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

NSA and AT&T

[pilsner.urquell]

Is anyone surprised?

Re:NSA and AT&T

[Trigun]

Face it, we all had our suspicions, but never really thought that there was enough processing power to datamine that much information. We always knew it was going on, but thought that there was too much data to effectively sift.

Well brother, they're sifting!

Re:NSA and AT&T

[Waffle Iron]

Your world. Delivered...
to the NSA.

Re:NSA and AT&T

[geekp0wer]

Ok, Your suspicions were correct. Now what are you going to do about it? Probably nothing. The fact that our goverment (which ever agency or sitting president) autorized it is a major problem. Letting it happen with out holding them accountable is the real tragedy.

Re:NSA and AT&T

[kimvette]

1. It's implied
2. The Constitution Itself states that our rights are not limited to what are expressly stated in the document

Today's government seems to have flipped the coin and reversed it despite the document's self-stated intent: officials seem to believe our only rights are the ones which are enumerated, and all other things are disallowed.

Re:NSA and AT&T

[virtualchoirboy]

Funny, but I thought this had some bearing on the matter:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There is also some additional information on the FindLaw site for those that are curious.

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

[Nutria]

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.

I totally agree with your sentiment. But...

From TFA: this equipment was the Narus ST-6400, a machine that was capable of monitoring over 622 Mbits/second in real time in May, 2000 .

W wasn't elected until November/December 2000.

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

Re:Worrisome

[GSloop]

FWIW, having the *ability* to tap is far different than actually using it.

And using it when authorized and overseen by a neutral, independant party such as the FISA court, or a judge is far different than claiming some absolutely crazy crap, like, "it was authorized by the AUMF" or it's an inherent power in the constitution, or it's available for any president with W as their middle initial.

As an aside, if an AUMF allows that kind of crap, then the next one ought to come just about the same time the sun turns into a red dwarf.

-Greg

Re:Worrisome

[einhverfr]

This is true. The AUMF argument is exrtraordinarily dangerous and would effectively turn our nation into a military dictatorship.

This being said, many of the most contraversial policies-- the criminalization of pure speech, the extraordinary rendition, and other serious erosions of human and civil rights actually began under Clinton. So unfortunately we cannot merely blame this on Bush as he is largely fulfilling Clinton's policies more than diverging from them.

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

[ScrewMaster]

And as for their inclination to make use of power....I'm cynical enough to think that if it's there, it will be used.

With or without their knowledge. Bush happens to be one of those presidents who is more openly scornful of legal restrictions upon his behavior. In reality, we're even more at risk from unelected officials that have even fewer scruples, who are more dangerous simply because they are so hard to remove.

Re:Worrisome

[kimvette]

A lot of conservatives feel let down by Bush, for any number of reasons - growth of government, spending increases, liberalization of handling of illegal aliens, Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the whole Gitmo thing, not practicing actual forensic science and using profiling in airport security checks out of fear of 'offending' political correctness people, limiting of peaceful protests to alloted "free speech" zones, pledging tax dollars to "economic development" abroad (effectively boosting up our own competitors), not promoting energy independence, and many other reasons.

The Republican party no longer stands for what it once did, but appears (at least at face value) be a form of liberalism of a different sort, bordering on fascism, either that or leading toward the mythical "new world order" which I used to read up on for kicks, but now after watching the Bush administration in action, now think that there may be at least some element of truth to those conspiracy theories which don't seem so crazy any more.

Thankfully some Republicans have awoken and have realized that the GOP is not what it once was.

In the next election whom do we vote for though? A big-government Democrat, or a big-government Republican, both of which seem to want to institute an Orwellian society?

Re:Worrisome

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

I think he got that, but there are actually people who want Al Gore or Hillary Clinton to be President. I'd love if Al Gore became President, because I know he actually has some good ideas.

Consider part of the foreword from Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance:

"For those who want to attack my view, let me save you the trouble of reading the entire book. On pages 325 and 326, I wrote:'It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.' It is possible; it needs to be done; it will create more jobs, not destroy jobs. I'm proud that I wrote those words in 1992, and I reaffirm them today."

On the other hand, who really voted for Kerry?

Re:Worrisome

[i kan reed]

in fact, forget whose fault it is anyways, just elect someone who will promise to stop it. As far as I know, there's no one like that up and running. We need someone.

Re:Worrisome

[Paladin144]

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?

You are very much correct. In the US, we refer to it as the Military-Industrial Complex. Some things don't change every 4 years, and the MIC is one of them. The Military-Industrial Complex is a term coined by Eisenhower to describe the entangled relationship of Congress, the Military and Big Business (industry - especially defense contractors).

I've noticed how somethings in our government really don't change. Take Cuba for example. It's been over 45 years and our policy towards Cuba hasn't changed on iota, even after all the different administrations we've been through. In fact, the military very much wanted to attack Cuba back in the 60's. After JFK was able to defuse that situation they decided to escalate Vietnam instead. You see, we need to have wars every few years in order to keep our poor defense contractors fed. We try to minimize (American) casualties, but it's very important that we bomb the hell out of some poor backwards-ass country every few years so we can test out all our cool new weapons, while using up the old ones. We can't buy too many new bombs until we use up the old ones, and how will we field-test each new generation of soldiers unless there's a real conflict to fight in? War is just a business like any other. In fact, you could say it's the engine of our whole economy. Now that you know the War in Iraq is all about buying yachts for the executives and lobbyists of Boeing, Lockheed, and other megacorps, don't you feel so much better about it? War is the American way.

Re:Worrisome

[einhverfr]

Well put.

Part of the problem though is that we are what we are now, and a true conservative would make slow and incrimental changes away from it rather than the radical departures that we see from the Bush Administration (at least in their justifications rather than their actions).

Finally I would suggest that the problem is not with the political parties as a whole but with the structure of our government. In particular, the role of the President is as non-conservative a role as you can find-- the President is a singular individual who usually wants to take less than eight years to leave his mark on history. This sort of unbridaled vision is at odds with any conservative methodology. Our "liberal" courts are actually far more conservative than our elected branches of governemnt. They respect precident, avoid sudden and large shifts in the law, and so forth.

It is time to get back to the basics. Promote stability of government and predictability of policy. Avoid electing those who seek to change course quickly or drastically. And then start to incrimentally fix the problems that we (the electorate) have created.

Re:Worrisome

[Paladin144]

i have to agree that america needs war, but look at how the economy changes for the better everytime there is a war. truly their is more then likly a better solution but at the same time look what war weeds out of the country. if there was a draft wouldnt the country be completly different, no more murders on the loose all of them weilding guns in a foreign country doning what they do best. not to mention that fact that this country was born out of war. so is it even a surpise, i for one believe that war for america is a good thing

You speak of the economy as if that was the only thing we need to consider. The equation is far more complex than you make it out to be. You say it's all about the economy. I say, what about morality? What about the basic human kindness of not rampantly killing each other? Besides, war is only fun if you're winning. But you always lose eventually.

Your fantasic delusions of a crime-free society in an endless series of wars reminds me greatly of 1984. Perhaps you should read that book.

Re:Worrisome

[killjoe]

You dilemma is kind of moot. Most people don't vote on those issues. In the next election the most important issues will be moral issues where a very hard line is drawn between republicans and democrats and the war with iran (yes I said iran).

By bombing Iran Bush and flagging the abortion and gay marriage issues the republicans will be assured of a win in the next election.

Nobody cares about the size of the govt. The republican party has a sure fire button to push with their electorate who are much more alarmed with homosexual "rights" then the size of the govt.

Re:Worrisome

[Anonymous Coward]

You should have been screaming your head off continuously for at least the last 40 years. Back when international "cables", more commonly known as telegrams, were the primary copiable international traffic, the carriers delivered mag tape logs of all traffic to the NSA. How do I know? I made the copies at one of the carriers.

Re:Worrisome

[vought]

liberalization of handling of illegal aliens

Did you mean Get hispanics to Vote Republican?

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?

Re:Worrisome

[danFL-NERaves]

The date you mention is when the product was made.

It wasn't turned against the US citizenry until much later, post 9-11. The information on when that occurred is in the previous articles.

Re:Worrisome

[kimvette]

Nobody cares about the size of the govt.

I do. Government should only build roads, protect borders, and keep order by punishing evildoers. And by evildoers, By "evildoers" don't mean those who disagree with whoever the president is, or who is a communist, or who is a liberal or who is a conservative. By evildoers I mean burglars, murderers, crooks, etc.

. The republican party has a sure fire button to push with their electorate who are much more alarmed with homosexual "rights" then the size of the govt.

Marriage? Government should NOT have ANY say in marriage. If two men want to marry, and it's immoral, if there is a God, let "God" worry about punishing them for immorality. It's not up to us to force morality on everyone else. My view used to be different on this matter, but I've thought about it a great deal; and realize that Marriage is a religious concept. Government has no business in dictating religion, be it the judicial branch, the legislative branch, or the executive branch.

Want a moral society? Create one by being a good example lighting the way. Don't FORCE it on people. I will no longer vote for morality, but for small restrained government with limited spending and limited reach into private lives. Let they who dc "evil" (in "God's" eyes) do evil, and let they who do good, do good. If you want "morality" set an example by being a good example. Right now many "Christians" are good examples of bad examples, and no wonder many people hate Christians. Me? I've become cynical thanks to Bush's policies encroaching on our "inalienable" Constitutional rights.

I resent my tax dollars being extorted for me to subsidize people who don't want to work.

Now, there are people who can't work - but I can't give to them because Uncle Sam (and by uncle sam I mean ALl taxes combined, between Federal, State, excise, and sales taxes) already takes abnout half my pay by the time all taxes/fees/etc. are added up.

Social security should be eliminated. Why should we be forced to put more money into a retirement system than we will ever get back? Replace it with more proective tax benefits on 401(K) and other individual, private retirement plans. Or, let people squander their money if they choose; it's their choice.

If taxes are more resonable

Also our tax system is set up to benefit those who use the most resources. Why should I, a single woman with no kids, have to subsidize large families who get a tax break for every child they can make? They should pay MORE in taxes because they use FAR more resources. They should pay more property taxes.

and the war with iran (yes I said iran).

That won't happen under the Bush administration, or is at least very unlikely - even he has to realize that the military is stretched so thin that we could not win a war in Iran, and furthermore, invading Iran will only provoke the entire Arab world into attacking Israel, which will in turn initiate a world war. He can't possibly be so blind as to think that we could possibly win. Also, with most of our manufacturing base gone, if WWIII were to break out, we would see imports cease due to sanctions and ourselves in a war that cannot possibly be won. He has already alienated much of NATO so our allies cannot be counted on to come to our aid.

Re:Worrisome

[Planesdragon]

IMNSHO, a lot of W-haters are exersizing selective amnesia regarding this case.

Except that NO ONE has alleged that Clinton went around doing these things without regard to either the FISA court, or that he lied about how often he would be doing this sneaky thing.

And if you think it all started with Clinton, then I've got to tell you about this bridge near his office that he wants me to sell you. It's a historic, early 19th century suspension bridge, no less. ;)

Re:Worrisome

[SageMusings]

Having spent 20-years in the Marine Corps, let me be the first to say "You are right on target".

I just left a year and a half ago and saw combat in operation Iraqi Freedom. I can say without hesitation, the leadership has their "dicks in their hands" contemplating having a venue in which to "Train" for real. Will people die? Sure, that's never been a problem for the military. They would gladly exchange a few sons for the realism you just can't get in excercises and simulations. The military NEEDS combat veterans. Period. This is an excellent way to grow a new crop. Why the hell did we do Grenada and Panama? Mostly for the opportunity to shake the cobwebs off our war machine.

It is damned refreshing to know some people can actually see what's going on. This not to say I condone these events. I'm just attempting to validate your point of view.

Kudos!

Re:Worrisome

[killjoe]

There will be war in Iran. It will be an air war like the once conducted by clinton. The planes will be based in Iraq and will be launched daily to drop massive bombs all over iran. All this will make for very nice TV broadcasts where there will be lots of explosions just like the movies, we will all eat it up and pat each other on the back about how we are number one.

There will not be any attempt at occupation, even bush knows by now that's a bad idea. There will be lot of killing and destruction though, we like that.

Re:Worrisome

[dfgchgfxrjtdhgh.jjhv]

governments have been trying to pull this crap for years. it didnt start with bush, or clinton & its not just in the usa, its been going on a long time, across a lot of countries, this is just a gradual progression now that the technology allows it.

if they get their way, we'll be under 24/7 total surveilance & even our thoughts will be monitored & automatically scanned for possible 'terrorist' ideas.

theres nobody you can vote in that will stop it.

Re:Worrisome

[arminw]

.....I'm cynical enough to think that if it's there, it will be used.....

What does cynicism have to do with that? It's just human nature that guarantees that it will be used. it doesn't really matter who is in power. No government ever GIVES human rights, they only take them away, just like they do with your money.

All this monitoring of course would be a lot harder if every byte of data any computer ever sent out on the internet would automatically be encrypted. I understand that there are still some forms of encryption that are be resistant to even the kind of processing power mentioned in the article. There is some money to be made by the first person to come up with a simple, powerful, universal encryption program that works for all data and all computers or computer like devices.

Re:Worrisome

[zenhkim]

> they still need to advertise the new weapons, these american tv-wars are great for that.

Carl Sagan made a wry observation about exactly that, back during Iraq War I when the TV news programs were loaded with glowing reports about the Patriot interceptor missiles, "smart" bombs, etc. "[It] was a massive arms bazaar arranged by the United States to showcase some of the products that you, too, might acquire -- and only for all the critical resources of your society that might otherwise be spent on bettering your people. Line up over here!" (excerpt from the Playboy interview).

Re:Worrisome

[fyngyrz]

Government should only build roads, protect borders, and keep order by punishing evildoers.

Suggestion for you. Modify to:

Government should only...

1. Improve, manage and maintain physical and educational infrastructure
   (FWIW, my take on physical infrastructure is communications, roads, airlanes, waterways, distribution mechanisms for heat and power.)
2. Protect the citizens, infrastructure and land from physical aggression, be it external or internal, large or small.
   (Note that I define theft as physical aggression.)

Anything else is government stepping out of bounds. When you call for the goverment to protect you from "evildoers", you create a class of government rulemakers that can define what YOU do as evil, regardless of the actual or relative nature of your actions.

You could be smoking pot to reduce your glaucoma, for instance, and end up in prison. You could build a home on some lovely location, and then the government could come along, decide your tax base isn't sufficient to their needs, and take your home and land. You could be attempting to purchase a drug such as alchohol on a Sunday and find yourself on the wrong end of someone's encysted religious agenda. You could be playing a Led Zeppelin song to a cabbie and find yourself the subject of a cavity search sans your preferred partner, lubricant, and molded accessories. You could be broadcasting your opinion to some subset of the masses and say something some moron somewhere decided was "evil", and find yourself a half a million dollars poorer.

You wouldn't want to live anywhere these kinds of thing could happen, would you?

Oh, wait.

Re:Worrisome

[tibman]

Who do you want fighting for your country? A blood thirsty pitbull or a lapdog?

A war they cannot lose a foe that cannot bring the wind out of their sails. Maybe we should send less troops to even it up next time?

They have to see their friends die as well as their enemies and the innocent. Those are only words to you, please don't throw them about carelessly.

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.

If someone calls me a hero, it's a slap in the face. I do what i do so my brothers and sisters don't have to. I wouldn't try to block anyone's attempt to volunteer, but i don't want to see the innocent lose what makes them precious. As far as Uncle Sam taking some scrawny pale kid and sending him into battle with rifle in hand. Who do you think fights these things? Not old men, i can assure you. Kids. Just out of high school with two months of training under their belts and they're ready to take on the world. They're just kids. Even when they get back and take that blood stained uniform off, they're still kids. Still laugh and play and can't legally drink.

now it is battle-hardened, blood and killing no longer scares it or slows it down it just wants more. We're monsters. You've ensured that we are absolute monsters. We don't fit in with "normal" people anymore. That's why so many soldier's hang themselves, become Bums, or re-enlist and fight until they're bodies are ragged and worn out. It is a rare case indead to meet a monster that laid down his rifle and doesn't miss it.

You can hate us, it's quite alright. We're already more tortured then you can ever imagine.

China - you are WAY behind

[LiquidCoooled]

All your base really do belong to them.

wow, and I mean just fucking WOW at the processing power alone.
This thing makes echelon look like a toy.

Since I live in the UK, this kind of technology is likely to be used here as well (since we have mandated supreme data retention laws)

This is truly scary

What really bothers me

[Newer Guy]

What really bothers me about all this is the President's "F**k the laws, I have a job to do" attitude. How is this any different then the attitudes of the terrorists?

We've all heard the saying: "Two wrongs don't make a right". Hasn't the Bush adminstration?

The United States is a nation of LAWS...So many of you constantly remind us of that fact whenever p2p is mentioned here...yet many of these same people believe that our President has the right to IGNORE laws he doesn't want to follow.

Why

Learning to love big brother;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are people so consistently surprised by this kind of news. I've come to simply expect that corporations are in full swing of subjugating the general public.

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: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

Let's translate in understandable metrics shall we

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The latest generation is called NarusInsight, capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second.

That's 1192MB/s, not exactly what I'd call enough to monitor the entire innurnet in real time, which means somewhere along the way, AT+T must be doing some filtering, which is even sadder.

On the other hand, that's roughly 2 CD-sized full-length movies a second, so that's about 2 hours worth of pr0n per second, which means that it takes a stadium packed with 7200 naked NSA agents and a truck full of Kleenex tissues to check out all the videos in real-time...

Where's the source?

[Chris Snook]

I couldn't find this software on sourceforge or freshmeat. It really troubles me that the US government is using proprietary software to violate our constitutional rights.

Re:Where's the source?

[Linker3000]

They will give you the source on request - but then they have to kill you.

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:Two words.

[MourningBlade]

Democracies fall because the public can be bribed.

Parliamentary governments fall because they either devolve into democracies, or they appoint a dictator because they can't get anything done.

Our constitutional republic is structured so that state governments have broader areas of control than the national government[1], but those walls have been broken down. Once it was discovered that, even though it's technically easier to influence state policy, pandering and political acts are more effective and visible at the national level the fight against constitutional restrictions began in true.

If we fall, it will be either because we have created a dictatorship or a democracy at the national level.

I believe the cure isn't better policies at the national level, it's the reaffirmation of the power of the states.

Unfortunately, a quick look at how many public-interest causes primarily lobby at the national level versus the state level is rather disenheartening.[2]

Though all may not be lost - as ideologues and ninnies have controlled the federal government, it has set up an antagonism with state and city governments. The recent movement (largely symbolic) by states and cities to forbid police cooperation with the USAPATRIOT act and - even more promising - with some aspects of the drug war[3], and issuing proclamations condemning national acts...well, it's heartening.

[1] - it's worth noting that corruption at the state and city level is many times worse than the wet dreams of the federal congress.

[2] - I don't have any direct numbers here - going off memory and a survey of some causes that I know. If anyone has better numbers....

[3] - Several states (California among them, I believe) have forbidden their officers from providing support to the DEA in drug raids. Some have done this for cannabis, as they have medical marijuana laws. Others have done it for financial reasons.

Conversation I overheard in a bar

[cortana]

Area 51. You heard of it, right? I worked out there. Most people think they've got aliens from another planet, but I didn't see any flying saucers.

Something's going on underground. I'm a pilot, which means I didn't get access to the main complex, but a lot of rock comes out of there; it's some kind of mine. But what I don't understand is why they're always laying more fiber-optic cables.

You know what I think? I think that's where the UN moved Echelon IV, back when they promised they were going to stop spying on people. They want to centralize everything -- every computer on the planet.

Also, here's an exerpt from a book I stumbled upon:

When one maniac can wipe out a city of twenty million with a microbe developed in his basement, a new approach to law enforcement becomes necessary. Every citizen in the world must be placed under surveillance. That means sky-cams at every intersection, computer-mediated analysis of every phone call, e-mail, and snail-mail, and a purely electronic economy in which every transaction is recorded and data-mined for suspicious activity.

We are close to achieving this goal. Some would say that human liberty has been compromised, but the reality is just the opposite. 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. One day every man and woman will quietly earn credits, purchase items for quiet homes on quiet streets, have cook-outs with neighbors and strangers alike, and sleep with doors and windows wide open. If that isn't the tranquil dream of every free civilization throughout history, what is?

(thanks W. Spector et. al.)

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:Conversation I overheard in a bar

[the_humeister]

Hey, that's dialogue from Deus Ex!

Re:Conversation I overheard in a bar

[robogun]

We are close to achieving this goal. Some would say that human liberty has been compromised, but the reality is just the opposite. 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. One day every man and woman will quietly earn credits, purchase items for quiet homes on quiet streets, have cook-outs with neighbors and strangers alike, and sleep with doors and windows wide open. If that isn't the tranquil dream of every free civilization throughout history, what is?

The problem is, all that security has to be controlled from somewhere, and that means power in the hands of men -- fallible, selfish men -- and all thru the 20th century, it was proven repeatedly that time this kind of control over citizens is at hand, millions die.

Your idea is straight from Orwell, do you really think that is going to get past Slashdot readers?

Impressive, but AT&T can bite me

[realmolo]

Seriously. The ISP I work for buys it's bandwidth from AT&T, but this week I'm talking to the boss about dumping them. The whole "we're going to charge Google to send data to our customers" thing was bad enough, and now we find out they're collaborating with the fucking NSA? Monitorying OUR traffic without telling us?

Screw AT&T. They aren't going to get my companies money, and I expect that I'm not the only one who is going to ditch them.

They should be sued into oblivion.

Re:Impressive, but AT&T can bite me

[Zen]

Good luck with that. Not to be a party pooper as this is /. and everybody here loves a good conspiracy theory and hates 'the man', but there are only a few huge global data telecom carriers in the world. AT&T happens to be among the big ones. So regardless of who gets your money, some of that money will get to AT&T regardless through backend peer agreements, leasing of lines and/or space from AT&T CO's, etc. It is naive to think that you can take all of your companies money away from AT&T. As you stated, you use a downstream provider of theirs, so AT&T wasn't getting all the money to begin with, and your provider probably (hopefully) has agreements with other upstream providers in addition to AT&T. All ISP's do this. It is incredibly stupid from an ISP's standpoint to only have a single upstream provider, so again, good luck with finding a provider in the US that does not peer with AT&T either directly or as a secondary.

Re:Impressive, but AT&T can bite me

[TooMuchToDo]

Look into Hurricane Electric. We buy bandwidth from them in the GBps range, they don't push data to pick-your-acronym-gov.-agency, and the bandwidth is priced right (plus, latency is rockstar).

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with HE. I am simply a satisfied customer.

what about encryption and VPNs

[Anonymous Coward]

I would assume that any business would set up a encrypted VPN tunnel as soon as their network was to enter the telco. So assumming that this was the case, how would this device (sitting inside the telco cloud) Monitor any of this traffic. Furthermore, I dont see how the device would be able to construct "a total network view" from within the telco even without encryption. (The firewall would block ping sweeps or other reconnasance based attacks) Joe consumer on the other hand, would not have a encrypted connection, so I think its safe to say that the sole purpose of this technology is to spy on citizens. Tor routing would provide the citizen/terrorist with encryption that would circumvent the monitoring device. So in the end, it sounds like this device is a hugely expensive monitoring device that would only catch the dumbest of dumb.

Employment on the NSA

[cervo]

Yes spying and everything is wrong. But with the NSA having more power than ever and needing to acquire/sift through more and more information all the time, wouldn't it be a very cool place to work.

http://www.nsa.gov/careers/ has links to all the areas. The only thing I found extraordinarily interesting is that computer programming type skills (ie Software Engineering) is more under the Computer Engineering/Electrical engineering career track than the computer science one.

The only question is that if you should decide to leave the NSA or are fired, does termination extend to more than your employment? Although seriously it does seem like a very geek friendly place to work.

Tor

[ChadL]

Tor (http://tor.eff.org/) is a good way to prevent the government (or anyone else) from watching what sites you go to.
It can be a little slow at times, but you do not need to use it all the time (unless you are very paranoid).

next frontier

[argoff]

Has anyone else been looking for the next frontier of freedom. What I mean is that for the longest time, the USA was the last frontier in freedom. If people in the world wanted to be free, they would find their way to the United States. While the USA is still more free than most places, the deterioration over the last 80 years has been notable.

Since most of the land in the world is claimed by less than free governments, I'm wondering if the next frontier in freedom needs to be sea based. I suppose for the next few decades people can probably use technologies to secure their freedoms, crypto, open source, etc..., but that won't get arround the physical controll problem. Eventually people will need to physically secure their freedoms.

Maybe the solution is for a bunch of liberty minded people to collaberate together to take controll of a small despot country, but that still would make it very vulnerable to larger military powers. Moving to more free states, juridistictions, and countries would probably help, but doen't seem like a permanent solution. Maybe it would be possible to convince all the freedom hating overloards to go somewhere else, but that seems unlikely too.

Re:next frontier

[lamp540]

we're pretty much fucked.

Re:next frontier

[xenophrak]

I think you mean something like this?

The problem with any sovereign nation, especially one at sea is the dependence on external resources. Just ask Japan how it goes.

I do think this is a cool idea, there is plenty of water given desalinization, and if you have a small nuclear reactor on board, you can generate heat and electricity for 15 years per refit. But food? Granted you can grow your own hydroponics, but for the number of people they are talking about, the infrastructure would be quite large.

And then there is the issue of defense. Would you devise your own weapons, or buy from the USA or the Chinese? Choose your alliances well, because they might just end up costing you your country.

No, thanks, starting a new country on this planet is quite impossible. Even at it's face, Iraq's reconstruction is fraught with problems. I say lets just kick the bums out who are in control and have some France-style awakening.

Better Privacy Laws

[hindumagic]

More people are starting to use the internet for their personal correspondence and business.

There are strict laws governing snail mail to protect against this very abuse we're seeing, among others. Imagine if companies, and the government, were able to know every bit of content in your snail mail? Would you be comfortable with that? What if every bit of your communication is available to the highest bidder? (a possible outcome of all this if something isn't done now)

Change the laws! Why is this information not as important as the stuff that goes on paper? Apply the same mindset that we have with the mail system towards internet traffic. I'd be fine if they recorded traffic's origin and destination, but they shouldn't lawfully have access to the *content* of my correspondence.

Technology is only going to make this oversight easier and easier. We have to educate people and change attitudes starting now.

Re:Let's translate in understandable metrics shall

[ScrewMaster]

Ten gigs a second is peanuts, but obviously there's more than one of these things ... and presumably the next generation will be even faster.

which means that it takes a stadium packed with 7200 naked NSA agents and a truck full of Kleenex tissues to check out all the videos in real-time...

Thanks for the image.

Watergate

[HermanAB]

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

Another interesting read.

[fred911]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70621-0.htm l (Wired). An interview of a guy that works (ed?) for ATT that the EFF has subpoenaed as a witness. Talks about the physical connection made and how/when they did it.

Before there was terror, there was greed

[unitron]

Notice the part of the article that cites another article from 1999?

Back then they were talking about how wonderful it was to spy on everyone so some internet traffic could be charged a higher rate to be passed along.

Nearer the top of the page it mentions that previous to September 11, 2001 they wanted to analyze everything to prevent "revenue leakage", which I take to be the industry term of art meaning "a failure to exploit loopholes and monopolies to screw everyone out of every last penny".

Now they can be greedy and "patriotic".

Re:Spelling Nazi, sorry

[Millenniumman]

Shouldn't the editors be able to fix this typo? The article is only a paragraph and might take an editor 5 seconds.

1984 is not a howto!

[NoSuchGuy]

Tell your politicans that 1984 is NOT a howto!

What I'd be interested in...

[SigILL]

What I'd be interested in is if this device does real-time packet reassembly and flow recovery. If not, what's to keep a terrorist from putting "BO" in one packet and "MB" in a following one? Or doing nasty stuff with fragmented IP packets?

Running a packet-oriented grep on a large datastream is not that hard (ie. easily solvable if you throw enough processing power at it). If the government's sniffers can reassemble packets and recover flows real-time, *then* worry.

EFF and Narus Met Back in 2001 Just After 9/11

[geekp0wer]

There was not much on the mainstream news sites other than the initial news story last week so I googled ["electronic frontier foundation" narus]. The first link was to a no longer available article at siliconvalley.com. The good news is that the google cache was still there.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:nc4cgqbKTjoJ:w ww.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/sp ecial_packages/security/2579675.htm+electronic+fro ntier+foundation%22+narus&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 "

The article appears to be a lead in for a round table discussion where both the EFF and Narus participated but I can not find the details of the conversation. Anyone else able to get their hand on it? Please post it to slashdot.

Re:To look at it another way...

[Fantastic Lad]

When a country is unassailable from the outside, then its enemies can only attack from the inside.

When a country is run by psychopathic liars who steal elections through rigged voting machines and who abuse the laws to ensure their continued control over the public, their enemies ARE the people.

-FL

OSI v. TCP/IP

[einhverfr]

OSI and TCP/IP are entirely different protocol suites. TO my knowledge, no complete OSI stack has ever been implimented. Yet there are plenty of OSI protocols, like T.120 and H.323....

TCP/IP operates on a 4-layer model, while the OSI protocols operate on a 7-layer model. As the OSI model started loosing brainshare, people tried to market it as a teaching tool (or vice versa).

OSI protocols seem really weird and complicated when implimented on TCP/IP. You have all sorts of things that have to be emulated, such as separate channels, which means you often have a very large number of sockets used and many of these are dynamically allocated. H.323 is a very good example of this.

Narus STA 6400 - Missing web page

[EMIce]

I read in some articles that according to papers filed with the court, they are using a piece of equipment called the Narus STA 6400. I googled for this model and the first result is the following -

NARUS Delivers Industry's Most Scalable Internet Business ...
Fully configured, the Model 6400 captures application-layer usage details via NARUS Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) on up to six full-duplex 100 BaseT ...
www.findwealth.com/narus-delivers-industrys-most-s calable-160875pr.html - 27k - Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages

This page has dissapeared from the server and it can't be found in google cache. Does anyone know much about this model? What sort of processing power is behind it and what are it's capabilities? It looks to have the ability to sniff through 600 mbps each up and downstream from the snippet above, but little else is known.

Also, only this first google result seems to have relevant info on this device. If anyone here has more info, please post. A lot of us are curious, especially considering that the administration has been saying they only sniffed suspicious communications.

Re:If you are not plotting anything illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you don't value your most fundamental right: freedom. The U.S. is founded on a very simple idea: You have the right to be left alone.

And for some follow-up reading: U.S. Constitution, Amend. 4 ;)

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.

Our main weapon is fear and surprise...

[ghc71]

Embracing the degradation of standards and tolerating ignorance and stupidity is one of the best indicators of a truly fucked up, retrograde mentality.

The embrace and the tolerance are two indicators, not one.

You would improve the legibility of the sentence by delimiting the participle clauses with commas, particularly with regard to the repetition of the word "and".
Embracing the degradation of standards, and tolerating ignorance and stupidity, are two of the best... etc.

1898 Redux.

[Kadin2048]

Actually I think the reason why we go to war every decade or so has a lot more to do with the American public's desire for it than any demand by the defense contractors. True, they get some benefit from it, but the last few wars that the U.S. has entered into have been done with widespread public support.

I would argue that at the core of the American body politic's psyche there is a core of subconscious uneasiness and malaise, which is fed by the deep-rooted fear that as a nation we are becoming powerless, or at least less powerful. Therefore, every few years it becomes necessary to demonstrate -- less to the rest of the world than to ourselves -- that we are still the Alpha Country. And we do this, in the tradition of any insecure adolescent, by finding someone who is generally disliked and kicking the living shit out of them. It is preferable if the people getting the shit kicked out of them are non-white and non-Christian, since a very large percentage of America, although they may read the NY Times and listen to NPR on the drive in to work, value such lives much less than they do blonde-haired and blue-eyed European derivatives. (Because as diverse as we like to think we are as a country, the US is somewhere between 75-80% white, depending on whose statistics you believe, and people dislike seeing people who look like themselves getting killed on TV.)

In other posts I have said that I think that the closest historical parallel to the current war is the Spanish-American war of 1898. I will not rehash my entire argument here, but suffice it to say that the root causes of both conflicts lie outside the traditional domain of geopolitics: both were heavily dependent on public opinion, which was brilliantly used by a great number of independent actors working for their own gain. But at the heart of it all you have the American public, who as a group are not nearly as adverse to the idea of employing violence for its own sake than many individuals would claim they themselves believe.

Ori Cohen, "33-year-old Israeli Immigrant"

[Master of Transhuman]

Why am I not surprised? Plus his company is invested in by Walden Israel, a VC division of Walden International. Walden Israel is headed by a guy who spent five years with a company developing optics for the ISRAELI MILITARY.

Why am I not surprised?

First, an Israeli company in charge of Federal wiretapping gets caught selling wiretapping info to drug dealers in LA and the FBI gets upset over their access to Federal wiretaps.

Now this - an NSA guy and an Israeli running the company sucking data into the NSA - and the Mossad?

As I've said before, Israel has figured out that the best way to spy on people is to be the country making all the telecommo hardware and software all the other countries use to spy on people. Brilliant strategy - and it's working.

Be careful

[wetfeetl33t]

[wetfeetl33t@localhost ~]$ traceroute www.slashdot.org | grep att.net
traceroute to www.slashdot.org (66.35.250.151), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets

[wetfeetl33t@localhost ~]$

looks like I'm OK!

Remember the Maine

[inKubus]

There's too much to talk about, but I think we should start calling it the Media-Military-Industrial Complex. The media is on the bandwagon now.

I wanted to comment on the AT&T Thing. Narus is company that was started in America by some ex-Israeli Defense Forces people (unit 8200 alumni) who wanted to bring their Semantic monitoring software to America to sell to big telecom. This was always security software and Israel has always been very very far ahead in that realm (because of the "realities" there. There are a lot of these companies that were formed by ex-Defense people, specificially unit 8200. Checkpoint systems is another fine example.

From this article (direct link:

Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years, unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street. This correlation between serving in the intelligence unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental:
Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by unit veterans.

Anyway, the original goal was to make a bundle of money selling this stuff. Why? Well, it's useful for a number of reasons. Because the internet has been "redesigned" around business and commerce (and the needs of the consumer), the nature of the network has changed. From the original decentralized network (which did use leased phone lines from Ma Bell, so it's not really decentralized from THEM), now there are huge "tier 1" trunks that carry the majority of the transcontenental data. The idea in the late ninties of "IP Network Convergence" or Voice Data Video etc. all coming out of one pipe was the big hot one. Of course, how do you make money when people are only paying for their ISP connection. Enter "usage-based billing".

The idea behind the Narus system was to create a system to track IP traffic and transactions semantically (because you still didn't know where the traffic might be coming from) and create a sort of database of records like they talked about in TFA. Like the old fashioned telcom "call records", these would record a source and target and the data transmitted. The data would only be stored if "relevant", ie: part of a usage-based service or today, "interesting" ie having actionable words or phrases, etc. Of course, then the thing in New York happened and all of a sudden there was a LOT of funding available for people who had the stuff in place or ready to go and a lot of the old red tape was struck down. Remember "karnivore?" Cohen and his more spooky cohorts made a few calls to 8200 friends (IDF and M*s*ad were working "closely" with the administration) and due to the no-bid process (not unlike that of the Iraq contractors and the Katrina and new york ground zero cleanup operations) they got the job in a sec.

Of course, AT&T is going along because they need support for the big merger with SBC (putting most of the baby bells back together. AT&T was once the largest company on earth and they are set to do it again. Guess what, voice calls are still big business and how do you think your cell phone calls go from tower to tower. You guessed it, land lines..............AT&T has always been an evil company.

Anyway, Narus is the key to everything now. The company was the one pushing for convergence from the beginning and now it's possible to monitor all traffic because it's all on IP. How convenient. Even an anonymizing proxy such as ToR cannot provide the protection you need if one of your packets happens to stray across one or more Narus points. It's a simple matter to monitor the packets and put together not only

Bingo

[KwKSilver]

It is dangerous for any government to be able to monitor its citizens this thoroughly, no matter what the original intent might be.

You hit the nail on the head, there. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Always has been ...always will be.

The answer?

[zenhkim]

> i have to agree that america needs war, but look at how the economy changes for the better everytime there is a war.

Reminds me of a debate I got into with one of those neo-con pro-biz warhawks just a few years ago about the (yet to occur) effects of the US war on Iraq. Mr. Warhawk was practically beaming about how occupying and rebuilding Iraq would pay for itself, how the US would reap enormous wealth from the influx of Iraqi oil, and that military spending would actually *strengthen* the American economy -- like the massive military expenditures during the Reagan Years! (Can you say "trickle-down theory"?)

I let him finish gushing about Ronnie Raygun, paused, then said, "Okay, sooooo.... war is the answer."

That kind of took the wind out of his sails. What I didn't say (but in retrospect really wish I had) was, "Therefore, the most important reason to wage a war in which hundreds to thousands of our American troops will be sent to a foreign land to fight and die ...ISN'T to defend our country, ISN'T to protect our liberty, and ISN'T to promote democracy ...it's to MAKE SOME MONEY?!?"

Alright, so let's accept the capitalist-pig view that war is all about feeding the money machine. How close (or how far) are we to breaking even on money spent on Iraq? How much is the federal deficit now? How much have gasoline prices changed, *and in what direction*? How much has consumer confidence and employee satisfaction improved (or worsened)?

Also, what of non-economic matters? How much safer (or more frightened) do we Americans feel about another attempted terrorist attack on US soil? How (un)successful have we been in establishing peace and starting a new democracy in Iraq? How much (or how little) respect do we have from the other nations of the world?

What of the veterans who return home (if they ever do -- for many US troops, tours of duty keep getting extended indefinitely)? If you develop PTSD and have screaming nightmares whenever you try to sleep, how much money is that worth? Or if you jump whenever a car backfires or a kid sets off a firecracker within earshot? Or if your mind keeps replaying the memory of a fellow soldier -- maybe a close buddy -- being shot in the head or blown to bloody bits? What amount of value, what price tag, can you possibly assign to that?

Btw, my closest friend is a retired Army master drill sergeant who served in Korea *and* Vietnam. I've seen him wake up in cold sweats during the middle of the night, and he keeps a bowie knife next to his pillow "just in case." Oh, and he despises Dubya. :-D

Re:Spelling Nazi, sorry

[fyngyrz]

Editors? You must be new here.

Under the Hood of AT&T's Monitoring System

[dougbaker]

When reading the article linked to please double check the writers math. While the numbers given for the capture rate are large the example seems to state that 10,000 million DSL links at a speed of 256K would be captured @ layer 4 on the 10Gbps links. My math suggests that there are aprox. 3900 DSL links @ 256Kbps each in 1Gbps,a nd therefore approx 39K @ 10Gbps. What is really missing here for me is details about the 'flow', ala Cisco NetFlow, rate per second which would effect the layer 4 processing rate. As we 'converse', i.e. traverse the tier1 transits, we send many frames in a single flow which could occur over several seconds. In a NetFlow like consideration all of such frames would comprise a single flow accounting and thus the 'data rate' to the probe, narus or otherwise, would be considerably smaller. Those tier1 transits probably do have 1000's, even 10's of 1000's of concurrent flows per second. that number is still not overwhelming as I myself have coded and operated NetFlow processing systems that process normalized records into an RDBMS at the rate of 1G records per day which is a per-second rate of under 12000 flows per second on 6x 450mhz SUN system. And I don't find Sparc to be the most powerful or processing environments! Surely the full 10Gbps per second full capture and storage of such feeds IS impressive and any such solution would have to have massive storage capacity on many storage channels opperating concurrently in order to just capture the data for later analysis. But those solutions can be purchased, just think EMC and a bunch of fiber channels. You could even experiment with this on your own DSL, or cable, by loading up ethereal and storing everything to your ata just to see that it is feasible. From there you could bypass all the cannd solution by going straight to libpcap and your homegrown code, Perl being my preference, and readily include your own indexing/tagging scheme to the data being grabbed by libpcap. So, certainly there is great issue here, however i is not one about the amount of hardware needed. I suggest a 'wire speed' collector writing to a large high speed storage with backend systems having read access to that storage for subsequent processing is rather straight forward for the 'average' homebrew.

What are U worried About?

[hackus]

Its the same thing over again through out history.

100 Revolution
200 Citizens get peacetime
300 Citizens get stupid and complacent
400 Givernment Goons get the upper hand
500 People die, people get upset
600 Government gets out of control
700 goto 100

-Hackus

Where's the Mainstream Media Coverage?

[Millard Fillmore]

I did a little poking around, and Bloomberg is the only mainstream news service/news website with any stories about the EFF lawsuit or the Mark Klein statement. How come the general media hasn't picked up this story? Isn't it newsworthy that Ma Bell is being sued for colluding with an illegal government domestic spying dragnet?

Re:Glad their monitoring terrorists

[realityfighter]

Huh? I don't know every detail of Clinton's administration, but I believe there was a good bit of Repub effort thrown into making people believe that he was some sort of underworld figure. They even started a rumor that he had murdered a former employee. So when I hear things like your IRS claim, my bullshit alarm goes off. Got any quotes to back that up?

Of course the people that criticize Bush now will be the first to criticise him if there's another attack. Why do you think they'd do anything different?

an acquiescent people have given it up.

[vague_ascetic]

In the big picture, an individual's personal porn preferences is not the problem.

The problem is that all legitimate American governmental power flows directly from the Constitution, and all elected Federal Politicians, as well as all appointed Federal judges have solemnly sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.

Amendments to the Constitution:

• Article IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
• Article V: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
• Article VI: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Do you need any help understanding the original intent of the following phrases?

1. shall not be violated
2. No person
3. In all criminal prosecutions

Have Americans' ability to understand simple English degraded to the point that nine old verbose fetishises for black satin moo moos must augur the Constitution's entrails to divine what was meant?

The government was precluded from equivocating on sworn warrants; Jury trials; public - a)presentment of prosecutorial charges, and b)trial; right to challenge witnesses and evidence; right to competent and dedicated representative to aid in defense, and lastly, most importantly, habeas corpus. This is what has been lost. This is why you should care.

There is no "terror" exception. These rights are universal, and bar the government's actions against citizen and non-citizen alike. They were explicitly placed in the possession of humans, not the state. Any governmental representative who takes these rights is participating in an illegitimate tyranny. The abject owardice and lack of faith in the American system is implicit in persons advocating acts which degrade these rights.

A president, "whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People".

This is what matters. The Dreamtime America is fading away.