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Privacy Advocates Protest FBI Warning of 'Going Dark' In Online Era
CWmike writes "CNET's Declan McCullagh reported last week on the FBI's argument that the massive shift of communications from the telephone system to the Internet 'has made it far more difficult for the agency to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities.' The law has already been expanded once, in 2004, to include broadband networks, but still excludes Web companies. The FBI says its surveillance efforts are in danger of 'going dark' if it is not allowed to monitor the way people communicate now. Not surprisingly, a range of opponents, from privacy advocates to legal experts, disagree — strongly. On key tech hitch with the plan, per ACLU attorney Mark Rumold and others: There is a difference between wiretapping phones and demanding a backdoor to Internet services. 'A backdoor doesn't just make it accessible to the FBI — it makes it vulnerable to others,' Rumold says."
'A backdoor doesn't just make it accessible to the FBI â" it makes it vulnerable to others.
Speaking of backdoors I've got these cool new Sony disks for your computer......
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
No. No goddamn panopticons.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Unconstitutional efforts to spy on citizens ended by progressing technology. I will have a nice little cry for the FBI tonight, right after my nightly one about RIAA lost profits due to piracy.
Great Intellect...
CALEA was basically a hand out to law enforcement, letting them sit back and eat doughnuts instead of going into the field when they need a wiretap. Now they are complaining that they do not get a similar hand out when it comes to the Internet, and dishonestly claiming that they do not want to revive the cryptowars? No thank you, FBI -- we are not going to give up secure communication systems or plant backdoors all over the Internet just because you long for the "good old days" when wiretapping-on-demand was enough to violate our privacy.
Palm trees and 8
... are you with us or with the terrorists?
I miss the days back when the only reason that our righteous free country would spy on our citizens or suspend our rights was to try to catch people working for evil governments who did things like spy on their own citizens and violate their rights. Back when it was easy to tell who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.
With all these small chips in our Civil Liberties and the growth of Government power and surveillance, does anyone get this feeling that maybe a couple of decades from now, folks will be looking back and shaking theirs heads and saying, "If we only knew back then that it would come to this."
First, the FBI gets a warrant for a particular "wiretap". This should be absolutely mandatory for what I'm about to propose.
Then, off a specific warrant, they go to whichever company the warrant lists, and either:
a) Install a packet-sniffer in front of the web server, logging everything to disk, which is then physically taken by the FBI as evidence - just like a conventional phone wiretap. This avoids the whole "anyone could use the backdoor" - if "anyone" can install hardware on the network, the 'security' is already broken so badly I had to use scare quotes.
or
b) go to the company, literally add code on a case-by-case basis to log a particular set of user's actions. This could include real-time alerts, if necessary. Oh, and the FBI is either the one doing the coding, or they pay standard rates for the service's programmers to do the job. This, again, avoids the security issue implicit to a government-mandated backdoor, by moving the "backdoor" from the computer level to the organizational level. It also does privacy better than a), because by being in the application layer instead of the network layer, it can be smart enough to only log the suspected users, not everyone.
This seems totally reasonable. The FBI gets the data they need (face it, there are always going to be times when they're justified in listening in on "private" communications), the internet companies only have to do anything if there's actually enough of a case for a warrant, there's no backdoors for a hacker to exploit, and, if the judges do their job right, everyone's privacy is maintained unless there's enough evidence to justify violating it.
And thus, by being at least mostly reasonable, it is guaranteed to not happen this way.
End fishing expeditions.
Have gnu, will travel.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The FBI can get a warrant if they've got evidence, but they want to snoop without them.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If they can already tap a broadband connection, they can see all the data anyway. Backdoors will only lead to people moving to TOR or something similar. Its only a quick download these days.
Who would have thought the FBI will help by mandating a backdoor that will free all information for everyone once it's hacked?
Korma: Good
The purpose of wiretaps is to capture information that is transient in nature and therefore lost after transmission. Online services are a different beast altogether, the data being more permanent in nature and therefore better suited to the traditional subpoena / search warrant model. Building surveillance capabilities into online services is like building surveillance capabilities into people's homes: invasive and unnecessary.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Actually, what's happened is that we peaked in availability. There was a point in the past where no one would have any idea how to get a hold of information about your whereabouts or if you put an envelope in a drop box two cities over with no return address it was as good as anonymous.
From 1996 to 2006...ish people started using the internet for a lot of stuff, and they did it largely unencrypted. Recent years have marked a shift towards encrypting everything (google using https for gmail by default and others), and because it's no longer as easy to analyse traffic patterns or see exactly what people are doing, they are worried it will go back to how it was: hard to track.
It's not that it will go dark, it's that it will once again become difficult. And frankly? That's fine. Right now we don't need more people watching us, we need people protecting us from the watchers.
Anyone out there know anything about IPDR and how the communications companies use it today?
Come on you know the lines...
This is not about establishing the panopticon, it is about maintaining it. We already established the panopticon decades ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALEA
Palm trees and 8
and they weren't even a right-wing country back then.
Land of the free.
Unless you're a terrorist. Only problem being that everyone is a potential terrorist, so best treat everyone with suspicion.
Everybody knows once you go dark, you never go back.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is the third time you've posted the same freaking article. We get it. It's been discussed. It's not news anymore.
Good luck. I can, right now have a heavily encrypted communication with several people over the internet that you will not be able to decrypt when the information is the most valuable to you. This is your own fault. You did not pressure Congress to fund the Sciences heavily to make sure we had the best and brightest here in the USA working for you. Instead you let them go off on their hunt on the constitution. You let the Fear engine get away from you and let the CIA have the ball with their Terrorism Bogeyman.
Now it's too late. Even a 13 year old kid in a basement has the tools he needs to make a secure encrypted communication channel that would take you months or even years to crack. Long after it was valuable to do so.
Want to fix it? Go to congress and scare the bejesus out of them, Get them to dump 20 to 30% of the Defense budget into Science and research. If we start now you can get back on top in about 10 to 15 years. It is the only way. If you dont, the bad guys will win. Get off your asses and scare the shit out of congress to get the funding, because if you actually talk to them like they were educated men, you will be wasting your time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Since the only domestic plots the FBI foiled were ones they set up themselves, the military recently killed foreigners planning attacks from the middle east so I think we really don't have to worry that much about terrorism. People on planes have shown that they will react and subdue a would-be terrorist so that isn't a big concern. As far as I can tell, the whole terrorist ball of wax is just a make work project for law enforcement much like the war on drugs.
"the FBI's argument that the massive shift of communications from the telephone system to the Internet 'has made it far more difficult for the agency to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities.'"
Or, exactly as DARPA intended it to be!
I mean, NSA already scans E V E R Y T H I N G on the internet. Let's consolidate our loss of privacy once and for all...
A pianist is walking around with two chips in his head, in order to be able to open his hands again.
Other people have eye-chips, hippocmpus, ... all sorts of things all over.
Should anyone have the power to control you like a THX1138 cop?
Someone needs to call these assholes (FBI/Federal Gov/Politicians) out for what they are. Traitors. Traitors to their country. Traitors to their oath. Traitors to their constituents.
Because that is what they are.
If you really want to keep your communications from the FBI, you can still always use a third-party local, secure ecryption system that the government can't easily crack. So they'll end up knowing anything they want to know about the people who don't think they have anything worth hiding from the government and NOTHING about whatever communications you choose to hide from their scrutiny. Well, they might know when it occured and maybe with whom, but they won't be able to crack the content. And if enough people object to their prying eyes, they'll find that they've driven most communications to use an ecryption method that neither they nor their proxies can crack in any reasonable time, so there will be a huge volume of "suspect" data: so much that they can't tell the difference between routine chats between business partners and chats between members of a terrorist cell discussing their evil schemes.
Allowing the FBI to wiretap the phone system was, at most, a minor inconvienience. Allowing tapping of the Internet is a much larger violation of privacy
Because phone taps had a physical location, you could control exactly who had access to it, just by securing the building.
Internet taps have no such limits, "secure" FBI accounts can be stolen and passwords can be hacked and nobody would even know until it was far too late
The only time a phone tap can "spy" on you is when you are on the phone, and we only really use the phone to talk to other people.
The internet on the other hand, is always on and contains multitudes more information than a simple phone call, including things that the police would normally need a separate warrant to look at, like the contents of your personal diary (on cloud storage) or a live video feed of the inside of your house.
Internet taps also remove the burden of individual warrants, With a phone tap you could only tap and record the single line that the warrant covers. The type of broad internet taps the FBI wants would be the equivalent of permanently tapping and recording every line at the exchange, and saving the recordings "just in case"
Of course, if you work in law enforcement, this is your daily work. Everyone lives in their personal bubble, and wants their daily work to be easier. However, in the big picture, spying on individuals is *supposed* to be hard.
Another point that people often forget: The government (or the FBI) is not some single entity. It is composed of individual people: some good, some evil, most just schmucks trying to get along. You cannot trust the government, simply because it contains some individuals who are not trustworthy. This is another reason that things like wiretaps should be difficult.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I, for one, welcome the FBI surveillance efforts going dark.
Let the FBI go solve murders, counterfeiting, kidnappings, and other legitimate activities.
What will happen is:
a) The FBI comes up with an idea. ...and implemented 3 years later under a different name.
b) The people complain.
c) The idea is dropped...
d)
Welcome to the USA. Home of the free.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/