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Surveillance Is on the Rise, Straining Carriers
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The number of telephone wiretaps from 2000 to 2004 authorized by state and federal judges increased by 44%, the Wall Street Journal reports, in part because of a rise in terrorism investigations after 9/11, and because the Patriot Act extended surveillance to Internet providers. All the surveillance activity can put a strain on carriers. 'Smaller telecom companies in particular have sought help from outsiders in order to comply with the court-ordered subpoenas, touching off a scramble among third parties to meet the demand for assistance', the WSJ reports, adding, 'Government surveillance has intensified even more heavily overseas, particularly in Europe. Some countries, such as Italy, as well as government and law-enforcement agencies, are able to remotely monitor communications traffic without having to go through the individual service providers. To make it easier for authorities to monitor traffic, some also require registering with identification before buying telephone calling cards or using cybercafes.'"
It has been said before, but welcome to George Orwell's 1984. The thing that gets me is the lip service paid to liberties. If governments are going to go to these lengths then why deal with the pretense of having "freedom"? What is next? Thoughtcrimes?
Why not just tell all communication corporations that they are taking them over and they will now be owned by the government so that surveillance can be conducted on the civilian populace? I'll tell you why..... It would be Revolution! So, our government(s) are slowly, methodically, chipping away at individual freedoms under the guise of "protecting" us. Benjamin Franklin had it right. If we are willing to give away all of this, we do not deserve freedom. The time is NOW to reverse these power grabs for Presidential authority and no oversight. Vote out those representatives and senators that have supported eliminating our rights and take back your lives.
Seriously, corporations are being saddled more and more with the burden of government oversight and expense which ironically, seems to be occurring more and more with Republican administrations. Government is larger now that it has ever been before and the US government is that largest bureaucracy in the history of the planet. There is a price for a government of this size and that is inefficiency and it is being sold to us under an umbrella of fear.
The other side of the coin is government subsidized corporations that are no longer having to compete in a fair and open market place as long as they agree to do the bidding of whoever is currently in power, further destabilizing the ideal of capitalism.
Remember people: The USA is only a couple hundred years old. If we want to stick around, we need to be more careful with how we allow ourselves to be governed. Because if we allow the infrastructure in place to arbitrarily discriminate those who may or may not agree with the overall power structure, then you could find yourself easily under investigation. Take a picture of the wrong thing? Say the wrong thing in an open forum like Slashdot? Support the "wrong" political candidate? Read the "wrong" books? Fail to conform in any way to the overall top 40 culture and you might find yourself on the wrong side of the "firewall" unable to get a job or participate fully in society or possibly worse.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
just from the fact that our rights have been violated on such a consistant basis. Up 44%??????? Are you kidding me? I'm *sure* that all these are completely related to terrorism and not other things.
In David Brin's book "Earth" he talks about a future society with zero privacy. However rather than the Orwellian 1984 version of no privacy, he talks about a world where everyone, from the farmer in the field, to the president of the united states having zero secercy. He debated that with the prolifiation of technology the idea of privacy had become obsolete, and the only way to prevent people with money and power from abusing their ability to spy on the average individual make it so EVERYONE had the capibilities.
I'm not sure if I agree with this thought, but when it comes to privacy, perhaps we've already gone too far, and privacy IS history. Perhaps it is time for total transpancy.
China to require registration for text messaging Thursday February 02, @12:44PM Rejected
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/HB03Cb 04.html
Had this story been posted this wouldn't be news.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Criminals will evolve as this techonlogy evolves.
If they know they are probably being tapped, or that their phone conversation might be being recorded by their telcom company ( something I think will happen given the cheapness of storage ) they will stop using it.
I'm not in the business of crime, so I have no need to be hiding my conversations. At the same time I don't want my personal talks about marital troubles being recorded and used against me in a divorce court. ( Sweetie if you reading I don't want that it is just hypothectical ). If I was in crime I certainly wouldn't be talking about it on the phone. Here are my alternatives.
First I'd encrypt several times in a way only know by me and the other side to make it appear to be binary data.
Then I'd chat on private channels on Counter-strike servers or something. Something that I know is not logging. I suppose the govt could sniff the packets and record them all and try and extract the info, but is it worth it. After the tap had been placed on my internet account I guess they would start recording all the packets, but that would sure add up. Heck I'd stream movies in the background just to make it harder. If I was being really paranoid I sent chunks of the message through several channels.
On top of that I'll use a code agreed on by the both parties. "I hate the Dallas Cowboys" means meet me here at xyz time or something.
I think it'd be better if they could tap into my machine via backdoors and take screenshots, however, this would probably require a human, and would be pretty detectable.
If the govt thinks they can just start a blanket approach to this problem, I think they'll find that it will just change the problem. Better to over use taps so people are lazy and continue to use easy to monitor channels.
The argument that we might have stopped 9/11 by having programs like this is a bit silly. We had so much more evidence then phone calls. The FBI and several people knew about the people who where going to do the attack, they just didn't act. Hindsight is 20/20, and if something even remotely like that happens again it will be taken very seriously.
Personally if you do make a phone call out of the country I think the govt has a right to monitor it. They setup the infrastructure and they have jurisdiction to anything dealing with the border. If you fly out of the country they can check you bags at customs and a whole slew of other things. The thing that they need to do is just lay that out. Let people know that they can be tapped, and if they are notify them. When you call long distance before the call starts play a message. "This phone call may be monitored by the U.S. govt for security reasons".
People will say that terrorist then won't use the phone system and we can't catch them that way. Well news flash they already are not.
And you completely ommitted the second requirement for the applicability of Ben Franklin's quote. You must also demonstrate, that the gains in security are only temporary.
Try again.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Interestingly enough, I find that from the WSJ, the number of wiretaps last year is only at 1,710 in 2004. 1,710 wiretaps for the year vs a USA 2004 estimated population of 293,656,842 is 0.00058% of the population (assuming one tap per person). Hardly something to gawk at.
... Yet, 2000 was a local low, the lowest since 1997 (difference of 4 taps), so you could just as easily say "the number of wiretaps from 1997 to 2004 are up 43%". The 1999 wiretap count is at 1,350, which means only a 26% increase from 1999, since 2000-2001 (election year) involved a large decrease (-11%) from the previous year. I'll leave this to others to argue the exiting government's preparedness for 9/11/2001.
.... there's a 16% increase in federal wiretaps from 2002-2003, and another +26% increase from 2003-2004, to a current 730 Federal Wiretaps for the year 2004. Wiretaps are going up across the board, but looking back at history, 1993-1994 shows the greatest increase in federal wiretaps, single year up 32% compared to +26% in 2004-2005.
That made me want to find previous years, so I stumbled on a watchdog group, EPIC, which puts the 2000 wiretap count at 1,190 for a +43.6%
From their data, which goes back to 1968, and a few pokes with Excel, we can see that State Wiretaps outnumber Federal by a 3:2 ratio every year back to 1998
The top 3 years of increases in the last twenty are 2001 (25%) 2004 (18%), and 1994 (18%). The wiretaps in 2004 are roughly double the amount in 1991.
If we group by Presidental Office years (since each president tends to change policies and staff when they come into office, group by 4 years), the Bush Administration increase is +14.6% in the first term... impressive, but short of the Clinton Administration's increase of +17.7% in its first term. However, neither president matches the rates of increases in the 80's, with 35% increase by Reagan and 20% increase by Bush Senior.
You make a good point, but I must argue that I don't care about the cause, I care about the effect! So what if it's not being consciously orchestrated to some grand scheme by an evil secret political cult. The gradual (and rapidly accelerating) loss of freedoms and complete disregard for the constitution in America needs to be stopped. As you stated part of the problem is currently elected officials either thinking too short term or not at all, that means that organised or not they are still part of the problem. We need to get people into office that are going to think past their next election and do something for WE THE PEOPLE instead of ME THE PUBLIC FIGURE.
I think another thing that needs to be recognized and dealt with in our government (and this applies to all parties, and goes back to Wilson policies [some will argue Lincoln]) is this fine line that policy makers keep walking between what is legal and what is constitutional. For instance the current hullabaloo about Bush's secret wiretapping keeps being touted by him and his cronies as legal under current law and presidential constitutional powers. If it were blantantly so then there wouldn't be the huge outcry that there is now, so obviosuly at best it's a convoluted or extremely technical argument that its legality hinges on. My issue is that regardless of the technical legal loophole Gonzalez et al may present, it is pretty flagrantly unconstitutional and immoral. Someone needs to stand up and say "Even if this is proven technically legal, it goes against the principles of freedom and everything that America should stand for, therefore we should reword the laws to MAKE it illegal!"
Bully for Bush that he MAY have found a gotcha clause somewhere, that doesn't mean he should get to use it, that means we should PATCH it!
There is a process in place for performing wiretaps of this nature, and that is the FISA court. It is already secret, wiretaps can already be started 72 hours in advance of even applying for a warrant through that court. It provides oversight and all of the expediency that an intelligence agency requires. And the stupid protest that somehow using that court would tip off the terrorists under investigation is ludicrous. To accept that as truth means either A) they believe the FISA court is compromised and the cases heard are being leaked to terrorists, or B) up until now terrorist cells were so stupid as to think they government isn't trying to find them and eavesdrop on their communications. Frankly B seems more plausible than A, and if A were true then there's a lot more to worry about then the legality of the wiretapping! Studies by the CIA and other government intelligence agencies have already demonstrated that sophisticated terrorist groups like Al Queda already operate with complex forms of communication to hide their tracks. They speak in codes, they use disposible cell phones, they change communication mediums and lines often. They have guidelines that if an operative is late checking in then assume they are captured and scrap the entire plan and come up with a new one. These people are not learning anything new by hearing from the NY Times that the government isn't going through its secret court to get orders to wiretap them. They are aware the government is actively seeking them, what the hell could they think we've been doing since 10 minutes after the first plane struck the towers??
It seems pretty clear that the only people being aided in any way by this warrantless surveilance program is the administration that has initiated it and is preventing any oversight of their activities. As they say, turnabout is fair play. If you've done nothing wrong Mr. Bush then you should have nothing to hide. Let the FISA court look at these cases and determine if they meet the burden of proof required by law!
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
AKA "The Next Great Depression". In the 1930s, the US was very much at risk of full-scale Communist revolution, as was happening around the world at that time. As much as the neo-cons would like to believe that FDR was a socialist at heart, the New Deal was a desperate attempt to stave off such a revolution by filling the bellies of the most destitute.
Social Security was a part of the effort, and was also political manipulation of statistics at its finest: cut the unemployment rate by reclassifying massive numbers of the unemployed as "retired".
Interestingly, in the 30s, the US had effectively no debt, so taking a hit to run these massive social programs was more feasible. Today, the US is encumbered both by foreign-held debt and entitlement programs. It would be much less able to respond to a depression today in the way it did in the 30s. If you think the US is unpopular in the world today, wait until it tries to weasel out of $9T+ in foreign-held bonds.