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FBI Quietly Forms Secretive Net-Surveillance Unit
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from CNET: "CNET has learned that the FBI has formed a Domestic Communications Assistance Center, which is tasked with developing new electronic surveillance technologies, including intercepting Internet, wireless, and VoIP communications. 'The big question for me is why there isn't more transparency about what's going on?' asks Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco. 'We should know more about the program and what the FBI is doing. Which carriers they're working with — which carriers they're having problems with. They're doing the best they can to avoid being transparent.'"
Just a guess, but maybe they want the unit to remain secretive?
Perhaps translucent is more accurate. Everything they show us is distorted.
The basic problem, of course, is that if they were to do this out in the open so that people knew what was being monitored and how, they would do something to maintain their privacy and, according to the latest FBI Local Terrorist pamphlet, anyone who is overly concerned about their personal privacy is likely a terrorist. Add to that anyone who uses cash for their purchases, who questions authority and who claims their rights under the Constitution and you can lock up the majority of the public as local terrorists. They don't need to be charged, just detained long enough to put them into one of the hundreds of thousands of pre-made plastic coffins stacked up in FEMA yards for "just such an emergency."
Since one of the FBI's mandates is stopping police corruption, I assume that they will be monitoring the personal communications of police officers rather than the personal communications of persons with unfavorable political opinions.
That would be reasonable, wouldn't it?
Speaking of big questions, I have a small one.
... that's so very important ... that they can't just get a warrant for?
What do they hope to learn from this new super-secret surveillance unit
Why all the secrecy and all the cloak-and-dagger bullshit when you could have the full force (and legitimacy) of a court of law backing you up? What is the need for "new surveillance technologies" when you can present a court order to the ISP and capture everything to and from your suspect at the source?
This sounds more like CIA/NSA territory.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Imagine if you were a fisherman, and in your application for a fishing license you had to identify the specific fish ("Charlie Tuna" or "Mr. Limpet" or "Wanda" or "Moby Dick") you were going after.
It wouldn't be fishing anymore. It would be more like hunting in California, or, perish the thought, detective work.
Because it's easier to take, and apologize later, than it is to ask permission.
Hence the basis for all governmental / corporate / law enforcement / union activities -> for example, if an officer of the law demands something, even if the written law / case law is unclear, people will typically give it to him / her; later on, when sued, the officer can explain to the court that 'he / she didn't know they couldn't do that,' and is let off with the legal equivalent of a love tap. The damage, however, has already been done; and the people are now subject to 'jurisdictional creep,' where it is the burden of the common man to prove his rights / privileges in court, while simultaneously disproving the rights / privileges of his offenders (many of whom occupy higher places than the offended, with greater resources and connections).
The current rules for the small guy are "DO NOT, unless explicitly told to"; the current rules for everyone else are "DO, unless explicitly told not to." I imagine such legal disorder preceeded the fall of many of the larger governments throughout history.
I am John Hurt.
What do they hope to learn from this new super-secret surveillance unit ... that's so very important ... that they can't just get a warrant for? ...
This sounds more like CIA/NSA territory.
This sort of surveillance does sound more like what what you would expect out of the CIA -- which is hampered by federal laws limiting them to spying on international communications and foreign nationals -- or the NSA -- which has invested in a huge new facility after admitting that there's just not enough power to come close to breaking a significant amount of encrypted traffic. The big question is why the FBI would jump into something it's never been a major player in before.
Best guess: they're trying to update wiretapping. They've been getting increasingly alarmed and vocal about just how little wiretapping actually buys you now. If you really want to keep something secret, you can just use an https encrypted connection to any one of numerous services that keep no records and have no mechanisms for spying on their users.
They recently floated the idea of requiring backdoors be installed into such service, the way telecom hardware is legally required to support conventional wiretapping. that idea had no real support in technical or public circles. Even if you trust your government, it's much hard to game a system that requires someone to go to a location within the your country and physically connect to equipment owned and operated by a someone else than it is to find an exploit in a protocol that can be prodded by anyone online and which would have to be implement by everyone from Facebook to Club Penguin.
With no widespread support for spying-as-a-service, they're stuck traffic-tapping the hard way: inspect every packet for the start of an HTTPS handshake so you can break the connection, or somehow crack an encrypted stream with incomplete knowledge. They still have no idea how they would reliably accomplish either of these. However they do it, it will probably require new laws to make it feasible. It sounds like the program casts a wide net in an attempt to find something that works, and is trying to keep it quiet because they don't know what solution will rise to the top, or how knowledge gained about the process now could be used to defeat it technically or legally later.