Slashdot Mirror
Security Threat In the New Wiretapping Law
The NSA wants automatic surveillance capabilities in telephone switches. But once such capabilities are built in, others could use them to intercept communications. Within 10 years this could render the US vulnerable to attacks from terrorist groups across the globe, as well as from the military establishments of other nations. "Such threats are not theoretical: In April 2004, phones belonging to members of the Greek government, including the prime minister, were spied on with wiretapping software that was misused."
Only Communist China and North Korea have such interests in implementing technology like this. Hell Bejing already is monitored 24x7.
I remember a quote from Reagan: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
My oh my has that come true. Sadly from the leader of his own party. Something needs to be done?
http://saveie6.com/
If you're arguing that mandatory wiretapping ports are a bad idea because they make the system vulnerable to attack, are you then saying that you would not be opposed to such ports if there were no security threat posed by them?
When you muddy the waters to fight only the battle right in front of you, you risk losing sight of the bigger goals and make yourself vulnerable to counterattacks.
Revolution.
We need this in order to protect our children from online predators! Once they track your children down they almost always attempt to call them first. We NEED safeguards for our children. To think otherwise must mean that you support child predators.
You are exactly right.
In many fields it appears people think in simple problem - implement solution form. Those of us who have training and experience coding or other complex technology have been retrained to think in a problem - evaluate repercussions of potential solution - implement solution form. Usually with quite a few loops over the evaluate repercussions phase because the initial solution was unsatisfactory.
Maybe the solution to the short comings in our government is to force them to take and pass advanced programming classes before being allowed to take office.
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
"But arguing against it because it has been poorly implemented and misused in the past is counterproductive."
No, it shows a clear demonstration of how impossibly hopless it is to do this in a secure manner.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
As seen on Bruce Schneier's blog.
I have heard this argument before and am surprised its gone so long with no one debunking it. First of all no one I know has dropped the "privacy" side of this argument, the security risk is simply in addition to the privacy reasons. You also need to consider that the people who are making the decision have already proven on more than one occasion that they are indifferent to privacy implications of legislation like this. If we can convince them to preserve some facet of our ever dwindling privacy out of fear of some script kiddy stealing a few hundred thousand from their trust fund its still a win. No commanding general would ever forfeit a battle because the only reason he was winning was a supply line interruption, he would move on to the next battle proud of his victory.
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
Maybe the solution to the short comings in our government is to force them to take and pass advanced programming classes before being allowed to take office.
Good demonstration of an unsatisfactory initial solution.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
This is not good. What happens when people know that other people can listen to their conversations is that they watch what they say, which makes democracy (if that is your thing) loose its value. Democracy can only exist as long as there is free speech. When free speech disappears, so does democracy. In addition I believe that this will have negative consequences for gays, political activists, people with illnesses etc. No one but you and the people you tell something, have any right to know what that something is. There will be leaks, you can not prevent that without taking extreme measures.
I'm afraid of laws turning from legal to illegal what used to be normal pastime and normal behaviour. Germany just recently outlawed "hacking tools", most of which are perfectly fine tools to monitor and audit the security of your own box. Copyright laws becoming more and more intrusive, to the point where copyright holders want to control the tools you use to play their content.
I'm not breaking the law. But I'm quite afraid of me not changing my behaviour and yet still being a criminal over night, without even noticing. Even under different circumstances, the chance that a law gets passed that outlaws what used to be normal practice is nonzero. Under these circumstances, it's even likely.
So that's what I'm afraid of when I'm giving up privacy. That for some reason what I do might be considered illegal in the forseeable future. And, well, ya know, when he's been doing it while it was legal, will he continue when it's illegal? Even if I cease to do it, I'll be watched with suspicion and should I be tried, whether justified or innocent, my past actions (back when they were legal) will be used against me, with the allegation that I might have continued to do so when it was outlawed. It's also a convenient pretense when a warrant is necessary against me.
Yes, I do not trust the government of my country. Why the hell should I? They don't trust me neither.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Didn't Hollywood teach you about the consequences of speaking about secret things over the phone?
Sure, with the electronic surveillance systems phone spying may be easier to accomplish en masse, bringing us one step closer to Old Bro (which requires not only monitoring to be -possible-, but to be efficient enough to be performed, analyzed, and acted upon on a regular basis...
But the truth still remains that phone networks were never, ever, EVER secure to begin with, and it would be naive to think that we were living in a safe and secure communications era until today.
It has been a long standing tenet in communications security, from CIA-level to your local small business, that there is no such thing as a secure (physical) comms. line, and the only way to ensure security is to use encryption (at which case your security is as good as it's weakest link, be it the key strength, random gen. quality, social factor, or w/e). Well newsflash: that doesn't work in the analog phone system, and never has.
If you need things kept secure, send them digitally encrypted. If you need things even more secure, don't transmit them at all. The public phone system has never been secure, nor will it ever be, whether against government interceptors or a teen phreaker. Live with it.
If they have nothing to hide, why isn't every communication between lobbyists and politicians recorded and publicly declared.
If they have nothing to hide, why is not the activity of every law enforcement officer recorded whilst they are on duty, rather than a taser to torture why not a video camera to record.
If they have nothing to hide, why secret no fly lists.
Let's all of us give up our secrets and privacy at the same time or maybe lets start with the people who are in such a hurry to take our privacy whilst keeping their own dirty secrets, which will be the most interesting, our little white lies, or the massive whoppers of the corrupt corporate executives, the typical lying politician, the abusive power freak law enforcement officer, and of course the biggest liars of all lobbyists.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The NSA already installed such a system in their "does not exist" fibre patching room inside the AT&T fibre facility.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Its always been about controlling the masses, sure they want you to think about all the wiretapping going on, but even in a perfect world, to have wiretaps on everybody 24/7 ...after a week, you would break the datawarehouse piggy bank. What this does, is dissuade any would be terrorist from getting any ideas going into fruition, and leaves the really bad ones in that category. By controlling the masses by fear (yet again amercia) we avoid the masses from sheeping too many bad ideas. Any idea which is different then the governments is a bad idea.
Now that the REAL terrorists are still needing to communicate and have heard this, they will implement even more cryptic ways of communicating. Which will in turn keep the big monster wheel going... making our good guys figure out new ways to counter that etc...
We are heading a dark road into even darker territory, soon our children may have to take polygraphs everywhere they go.....
When your weapons are used against you, you have to wonder if you really needed that weapon in the first place. And people should question why we let you have that weapon. Of course this all assumes that people have an influence on the government, which seems like we haven't for quite a long time, if ever. But I digress, this can all be summed up by a child in a cartoon:
Calvin and Hobbes
Clearly, this isn't a partisan issue. The bill that just passed did so with the approval of the democratic controlled congress. People are playing partisan games over this because, unfortunately, it makes political sense to do so. Politics don't help anyone make rational decisions, though, so let's get them out of the way.
Clearly, there is a security case to be made for listening to phone calls without warrants. If a known member of al-Qaeda makes a call into the united states, there isn't time to ask a judge to approve a wiretap. Even more clearly, the power to tap phones could very easily be abused. This is slashdot; we're all paranoid here. Having phones with built in mechanisms for wiretapping is just asking for all kinds of trouble.
I think the most rational response to this is to recognize the usefulness of such a program, and then attempt to design one that is as impervious to manipulation as possible. General rules that have proven useful for this sort of thing in the past:
Ultimately, though, it's not our laws that keep us safe. It's not the Constitution that protects our liberties. We are free because we have a culture that values freedom above almost all else. Personally, I think it's a culture worth aggressively defending. Will we sacrifice some freedom in the defense of freedom? Of course. From a historical perspective, all American wars have resulted in the citizenry being less free. Lincoln and Wilson both threw detractors in jail. Nobody is proposing that here. The loss of freedom is extremely mild from an historical perspective. When the struggle is over, the freedoms will return like they always have in the past, as long as we demand them, which we will. If you think the struggle is never going to be over; you're absolutely right. Until we get everybody in the country as committed to destroying al-qaeda as they are to protecting moslems from being offended and suspected terrorist's phone calls from being interpreted, nothing is going to get accomplished.
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