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FBI Planning New Net-Tapping Push
Section_Ei8ht writes to tell us CNet is reporting that the FBI is pushing for legislation to allow law enforcement officials free access to networking gear via built in backdoors for eavesdropping. From the article: "Jim Harper, a policy analyst at the free-market Cato Institute and member of a Homeland Security advisory board, said the proposal would 'have a negative impact on Internet users' privacy. People expect their information to be private unless the government meets certain legal standards,' Harper said. 'Right now the Department of Justice is pushing the wrong way on all this.'"
make me wonder why we just don't encrypt the entire network ? I understand there would be more over-head, but wouldn't that be the same as games pushing hardware?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
I also don't agree with the provision that says that law enforcement officials would not have to publish a yearly "notice of the actual number of communications interceptions." Keeping this information private would not help their investigations. What difference does it make to a terrorist whether the FBI intercepted 12,000 or 120,000 communiques.
Isn't this the same thing that was said when the government wanted phone taps and access to your bank accounts ? Not to mention any national database.. no chance there of someone abusing it ?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
- Every conversation I have ever taken part in.
- Every place I have ever gone.
- Every purchase I have ever made.
- Every person I have ever talked to.
- Every book I have ever read.
- Every thought I have ever had.
It is required for the security of America and the World. The only people who resist the adoption of laws to allow the above are the people who have something to hide. Those who have something to hide are terrorists who wish to strip me of my "freedom".There are many ways to implement court-ordered wiretapping. The CALEA debate is not about whether IP networks should be wiretappable but about how it should be done and who should pay for it. Before CALEA, the FBI had to install Carnivore sniffing equipment at ISPs. I guess they think that's too much work, so they want every router at every ISP to be upgraded to have built-in wiretapping, so they don't have to lug any equipment around. And they want the ISPs to pay for these upgrades. And according to the article, now they want the ISPs to also filter the traffic for them, so they get only the traffic they want.
IMO this is an expensive, complex, failure-prone solution to the problem.
I don't think so. . .
With the way warrants work now, abuse is fairly hard, at least at the individual level. Some pissed off or nosy cop or FBI agent can't simply search your house or tap your net connection and so on. If the cop shows up at an ISP with the tap equipment, and so warrant, it's not likely he'll get it in there and it's pretty likely he'll get caught. Same idea as if you come home, and there's a cop rifling through your shit. You ask for a warrant and one isn't forthcomming, he's in a lot of trouble.
Well the problem here is that this can all be activated remotely, silently. A similar idea would be for the government to put cameras in your home. I have a feeling nearly everyone would object to this, regardless of the justification. The problem is that with something like this, an individual can spy on you at random, with almost no accountability. They just turn tapping on and go. There's no oversight.
Between the cost and the abuse potential, I can't possibly see this as a good thing. All power you give the government has potential for abuse, and you need to weigh that against what it gets you. This gets them nothing but convenience, they already have the legal authority to tap connections and such, and opens up huge potential for abuse. Thus it should not be allowed. The cost argument just makes it that much more compelling. It is not the burden of private businesses/citizens to bear this cost.
I also find all this extremely uncompelling because our existing crime fighting tools appear to be working. Violent crime in the US keeps going down. I don't think we'll ever eliminate it, but it looks like we are moving in the right direction, it looks like we ARE able to fight it. Thus I'm not seeing the need for this vastly expanded government power.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
You're absolutely correct about this law enabling individuals to bypass the protections we've built up since our country was founded.
And that's not the worst of it. Individuals can harass other individuals.
But the same tactics can apply to groups within the law enforcement agencies. And that makes it too easy to implement a police state without ever passing another law. They can monitor anyone / anywhere / anytime without any oversight or paperwork.
Goodbye Democracy.
Back in 2004 some of the highest-ranking politicians and other most influential people in Greece had their cell phone conversations surreptitiously recorded by an unknown organization for a period of months.
The job could not have been pulled off without the presence of automated wire-tapping functionality built into the Ericsson switches in Greece. What makes the "greek experience" relevant here is that Greece didn't even purchase the wire-tapping "option" to their switches, it would have cost millions more and they decided to save the money and thought that by not purchasing the extra software and hardware they didn't even have to worry about the issue. They were very wrong.
If ever there was proof that wire-tapping features built into systems for law-enforcement use can and will be exploited by unauthorized users, this is it. It really does not get more clean-cut than this - except for the speculation as to who exactly these unauthorized wire-tappers were - the leading candidate is the CIA. Which would lead even just a mildly paranoid person to wonder if perhaps the FBI is jealous of the CIA's latitude in foreign operations and they just want the same, easily-abused by themselves, features within their own jurisdiction.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Who is going to want to buy this stuff?
Not anyone outside the US... and not anyone *inside* - at least until they are required by law to "patriotically" only buy US-made networking gear.
It would have been nice if they had learned *something* from the years of the crypto export restrictions - stuff without the restrictions / backdoors / etc will be made somewhere, and will be purchased and used...
All this crap does is kill the viability in the global marketplace of products from US networking gear manufacturers. Sigh.
No. And I find it very telling that it is brought up so often by people who want to take away our Rights.
Fascism has nothing to do with Jews.
Fascism depends upon identifying an "enemy of the state". This "enemy" has to be so terrible that the Rights of the rest of the citizens must be "temporarily" restricted to prevent the atrocities that these enemies will surely bring.
The Nazi party identified Jews, Communists and Blacks as "enemies of the State". Pay attention to history.
And I never said that it was "inefficiency" that lead to Fascism. What I said was:
"Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people."
Freedom is not safe nor is it free.
Our Forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence knowing that their signatures would be used to condemn them to death if the British won the war.
They believed in Freedom enough to PUBLICLY identify themselves and their beliefs.
They fought and died for provide those Freedoms to you. And now you want to sell those Freedoms because there is a slight chance that you will be injured or killed.
The chance of a "terrorist" killing you is LESS than the chance of someone in your own family killing you.
It is LESS likely than you being killed on the highways.
Yeah, these people were all wrong about Freedom when they signed their death warrants back then:
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/signers/
It's so good of people like you who are willing to sell our Freedoms and Rights for a false sense of "security".
Put "lawful intercept" back doors everywhere, and how long do you think it will take the next Kevin Mitnick to figure out how to exploit them? Remember that the FBI wanted remote access, so physical security won't help, and that 38,000 FBI passwords were so lame that a cracking program could guess them.
Nor is this theoretical. The Greek prime minister and many government officials found themselves eavesdropped on through the "lawful intercept" features on a celllco switch. To belabor the point, whoever was doing it was not the Greek police.
I believe that it is you that needs to work on your "cognitive thinking".
Well, unless your name is "Richard Pipes" I don't believe that he posted here.
Are you his secretary? Are you scheduling his appointments?
If not, then learn to support the statements that YOU make. Don't try to dump your claims off on someone who is not here and has not posted.
Actually, I did address them.
The "consequences" you speak of are nothing more than emotional reactions by people who do not understand statistics. And those "consequences" are what the "terrorists" are attempting to achieve.
So, if you are afraid because a terrorist killed someone, then the terrorist has "won" that round.
Nice attempt at a strawman. I did not say that the United States has no enemies. North Korea and Iran and two obvious examples.
But you won't stop North Korea or Iran by spying upon what US citizens say in chatrooms.
Just as McCarthy's witch hunts to find "Communists" in "Hollywood" did not in any way, shape or form hinder Soviet Russia's activities.
Did you understand it that time?
It was you who brought up "cognitive thinking".
It was you who tried to deflect arguments to "Richard Pipes".
It was you who could not understand that McCarthy did nothing to hinder Soviet Russia.
It is you who is resorting to personal attacks. That would seem to indicate that you're cache of "logic" has been expended.
Statistically, you are more likely to die from suicide than from a terrorist attack.
The only reason that terrorism still exists is because people do not understand statistics and allow their emotions to be manipulated. You've chose the emotional side of this issue and I have chosen the rational, statistical side.
"Do you have something against the regular police wiretaps done with warrants?"
Those are fine, assuming the warrants are based on probable cause and issued by an independent court. But those aren't the issue at all here.
Is it now illegal to make your front door out of steel, because it would make it too difficult for police with a warrant to break it down? That's what we're talking about.
We're talking about mandating bad security, so that it will be easier for police with a warrant to break it. If you understand anything about security, you'll see that it also makes it easier for anyone, including criminals inside and outside the police force, to break it.
In other words: this increases the risk of crime in order to make a wiretapper's job more convenient.