Slashdot Mirror
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'm really saddened and angered by the continuous erosion of our civil liberties. I've seen this decline for a while 9/11, but it keeps getting worse & worse. And sadly, it really seems to be independent of the party in power. Total government overreach.
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.
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.
Thre is already a name for it - totalitarianism, the involvement of the state in all aspects of life.
The most you can hope for is a civil suit. The process and any penalties will be paid by tax dollars to the reporters.
Its over. The entire justification for when we STOLE the states from the king of England was that we were going to live system where the people govern themselves.
But thats over now:
1. The ratio of citizen to congress critter has risen steadily so that they can walk or run away from their constituents
2. The function of the Senate has drastically changed and more decisions are made there, further eroding the power of popular vote. 2 per state/6yr terms
3. The things we used to laugh at the Russian people for: Corrupt press, Corrupt travel restrictions, Reading Mail, Wiretapping, corrupt law enforcement are all S.O.P for our government now.
4. We used to laugh at the Russians for electing their leaders. Both candidates came from the same party and there was no real choice. Which is what we have here now.
5., We used to laugh at the Russians for infiltrating and subverting democracy groups. Thats what we do here now.
6. We used to laugh at the fact that no one there "owned" anything. With the value of everything here based on an arbitrary currency, it essentially the same thing.
7 There is a defacto get-out-of jail free card for every president in office or after term.
I have worked with the people who "watch over us". They are relentlessly dishonest and always convinced they are right. And they have only one lens to view anything: us vs them. And once you are 'them", they have no morality at all.
Try to enjoy your life. Try not to have kids.
I remember this with the Clipper Chip, and FBI Director Freeh. It is understandable that they want this -- makes their job a lot easier, and makes a lot more material to sift through.
However, there were the same issues with this wiretap stuff as with the Clipper Chip:
1: Bad guys getting access to the backdoor, just like back then, bad guys getting access to the LEAF (law enforcement access field, part of the key escrow mechanism.) When (not if) this happens, every single endpoint is wide open, and this becomes a national security issue when companies start getting hacked wholesale and there is nothing they can do except power off and unplug.
2: Abuse. Of course, this would allow anyone with access to this a lot of material they can scoop up, and sell.
3: There would be -billions- spent by rogue nations, criminal organizations, and others to get at those master keys. When the money is at stake, it will turn into a game of finding out what people are even close to the master keys, and kidnapping their family. The billions spent on compromising an update repository in order to get backdoored programs into the target would reward the rogues with trillions.
Securing the master keys is one thing. Keeping them secure while in use for massive eavesdropping and protecting them from leaks is a very difficult task. Someone in the chain can be compromised eventually, which leads us to point #1.
Plus, we already have a shitload of ways that an endpoint can be compromised. A lot of software updaters send a unique computer ID. It doesn't take much to have a certain ID get a slightly modified signed update while everyone else gets something else.
"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.