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FBI May Get Easier Access To Internet Activity
olsmeister writes "It appears the White House would like to make it easier for the FBI to obtain records of a person's internet activities without a court order to do so, via the use of an NSL. While they have been able to do this for a long time, it may expand the type of information able to be gathered without a court order to include things like web browsing histories."
It seems like on civil liberties issues Obama is being almost as bad as Bush. There's something deeply wrong with my country when I read a headline and my first thought is "Well, at least this President isn't having people tortured."
The usual solutions . . . unless they're planning to outlaw those too?
Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
Always treat every single thing you do online as if anyone could see what you are doing. If you don't want people to know you are visiting certain sites, then don't visit them. If you don't want people to know your opinion about something, don't write it on Facebook.
Treat everything you do online as if you have zero privacy. That way, in case something goes screwy, you have no surprises waiting for you.
Living With a Nerd
I'm sorry but I have a sense of Privacy in my life and the thought of some bureaucrat being able to snoop on my traffic or anything they want without a warrant is to damn Orwellian for my taste.
We have laws to protect our rights, among those are the rights to Privacy. Why the hell then do we allow the Executive Branch of government trounce on those rights because of National Security? Just because
I use technology to communicate doesn't mean I subrogate my rights to keeping those communications confidential unless I decide to make them public. Yes, the Internet is public but what I have on my computer
is private. If they have a suspicion of illegal activity, get a warrant, make the case in front of a judge and then and only then can they do these things.
Frankly, I think I'll be like Johnny Depp and get my own Fuck Off Island if these damn so-called security experts keep pushing our Privacy into the trash.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Power cannot and will not be compartmentalized. A government that has the ability to give you everything you ever wanted also, by the simple reality of power, has the ability to take everything you ever had.
Do not ignore the big picture. A government should not only be measured by individual laws and mandates, but as a single entity in reference to its power over the people. In other words, the reason the FBI is able to enact this form of oppression is because government is big enough.
Things that can be abused, will be abused.
This is especially true when people working for law enforcement agencies have a sense of entitlement and no real accountability for their actions. There's a reason for warrants.
.... but this, along with a lot of changes made with the last few adminstrations is getting ridiculous. Why must those of us who are law abiding put up with our civil liberties being stripped away piece by layered piece until we are truly in Orwell's "1984". I know that the reason that is being touted is to help the FBI and other agencies catch those would mean to cause harm upon us, but this is not the right way to go about this.
To counter the arguement "If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide", I have done nothing wrong and I simply would like to continue to have my privacy that is part of my civil liberties. Just because someone does no wrong doesn't mean they wish to be an open book.
I prefer my habits via driving, phoning, texting, or web surfing to be my business, not yours or anyone else's.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I weep for the freedoms that America once enjoyed.
Enjoy your fascist state, the rest of the world is laughing. You've lost the war on terror, and now sit huddled in a corner.
And, fuck you FBI, with your domestic spying and stupidity.
...not vile corporations. They have your best interests at heart. The infallible, incorruptible regulators must have information to do their job of protecting you from the evil businessmen (and, of course, from yourself). Just cooperate and no one will get hurt.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Here are some awkward related questions:
1. What do you think the US government's encryption-breaking capability REALLY is these days? e.g. for example,
are common encryption protocols and key-lengths used in, say, online banking and e-commerce readily crackable by the Feds?
2. Do security agencies of the federal government automatically flag for further investigation all people who use "an excess
amount of encrypted traffic"?
3. Does the FBI, a "domestic" intelligence agency, have the right to spy on foreign residents whose net transactions
traverse the US border? If they don't have the right, are they doing it anyway, or is that some other agency?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Politicians say whatever it takes to get into power, then they do what they wanted to do all along - until 6 months before the next election when they change tune just long enough to get a forgetful electorate to vote them in for another four years. And you fall for it every time. Sucker.
It doesn't matter whether you vote Republican, Democrat, Labour or Conservative (in the UK), you will get much the same thing.
If you want change, vote for another party or become a politician yourself. Failing that, you are wasting your time.
Who's internet identity will they get?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I suspect what he is asking for has been and is happening currently. They know it is illegal and they do it anyway and are pushing for this to retroactively cover their asses.
eat it, burn it, or flush it after memorizing it
oh wait, I forgot, they will soon be able to read your thoughts by analysing neuro-electric activity,
at least enough to be sure you're hiding something, at which point, it's the rubber mallets.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
EVERYTHING is intercepted.
Yours In Akademgorodok,
Kilgore Trout
As the old song says... ..."meet the new boss; same as the old boss"
In the post 9/11 world, the National Security Letter is an indispensable tool and building block of an investigation that contributes significantly to the FBI’s ability to carry out its national security responsibilities by directly supporting the furtherance of the counterterrorism, counterintelligence and intelligence missions.
Don't you just love that "In the post 9/11 world" bit? They use that qualifier for everything that infringes on privacy. Its the "Think of the children" of the Military Industrial Complex. Yes there are bad people. Yes there are folks that want to do bad things. But again, trading privacy, and hence freedom, for security, well you know the rest.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
My girfriend was convinced that Obama was going to change everything (she's so naive, but it's kind of cute in a girl). I told her that he would just continue 90% of Bush's evil shit once he got into office, and even the 10% of change would be moderate/token at best. It's the one point on which Dick Cheney and I agree. Obama is like every other politician. He only hates the police state when he's not the one in charge of it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I believe Obama when he said there'll be no more torture in the U.S. I took that as an indicator that all torture will be carried out offshore from now on.
Two quarters, Three dimes, a nickel and four pennies. That's 89 cents of change I can believe in. I like it just fine.
"I have to erase some stuff. A lot of stuff."
Somebody made you eat a SarcMark for breakfast this morning, didn't they? ;)
It seems to me that this is just moving further in the FBI's renewed interest under Obama to go after file-sharers without the need of the courts prove their need. Everybody knows file-sharers are terrorists in disguise, anyway.
ACTA is failing on a worldwide scale, so why not make sure they can move forward in other - easier - ways?
Stuff like this is why I joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
It's hopeless.....
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Your illegal, unlicensed use of that trademark must be punished immediately!
I feel safer already!
That is all.
Hehehe Oops! I meant uh.... Open Sarcasm's alt+U0161!! Honest!
There is much emotional reaction against using torture, but there is also zero inherent reason that (properly) applied stress cannot be used to (in conjunction with other information and other methods of information extraction) to produce useful intel.
When one fights cultural enemies who don't play by the rules, it becomes reasonable to abandon the rules which only exist for ones own benefit (expectation of reciprocity).
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
No, the problem with "If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" is that those who seek to employ it WON'T let it be applied to them as well.
That reminds me that I need to pay my bill from Privacy.io for my VPN connection.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Why is the National Soccer League being used as a way to track people now? Did the FBI lose a bet or two on the World Cup and they're just pissing in everyone's pool now? What has this world come to? I dream of a place where young black boys and girls and young white boys and girls can play soccer together and go home and tweet about it and say to each other: Thank God Almighty our internet is free at last, Free AT LAST.
Or in this Obama world I'd like to think that his misdirections could be less obvious and we wouldn't see him shitting on the Constitution so openly.
By that measurement there was never any torture in the US. It all took place on land we lease from Cuba for $4085 a year.
Qxe4
Treat everything you do online as if you have zero privacy.
If I can't have privacy, I'd at least like anonymity. That's what we are really after anyhow. Privacy relies on your identity being known, but your activities remaining unknown.
Reply to That ||
false, the reason we don't torture has absolutely nothing to do with non-expectation of reciprocity. we should not torture because it is evil.
besides, who is the real "cultural enemy", who has mass-murdered the most innocents in this fake "war on terror". It isn't any muslim nation, and the "Taliban" being fought now is not the one that hosted bin Laden. We of the U.S. are creating more "Taliban" (disgruntled Afghans who resent foreign occupier and who are thus taking up arms). This "War on Terror" is about money and and having a rallying point for an ideology and an excuse to remove our liberties. It is not in any way about fighting those who attacked us nor is it making us more secure. It is a lie, a treason committed against We the People.
Great. More outsourcing. Why pay American torturers when third world countries will do it for much less?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Maybe I'm just a cynical person...well, there's no maybe about that...but I never thought the FBI or any arm of the government would stop to get a warrant for anything if they wanted it badly enough. I don't think 'little pieces of paper' will be a prevention when somebody on the inside needs something badly enough, and I think if people think otherwise they are being naive.
I once spoke to an IRS employee who worked with the bureau in the 80's and he said the IRS could get anything it wanted, and that part of their threat was that they would "ruin lives" if they needed to. I also recall a business associate who dealt with the IRS in the 70's and again in the 90's. He was incredibly wealthy, as in, 'private corporate jet' wealthy, and he told me, 'if the government wants to take you down, don't fight it. Settle. You absolutely cannot win. They can do whatever they want'.
Interesting that we never see any studies of the effectiveness of such unconstitutional laws and the cost of FBI and other law enforcement agencies infringing on our rights. It's like the US air marshal program and the cost associated with it. $200 million per arrest @ 4 per year hardly seem effective nor cost worthy and probably hasn't made anyone safer, never mind the conviction rate that's enough to make you sick.
When one fights cultural enemies who don't play by the rules, it becomes reasonable to abandon the rules which only exist for ones own benefit (expectation of reciprocity).
I expect my government to play by its rules. There are only two things that separate the US from "the terrorists": the rules those groups adhere to and the money they have available. If the US decides we should play by whatever rules "the enemy" plays by, then the only thing separating us from those enemies is money, and the US won't always be the richest country on the planet. I don't want to have to follow the richest country's rules; I want to follow rules I agree with. The US needs to stop fucking around with other countries' governments and stick with leading by example.
"How are NSLs different from subpoenas? Are NSLs subject to limitations?" "..." "NSLs, however, are subject to two significant limitations. First, they are only available for authorized national security investigations (international terrorism or foreign intelligence/counterintelligence investigations), not general criminal investigations or domestic terrorism investigations. Second, unlike administrative subpoenas and grand jury subpoenas, NSLs can only be used to seek certain transactional information permitted under the five NSL provisions, and NSLs cannot be used to acquire the content of any communications."
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Why would you believe any information obtained through torture? If you are innocent and someone is torturing you won't you eventually confess and even make up false accomplices? And if you are a terrorist who believes in whatever cause wouldn't you still make up false accomplices to make the torture stop while still protecting your buddies so they can continue their causes? I don't see how torture can be useful for anything except maybe to eventually force someone into admitting something you already knew... or... thought you knew. How do we know there aren't innocent people rotting in Gittmo today b/c someone (maybe a terrorist, maybe not) just didn't want to drown and shouted out their name?
The only way to accomplish your goals is with term limits, public funding
It's actually easier and harder than restructuring campaign finance and service terms. Which is to say, while I completely agree with your statement that there are systemic problems, what you're talking is neither necessary nor sufficient to change.
Only one thing will really change this: the general population of the united states is going to have to take a different attitude towards law enforcement and terrorism than we have now.
Right now we're a country largely full of people who firmly believe that they'll never be unfairly accused of a crime, that FBI and the police are always good guys, that abuses of power are rare, but that the world is a thicket of bad people who are just waiting to get them, and that we're just too soft on criminals, and if we didn't have all these pesky legal technicalities in place, by God, we could get some *real* justice meted out and finally be safe.
Count on it: this very election cycle, there's going to be people running as "tough on crime" and "protecting America against terrorists." Opposing candidates who actually care about due process and understand the principles behind why we have it are going to be characterized as "soft." And you know what? It. Will. Work.
We have people in power who compromise civil liberties because we not only don't kick up a storm when they happen, but because we have have an electorate that actively wants them eroded.
Tweet, tweet.
We of the U.S. are creating more "Taliban" (disgruntled Afghans who resent foreign occupier and who are thus taking up arms).
You might add that, thanks to Wikileaks, we now know that Pakistan is giving our tax dollars directly to terrorists as well.
We're certainly making things a lot worse, and we find out new and interesting dynamics of that every single week.
Don't worry about the FBI. What you should be concerned about is Google, which by my estimation is really just a business front for the NSA in its quest to 'know all'. Think about it: Google will happily and for free store or provide you services for:
- Email (gmail)
- Videos (YouTube)
- Files (Google Drive or whatever its called now)
- Audio communications (Google Voice)
- Photos (Picasa Web Albums)
- Friendship communications (Orkut and Buzz)
- Personal documents like spreadsheets, etc (Open Office)
- etc etc.
Of course one of the fine print actions that Google 'will do for you' is to mine the contents of whatever you entrust to them. They say that they are looking for information in order to create metadata in order to advertise to you, but no doubt they also are looking for activities, intentions and content that is either a threat (terrorism), subversive (damn commies) or illegal (child porn, etc.)
You might not think that 'Do no evil' Google is really the bad NSA, but this is similar to how they've operated in the past when they want to accomplish something very public in a non public manner. Recall their deal with Howard Huges in the 1970s to recover a soviet sub from the bottom of the ocean under the guise of operating a new mineral mining method.
If you look at the reported income for Google this is also suspicious. These revenue numbers are HUGE and when you evaluate it there needs to be a LOT of people clicking on paid ads or purchasing Google search appliances, etc. My own research indicates that the majority of people I've asked don't click the ads that often, leading the question of where is this nation of ad-clickers anyways? Perhaps it is just a way to launder, er feed money into an organization that is of immense intelligence value but simply doesn't have a true revenue model that provides the income that they claim.
I'd love to be wrong, so please show me how I could be so fooled by my suspicions.
they wouldn't get much from my isp. i run linux from scratch on a vm with darknet because i don't like how my isp tries to dictate the dns server i use. a clear and obvious sign they glean info from user habits to sell to marketing firms. as far as data security goes the file system is loop-aes. i guess if i wanted to be paranoid i could point my cache to /dev/null. there is a howto for a tor based vm on encrypted file system that is a lot like my environment here: https://svn.torproject.org/svn/torvm/trunk/doc/design.html
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
"Safety is the tool of the Tyrant, no one can be against safety". I tell my children to be ready, maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow but someday the bullets will start flying again, as they did when this country began. It's only a matter of enough people missing enough meals and enough people not having a place to sleep safely. Those that want to "protect" us, from others as well as ourselves, have themselves become paranoid tyrants.
So we really shouldn't have moral high ground? We should be as bad as our worst enemy?
We should completely forget about human rights, ethics, and morals when it is convenient.
An eye for an eye, and all that.
So if we torture how can we really raise the oppositional rhetoric against people torturing us? Accepting your world view, I would have to be completely apathetic and ambivalent to others torturing our people. Who cares if they torture us, since we torture them!
But then again patriotism and nationalism have absolutely nothing to do with reason, or logical consistency (as evident by my fellow Americans blathering about being #1, when statistics no longer back this up in basically any area anymore).
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I know the agencies can decrypt anything they want to for standard SSL encryption, and probably will if you're red-flagged somehow, but if I understand this article correctly, they can't make legal use of this information without a formal NSL letter first, right?
In that case, if I am using, say https Gmail, can the ISP technically answer such a NSL letter?
The Google IP address is visible in the TCP/IP headers, but isn't the sender and recipient name and IP hidden behind SSL?
Or are the senders and recipients visible because Gmail is using POP4 or whatever protocol that the ISP can read?
Anarchy transitions to oligarchy even quicker than the others. In fact I'd consider it more of a in-between state on the way from something else to oligarchy.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Therefore no amount of public financing is going to work unless the government bribes them instead of the corporations. Politicians are owned by "the people" and it's only a matter of which people.
Of course you brought up the crux of the matter. Where is the "openness" that Obama promised. But for that matter, where are ANY of the other campaign promises he made? The guy is a professional bullshitter, and we deserve better for a President.