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US Rep. Joe Barton Has a Plan To Stop Terrorists: Shut Down Websites (arstechnica.com)
Earthquake Retrofit writes: In an FCC oversight hearing, U.S. Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) asked Chairman Tom Wheeler if it's possible to shut down websites used by ISIS and other terrorist groups. He said, "Isn't there something we can do under existing law to shut those Internet sites down, and I know they pop up like weeds, but once they do pop up, shut them down and then turn those Internet addresses over to the appropriate law enforcement agencies to try to track them down? I would think that even in an open society, when there is a clear threat, they've declared war against us, our way of life, they've threatened to attack this very city our capital is in, that we could do something about the Internet and social media side of the equation." Wheeler pointed out that the legal definition of "lawful intercept" did not support such actions, but added that Congress could expand the law to validate the concept.
Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee is exploring the idea of using the recent terror attacks in France as ammunition to force tech companies away from end-to-end encryption. "Lawmakers said it was time to intensify discussions over what technology companies such as Apple and Google could do to help unscramble key information on devices such as iPhones and apps like WhatsApp, where suspected terrorists have communicated."
I guess it's a matter of giving up encryption or just.. the internet generally, in their paradigm now?
Yes! Shutdown Facebook! Shut down Twitter! Shutdown those damn emojis and skateboards too! And don't forget the damn rap music!
I will vote for that!
Oh yes, I remember. He's the one that thinks that wind turbines will use up the wind and cause Earth to warm up.
https://www.facebook.com/reale...
If left up to them we will see patriot act part 2, death to the constitution edition.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
... technology. You can't shut down the internet, they will find a way to communicate regardless.
...the attacks on our Rights.
Stop hiring Representatives of our Constitution and the People who clearly don't give a shit about either.
Could we PLEASE have a basic IQ and literacy test requirement to serve in public office?
That way we can gather intel! If we push them off of the internet and back onto the sneakernet then we will have a much harder time getting information. We'll need to find and infiltrate the cells, gain trust, let some incidents happen as a calculated risk in order to get deeper into the organization, etc.
At least this way if they post we can determine the time, possible location, IP addresses, we can set up taps to capture PCAPs and further enumerate, the list goes on and on.
Here in Europe many people are calling for closed borders as if radicalism only occurs through immigration, while a lot does indeed occur locally with the help of literature that is - what isn't? - spread through internet. Shutting down internet is foolish, as I hope most of Slashdot will agree with me, but it is hardly any more foolish than the cry for isolation through border controls and closures.
Shut down a website hosted in another country, run from outside the USA, not affliated with any US company ... ... or one that is use by 3 billion people legitimately, and 2 terrorists ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Now that the world is subject to the jurisprudence of the United States, this should be trivial. /rolleyes
Let the hackers shut them down. Once you let the GOVERNMENT start shutting them down, they will have their little fingers into sites that are terrorists like, then they will go after sites that say "hateful" things about the government or politically protected groups. Where will it end. 1st amendment, means FREE speech. Sadly you have to take the good with the bad. Who will decide what is "bad"? I don't like all the porn sites, the crap on tv that is overly sexually aggressive, but I just don't bother viewing or hearing it. But, if you start letting the government, be the one who determines what is "allowed", it starts you down that path, you'll never be able to stop.
I got a better idea. Let's shut down the institutions that finance "moderate rebels", I mean Saudi Arabia, No wait, I mean Qatar.. Oops, I'm sorry meant UAE
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
>> ammunition to force tech companies away from end-to-end encryption
Um...what major social or web site actually uses "end to end" encryption? Lots of sites use HTTPS to connect a client to a server, but all those communications are decrypted and easily snooped/stored/retransmitted at the server.
(Where "end to end" encryption means "only the sender and recipient can see the plaintext message" - examples include PGP-encrypted messages, SMIME-encrypted emails, "strong zip" encrypted files and the like.)
TX is the new FL
So, let's say that the US government is successful in stopping end-to-end encryption in any apps created by US software authors.
Do you think the terrorists just say "well, damn, that jig is up -- it was good while it lasted" at that point and start picking up the regular old telephone?
Or do you think that perhaps, just perhaps, that they will start using a software app developed outside of the US which still has end-to-end encryption.
Or do you think that perhaps they might even develop their own lacking any world-wide availability?
We are not dealing with complete morons here folks. The network will route around damage.
Half of his appeal comes from the principle that the open society is not a suicide pact. That means "our Bill of Rights is more important than your feelings." If that means we have to tell people from countries with known terrorism problems that they are categorically not welcome, then so be it. Their feelings are simply nothing when juxtaposed with defending the 4th amendment. I'd rather see 1M Syrians forced to stare down ISIS than see the status quo continue and help ensure a steady supply of potential excuses for abridging our rights.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has published its report: it did not find any trace of intelligence in the US senate.
Can't blame them when the cumulative IQ of all members in the house is a mere 140. And that's being generous.
Forget going after their internet communication. Go after their money. Bomb their trucks, bomb their oil wells. Block all money flowing from Saudi Arabia to ISIS. We can't do anything about random terrorists in Paris but we can do something about the huge area of land that ISIS is occupying. Many people in that region are joining ISIS just so they can get better food, cheaper electricity, and luxuries like Redbull. Seriously, why do they have access to American luxuries like Redbull. If we can do a trade embargo on Iran, surely we can do something about ISIS getting Redbull. Sure, Redbull isn't that important but if they are getting imports of that then you can be pretty sure that they are getting imports of a ton of other things. Cut off their money. I might even be in favor of taking out their electricity. Definitely bomb any oil rigs, gas tankers, etc.. under their control. If we have to airlift food in to feed the civilians, fine, but make sure that the terrorists there are not living more comfortable than the civilians. If you really want to go after their communications then don't worry about their communication over here but instead block their communication over there. Block their communication to the outside world, airdrop jammers so that the whole area is on radio silence. It's hard to deal with Terrorists living among us. It's really easy to deal with them when they occupy specific territory. Send their territory back to the stone ages. If they don't have electricity then we don't have to worry about whether or not they are using facebook. If they dislike modern culture then oblige them and send them back to the 1300s where their views belong.
The terrorists also used roads and sidewalks. We should shut these down too to prevent future attacks!
Well, I know that shutting down Pirate Bay has been the easiest, simplest thing that world governments have managed to do, over and over again.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I'm just so inexpressibly sick of the stupid Reductio ad Hitlerums (technically Reductio ad Terroristiums.)
Because *Insert Offending Group* uses *Insert Technology/Product/Thing*, it's bad and we need to get rid of it because it's bad and we don't like bad stuff.
That's essentially what both Barton's statements, and the whole "we should ban encryption that we can't break easily" arguments are.
Never mind that there are HUGE legal obstacles (and some nasty consequences) to such government overreach.
Never mind that end to end encryption makes users safer, even if the government IS lumped in with all the other bad guys.
It's incumbent on all of us to stand up to these assholes and say "no".
And, every time they bring this idiocy up again, stand up and say "no" again.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Even (and especially) with regard to the lot unhanged knaves in our own government.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Why can't we just sever the internet connection to those areas/countries we are at war?
Are we at war? Has that been declared by Congress? Or is it more like that thing that happened 15 years ago justifies us in doing whatever whenever forever?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I am no longer surprised to see the letters "US" whenever I read about a politician who is against Freedom of Speech.
Yeah, just remember it's the terrorists who are threatening our way of life.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
America should have been working on this problem continuously, as part of a process. Find unmitigated evil, shine the light of the FIRST FUCKING AMENDMENT on it, and watch it writhe in agony as it dies. But no, we're lazy. We have to be attacked by this worthless piece-of-shit terrorist named U.S. Representative Joe Barton. That's how the real-life America actually works.
Fine.
I say, let this terrorist find our weak spot and try to harm us. If he can find the unconstitutionally overreaching law which, in the eyes of extreme authoritarian Stalinists (a.k.a. Republicans) mistakenly appears to take this power away from the people and give it to the ever-bloating government, then let him find it. Let him use it. Yes, Barton probably even can hurt some Americans with his announced upcoming attack, but that's ok.
We will still prevail: once he reveals his secret weapon against democracy, then we'll just take that thing to SCOTUS and wipe it the fuck out, without mercy. One more security vulnerability: closed.
But of course, it brings up the question: should we be we be using people like this to find our exploits, or should we be finding and fixing them ourselves, before they are used against us?
It's not only tough to find the least intelligent member of Congress, but tough to find the dumbest one from Texas. Louie Gohmert gives Joe Barton a lot of competition for that honor. Gohmert opposed changes to marriage laws by saying "when you say it’s not a man and a woman anymore, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?"
Because censoring these types of people *always* leads to better understanding and peace. Said no one ever. Anywhere.
They've declared war against us, our way of life, they've threatened to attack this very city our capital is in, that we could do something about the Internet and social media side of the equation." Wheeler pointed out that the legal definition of "lawful intercept" did not support such actions, but added that Congress could expand the law to validate the concept.
So in response to their declaration of war on "our way of life" his response is to give that up and create exactly the society they want where people don't have strong rights to privacy, security in their property, and freedom to speak.
What an ass.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I bet the US government has infiltrated a lot of these sites and gets far more intelligence from them staying up than from taking them down.
Let ISIS on TV to deliver their message directly to the public rather than the way they currently express themselves.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Clearly Barton's idea has numerous, show-stopping problems but I feel like playing contrarian.
Even in the US, the 1st amendment isn't totally immutable. There are concepts like "fighting words" and the notion that you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. And I don't doubt that the court would go along with some limitations on 1st amendment rights during wartime.
Could Barton have some kind of argument based on these limitations? Could you possibly even frame the argument that taking down terrorist web sites was actually protective of law abiding Muslims because ordinary people might be incited to violence against them by exposure to propaganda that colors Islam as a religion of violence and hatred?
If the question is, can't we just identify which web sites or social media services terrorists are using and shut them down, regardless of borders? My reply would be, can't you just identify which people are terrorists and kill them regardless of borders?
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
No, it's not like Comcast customer service. For one thing, Comcast is basically a monopoly in many markets; you have no choice in whether to use them or not, if you want cable or high-speed internet service. Secondly, Comcast customer service is bad for a good reason: it makes them more profit. Their CS is *designed* to be the way it is, expressly to improve profits. It's not an accident due to incompetence. It only seems that way if you have some naïve notion that monopolist companies actually care about customer satisfaction, which they don't.
With the government, they're incompetent because you (plural) elected them, so you're getting what you voted for. When you have a bad elected government, that just means that the voters are embiciles.
President America, shut down everything!
When guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns
You've all heard this countless times before, but the sentiment couldn't be any more true in this case.
When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use encryption
Outlawing end-to-end encryption will create more problems than you think it'll solve, and it won't solve the problem you intend it to solve! Please, politicians, would you go get some sort of rudimentary technical education, or at least get some technical advisors, or technical advisors that aren't incompetent? Thanks.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I'm sorry, but if ISIL is a big enough threat to curtail our personal privacy and erode away Constitutional rights, then why the hell are we pussyfooting around just bombing them? If they are that big of a threat to us and our way of life then we should be fighting them with everything we have. This isn't like Iraq, or even like Afghanistan. ISIL is a demonstrable threat to states not just in the region but around the world: if they aren't a perfect case for multilateral action I don't know what is. Iraq and Syria won't solve this on their own. If the US/Europe and Russia/Iran could stop arguing between each other and actually work together and cooperate ISIL would be eradicated by the end of next year. I would rather work with one "enemy"(Iran) than become just like the real enemy (ISIL-I'm looking at you Trump with your "close all mosques" statement).
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Seems to me that no amount of legislation about encryption, or shutting down or wire-tapping in-game chat on consoles or anything of that nature is going to help. It really doesn't take much tech savvy to write your own point-to-point or client/server communications system that can be encrypted out the wazoo and passed through any number of security-through-obscurity layers. Making the easy ways to do it illegal simply forces the bad guys into 'doing it properly' and then you'll still be unable to track or capturee it.
www.sjbaker.org
We have enough corrupt politicians, time to vote in the ethical ones.
Ethics tests don't help a lot. Professions with ethics tests tend to be the ones with the biggest assholes and some of the most immoral behavior, like lawyers and reporters. The problem is the ethics tell you the rules and maybe punish you if you get caught, but they don't actually strongly incentivize moral behavior. You're still dealing with self-regulating professions, and self-regulating professions inevitably support their own people. Even Joe McCarthy stayed in the Senate after he was censured. It takes a LOT for an attorney to get seriously disciplined by the bar, although the bar looks into things utterly irrelevant to being an attorney, too. Good luck trying to get a panel of doctors to discipline a colleague. Reporters harass people trying to get them angry and badmouth other people as *part of their business model*, but always say "I'm just doing my job."
...is #473 in the Encyclopedia of American Loons.
(I'm too lazy to give you a link--just use Google.)
From Wikipedia:
The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks.
The entire idea was to have a decentralized network that couldn't be controlled by one entity and could continue to operate after removal of multiple nodes. At best the US has some control over DNS however you don't need a name to have an Internet site and its probably more preferable NOT to and just access it by IP address directly.
While I certainly am not on the side of terrorists, all that has happened is an arms race to TRY and control the Internet. This is impossible and will be replaced with lower tech solutions while making the everyday use of the Internet less private and secure for ordinary users (which is what most governments want but that's another conversation).
When you have people openly (or at least semi-openly) plotting against you, what you want them to do is keep talking where you can see and hear it.
You do not want them to shut up and go covert because that makes your job much harder.
The Brits outlined how to do all of this with "Ultra" -they didn't go out and TELL the Nazis the Enigma machine had been compromised. No. They let them keep talking and planning and in the end even sacrificed some lives to ensure the Nazis had no idea they were being monitored.
Had the Brits (and it has to be said, the Poles who started decoding Enigma) gone and waved it in the faces of the Nazis, all it would have done is forced them to use some other covert method that nobody could monitor.
The bottom line from this or any other kind of speech is that it may be unpleasant to hear and see ideas and things you disagree with, be they hate speech or racism, bias, religious proselytizing, political pandering, or whatever. If you make the speech go away, if you make it fall out of the public eye, then all it does is fall into dark corners where the harsh light of judgment cannot easily see it. You won't stop it, In human history, nobody has ever stopped talking about something because someone else (parent, government, teacher, priest, etc) said not to. It isn't human nature to simply surrender ideas like that and stop thinking and talking about them, By trying to lower the boom on open chatter, you simply make such discussions hide and in so doing you make it much harder to monitor and squash.
Sig for hire.
The west has become nothing more than a collection of cowards and morons......
Hey our way of life is under threat, we need to defend it by........changing our way of life!
Umm do none of these politicians notice how stupid that is?
First of all, no matter what measures you put in place, short of getting a few of pre-cogs or embedding a chip in everybody's brain that monitors and reports back all thoughts or locking up all humans, THERE IS NO WAY TO ELIMINATE TERRORISM. Ever.
Second, if we want to have a free an open society, this is just the cost of of having such a society, We will forever be vulnerable to such attacks. Yes horrendous and tragic, however hardly a threat to a society as a whole.
Funny thing is, we as a society, accept the fact that in order to have cars, there will always be deaths caused by car accidents. However, we can ACTUALLY eliminate all car related deaths OVERNIGHT, by banning cars, Yet nobody in their right mind would suggest such a thing because, for some reason, people as a hole realize that the benefits of having cars far far far outweighs the cost to society (the tragic thousands that are killed every year in car accidents). Why this logic is not carried over when terrorism is involved is beyond me (although the constant bombardment from propaganda I mean mainstream media telling us to be terrified might have something to do with it).
And my final point for the day, didn't terrorism exist LOOOONG before the invention of computers and SLL encryption? It didn't seem to stop them or slow them down back then, why would it today? Also how will you force terrorists to NOT USE encryption? You can't simply un-invent it, or put the genie back in the bottle. All this would accomplish is remove the few protections we have from an over-reaching tyrannical government, while terrorist will happily keep using their rooted/jailbroken android/ios devices to send encrypted communications to each other.
We can't just ask service providers not to use encryption, because people might just use their own encryption prior to using those services. What we need to do is stop all encryption by getting everyone to forget about math.
...that just means that the voters are embiciles.
There are certain words that you should be really, really sure to spell correctly. I think "imbecile" is one of them.
The Senate Intelligence Committee.
Making us change what we do (use a certain website) because of a terrorist? Isn't that exactly their end game? To change our behavior?
Democrats lost a lot of representative seats in large part because "excess" gov't domestic snooping was big in the news at the time of elections. Now the administration is "not doing enough".
I looks like the country is now doing a flip-flop, just like I predicted, upon a big terror event.
Table-ized A.I.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. That's true whether I choose to encrypt my communications or not. I care not a whit if politicians don't like it, there's nothing they can do about it without violating my First Amendment rights.
Some of us still take the Constitution seriously.
Why not just put all the terrorist sites on the same Series of Tubes, then stick a giant cork in there whenever they start contradicting our carefully constructed narrative?
Great idea! Let's start by shutting down:
joebarton.house.gov
twitter.com/RepJoeBarton
I think the guy is spreading fear and terror!
(That was sarcasm, in case you are confused.)
In Barton's case, it would be well worth the effort to crack open his skull and find out, though my bet is on hard vacuum and asbestos.
I need material for my PPTs! Especially to copy and paste. MOAR!!!
I won't dismiss that we need both. But if we turn of their internet then they totally go underground and it'll be a little harder. We need to have them online so when one of the younger/boastful types slips we can catch it.
Whack-A-Mole project.
Pointless.
Now, hijacking them, yeah. As if the intelligence community isn't already all over this in a multitude of ways.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Our last declared war was WW2. All those other "wars" since then technically weren't wars.
Which is nothing but a meaningless semantic, and actions speak louder than words.
The definition of war is not vague. It is a declared conflict between NATION-STATES. We are not at war with any NATION-STATE at this time. We are engaged in policing actions around the world, but not war.
Good-bye
Wind turbines are giant mixing blades. Downstream from a turbine there are turbulent vortexes that mix with higher layers of air, renewing the wind speed at ground level. That's why a wind farm spaces the turbines about 5 diameters apart, to allow time for the mixing.
Yes, turbines extract some energy from the wind, and slow it down a bit, but they do so from a thicker layer of air than they are tall, and wind speeds at higher altitudes are faster than at ground level. Hills and trees produce friction, and slow down surface winds.
because clearly, there were no terror attacks prior to the internet.
Shutting down websites is a ridiculous idea. The US does not control world domain registrations and could not do this. I propose a more interesting solution: Getting NSA off their butts and stop tracking everyone's porn viewing habits and start identifying who uses these suspect terrorist sites. Then we might get some usable intel.
"The Eagle has Landed"
That is an encrypted statement, and without my decoder the 3-letter-folks are not able to understand it? And we're pretty sure the terrorists have spoken several of these words on several occasions, who knows what they could be saying? Speech needs to be banned NOW because it can contain nuances and double-meanings which prevent literal evaluation of the already-recorded conversations across the board!!
Wind turbines are giant mixing blades. Downstream from a turbine there are turbulent vortexes that mix with higher layers of air, renewing the wind speed at ground level. That's why a wind farm spaces the turbines about 5 diameters apart, to allow time for the mixing.
Yes, turbines extract some energy from the wind, and slow it down a bit, but they do so from a thicker layer of air than they are tall, and wind speeds at higher altitudes are faster than at ground level. Hills and trees produce friction, and slow down surface winds.
Awesome! Perpetual motion, and free energy extraction. Quick - To Youtube!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
To the common man perhaps, but the military brass will find ways to ensure the people they want to have connectivity will be it microwave line of sight or radio, or something. Just a few hops til it reaches a non-war-zone.
If you're not from my caste/religion, you're non-human to me;
http://wh.gov/iyhMK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
Why the obsession with terrorist communication anyway?
There seems to be some universally accepted idea that communication is this greatly important thing that terrorists must master in order to pull of big attacks. Why?
Why do they need large amounts of secure communication to pull stuff off? Do we really know that they do need and/or use that? If terrorists suddenly had no electronic communication would terrorist attacks somehow stop happening?
Why can't a group of terrorists simply gather in a member's livingroom and have a talk? If they intend to move to various cities, set up identities and all that junk before they strike.. so what? Then they meet ahead of time and agree that they will strike at X time on Y day 2 years from now or something like that. Then... they go their separate ways to build their new identities.
Why would terrorists NEED to communicate to kill a bunch of people?
I think 'intelligence' organizations are obsessed with the idea of terrorist's communications because obsessing about communications are their job. Spying on those communications is the only tool those people have. It's the old adage.. when the only tool you have is a hammer.. everything looks like a nail.
When they complain that they need more hammer.. the public.. scared and not thinking just accepts their word.