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Former FBI Agent Calls for a Second Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Former FBI Agent Patrick J. Dempsey warns that the Internet has become a sanctuary for cyber criminals and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure Internet. Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials. The problem is various legal systems are unprepared for the fight, which is why he claims we must change the structure of the Internet."
Will the second internet have Third Life?
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
"We need a second Internet so we can make it easier to spy on you and track you."
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Someone give this guy a VPN.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Sorry, but changing the "structure of the internet" because some former policeman says it would be a good thing just ain't a persuasive argument. If anything, take whatever he says and do the opposite.
"We're too stupid to deal with this interweb thingy, so we need the entire world to change how things are done to accommodate our incompetence."
Yeah, that's going to happen.
-- Will program for bandwidth
"Former FBI Agent Patrick J. Dempsey warns that the Internet has become a sanctuary for cyber criminals
Any time you have a new community or resource to exploit, there will be criminals. However, calling it a sanctuary is hardly apt. I can think of more than a few places that are a sanctuary for criminals, yet you won't see the government razing those neighborhoods and starting anew, would you? Besides, who gets called a criminal?
and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure Internet.
Ummmm, no. What he means is that they want to form a new network that can routinely be filtered, scanned and probed with no means of anonymity (already going away) or flexibility.
Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials.
How about figuring out how to deploy a network within your own agency first, that agency employees can actually use?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I don't care about your needs to "successfully fight cyber crime" which to me translates to "successfully sniff out rats".
I care about speed, anonymity and integrity of data.
That very annoying "internets" word will be real and I won't be able to threaten to kill a puppy every time sombody that should know better uses it.
Since major cities have more crime than before why don't create new cities.
As opposed to extraditing murderers, mafiaa members etc is easy with respect to "traditional" crimes?Why hire competent people who technology as tools and adapt your law enforcement agency when you change the world around you to adapt to your incompetence?
And for those who says "Think of the children": No law can effectively parent your child for you. Do you damn duty.
When the government or agents of the government ask for something, the opposite is probably in your best interest.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... the FBI want's a pony.
for every time I've heard: "our code base is crap, let's rewrite it from scratch".
Apparently this FBI agent hasn't heard about the Internet2 yet. This is an existing high speed network used mainly by colleges.
What do we do when the second internet is overrun? Building a new internet everytime "cyber-criminals" get on it sounds expensive...
If only we could create a second, more secure Nigeria.
Education is the silver bullet.
There really is no internet in such a way that you can just 'replace' it.
The 'internet' is simply many computers connected together, interchanging data over cables. I could create my own internet, for example, using different protocols and such, and creating my own sever system, browser, and etc.
It just doesn't make much sense to 'make' a new internet. The internet is the world, and you just can't replace it.
Moreover, what would prevent me from doing the above and bypassing their 'secure' measures? Censorship never works.
How many times over the years have we read about incidents of cybercrime, where the FBI was contacted for assistance and promptly blew off the victim because they didn't lose enough money, or weren't some big important corporation?
They weren't interested in nipping the cybercrime problem in the bud in the early years, and now the internet is a hive of scum and villainy.
~Philly
There is only so much we can do to secure any network from attack. There will always be ways to spoof identities, and commit illegal acts. Retooling the whole thing won't make a different in that regard. We may up the bar a little, but that won't last for long. People will think of new ways to work around what we can think of today.
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind an overhaul on DNS and SMTP to slow some spammers and other jerks down.
The real problem is the diverse nature of laws between different countries and the strong enforcement in some places and near zero enforcement elsewhere. Think about it, someone in Russia can do almost anything outside their country and not be prosecuted. In other places, we have parts of the Internet filtered because of some lame moral code.
I just wish these people who don't understand the spirit of the Internet would take their marbles and go home.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I'm not going to be lectured about the internet by Dr. McDreamy.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
***
Some years ago, I was investigated by the police following a web page in which I disparaged a spammer (where I live, there is no freedom of speech). The spammer managed to convince that the page was somehow illegal; it took something like 5 months to the police to figure out who I really was, and all along the way I could hear them loudly stomping like the fuckingly clueless marching morons they are. When they finally directly got to me, I told them to fuck-off, as they didn't happen to have jurisdiction. Despite the thinly veiled threats of siccing the local cops on me, I held firm, told them to fuck-off, and eventually, I learned that they would not press charge as they weren't convinced that the charges would hold in water...
Makepeace: "Oh butt out, you're just hung over. Again."
Oh that's just great. So just because poor mr Dempsey woke up one day believing that someone wasn't ready for a fictional fight then we all should just drop the world's communications infrastructures and rebuild it according to mr Dempsey's vision. For the sake of those poor unprepared legal systems, of course. And also the world's safety. And the children, now that we are at it.
What mr Dempsey is advocating is nothing more than taking over the control of the medium. No one has it and he wants it badly, claiming that it's in everyone's best interests to be controlled by an overreaching, totalitarian organization. Well guess what mr Dempsey, the internet works great just as it is and no one benefits from having a righteous mr Dempsey, head of the internets, fighting the fight that those poor, fictional legal systems are supposedly incapable of carrying out.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I'm sure you look good in blue.
"If we accept the fact that the greatest hurdle in arresting international cyber criminals is that various legal systems just aren't prepared to address the speed at which these crimes occur or the various nuances that are unique to computer crimes, then the question is: What can we do to fix the problem?"
So, he goes from acknowledging that there's a jurisdictional problem and a speed problem when it comes to law enforcement to creating a new "verified" internet where you have to "prove" who you are? Umm..no.
And he goes on to hit every hot topic in security today: DDOS, identity theft. spam, etc. And then, he makes the claim "the fact is that Internet crimes are almost always international crimes." And he doesn't back it up, rather gives anecdotal evidence of a hacker in Russia using computers in Thailand to steal data.
I am not a security expert (and I'm not pretending to be) but this "sky is falling" mentality is crap. Most identity theft (the act of stealing) is not done over the internet, its done locally. Yes, selling lists of thousands of SSNs and credit card #s happens over the internet, but the thievery itself doesn't.
In fact, this would make things worse: you're creating a global ID. Once someone steals your global ID they can do whatever they want. And once again, your ID wouldn't be stolen over the "new" internet, it would be stolen because you didn't shred a document and someone went dumpster diving.
This doesn't solve any problems.
Which, of course, would be regulated by the US government.
Has this guy thought for a few minutes about the implications of having a "second internet"? It's the dumbest idea I've seen since the /. article this morning about having a "UNG" (I mean seriously, wtf? If you expand the thing, it becomes "UNG's Not GNU's Not Unix").
Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo! Shopping, and every Internet Banking website has decide to stop all online transactions and go back to traditional manufacturing and distribution chains because top business analysts working closely with the FBI found that cyber crime has caused insurmountable loses. They are also looking in to replacing our existing currency system to curtail the massive amount of crime and fraud not found on the Internet.
.. with blackjack, and hookers!
The reason why the internet is so powerful is because it's unsecured. It's even designed to be unreliable; everything is designed to expect failure. Imagine a system that's totally secured, that means that every packet on it is known and vetted. And more importantly the origin and destination is logged and tracked. In practice such a system would be hard to enforce and would be stifling to commerce and innovation, IMHO.
saying that the Internet has become a sanctury for cyber-criminals is a lot like saying the physical world has become a sanctuary for (non-cyber) criminals.
Both are probably true.
I won't disagree with the assertion that the internet is a game-changer when it comes to criminal investigations, but the idea that we should castrate it for this reason is ridiculous. The dinosaur who raised this complaint is clearly a digital immigrant. Most of his generation lacks the level of familiarity necessary to effectively investigate crimes involving the internet. The problem goes beyond a simple matter of training. A good investigator needs an intuitive understanding of how people interact with their world, including the internet, more than they need an intimate understanding of protocols.
The next generation of investigators will be digital natives. They'll have grown up with the web, email, blogs, message boards, IM, flickr, youtube, social networking, and the like. They won't all have CCNAs, but they'll have a sufficient understanding of how people use the internet to know when to bring in forensic experts.
The transition will be difficult. The digital immigrants with extensive investigative experience and the digital natives who are novices in their profession will have to cooperate and exchange their knowledge and wisdom, and in the meantime, some criminals will slip through the cracks. That's the price of progress.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
This is typical. He wants to throw away the Internet because it can not be controlled and scanned by the government. What a moron! Or is he simply pushing to get IPV6 implemented to replace IPV4? That would serve the same purpose for the most part.
Of course then the real criminals (those called politicians) would resort to other means to conduct their business. Like VPNs. Oh, wait, so could everyone else!
He needs to adapt or get out of the way. Change the laws and get the cooperation between agencies setup before investigations have to be initiated. But I guess that sounds like work. And we all know government employees work as little as possible.
From the article...
"...a new, more secure Internet where users would be required to register prior to gaining access."
I already have to do ridiculous things like 'prove' who I am before boarding a plane, I'm sure as hell not going to jump through anymore government hoops for something as simple as internet access. And what would this 'registration' require? SSN? Birthdate? Can people be put on a 'no-internet' list? Who has final say over who is allowed access? What would keep people from filling in junk info like I do on every website that requires registration?
It's scary that this guy thinks that he knows technology, but doesn't have a clue that his plan is blindingly stupid.
Fuck off.
We should make a thousand internets if it will make us safer!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wheres Al Gore when you need him?
Wandering Wombat (531833) once said: "a watermelon is NOT a puppydog"
Let all of the various conglomerates move all of their online advertising, and shopping, and noise to a new internet.
We all stand and applaud, then cut them off from ever returning to the old internet.
Then we can go back to the days of sharing information and having fun without that stupid "punch the monkey" ilk...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
so we can re-use our old forms. It's a bit surprising how effective this is.
--
Patrick J. Dempsey, your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting international "cybercrime." Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from nation to nation.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) legitimate Internet uses would be affected
(x) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) it will protect us for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) users of the Internet will not put up with it
(x) microsoft will not put up with it
(x) the police will not put up with it
(x) requires too much cooperation from criminals
(x) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) lack of centrally controlling authority for the Internet
(x) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) asshats
(x) jurisdictional problems
( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) huge existing software investment in the Internet
(x) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
(x) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) extreme profitability of international crime
(x) joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with criminals
(x) dishonesty on the part of criminals themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
(x) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) sending email should be free
(x) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) i don't want the government reading my email
( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
( ) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
(x) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
Since major cities have more crime than before why don't create new cities.
They are doing this gradually. Remove all the tree, bushes, gardens and parklands that criminals hide in. Place homes close together so that there are no alleyways for criminals to hide in. Require that people make sure that their homes have iron bars over the windows and doors so that no one can break in. Surround office blocks and residential areas with high security fencing and place CCTV cameras everywhere so that no area is unmonitored. Have biometric scanners to make sure nobody isn't who they say they are. Make sure that all financial transactions are logged and audited electronically.
It might not be a fun place to live in, but at least no crime will go unpunished.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
1. I can't do my job because of X.
2. Changing X would fix that problem.
3. Therefore, we should change X.
With no regard for whether X has any value of its own. Open your eyes and look outside of your own field before you decide to change the world in your favor.
Visit the
"The problem is various legal systems are unprepared for the fight..."
I think Mr. Dempsey misspelled 'all'...
"Doing law enforcement is getting harder, so let's change the rules"
I see this now in almost every arena of law enforcement... and for good reason. It *is* getting harder to do low enforcement. The thought process is something like this: "As law enforcement, we know we're failing; we can't really stop the criminals, so let's treat everyone as a suspect." Basically enforcing laws is a traditional behavior. It is the way to maintain stability and control on society and in a similar way that traditions maintain cultural norms. Traditional behaviors are the antithesis of innovation.
Technology is changing at a breakneck pace, and increasing in the speed of change. It is hard, nigh impossible for large, bureaucratic, rules-based organizations to keep pace with innovation in technology, and the concomitant adoption by criminals.
The disturbing thing is that instead of law enforcement innovating to keep up with the demands of the job, many in law enforcement have lobbied successfully to change the rules of the game. This is most true in the United States over the last five years with the tired dirge: "give up your liberties or the terrorists will win".
I think the correct solution is to change the way we do law enforcement. Change the people who do it. Make smaller, more nimble organizations. Change the speed with which law enforcement operates. Remove entrenched, non-technical savvy deadweight from organizations. Incorporate the latest technology. Change quickly with the rest of society and keep the fundamental principles that make open society possible and successful.
And for christ's sakes, please stop degrading people by forcing them to take off their clothing and shoes to board an airplane. I know, it seems totally off topic, but the same idea we can't really stop the criminals, so let's treat everyone as a suspect.
... Would be a wonderful think (but hardly in they way imagined by this character). If you take a step back, our current "internet" is really a ball of crap. The domain system is horribly abused and disorganized (everything lumped under .com just because grandma can remember it. And then throw in the cybersquatters...). The standard for producing documents (html/css+javascript) is horribly complicated and not universally supported in the same ways, and many people loose site of what it is they are trying to accomplish when developing websites (conveying information in a document vs. throwing in bells and whistles). Many of the things html is stretched to do could be better done in other ways.
Upon reading the article summary, I thought the guy must be nuts.
After reading the article, however, and carefully thinking about his ideas, I've concluded that he is instead an idiot.
Has this man never heard of Metcalfe's Law? His second, registration-only internet will be about as popular as BITNET and Telenet are these days. (Yes, Virginia there were globe-spanning networks before the Internet. It's true!)
While he's at it, he might as well call for a second telephone system, one that only allows people to say nice things.
I already find the current internet to anti-my-privacy. My ISP, in particular can have an incredible amount of knowledge about what I do, which makes me very very nervous.
expandfairuse.org
Perhaps they should contact Stevie B. He might have the old MSN blueprints handy from the mid nineties. I'm sure he'd be thrilled at having a second shot at replacing the internet.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Indeed, as another replier said, there is already an Internet2. However, even before that, "internets" was a valid term. See RFC 1918, titled "Address Allocation for Private Internets".
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
does the phrase : 'Former FBI Agent' mean anything...../?
Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law:
I call for a second FBI.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
and the first one is something called Aol
fvck b3ta!
'Internet2' is taken apparently.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Patrick Dempsey? WTF?
I know this is probably redundant, but I'm drunk and don't give a shit.
I have come here to chew memory and kick ass... and malloc() is returning a null pointer.
If the Olympic-Hosting Overlords can have it, why can't we?
*sarcasm*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Anonymous Coward warns that the real world has become a sanctuary for real criminals and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure real world.
Duh. Why don't they just make crime illegal?
Or, to put it another way...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Every couple of months someone hooks up a $50 Linksys router to my company's IPSEC-secured network, leaves DHCP on, and brings the network to its knees. Flurries of email ensue, "Don't reboot your machines!". There's then a half-day hunt until we find the moron who plugged the stupid thing into the corpnet and pound him (or her) with bars of soap.
Meanwhile, IT has started a "Incident Process" with "Investigation Status" pages and "Incident Response Metric Reports" and is collectively useless.
I'm really dubious that the FBI is going to be any more useful, response-wise, than the bloated, self-important IT staff here who couldn't track down a MAC address with less than five meetings and a "Wups, we need to develop a new web page for that kind of issue" memo.
The FBI's likely response to any kind of threat: Pull the plug on the whole thing ("for the children!"). Yup, that's the kind of thing you want to base a country's commerce on.
Actually, the internet is a sanctuary for cyber criminals. You don't find cyber criminals holding up armoured trucks at gun point, regular meat criminals do that, you find cyber criminals on the interwebs. That's why they're cyber criminals. The intertubes are a sanctuary for cyber criminals for exactly the same reason that the FBI is a sanctuary for corrupt FBI agents.
I totally recommend creating a second internet, and a second FBI, a second stock market, a second local primary school. Everything.
No one thing should get all the cred for harbouring criminals. If people want to be paranoid and really stupid, let them be paranoid and really stupid and have a good laugh at their expense.
I don't therefore I'm not.
I suppose that you'll need to have a national ID card before connecting to this second internet.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
Go ahead, Mr. Dempsey, start your new Internet. You act as if creating a new one requires some sort of special permission, but you'd be wrong. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from creating another Internet using TCP/IP or whatever protocol you like. You can design it any way you want. You can even run Web servers on port 90210 if you like. Hell, you might even find a way to run the whole thing on NetBEUI. I doubt it, but don't let me kill your dream. I'm sure MS will be glad to modify it so it'd work...for a price. So you go right ahead and start your new Internet. Get everything set up, then you can get back to us. If we like what you've built, maybe we'll come over for a visit. I doubt it, but don't let me discourage you.
Now, maybe I'm mis-remembering here, but I seem to remember hearing about this little doo-dad called "Internet 2." You know, for scientists and certain authorized parties and such.
But yeah, we definitely need to get to work on that "Internet 3." Screw Web 2.0, I'm already on Internet 3!
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Yeah, and these newfangled "automobiles" make it so much harder for the cops to catch crooks, since the cops now have to move so much faster, and even cooperate with cops in the next county. Instead of the cops getting automobiles and some radios of their own, we should get rid of automobiles, make them illegal, and instead give everyone some other kind of automobiles that all have cutoff switches in their motors that cops can stop with their radios.
And no criminals will ever figure out how to wire around the cutoff switches. Then cops can just go back to being lazy again. Oh, and by the way, we should let the cops trample all over our rights that we discarded because protecting those rights was too much work.
I feel safer already. Don't you?
--
make install -not war
Dr. Montgomery, on the other hand, is more than welcome.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
One man's criminal is another's whistleblower, human rights activist or political dissident.
Our shields can't protect against that amount of dumb!
Hey! Look a Distraction!
My god, it's full of porn...
I guess it's a matter of taste, but holy moly, this story pretty much epitomizes the Slashdot Troll Story. At least it's a new* variety of Troll Story (see also, the RIAA-Bites-Man story, the Crazy-Patent story, the Pro-Microsoft story, the Spammer-Tells-his-Story story, the now-faded SCO story, and many more).
* I write this half-expecting someone to produce an old Slashdot story about a crackpot scheme involving setting up a New Internet in order to fight crime.
Sure... and many people could call for Second World, Second America, Second Justice and Equality, Second This and Second That...
But just like our world, our history, our environment and most of our basic conditions can't be just restarted from scratch, the Internet can't either.
Simply, because "the Internet" is not a piece of technology, a piece of legislation, a piece of bad manner or habit that can be simply changed at will.
The Internet has become a sophisticated reflection of virtually every segment of our human nature, society, economy, etc. And not only the reflection of it, but it is actually getting to be part of the fabric of what we are as individuals and society.
Yeah, if you could just take off the streets all the criminals, crime would stop to exist, right, Mr. Former FBI Agent genius?
linking the "first" internet to the "second" one, what do you get? The internet? Isn't it kinda like adding infinity to infinity? Or would it then be called the omninet?
I will assume that on this "new Internet" that we won't be allowed to legally have a open wireless routers as well. Otherwise I'll just sit outside your house, or point my Pringles can towards your window from the comfort of my couch, and use your registered connection on this "new Internet" and let you take the wrap for my crimes.
/. to find my IPv4 address which will easily lead him to my ISP as it is a static address and properly registered. Either that or the whois lookup and a subpoena with the registered registrar would do as well. I wonder if I'm moving too fast for him?
:*] ... it is my livelihood after-all as I am a geek.
Of course I'm on the "old Internet" right now and if Patrick thinks I should be investigated today I'm sure he can subpoena records on
Seriously though -- I just use the Internet [no crimes coming from me
I suppose we should also consider changing our banking system(s) since there are also a lot of crimes happening with these new fangled credit and debit bank cards. What a moron.
... where the agents are significantly smarter than this ex First FBI agent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cointelpro
Just one of an incredibly long list of reasons not to give governments one inch when it comes to our privacy, on-line or otherwise.
Seriously, does it surprise anyone that law enforcement wants a more "secure" and hence traceable, internet? The Law is moving in on this frontier; some of the residents demand it, and cops always want more power.
Heinlein wrote about this decades ago - "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Great read, and extremely relevant.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Former FBI Official Imaj Oke stated today that We need a new earth due to the massive amounts of crime and terrorism on this one.
"Our current planet is so rife with criminal activity that we need to populate a new planet that will be restricted only to fully law abiding citizens." He said at an interview earlier this afternoon, "Once we have established the new planet the old one will, of course no longer be necessary and will be dismantled for parts."
Oke went on to describe the technical merits of the new planet stating that life on the planet would be fully controlled by benevolent corporate monopoly interests to ensure that nobody's intellectual property is infringed.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
Yes, we need a new Good Internet that the FBI, SS, RIAA, etc. will make safe and legal for everyone. The rest of us will stay on this one (to be renamed Evilnet).
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Former Computer Science Major Anonymous Coward warns that the Former FBI Agent has become a mental sanctuary of ignorance and incompetence and the only way to rectify this is to talk to a second, more competent FBI Agent. Anonymous Coward explains that the idea that a Second Internet is needed to fix an outdated legal system and law enforcement that finds itself out of depth in a puddle is ludicrous and laughable. The problem lies with the Former FBI Agent himself, who is a dangerous, controlling fool who doesn't realize that the problem could be solved, by rather than taking a closer look at the infrastructure of the internet, taking a closer look in the mirror instead.
has anyone thought he could be saying this to cover how much they can see? If everyone thinks "the government is stupidly behind the curve" then they will suspect less.
lets stop making laws every day and make everything we do illegal and be a free country. What happen to artist getting paid for live shows. They make a penny or two off every CD. Honestly I would not care if people bootleg my material to make me more known and popular among the public. It would pay off in the long run. Only reason they want this is they passed so many laws they can't keep track of them all any more. They need to make a whole year where congress does nothing but get rid of laws instead of pass them. Thats what this country really needs.
Pedo 2: 13, f, nyc. u?
Pedo 1: 12, f, nyc 2! Hmm, a network of only 13-year-olds.... So the real question is, would it be one giant digg?
Mod parent up please
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
This guy is a complete moron who clearly lacks any perspective on the internet. It's not the tubes that are the problem. It's the people using computers without known exploits clicking on things their friends send.
The solution isn't replacing the tubes. That'd be retarded. The solution is more secure software that protects the users from themselves.
It's no wonder the FBI can't track down cases of ID theft if this guy is an example of the people in charge.
:wq
What we need is two internets, one will looks all pretty and clean so that the FBI can boast about how effective they are, and one for people to actually use (the super web)
Clearly, he hasn't read that the current Internet has a provision for this: the Evil Bit set in the IP header, as specified in RFC 3514, published 1 April 2003.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Yet again, King Canute orders the tide to stop coming in.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
From the reports I've read about the FBI's IT woes, he may never have truly experienced the first internet...
First of all, how much of the crime he is referring to is pirating/gambling/porn/censorship related.
Second, businesses are already dealing with the current cyber crime and are adapting and getting better at handling it.
So far we have established that the second internet wouldn't be used because it wouldn't be free, and wouldn't vastly improve on anything.
We could go on all day about how this is fucking stupid, and anything that met his definition of secure, would probably not be scalable and would remove the freedoms most people enjoy the internet for.
Can we mod this article as Troll?
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
is it SPAM? Phishing? DDOS attacks? Or is it child porn, terrorism and that kind of things?
If it's the first, then it's not a new internet we need, but rather to fix what is allowing these attacks to take place.
If it's the second, then my friend, there's no solution. Crime was committed before the internet. Changing the internet won't solve crime. Child porn happens because children are kidnapped and abused. And that happens OUTSIDE the internet. Perhaps we need to spend less money on Iraq and more money on programs to prevent child abuse and all that.
If you want children not to be approached by stranger adults, then make some kind of "child ID" using a centralized certification authority or something. Or how about EDUCATING YOUR KIDS?
Just like you need a driver's license to use the public road system, or a passport to fly, you will need a Internet license.
If the identifier for a block of data is a hash of the data, you can verify its integrity without knowing a hill of beans about who or where it came from.
If the link pointing to a secured, anonymous site is a hash of the site's public key, you can verify that the site you're talking to can use the corresponding private key, which is the same thing SSL buys you. The high-priced "secure site certificates" just certify that the owner of $DNS_NAME also owns $PUBLIC_KEY; if you got a self-authenticating link from another web site you trust, the level of assurance is comparable.
If the algorithms that underpin this stuff are broken then the whole digital security house of cards is toast, including "High Assurance SSL Certificates" (Now with green pixel paint for your clients' address bars! Sorry, cross-site scripting protection not included.)
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
2. ????
3. Profit!
If you were to shut down all ISPs in the USA, the amount of criminal activity and actual COST that effects companies and consumers would be less then 1/10th of 1% of actual crime reported and collective success via trial court systems. That being said, the internet does nothing that can not be done via US postal mail and private package delivery services.
IP is not actual property as no taxes are paid on said property, it is the right to an idea that limits the use of who can use said idea for a profit or not. The FBI and big brother want to spy on people, but you can't spy on everyone. You never will be able to without causing issues that blockaid the actual success of said spying.
Terrorism, Gangs and high profiles crimes happened before 'internet'. They continue to grow, not due to 'internet' but due to laws and punishment and various other areas of governmental policy.
More people die from gang and terror related violence then internet credit card and identity theft. Big Business and Capitalism are the main factors that create roadblocks for technology, not crime.
We don't need a second Internet, we need an Identity Layer on the Internet we've got. Check out http://thetrustednet.org/ for a comprehensive solution to most of the problems of the Internet, including cybercrime.
Do they really want to dig out all the tubes and replace them with new ones ? I remember a couple of years ago they replaced all the natural gas pipes, that was a real pain, and the new internets would be more expensive even though they're theoretically more caloric.
I heard NYPD will be testing this new concept developed by FBI: to deal with the Russian mafia problem a second, more secure Brooklyn will be set up on the outskirts of Ruby Valley, Nevada.
Can't he just recommend that routers check for the "evil bit"? It would be about as effective and much easier.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I suggest mandatory beheadings at birth - that way no one will EVER break the law. It would be easier, too - LOL.
It has been a long time since I've seen such a terribly written post filled with so much garbage reach the score 5 on Slashdot. I have no choice but to debunk the entire post piece by piece.
requiring convicted criminals to use a vpn would be a step in the right direction. also much easier to implement than trying to build an internet around catching crooks.How would this help catch anyone? How would you enforce it? How do you propose that you try to catch someone violating their VPN lock? Do you expect them to post to their MySpace while they're stealing credit card infos?
so what do you do with the criminals from Africa who are connected to organized crime, who have whole 'internet cafes' and people standing watch so they can get out of there if the 'police' come, who are more than likely on the take anyways...Seriously, you don't need your own accomplice cafe to be anonymous on the internet, much less to skirt some stupid probation condition like "only use the internet through our proxy/vpn." ---- Shit, okay I need to go see a woman, apparently, so I'll just end with this:
although i Seriously doubt they're going to make it easier for the movie and music industries to track down users, and catch them 'in the act' what is going to get targeted is the stuff that really steals from the banks, and the rich and gives it to the criminals.if i had the money I'd bet a billion dollars that within a decade hacking will be traceable world wide, through hardware ids before they get the money transfered from one bank account to another one.
Why do you need a billion dollars? I'll give you 10:1 odds on any amount you name. You don't understand anything, I am really embarrassed that Slashdot even ran this story, let alone give a post like yours a score of 5.
Seriously Slashdot, you guys fucking suck now.
I can't end this post though without commenting on the original article.
This is one of the worst written articles I've ever seen on Slashdot. It contains absolutely nothing that cannot be solidly labeled "FUD." The article itself is all over the place, devoid of real-world examples you might get from a real journalist, and reads like it has been written by a child. It's very clear to me that Patrick J. Dempsey is not very intelligent, and does not understand the types of challenges that exist for internet security, nor does he understand the liberties we're used to enjoying here in The United States of America. Case in point: this guy's argument could be made in favor of putting cameras on every street corner and requiring everyone to carry federal (or international) identification cards.
"can the global economy take a 7 billion dollar a year hit to cyber crime every year, for the next 20 years? no it can't "
How did this get modded insightful? Honestly.
7 billion, from a world perspective, is peanuts. A single division of a large corporation - but not in the Fortune 500 - will have revenues exceeding 5 billion a year. It may be a lot of money for you and I, or even for CEO Ty Coon - but spread around, it amounts to nothing - fractions of pennies. As it stands, it is cheaper to simply write off the fraud than pursue it - most of it. The idea of building a second internet to prevent 7 billion in damages is laughable IN THE EXTREME.
"doing something like that would discourage the growth of online crime in iran and africa"
Just out of curiosity, why are Iran and Africa singled out here? I mean we all know about the Nigerian email scams and such, but if we're talking about cyber-crime, Eastern Europe, Russia, China and South America are the big kids on the block. The Iran thing either comes from a recent headline or your political bias.
In rebuttal to your statement, why would, say Iran and 'Africa' opt in when there is a perfectly working Internet already?
Should the Western consumer should be forced to use Internet 2.0, that way the scammers will need to either use the 'new' Internet to scam them or give up scamming entirely. This ridiculous notion is akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Also, capitalization is your friend.
This post is not even remotely close to being accurate!! you can check for yourself @ http://www.fbi.gov/
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Siting the difficulties of policing an unsecure planet Earth, FBI agents have called for the creation of a new, more secure Earth, or "Earth II" so to speak.
Wouldn't people be safer in the first one, knowing they can't trust anyone than in the second with a false sense of security?
Knowing you can't trust people keeps you prepared. It's when you trust people on the net / websites that you risk losing what you give them.
...and this ends up happening, they'll have to rate the old internet 'Arrr'!
nt
Is this guy talking about the same Internet I am familiar with?
The one that has been doing a "structural redesign" from something called "v4" to something called "v6" for what, 8 years or so?
This guy will be lucky to get an address in the not too distant future, and then there won't be anything to worry about!
Fact: One cannot defeat technology with more technology. Any bored geek, hacker, cracker, or phreaker could tell you that.
Creating a second internet would be way too hard. Maybe we can just shut the current one down instead? Sounds like something the current administration would get behind.
When did ASL stop meaning American Sign Language?
Pedo 1: American sign language?
Pedo 2: 13th foreign national youth competition. You?
Pedo 1: 12th foreign national youth competition, too!
*head explodes*
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That does beg the question....have 2 pedophiles solicited sex from eachother?
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
"First, everyone under the hat of IFPI and the various Recording and Movie Ass. of wherever are in the game as their business model is evaporating. "
Riigghht! You keep thinking that. Someday reality is going to take a dirt nap and leave your fantasy room to play.
"They want more restrictions and more monitoring, so that they can eat into your consumer surplus better."
Nice to know you have a "consumer surplus" between the crushing debt and the bank taking your house.
"Most other copyright and related rights owners jump on this bangwagon, as they have strong vested interest in having their monopoly to be extended in various ways."
The right to prosecute those who's reaction to being informed "hey bud! you're breaking the law!" is a big middle finger.
"Then, there are the newspapers and the TV -- in addition to belonging in the first group, they feel their revenues are being eaten by a random collection of bloggers, aggregators and other uncontrollable internet evils that deliver more targeted and interesting commentary faster and at lower cost."
Oh heaven help us! Youtube is now the biggest download off of piratebay.
"And, this push against the free internet is happening everywhere. "
You know the funniest thing about the "free internet" argument is that the majority of the internet was built and is sustained by non-free sources and entities. Just because the end user doesn't get a bill for the true cost doesn't make the internet "free". Let alone no society has ever been a "do whatever you want" free.
Two police agent decoys have entrapped each other.
(and the handcuff party a few days later gets kinky)
Since Macs are certifiably 100% secure, as there has never been a case of malware with OS X (other than users manually running Trojan disk images as root), why not a Mac only network?
What if U.S would build a giant firewall around U.S internet so no connection would go in and no connection would get out. And same for a real world border, no one comes in and no one goes out, first just let all turist to move out U.S and those few U.S citizens to move back, like give a 2-4 week notice.
;-)
Then just activate that total blockade and keep it up next 45 years so U.S would get time to solve their cyber criminals, and all other criminals same time.
And then give "Kill on sight" permission for all guards on border and same for other countries around, give them permission to shoot every damn thing that comes from U.S.
Then we really could get "terrorism" end in the world.
It's just too "bad" that Microsoft is left U.S side, but hey, in same time we could get MS cut to many small pieces because those subsidiarys couldn't work together so well when HQ is down
And yet, look at how many knowledgeable, smart, /. readers have proposed any real solutions.
Instead, we get the "people could still steal, so we should change nothing to stop it on the internet," which is an equally dumb idea.
runs encypted on the internet, everyone on it is "semi-anonymous" - they all get an identifier, which, is read from your implant (or a biometric scan?) Its the only way you can access. Every single virtual scribble you make is traceable, audited, re-playable. No need for passwords, credit card entries, form fills, logins, etc.. like ssh with auth keys. It seems to be technically feasible....some smart guys will figure out the details...like non hackable biometric scans if the implants dont fly.
Soooo how are they going to stop people from just layering an anonymous protocol on top of whatever they force on to people?
Soooo how are they going to stop people from encrypting data and obfuscating it?
Soooo how are they going to stop people form implementing a "slow drip" protocol through random nodes which is also encrypted?
There is absolutely no way to police the Internet without significantly impacting response times, etc. QoS will suck and they will still never be able to touch 99.99% of the "criminals".
"Oh yeah? I'll just make my own internet. Without blackjack! or hookers!"
Why America needs a military censorship? America entered the period of deep difficulties. The image of secure haven was destroyed on 9/11. It is not cool anymore to live or to invest in the USA.
To remain a superpower the USA needs Siberia. Madeleine Albright declared that the resources of Siberia belong to the "whole humanity" (read the West). America and its European satellites prepare for the Great Crusade. Iraq and Iran are just a springboard.
The leaders of the USA realize that the financial and economical crisis are just the first signs of the decline. At the same time the BRIC countries experience 8 - 9 % growth, and the general opinion among economists is that it's just a beginning.
Why Siberia? The territory of Russia alone is almost 5 times larger that of the whole EU. Almost all resources of the world, energy, metals, etc. are in Siberia. Who controls Siberia - controls the world economy.
The USA occupied shortly the Siberia in 1918 and 1919 but was fought out by the bolshevics. They want to replay it. America prepares for the war. The radars, the record military budget, the 700 military bases, the expansion of NATO are parts of this historical process.
The price of the gas in the USA exceeded 3 USD, soon it will be 4+. Those who were in the USA and know how it is built realize that Amrica simply will not be able to function with the expensive petrol.
When Vladimir Putin was asked of his opinion on this Madeleine Albright's ideas he answered that it showed that the course on the strengthening of the defense was correct. So the world is nearing the new great war. That is why the military censorship, the second Internet for the "democracies", is needed.
If you can build it, they can break it. There is no such thing as perfect security.
What really needs to happen is education of users (YOUR BANK WILL NEVER ASK YOU FOR YOUR PINNUMBER OR PASSWORD IN AN EMAIL also NEVER LOGIN TO YOUR ONLINE BANK VIA A LINK IN AN EMAIL!!!), better security on the bank half (whats the point of a secure user if your servers are not) and basically better international cooperation with regards to cyber crimes.
Oh, and fixing all those Win^Z^Z^Z bot laden computers would go a long way too...
like 3 years ago. Trouble will be getting people to use you "new" internets
divide and conquer, your free speech will soon be no more.
We are already working on a second "Internet" its called "Freenet" and it aims to eliminate many of the current problems with the Internet such as censorship and accountability.
Segregating the Internet!!!! Why do I get dejavu when I think of that? Oh what that's how it all started.
Honestly this idiot is suggesting we work backwards and devolve the Internet.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I wouldn't care if the "new internet" is highly censored, controlled and governed by tough international rules laws and security restrictions - as long as I can switch on the good old internet 1.0 aka the "anarchy net". Bank affairs and work goes through Internet 2... pr0n, IRC chatting, Quake playing, warez hunting and wikileaks reading goes through internet 1.
Don't believe a goddamn word anyone in the govt says about security and fighting crime if it involves changing the current status quo. They're full. of. shit.
Well, our "free" society, the one existing on the USA, EU, Japan, and most of the developed countries, is a society expert on making us think we have the right to express our opinion freely. The truth is another. They simply let us do what we want as long as it doesn't interfer the interest of big corporations and the ideals of the ones at power. Tis means that we have the right to demonstrations, but they have the right to make some illegal.
:)
Of course, I understand that one of their missions is to keep the safety of population, but there's a big step in, for example, demonstrate supporting absolutist ideas, and trying to take the government down by force. Everyone should be free to express their opinions against everyting and everyone. In fact, and with that i'm not saying i'm a supporter of absolutism or fanatism, since i'm the opposite, if more than half of the population supported absolutism, a free government like the one we're supposed to have should support a new absolutist government and retire himself.
What happens on the internet is more of the same. In the past, very few persons could give their opinions, half of the websites were corporations and little commerces, while the other half were technical and artistic websites. That changed since the web 2.0 was born and p2p appeared. Now everyone is able to give their opinion, have a website in where people with a similar way of thinking can interact in real time, etc.
The world is no longer this flat thinking world they created in where people's thoughts came more likely from the TV or plain websites, now people have it easier to form their own ideas and see really brillant ways of thinking.
Now they notice it was beginning to become the standard, and are trying to remodelate the internet since they see a great potential on it for them to guide people to the "good path". Right now things are still good enough, but if that continues this way, we'll lose a great interactive way to enrich our minds. Maybe it's the time to create a second internet taking advantage of new technologies?
Mobile phone usage is growing faster everyday. Also does their technology, starting to mach the one of a simple PC. Maybe in about, let's say, seven or ten years, being optimistic, will be the time to create a global p2p internet. I notice the ping problems, but I also notice that good algorithms could try to take advantage of a symmetric brandwih on the wifi cards to make an inverse asymmetric p2pnet in where the upload works more than the effective (the one for ourselves) download, since most of the download would be working to make the net stable.
PD: Yes, i've got a trippy day, the gym destroys my reasonment capacities I think
Here's my prediction:
As the government tries more and more to clamp down on the internet and bandwidth becomes more and more free OR the government successfully forces us to go to this "Second" internet (let's call this "surveillance net"), people will come up with a new "freenet" to lay on top of this new freedom restricting internet.
All it would take would be an open source program protocol that would pass information over the "surveillance net" by encoding the data, chopping it up, and passing it through multiple nodes (think parallel, not serial distribution) before it gets to the recipient. That way nobody (i.e. government) at any single node would be able to tell what data was being passed or even to who. This would successfully nuke any second internet benefits. With this expectation of a free internet that the general masses have grown to expect, I think you'd get a large percentage of people who were willing to be freenet nodes. (you can of course try to mandate this like bittorrent nodes where you have to be a node on the freenet in order to use the freenet).
I think all this really requires is that bandwidth be cheap and a push by the government to clap down on internet freedoms. I think we'd very quickly see a counter-revolution and open source developers would create the freenet.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
There may be a need for a "new" net, but the goals would be completely different.
Such a network would need to provide things like distributed caching by default and censorship resistance, as well as anonymity.
For example the network would cache all cachable protocolls by default, as often as it can be done. Then no site could be slashdotted again as many of the routers in between would just cache the content. A great side effect is that the identity of the originator of the request would be obscured by the routers.
Another important point is that it must not have any "single points of control" like the DNS-system or IP allocations.
Furthermore we would need to focus on every participant beeing able to route. The network must not be tree-like anymore. If you have wireless LAN and your neighbour has, too, there must be automatic peering.
Another idea would be to make it work on scaresly connected networks. Imagine you have a mobile device. It could try to fetch your encrypted (!) e-mail and fetch it whenever you have a connection. Every router in the connection would try to accept the request and cache the response until you have a connection again.
Once again: "We fear what we cannot control".
-- Truth suffers from too much analysis.
Most of the security and crime problems associated with the Internet are problems with the client, not the network. In other words, Microsoft Windows is the problem.
If desktop clients ran each browser window in a separate jail, and downloaded programs were constrained by NSA SELinux type mandatory security, or a virtual machine monitor, to stay in their individual compartments, most of the attacks on personal computers would stop working.
If it weren't for those armies of zombie PCs out there, hiding where something unwanted was coming from on the network wouldn't work. Look what's happened to spam. Today, essentially all spam involves compromised machines. Any that doesn't is shut down, fast.
Ir's all Microsoft's fault.
Oh, wait. He means the other meaning of "secure". Darn.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So once again police is finding it difficult to keep up with technology and ask us to limit the technology for investigation purposes. This seems to be just yet another attempt at introducing a police state in the wake of 9-11. I say no thanks!
I suppose this agent is dreaming of our proudly french invented Minitel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel)...
That was secure, only companies could run a server, if they were accredited by the national telecom group. Usual mortals were "clients only" (in both senses of the term) and were paying by the minute of connexion.
In the early 90's I remember introducing Internet to some top executives in Paris, and one of them said : "Yeah, that's a Minitel but it's in color, we can do that too"...
"we want a controllable internet"
typical fascist government attitude.
Read radical news here
The internet as we know it today has evolved from an ideology of a few researchers. Vennevar Bush, who proposed the Memex system in 1945 that made it possible to link information sources via interactive computing. Ted Nelson, who thought of the hypertext system, which links texts with keywords in a very different way and that we still use today. And Tim Berners-Lee who brought the dreams of this information network into reality with his World Wide Web. The ideology of these men was that information should be available everywhere, for everyone, at any time, for free. Everyone should participate in this World Wide Web and should be unrestricted in any use. From this freedom, that is more and more restricted by some governments, hackers from all over the world have developed better software and even helped making the internet what it is today. Hackers are the watchdog of the ideology of this freedom and get there support from internet users from all over the world. The Aibot hacks wouldn't be so successful if the Slashdot community didn't support it at the time.
The internet shouldn't be made more 'secure' by the government. The internet as we know it, is designed as a network which gives everyone the opportunity to participate. Restricting these 'rights' would be against the ideology from which the internet is build. We should see the internet as a public domain, where users are responsible and should watch for cybercrime and fight it. Let's think of securing the internet by participating as users instead of giving this out hands to the government.
I would love to see the RIAA, MIAA, CIA, FBI, ad networks, adware distributors, email spammers, pop-up advertisers and other such useful Internet services moving to a different Internet.
/dev/null or whatever you want.
Call it Internet 2 or
Perhaps Mr Dempsey should contact the Pakistani government and co-operate on this. Together they could build a shiny, brand-new Internet where there are no bad people or representations of things they don't want represented.
Cybercriminals can create code anonymously because they have easy access to program memory. Once we eliminate this attack vector by forcing code to be signed and permanently linked to licensed programmers then malicious code will die off. This is easy to enforce, Cisco has already demonstrated the ability to limit internet connections to systems that can be proven to be running specific software. With public key crypto, we could make it very hard to spoof the tokens that we would require for internet access. This way, hobbyists can tinker with programs, but these programs will not have the ability to create network connections because they can be walled off, much like java.
This has to be the only reason, in fact, and not just one of them. Cybercrime can be stopped without any monitoring!
The article talks about hacking into bank accounts and identity theft etc. So if the government wants to crack down on this, why don't they just mandate that banks have to send their customers a bootable read only flash drive that contains a basic operating system, browser, SSL certificates and a one time pad? It wouldn't matter how badly some clueless moron's computer was trojaned to hell, because the bank would only accept connections from the booted flash drive.
You can't get mugged on the internet. You can't be coerced on the internet. Criminals need YOUR COOPERATION.
The U.S. could also stop using checks like every other civilized country, because they're a ridiculously huge security hole and a huge pain in the ass compared to direct bank transfer. But all of this would make too much sense, because none of it involves more government monitoring of its citizens.
The land of the free. Where no laws must ever tell corporations what to do, but citizens must compensate for their ineptness by being spied upon.
My Sig: SEGV
This idea is simply throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Since a relatively few internet users are cybercriminals, it make no sense to spy on EVERYONE as if they were cybercriminals.
Instead of punishing every internet user by puttign them under continuous scrutiny, why not punish the criminals themselves by making the penalties far more threatening: 25 years hard labor, no parole or probation.
I mean, think about it: Make cybercriminals work for 14 hours a day in the fields (hand tools only).....for 25 years. The prospect of spending 25 years of pulling weeds, picking cotton in the south, shoveling snow in Siberia, or breaking rocks with a small hammer in the middle of Utah would scare the shit out of anyone running scams, spamming, stealing data, or running botnets.
Evans spammers Ralsky and Catts openly admitted that they would keep on spamming no matter what.
Bottom line, get caught and:
MANDATORY Full restitution. (You got paid, now its time for your victims to get paid back.)
MANDATORY Fine amounting to %50 of total worth/value. (Not exactly a parking ticket. All of it goes to schools)
MANDATORY 25 years hard labor. $0.01 per year payment. (Giving them 3 years in an air conditioned building won't make the message stick)
MANDATORY Complete asset forfeiture/seizure (Anything in your possesion, being controlled by you, or with your name on it. Goes to paying for your expenses. Anything remaining when you are discharged goes to schools).
MANDATORY residence in an outdoor prison camp. (24/7, like the one in Arizona or New Mexico)
NO Parole. (You're in for the whole trip)
NO Probation. (You screw up, you're screwed)
NO Visitation. (You are NOT on vacation)
NO "Special Needs" segregation. (You will all be treated equally)
NO Mail. (except legal documents).
NO Motorized/mechanized tools, only hand tools. (You didn't think we'd make it that easy, did you?)
NO Luxuries (heating/air conditioning, T.V., radios, rec yards). (If there are law abiding citizens that can't afford this, then you can't either)
ALL medical/legal/incarceration expenses are paid for by your seized assets. When your money runs out, so does your medical care. If you die in custody, you cannot will any of your assests; The Government gets it all and it ALL goes to schools (NO reappropriation). (Hey, there are law abiding people who don't even HAVE medical care. If you get sick you pay for it just like everybody else.)
NON-U.S. born citizens have ther citizenship permanently revoked, deported to wherever they came from, and banned from ever reentering the U.S. (We didn't let you become a citizen just to screw everyone else over. You blew your chance.)
Same meal served 3 times a day, 7 days a week: Governemnt Cheese, water, fortified bread. (There are law abiding people who are starving, so you shouldn't complain)
Work from 1 hour before sunup to 1 hour after sundown (Crime sucks, doesn't it?)
The only possesions inmantes are allowed to have are blankets, pillow, basic toiletries, and a thin mattress. (Prison is not your home. The lights go out when the sun goes down)
If this was applied to criminals inside the U.S., nobody would think about getting caught running a botnet or SPAM server in the U.S. (or commiting any other serious felony) Plus, if someone is caught outside the U.S., have them extradited and put to work here. Even more, other countries might implement it as a way to make the punishment the same everywhere, making it too risky and too expensive to run such cybercrime operations.
The problem with the prison system is not that sentance are too long, it's that prison isn't as terrifying enough a place to make it a good deterrent and get the message to stick. Prisoners are property of the State until their sentence is done. Period. If you don't like it, then you should have thought about that BEFORE you decided to break the law.
It's high time to punish the people who break the law, and stop punishing the people who don't. I'm not a criminal so stop treating me like one. Put a prisons' worth of inmates to work on farms, open pit strip mines, and quarries and you could cut out the need for all the fuel-guzzling heavy equipment.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Mr. Patrick Dempsey in action http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1278/540989432_efe4a79ee7.jpg
Victory shall be mine!
, is a great thing to hear from a fed,
surely?
A blog I run for the wealth
The safe internet was called MSN. It never became popular.
Although it isn't what this guy is looking for, we do have SIPRNet.
and don't you forget it!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
We are already working on a second "Internet" its called "Freenet" and it aims to eliminate many of the current problems with the Internet such as censorship and accountability.
Why is accountability for your own actions ever a problem?
Anonymity can be used for good, typically for the protection of people who would otherwise be unwilling to take action in the interests of justice. Most of the time there are other ways to protect people where this is true, and in cases where anonymity really is justified because of dangers to the person concerned, it seems unlikely that they'll be plastering their views all over the Internet.
Anonymity can also be used as a shield to hide behind if you break the law. The Internet is not a licence to break normal laws by committing acts like fraud, harassment and defamation with impunity. However, the Internet combined with anonymity is as good as such a licence, because if you can't identify the person doing the damage, you can't bring them to justice.
There will always be questions of "who watches the watchers" in any legal system, and the Internet raises complex ethical questions about dealing with the differences in laws and authorities between different countries. These are legitimate concerns, and society will have to find a way to deal with them. However, I would wager that most use of anonymity on the Internet is of the CYA kind, and I would argue that any system that allows people to avoid accountability in this way must be broken to some extent.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This time it's personal MF's! Nice idea, but good luck convincing the ISP's to fork out the expense, they won't upgrade the kit they have at the moment here in the UK, they simply keeping capping slower and slower to delay the inevitable
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
For obvious reasons i don't want to google the link from work
:)
But there recently was a case of an adult man (twenty something i think),
who was pretending to be a 13yrd old school boy ( the teachers thought there was something strange about him, but couldn't quite work out what..)
and who was in a relationship with a couple of 40 year old guys who also thought he was 13...
the older guys apparently felt cheated and deceived when the discovered that their 13yr old was in fact 20 something and just shaved a lot...
the link was from news of the weird, which is a great verified source of strangeness like this
p.s. and also no it doesn't "beg the question", but i'll leave it up to a philosophy nazi to slap your knuckles for that
Law enforcement is probably the lowest form of job. I'm sorry, the police suck. They aren't the guys on TV. Most of the time they are stupid. They have no real concept of scientific method and most criminal investigation is nothing more than a witch hunt. Most of the time they are lucky because most criminals are just as dumb as the police.
The gods help you if one of these reptiles accuses you of a crime. They decide guilt before collecting evidence. Then they make their case that you are guilty. It is far easier to paint a picture that someone is guilty using the stuff laying around rather than actually thinking about the evidence.
The police would like nothing more than to track and have information on every person, find it inconvenient that things like civil rights get in the way, or that beating up a "suspect" is a bad thing. They are driven by power and the ability to intimidate people. In the locker room they joke about giving people shit. I know this because I know a lot of cops, and I've only met a couple who were decent people and they had to quit because they couldn't take it.
The police mind set is antipathy for freedoms we hold dear. When the police want to change something that exists, they will use "crime" as the excuse, but make no mistake, it is about control. Unfortunately politicians are not much removed from police.
this is like saying America would be better if we put everyone in jail. This guy is a true freedom fighter! I'm glad my governement pays him, his ideas are way better than actually hiring people that know network security. (and implementing their ideas).
We are already working on a second "Internet" its called "Freenet" and it aims to eliminate many of the current problems with the Internet such as censorship and accountability.
Why is accountability for your own actions ever a problem?
Yes if you practice freedom of speech!~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Rules, like the English language, always have exceptions to them... :-)
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Former agent? I think he just played one on TV.
Exactly how long does he think it will take before someone, somewhere, installs a router between the old Internet and the New Internet?
I would guess it might take slightly longer than a nanosecond. But not by much. Most of the first New Internet routers will be installed in schools, to protect the children. I'm pretty sure that there is at least one evil grad student in one of our schools who is fully capable of configuring a router.
On second thought, the New Internet would probably be connected to the Old Internet before it even boots up for the first time.
Keeping it as two distinct tiers would allow the desired light-weight access, anonymity and freedom at one level, while a second set of protocols running in parallel with the original could offer end-to-end security and authentication which would be a big security win for business and personal data. It would be the end of spam - since all spam could be immediately traced back to its origins, and the end of redirect attacks as well.
Clear, Dark Skies
Could someone tell law enforcement and the media that they must have missed the memo where we all stopped using "cyber" a long time ago?
Seriously... every time I hear "cyberthis" or "cyberthat", it's inevitably someone in law enforcment, the media or k-12 education (but talking about some enforcement issue). The cops are the worst... every unit they create is cyber-something... I guess they think it sounds cool. In actuality, it's more like hearing your grandpa say "gettin' jiggy with it".
However, if they're serious about such an endeavour they should go study with those who've already begun this sort of thing: China.
I'm sorry, Mr. Dempsey, sometimes a job just has to be hard.
- I am made of meat.
Accountability is a good thing. This is not a question of accountability, it's a question of whom you are accountable to.
It's a very short step from finding scammers and criminals and holding them accountable to finding political dissidents and persecuting them. You cannot have one without the strong likelihood of the other. If the potential for abuse occurs, then abuse is inevitable.
blah blah blah
on second thought, forget the internets....and the blackjack...
Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warns that the Interstate Highway system has become a sanctuary for out-of-town criminals and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure series of streets, avenues and highways. Hoover explains that, in order to successfully fight organized crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with interstate law enforcement officials. The problem is 48 states's legal systems are unprepared for the fight, which is why he claims we must change the structure of automotive travel.
In related news, 1 in 5 American adults have been solicited by the Mafia for illegal bathtub gin during prohibition. Is your family safe from booze-o-philes?!
"You were hiding jews in your house ? Prepare to die !"
Accountability means that you are accountable to someone. That someone can easily abuse his powers; Hell, even the finnish police, the police of the state repeatedly voted the least corrupt in the world, began abusing the kiddie porn filter immediately after it was implemented. There is no authority worth the trust accountability requires.
Unfortunately, in Real Life, accountability is a neccessity. While it inevitably leads to abuses, lack of it means us violent monkeys live up to our murderous nature and rape, kill and loot each other. That's why we have governments, nation-states and courts of law.
However, it is impossible to murder anyone in the Internet. It is just as impossible to rape them, or cut a single hair from their heads. It is impossible to even rob them - altought it is possible to spy on them enough to gain access to their online accounts, which is one of the reasons why I don't have any. In fact it is impossible to do anything except say something nasty to them.
So, why would we need accountability in the Internet ? Who, exactly speaking, is actually being hurt by the spam, botnets or porn ? No one.
No, this "accountability online" is simply a guise for tracking down the people who leak nasty secrets of politicians and corporations, in order to punish them and thus cause a chilling effect. Internet and especially the anonymous protocols working on top of it - such as Tor and Freenet - are every politicians worst nightmare: an information propagation channel they can't block. "The truth shall set you free", so is it any wonder that every overlord in history has tried to prevent it from getting out ?
A democratic society - indeed, any free society - needs an anonymous communication channel with no accountability of what you say. If that is also useful for criminals, then that is simply the price you have to pay. The alternative is freedom of speech a la Soviet Russia: you are free to pee on Lenin's statue while shouting "down with communism", but you'll be sent to a Siberian labor camp for it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
WASHINGTON D.C. (AP) -- "All we're saying is that we want our country to be a real country again, one where we can have faith in our constitution, one that is grounded in the rule of law," said Jason Smith, spokesperson for the group "Americans For a Free America (AFFA)." Smith continued: "we have the backing of several million Americans. Our group is committed to ensuring that our government returns to being constitutional, and that our country stops this slide that has turned it into a "dictatorial banana republic." Our charter states that this must be accomplished using constitutional, non-violent means, and part of what needs to be done is that we need a "second FBI." While it is clear that most agents in the FBI we have now are honest, hard working Americans who believe in protecting our country AND the rights of it's citizens it is just as clear that there is a criminal group operating above (and infiltrating within) the FBI."
When contacted for comment on the AFFA group, agent Johnson of the FBI commented: "It is clear that AFFA is a domestic terror group, all they want to talk about is freedom when we are fighting an endless war. We need to be able to do whatever we want because most certainly this group may kill babies, torture puppies and bomb buildings. This cannot be allowed."
When presented with the quote above, Smith replied "This is why we're calling for a second FBI, the criminals in our government have ruined the first FBI by either asking them to, or allowing them to commit crimes against the people; and be clear, we are not saying most FBI agents are criminals, that isn't the case, my uncle was a fed, but the corruption at the top and in certain "joint task forces" ruinz it for the 98% of good, America loving agents."
When asked what evidence the agency had of anything illegal acts by AFFA, or why they would suspect that a group committted to peace, freedom, and the rule of law would commit such heinous acts, I was detained and questioned for 10 hours about if I was part of a domestic terror group and whether I supported the constitution. I was released after I agreed to publish the following statement: "I now see that the the FBI is right, this group and their type is dangerous. We are all in danger, danger is everywhere, and the internets is where it hides."
doesn't want to invent another internet right now. The last one took a lot out of him.
My net is completely safe:
My ISP caps my download so I can't download evil viruses
My ISP throttles my p2p traffic so I can't download music and become infected with the terrorist virus and become one of them like the RIAA video says
My websurfing experience constantly pops up with anticybercrime tools that I can buy for only 19.95, I have 204 of those tools installed so far
I have norton, so my internet apps are all blocked anyways and my computer is too slow to let me experience the web and get terrible cybercrime done to me.
Also, I installed vista SP1 and now my computer boots to a blue screen so it is even safer.
Why another internet?
PS. Without my PC, I decided to go play outside and got hit by a bus. Damn you internet!!!
The proponent is clearly a techno-weenie. The 'broader issues' he raises as an adjunct to this stupid idea may deserve wider discussion....(which already tends to happen on sites such as this)
Perhaps if he was to lurk here for a while he might make any announcements on similar matters less obviously flawed/miopic/overtly partisan ?
(couldn't hurt...)
I am only spending about $60/month right now. You say I can get a connection to the new internet for only $60 more per month! Sign me up!
read geekonomics
first, a second internet is a pipedream, at best.
why aren't we discussing incentives for software vendors to make secure choices?
Well, if you feel that way, lets get away from the anonymity of the ballot box, eh?
I mean, you *would* support posting publicly your voting record for all elections wouldn't you? I mean, no need not to be held accountable for who you voted for in each election (or if you voted at all), right?
There are many reasons for true anonymity...political expression is just one of them. Of course with anything out there...you can use it for good and evil, but, if we were to toss out everything that could be used nefariously, we'd not have many freedoms or possessions left.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I wouldn't really expect a "former FBI agent" to look at things this way, but here's how I see it. You're *always* going to have countries who don't respect your own nation's laws. They may pay "lip service" to them, or co-operate occasionally, when they're in the middle of other political negotiations with you. But ultimately, that's the whole POINT of dividing the globe up into nations. If we could ALL agree on what was worth prosecuting and what was legal, we'd be just fine with a big "one world government". (And scarily enough, some people still advocate just that!)
Most of the "Internet crime" you hear about happens because proper measures weren't taken to prevent it. The mass thefts of credit card numbers by hackers, for example? It's either the rare "inside job" (like the AOL employees who tried that one time), or more often, security weaknesses that an outsider exploited to get to the data. Demanding more "accountability" by requiring an Internet that people "sign in to" to identify themselves? That's pointless, and absolutely destroys a big part of what makes the net great; its anonymous, de-centralized nature.
Anyone intelligent enough to find and bypass security weaknesses on corporate servers is also smart enough to find ways to sign on a "new Internet" using other people's credentials.
And in any case, it STILL does little or nothing to fix the fact that other nations still DON'T CARE that one of their own citizens just hacked a business in YOUR country!
The "rest of the world's laws" are no more a "stumbling block" with Internet crime than they are with any other crime. All you can do as a nation is devise secure systems to make these foreign crimes more difficult to pull off in the first place. (The U.S. govt. does this all the time with our cash money. Each bill has its own unique serial number, and many many forms of counterfeit protection are put into them.)
"It is just as impossible to rape them"
Agreed. You can't rape the willing.
I don't believe in freedom of speech as an absolute. It too often conflicts with other fundamental rights and freedoms, and sometimes I consider the others to be more important.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Listed at CIO of Janney Montgomery Scott. But when I try to get into the Janney Montgomery Scott website, the website contains javascript which no respectable and reputable company will do. I can't even sure that the javascript will not try to exploit my browser.
I said that he is probably an idiot and very rightly so. There is no way that a 2nd internet will take off, unless the current one is forcefully dismantle. Put me on the front page of slashdot for my comments?
Evil will always win because Good is buried in paperwork!
The ballot box is an unfortunate example, because it leads to confusing anonymity with confidentiality.
I have no problem with someone knowing that I have voted, and indeed a record of this fact is kept to ensure that I can't vote twice. I am thus not an anonymous voter, and I hope we'd agree that allowing arbitrary anonymous votes is not likely to meet with democratic success.
Who I voted for is a different question. That is private/confidential information. Since the information is not publicly available, I don't believe it is necessary for me to put my name to that information.
As it happens, there is also no crime that can be committed by voting in a certain way as long as I am casting my vote(s) according to the rules of the election, and no-one else's rights can be infringed by my doing so. Thus there would be no legitimate need to break confidentiality anyway. I think this is a separate issue to the anonymity question, though.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This focus on investigating exclusively via the internet is only a small portion of this battle.
Why is Visa not cracking down on merchant accounts which are associated with illegal pharmacies like "Canadian Pharmacy"? They're the ones processing the orders. That's not just an internet phenomenon. MasterCard by comparison has very effectively taken action against rogue merchant accounts over the past few years.
Why aren't banks modifying their policies regarding the processing of fake checks used in 419 / Nigeria-style scams?
You don't need to build a whole second internet to take these fundamental steps to stopping cybercrime. And these changes would take far less time and effort than re-creating an entire network infrastructure.
Western Union could also tighten things up. The second I hear that company's name, I immediately think of two terms: "fraud" and "money laundering." That's not good for their brand or their services.
Yes, law enforcement worldwide *must* act faster, and more proactively, and with greater cooperation, to thwart this type of crime -- but assuming that purely online methods are the key is a bit misguided, in my opinion.
And while we're at it: when is anyone in Russian law enforcement going to shut down the people behind storm worm (etc.)? I'm sure the obvious answer to that would be "when the bribe money stops coming in." But seriously: It's the elephant in the room and nobody is talking about any kind of action against Russia / Ukraine / Romania. The Russian government continues to try to gain acceptance into the WTO, all the while endorsing very large-scale, rampant international cybercrime and fraud. Who has the ability to ask these questions and take action? The WTO? Nato? The UN?
SiL / IKS / concerned citizen
-- SiL / IKS / concerned citizen
Well, I'm afraid I disagree with you about the complete lack of damage of any on-line activity. Have you never heard the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword"? Have you never seen the results of identity theft? Heard of a career being ruined by defamation? Thought about how many hours of people's lives are lost to spammers and the like every day? The fact that you personally may have been lucky enough to avoid any damage does not mean everyone else is so lucky, particularly when by your own admission you avoid services many people use all the time.
In any case, as I acknowledged previously, there is always a question of who watches the watchers in any legal system. There must be checks and safeguards on any authority delegated to governments. No-one should be able to look up this information arbitrarily without demonstrating that there is a genuine need for it to uphold the law, and no information so obtained should be kept once it has served that purpose. But neither unauthorised interception nor over-greedy databases are a problem unique to the Internet, and they must be fought through proper constitutional safeguards, independent oversight, and harsh penalties for abuse wherever they occur.
Regarding your point about anonymous communications channels, I would draw to your attention another post I made regarding the difference between anonymity and privacy/confidentiality. If you are transmitting confidential information privately, I don't see why your identity need be public; it need only be known to the other party. This is sufficient to safeguard, for example, whistle-blowing to a legitimate source in the media, or private debate about government policies and people's reactions to them. However, it is not sufficient to safeguard attacks on banking web sites, public defamation, or someone caught supplying state secrets to an intelligence officer. Personally, I have no ethical problem with any of that.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
the only reply I can think of to this guy is:
SHUT UP.
brian botkiller "Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance" - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Orson Scott Card should get a new career. Writing is not his forte. Ender's Game (only the original short story) was mildly interesting. Nothing else has really stood out.
You will not find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
To which the correct response would be "Yes, and I'm proud of it."
We are already working on a second "Internet" its called "Freenet" and it aims to eliminate many of the current problems with the Internet such as censorship and accountability.
Freedom of speech did originally, in the 18th century or so, frequently also entail that you did specify an actual author publisher that could be brought to court for the possible crimes. The most important aspect of freedom of speech is that you cannot be stopped before you distribute something to the public. Then, the interesting issues are if we can create sets of authorized personas, so you can still keep privacy, by only showing one of your "faces", for example.Why is accountability for your own actions ever a problem?
Yes if you practice freedom of speech!~Dan
Freedom of speech did originally, in the 18th century or so, frequently also entail that you did specify an actual author publisher that could be brought to court for the possible crimes. The most important aspect of freedom of speech is that you cannot be stopped before you distribute something to the public. Then, the interesting issues are if we can create sets of authorized personas, so you can still keep privacy, by only showing one of your "faces", for example.
Well, if you feel that way, lets get away from the anonymity of the ballot box, eh?
....... Bush!
But, but, I voted for
Just call in Team America and take 'em out.
"Hey cyber criminals, steal this!"
Freedoms are to only go so far as to not infringe on the rights, liberties, and freedoms of others. And this is where your little conspiracy theory falls short. The notion of the sticks and stones argument is all full of holes. I guess the court should rule out Dateline NBC's captured conversations with sex predators as permissible evidence in court? I mean, they didn't actually have sex with a minor... and just ask most of them, they just wanted to make sure the poor kid was ok being left home alone...
Its not because politicians don't want you to know some big secret, its people demanding protection...they don't feel safe online, so they'll figure out a way to feel that way, and if it means certain restrictions, then that is the choice of a FREE SOCIETY.
I have no problem with someone knowing that I have voted, and indeed a record of this fact is kept to ensure that I can't vote twice. I am thus not an anonymous voter, and I hope we'd agree that allowing arbitrary anonymous votes is not likely to meet with democratic success."
I'd argue against this. Your vote is anonymous...it cannot be tied back to you in any way. Your showing ID or whatever as a record of voting, is more analogous to logging onto the internet. But, after you log on, there are ways to do things (vote in an online poll maybe), which cannot be tied back to you in any way, much like your vote in an election.
One is access...you do provide some sort of credentials to access both the internet and the voting booth, but, the actions you take once you gain access to both, can and should be (especially for voting) anonymous, with no way to tie your actions back to you.
Also, as far as I know...I don't think it is public record at this time, if you vote or not. It isn't anyone's business really. Actually in the past...and even in some places today, you don't even have to show ID to vote, these laws are having a tough time being repealed even...which unfortunately does lead to people voting more than once, and people that aren't official citizens of the US vote, but, that's a whole 'nother thread for discussion.
But, as above, I'd argue that your vote is indeed anonymous. As is the fact that you DID vote at all...I don't think your employer can go get public records to see if you voted or not.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The reality is criminals are greedy and whilst something works will keep doing it. So you can eventually get them. If it wasn't for repeat offense by criminals in none internet crime most would get away with it.
The PTB (Powers That Be) would love a "replacement" Internet where anonymity is impossible or at least extremely difficult. An Internet in which you would have to provide full, verifiable, real personal information just to get on, logging in through a central controlled gateway, and where every keystroke would be clearly traceable to you. An Internet in which anonymous posting and nicknames or handles are useless. And an Internet in which even if you are able to somehow crack the security and fudge your online identity, you can be tossed in jail if you do so.
It ain't about fighting crime (and never has been) -- it's all about control. The press and the media can be influenced, bought off, even controlled at times. But the Internet is a huge, multi-tentacled, slippery, uncooperative monster. That scares the hell out of the PTB. It must be tamed.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
One where you don't have to worry about people watching what you are doing so the can make up reasons to bust you.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well as a member of the Internet, I call for a replacement FBI
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I think what he has in mind is a 'second network' constructed of voluntary participants who agree to make themselves accountable to regulation in return for a more open and secure networking experience. I can't immediately see this as having a huge impact on the existing internet, though it might reduce the noise level with respect to investigative activities. In time, if this second net is successfull, it could end up selling itself to the point where the current internet becomes relegated to the same status the porn industry now has: a small 'haven' for those who engage in, or are likely to engage in shadey illegal activities.
PKI doesn't even solve the right problem a good chunk of the time. How many sites have a link on a non-secured page that refers to some third party order processing firm? A man-in-the-middle can tweak the received non-secured page to point to a different "secured" web server and the customer is none the wiser. PKI provides decent assurance when you type in a "https:" URL and very little when you click on a link, which is why PayPal inter alia warn you to type in the URL.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
... I shall create my own internet also! Oh, and I'm only inviting the cool people.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
A democratic society - indeed, any free society - needs an anonymous communication channel with no accountability of what you say. If that is also useful for criminals, then that is simply the price you have to pay. The alternative is freedom of speech a la Soviet Russia: you are free to pee on Lenin's statue while shouting "down with communism", but you'll be sent to a Siberian labor camp for it.
Freedom of speech is the most important thing we have in democracy and Privacy/Anonymity upholds it.We are already on the path to becoming the next China or North Korea lets not go down without a fight people like the RIAA need to be recognised for what they really are people who would put profit before freedom.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
next question??
Hey, I've got an idea... Iraq is so full of criminals and terrorists, we must destroy it and build a new one... the bombing will begin in five minutes...
you really expect me to be able to express my opinion of what's so fucked up in this world in 120 characters or less?
Actually, he's sort of right.
His reasons are wrong. The methods are wrong, too.
But we do not two internets, one for the clueless to use like a phone, and one for those willing to get a clue to be their own ISPs on.
The latter, of course, is where innovation will occur.
The former will _not_ be secure (and we geeks will have to raise a fuss every time we hear someone say it is). It will simply take a lot more effort than your ordinary user is willing to go to, for them to find their ways onto newsgroups where binaries are allowed and such.
There are lots of things we can do to reduce the windows, for instance, for e-mail address harvesting:
Mailing list servers should act as full mail providers for their members, providing address that are only valid for the mailing list members. The server would forward list mail to the registered members and provide black/white/grey/color-listing for the members. The filtering would be effective because the usual sources and destinations are from a limited set. The list contents could safely be published (even as Google archived newsgroups) because of the filtering.
ISPs should be providing similar filters, and they should not be charging extra, and the number of rules should not be limited to less than twenty. Google and Yahoo already do some filtering, but all ISPs should be filtering.
One problem with current filtering techniques is the lack of support for digging for false positives. Sequestered mail should be viewable, sorted by the reasons for the sequestering: Bad headers in one box, sorted by the types of problems. Suspicious subjects and content in another. Identifiably evil binary attachments in another and un-identifiable (by actual content, not be extension, of course) binaries in yet another. Sender names that include known probably bad patterns in another box, and unknown sender names in a box that's labeled "unknown sender" rather than "junk". Threading junk is also a useful technique.
(This kind of sorting and organization should be provided for archiving legitimate mail, as well, but that's another topic.)
If the service providers were actually providing services we want, unsolicited, illegal scatter pattern advertising mailers would mostly self-destruct. Not entirely, but mostly.
(The most prominent OS and applications vender is the biggest block to progress in this direction, of course.)
Web sites and web browsers are amenable to similar improvements:
Banks should not provide access to accounts through the general purpose browsers. Single-purpose browsers are not that hard to build, and don't need all sorts of bells and whistles. (If you want video feed on your screen while you are on-line to your bank, open up a separate application.)
Of course, the account browser could be even safer if it were in separate hardware, as someone has pointed out
But we do need two general classes of service on the internet.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
It is just as impossible to rape them, or cut a single hair from their heads.
I recommend you take a look at the classic (and timeless) "A Rape in Cyberspace" by Julian Dibbell http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html More than ten years old, but containing a core of truth none-the-less.