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FBI Wants Authority To Filter Net Backbone
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, writes "There are places where criminal activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the backbone data, which is already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
The legal authority to block anything he can't read.
I would say "Welcome to Soviet America" but the feds have had the "we can do what we want in the name of protecting the country damn the Constitution" attitude off and on since the 1700s.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
will they pry my private encryption key passphrase.
Back around the turn of the millennium, the U.S.'s monitoring of Internet traffic was a big topic of discussion on the Internet, spurred on by James Bamford's Body of Secrets and the European Union's report on ECHELON facilities. Except for some of us Slashbots, the public seems to have lost interest in this troubling phenomenon.
What if their combing leads me to a brush with the law? It could get hairy....
Invenio via vel creo
Who sees that this could become a huge regulatory nightmare in the coming years for software developers? This will only be effective so long as either the public continues using mainstream protocols for most activities, and the protocols that the FBI wants to monitor don't get changed or replaced on a regular basis by those who don't want to be monitored. The eventual outcome, IMO, besides the obvious privacy, constitutional and financial issues involved in this would be a bridge between this mandate, the data retention mandate and CALEA causing all providers of IT products to comply to make their products easy for law enforcement to monitory, going so far as to outlaw the deployment of software that is capable of evading surveillance.
I for one DO NOT welcome our evil packet sniffing overlords.
I want my country and constitution back. These people have a lot of nerve to ask me for money to be able to read my private papers and correspondence.
Small steps, seemingly innocuous in and of themselves, but taken together, result in a total subversion of the intent of the founders.
Remind me again how any of this falls under the umbrella of rights protection with which the government was originally charged.
Why is it so easy to trash the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and so hard to put them back? What a bunch of assholes. They must have had the words "probable cause" surgically removed from their brains.
we will end no whine before its time
You have to know if the Feds are asking, it's because they are ready are doing.
Which also means they never stopped the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program or Echelon, the NSA worldwide digital interception program or Carnivore, the FBI US digital interception program.
Man, I bet they've got petabytes of freaky porn by now.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Backbone operators are unlikely to block encrypted data. That would bring down things like VPN and HTTPS which their corporate clients need. Even if they were selective in which encrypted data they block, there will be mistakes and workarounds. Encryption is still a good way to go, even if we had large mesh networks.
Developers: We can use your help.
Yeah, and I want to get laid and every five year old wants a pony. Unluckily for me and the five year old, however, the FBI is the only one likely to get their wish.
There are places where criminal activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country.
Yes, they'll solve all those murders, rapes, assaults, robberies, and other violence by monitoring the backbone.
While you're at it, why not tap all our phones and open all our postal mail as well? Hell, walk on into everyone's house looking for evidence of criminal activity! Why not?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
e'll-Way ust-jay se-uay ode-cay.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Old system - the duly appointed authorities had to SUSPECT you of a crime ... and get sufficient evidence to convince a disinterested 3rd party (a judge) that there was a need for a warrant.
... just something you want to read about someone. Stalking ex's. Harassing people who do not respect you enough. Getting some info on that cutie you saw at the grocery store.
New system - skim through the LEGITIMATE transactions of EVERYONE hoping to find something criminal or actionable or
Fuck that.
The problem I see with all these discussions of privacy vs. evil child porn is that there is no way to independently verify how big of a problem child porn on the internet really is.
The FBI would have you believe that it is a huge problem worth drastically expanding surveillance powers over. Yet compared to the 70s, when (afaik) there was legal child pornography being produced and sold, what is the production rate for this type of material today? Are there really any child pornography sites on the internet where people can pay to download child porn? (please no links)
I also worry that the focus of law enforcement's "war on child porn" is shifting from the visual depiction of young children actually engaged in sexual activity with adults, to (1) pictures of naked children not engaged in sexual activity, and (2) material that is made by teenagers themselves. The original intent of having an exception to the First Amendment for child pornography is being distorted. This is especially true when you consider that CGI child porn that is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing is illegal to possess (thanks to the PROTECT Act), and that people are being arrested for pasting pictures of children's heads on naked adult bodies: http://www.theledger.com/article/20080418/BREAKING/453898235.
I do not know in my right mind how, it became permissable for George Bush to undermine civil liberties in the same way that we always argued it was wrong for Democrats to do.
... To secure these liberties, governments are instituted among men", is under assault and in the name of a rival that frankly is not nearly the equal of the rivals that we have faced in the past. We overcame the British Empire to secure our independence. We fought the Barbary Pirates, our own Civil War, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany, and then put our cities on the nuclear firing line against the dark stain of Communism... and we NEVER once entertained turning America into a land of checkpoints and identity requests.
Liberty and Freedom do not care about political affiliations and political parties. If a federal practice is wrong, it is wrong regardless of which party does it. If we do not want Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama or Bill Clinton reading our e-mail, then we should not tolerate George Bush or John McCain doing it either. Doing so only undermines the very essence of the rule of law and the fabric of our democracy. It is the totalitarian regime that justifies itself through personality, not the free one.
We conservatives have many differences with our fellow liberal americans and we always will. However, the very thing that makes us American, the idea, as Jefferson said, "We are endowed with certain inalienable rights
What is going on now in our country is madness. America is not supposed to be a place where guys with machine guns are walking around train platforms, asking if you have a driver's license with federal approved features. America is not supposed to be the place where the government collects data on all of its citizens.
Yeah, the muzzies blew up the world trade center, and its sad that those people died. But, the British burned our nation's capital to the ground, the Germans sunk the Lusitania, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and captured an army of 80,000 men of ours. We've been attacked before and we'll be attacked again, and what makes America special is that we keep our freedoms, rather than surrender them.
There's a million dead soldiers rolling over in their graves because we have so easily surrendered every freedom they fought for. It's an insult to them, to our national heritage, to turn our country into some sort of crappy police state because a few muslims with box cutters give us the willies.
Support those candidates, regardless of party, that promise to end the Dept of Homeland Security, promise to repeal the USA PATRIOT ACT, and join me in a call for a Constitutional Amendment that bars the Federal Government from intercepting any electronic communications within its borders, unless it can prove before a court that those communications are with another nation with which the USA might be in a state of war.
This is my sig.
"the backbone operators can just just block encrypted data."
Email message:
Here's my vacation photos
a whole lot of mime-encoded binary that might have
a legal-looking jpeg header at the start.
How are they going to filter this exactly?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Get the word out and vote. Real change comes from knowledge. The Republicans are going to be run out of Washington on a rail but that won't matter if their replacements don't enforce the Bill of Rights. Vote for people who get it at every level of government, regardless of party affiliation. Write the representatives you already have and tell them what you think. People like RMS already have political action notes. Join or form your own civic group to get the word out and organize effective rights defense. There will always be people who attack your rights because it makes their lives easier but everyone is always better off when rights are protected. Make noise and the right kinds of things have a chance of happening.
George Walker Bush
Richard Bruce Cheney
Larry Edwin Craig
Oh, you wanted pictures, too. Okay. How about this one? The big banner says it all.
The people who have the most to fear from this are the politicians. After all, if the FBI can snoop it, guess what will inevitably follow? One word: Net-Watergate. Your political enemies won't cave in to your demands on that anti-terrorism bill? Threaten to expose that they visited hot-young-underage-nymphos-with-bags-over-their-heads-and-bushy-underarm-hair.com on twelve separate occasions in the last year.
Yikes.
Or just claim they did. Remember, anything digital can be faked.>> "There are places where criminal activity is centralized..."
Yes there are. The White House, NSA, Dept of Homeland Security.
But, since there is some illegal activity among the billions of data transactions online, law enforcement (specifically, the Executive Branch) insists on having access to all data.
I'm certain that some of the cars zooming down I-80 across Chicago are involved in some illegal activity. Does that mean that every car should be stopped and searched? It's possible that in one of the houses or apartments on my block there is something illegal to some extent going on. Should the FBI have open access to all the residences then?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sadly it's not just a Republican or Democrat issue. The Patriot act, communications decency act, etc were all pretty bi-lateral. The Bush administration have clawed their way to a lot of executive privileges and trampling of rights, far more than any other president. However the Congress hasn't done much complaining. Where are the changes the Dem's promised when they took back the house?
There are a few individuals who are good on privacy and the rule of the constitution. This election cycle I can think of Paul (R) and Kucinich (D) as candidates who didn't get the attention they deserved since they weren't soundbite only types of people. Upholding the constitution doesn't seem to be generally a popular topic for people when they vote.
The EFF and EPIC are good places to visit regularly, especially EPIC's bill track.
That reminds me, I once had a (few) interviews with an "off shore" (and a rather large multi-billion dollar) bank (I never got the job, but it came damn close). They never marketed themselves as an "offshore" bank, but the more questions I asked during the interviews it became apparent. One question I asked about the bank's history is that they evolved from various European banks and financial industries during the Nazi era to elude government (Nazi) interference. To this day this bank (and I'm sure many others) are still active in keeping the flow of cash moving. When it all comes down to the bottom line money talks. History and more specifically economics will show that creating artificial barriers to commerce (however illegal that commerce may be) will never work.
Beginning with the sentence on the madness in our country, I completely agree. But previous to that there seems to be s blind swipe at the left...
Most of the "new liberties" we've all gained in the last 100 years have come from the liberal side (think womens suffrage, almost the entire civil rights movement, the right to show belly buttons on TV, etc etc etc), along with most of the original liberties that have been protected (think ACLU, anti-discrimination, unions, free speech, separation of church and state, etc etc etc) The Democrats guilt comes mainly from their nanny state problem. The rights they've taken away are the right to not use a car seat or a helment, the right to keep unregistered loaded firearms under our carseats etc. Overall I think the balance has been a positive one.
Contrarily, the biggest most important rights that Republicans / conservatives were supposed to protect were States Rights with a small Federal Government. Republicans have not only failed miserably at this, but they've done a complete about-face. If any party has been the Big Brother party over the last 70 years or so, it's been the Republicans. Can anyone reasonably deny that?
So please don't swipe at the Democrats because you have to wear a seatbelt and can't put a Nativity Scene in front of a public firehouse. That's the pot calling the microwave-safe plate black.
Beginning with the sentence on madness, I completely agree with him. And I'll add that we need to jettison the current party system and re-do it. We disagree so strongly on the past, but it seems (hopefully) that there's more and more bipartisan agreement on our future.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I'm certain that some of the cars zooming down I-80 across Chicago are involved in some illegal activity. Does that mean that every car should be stopped and searched? It's possible that in one of the houses or apartments on my block there is something illegal to some extent going on. Should the FBI have open access to all the residences then?
Just yesterday, there was the sentiment expressed that hunting pedophiles should trump privacy. At one time that post was up to +4 insightful. Slashdotters tend to be very protective of online privacy rights, far more so than the average American, I suspect that the reasoning expressed in that post would have appealed strongly to most Americans. So all that needs to happen to make this go forward to for someone to say that the FBI tap is needed to stop the pedophiles and it's a done deal. Anyone who opposes FBI internet filtering is a child rapist. Any private citizen using encryption is a baby touching terrorist.
We are all just people.
I find it also fascinating that if you presented this in non-internet terms, the citizens would be up in arms.
Here's another example that might be more obvious to the ordinary citizen:
"There are places where criminal voice communication is centralized: the telephone switches located in central offices across the country. All of the telephone network's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off the signals. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the content of all the telephone calls, which are already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way