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Government Wants to do Massive Internet Monitoring
jht writes "Taking the Clinton Administration's electronic paranoia to new heights, this NY Times article details plans to have the FBI establish an infrastructure (called FIDNET) capable of monitoring all non-military public networks. And you were wondering why they're so down on encryption... The NSA is reviewing it now, with final rules expected in September. " Uh,oh. This is potentially a Very Bad Thing. You may want to e-mail your Congressional Representative about it. (Free NYT online subscription required to read the article.)
This is the truly scary part.
There is no way the government could possibly do this task intelligently. There isn't the manpower and computational power available. You're right.
So simplistic monitoring it will be. And the results will be similar to those of SurfWatcher software... You won't be able to research Childhood causes of breast cancer, hashtable processing algorithms, or anything containing a word combination that some bureaucrat deemed inappropriate in some context.
That is of course for 'in the clear' communication. If you send something encrypted, you'll end up on a 'watch' list, and your activities will undergo closer scrutiny.
And just try to take a guess at who is going to pay for all of this. No new taxes!! But we'll jack up the old ones. After all, it is a matter of national security.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
It all seems like:
1 Small (perhaps temporary) problem exists.
2 Government claims they can fix it by raising taxes and spending money.
3 Problem gets worse.
4 Government claims that things are getting better or getting worse, but they need to spend more to really fix it.
5 Goto 3
Perhaps the problem is at step 2. The goverment shouldn't be fixing the problems anyway because they have a vested interest in maintaining themselves.
People have that attitude all the time, though. I get strange looks when I say that I see my goal as an software engineer is to make myself obsolete. I want to do my job well enough that they don't need me to do it anymore (because it's soo automated, or so easy that anyone can do it, or because it's completely solved and doesn't need doing anymore...). I want to be able to move on to other things, but most people don't get that. Perhaps people in the goverment more so.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
Agreed...
The person isn't evil, isn't a tool, and really believes in the goal, is convinced of the sincerity of those he/she works with...
This person is a tool of a larger organization, although in this case more or less ignorant of his/her involvment. My point is that you cannot stop this kind of invasion of privacy by appealing to the techies who write code for the FBI.
I personally believe that there is a lack of people who hold their own beliefs and convictions above money in their own pocket. We can only hope to educate and pursuade those who don't have these convictions, but how many of the remaining ones who believe that this is wrong will turn down that high paying offer from a government agency because they know it is wrong?
I know I would, and I suppose you would too. You give me faith that there are others as well. They are not bastards who need to be shunned, or made fun of, or ridiculed. I believe there is more to life than money and I hope these people will believe that as well.
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Excluding extremely high-traffic servers, a PC that is connected to the internet is devoting anywhere from a tenth to a thousandth of its processing power to the task of actually generating net traffic. I would estimate that a ratio of 1 PC monitoring to every 100 actually generating traffic would be more than sufficient. I imagine you could get away with a ratio closer to 1:10000.
It seems to me, from the article, that they'll be concentrating on specific points of vulnerability. That is, data flowing from Joe's ISP to Jane's ISP down the street will probably go unmonitored, but data flowing from Jane's ISP to Chase Manhattan Bank will be tracked and catalogued. At least, that is how it would be likely to work if they were really trying to defend the vital points of our data infrastructure against attack, which is what they claim. Any evidence to the contrary would seem to me to point to definitely sinister motivations.
Actually, that brings up an interesting point. The stated aim of this system is to detect attack and intrusion attempts -- the worry is that it will be misused for surveillance and monitoring of private communications. But a system that does one should be constructed differently from a system that does the other. I'm no expert -- perhaps someone out there would care to expound on whether that statement is accurate, and what those differences are most likely to be.
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
The description under the post on the main page says you MAY want to write your representative. I'm begging you all -- PLEASE write your rep! Posting on /. only won't solve the problem. Please take action. Once momentum for this sort of thing builds up, it's almost impossible to stop. Let's use our community size to have some positive influence.
>1. Labor unions ?
;)
>2. Communists ?
>3. Jews ?
>4. Catholics ?
> When 'they' go after the first of any of these
> groups (or any other non-criminal groups)
Now who decides what is a criminal group? Of course, you know it's criminal to be a Labor Unionist, Communist, Jew or Catholic.
As for in the US of A, they've already started to go after the dope smokers(all property stolen and sold + 30 year sentence for smoking pot), to a smaller extent the nerds(anything you own that involves electronics or telephony in any way gets stolen if anyone(usually someone in the FBI looking for a case) says you might have done anything possibly illegal with a computer and you never get it returned, plus some accused have spent long times in jail without trial), and probably a lot more that I don't know about. They've been going after the Native Americans for so long that people don't notice anymore, IIRC the last military action was in the 1970s, and theft of land and property continues to this day.
I've never done illegal drugs or cracked, illegally hacked, or phreaked, so don't call me a dope-smoking h4x0r lamer. These things are happening in the US, and if you live here in the States you should be very concerned.
You should be concerned that people are getting life sentences for petty crimes. You should be concerned that people are getting pulled over, harrassed, and arrested for Driving While Black. You should be concerned that the people have lost their constitutional right to constitute a fighting force powerful enough to defeat an invading army, or to defend against the US military if the government becomes corrupt. You should be concerned that the Congress is considering an amendment to the Constitution that will make it illegal to protest against the government by burning a flag, which if it becomes law will be a precedent for further legistlation restricting public protest.
As for the topic, monitoring the public does not show a desire to solve crimes. It shows a desperation to find criminals which makes every citizen a suspect of crimes that have not yet been commited. Public monitoring could also be used to find people who do not like certain government policies(say, public monitoring for instance) and punish them in underhanded ways such as ordering an IRS audit(It's happened before, Nixon ordered the IRS to audit several of his political opponents).
Most people consider themselves to have a right to privacy. The gov't does not need to hear their telephone conversation with their aunt, the gov't does not need to see what's in the love letter they're writing to their [g|b]f, the gov't does not need to watch them take a piss. You get to the old envelope example -- If we didn't value privacy we wouldn't use envelopes, and it is in fact a federal offense to tamper with mail.
The government already has the powers to post surveillance on somebody, however they need to go through a judge and present evidence that this person may be a criminal. If the gov't doesn't have a good reason, the judge can tell them to stuff it. With public monitoring, this important legal right will disappear.
These 'rights' are often considered 'loopholes' that let guilty men go free. We have them for a reason. The founders of the US knew what a corrupt police force did compared to an honest police force, and drew up a set of laws that requires the police to be honest. When the police have acted in ways which deprive the rights of the suspect, you will read in the morning newspaper about a guilty man who has gone free because of a loophole, never mind that a man is not considered guilty until he has gone through a trial and been found so. Losing suspects and evidence because of acting in an illegal manner is what keeps the police forces honest. When we lose these laws and regulations, we stand to be ruled by a corrupt police system.
-Perpetual Newbie
The ACLU does not favor Clinton. Maybe take a look at their site. The ACLU consists largely of libertarians (socialist and capitalist) and such. It is well known, even among hardcore democrats that Clinton resembles more of a moderate Republican, than a "liberal" Democrat. Al Gore is even worse. This blind party loyalty/hatred is stupid. Not all democrats meet certain descriptions, nor republicans. Democrats are FAR from left wing at all. They tend to favor a bit more social spending, but that's about it. I don't like either side, because as you move more to the left of democrats, it tends to be limiting of freedom, but more help for those who need it. More to the right, more control over your freedom, but more favor to corporations. Not that either side dislike corporations, they're both business friendly political parties. I don't see how anyone could disagree with this. Democratic party does not equal Communists. The republican party does not represent fascism, although both seem to be fairly close to fascism. They both get paid off by the wealthy and corporations, so, if one party really opposed them, it'd be unlikely the rich and corporations would invest into their funding.
On the one hand, I'm not one to encourage needless paranoia. On the other hand, I don't like this.
I'm in a fairly militant mood these days for both personal reasons (as discussed on the Ticket Booth Tyranny thread) and political ones ( Damien Echols' Rule 37 appeal was denied, and I'm very pissed about it).
Post-Columbine, a friend of mine was given trouble for wearing a BEIGE trenchcoat. If the Powers That Be (or anyone else) start looking for a certain "profile," then anyone who has anything in common with that profile is screwed. Where I live, there have been a lot of recent stories concerning racial profiling. (Maybe THAT is why more African-Americans aren't on the net. *wry smile*)
But of course, it's not just race. If someone wants a scapegoat, it's easy to pick a likely-looking one. This goes on in schools, it goes on in law enforcement, and it goes on in politics.
I'm not over-cautious with personal info because I don't feel I have to hide things from people. However, I realize that if things in this country get really crazy, I'm going to be one of the first people that gets harassed for being a social deviant.
The FBI's probably got a file on me as it is, but as long as I'm not kicked out of my housing or prevented from getting a job or arrested for something I didn't do (or something I did do that shouldn't be illegal), I don't give a damn. However, I've got contacts, resources, and what-have-you; many of my fellow social deviants aren't quite so lucky.
So I fight for their right to keep their correspondence and personal details private. And since some of them talk to me over e-mail, I don't want anyone reading my e-mail either. Things that I do that are public or semi-public record (/. posts, my web page, petitions I've signed, that sort of thing) are obviously things that I don't mind having traced back to me. But there are a lot of people who can't or choose not to be as open as I am, and dammit, that's their right. (Even in the current atmosphere of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, for instance, I'm sure some homophobic military types would love to scan e-mail looking for anything that might suggest a soldier is gay. *sigh*)
Another big problem here is that people don't profile for actual criminals as often as they seem to for stereotypical criminals. Racial profiling is a major example of this -- black man driving nice car in suburbs, wonder how he got it? Drug money? Let's stop him. Etc. Satanic Panic based profiling is another biggie; there is no other reasonable explanation for why Damien Echols is on death row and his two friends are in prison serving life sentences. With net-based searches, we'd get the additional problem of "profiling" of anyone who, say, visited 2600's website.
I, personally, have nothing to hide, and haven't suffered much in the way of harassment. But damned if I'm going to make it easier for other people to have their lives ruined for no good reason.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
most staffers and appointees indicted
most staffers and appointees convicted
I'm not sure about these. Reagan had quite a few of his staffers and appointees indicted and convicted for his Iran/Contra dealings.
most dramatic attacks on civil liberties in this century
While bad, they weren't the worst this century. Take a look at world war I, where members of the U.S. Socialist party were imprisoned for opposing the war. Not for doing anything illegal, mind you, just for speaking out publically against the war.
largest expansion of US government spending since WWII
I'm not sure about this one. I was under the impression that Reagan expanded US government spending significantly more than Clinton has. I could be wrong however.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, on the one hand there is nothing really new in this. NSA has been monitoring the 'net for ages, and now FBI wants to have a peek, too. On the other hand the government agencies are not exactly known for cluefulness, so the idea of yet another bunch of idio^H^H^H^Hgovernment servants watching the net does not appeal to me at all. They are very likely to see something they do not understand and do Very Stupid Things (tm) as a result.
Yet, on the third hand, this could be the necessary push to get strong encryption in wide use over the net. Generally it's too much of a bother but now that everybody and his lawyer will be compiling a database of IP traffic I just might try persuading my friends to use strong crypto in email.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
This isn't as big a deal as people are about to start freaking out about - although it's definately worth a letter or two to your wonderfully representative *ha* elected officials.
The open-source and linux communities have the power to make these plans effectively useless through the implmentation of transparent public key encryption schemes - Fuck ITAR, this is an international community. A good implementation followed by a new "secure" linux distribution - perhaps Trinix - or maybe RedHat, but they're less likely to take on "the Man", IPO and all.
So let them monitor your SSH sessions, let them monitor encrypted web communitications. The key is to make it automatic and transparent, so that the end user doesn't have to do anything.
I'm sick of this bullshit from the US Government - I'm not a US Citizen, but being north of the border in Canada means this crap will diffuse up sooner or later - Our spineless prime minister does what the US wants.
So rather than bitch and moan and cry and whine, we've got the tools to make this system effectively useless. Run with it.
AC (with damn good reason).
"Government officials argue that they are not interested in eavesdropping, but rather are looking for patterns of behavior that suggest
illegal activity."
What I want to know is: what sort of patterns suggest illegal activity? Based on previous nonsense, I wonder if use of encryption is enough to raise warning flags.
- Routinely encrypting all my traffic may not buy me much privacy.
- Traffic analysis can reveal where I have been surfing and who I have been emailing without saying anything about what I was saying. But I imagine that in this hypothetical police state exchanging email with subversives would be a crime. And don't think that anonymous remailers will protect you; remember anon.penet.fi.
- Failing traffic analysis, I am still conducting transactions with websites, who is to say that they won't decide that its financially advantageous to get together and construct detailed profiles of me. Isn't that what ads.doubleclick.com is doing?
- How do I know that my security protocols are really secure? I just downloaded PGP from some random website or installed the standard Red Hat Distribution. How do I know that the implimentation wasn't weakened so that powerful interests can read my mail anyway? Worse I might believe that I can send whatever I want with PGP and end up incriminating myself more completely.
- Rather than pressuring congress to allow me to implement weak and insecure protocols that give me the illusion of privacy, why don't we pressure Congress to open up government. "Okay Congress, you want to monitor our networks for criminal activity, you can, if you make verifiable public records of all activities and results from the monitoring." Better yet, if they want this tool, let them build it, but make it a public domain tool that serves everyone. Why should we trust incompetent government workers to secure our networks?
- Perhaps surveillance of everyone is immanent, but it doesn't have to be clandestine. We have an opportunity to choose how it is implemented.
If given a choice between having all my email read by the NSA without my knowledge or permission or having all my email read by the NSA and receiving notification whenever it happens; I will always pick the later case. Even better is if I recieve notification from anyone when that email is used. Whose to say that Coca-Cola doesn't have nefarious schemes?This bargain could be struck on many levels. If congress wants to monitor all email, I'd be quite happy to go along with this if in exchange the government would publish all gov. documents on the web five years after creation regardless of classification.
-Carl Coryell-Martin
I've not seen reports that Echelon is employed within the US itself. From what I've read, Echelon employs the hardware formerly used to spy on the Eastern block to spy on Europe as a whole, focussing in particular on industrial spionage.
The plan, an outgrowth of the Administration's anti-terrorism program...
Ah, yes. Not unlike Ireland's Special Criminal Court, ostensibly for terrorist cases in which juries are, ahem, impractical. This court is now used for drug dealers and pretty much any case in which a jury is likely to dismiss the case or return an inconvenient verdict.
If it wasn't obvious already, here is all the motivation you need to routinely encrypt every network traffic you can. With routine logging of activity and computerized searches of the reulting databases the possibility of misuse ranging from unauthorized abuse by individuals up to systematic clandestine surveilance of everyday netizens is immence.
The only efective way to combat this is routine use of strong encryption no matter how innocuous the nature of what you're doing. The congress won't do much as these things are always justified in terms of stronger law enforcemnt aginst stalker pedophile spies form China (or whatever the bad-guy-du-jour is) And your representitive/senator can't appear to be "soft on crime" now can they?
here's a description about echelon: http://capo.org/opeds/pp0615.htm
Juiced? Or Not?
That's right folks,
Never mind the privacy issues, never mind ethics or morals or any of that ethereal stuff like Liberty or Freedom. It's about the money.
Ever since the boom of the Internet, the Federal government has been losing money. They support much of the backbone infrastructure through NSF grants and such. The Internet2 is based in major Universities, but funded by the Fed, and we're going to piggyback off of that tech in a little while. The Fed is losing money since their grants are used to send spam and view porn.
But that is not the biggest dollar sinkhole that results from the Internet Age. It's all about the stamps!
That's right. The price of stamps has gone up dramatically over the last vew years. As we've migrated out corespondences to the net, the U.S. P.S. has tried to break even by hiking stamp prices. This just drove more people onto the net, and into long distance phone companies. This is why they're fostering competition and the proliferation of 10-10 numbers...
The government is just trying to make the net less convenient, more shady and just plain creepy(r) to drive the sheeple back to using the ol'U.S. Post. Under Federal regs, nobody (FBI, NSA, CIA, IRS...) can read your mail.
Watch for new U.S. Mail ads this fall. I ga-roon-tee it.
--Where'd I leave my meds?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Perhaps this is another sign that geeks need to start getting involved in politics. We sit and watch the clueless government do one thing after another to take away privacy, cripple technology research and advance, and just generally try to treat us like children.
And all the while, I see geeks complaining about it, but doing little else. Maybe it's time to start getting the word out to people what is being done, and do something to change it. All the whining in the world won't do any good if that's all that is done.
I don't know, maybe a Geek Political Party? So the geeks will know who to vote for? So some visibility may be gained? Or is this just another one of those ideas that wouldn't work?
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
"When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn?t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn?t own a gun. Now they?ve taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it."
It might interest people to know where this came from. The original quote belongs to Pastor Martin Niemoller who had the misfortune to live in Nazi Germany in the 30s:
"First, they came for the labor unions but I wasn't a labor unionist, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Communists but I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Jews; but I wasn't a Jew, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Catholics, but I wasn't a Catholic, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak up."
You might want to keep this in mind.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I'd certainly like to see some of the details filled in on this plan, as the NYT was fairly vague about it. This is probably because the plan isn't close to final yet. What sort of "patterns of patterns" are being monitored here? Other than detecting quantity-based attacks such as smurfs and mailbombs, I don't see what this monitoring can accomplish. Most attackers of other systems will look more or less like authorized users in terms of the quantity of bandwidth they use in their attacks. Only by inspecting the actual contents of their packets could you find out what their actions are, and there are way too many packets flying around for that. Also, how is this monitoring system planning to differentiate between authorized users doing potentially dangerous things (rebooting a server, etc) and unauthorized users doing the same thing?
Implementation issues aside, this doesn't necessarily decrease the security or privacy of Internet use. With the proper tools anyone could monitor Internet packets right now, whether or not there is a sophisticated government effort to do so. Plaintext email and other unencrypted data will be no less secure under the FBI's plan, and packets to and from your host to the rest of the 'net will just be logged in one more place than they were before. The loss of privacy and security is not as severe as you would think; mostly because there wasn't a whole lot of privacy and security on the 'net to begin with. There's an understanding that you don't monitor traffic that isn't yours, but there's no guarantee that everyone who can see your traffic is high-minded enough to abide by that understanding.
This is not to say that I support the government's monitoring plan - I don't think it will work, for reasons listed above. And of course I object to my traffic being preemptively monitored by a government party without a warrant or a court order. But I'm not sure even in the worst case there would be as much loss of privacy as there would be loss of the illusion of privacy. If this leads to more pervasive use of strong cryptography, wonderful.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Hey -
lets all just think about this for a moment. Maybe I'm being simpleminded, but in order to effectively monitor all the traffic on the Internet today, wouldn't you have to have an equal amount of computing power in aggregate to that which is generating the traffic?
Lets just say (hypothetically) that the total combined bandwidth usage on the internet today is 100 Terabytes daily (in the USA). This traffic is generated by a billion computers being online at once, all transferring files, exchanging mail, etc. Wouldn't it take a system (distributed or centralized) of equal processing power to effectively monitor this?
Unless we're talking simplistic monitoring, where some widget is snapped onto the major switches, and whenever it sees some keywords, it generates a signal that computer X exchanged a restricted word with computer Y. But - come on, even that would require immense devotion of computing power (effectively a system that mirrors the power of the switch itself) and it wouldn't even be logging the traffic...
Maybe I'm just being stupid - or overly optimistic. Someone let me know if my hypothesis is correct - that in order to monitor a system that has the complexity of the Internet - one effectively must duplicate the level of resources currently on the internet.
- PW
Let's say you go and visit www.hyperreal.org -- a site that contains, among other things, information about psychoactive substances, some of which happen to be illegal in the US. Now, of course, only drug pushers would be interested in information on such a filthy topic, right? So you wouldn't be surprised to see some cops on your doorstep with a search warrant, the probable cause being visiting the site? And don't bother applying for a government or a government-contractor job: "We see you engaged in some patterns of behaviour that could point to illegal activity on your part. Be thankful we don't prosecute you. Next, please..."
This is fiction right now, but it could easily become reality.
Just use strong encryption for everything. I don't see the problem.
Use of encryption necessitates that both parties do it. In the example above how would encryption have helped me (other than using Freedom.net or some equivalent of it)?
I know it is illegal to export it from the USA, but is it also illegal to use it?
It is legal to use. For the time being, that is.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Having failed to control the availability of reasonable cryptography,
the FBI wants to install a giant traffic analysis system. Some
thoughts on this system:
o It represents a second best surveillance tactic after
eavesdropping. If you can't tell what a person is saying, it's at
least interesting to be able to tell to whom they're saying it
(traffic analysis). If the Clipper chip was plan A, this sort of
thing is plan B.
o This is definitely a lot bigger than what any private agency can do
because they FBI can theoretically use the law to gain monitoring
access at any network access point they desire, which a private entity
could not, and likely would not, do.
o Federal law enforcement realizes that the public computer
internetwork has become or is rapidly becoming the world's primary
nexus of communication, and therefore they must be able to analyze it
in order to snoop on the citizenry.
o Traffic analysis in order to hunt for "patterns of behavior that
suggest illegal activity" might lead to a vague fishing expedition
approach to law enforcement. Perhaps this is an attempt to do an
end-run around troublesome fourth amendment protections, which are
fairly well defined in the case of telephone wiretapping.
Interestingly, this seems to me to require that the use of IP
telephony would get far less protection from warrantless search than
regular phone calls. For example, even if you encrypt your phone
call, and even if you use anonymous forwarders, this type of system
might theoretically allow the FBI to detect the end points of an IP
telephony call, unless you handed the call off along the way to the
PSTN (a normal phone company). The FBI could thus ensure that there is no
reasonable expectation of privacy in telephone call end-points, which
might then make such information admissable evidence in criminal
prosecutions.
o The conflation of domestic and international concerns may be a new
tactic in the constant pursuit of greater surveillance powers for law
enforcement. I expect we'll see more of this. Theoretically these
measures are for "national security", and defense against foreign
attack, but that excuse is being used to justify snooping in the US.
The internet, by being a global medium open to easy foreign access,
may well represent the thin edge of the wedge for this sort of
argument, where foreign threats are used to expand the powers of
domestic law enforcement.
The NSA has been monitoring Internet traffic for quite a long time not only on a domestic level, but globally. I suspect the NSA will either turn down the FBI's plan or declare neutrality because A) the NSA would get too much publicity if it was approved and publicity is the last thing they want, and B) they already have such a system. If they downright scrap the FBI plan, that will spurn assumptions that such a system exists and they don't want that either.
I mean, does it really matter all that much if someone knows what websites you're going to?
;)
You must lead a very boring life
Yes, it does really matter. See the post below for an instructive example.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
It's not slowly eroding. It's gone. Sorry to break the news.
Even if you do encrypt all your communications, the headers on your email say where the mail came from and where it's going. This is almost as useful as knowing what is actually said, when combined with other information, say, banking transactions.
Credit reports are only a SSN away.
SSN's are only $50 away
Everything about you is available to anyone willing to spend a little (very little - say $500) money...
Encryption + anonymity.
Hey, guys, accelerate your beta, we need this thing now!
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Just image for a moment, someone who has graduated school, perhaps with a CS degree, has spent some time with ROTC, perhaps would like to get into law enforcement, but doesn't like the idea of getting shot. Instead, the person gets a call from someone at the FBI who says "We need people like you. We are building this network monitoring facility, with all this high-end equipment to help protect us all from terrorists abroad. We will be looking for specific types of attacks and we need you to help write the software for that." The graduate meets the FBI people, likes them, they sound like they really believe what they are saying (and perhaps actually believe it), and so the grad joins up.
The person isn't evil, isn't a tool, and really believes in the goal, is convinced of the sincerity of those he/she works with...
Bottom line, I'm scared by all the invasions of privacy, the goverment intrusions into far too many aspects of life, the threat of being harassed by the Enforcers (police), the unauthorized confiscation of private property, etc. but to say that these people are all immoral, irrational bastards out to screw us all is just demonizing people who are more like you and me, than different.
Yeah, some of them are assholes, and some are stupid and many are irrational, but they are still just human beings trying to live out their lives the best they can.
And while trying to get along the best I can, I try do something to make the world a better place (according to my own, perhaps warped, judgement) by avoiding (and protecting myself from) the assholes, educating the stupid and by being understanding of the irrational (and trying to help them do the rational thing).
Bottom line, I'm very much against this proposed system, regardless of the goal, since I believe having a highly distributed, highly heterogeneous network, with individually applied security is the best defense. I also believe that a system like this can all too easily be used (by the stupid, or the irrational) to do bad things to you and I. (Besides being an ineffective way to do it's stated intent.)
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel