Slashdot Mirror
Obama Wants Broader Internet Wiretap Authority
An anonymous reader writes "The White House plans to deliver a bill to Congress next year that will require Internet-based communication services that use encryption to be capable of decrypting messages to comply with federal wiretap orders. The bill will go beyond CALEA to apply to services such as Blackberry email. Even though RIM has stated that it does not currently have an ability to decrypt messages via a master key or back door, the bill may require them to. Regarding this development, James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology commented on the proposal, saying, 'They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.'"
Just a few days ago they raid the anti war movement and now right before the election they want to discuss this? This is a politically stupid time to talk about broader wiretap authority!
the more they stay the same (or get worse).
At least they are trying to make it legal. I'm sure the TURRISTS won't just use standalone encryption.
Now they want to direct all the spy agencies on the new "terrorist" the American citizen. They want to bug our houses, tap our phones, point satellites and drones at us, have informants stalk us, and feed the information back to the local police so that if we break even the slightest most esoteric arcane law we get raided, arrested etc.
Replace "Obama" with "Bush" and it's "Bush Wants Broader Internet Wiretap Authority." and the reason is to help law enforcement? Privacy and civil liberties should be given up to help the police put us in jail easier? They have to do a better job justifying the unlimited surveillance powers they claim to need. There aren't that many terrorists, unless they plan on going back to the 60s and raiding all the anti war movement hippy types and Alex Jones listeners who happen to know what encryption is.
There is an FBI already. There is an NSA already. If it's a national security concern the NSA already can crack the encryption so why do we have to make it so easy that any 2 bit local cop can do it? If it's about national security I'm sure they already can crack most of it if not all of it. If it's about law enforcement then it's not worth the sacrifice. There aren't enough criminals to justify it and most criminals aren't using encryption.
The only way they can justify this that I can see is with the "It's more efficient, it saves money", unfortunately even if it does save money it doesn't offer anything to the citizen. It doesn't make us feel safer and probably doesn't actually make us safer either. For a lot of us it will make us feel less safe because whenever a person feels under the microscope they usually feel less safe.
Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
Of course, the New York Times article is way better than the Faux News article but my submission this morning turned into a paywall.
Bad, bad, very bad idea. Every academic says this is stupid, again from the original article:
Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, pointed to an episode in Greece: In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s.
The government is trying to protect us by forcing us to be less secure and more vulnerable. That logic simply does not follow. I'm not against responsible internet wiretaps but this is the opposite of responsible.
My work here is dung.
the same shit happens. Disagree with the government, you end up in jail/raided/etc. ... WTF? At least Soviet Union had a law about disagreeing with the government, so at least you'd get a day in court.
The terrorists will develop their own encryption schemes so using wiretaps would be completely worthless anyway. The mafia is smart enough to outsmart this, street gangs are smart enough, terrorists are smart enough. This is to watch the civilian population like you and me.
What I don't get about all this Blackberry-encryption-fuss: if Terrorists really care about encrypting their communications, there are free tools on the interwebs that will let them do so. These tools can not in any way be breached by the government or the service provider. The fact that this is so, is also well-known.
Thus I am forced to conclude that any terrorist that understands the need for encryption, also understands the need for encryption that he himself has total control over, and thus would not be relying on RIM to secure his communications.
In conclusion: this will not prevent terrorists from communicating securely. Now, Obama, go back to your health care reform and struggling economy.
Gee, where have we heard these arguments before?
Palm trees and 8
.. except for a specific and clear "antisurveillance" ideology which really only exists among small groups of idealists.
'Greenism'? Surveillance would be brilliant to monitor emails for emissions regulation avoidance. Republicans? Hey, gotta catch those crooks who threaten the property rights of honest people. Democrats? Human society can only be nice if we can detect and catch those who might harm it or escape their responsibilities to their fellow man.
So whoever you vote for: Surveillance is what you're going to get, because it is found to be useful.
It is the natural tendency of political power to expand and consolidate over time. History has confirmed this over and over again. Like a mega-corporation hungry for more control over the market, government will keep pushing to expand their revenue and power over the people, like clockwork, year after year.
There's a reason why the elite at the top of the pyramid are swimming in wealth, and it's not because they're satisfied with the amount of control they have over the populace. Government is a business, and like any business, their primary objective is profit. The difference, of course, is that government holds the special right to generate market share through coercion, rather than persuasion.
Hope. Was not that the so called banner from 'Democrats' during their endless waa waa about Bush. Not much needs to be said. Gitmo? Ha. Iraq? Ha. Afganistan, Ha.
Obama is gone after 4 years, and will be hated by both sides.
We`re all equal
Hey America,
How is that Hope and Change working out for you?
Sincerely,
George Bush
how is all this "Change" working out for you?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I, like so many others, had the audacity of hope that Obama was a good man and interested in a better America... a second coming of JFK. (Yeah, I know there are people who will say JFK was the anti-christ.) But, instead of his promised removal of Bush administrations attacks on our freedoms and privacy, he persisted in it and defended it. Some people said "but this is normal! He is probably reviewing it before he makes changes!" How about now? No? Illegal wiretapping program is still running. And now he wants MORE.
So, Obama and other players in government HATE our freedom and HATE our privacy and will stop at nothing until both are gone. They make claims of defending and protecting our freedoms while they take them away. They make claims of "terrorists" hating our freedoms, yet the only ones who are attacking them are our own government. ... and still no one cares. We are all too busy trying to figure out how and why we are all getting obese and getting diabetes to concern ourselves with where the government and big business is taking our country.
When (if?) conservatives say "the government should not have that power", what they mean is "the liberals currently in government should not have that power, but it is okay for our side".
When (if?) liberals say "the government should not have that power", what they mean is "the conservatives currently in government should not have that power, but it is okay for our side".
Both conveniently forget the problem of not whether YOU will not abuse the power when asking for it, but once granted whether or not those elected AFTER you are gone will abuse the power. For those playing at home, the answer is invariably "YES".
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
What does the DNC-NBC say about it?
Nothing.
I'm guessing that's some regurgitated joke about MSNBC. If it is, you didn't even bother to check their front page. They seem to be running the regular AP story about it. Look, when the New York Times are the only ones willing to get off their asses and actually do some work in order to garner eyeballs, it's hard to find other sources. Even the Fox News article appears to be entirely based off the New York Times article. Even the MSNBC article (and I'm guessing AP at large) cites them:
The Times said the Obama proposal would ... The Times said that some privacy and technology advocates say the regulations would create weaknesses in the technology that hackers could more easily exploit.
My work here is dung.
If the white house and the rest of the government want to continue to litigate our freedoms away, the least they could do is show how these programs actually have caught real terrorists. Because, quite frankly if they can't even show that, they are eroding our rights away for nothing other than more control. There are several reasons why we haven't had a terrorist attack since 9/11 and none of those are thanks to the government.
A) Natural stupidity. Terrorists aren't exactly smart, remember the "times square bomber" who used as his detonation device.... firecrackers? Yeah, it takes planning to pull off an attack and quite honestly the terrorists don't have that ability.
B) Passengers in public transit. If you look like you are going to blow up or hijack a plane, the passengers will take you down. Ever since 9/11 people associate hijacking = run into a building rather than the pre-9/11 mindset of "do nothing, wind up in Cuba, get on a plane back home".
C) Terrorists aren't common. This idea that there are millions of terrorists trying to kill you all the time is laughable and has no basis in fact.
Granted, these laws are pure BS no matter how many "terrorists" they've caught, but if the government can't even show a single terrorist caught using these, and a real terrorist that could actually cause serious harm, the citizens should strike these laws down even faster.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"Hope and change" my freckled ass.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Hey Obama, spare any change?
Oh, right, America's attention span is so low that they forgot that they were holding hands in a circle chanting all the slogans and catch-phrases spewed by his campaigners.
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
America, you'll get fooled again
As long as they have their Sunday Night Football, we won't have anything to worry about.
If a user wants unbreakable encryption, it is easy to do. There is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Unbreakable encryption predates the modern computer by about a half century. It was invented by the US Army Signal Service for use in World War I. It is commonly called the "one time pad".
It has to be used correctly, or it becomes breakable. It also has logistics issues. The key material has to be physically transported and physically protected.
However, the technology is well known and has been for nearly a century.
Somebody ought to tell our technology-challenged public officials about it.
The genie's out of the bottle already: with Android and a crypto package, any determined person can put together a mail client good enough for a "dark communication" (or find someone to do it... quite cheap, it's like no more than 3-4 men*days worth of work).
Either they are stupid enough (to even attempt to legislate PI=3) or... what the hell I'm missing from the picture?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The list can go on. Thinking that the Democrats are for personal freedom is outdated thinking. Both major parties are led by totalitarian control freaks.
I want to be very clear on this statement, on behalf of GNU Telephony. It is not simply that we will choose to openly and publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption directly to the public worldwide as it is needed especially in nations, such as the United States, where basic human freedoms seem most threatened.
To fully understand the nature of such surveillance and societies, imagine being among several hundred million people who each wake up each day having to prove they are not a "terrorist" by whatever arbitrary means the government has decided to both define the terms of such a crime and whatever arbitrary means they might choose to define you as such. It is a society who's very foundation is built on the idea of everyone being guilty until proven innocent. It is the imposition of an illegitimate society, and one that probably will ultimately require a revolutionary response.
David Alexander Sugar
Chief Facilitator
GNU Telephony
Who says there are only 2 parties? Usually.......it's the same 2 who keep saying there are only 2.
The United Arab Emirates, followed by their huge cousin Saudi Arabia, are shutting down Blackberry until RIM lets them spy on its data in realtime. RIM has been able to argue it doesn't have such a backdoor feature. Obama has the clout to force this Canadian company to create one. And then the Saudis and the rest of their medieval tyranny neighbors will spy on us. They don't need no steenkin' warrants. And neither does Obama, if he personally decides it's a "state secret".
--
make install -not war
As betterunixthanunix says above, we've already seen the abject failure of the Clipper chip in the US. In the UK they tried to pass a "key escrow" bill which would have made it illegal to send anything encrypted without lodging a copy of the key with the government first. Campaigning got this bill defeated several times, and so instead we got RIPA which means law enforcement can oblige you to hand over decryption keys (or you go straight to jail).
Huge amount of material here:
http://www.fipr.org/rip/
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
First things first: the encryption horse has left the barn so long ago that all traces of the barn's foundation have turned to dust. Any reasonably competent adversary will have unbreakable encryption. The US government has helped with standards like AES, even. A large potion of the 'net traffic is already encrypted - every SSL session is encrypted at the ends of the chain, untappable once it's in the network. Changing that mechanism now into something that can be tapped will recreate the whole key escrow debates of the early nineties. The infrastructure required then was enormous, it would be exponentially harder now.
The only thing that makes sense is forcing large scale commercial communications companies to escrow keys, so that casual terrorists can have their communications hoovered up with everybody elses, and then analyzed by NSA in their spare cycles. This will catch a few proto-terrorists, I presume.
With this proposal I have crossed two lines, the first is questioning the governments motives, and the second now questioning their competence
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The sad part is that people will be disappointed in Obama (as they will be disappointed in all politicians) and will vote for the other party that started all this shit in the first place.
The "shit" actually started with Obama's party, but started long before GW Bush was even born.
Study your history son, and you'll find that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the instigator of the US federal government's hardest turn and acceleration towards the path of this kind of tyranny.
"Patriots trying to protect the Constitution from "domestic enemies""
And if their fertilizer bomb happens to kill all the kids in a daycare center that happens to be in a federal courthouse, well, I guess the ends justify the means.
Motivations don't make a terrorist, tactics do.
... for the slashdot community. As a part of the conservative slashdotter minority, I came to this thread fully expecting to see most people coming out in Obama's defense on this, or trying to excuse it somehow, but I saw nothing of the kind. Rather than pile on, I'll just say that I admire people who consistently back principles rather than personalities.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
And get all your friends to do the same. If enough people start writing in and telling the government that they DON'T want their civil liberties violated, maybe the government will start listening. Especially if you put a couple of bits of paper with pictures of presidents on them inside the envelope...
I love how the OP gave this article a title of "Obama Wants . . ." (well, the submission used "US President wants. . ."). Not the FBI or the DOJ or the NSA, or even "Feds Want . . ." in order to be comprehensive; but Obama. As if this was some devious idea Obama had while dining on babies, rather than something the law enforcement and national security comunities have been working up for more than a half-decade. Of course he's responsible for the actions of the administration while he's president; but that's a long way from this being part of his nefarious plan for fascism. I looked for the quote from Obama or a spokesperson of his in TFA -- something, *anything* indicating this was an initiative specifically coming from him -- but couldn't find it. Nonetheless, just as the OP intended, 90% of the replies have been about Obama, rather than about the actual regulations. Way to be manipulated, folks. Given this, how unsurprising that the story link accompanying the submission was to Fox News, even though that Fox News story does absolutely nothing more than quote a story in the NYT.
And to head it off at the pass -- it shouldn't be necessary, but someone here will try it anyway -- I can't stand Obama. I think he's been terrible in a variety of ways. I just also can't stand people who are intellectually dishonest in an effort to score political points.
By law, the US government publishes a report each year on all lawful wiretaps, Federal and state. Here is an excerpt from the latest report: "Public Law 106-197 amended 18 U.S.C. 2519(2)(b) to require that reporting should refect the number of wiretap applications granted for which encryption was encountered and whether such encryption prevented law enforcement officials from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted pursuant to the court orders. In 2009, one instance was reported of encryption encountered during a state wiretap; however, this did not prevent officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications." In other words, there was just one lawful wiretap last year where communications were encrypted and even that did not stymie law enforcement. The proposed law is not about aiding law enforcement, it's about perfecting the surveillance society, where all communications are filtered for suspicious content.
While the Bush Administration certainly pushed for major increases in intrusiveness, it wasn't new with them either - Louis Freeh from the FBI were pushing this kind of thing under the Clinton Administration as well, and presumably the Bush 41 and Reagan administrations. The civilian surveillance enthusiasts aren't just up in the political structure of the Executive Branch - they're down at the operational levels in the FBI and NSA, and of course the kinds of people that get picked to run the FBI are part of that. The NSA wanted to prevent Communists from having eavesdropping-resistant conversations, but they've long since figured out that there aren't really any significant Commies around any more. On other other hand, the FBI is heavily into eavesdropping, primarily for the Drug War, secondarily for Gambling(!), and also for other crimes which make up a high fraction of their rhetoric but only a few percent of their actual reported wiretap approvals.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But yes, the Surveillance State folks have been active under both Democratic and Republican Administrations. They were highly visible under Bill Clinton, when Louis Freeh was heading the FBI and trying to run the Crypto Wars, using Commie spies as an excuse but the Drug War as the major actual user. And big big kudos to the couple of guys at Netscape who put SSL into the browser, and to everybody who told the Clinton Administration that online commerce needed it, and to the Clinton folks who understood that the Internet technology boom was what was making their economic management look good so they shouldn't let the FBI mess with it. And a big Boo Hiss to the apparatchiks who put all the surveillance stuff back into the Patriot Act as soon as the Bush Administration had an excuse to do it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The difference between Obama and Bush is that Bush was everything that he promised to be, and Obama is not. And no, neither of those are good things at all.
Check your premises.