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Plans For Widespread Monitoring of Communication In Europe Revealed
TrueSatan writes "A leak from the Clean IT project reveals how it has been subverted from its original, much more innocuous, goals into a surveillance horror story with democratic freedoms and personal rights being the victims."
The leaked document in question. Gems include member states repealing anti-filtering laws and a mandate that ISPs be held liable for not reporting terrorist use of their networks. The Clean IT Project counters that there's nothing to see here (amazingly, through a series of tweets with a journalist).
Problem solved.
An article from March 19, 2012 shows that The Ban On Encryption is already a Work In Progress.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
The problem in the intelligence community today is not finding new ways of getting the data -- in fact, the technology to do that has been installed in every telco switch and every internet access point since not long after AT&T started replacing phone operators with banks of programmable relays. The effort required to get the data is trivial.
Big-time wiretapping never went into US electromechanical phone switches. I had to look into this once. Until switches went digital, wiretapping was a huge pain for law enforcement. Court-ordered wiretaps required manual wiring at the distributing frame. New York Telephone billed law enforcement for wiretaps at leased line rates. When Guliani was a prosecutor going after the Mafia, they had serious budget problems paying for wiretaps. On one occasion, the FBI didn't pay their bill, and New York Telephone billed the party being wiretapped. That was one of the motivations for CALEA.
There was a very limited capability to listen in remotely by using the Automatic Line Insulation Test equipment. That equipment normally cycled through lines in the pre-dawn hours, when cables are damp, applying test voltages across the line and between line and ground. (This is the cause of the early morning "bell tap" problem with some low-end phones.) ALIT could be used remotely to test or listen in on a line. But an ALIT unit in the crossbar era was three racks of test gear, and a crossbar central office would typically only have two of them for 50,000 lines. Sometimes telcos would let the FBI use one for a while, but tying it up for any length of time interfered with operations. So dial-up wiretapping was strictly for emergencies.
Now we have wiretapping designed into everything.
The EU commission is not DIRECTLY elected, but neither is any other government in Europe. With the exceptions of a few presidents (most being powerless and appointed) no head of state/government is directly elected in Europe. De-facto, most governments are picked from parliament, though this is not a legal requirement in most states. The commission is in fact elected by parliament, although it is also at the same time appointed by the memberstates' governments. In most states in Europe, the prime minister is appointed (in some cases by the king/queen/president and in other cases by the speaker of parliament who is appointed in some other way), and then elected by parliament. This is actually not that much different. Although, it would clearly be better if the commission is taken from parliament from a democratic standpoint, some states does not seem to like the idea that much. But things are changing for the better.
Following the Lisbon treaty, the Commission president will be selected from the candidates fielded by the European parties starting with the next EP-elections in 2014. In addition to this, the future group (consisting of some of the EU foreign ministers) have also fielded the idea that the commission should be selected by the commission president and subject to the normal parliamentary scrutiny of a memberstate government (and presumably with a requirement to have one commissioner from each memberstate).
"Civis Europaeus sum!"