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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 $450 per student.
I think I speak for all of us when I say...
"Flip THIS."
Can I have wire tap access to the Department of Justice's systems, 24/7 with remote access? You know, I just want to make sure that they're not doing anything that they shouldn't be.
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Washington University in St. Louis isn't either. It made the front page of our school's newspaper - though, admittedly, that's not entirely hard... "Student gets hit by pie" was a front page headline too.
I don't even have that kind of remote access to the boxes I administer (and I work in the wireless communications industry)! The best I have is SSLdump, and If I want to run TCPdump on a server (from home), I have to dump to a local disk, then tar zcf it, then scp/rcync back to my home PC (servers are gigE, and I'm 3Mbit cable).
Why can't the universities say, "Sure, just tell us when you're going to buy us the equipment"?
BBH
I think they decided it's easier to present this as a debate over an "unfunded mandate" than over "invasion of privacy". It's probably also easier to make a consitutional argument this way.
Terrorism seems to be any act against the U.S. Government, half the population already disagrees with the policy of that government.
Why should they be allowed to tap into the intellectual centres of their country?
Universities are the places where revolution has historically started, curtailing student influence merely stops one of the free checks and balances on the system.
You think they want access to ensure national security?
-or-
some other reason. hmmm... Feds want to snoop into students computers/data traffic. To find budding terrorists? or perhaps p2p traffic?
Hmmm... didn't Attorney General just a few weeks ago state one of their significant goals is enforcement of intellectual property law?
seems feds are a bit lost from the path.
450$ 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.
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.
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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.
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.
How dare you suggest that the $450 would be better used for educational purposes rather than unnecessary eavesdropping.
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.
...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".
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
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.
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.
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"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.
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?
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.
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