Under the Hood of AT&T's Monitoring System

pkbarbiedoll writes "The recent discovery of AT&T's monitoring program has raised more than a few eyebrows. While the class action suit filed by EFF is pending (as well as a seperate suit filed against the NSA filed by the ACLU), interested parties are taking the time to learn more about the scope of this massive invasion of privacy. Bewert examines the Narus architecture used by AT&T in their previously shadowed (and ongoing) collaboration with the NSA."

Comments

Worrisome

[Winlin]

And not just for those people who dislike the current administartion. As has been said before, even if you approve of Bush, how will you like President (Clinton, Kerry, Gore, etc) having this same technology at their disposal. It is dangerous for any government to be able to monitor its citizens this thoroughly, no matter what the original intent might be.

Re:Worrisome

[legirons]

"IOW, Clinton did this, not Bush. Remember Carnivore?"

What makes you think it's the president's idea? Surely the NSA does what the NSA does, regardless of the person who's theoretically supposed to be telling them what to do.

People who've watched Yes Minister will know what I mean.

Or if you've been watching the UK Home Office do its "ID cards" thing regardless of which figurehead is nominally in charge of the department. People used to say that it's all David Blunkett's fault, until he left and his old department of civil servants carried on doing exactly the same thing with a new "leader".

People blame one president for what the FBI, NSA, DHS, etc. are up to, and when that president leaves, it all continues as if nothing had changed. Aren't government bureaucracies the same, the world over?

Re:Worrisome

[Nikker]

Wow, just wow, buddy you need to get out.

Our defense contractors can stay fed by selling new shit to our military, while unloading old technology on other nations. There's plenty of wars out there to keep all of them rich; there's no requirememnt to start new ones.

You believe that eh? It's like saying WallMart doesn't need to make anymore money they have enough already. Microsoft doesn't need any more advertising their market is big enough. Pull your head out of your ass man, when you have this much money it's no longer about having enough money to afford an object of your chosing, do you think these guys are saving up for a bigger pool in their backyard? If they can make more they will do evreything they can to make that happen.

field-testing new soldiers" is rather pointless, as human nature rarely changes. Training is standardized and does not decrease in effectivness. Therefore the only thing to be gained by sending soldiers to war is the development of new tactics and doctrine. However, those things tend to change from conflict to conflict anyway, so starting wars just to develop new tactics is also rather pointless.

You really have your head up your ass on this one, but let me break it down for you anyway. A Pitbull is a type of dog, this dog is known to be agressive by nature and used in dog-fights around the world. Now you may think that these people just get a dog drop it in a ring with another and let em go? No. They beat it, make it angry, provoke it, even after all this it's still not ready you know what they do? They take a little fluffy puppy and make the pitbull rip it apart, now it has the taste of blood and the confidence to kill. Now it makes the first move, now it is battle-hardened, blood and killing no longer scares it or slows it down it just wants more. This is what is happening in Iraq a country with millions of active soilders being told how wars are fought, shooting rounds of ammo in preperation for the one that will kill the other guy. After a while no amount of screaming or preperation can improve their skills as killers they have to actually kill 'a fluffy little dog'. A war they cannot lose a foe that cannot bring the wind out of their sails. They have to see their friends die as well as their enemies and the innocent. Now they go back to the millions and become heros and bring the millions of unready up to a new level, get them frothing at the mouth just waiting for 'fluffy' to rear their head up again. Now have a real core to your army. If you think uncle Sam can pick your scrawny, pale ass give him a gun and your gonna let the frags go like Quake, you would likely shit yourself before you got your first shot off and possibly go into shock when you get real brains splattered all over you.

Now I guess you think you know something really well but look over what was just said....

Where the hell do you get these ideas from?

Two words.

[KitesWorld]

'Absolute power'.

A democratic government is supposed to have limited power by design. However, as they grow, they tend to cut themselves free of the shackles that their founders placed on them.
If you're going to be suprised about anything, be suprised that it didn't happen sooner.

Re:Learning to love big brother;)

[mrchaotica]

I've come to simply expect that corporations are in full swing of subjugating the general public.

There's a word for that system of government: Fascism.

Re:Conversation I overheard in a bar

[Guppy06]

"As surveillance expands, people become free from danger, free to walk alone at night, free to work in a safe place, and free to buy any legal product or service without the threat of fraud."

Note that "free to dissent" doesn't appear in that list.

Re:next frontier

[lamp540]

we're pretty much fucked.

Watergate

[HermanAB]

Well, it seems Ol'Nixon wasn't so bad after all...

Re:Learning to love big brother;)

[Paladin144]

There's a word for that system of government: Fascism.

I'm surprised that you haven't been modded flamebait already by the (guess who!) fascists. I'm glad you weren't modded down, because you are 100% correct.

I understand those of you who are in denial, however. The idea that America is slowly going fascist is a big, painful pill to swallow. However, the fact remains that corporations have unprecedented control of our society, and our government. Corporations are the primary institution of our time, just as capitalism is primary ideology (not democracy, that's for sure. How often do you vote? How often do you shop? Compare.) of 21st century America. Add to this unfortunate mix the shadow government in the form of the Military-Industrial Complex, and you have a recipe for the hidden hand of fascism.

I leave you with a quote from Mussolini:

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

Blaming Bush is just taking the easy way out.

[Kadin2048]

Oh, yes, so the Clinton Administration was just purchasing some vast computer system, capable of datamining gobs of internet traffic ... and you don't think they were planning on using it as a wide net?

Wake up -- blaming this on anyone one administration, and certainly on any one person, is ridiculously shortsighted. Go ahead and blame it on Bush; the people that actually engineered this sort of policy, wherever they are in the NSA or various other government offices, will probably sell him down the river easily enough. Executives come and go every four or eight years, the attitudes that enable a project like this, even the raw technology itself, takes longer than that to put together.

If you give in to the temptation to blame Bush, along with all the other sheeple over at Daily Kos, you're really ignoring the majority of the problem. It's akin to seeing an iceberg in front of your ship, and sawing off the part you can see above the water and then saying the problem is gone. No it's not, all you did was get rid of the very thing that allowed you to see the problem. The thing that's going to kill you is still lurking below the water. (Ignoring the rather obvious fact that a proportionally equal amount of the iceberg would come back up out of the water as soon as you cut the top off.)

If you build a system that's capable of monitoring everyone's email, it's naive to think that it'll never be used. So the real problem here is that this system was constructed in such a way that it could be used indiscriminately, and to find an answer to why that happened, people have to be willing to look further back into the past than just G.W. Bush, something I'm not sure they're prepared to do. It's too easy and too satisfying to use something like this as political hay, rather than as the wake-up call it ought to be of how systemically out-of-control the government is, and has been for some time.

The behavior of our current and less-than-beloved President is a symptom of a problem, not its root cause.