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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.)
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.
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
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).
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.
"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.