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FBI Quietly Forms Secretive Net-Surveillance Unit

Posted by timothy on from the indefatigable-declan dept.

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.'"

25 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Ummm by globalist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just a guess, but maybe they want the unit to remain secretive?

    1. Re:Ummm by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Just a guess, but maybe they want the unit to remain secretive?

      Which is fine when you're conducting foreign intelligence operations. However, the FBI's charter is to investigate private citizens within the United States. Given their track record, I don't think anything they do should be opaque:

      They consider anyone who protests the government a terrorist, recently helped bust protesters for terrorism in Chicago -- which in actuality they were busting them for making beer. In their own home. They break federal laws so often that they had to change the laws so the FBI could continue to get convictions -- they still conceal evidence from defense attorneys to this day, and increasingly call such evidence off limits "due to national security". The FBI was instrumental in the passage and current use of the Patriot Act, which prevents citizens from even knowing the evidence presented against them, as the Constitution prescribed. I could go on, but really, I think you get the point: The FBI is one of the most corrupt law enforcement agencies in the world. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country worldwide. The Innocence Project routinely finds people who have been sitting 20 or 30 year prison terms for crimes they can prove beyond reasonable doubt they did not commit. The FBI's response has been to open case files and monitor everyone who comes in contact with the project. Anyone who shows the FBI as a corrupt organization quickly finds themselves facing trumped up charges of tax evasion, drugs, or even copyright infringement: Whatever it takes to silence their critics.

      I mean, I could go on... it's not hard to find examples of FBI agents engaging in activities that in any other civilized country would be grounds for imprisonment... and that was pre-9/11. Since then, they've enjoyed practically blanket-immunity for civil rights violations, and it shows. Any citizen of this country that thinks the FBI is anything but a bunch of thugs with a huge budget and no ethical constraints is deluding themselves.

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    2. Re:Ummm by joocemann · · Score: 2

      When government acts and hides its actions from its citizens, is when that government is not Democratic.

      Land of self justified intelligence operations, like before the Intel Oversight Act of 1974, which mattered for a good 25 years and is now regularly ignored thanks to out governmental failure to do its job.

      Word to the offended: Don't buy a gun, you cant win that even in your wildest dreams. And gold is for stupid people from 2000 years ago. Inform your peers, resist with peace, and call for a new way. Iceland just pulled off a constitution, bank, and politician, reboot ---- peacefully. The reason the last thing you heard about Iceland was bankruptcy 3 years ago is because a peaceful revolution of the people was happening and corporate media fears pure democracy and its examples when visible.

    3. Re:Ummm by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

      There was a time when copyright was a purely civil matter, and the FBI wouldn't have been involved at all. That was before the NET act.

  2. Transparency. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    '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.

    What are you talking about? This is the most transparent administration in history! (Source )

    1. Re:Transparency. by Lynchenstein · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Perhaps translucent is more accurate. Everything they show us is distorted.

    2. Re:Transparency. by causality · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Speaking of big questions, I have a small one.

      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?

      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
    3. Re:Transparency. by flaming+error · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Transparency. by lightknight · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
    5. Re:Transparency. by geekoid · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You mistake whats going on.

      This is to get technology so when they get a warrant they can gain access. A warrant to get into the new fizzjingle device does no good if you can't get the data of the new fizjingle device.

      They don't want people to know that can now access what had been the super secure fizjingle device.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    6. Re:Transparency. by Ghostworks · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  3. Submitted by an Anonymous Reader by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who is, I suspect, no longer anonymous to the FBI...

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:Submitted by an Anonymous Reader by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      > Who is, I suspect, no longer anonymous to the FBI...

      Neither am I. For real. Here's one product they use to monitor internet traffic on targets: Narus Insight.

      They already have all the capabilities discussed in the article, which is itself overly dramatic. Take a look at the product page for that software and see for yourself.

  4. why so secretive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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."

    1. Re:why so secretive? by c0lo · · Score: 2
      Duh. I fail to understand why so many are tricked into focusing on "why so secretive" and distracted from why net surveillance at all

      It's like saying: "yeah, I have no problem in being spied on as long as I know that I might been under surveillance!" (and I'm saying this as one that was born and grew up under one of East European communist regimes, with their secret police present in the shadow. What good its to know that Big Brother is watching you if you can do nothing?)

      --
      Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
  5. Police Corruption by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  6. Justice Department Budget request by kb1cvh · · Score: 5, Informative

    This appears to be the Justice department budget request for the project.

    http://www.justice.gov/jmd/2012factsheets/docs/fy12-national-security.pdf

    Time to spend more time improving Tor

    https://www.torproject.org/

    --
    Peter AI6PG
    1. Re:Justice Department Budget request by retroworks · · Score: 2

      Have tried Tor, found it promising but buggy. I think it would be cheaper and easier to have my computer auto-search random words from the dictionary when it's on idle. If 15% of people start using Tor, they'll either find a way to stop it or bug it or take it away. But no one can stop me from showing random interest, and no one can get me for surfing a specific site if my browser searches millions of sites randomly.

      --
      Gently reply
  7. Avoid? by Qubit · · Score: 2

    They're doing the best they can to avoid being transparent.

    Being opaque/translucent would suck. Wouldn't they want to be transparent, so that users don't see them or their effects on the network?

    I can see it now -- suspect gets a text that says "WE'RE IN YOUR VoIP PHONE, MONITORING YOUR PHONE CALLS, LOVE, THE FBI." Oh yeah, gonna catch a lot of crooks that way.

    --

    coding is life /* the rest is */
  8. It's not about warrants, or lack thereof by sirwired · · Score: 4, Informative

    This center isn't about obtaining intelligence without a warrant, it's about executing a warrant that the FBI has obtained. An old (and I mean old) wiretap involved nothing more than a wire recorder and a pair of alligator clips at Ma Bell's central office. This center appears to be tasked with devising ways to execute surveillance warrants when the suspect is using technology that doesn't currently have "hooks" to tap.

    What good is a packet trace if you can't turn the hex into useful data? How do you handle roaming VOIP? Are there currently "hooks" in the system for intercepting cellular data? You get the idea...

    Now, none of that means that this technology won't be put to nefarious ends after it's developed, but the stated intent is benign enough.

  9. This idea might work by Walt+Sellers · · Score: 2

    If the FBI wants to watch all the data, then:

    - They should just pay for all the hosting, backups and bandwidth.
    - Include surveillance in the terms of service.
    - Then offer the services to everyone for free.

  10. Re:VoIP encryption? by generica1 · · Score: 2

    It's not practical for VoIP providers to offer encryption most of the time, because their connections to the real POTS/PSTN is still just regular, wiretappable PRI/T1s at some point along the line. They have to interconnect with the real phone network at some point to be useful, and all calls therefore are still tappable.

    However, you could just use Zphone with ZRTP (or run your own PBX using FreeSWITCH to accomplish what you are looking for from a VoIP provider).

    --
    JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP IRRIGATE
  11. What's the next step? by interval1066 · · Score: 2

    So after they establish this bit of nonsense are they going to be empowered to put netizens on double secret probation?

    --
    Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
  12. FBI recruits,plans,funds& thwarts OWN terror p by FriendlyLurker · · Score: 2

    Your examples are comically ironic considering you are trying to justify FBI actions, given that the weight of evidence is in: "Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack, supplies them with the money, weapons and know-how they need to carry it out — only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI."

    http://www.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/singleton/

  13. Re:HEY! LOOKIT OVER HERE!!! Secret Internet Agents by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

    The extra z was accepted lingo in the piracy scene.

    Fifteen years ago.

    Just a little out of date, that's all.