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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.
They're trying to offset the costs of the wiretaps, and taking a swing at Google, who isn't playing nice with government requests, at the same time.
Anything can make sense if you look for the conspiracy angle.
Ramen
I thought this was going to be about mailmen with hernias.
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.
Of these factors, only the fear of terrorists (foreign and and domestic) has risen noticably in recent years. Hence the willingness of the citizens of democracies to accept their governments' attempts to prevent new attacks.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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
I have resorted to pigeons. This post was sent via a pigeon which flew to India where my outsourced-poster hit the submit button
...says:
"The next Slashdot story is visible early to free day pass visitors; sponsored by Verizon Business."
Amusing timing.
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You know, there's a reason the fourth amendment exists. This BS of "if you have nothing to hide, you don't need privacy" is crap. Why are people ok with handiong power over to the state. What happens when a bad president gets elected? Who honestly think that can't happen? Right now Bush may be good, but many of his supporters will say clinton/democrats are bad. And vice versa. The point is, once the state has all this power good luck trying to curb abuses.
.. nobody will dispute that. The problem is that the innocent do, and it's the burden and responsibility of the free to ensure it. Many have forgotten Ben Franklin's words "those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither".
Second, all humans have an INHERENT right to privacy. Even the constution alludes to that when it says the "right against unreasonable searches without warrants shall not be violated"
All of us have the responsibility of ensuring that innocent humans are not harmed by overzealous and wrong "security" measures. How is it in the nation's interest for all her citizens to have to explain to God why tyranny was carried out in the name of security?
Terrorists don't deserve due process or privacy
It's a technological attempt to solve a problem not solvable through technological means.
Even if literally EVERY phone call was monitored (a nearly impossible feat), what's to stop "terrorists" from talking in code?
E.g.:
Terrorist_1: "How's the weather?" ("How's our plan going?")
Terrorist_2: "Fine." ("Fine.")
Terrorist_1: "That's good. Is it going to rain tomorrow? ("Are we ready to go with our attack tomorrow?")
Terrorist_2: "Yes, the weatherman says so." ("Yes, Osama gave me the go-ahead.")
Once terrorists start pulling tricks like this, then what would the wiretappers try? Arresting anyone who calls anyone in the Middle East and talks about innocent-sounding subjects?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
The number of telephone wiretaps authorized by state and federal judges increased by 44%
And how many more were not authorized?
Developers: We can use your help.
The #1 theme of the Bush administration has been fear: terrorists, they say, are an existential threat so dire that any and all means used to oppose them are justified.
No.
Various nations have seen and defeated far worse threats than terrorism. Liberty is not a weakness, it is a strength. A robust and fair justice system is not a weakness, it is a strenghth. Democracy is not a weakness, it is a strength. Combined they serve as the absolute best form of not only protecting ourselves from others but protecting ourselves from ourselves.
I wholly reject the notion that the threat posed by "terrorism" is so substantial as to justify any tactic. I am not afraid, and I will not be goaded into fear by the government. I will fight, but I will fight for liberty, justice, and democracy, and will oppose all efforts to undermine them, whether from abroad or at home. I hope those of like mind throughout the civilized world will do similarly.
Wire taps my ass. Check out: http://www.askcalea.net/
Yes, I have worked for various carriers though out my professional career; everything from RBOC/LECs, CLECs, CAP's, Cellular. The current state of affairs is freakin depressing. The old school method of getting a wire tap is:
1) Get a court order
2) Submit it to a carrier to get a tap
3) Carrier puts on tap and makes all sessions available to authorities.
Ya want to know how it works now.
1) Remote login (law enforcement)
2) Start recording (aka run a few commands)
3) WTF happened to the court order
All companies that make communications equipment have CALEA access built into their equipment. The system is getting freakin abused and no one has a clue that this *hit is going on.
PS: Yeah, I am just a wee bit touch about the situation.
PSS: The telco folks have always done their job; but that wasn't good enough... Direct access is what has been given away.... and that is a load of horse *hit. By the way; CALEA stands for Communications Assistance Law Enforcement Act.
With all the increase in wiretaps, all we've really done is bury the important intercepts under mountains of useless data. Like out of all the Bush wiretapping, how many warrants were actually issued? It wasn't that many, less than 20 if memory serves. Out of thousands of wasted man hours combing through wiretap intercepts. Not to mention the potentially crippling political backlash from an electorate that really doesn't like being spied on by anyone, especially their own government.
This is FEMA and Iraq all over again in intelligence gathering. It's insane, likely illegal and it's not going to work right, ever. So it's illegal AND stupid. What a combination.
Hopefully we'll get smart before spending ourselves into a hole we can never get out of, but I'm not holding my breath. This is the country where 52% of the population can't tell the difference between a real war veteran and a draft dodging, Conneticut frat boy prentending to be a religious fighter pilot from Texas.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just goes to show how chicken little the left really is on this subject.
p ort/table300.pdf
Let me get this straight, wiretaps have not EVEN DOUBLED since 911, despite the war, despite so called invastions of privacy, and you want to cry more about it?
Personally, sounds like they have not done enough wiretapping, I would have expected a doubling or tripling of wiretaps.
Instead I find they are very restrained in their requests.
FYI: here is the baseline for 1999 and why they were tapping. 890 were for narcotics, and only 45 landed in the "other" catagory that was not a criminal investigation.
http://www.epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/2000_re
in 2004, 1308 were for narcotics, so there is the growth of 44 percent. Other grew to 64, also an approximately 44% increase.
http://www.uscourts.gov/wiretap04/Table3-04.pdf
64 people in a population of 250 million. THAT is restraint, not taking peoples liberty.
Yes I know that does not include the so called "illegal wiretaps" by the President. I am not too worried unless the taps were not on inbound international calls from known terrorists calling people here in the US. If that is what they are, then there is no crime in doing that.
Anything else and they have to explain it.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Hell, you don't have to go all the way to the Middle East to find someone who hates me. There are people much closer than that, should we be spying on them too?
The FAULT lies with the US Government and the US citizens. Yes, certain groups in the middle east have done horrible things, and we have no/little control over what they do. OTOH, we have complete control in how we respond.
Find coupons in Greeley
All the surveillance is worth it, because we've caught all the terrorists! I feel safer knowing we've got all those Qaeda evildoers. I'm finally satisfied that we've caught Osama in our dragnet. And the byproduct, catching all the drug mafia, has really cleaned up the streets - and our nation's veins. So we've made some Quakers paranoid - they live to quake, right? And, in an unexpected bonus, the Republicans won't be taken by surprise by any Democratic Party dirty tricks. If only we'd let Emperor Nixon protect us, in his wisdom, we'd have all the oil we want, and terrorists would never have attacked us.
--
make install -not war
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.
Freedom 9/11 victory 9/11 lurks freedom internets 9/11!
Ok...I have had about enough of this spying nonsense. Lets just admit that its going to happen, noone is going to stop it and just deal with the future. First I propose that since the government is digging so deep into the telco world to spy on everyone, why don't they just deliver the final blow to the industry? Lets just go with government owned communications infrastructure.
We won't have to deal with these dirty money grubbing telcos anymore (see Bellsouth's behaviour over free wifi, or Verizon's wanting more money from the internet content providers)
We won't have service that is any worse. (Government work isn't typically much worse than what we get now)
The prices will go down. (No profit margins to maintain)
This way the government isn't crushing the smaller business for the big telcos by mandating wiretaps. Now its equal for everyone involved.
Disclaimer: This is not meant to be serious, I know some have a problem reading into things like this. Thank you.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
"What is next? Thoughtcrimes?"
Actually we have had thoughtcrimes for a while. I'm sure others can add other examples, but the "Hate Crime" laws are specifically and solely thoughtcrime laws. For example, you might get a year for lighting someones lawn on fire. This act, even if it was designed to intimidate the homeowner because you hate them, might still only get you a year. BUT, if you light the fire in the shape of a swastika, you are likely to get 6 years. This means that you will spend 5 years in prision not because you destroyed their property, you threatened them, or even because you hate them. You will spend 5 years in prison because of your beliefs. Because of your "thoughts".
Now, don't think I am trying to defend neo-nazis or anything. I think that the person that picked a victim out of a phonebook and decided to intimidate them and destroy their property should get the same sentence. No one should sit in jail because of their beliefs. Even if I think their beliefs are vile.
I think this is much more interesting than the constant railing against our government's efforts to monitor terrorist and foriegn government agent communication. At least in this country there are several hands this information has to go through. Like the article says, outside of the U.S., governments have the ability to monitor communication directly.
I know that Slashdot is left-leaning and apparently never misses an opportunity to post a "see, President Bush sux0rs!!!!" story and this is just par for the course. Do you think that other liberal administrations haven't monitored communication in this country? As a matter of fact, if you think back over all administrations we've had, which administrations have done more to hurt this country rather than help or protect it? Jimmy Carter's giveaway of the Panama Canal, hostage crisis disater, energy policy disaster, coverup of the three-mile island disaster or remarks that there was no need to apologize for Viet Nam? Bill Clinton's transfer of missle technology to China, bombing an asprin factory and killing the janitor, ignoring an opportunity to capture Osama Bin Laden when he was offered, and (since everyone likes to point out lies) lieing under oath and being impeached? L.B.J./Kennedy starting the Vient Nam war or his remarks about Thurgood Marshall - "Son, when I appoint a nig**r to the court, I want everyone to know he's a nig**r."?
The fact is, President Bush will be trashed no matter what he does or doesn't do. National Protection? He's infringing on civil liberties!! Natural Disasters? He didn't move fast/more/personally or did too much. (Didn't he plant explosives and blow up the dikes himeself?)
ConsultingFair.com
One trouble with that, as with all utopian visions, is that implementation never follows design. As Communism inexorably devolves into dictatorial oligarchy, a select few would have privacy while the rest lived as slaves to the Eye.
Even if that weren't to happen, democratic tyranny would be unavoidable. If everyone knows what everyone else is doing, a sheeplike uniformity would be the result, with any oddballs subjected to public disgrace. "You painted your bathroom what color? Weirdo!" "Look, he's got a flashlight under the covers! He's doing something private under there! Pervert!" "You spanked your child? Abuse! Abuse!"
Some of the greatest joys in life are private. A quiet conversation with a spouse. Reading a bedtime story to a wide-eyed child. Singing off-key in the car. Posting anonymous trolls on Slashdot.
The right to privacy is not just an invention of the courts to justify abortion, though some read Roe v Wade that way. Privacy is infused in the Bill of Rights, from the right to practice religion as we see fit, the right not to have troops in our homes, the right to own weapons, and the right to be secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects".
Whether abused by the powerful or not, the world Brin proposes is a totalitarian hell.
sigs, as if you care.
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.
Cynicism alert:
I dont know about you, but personally I would rather get used to the idea of having a 9/11 once every 2-4 of years, than give away my real freedoms, not the ones advocated by our Texan Overlord.
Hell, I will ever risk my life and I would bare with the risk of having my kid becoming the victim of a pedofile than allowing those shady people to go through all our personal data (general pornography statistics my arse, google hold on there).
Many posters are trying to come up with explanations as to why the public is not outraged at this Big Brother situation. I would like to provide a very simple and clear reason why the general public does not really care.
The public does not care about these privacy invasions, patriot acts, wiretaps, etc, becuase they hear people whine about how our privacy is being invaded everyday, but it has yet to actually happen.
Let me clarify.
There has yet to be a single major case of someone who wasn't really evil being anything other than mildly inconvienced. If and when some average joe is taken advantage of, or criminally or financially damaged, THEN you will see people upset.
I'm not saying I agree with any of this big brother crap that the government is doing. I'm just saying that so far, they have actually used all of these technologies as they promised to do, and have not targetted anyone innappropriately. Until they do, no real effort to battle these invasions will begin.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
But today's wiretapping system isn't set up that way. The way it actually works is that there's a back door into the routing system for telephony, SS7. The back door is run by private companies, mostly Verisign. Verisign calls this their NetDiscovery Service. Wiretapping is done by issuing commands to switches (phone, cellular, IP) over the SS7 network.
Take a look at what Verisign describes as the subpoena processing flowchart. Note that there are no blocks on that chart for the court system. There's no data transfer back to the court system. The "legal review" step is marked as "optional". There's supposed to be a subpoena to start the process, but there's no external validation that what is monitored matches the subpoena.
That's the real problem. We need to put the courts back in the loop. It's wrong for them to be out of it. Courts have an obligation to monitor compliance with their subpoenas, and to oversee law enforcement. They're being denied the tools to do it.
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. --
So, start "straining" the onerous government agencies with FOIA (freedom of information act) requests.
Read any good sonnets lately?
Shouldn't the carriers be shouting "No free ride for surveillance!" and charging the gov't a premium for this service?
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Some of my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ take this belief and then say, "Well, since God is watching us anyway, who cares if the government decides to look in on my life? I have nothing to hide. And even if I did something wrong, God is more important and I care more about what He thinks."
The problem inherent with this logic is that wicked men will be the ones who will be doing the watching. These men would have the ability to shift the behaviors and actions of people based upon the information they possess. This shift may not be in alignment with what my God requires of me, so I cannot support this monitoring.
Just a thought...
--Chag
as a simple result of your sources, you're only counting the wiretaps that were obtained through the courts.
There are actually more wiretaps-- maybe significantly more wiretaps, it's hard to know?-- happening than that lately, because as Attorney General Alberto Gonzolez tells us, getting a warrant for a wiretap is just too much of a bother.
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.
You also forget that members of the military, reserves, national guard, etc. are still citizens with friends and relatives. Some of the soldiers would not take kindly to orders directing them to kill other U.S. citizens.
... the whole nine yards.
I have to disagree. An overriding theme of most militaries is dehumanization. On the battlefield, the killing of human beings is referred to by disconnected terminology like "taking out a target". A soldier, trained to carry out orders without question will not resist. Even if an order is illegal, a soldier risks jail or execution if he or she cannot prove that fact before a military kangaroo court.
Sounds like you haven't served in the U.S. military. We are, believe it or not, thinking people, not automatons. First of all, we aren't *allowed* to perform police duties on American soil under normal circumstances. But I know even if martial law were declared, many of us would simply refuse to conduct operations against Americans for the purpose that is being discussed here. Would I shoot someone who shot at me first? Sure. But I believe American commanders are smart enough to know their troops don't want to kill other Americans. You'd probably see operations conducted in more of an anti-riot style than a war style - i.e. lockdown with curfews, tear gas and other crowd control measures,