, shows how little you truly understand about the inherent complexity of these networks.
But hey... I'm just some guy on the Internet spouting off. That being said, it's not like I'd rush out and hire you to be one of my network techs.
$0.02 (CDN)