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).

Comments

The Only People Who Benefit From This

[GeneralTurgidson]

Are consultants and hardware manufacturers. The government has no idea what to do with this information, and its going to spend an enormous amount of money for what will end up being a data vault that is locked away because its too big of a failure to admit they were wrong in the first place to attempt this.

Re:The Only People Who Benefit From This

[Charliemopps]

And then the wrong person gets elected to office and this vault becomes your living nightmare. The problem with this sort of data collection isn't the benevolent intent of the present, it's the malevolent intent of the future.

Re:The Only People Who Benefit From This

[girlintraining]

They could always use it to source new episodes of CSI. "Zoom in on that packet! Right there, between the 1 and the 0 -- enhance that. We found the killer's digital fingerprint inside this captured packet. Gear up, let's go get this dirtbag!" Kidding aside, you're right but only to a point. There are few people who would deny that the Allied power's interception and decryption of the Axis' communications during WWII was invaluable in helping win the war. What isn't known is that many of those communiques still haven't been read. Even back then, the amount of information intelligence services had to sort through was enormous.

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. The amount of resources required to store the data is less trivial, but we already have massive data centers sitting in remote parts of the United States doing nothing but storing said information for various law enforcement agencies -- not that they're hard to find, just look for images that have been cut and pasted from other locations on satellite imagery, if they bother to hide them at all.

However, making use of that information has always been problematic -- and most intelligence failures, including 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma city, and a very long list of military intelligence SNAFUs in this country can trace their origins to the lack of analysis of the data. Converting raw digital data into actionable intelligence still requires a lot of man power. A substantial portion of the NSA, FBI, and CIA's budget is dedicated towards the very simple task of translating. As in, converting say, islamic into english. A more substantial portion is dedicated to people analyzing those translations, sorting through the massive amount of information, and compiling it into situation reports, which are then either posted internally to wiki-like data stores, or forwarded up the chain of command and assembled into briefings where management decides if its actionable. Only a small portion of their budget is dedicated to capturing and storing data -- and yes, that also includes all the birds they have orbiting.

Analysis of available information has always been the achilles heel of intelligence services. I doubt even 0.1% of the information stored in all those data centers is ever used. The rest just sits there, gathering dust, on the off-chance that someday, an analyst will push a button labelled "Tell me everything about X", and the drive with that information on it will spin up and spit it out into a report.

Re:The Only People Who Benefit From This

[Anonymous Coward]

The government has no idea what to do with this information

I keep on hearing this from posters here on Slashdot and elsewhere in the blogosphere or anywhere there is commentary on the subject.

"the data is going to be too big, to do anything useful with it" is a very common meme.

But this is so far from the truth. Just look at what Google has done with the disparate information on the net. In a sea of data it is very easy to find identifiable information of individuals from very little.

I started playing the "who is this guy emailing me, really" game after dealing with a bunch of "Craigslist Flakes". As a simple example: Just looking at X-Originating-IP in an email combined with Google can reveal a great deal of personal information about the sender.

The editors of Slashdot can even try to extrapolate data on me right now. Submissions I've posted, pages I've visited. They can look for my ip somewhere else on the net and try to associate it with a name. It's not an exact science since they are only going by my IP and it sometimes changes. But as with all things, that can be worked out. To Slashdot I am not really an Anonymous Coward.

The data collected by the government will be easily searched/correlated/whatever when they need it to be. It's not going to be too big.

Re:Just use encryption.

[Yvanhoe]

The next step is to ban it. Do not wait until it is too late to show your disagreement.

Re:Just use encryption.

[MightyMartian]

How could anyone meaningfully ban encryption? First of all, financial security is built on top of encryption algorithms. Second of all, they're algorithms. I would be like trying to ban F=MA.

yet another slippery slope

[kermidge]

I made a real try at reading the doc in a dispassionate, scholarly fashion, but couldn't make it past page ten: I kept seeing in mind's eye the substitution of other words for "terrorist," leading to "anybody we don't like" and ending with "everyone except us." Knowing that this and the many similar plans would have been a Stasi wet-dream didn't help.

Re:Just use encryption.

[penix1]

No, it would be more like you are guilty of whatever they are accusing you of BECAUSE you used encryption. Why would you encrypt it in the first place if you didn't have something to hide?

Re:Just use encryption.

[ThatsMyNick]

They can still track who you talk to, who your friends are, what websites you visit, who you call (assuming your calls encrypted, if not what you talk).
 
Encryption hardly solves the problem.

freedom lost

[reovirus1]

If they hated us for our freedoms, we must be pretty well liked by now.

Re:Just Ban Encryption - Has Already Started

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Don't forget about pumping the omnipresent cameras into facial recognition software, and dumping it all into tracking databases. This on top of character recognition tracking license plates.

Oh, you're gonna get Godwinned. Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, these all approve.

Re:Just use encryption.

[gizmonic]

The problem with that here in the USA is that people are completely clueless about their rights. The Fifth Amendment is there to protect the innocent from over zealous prosecution. The second someone on a jury buys the "why use it if you have nothing to hide" argument, they've essentially bought into the defendant being guilty and needing to prove innocence. Unfortunately, most of them can't think a thought deeper than the last 30 second commercial they saw, so good luck getting them to comprehend something with that level of importance.

Pirates and Terrorists

[fearofcarpet]

Some day I am going to have to explain to my son how we managed to defeat a genocidal megalomaniac bend on world domination, narrowly avoid nuclear annihilation, and rebuild an entire continent in the 20th Century, but that in the 21st Century somehow pirates and terrorists are the biggest threat to Western Civilization. But my biggest fear is that he is growing up in a world where the bar for personal privacy, security, and liberty has been set alarmingly low.

Those of us who experienced privacy in the pre-WWW, pre-datamining era--the before time, the long-long-ago--still have a viscerally negative reaction when we learn about how Company X is collecting information on us in some new-and-intrusive way. Even when it's to protect us from pirates and terrorists, we at least object to it even though we have, thus far, just rolled over, muttering under our breath as a glorified hall monitor looks at pictures of our naked bodies before we are allowed to board an airplane. And we still get angry when we find out that a government is spying on us and listening in to our conversations--digitally encoded or otherwise.

People born after 2000 will have no memory of a smart-phone-free world by the time they are of voting age. They won't find it unsettling that you have to enter a credit card number before you can log into your iThing or that their toaster needs to know their birth date. Let's just hope that the elderly continue to have a disproportionate influence in electoral politics--at least until I die.