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CALEA update
The article is actually an AP article, and this is a temporary URL but will probably remain available throughout today. If it's not available, just search your favorite news site which carries an AP feed.
Background: In 1994, the FBI, complaining about pedophiles and terrorists on the internet, got Congress to pass a law requiring all telecommunications providers to make their networks easily tappable. One example of the necessity for such which is still trotted out by the FBI is solving kidnappings - "What if your child was kidnapped?". However, try as I might, I can't think of any situation in which a wiretap (which has to be placed on a known entity) would help locate a missing child. If you know who's got the kid...go get him.
The primary stated reason for the law was that the telcoms were upgrading to digital from analog, and therefore the men in black couldn't just hook up an alligator clip to the wires anymore... the law was explicitly stated to NOT expand law-enforcement access to communications but simply make sure that they could access digital phone lines. The telecommunications companies fought the law until Congress added $500,000,000 in government subsidies for them, when they promptly shut up.
Unfortunately (but expectedly), the FBI has interpreted the law as granting them free rein to tap anything at any time. The FCC is granted the power to implement CALEA - and the current FCC commissioners would make Big Brother proud. So the FBI has sought and received, as of August 30, substantial additional tapping powers - they will now receive the current location of cell-phone users during the tap, the ability to listen in on conference calls even if the tapped party has left the conversation, and a couple of other minor enhancements which slowly yet steadily erode your privacy.
More important, the FBI has also sought the ability to tap packet-switched communications - by which I mean, of course, the big bad Internet. This authority, never enacted in law, has nevertheless been granted by the FCC, to be implemented by the telcoms no later than September 2001.
Recently there have been stories about companies in Russia having to provide the ability for police to tap internet communications. U.S. folks laughed at those poor bastards, living in a surveillance state. The only difference between Russia and the U.S. is: the Russians are more upfront about their surveillance.
See EPIC's wiretap page for more. -- michael
AP Text (which you better not link to, as I've probably breached copyright).
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI reached a first-of-its-kind agreement
enabling telecommunications companies to use computer software made by
Nortel Networks to assist law enforcement agencies in conducting lawfully
authorized wiretapping.
The agreement calls for Nortel, a major supplier of telecommunications
equipment, to provide certain software to its carrier customers. Nortel will
waive the license fees.
The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act authorized
$500 million for the purpose of reimbursing the telecommunications industry for
its costs in cooperating with law enforcement agencies in wiretapping.
``Carriers can now begin taking steps to correct technological impediments
within their networks that currently prevent law enforcement from being able to
carry out court-ordered electronic surveillance directed at suspected
criminals and terrorists,'' Attorney General Janet Reno said in a statement.
The telecommunication carrier Ameritech also is a party to the agreement. FBI
Director Louis Freeh said the bureau is working toward finalizing similar
reimbursement agreements with other carriers and manufacturers.
I guess there's nothing we can do about this, huh?
Makes a helluva case for strong encryption, though.
I just wish the government would go away...
Hrmmm...didn't work.
Now what?
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
Already we have things like PGPfone, but, well, to be perfectly honest, it really sounds like you're using a cheap microphone hooked up to the Soundblaster on your PC. Anyone know of anything in this realm that actually works well?
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Even if the FBI could intercept any data that is out there, it would be completely useless to them if it is encrypted data. So long as the FBI is not granted a magic key by either consensus among crypto companies or by government regulation, privacy over the internet can and will exist.
As far as tapping digital lines... It should be allowed, but only with a court order. Just like it is with analog lines. Sometimes, there is a justifiable reason for a line to be tapped. Think suspected drug dealer here. The problem is not with the FBI tapping lines, it is with thee frequencey of which lines are tapped. Court orders for line tapping are given out too frequently and with too broad of a spectrum of reasons. Call your representatives in Congress and express your concern with this issue, they will listen (on occassion).
--
Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
...that you have a right to privacy over a private network anyway? I've never read anything in any literature from any of the phone companies I've dealt with that guaranteed that no one was listening in to your calls, etc...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
What worries me about making networks easily tappable is not so much the feds nosey actions, but the easy time other non-feds will have tapping networks. This is very scary. It not only compromises the privacy of those exchanging information via the network but also compromises the security of the network itself. Now that's a problem.
-- Moondog
They can already tap phone lines. Most people connect via phone lines. I'm sure it'd be simple to copy the serial data from a phone line and un-ppp the tcp/ip packets.
It wouldnt be TOO easy, but it'd be doable. I agree that they may have to tap communications occasionally, but it should be harder than just phoning up an ISP and saying "open back door #145, we'll show you a warrent later"
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I'm interested in any legal or technical experts who might care to comment on how this type of law affects people who run proxy (or other IP routing) services?
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Specifically...remember back in the "good old days" that penet.fi was one of the first host to allow some degree of anonymous access? After someone successfully sued in Finish court for the identity of one of the anonymous e-mailers, the service was shut down to prevent other people from having the same breach in privacy.
What if I ran a proxy service that would allow people to surf the web or other TCP/IP services anonymously?
Since I'm not a telecommunications provider receiving some federal funding...does that mean if I throw out my DHCP/DNS/IP logs every night I'm free and clear? Is there any part of this law that says I NEED to keep a backlog of this information so when the FBI comes knocking I can point out the TRUE identity of someone using my service?
I know there are several proxies out there right now but I do not know if any of them keep or toss information like this and I'm very curious to know if there's anything to mandate logging.
Personally...if I do run a proxy service...I'll probably play dumb and if some federal government want to pay for some training classes well then maybe I'll consider learning how to use the logging features of my proxy software.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
That's not really an issue for the FBI, which does not wish to be bothered with quaint notions of only surveilling a small number of specific individuals after legitimate cause has been established for each (as evidenced by their lobbying for "roving wiretap" powers).
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
They object that it will be expensive and impractical to provide the required level of access, and in any case the average PC Plod will need a lot of education in using the intercepts, which Demon don't have the time to give.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
This makes things like Free/Swan and Speak Freely even more important. Something tells me that
there is going to be some serious cellphone
hacking going on soon.
Jim Burnes
jburnes@earthlink.net
The feds have better things to do than listen to random Joe's spouting random stuff around. Chances are really good that if they are listening to you, you deserve it.
A couple of points.
/. last week?
1) Wire tapping has been of great service to law enforcemnt in the past, providing much needed evidence or information leading to much needed evidence. Say there's this kidnapper, and you don't know where he is. So you tap his girlfriend. The kidnapper, learning nothing from "Cop Shows 101" calls said girlfriend. Trace the call, find the kidnapper. Case solved.
2) Encryption Encryption Encryption. Wasn't there an arguement about 4096 bit on
3) Why are you worried? are you a criminal? Do you associate with criminals? Do you have something to hide? Then why should they tap you?
It's this last point that is the real worry. It's not the ability to tap everything, it's the abuse of the ability that is the problem. So the question really is not, "hey, to tap or not to tap?" but rather "is the FBI mature enough to use their new power appropriately?"
Honestly, they could be sitting in plumbers van accross the street from you right now. Buy they're not, are they? They're probably parked at my house.
And isn't there some law about not being able to use information against you that was discovered while looking for something else?
Praise for the man that invented the preveiw button.
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
FreeS/WAN. The FBI can bite my shiny metal ass.
Here's a situation...
Candidate B is running against candidate A. Since either A is currently in office, he will secretly issue a wiretap to get any kind of dirt on B that it possible.
Think it's rediculious? This is what Richard Nixon essentialy did, albeit in a far more crude manner.
There is also the situation when people are engaging in a legal activity, although one that the government frowns upon, such as a major political rally, like the Million Man March. Perfectly legal (preedom os association is prodected under the First Amendment), but the government really did not like it happening. Imagine if the government had been able to get specific details from a convenient wiretap, or was able to pull it out of private e-mail, and was then able to set up police in such a way as to effectively block the march. I think that issues like this is what this is all about.
--
Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
All the more reason we should all routinely encrypt everything that goes over the network. What is needed is more seamless encryption tools, e.g. if all e-mails are routinely encrypted/de-crypted using public key cryptography without intervention from the user, most people would probably do so.
If internet communications are routinely strongly encrypted all this Big Brother business would become moot. To be sure there are legitimate reasons for the feds to snoop on people, but such a power will be abused (either officialy or by "rouge" agents)
Also this is fundamentaly different from tapping phone conversations in that more and more transactions now take place over the net. Net surveilance would not only include person-to-person communication, but also financial transactions, purchasing habits, reading habits etc etc.
It seems to me that the feds don't really have a compelling reason for this otherwise they would be able to come up with a better reason than the tired old Terrorists/Pedophiles/"Think of the Children" justification.
Have you actualy ever seen any terrorists --Brazil
It's curious how politicians use words. Janet Reno said "criminals and terrorists", which is of course redundant, since terrorists are criminals. But it seems that everytime a new law like this is presented, they talk about "terrorists" and "pedophiles". Scared people will not complain too loud about freedoms being attacked, since after all it's because of terrorists that police-state laws like this are needed.
Politicians seem to want people to think the Net is full of terrorists and pedophiles, so they can regulate it as they want. I hope people won't believe them, and we will complain as we should.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
This may soon become the national motto in the very near future. Let it now be known (to any who may have had doubts before) that we live in the Orwellian age. If this is the way it is to be I would rather be dead.
WAR IS PEACE (American forces killing to keep the peace)
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY (What we thought was free speech is now a trap to catch people who say what they think, and think THE WRONG THINGS)
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH (What is called education is actually programming intended to make us moronic consumers, keeping the economy strong)
Not only is BIG BROTHER watching, he is waiting too.
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."
<rant>
And most importantly, don't forget. A lot of people feel ignored online because a paper letter still counts more than an email to a politician. That's because the pol expects the emailer to have forgotten about this by Election Day -- not so easy to do if you're so steamed you can write a letter, lick a stamp and send it. (Or so the theory goes.)
The FCC is appointed by the President -- tell him (or, better yet, the party he's from) that they won't get your vote as long as shenanigans like these persist. And do it, too. Don't buy that "you'll throw your vote away" crap -- if 89% of this country didn't vote for the Democrats or Republicans, how much of a waste is that? IMO, you're probably wasting your vote if you do vote for the two major parties, since both of them probably represent many, many views you find repellant, no matter who you are.
A candidate that forms his opinions based on an overriding philosophy that you agree with may still come down on the wrong side, but with less frequency, and probably not nearly as wholeheartedly as a politician who just checks the party scoresheet -- most of which was probably written by the biggest contributors this week.
I hate to sound so vitriolic, but the ineffectiveness in American politics is the result of the apathy of its citizens -- fostered by those currently in power that characterize our system as "imperfect, but the best we can do."
Well, half-truths are half-right -- it's certainly imperfect, but the two parties that are exactly as different as Coke and Pepsi that is, as different as they need to be to convince you there is any difference at all. Small voter turnouts only help them engineer the elections better -- turn out in force, and vote for the candidate you feel most comfortable with, even if you think he'll only get ten votes.
Treat politicians like employees, or better yet, like vendors -- there's plenty of vendors. If we do, maybe we'll get some customer service. phil
</rant>
I don't like it, but thats what happens to public networks. You can't trust anything that is controlled by Govt or industry. We need to develop a means of communication that is like what the fuel cell is to gas & electric. Govt loves industry & encourages consolidation. A few companies are easy to control, a lot of companies are harder and a lot of individuals are impossible.
Did ya see the news about the Canadian cell phone company having to kowtow to the FBI for the very same wire tapping reasons? Friends, it's a lost cause. Within 5 years I expect to be able to use encrypted voice over IP and the FBI won't be able to learn jack about it. Even the destination will be hidden by anonymouse recallers(?) just as anonymous remailers hide email destinations.
Not eveyrone will use it of course, especially ordinary punters. But I sure will, and lots of you will, and definitely those who have something to hide and the brains to survive.
What a waste of $500M.
--
Infuriate left and right
Suppose a legal but unscrupulous adult web site redirects you to an illegal child porn site? (Just to build up their ad counts). It's happened to me, and I got out as quickly as I could. But if the FBI has the broad powers, they can identify you as a patron of the site and launch a further investigation. How are they supposed to know you were tricked? How can you prove you didn't go there intentionally? And this whole thing about Kidnappers is total crap, exploiting our deepest most primal fears just to get their way.
Seeing as so much traffic from anywhere moves within the states, how does this bode for Canadians and others who are unfortunate enough to get shadowed by the usa's laws and lack of morals?
This almost leads to an ask.slashdot question: What tools (whether legal or not) are available for the following:
--Telephone encryption
--Cell phone encryption
--Anonymous web movement
--Email encryption (pgp/gpg obviously)
--Cell phone location hiding
--etc. etc.
Obviously, which are "uncrackable" (I don't consider 40-bit anything to be uncrackable with the kind of computing power a governments budget can come up with)
I think what's needed (perhaps as part of Your Rights Online) is a large discussion forum in the style of the old BBS's with message bases so that we can have a solid on-line location to find answers to questions such as these!
Securityportal.net, hackernews.com, etc. etc. are great, but it's *so* hard to go around the web and find any real solutions to invasions of our privacy... A central discussion place would be nice.
Anyways, just a handful of thoughts.
Personally, I'd rather be innocent of a crime, but thrown in jail for protecting my privacy, than living "free" but being watched by some "authority".
mindslip
How on earth are they supposed to be able to track who you are on a network?
Using a few little tools, you change the MAC address of your card.
You can use those freebie introductory access CDs from the front of any magazine to contact almost anywhere..
The IP address will never be the same, especially if you use different ISP's to connect all the time.
The encryption factor takes care of them not being able to actually READ the contents...
What's the point of this new power??
It's like legislating that you now have the power to breath. It doesn't achieve much, because you could do it all along.. It doesn't get you anything extra useful.
Unless, of course, you've got one of those nice PIII chips, and forget to alter the serial..
Malk.
Secondly, there are those who are maliciously accused of crimes-with-victims, who are actually innocent but are just assumed to be guiltydue to Satanic Panic, the belief that "women/children never lie about being abused," or some combination thereof. A close friend of mine's father was accused of sexual abuse by my friend's psychotic alcoholic mother, and damn near had his life ruined even though he hadn't done anything and my friend steadfastly maintained that he hadn't done anything of the sort to her. This has actually become a depressingly common tactic in custody battles. Imagine, if you will, being a non-custodial father and having every communication between yourself and your children "supervised" or tapped and having some very misguided "experts" misinterpret perfectly innocent statements as signs that you are a child molestor. DON'T LAUGH. It happens more often than you think. And it is a *major* problem.
Then, there are folks like me, who are dead if there is ever another McCarthy-type situation in the USA. Like I've said before, the FBI's probably got a file on me, but it hasn't ruined my life yet. I'm probably in their "harmless anarchist" bin right now.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I'm thinking.
I'm thinking that this is consistent with the rest of 4th Amendment abuses of the past couple of decades. The Feds can now sieze your house, your car, your boat, your computers, your telephone, and everything else you own because you are a "suspected drug dealer". Your congressman might care, but won't do a thing for fear of looking "soft on crime." You don't even need to be charged with anything.
The issue with this is not "is there just cause" but "who is watching the watchers?" Our founding fathers are surely turning over in their graves.
2 Things:
1. The FBI wants to tape the first 10 seconds of every call, and store it in an archive.
They want these tapes "just in case" they need to monitor conversations that happened in the past.
They can do this very easily because CALEA allows the feds to log into a switch and electronically listen to any conversation they want to, since the information will be sent straight from the switch to the FBI office over a high speed fiber connection.
Previously the Feds had to attach something physically to the wire to listen in, now they just telnet to the switch and have complete access!
2. It's not just Nortel that's providing the software. Lucent, Ericsson, and every other telephone switch provider in America is required to have this functionality by December 1999.
If they do not comply, they will be heavily fined by the government.
Lucent switches, the core of the Bell network, will have this functionality by October 1999.
That's next month!
We have to do something about this now!
-- Rose Kennedy (A former telecom switch programmer)
Am I the only person who is starting to view these words as red flags?
At the height of the War on Drugs, it seemed that the fastest way to get something passed was to say that it was designed to thwart drug dealers. Now that the American public has grown a little more skeptical of this rhetoric, we've moved on to terrorists. Terrorists are the new boogeymen -- we must do whatever it takes to stop them. You, the citizen, need to forget the Constitution for a while because we, your leaders, are trying to fight terrorists.
We did this with McCarthy (sp?), too. The Reds had to be stopped -- First Amendment be damned. Haven't we learned? What is the next boogeyman? Will it be those porn-downloading, foul-mouthed Anonymous Cowards on the internet?
And then there's legislation for "the children". Long after we've come to our senses with "Commies", "Drug Dealers", and "Terrorists", we'll still be passing stupid laws to "protect the children". It's too dangerous politically to oppose anything cloaked in a "protect the children" argument. It inspires a nice emotional knee-jerk response in the voters and shuts down the higher reasoning and skepticism functions of their brains.
I'm not denying the presence of drug dealers or terrorists in our world today, but I'm tired of leaders who can't come up with better ways to protect me than to force me to give up freedoms and privacy. It has the characteristics of a power-grab disguised as "protection". That is not "protection", it is "manipulation".
If this the only protection they can offer, I prefer to watch out for myself, thanks.
Sorry for the essay. I'll go back to work now.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I asked them what this is based on, their reply was that it was in the regulations. When I asked to see the regulations, they told me that they don't have to show it to me.
If I had a Pilot in my pocket, would they strip search me?
Injured Software engineer wins against Mattel!
Face it, back in the days of analog copper voice lines, the gov't discovered that it could listen in by clipping a pair of alligator clips on the wires elsewhere and listen in. Over the years, this got codified into law. What did not get codified into law was the requirement that telcos make their system able to be tapped. 90 years later, we've got fibre optic trunks carrying gigabits of digital encrypted data carrying millions of simultaneous communications. And the dinosaur gov't still wants to use its alligator clips only to find that it can't. What's more is that a single communications may not even flow through the same cable. It can be packetized and take 1000 routes and reassemble at the other end. But we know all this; gov't too but they don't care. The gov't is not a technical entity, but it has power. So now it wants to simply mandate that they get their hookup. Telcos have offered to let gov't officials into their central offices to listen with appropriate court orders, but this is not good enough for gov't. They want to be able to do their own secret taps without asking anyone or anyone being able to find out. This is fucking scary. As a backlash, individuals are turning to crypto to render tapping (even secret tapping) useless. Well this has gotta go, the gov't says. First, crypto is delared munitions. Then companies shift development out of US. Then Wassenaar tries to stop crypto over the globe. Then gov't cracks down on crypto exporters who challenge. Oddly, 9th circuit court sided with crypto. Don't expect this to go unchallenged. And so far, just like this, it's been, move, countermove, by techies and gov't spooks. A huge collision between these two groups is imminent. This is the kind of stuff over which nations will fall (when commies made 1991 attempt to cut comm and resieze power in Soviet Union), start reneging on international treaties (Wasenaar), ignore the law and go their own way (The (mythical?) NSA line eater), start "making examples" of hackers to scare the rest (Mitnick, etc.) start mandating mass packet monitoring at the ISP level as a condition of maintaining their business licenses thus bypassing end user protests (see Australian net nanny requirements), 1st time ever restrictions on once basic freedoms (in 1986 and 1994, US, for 1st time ever, outlawed listening to certain portions of the radio spectrum, and outlawed manufacture of certain types of radio receivers. We. Who once scoffed at Soviets banning radio receivers.). All this is converging on what will be a massive shakeout that lies in the not too distant future. The real battle has not yet begun.
Am I a criminal? Do I associate with criminals? Do I have something to hide?
For me, the honest answer is 'yes', thus the anon coward status. I've been known to light up a joint about three or four times a year, usually when a random person passes me one at a concert. That's the extent of my criminal activity.
HOWEVER, I don't particularly want somebody listening in on say... conversations with my lawyer, conversations with my broker, conversations with my girlfriend... etc. The issue has nothing to do with trusting the federal government, it has to do with trusting every single individual employee of the government. Written policy which states 'unless we think you're a drug-dealing, arms-trafficking, pedophile, we won't do this' is all well and good until one realizes that one person could easily listen to my conversations and blackmail me with say, the charges I had pressed against me as a youth but were later dropped and expunged, or perhaps they could use something from a conversation with my girlfriend to help my ex get custody of my daughter, something which would break my heart.
The trouble is that as soon as something is possible, then it will occur. The more of this stuff that happens, the more America depresses me
That's what. Having immgrated from a Communist country where you lost your TEACHING job if YOU didn't join the PARTY, I'd be one to fight this.
Now I'm really sorry if bringing up the subject makes you feel guilty or annoys you (Hence: "What makes you think..."). Tough.
1. I prefer to stand up for myself than whine about the possible futility of any effort. I'm not afraid of disappointment, unlike yourself.
2. I hope to die before I live in a country where the government tells you the ruling figure is your grandfather. Ask my own father about how he cried as a teenager when Stalin died.
3. And hey people die anyway, might as well skip the part about throwing up every morning because of consequences of being a coward.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Neither are you safe if you haven't done anything wrong. The Feds have a penchant for trying to turn people into levers to get at other targets. If you have some chance acquaintance with someone they want to get, you may find yourself wiretapped, "black bagged", a circumstantial case fabricated to indict you, and the price of your freedom being set as your "cooperation" with the investigators (meaning give them the testimony they want to hear even if it's perjury). If you refuse to lie for them, you will find your ass in prison more likely than not and ruined in any event. Your legal fees will bankrupt you.
This goes on every day. The only reason it is possible is because our technologies are biased away from privacy, allowing the police agencies to fish with big nets. If they had to actually expend effort to get at people's communications, they would have to actually aim at their targets and the innocent would be safe.
I just came across some scripts recently that will add PGP functionality to Pine rather easily for other ssh stalwarts like muh'self. They can be found at Linux.com in the tuning section. I can also email them to any interested parties. Just ask.
Dirk
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
not to give a damn.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
How on earth are they supposed to be able to track who you are on a network?
Piece of cake, ducky...
Using a few little tools, you change the MAC address of your card.
And that helps you how? If you dial in, your MAC address is irrelevant, and if you have something like a cable modem, the cable model suddenly stops recognizing your NIC and you are cut off from the net until you change your MAC back.
You can use those freebie introductory access CDs from the front of any magazine to contact almost anywhere. The IP address will never be the same, especially if you use different ISP's to connect all the time.
The IP address may change, but that IP address points to an ISP. That ISP has logs, in particular, logs of which phone number was assigned a certain dynamic IP at which time. So unless you dial in from pay phones (doable, but a huge pain in the ass), it's not a big deal for law enforcement to link your posts/rants/site visits to your home phone number.
Being anonymous on the net is generally hard. Either you have to use a public terminal (Internet cafes, dial-in from payphones, etc.), or you need a hacked machine as a gateway.
Companies like ZKS (Zero Knowledge Systems) may provide a solution. When they finally come out with their system, we'll see how good it actually is.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The internet implications of all this are probably less dire than many slashdotters anticipate. ANYBODY can packet sniff, etc. No warant required. This is about getting a warrant and getting into the e-mail files you have with AOL or whomever. I suspect your ISP wouldn't give them up without a warrant anyway, and they might not give up your name and the address they send the bill to without a warrant either.
I suspect this is some knee jerk reaction by some federal thug, who is basically clueless. I have, of course been known to be wrong before, and there may be some very specific little wrinkle in all this I've overlooked.
But, basically on the internet they have a lot more operating freedom (just as we do). For them, this means they don't have to get a warrant to put a monitor on to watch out for e-mail to fterrorist@thugs.com, or whatever. They would have to get a warrant (no surprise) to have thugs.com give them a copy of fterrorist's mailbox.
The internet is not at all like the analog phone system, where there was an expectation of privacy which was widely abused. The feds have had a variant on blue boxing, which enabled jillions of wiretaps to be made from one phone to any other phone on direct dial since the mid-60's. That's why the White House is on a switchboard! Apparently, there was something with digital that interferred with this vehicle for illegal wiretaps, just as cellular phones had done. I'd be interested if they still have anything equivalent to the old blue box variant, or if they have to get a specific entry to make access to the signals, essentially like to old fashioned wiretap. If so, with digital telephony, we may be better off than before, since it this would mean that they would have to go up the pole outside your house or get a warrant to obtain the cooperation of your local baby bell to monitor you.
However, try as I might, I can't think of any situation in which a wiretap (which has to be placed on a known entity) would help locate a missing child. If you know who's got the kid...go get him.
So when you go bust down the guy's door and it turns out he moved the kidnapped child to an abandoned warehouse down the street, and the child is killed because you violated their first demand ("No cops."), what then?
Wiretaps are just like any other evidence-gathering tool.
If your child was kidnapped, and you had a list of 2 people you think did it, wouldn't you want the cops to be able to tap phone lines to be able to tell for sure? With a wiretap they can collect information about the group's movements, plans, and *locations*.
The real problem is that most people don't care enough to change the way they vote as a result of this stuff.
2 key problems to solve:
The current safety may be only because although the NSA/GCHQ/etc act in a way that is above the law, the people that make governing decisions are not to the same extent.
So which is more likely - Clinton/Blair etc finding a way to act illegally without a Starr report, or making the NSA act in a sensible/lawful manner?
Echelon Links, And More, And More
DWR is Ajax for Java
This is very naive. Why should you worry about people that have no power over you being able to impede your privacy? That might be annoying, but nothing else. I send private emails over the Internet every day knowing that everybody could be looking at them. Probably, so do you.
What I worry about is the combination of transparency and obedience. Freedom in the authorative society is directly related to the fact that most of our actions are not subject to scrutiny from above. The total government surveilance society is as much a nightmare with our current laws as under Ingsoc.
-
I don't think adding access points to a network inherently reduces the quality of the security.
Here's my logic: @Home could add the capability to their network to turn on a packet sniffer at my modem and send all the data back to the feds. The alternative is to setupa a sniffer on the loop and weed out all the junk that isn't from my IP. This makes things more convienent for anyone who might want to watch my moves, but it doesn't improve their chances of cracking my SSL connections.
The security is based on how I protect the information, not who has access to it (in the protected form).
Privacy is a matter of respect. Any sign of an to consider me as less than an equal in terms of opportunity and as an individual I take as a THREAT.
Every collectivist totalitarian state uses fear and shame to bring people down.
Second the government is not above me. We are above government. And we and the government are below the law. Read the constitution again.
I expect some respect from my government. I'll say it again, I am not above the law. I am above the government.
Wake up.
If it helps society in some small way,
YOu're thepert tell me how. Fucking parrot. By the way YOU WANT TO CONTRIBUTE to this knee-jerk TV addicted self-destructive society?
And they're bored enough to listen to me...
Get out in the real world once in a while. Every state has laws against sexual behaviour of almost any kind... You'd probably be under house arrest by morning. They haven't been able to track people so closely until now.
Of course, maybe you need to see for yourself.
Think about it: In Canada a parent takes an innocent picture of their child running happily naked through the house and then gets arrested because the developer thought the picture erotic. Who's really the pedophile here? Hint: not the parent. I mean it's like calling perverts all those painters who painted the Madonna and children running around her.
Wake up. Please wake up. BIg Brother isn't the gov't. It's your next door neighbor.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
The government is constantly expanding and they they are running out of ways to control your everyday lives. Its also about working towards a one world type government. The first steps are already being taken. 1. Disarming the general population (more gun control) 2. Dumbing down the population (its easy to manage sheep) 3. So on and so forth, you get the idea.
As an employee of a comms equipment manufacturer in the UK, this is a matter of concern to me. How are we supposed to sell into US markets? Is this protectionism in disguise?
How does one go about giving the World Trade Organisation a heads-up about this? Does the WTO in fact cover this issue?
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
The warrant is supposed to state what property can be searched, and for what. Now, what if the cops find something else? IIRC, they can use it, so long as they were conducting a legitimate search as per the search warrant.
For an example, imagine a felon has a bag of drugs in his sock drawer. If the cops come in with a search warrant for a handgun, they are justified in going through the man's sock drawer (you can hide handguns in sock drawers), and can then bust the guy on drug charges and use the evidence legally in court. If the warrant is for, say, stolen washing machines, cops have no right to go through his sock drawer: he cannot possibly hide a washing machine in a sock drawer. If they do, and find the drugs, they cannot use that as court evidence, arrest the guy for it, or bring that to a judge to get a warrant for searching for drugs.
Of course, in the latter case, they may use legal surveillance methods to see if they can get some legal evidence for an arrest...
--The basis of all love is respect
...but not by any of this legislation.
It honestly sounds like most of you people would prefer that law enforcement have *no* ability to collect evidence. No wire-taps, no search warrants, no security cameras.
I don't think I have *ever* read a Slashdot article with this number of posts and NOT A SINGLE FACT OR STATISTIC backing ANY of your objections up. No numbers, no statistical trend showing the number of illegal or unnecessary wiretaps, nothing. You are all simply feeding on each other's fears and magnifying them to a horrible frenzy.
Do you people really wish to live in a place where the privacy of every person is held in the highest regard -- untouchable even in the most extreme of circumstances? I take COMFORT in the fact that my law enforcement bodies are able, through a court approval, to discretely and confidentially monitor communications -- in any form. Like most of you, I have no statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if wiretaps aided in a significant number of prosecutions that would have been impossible without them. People -- we do have checks and balances in our governments. Statistics on wiretaps are collected and analyzed. If a group of people are requesting an ungodly number of wiretaps while producing few prosecutions, this will be noticed.
I am also extremely displeased by the high degree of bias in these "Your Rights Online" pieces. The "author" bringing the stories to us also brings his editorial along, complete with conspiracy theories and the invariable "Big Brother" tie-in. To privacy activists, this is pure adrenalin, hence the high number of very vocal anti-government and anti-law-enforcement posts.
Now, before you folks unleash your fury on my "naive" and "ignorant" ass, let me just say that I obviously don't want to see these types of things abused, but we DO already have oversight in place to see that this doesn't happen. If you feel that judges are being "tricked" into allowing wiretaps, or that these judges are "in" on the conspiracy with the cops to violate your personal privacy for their own kicks, THIS is what you should be working to fight.
Don't hinder law enforcement's abilities to conduct investigations in a LAWFUL and DISCRETE manner just because there exists the POSSIBILITY that these abilities will be misused.
Do you folks think that people in charges of these law enforcement organizations and the people appointed to act as judge are all complete IDIOTS? I'm perfectly willing to concede the fact that a small number of these people are, in fact, stupid people, but that does *not* mean that these organizations are collectively out to ruin your lives and your privacy for their own kicks. These people are fully aware that there are privacy activists out there that would have a field day if they fuck up, with a result of them being out of a job.
PLEASE don't read and take things at face value. THINK FOR YOURSELF and don't just jump on the frightened privacy bandwagon until you make an informed decision on your own. The government is NOT OUT TO GET YOU. If you don't like how your local law enforcement is behaving, you have two options: 1) Write a letter to your local government and media and express your concerns; 2) MOVE OUT. If you don't like how your national law enforcement is behaving, you have two options: 1) Write a letter to your congressmen and media and express your concerns; 2) MOVE OUT.
You people need to be working *WITH* your government to address your concerns, not *AGAINST* them.
AFAIK, this is exactly the kind of thing that Freedom servers are made to prevent. The Freedom Network is designed to use strong encryption and other techniques to make it not possible to track your internet access. encryption makes sure they cant read it in the network, and proxies make it impossible to trace back to you. anti-traffic analysis makes sure they dont even know if you -are- using the net at a particular time.
has anyone tried Freedom? ive just read their www.
Why not get rid of politicians ability to vote in new laws. The only power they would have would be to introduce new bills. The people would vote on them (and introduce them if the idea has enough support). I can hear it now: "How would we get the people to vote on laws, where would they find the time to research these laws and go out and vote on them".
To get people to vote on laws, you could offer a 10 percent tax break on their income tax, or give them some sort of sales tax waiver certificate. If they don't vote for a period of time, then they would get something like a 60% income tax penalty. This would be refunded in increments if they start voting again. Of course some people with limited intelligence or other hardships could get waivers.
The bills would have to be greatly simplified for this to work. They would have to be written in the same technical jargon to avoid loopholes due to wording issues. However they would have to be reduceable (SP?) to four or five bulleted items that anyone with a sixth grade education could understand.
The bills would have to be easy to vote on. An electronic method might be the cheapest and best way, however it might be too prone to fraud. This is something that would have to be worked out. The main requirements would be that it would have to be easy, it would have to be done in the home or somewhere else convenient, it would have to be secure and it would have to be cheap.
This is something that would be hard to do at first, but would eventually work its way into American culture and people would get used to it (especially if you didn't have to pay over $1000 in sales tax on a new car!!!). There are also a lot of details that still need to be worked out, but I think it would distribute the power a bit more so that the politicians cannot pull this back room crap they are doing now.
What are your thoughts on this???
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
http://www.infoshop.org/voting.html
how does this bode for Canadians and others who are unfortunate enough to get shadowed by the usa's laws and lack of morals?
As an extreme option, you could simply choose not to do business with US companies. Express these privacy and confidentiality fears and concerns with these businesses. They will in turn complain to their government and things will change.
Though I suspect the number of people that will actually do this will be far too small to make any appreciable impact.
Oops.. guess I shoulda used the preview button.
Okay, so this will stop drug dealers? Here's how a drug dealer gets around this one. 'dude, if you want to call me on the phone a gram of coke is a 'frag'' (stated in person).
The conversation later sounds like this
"yo dude, man, want to play some quake?" (can i buy some coke?)
"sure dude, what's the fraglimit?" (sure, how much?)
"I dunno, let's play for 12 frags" (12 grams)
Okay, now the drug dealer, without encryption, has just made a 12 gram deal, in a basically unbreakable code. he's not a drug dealer, he just likes to play quake.
Besides... Completely denying the law enforcement agencies these monitoring tools is no more or less restrictive and comprimising than the lack of privacy issues you people are so worried about.
They're servicing me, not me them. Geez. wake up.
It isn't about restriction you idiot. It isn't abvout tallying up inconveniences to find out who's unfair. This isn't a juvenile game of keeping score.
It's about personal security. Why should I have to depend on the Feds. How can I possibly feel secure with my life in some other person's hands?
In the words of a spiritual leader I greatly respect, "I have achieved more by not being dependent on others. I have achieved nothing by aquiring others to do my work."
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
You people need to be working *WITH* your government
No, the correct phrase should be The government should be working for the people, not against them. I don't completely disagree with both the privacy nuts and people like yourself, but this kind of potential Orwellian state can only work if the watching agencies are honest. Now, given the recent track record of Washington D.C., I cannot fully trust our government to always conduct itself in a lawful manner.
The only thing you need to bypass Government wiretaps is Internet telephony. While the FBI may be pushing for eavesdropping on so called packet switched media. The reality is that this is beyond mere technical difficulty, and well in to the realm of technical impossibility. Think about this for a second.
To tap a phone line law enforcement only has to lean on one, possible a few parties. Namely your telephone company. Since telephone companies are cowardly, heavily regulated monopolies this has not proved very difficult. After all, they only balked at the *cost* of CALEA.
However think about what it would take just to tap an IP stream. First, because of the very nature of packet switching, you need taps everywhere. Since there is no analog for the central office on the Internet. So just to start with you need to lean on a lot more parties, every ISP basically. While many, most, ISP's are cowardly corporations, not all are. There are lots of community and non-for-profit providers who do have some spine. Not to mention that clandestine "gray"-nets would immediately spring up, should such regulations be imposed (look at what's happening in China if you do not believe me). So, even if extremely intrusive, almost certainly unconstitutional laws where passed, wily individuals would still get around them.
Furthermore we have not even addressed the problem of making something meaningful out of a raw IP stream. For that the eavesdropper would need, not only all the packets sent and received, but would also need to know what program you are using. A raw stream of UDP packets does not provide very much info. and programs could easily be written to obfuscate their purpose.
Let's face it packet switched communications is taking over from circuit switched. Packet switched is technically extremely difficult to tap without having monolithic control of the entire network. Given the current political climate I find it impossible to believe that after decades of decentralized authority the Internet would revert to the sort of central control authority required to make the DOJ's dreams possible.
So, basically, fight CALEA like hell, but promote Internet telephony even more.
What else would you call it when the government pays off private industry to do its dirty work? They can call it what ever they like (they've chosen the term "reimbursement"), but the end is the same. It's even a greater commentary on the sad fact that in the U.S., most people will do anything if the price is right.
I signed up to be a beta tester about 3 months
ago and they still haven't gotten back to me.
Does anyone know if they have released a beta?
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
So you know I atleast have some basis for my statements, an uncle of mine was, before his retirement, a postal inspector. Another friend of mine was, and presently still is, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (or the FBI.) Both of these people have told numerous stories that go basically like this one. US Customs is required to monitor all shipments from other countries with such things as drug and bomb sniffing dogs. However, US Customs also has the dogs sniff domestic parcels as well. US Customs finds something in a domestic parcel, destined for a certain area, or orifiginating in a certain area. US Customs calls local law enforcement and tells them to go pick someone up for mailing something illegal. Local law enforcement goes to the judge and says that they got a tip from US Customs. The judge officially says that this time he will issue the warrant, but at some point in the future, he won't. (That point has yet to come.) It is illegal for US Customs to inspect domestic packages, but they do. They just never officially admit it. And as far as wiretaps go, a recent study in California found that of all the multitudes of wiretaps peformed, less then 1% of the taps made had anything remotelu criminal in them. The FBI gets far more information from entering a home and planting camera's, microphones, and other bugs. Now, what about people with alarm systems. Your wonderful alarm company tells the FBI the deactivation code, or turns the system off remotely. About the only thing a wiretap is really good for, is in a kidnapping investigation, they can locate where the caller is calling from. Up until this law was passed, cell phones made it hard to nail down an exact location to start searching. Now with this law, the FBI knows exactly where to search. I agree with the FBI's statement that they want to fight crime. The problem is, human nature dictates that this will be abused.
.It honestly sounds like most of you people would prefer that law enforcement have *no* ability to collect evidence. No wire-taps, no search warrants, no security cameras.
YES.
I don't think I have *ever* read a Slashdot article with this number of posts and NOT A SINGLE FACT OR STATISTIC backing ANY of your objections up. No numbers, no statistical trend showing the number of illegal or unnecessary wiretaps, nothing. You are all simply feeding on each other's fears and magnifying them to a horrible frenzy.
I do believe it has been covered quite well especially here and earlier articles. Besides what are statistics worth anyway. Sorry, but I don't want to live in your little Utopia. In the middle of NOWHERE.
I am also extremely displeased by the high degree of bias in these "Your Rights Online" pieces. The "author" bringing the stories to us also brings his editorial along, complete with conspiracy theories and the invariable "Big Brother" tie-in. To privacy activists, this is pure adrenalin, hence the high number of very vocal anti-government and anti-law-enforcement posts.
Like the bias of gov't talking about terrorists to scare the morons into a frenzy.
Now, before you folks unleash your fury on my "naive" and "ignorant" ass, let me just say that I obviously don't want to see these types of things abused, but we DO already have oversight in place to see that this doesn't happen. If you feel that judges are being "tricked" into allowing wiretaps, or that these judges are "in" on the conspiracy with the cops to violate your personal privacy for their own kicks, THIS is what you should be working to fight.
Ahem... people can't be in a million places at once. besides what are you suggesting? Should we bribe jufges to be good Americans.
Sounds like watching an old episode of Superman on one TV and McCarthy trials on the other.
Don't hinder law enforcement's abilities to conduct investigations in a LAWFUL and DISCRETE manner just because there exists the POSSIBILITY that these abilities will be misused.
It's their responsibility to prove guilt not mine. I like erring on the side of caution. Pun intended.
Do you folks think that people in charges of these law enforcement organizations and the people appointed to act as judge are all complete IDIOTS?
As an individual speaking for hisself, like a good individual should, I believe that given the BIAS of the Feds against the Internet, they don'tr use it often. They would quickly realize how futile their actions are.
I'm perfectly willing to concede the fact that a small number of these people are, in fact, stupid people, but that does *not* mean that these organizations are collectively out to ruin your lives and your privacy for their own kicks.
What the fuck! What is up with all this crap about privacy to avoid shame or snooping for kicks? Breaching privacy IS A LUCRATIVE business.
These people are fully aware that there are privacy activists out there that would have a field day if they fuck up, with a result of them being out of a job.
The same way basketball stars can continue to play after using drugs. Mind you I don't buy most drug charges, but there are rules to playing games.
PLEASE don't read and take things at face value.
I didn't. Pedophiles do not own the Internet.
THINK FOR YOURSELF and don't just jump on the frightened privacy bandwagon until you make an informed decision on your own.
Welcome back to the show... If you're just joining us, Hoover, Nixon, John "the common Pilgrim" Calvin, the Inquisition, Gulags, and Stalin were real people. It maybe hard to believe but they DID EXIST.
The government is NOT OUT TO GET YOU.
How do you know I'm not a criminal or a terrorist or a Jehovah's witness for Christ's sake? Oh YEAH NEWS FLASH Russia's after Jehovah's witnesses again. And no I'm not one. You call yourself informed? Moron.
If you don't like how your local law enforcement is behaving, you have two options: 1) Write a letter to your local government and media and express your concerns;
I do. It's like high school. Selective listening.
2) MOVE OUT.
China here I come. Or Oblivia. Who's in power there now?
You people need to be working *WITH* your government to address your concerns, not *AGAINST* them.
YEAH, sure. When Clinton puts some moron kid on stage for taking a violent game and showing it to his mother, I feel secure I'm being heard.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Legalizing drugs will not solve problems. Those who use will use to excess, creating more problems, both social; and legal. It's easy, let's have drug free America.
I think you present some good points, a few faulty ones, and was actually about to write up a nice response, right up until I read this line:
You call yourself informed? Moron.
I can't wait for the day that people can have an intelligent argument without resorting to name-calling.
I do. It's like high school. Selective listening.
Remember: You elected the people that are listening to your letters.
Cheers...
Hmm... /.
/., and I don't want to use the slang..but you get my drift.
Seems like these topics bring out all the libertarian off-topic reply's at
Without being labeled a Nazi(I'm Republican), and as someone familar with Law Enforcement; it is important that the ability, and technology exists to allow investigation to go on unfettered.
If you don't support the basic right of the Police to enforce the laws:
1.Vote_in_a_candidate whose agenda will allow him to change the unappealing law...That is what a democracy is about after all.
2.Failing that, if you think the Police want to snoop for no reason (ur wrong!!), just be sure to not call on them the next time you need them. Call you local libertarian, who'd (according to some of the asinine comments I read, leaglize drugs in the name of protecting pertsonal privacy.)That's pure hogwash (really it's something else); but then so many flamebait's are sent in too
This is from 1996 so it's not too current but I think it's safe to assume the amount of wiretapping hasn't gone down in the past few years. ACLU Calls on Congress To Kick Wiretap Habit...
Err...we have elected judges? Which ones exactly? I have never, *ever* voted for a judge. There's a reason for that. Possibly the very reason you just mentioned.
When will the "anti-fun" coalition ever cease their interminable bullshit? have you ever even smoked pot? Drink coffee? Alchohol?
You don't have the right to tell me what to smoke. Drug use is NOT a moral issue and I challenge ANYBODY to defend such a ridiculous claim.
ADDICTION is an issue but ADDICTION is not a tremendous problem in this country.
The drug war is nothing more than an excuse to keep a "superfluous" (to capitalists) population under control and in prison. Our prison population has tripled since the facist, Reagan, took office. It's time to end this nonsense.
1998 WIRETAP REPORT
1997 WIRETAP REPORT
So, does this change anything? Lemme explain my statement.
As it is now, we are just entering into the digital age. Hence the FBI and FCC's desire to have some control of it.
Last week I rented The Siege, a movie about the FBI tracking down terrorists in New York. An ongoing joke was when the taxi driver from Wings kept asking why they (the FBI) didn't have microwave snooping gear on top of the stuff they were already using.
Wire taps are low level tech to these guys. They have radar, infrared, nightvision, directional microphones, bugs, not to mention those nifty lasers that can pick up sound by how a piece of glass vibrates. If they want to spy on you, they can do it *easilly*.
As it is, a massive majority of Americans go about their daily lives completely unaffected by this.
Honestly, how does being able to snoop digitally actually change anything?
Besides the fact that we can encrypt our digital communication a lot better than the FBI can decrypt it? To the best of my knowledge, they would need the NSA's help to decrypt stuff using 4096 bit keys. And if the NSA is after you...
And why is it so many of the AC's posting here are worrying about the FBI breaking down your door and coming after your weed? If they were, the nubmer of prisons in the US would have to be tripled.
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
That's it except it's a BBS on Apache. No need to log onto the Internet to USE the Internet. Or just replace the damned thing. Slashdot for Newsgroups anyone?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
"terrorism" is one of the most used tools of government propaganda. "The fight against terrorism" has been the excuse for a tremendous amount of atrocities.
support gun control: take guns from cops
I'm no expert on this but can't somebody spoof IP addresses while sending the threatening data?
Assuming that Osama Bin Laden hires a cracker who spoofs Rob's IP address to threaten the prez, doesn't that automatically make Rob te prime suspect?
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Those who use will use to excess :-)
Right, just like drunk drivers.
Wake up, man. Alcohol is more harmful to your body, more addictive and the cause of more deaths per year than pot could ever be. The War on Drugs would HAVE to include alcohol or it becomes a joke. Oh wait, it IS a joke.
Sheesh.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
If you use, there is a good chance that you will fall into excessive use no matter the legal status of the drug. After all, that is why they are considered addictive.
Legalizing drugs will solve the problems of crime associated with their manufacture and distribution. Putting the responsibility for making and selling drugs on pharmaceutical companies will increase product quality and provide tax revenue for the government. Net result- less problems with overdoses, and money for treatment programs.
The other problem legalization solves is the need for intrusive government intervention AKA The War on (Some) Drugs. The fact that your car/house/boat can be seized without recourse because your buddy decided to bring over some pot is a violation of basic human rights. Legalization will help remove one of the great excuses for the intrusion of the government into the lives of common citizens. Granted, legalization alone wont get them to keep their hands off the net. However it may help weaken their arguments (They will scream Protect the Children instead). Another benefit is that it will prevent the destruction of families because of insane mandatory minimum sentences for petty infractions. A whole lot of good can come from legalization, both on the internet, and in the big blue room.
-BW
it's more dangerous than coke ... of course, if the wiretappers are determined enough, everything you talk about is just a code for talking about evil, sinful, filthy drugs
support gun control: take guns from cops
WINDOWS NT SERVER 4.0 IS ENTERPRISE-READY :-)
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Wire taps are okay in SOME cases, but they do scare me. The problem is, the government doesn't have to answer to anybody. As long as the American economy is doing good, people in general who are not informed about what's happening in the world around them will not care. People who read news on sites such as Slashdot have been informed about these privacy invasions and wiretaps, yet they only make up a small percentage of the population. I guess it's up to the government to regulate itself.... (good luck)
Rajiv Varma
Customs takes down more online pedophiles every month than the FBI takes down in a year. The FBI also has the lowest conviction rate of all federal agencies. I don't care what the commie liberals say, but the FBI is the american KGB and we *ARE* a police state
---Got Coffee?---
The very LARGE point is that the ability to do all this is automatically is apt to be abused. Ever have to argue over an incorrect bill with someone who says "the computer says it's right"? Imagine what they'll say about their keyword search programs. "If it picked you out you must have done something." The FBI has a VERY long history of abusing US citizens rights and seldom admits to a mistake. Read any newspapers lately? You may have heard about Waco. They even cover up info from the Justice Department! Do you think the average wrongly-accused person stands a chance? As a former prosecutor said about the Starr investigation: "Give me unlimited money and a few FBI agents and I can put ANYBODY in jail."
You don't have to be criminal to get caught in a web of keywords that make you the target of an investigation. Try explaining to your boss how the nice FBI man was mistaken. Good luck.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Please understand this when we fight any infringment on our freedom.
If our government works as intended, the police enforce laws created by duly elected legislative bodies. Period. It is not the role of police to decide what citizens ought or ought not be allowed to do, just as it is not the role of the military to decide whether other countries ought to be attacked.
To say that citizens have no right to call upon the police unless they concede the rights ratified by those same legislative bodies is to say that this is, indeed, a police state.
Fah...
You have been watching too much "Murder She Wrote." How exactly are you going to know which phone to tap if you don't know where the kidnappers are? I suppose you are expecting the kidnapper in question to pop back to his apartment for some tea and cookies and a quick phone call to Grandma telling her that he has got the kids locked up in the Warehouse at the corner of First and Poster.
Or are you expecting the Feds to tap every phone in a 4 square mile territory, and just listen to everything that goes on?
What the Federales will almost certainly do is to tap _your_ phone (with your permission), then if the bad guys call they will be able to find out where you are being called from. They won't know anything about the groups plans or movements, however, unless the group decides to tell you.
Even if broader wire-tapping could help in this theoretical situation I would not think that it would make broader wire-tap measures a good idea. The chances of my child getting kidnapped is considerably less than her getting hit by a drunk driver. This doesn't mean that I want alcohol made illegal (and I don't even drink). You can't protect yourself from everything, so why barter away your rights without a realistic chance of some type of return.
...as long as it [pgp] hasn't been compromised, or the NSA hasn't used mind control to get some genius mathmetician to develop a new prime number theory, this should nix most of what the 'Feds are trying to get away with.
;)
:)
Just make sure each end has DSL or two-way cable
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing
Since the FBI knows that tapping the Internet would be technically infeasable, it wanted to create the FIDNet. With all the people that wrote in to complain about the FIDNet, they got rid of the plan. What they are trying to do is role the FIDNet idea into CALEA. Thus, at some point, all Internet traffic will be routed through FBI controlled computers anyway. I for one would rather live in a state where just maybe if I get on a plane, its going to get blown out of the sky. Thats the risk we take. In a recent study performed, comparing modern US society against the society depicted in Goerge Orwell's 1984; there are approximately 134 characteristics which define 1984. The US society matches over 100 of them. The root of the problem is in the governments sense of self preservation. If someone can stand up and argue against the government, then maybe people might start thinking that we don't need the government in its traditional sense. The government can control the media. In its present form, the government cannot control the Internet; thus the government wants to make sure it can control the Internet. Put simply, all these laws, even though they are in the name of fighting crime, their purpose is self preservation. Probably the single scariest thing that has happened is Jesse Ventura proving that by using the Internet, he was able to circumvent the traditional methods.
Is this Jason Earl of the MacArthur/San Antonio Earls? Just curious..
Exactly. Los Angeles has had over the years numerous scandals involving police abuse involving spying on legal organizations. Allowing the FBI to listen in will defacto make it easy for every podunk red-squad to eavesdrop
you know i REALLY doubt the govt would waste their time watching you 'rough up the suspect'. as paranoid as most ppl are about this I think that not quite so many ppl are pissed about this- wanna know why? because they don't do anything illegal! it's that easy! just don't rape little kids and i'd say you have a really good chance of not being watched by the govt'.
I've been thinking of somethingh along the same lines as Emacs' "M-x spook" command -- "M-x spook" inserts a few dozen randomly-selected keywords (e.g., nuclear, Iran, terrorist, president, bomb, etc.). The idea is for people to routinely append this to their e-mails on the theory that Echelon is scanning messages for such keywords, and that causing it to come up with huge numbers of false hits would decrease its effectiveness, ideally making it impractical. At least one Slashdot user has done this in his signtaure -- he has a comment further down on this thread.
Anyway, my idea: on the theory that "they" are using encrypted communication as grounds for suspicion of other crimes (i.e., "He sent an encrypted e-mail, so he must have something to hide..."), what if people just start e-mailing random noise to each other? Since, with the right algorithms, it is not even possible to prove that there is a message hidden in a transmission, "they" would not be able to tell the difference between an e-mail that contains an encrypted message and one that is just random noise. Hence, if people just routinely mail a few dozen kilobytes of "/dev/random" output back and forth, what could "they" do? It would become impractical for "them" even to identify suspects based on use of encryption, since there would be too many false hits.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Bald Wookie dun said:
To tie a minor thread on this...oddly, the three legal drugs (caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol) are known to not only have as many bad health effects as many of your illegal drugs, but in some cases are every bit as addictive or moreso.
To give an example--nicotine, which is legal to the point of being an OTC drug, is now known to be as addictive as, and probably more addictive than, opiate narcotics and probably is equivalent to or even slightly more addictive than cocaine on "liking indexes" (measures of physical addiction that show how hard it is to "kick the habit") and by biochemistry. Some scientists studying the mechanisms of addiction have stated that nicotine may be the most addictive substance known...smoking is well known to cause health problems (just read a cigarette packet, already), cigarette manufacturers are known to "dope" cigarettes with nicotine (this came out publically in the tobacco hearings in the US, and has been common knowledge for years if you live anywhere near a cigarette plant or know employees--there's vats that if you so much as touch they HAVE to send you to hospital because those vats are full of nicotine and have nicotine residue on the outside to the extent it will give you nicotine poisoning, and nicotine poisoning is NOT fun--much the same effects as strychnine poisoning).
Alcohol, too, has known health effects if taken in excess, is poisonous in quantities only slightly above that necessary to get one bombed, slows reflexes enough that one becomes dangerous if one tries to drive, and is known to cause physical dependence. In fact, a fair number of liver transplants in adults have to be done because of cirrhosis of the liver--basically the liver gets burnt out by long-term attempts to detoxify ethyl alcohol once one gets physically addicted to it.
If we want to talk prescription medications, some opiates are actually available over the counter (Cheracol and, in some states, paregoric) and most are schedule IV or III (addictive potential, but you've got to take a fair amount) drugs...benzodiazepine tranquilisers are KNOWN to be physically addictive (most responsible doctors will NOT give you more than a week's supply of Valium or Xanax for that reason)--are every bit as physically addictive as morphine in fact, taking them with alcohol or driving whilst taking them is a good way to get one's self dead, and yet they're only Schedule IV.
Marijuana is not known to be physically addictive (the only indications of physical addiction are in rats given obscenely huge doses) and doesn't necessarily have to be smoked (some of the bad effects of smoking are from the smoke itself; ANY smoke will give off carcinogens if you burn organic material). Psychological addiction is probably another story, but people can get psychologically addicted to everything from sex to Quake to reading Slashdot (you could seriously argue that autistic kids are psychologically addicted to "self-stimming" [rocking back and forth, or smacking one's self...the kinds of "stereotypical" actions you see in a lot of autistic kids; they do this to calm themselves down after being overstimulated--the major problem in autism is that they essentially can't filter out stimulus and/or are oversensitive to it--rainfall might sound like millions of hammers on tin, and in the worst cases sight and sound and smell might blend all into each other not unlike how one's senses get scrambled on LSD; a good way of thinking of how severely autistic folks have to deal is they are undergoing a perpetual bad acid trip] because it's relaxing :), and the mechanisms for psychological addiction have more to do with probable imbalances in body chemistry to begin with rather than body chemistry being altered by a drug itself. The worst effects that have ever been proven for long-term marijuana use are maybe problems with memory; the jury is still out on whether pot reduces initiative [for that matter, so does alcohol; so does Valium--both of these are quite legal]. Marijuana has several beneficial uses, not the least among them being as a mild tranquiliser and possible antidepressant, and the only known treatment for AIDS Wasting Syndrome and wasting syndromes of cancer.
However, pot is still illegal--Schedule I. Oddly, pure THC is Schedule II (same as morphine) and legally sold as dronabinol, though it's not been proven to have the same bad health effects as morphine or amphetamine. I've heard that this is largely due to lobbying by alcohol companies after Prohibition (they didn't want pot cutting into profits--especially since they were having to recover from the LAST War on Drugs, folks finding out there were better drugs and better drugs FOR you could well have caused serious hurt to the spirits industry in the US).
Now, to steer this back on topic--I think that giving anyone in power to tap into someone's convo IF THERE IS NOT EXISTING PROOF THAT THE PARTY IS DOING A BAD THING is just plain Wrong and WILL ultimately be abused. Period. Look at COINTELPRO or records of the CIA's investigation of Catholic refugee support groups if one needs examples...or the list of groups listed as Officially Subversive (which includes--and I am not making this up--the SCA, the Jihad Against Barney the Dinosaur [must have been that "jihad" word ;)], the NAACP, Amnesty International [because AI has reported on how the US commits human rights violations and supports groups that violate human rights in other countries], Human Rights Watch [same thing], most people who have protested major military actions, and probably by this date the EFF and Slashdot's entire membership :). It is entirely possible that we could get Bad Folks in government and this info could be used against one.
For instance, I happen to think fundamentalist "Christianity" sucks arse (largely because I grew up in a family of raving fundies, and I've seen enough of the bad side of the Religious Reich to REALLY make yer hair curl--folks drooling over any possibility that nuclear war might break out and bring the Rapture early is damned scary, and I'm just now realising just HOW wacko some of what goes on in there was). As a result, I do support groups fighting the influence of the Religious Reich as well as groups speaking out against religious abuse in general.
I also happen to know that more than a few fundies, including people from the very church I left, are...to put it mildly...extremely active in politics from school boards on up [this is what likely happened with the Kansas school board, btw; it's been a position plank of the UnChristian Coalition and a number of groups even FARTHER to the right to take over the school boards and move up from there to infiltrate political parties]. (Some of you in Kentucky might recognise Frankie Simon's name...for those who don't, let's just say he's trying his best to outdo Fred "godhatesfags.com" Phelps, and also happens to be the head of most of the fundy and pro-censorship groups in Kentucky. And happens to be a deacon at aforementioned fundy pit, and most of the rest of the "deep in" members of the church are as rabid as he is...nasty place.)
If--God and Goddess forbid--one of these fundy groups were to get a candidate in who could appoint heads of the FBI or a state equivalent, I can GUARANTEE you that everyone in the US or in that state who is a member of the ACLU, People for the American Way, a member of an anti-censorship group, anyone who's ever supported or has run a Fairness campaign so people can't be fired just for being gay, anyone who has ever talked publically about being a walkaway from a Bible-based coercive group or who operates a walkaway group for folks escaping from Bible-based coercive groups, and a fairly long list of others WILL end up on a shitlist somewhere...and they will probably abuse the "secret wiretaps" so they can hope to find something to bust these folks on. (An example I can think of off the top of my head--a walkaway or gay-teens support group talks to a kid who is having real doubts about fundamentalism because he's discovered he might be gay...and the state just passed a law against kids getting any counseling at all without parental consent...except the kid CAN'T get parental consent because if he stated he had doubts about fundamentalism and/or he was gay he'd be putting himself at severe risk for physical abuse and/or basically being psychologically tortured by the church members trying to "exorcise" the "demons of rebellion" or the "demons of homosexuality" out...and yes, people have died in these before, and many more have ended up in mental hospitals).
What if the Scientologists were somehow to persuade the FBI to investigate everyone who posts on alt.religion.scientology so they can get more info to harass them? What if they do it JUST to harass them (yes, they've pulled stuff like that before)?
There's just too much potential for abuse in this...I'm beginning to wonder if there's hope to fix this other than setting up either a PAC for Internet users (one is being worked on called USORS) or starting a third party expressly for the Internet-connected...and I've been giving really serious thought to the latter recently... :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Hmmm... I guess that means a smart cop will always put something small on his list of stuff to search for. I'm sure they could think of something in nearly every circumstance.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I don't think that the actual ability of the FBI to wiretap Internet lines is what's really at stake here. I mean, do you really think that they have nothing better to do than to sit around waiting for you to download some warez? That isn't what bothers me about this issue. It's the precedent that it sets. Everytime the government passes a law like this it becomes easier for them to control everything that people see, read, listen to, etc... all intellectual stimuli. Control this and you control the way people think. It's what lies down the road as a result of anti-privacy acts such as this that scares me. It seems ridiculous now, but how long until they use software to log whatever you do on your personal desktop and upload it to a server to be looked at on whim by some secretary? How long before Big Brother's hands are around our throats? Oh, and if you think the FBI is scary, remember when Congress asked the NSA to demonstrate some of it's code-breaking abilities and the NSA just said "No."?
Everything I know I learned by eating the brains of smart people.
1) Efficency... A current "modern" cell phone call takes about 810,000 instructions in the main call processing core just to set up the call. This includes hooks for about 10% of the previous CALEA requirements. These instructions take anywhere from 2 to 12 seconds to process based on conditions. Now.. if all of the CALEA request were implemented and the current multi-billion dollar equipment is retained, a back of the envelope calculation shows that for CP alone the number of instructions should at least double, complexity should increase by a factor of 5 or 10 and code errors should jump way up. I would expect between 10 to 40 seconds more time to set up a call and a reduction in capacity of over 50%. This would translate into cost increases of 2x to 4x passed on to the consumer. So when you push the send button it would take 30 to 50 seconds before anything happened. WAIT it is worse. The bozos want to know what buttons you thought about pushing ... Those buttons that you pushed and then decided not to send. This means the phone must always be transmitting whenever any button is touched! Want to talk about landfills filled to the brim with batterys? Want to talk about BSCs and their airwaves dying a fast death. Perhaps the government BOOBS should be required to have some engineering experience in TELCOM before drafting and writing laws. Perhaps their brains are missing. 2) Calea requires a random 1/4 of all voice calls and all data calls to be delivered to your local FBI office. This is in addition to all of the other bullshit data and location info they want. Normal vector is from a switch or transcoder directly to the local FBI office. 3) If you look at CALEA it makes truly high bandwidth NON-HIERARCHIAL data system in effect illegal. For example a GRID is a much better distrbution system then an tree. Why do you think your water is distriubted in a GRID. If you used a grid such a water system to distribute data there would be more than one path from point A to point B and so the nosy folks in the government couldn't be sure that they tapped every message. This would mean that they couldn't abuse our communications to trade on wall street or other sins based on ill gained information. In addition a multi-dimensional communications system would tax their ablility to listen on shear bandwidth alone. They have to stop this improvement in technolgy to protect their corruption.
I'll have to borrow that one... WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH WINDOWS NT SERVER 4.0 IS ENTERPRISE-READY
I'll have to borrow that one...
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
WINDOWS NT SERVER 4.0 IS ENTERPRISE-READY
How does the restoration of geographic location abilities to digital communication services translate in any way to me asking people to justify their freedoms?
Please elaborate on the point you were trying to make and I'll do my best to answer you. If you're confused about something I've said, please just ask.
I really don't see how this would work. If I am on the 'net, then I am sending out packets to the nearest switch where they are being multiplexed with other stuff and sprayed out over the cloud. It is only through the good graces of a working router table that this stuff works. Wouldn't they have to tap the last mile of copper just to keep the tap legal and avoid the huge suit that I would bring if my stuff got caught up in an ongoing legal investigation of someone else?
Also, you know that Bill of Rights they taught us in skool? They actually exist, I've seen them. Someone ought to show them to Janet and Bill, they make for some darn fine reading.
How is it that whenever technology prodcues something that makes it harder for the police to monitor citizens (e.g. digital networks, strong crypto), this is a "problem" that must be "addressed" by new regulations, but when technology produces something that makes police surveillance easier (e.g. the look-through-walls capabilities described here a few weeks ago), the government quietly adopts it as part of the new natural order of things?
If the status quo of police capability is so important, it must work both ways. Otherwise, the relationship between the State and the individual becomes a one-way ratchet which can only tighten and never loosen.
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/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.