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FBI Considers CALEA II: Mandatory Wiretapping On Every Device
Techmeology writes "In response to declining utility of CALEA mandated wiretapping backdoors due to more widespread use of cryptography, the FBI is considering a revamped version that would mandate wiretapping facilities in end users' computers and software. Critics have argued that this would be bad for security (PDF), as such systems must be more complex and thus harder to secure. CALEA has also enabled criminals to wiretap conversations by hacking the infrastructure used by the authorities. I wonder how this could ever be implemented in FOSS."
Given how well the intelligence agencies have 'protected' us these last two decades...
Isn't it time to get rid of these assholes? Or at least save some money on our fake no help agencies?
You could cut half of the people at the FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, FEMA, TSA, DOD, And several others i can't think of...
And we wouldn't notice any difference at all. None..
This is where a true police state begins. An ear and eye in every device. Wake up before it's too late.
Never allow laziness of police forces to erode your civil liberties and freedoms.
Why do critics need to argue anything? A simple no, get lost, should suffice. You don't need reasons to refuse law enforcement access to your communications, they need reasons to access them in the first place.
"I wonder how this could ever be implemented in FOSS"
How many phones have a completely FOSS operating system????
Easy solution: Lifetime imprisonment for anybody that disables this. And the death penalty for anybody that instructs others how to disable it. After all, these people are dangerous privacy-terrorists that want to keep things from the government!
I am quite serious. The idea at all is the last stage of a surveillance state, where nobody gets any privacy, the government is the final arbiter of what behavior is acceptable and what is not, and though-crime becomes real. They can then threaten, remove and kill anybody they do not like at their leisure. Low-tech versions of this have existed before, namely in the 3rd Reich and in Stalinism. Say something the authorities do not like? Go to the KZ or Gulag. Quite a neat solution to a population that may have its own ideas on how it wants to be ruled.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why is the parent comment rated -1? You might not agree with it but that is not a valid reason for moderating it down. It is on topic opinion, not flamebait or troll.
This is censorship, plain and simple. I see how how moderation is used to enforce the groupthink here. Shame, for shame.
Here is news for you: "evildoers" will basically not be affected, as they will just work around these devices. It is ordinary citizens that are the target, as they do not have this opportunity. "Evildoers" will just experience a slight increase in the effort needed to do business. ON the other hand, this will create a nice set of possibilities to extort said normal citizens (sheep as yourself).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is such a wildly inappropriate idea that if it gets any legs at all the reasonable powers that be will jump on it and squash it good.
I cannot allow myself to believe we as a country are willing to seriously consider implementation of anything like this.
That's the exact thing I said with all of the illegal wiretapping and privacy eroding laws they've been passing. The fact that someone thinks it's a good idea is scary enough.
The terrorists have already won.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, it's in the realm of those who launder their dirty money through campaign 'contributions'. All policy originates from them.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"America is great because America is good, and when it ceases to be good it will cease to be great."
Of course America has made mistakes. But I always believed they were honest mistakes, by people who wanted to do good, but were wrong, or misguided, and we would eventually feel shame about these mistakes and work to correct them. Think Japanese internment camps, segregation. Awful things that show the inherent goodness of America by their correction.
The day that idea died for me was the day in 2005 when Alberto Gonzalez's DOJ letters became public. That we're going to use mealy-mouth lawyer words to call obvious torture "not torture." That's pretty much it. Game over. We are not the good guys anymore, who can make any claim to a moral high ground.
The slippery slope is so far above us we can't even see it anymore. Of course all the PATRIOT Act powers that were "just supposed to be for terrorists" got used for regular criminal investigations of drug dealers. And then we've got Obama assassinating people with drones, and it takes a Rand Paul filibuster to get the White House to say "meh, maybe we won't launch missiles at Americans on American soil." Of course a few weeks later some bombs go off in Boston and even Paul changes his mind and says its just fine to shoot missiles from the sky at a robber fleeing a liquor store. The RoboCop dystopia isn't even tongue-in-cheek anymore. At least the ED-209 told you to drop your weapon before it shot you anyway.
Oh and when the criminal bomber was caught (allegedly, etc etc) we've got John McCain recommending "enemy combatant" status so we can indefinitely detain and torture him. When that happened I had just finished reading McCain's memoir, "Faith of my Fathers" a large part of which is about his own imprisonment and torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese and I had a really tough time reconciling the man in the book with the man on the TV screen.
Our "rights" don't really exist anymore, because the state can just lawyer language them away. Of course you have a right to a fair trial! Unless you're an "enemy combatant." Cruel and unusual punishment? Torture? Absolutely forbidden! Thankfully waterboarding and sleep deprivation aren't torture, they're "enhanced interrogate techniques." And of course you're secure from search and seizure of your papers where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, your email doesn't necessarily count as "papers," and they're stored on somebody else's server. And while you may assert a reasonable expectation of privacy over your email, the DOJ says you don't, so they can just read your email as they want, because they get to decide your level of expectation for you.
So today, that the FBI want a backdoor into our communications? Not surprising in the least. I'd be surprised if they didn't. Par for the course.
And now, thanks to this post, I'm probably on a watch list somewhere.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Watergate whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg:
“Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life. (And his aide Henry Kissinger was not the last American official to win an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.)
He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal.
That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to “incapacitate me totally” (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama,with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders. they have all become legal.
http://www.juancole.com/2011/06/ellsberg-all-nixons-crimes-against-me-now-legal.html
The difference was that under the Third Reich and Communism your neighbor who did not like you for some reason could also report you and have you put into a concentration camp. Unless there is a huge culture change in the US, where squealers and informers are still looked down upon, that system is not likely to work, because there would not be enough squealers and informers.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way, informers can report anonymously and then everybody fears everybody. I lived the first 22 years of my life in such a state and I was taught early about things that must not be spoken. It was sad to find out after the Cold War that in the East Germany it was much worse, almost every 3rd comrade was an informer for STASI.
Please don't say "It can't happen to us" because it can - and then it's too late.
I never said that it can't happen here, but that it is unlikely unless the American fundamental attitude toward tattle-tales changes dramatically. When the founding fathers of this country threw off the authoritarian yoke of the British king, the country was infected with a spirit of individual freedom that has never existed in Europe. Germans always acceded to authority and the power of the state far more readily than the much more independent-minded Americans. That is why there is no other country on earth that has the equivalent of the Second Amendment in their Constitution. Maybe this will change in a generation or two.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.