As always I am a firm and loud voice against such government over stepping. On the other hand, we truely have too little information to make any sound judgements about the actual affect this proposed system will have.
I can imagine some fairly interesting possibilities though:
If the various three letter agencies actually attempted to log or filter all packet information they would have simply too much information to do any good with it. The information they would have would be less than insteresting though. All true terrorist communications would be encypted, encoded or hidden in such a way as to be missed by filters. The only thing left would be gigs of usenet and slashdot postings ranting about our government's pathetic attempts to catch terrorists (come on guys, there are much better ways that don't require so much time, money and invasion of liberty).
Microsoft will start to charge licensing fees for thier implementation of VPN, which will suddenly come into much wider use. I cannot imagine the FBI or NSA making much headway in filtering data from tunneled communications.
Stupid criminals who have not figured out how to use PGP and other privacy tools will be weeded out leaving a population of smarter super criminals to rule the net.
Seriously, this proposed tool could provide a serious threat to the privacy of all netizens, but it is not the ultimate threat. We need to worry much more about the possibility of our government becoming so fed up with thier own inaptitude that they outlaw encryption and anonymity. That would be a true disaster.
I agree with the posts here that suggest that Big Money was the reason for this change of mind. It can be said generally that legislaters listen more carefully to Banks and the RIAA then they do to a bunch of grass roots free as in beer nuts like us.
Perhaps we can use this to our advantage in other areas where we would like to influence legislation. Rather than lobbying the politicians directly, we simply need to formulate arguments for or against legislation that appeals to Big Money and lobby them instead.
This tactic is unlikely to work with respect to the DMCA and its decendants; I can think of no argument that would persuade the RIAA et. al. that these copyright laws are bad for business. But there are many other areas of online privacy and security which could be of great interest to Big Money if framed in the correct way.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. SPAM, by its very nature can be controlled on the server end without regard for what client is being used. If the ISP restricted SMTP traffic to their server then they would have the ability to filter 100% of the outgoing mail no matter what email client is being used. This is obviously a less restrictive practice and will get the same results.
All email clients use the same SMTP protocol, although there may be small differences in the number and method of extensions allowed. From the server end email looks identical no matter what client sent the email. The only way for an SMTP server to tell which client sent the email is to read an X-Header which simply identifies the client and makes no difference in the way the message is processed.
This demonstrates that there is no realistic difference between the use of different clients in terms of SPAM.
How do spammers abuse the system? They write email clients that do two things:
1. Falsify headers
2. Send massive amounts of traffic rapidly
As mentioned above, both of these issues can be addressed at the server and do not require a limitation on clients. If all SMTP traffic is blocked except for the MS server, MS has the ability to do two things:
1. Verify the headers of all SMTP traffic before forwarding the messages
2. Limit the number of messages processed per day or hour
I would never use an ISP that used these restrictions simply because I want a great level of freedom, but at least these actions could be justified by the need to curb SPAM on the network. Disallowing competing email clients cannot be justified that way.
Forgive me if I am falling for a flaim-bait trap here.
There is no comparison between a Private Company imposing a restriction on the services or products they provide or support and the Anti-Competative behavior of a company which prohibits the use of a competitors product when the use of such product has no conceivable relationship to or affect on the services they do provide.
You are talking about the same country in which courts upheld the expulsion of a six year old boy from an east coast school because he kissed a girl on the cheek? After all, a no tolerance policy is a no tolerance policy.
The US Constitution contains a clause which prohibits Ex Post Facto laws. In general, a law is ex post facto if it punishes an act which was not a crime when committed, increases the penalty for a crime after the commission of the crime, or substantially changes the proceedural due process attached to a crime.
Most courts have ruled that changing the statute of limitations on a crime is a violation of the prohibition on ex post facto laws under the third reasoning. Other courts have said that if the statute of limitations in effect at the time the crime was committed has expired, a new statute of limitations may not be applied. These courts allow the statute of limitations to be extended if it has not yet expired when the new statute is passed.
Either way, the language of this law is obviously ex post facto and is unlikely to stand in court.
That is hardly a solution. In order to get a search warrant you need evidence that a crime has been committed. The whole reason for wanting to put back doors in encryption software is that law enforcement is unable to get evidence of a crime when encryption is used.
Much has been said over the last week about the government's ability to enforce such a law. One groups says that outlaws and terrorist will obviously refuse to use such weak encryption and others respond that law enforcement will then be able to indict them for violation of the back door law.
This second argument is specious for two reasons.
First, any law forbidding strong encryption without a back door could be binding on the sender of messages only. The receiver of a message encrypted without a back door could hardly be held legally liable for the action of another. Therefore, if the head of a terrorist organization outside of the US used strong encryption to send messages to terrorists inside the US, no law has been broken. The backdoor law is not extra-territorial and cannot ban someone outside the US from using non-backdoor encryption, and the receiver in the US cannot be held liable simply for receiving such a message.
Second, the argument assumes that law enforcement can somehow detect whether or not a message is encrypted using a backdoor program or not. The ability for law enforcement to archive messages and search through their contents is truly staggering, but it is not all powerful. It takes many many computer cycles to sift through unencrypted data searching for words or phrases in order to be useful at all. There is no indication that anyone would have the computational power to sift through archived messages to determine if a message is encrpted or not, yet alone whether it was encrypted with lawful or unlawful software. Making such a determination on the fly would be absolutely impossible.
Unless, of course, messages encrypted with compliant software contained flags set at specific bits to alert law enforcement to the presence of lawfully encrypted text. If that was the case, however, terrorist and other non-crypto-law abiding people could simply alter the open source code for their non-compliant crypto package to add the special bits. Law enforcement would still be unable to determine on the fly whether a message was lawfully encrypted or not.
That leaves them only one alternative. They would have to try to decode all encrypted messages on the fly in order to determine which were lawfully encrypted. That action in and of itself would violate the privacy rights of anyone whose message was decrypted simply to determine if it was lawfully encrypted.
Furthermore (or more precisely, once again), the ability to capture all messages and attempt to decrypt them on the fly in order to determine which where lawful and which were not is currently a technologically impossible task.
Make it illegal to have crypto with no back doors and all law abiding crypto users will use back-door laden crypto and their law abiding messages will be an open book to law enforcement agencies.
Criminals, on the other hand, will continue to use widely available crypto packages with no back door and will still be able to transmit messages without threat of law enforcement decrypting them.
...is not necessarily the fact that OSS would benefit from such a move, but the fact that the EU takes the privacy of its citizens seriously and is eagerly promoting information security and encryption.
Those of us in the US, on the other hand, have principles in the government (the VP for example) who have attempted to make information security and encryption illegal.
I am the last person that would ever condone anything that smelled even remotely like censorship, but from a customer perspective I think this move makes sense.
When I contract with an ISP I want to be connected to the internet at the highest possible speed and reliability. If the ISP is spending time and money subsidizing usenet or free home pages it makes it even more difficult for them to provide me with the level of service I require. I want my ISP to focus their resources on the service I am paying for and that is connection.
At the same time, I subscribe to a commercial usenet service and I want them to focus their resources on article completion and retention. If my news service suddenly started offering connectivity to its subscribers without charging additional fees, the news service itself would suffer. Most people would find that unacceptable and yet they expect their ISP to offer commercial quality news service at no additional cost.
I realize their is a historical backdrop against which most ISPs offer email, home pages and news groups along with connectivity. But the internet market place is evolving and maturing into a more service oriented place. Some things are worth paying for and if you truely value usenet you will subsidize its existence by paying for a premium service.
On the other hand, if SBC is continuing to offer some binary newsgroups and not others than their move cannot be seen merely as a move to improve quality of service for their customers, but must be seen to some degree as censorship. After all, they had to use some criteria other than cost or quality of service to decide which groups to offer or not.
Under these circumstances I think that their motive should not be applauded even though it will almost certainly allow them to increase service levels.
On a closing note, I used to use SCB/PacBell and their service is horrible anyway.
These guys have been listening to their own snake oil pitch too long.
Even assuming that they can produce great full screen video with a 28.8 connection, there is no evidence that broadband will no longer be needed. They seem to AssUMe that the only thing broadband is used for is streaming video.
How will this miracle technology help me download the latest Linux Kernel in a few minutes over 28.8. It will not. Speed up my binary newsgroups downloads so I can get gigs of possibly copyright infringing binaries every day? No. Will it even speed up my web browsing so that I don't have to wait 30 to 60 seconds for CNN.com to show up? No, not that either.
Broadband is safe whether or not their claims are real.
What I'm saying is that if there aren't any better examples with which to illustrate the potential for the abuses of power, then this is as far as I think the message deserves to go.
Very well...here are a few more:
* DICK GREGORY: In 1968, the activist/comedian publicly denounced the Mafia for importing heroin into the inner city. Did the FBI welcome the anti-drug, anti-mob message? No. Head G-man J. Edgar Hoover responded by proposing that the Bureau try to provoke the mob to retaliate against Gregory as part of an FBI "counter intelligence operation" to "neutralize" the comedian. Hoover wrote: "Alert La Cosa Nostra (LCN) to Gregory's attack on LCN."
* FREEDOM RIDERS: In 1961, black and white civil rights workers boarded interstate buses in the North and headed south in an effort to desegregate buses nationwide. The FBI learned that when the freedom riders reached bus depots in Alabama, the state police were going to give the Ku Klux Klan "15 uninterrupted minutes" to beat activists with baseball bats, clubs and chains. The Bureau allowed the violence to occur; activist Walter Bergman spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, partially paralyzed.
* VIOLA LIUZZO: The white civil rights volunteer from Detroit-a mother of five-joined Martin Luther King's 1965 Selma (Ala.) campaign aimed at securing the right to vote for blacks. She was shot and killed after being chased 20 miles at high speed by a carload of four Klansmen. In the car was Gary David Rowe, a well-paid FBI informant inside the Klan; the violence-prone Rowe had played a big role in the beatings of freedom riders years earlier. "He couldn't be an angel and be a good informant," commented one of his FBI handlers.
* FRANK WILKINSON: A lifelong civil libertarian who led the campaign to abolish the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, his FBI surveillance file spans 30 years and 132,000 pages. Estimated cost to us taxpayers: $17 million. Wilkinson never advocated or committed violence, but the file shows that the Bureau burglarized his offices and encouraged beatings of him. The FBI once heard of a right-wing scheme to assassinate Wilkinson-but took no action to inform him or protect him.
* MARTIN LUTHER KING: For years, the FBI used spying and infiltration in a relentless campaign to destroy King- to wreck his marriage, undermine his mental stability and encourage him to commit suicide. The Bureau created dissension among King's associates, disrupted fundraising efforts and recruited his bookkeeper as a paid agent after learning the employee was embezzling.
The FBI utilized "media assets" to plant smear stories in the press - some insinuating that King was a Soviet agent. One FBI media asset against King in the early 1960s was Patrick Buchanan, then an editorial writer in St. Louis.
The FBI once hatched a scheme to "completely discredit" King and have him replaced by a civil rights leader the Bureau could control. The one individual named by the Bureau as "the right kind of Negro leader" was lawyer Samuel Pierce-who years later became the only black in President Reagan's cabinet.
King was hated and regularly threatened by white supremacists and extremists-but the FBI developed a written policy of not informing King about threats to his life. Why? Because of his "unsavory character," "arrogance and "uncooperative attitude."
* PETER BOHMER: For months in the early 1970s, this economics professor and other antiwar activists in San Diego were terrorized-with menacing phone calls, death threats and fire-bombings-by the Secret Army Organization, a right-wing paramilitary group. On Jan. 6, 1972, gunshots were fired into Bohmer's house, wounding a friend.
After a bombing months later, a trial revealed that Howard Barry Godfrey, co-founder of SAO in San Diego and one of its most active and violent members, had all along been a paid FBI informant. Godfrey testified that he had driven the car from which the shots were fired; afterward, he took the weapon to his FBI supervisor, who hid it.
* BLACK PANTHER PARTY: Some critics are denouncing the new movie Panther as an anti-FBI fantasy. But the hard facts about the FBI's war on the Panthers were published in 1976 by the Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Frank Church. Using paid infiltrators and faked documents, the Bureau routinely tried to goad militant groups or street gangs to commit violence against the Panthers.
In southern California, FBI agents helped provoke Ron Karenga's militant US group into attacks on Panthers and boasted about it in memos to headquarters. When the FBI learned that the Panthers and US were trying to talk out their differences, agents did their best to reopen the conflict. Four Panthers were ultimately killed by US members, two on the UCLA campus.
In Chicago, the FBI office forged and sent a letter to the Blackstone Rangers gang leader saying the Panthers had a "hit out" on him. The FBI's stated hope was that he "take reprisals against" the Panther leadership.
Although that plan failed, Chicago Panther chief Fred Hampton (age 21) was killed months later in a predawn police assault on his apartment. Hampton's bodyguard turned out to be an FBI agent-provocateur who, days before the raid, had delivered an apartment floor-plan to the Bureau-with an "X" marking Hampton's bed. Most bullets were aimed at his bedroom. The infiltrator received a $300 bonus: "Our source was the man who made the raid possible," stated an FBI memo.
Among the hundreds of schemes detailed in FBI memos were plans to contaminate the Panther newspaper's printing room with a noxious chemical; to inject a powerful laxative into fruit served to kids as part of the Panthers' free breakfast program; and to target smear campaigns at various Hollywood celebrities who had come to the Panthers' defense.
* CENTRAL AMERICA ACTIVISTS: Many recent news accounts say that FBI abuse pretty much ended with J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972, and that the Bureau has been in check since the Justice Department issued new guidelines in 1976. Not true. FBI disruption of lawful dissent has continued-though the terminology has changed, from counterintelligence (COINTELPRO) to "counterterrorism."
During the 1980s, groups critical of U.S. intervention in Central America were surveilled, infiltrated and disrupted by the FBI. Political break-ins occurred at churches, offices and homes-and material from the burglaries ended up in FBI files. In the guise of monitoring supporters of foreign terrorists, the FBI compiled files on clergy, religious groups and thousands of nonviolent anti-intervention activists. The investigation produced not a single criminal charge. The whole sordid story is detailed in Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI, a book by former Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan.
It appears that the FBI has been less than candid about the technical aspects of what carnivore can and does do. There are lawsuits and congressional investigations proceeding in an attempt to weed out this very issue. We would be remiss if we assumed that we knew exactly how this system does and does not work.
However, there is evidence to support the fact that both filtered and unfiltered traffic are archived and later sorted.
It is true that the FBI must get a court order in order to use Carnivore to intercept the contents of a suspect's communications. Under most circumstances this would be a satisfactory due process safeguard against abuse. In fact, it has been the status quo for preventing abuse by law enforcement for decades.
This is not the case with Carnivore. The system captures all trafic on the network based on protocol. A court order to intercept the contents of John Doe's email could also result in the capture of your email if it happens to be crossing the same network.
After the packets have been captured they are filtered to present a set of emails to and from the subject of the court order, but your email and the email of hundreds of other innocent individuals is already sitting on the FBI's computer waiting to be misused or abused.
And the threat of abuse of that information is hardly miniscule. This is the organization that withheld thousand of documents in the timothy mcveigh trial, attempted to railroad Wen Ho Lee as a spy for taking his work home with him, kept dossiers on thousands of politicians, businessmen and regular citizens for political motives, murdered Randy Weaver's wife and son, and massacred 33 women and children at Waco.
On August 7, the court ordered the government to submit to the defense and the court a report "detailing how the key logger device functions" by August 31.
Microsoft has invested millions of dollars in rolling out Windows XP and.NET. They are well aware that the Justice Department will seek an injunction to stop the release of both of these technologies when the case goes back to the district court for a penalty hearing. They are not about to allow that to happen before XP and.NET are rolled out.
Their delay tactics have already resulted in the demise of the Netscape browser before relief could be granted. They know that if they can roll out XP and.NET before the district court can stop them it will be too late. You can't put the egg back in the shell. The district court will still be able to consider other remedies, but Microsoft will have already been successful in widely deploying new proprietary standards and other agendas such as new activation techniques, killing USB 2.0, strangling MP3, anddiscourage Linux/Windows dual boot systems.
Because these new standards and agendas will have been adopted by other hardware, software and service companies, the district court's ruling will have limited effect on the standards and agendas themselves.
Perhaps we should petition the patent office to make use of some of this great new technology in their patent application process. A web site could be set up to request comments about prior art for patent applications that have made it through the application process, but before they are granted.
Those applying for patents would benefit because they would not be granted patents which would eventually be ruled unlawful in court. They would then be able to apply for more narrowly drawn patents which do not infringe on prior art.
Owners of prior art would benefit because they would not have to spend time and money on court battles in order to establish facts which should have been established at the patent application level in the first place.
Consumers would benefit because they would not have to bear the increased cost of products and services due to patent lawsuits.
Slashdotters would benefit because we could spend our time contesting patent applications instead of ranting about bogus patents after the fact.
This guy's computer is infected and attacking me every 10 minutes or so. I went to his web page and found this resume which indicates the guy is a Windows2000 expert and Network Technician!
I have logged 27 attempt in the last 5 minutes from Sprint Broadband customers. This could really get annoying. The main problem I see is that even though I am not vulnerable to the attack, my ability to monitor for other attacks is being diminished. A determined hacker could easily attempt to slip in with all the noise.
I am logging about 50 attempts per hour and nearly all of them are coming from IPs within my ISP (61.x.x.x). This is a 5MB wireless network and it seems to be very busy tonight.
You are correct in that this is not a first amenment case and never was. I was replying to several posts which dismissed first amendment claims because of nationality. Such a notion is incorrect. The first amendment case does not stand because, as you pointed out, the indictment is for selling a circumvention device.
On the other hand, it is not necessary to defeat the DMCA in order to win this case in court.
I am sure a jury could be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this man wrote the program in question, however that is not unlawful under the DMCA.
What is unlawful, and what the charges allege, is the willful sale for profit of such a program. There is grave doubt in my mind that a jury could be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that he had anything to do with such sales. It was the company he worked for that sold and distributed the program and that is a strong case for aquital.
Slashdot Mirror
I can imagine some fairly interesting possibilities though:
If the various three letter agencies actually attempted to log or filter all packet information they would have simply too much information to do any good with it. The information they would have would be less than insteresting though. All true terrorist communications would be encypted, encoded or hidden in such a way as to be missed by filters. The only thing left would be gigs of usenet and slashdot postings ranting about our government's pathetic attempts to catch terrorists (come on guys, there are much better ways that don't require so much time, money and invasion of liberty).
Microsoft will start to charge licensing fees for thier implementation of VPN, which will suddenly come into much wider use. I cannot imagine the FBI or NSA making much headway in filtering data from tunneled communications.
Stupid criminals who have not figured out how to use PGP and other privacy tools will be weeded out leaving a population of smarter super criminals to rule the net.
Seriously, this proposed tool could provide a serious threat to the privacy of all netizens, but it is not the ultimate threat. We need to worry much more about the possibility of our government becoming so fed up with thier own inaptitude that they outlaw encryption and anonymity. That would be a true disaster.
Perhaps we can use this to our advantage in other areas where we would like to influence legislation. Rather than lobbying the politicians directly, we simply need to formulate arguments for or against legislation that appeals to Big Money and lobby them instead.
This tactic is unlikely to work with respect to the DMCA and its decendants; I can think of no argument that would persuade the RIAA et. al. that these copyright laws are bad for business. But there are many other areas of online privacy and security which could be of great interest to Big Money if framed in the correct way.
All email clients use the same SMTP protocol, although there may be small differences in the number and method of extensions allowed. From the server end email looks identical no matter what client sent the email. The only way for an SMTP server to tell which client sent the email is to read an X-Header which simply identifies the client and makes no difference in the way the message is processed.
This demonstrates that there is no realistic difference between the use of different clients in terms of SPAM.
How do spammers abuse the system? They write email clients that do two things:
1. Falsify headers
2. Send massive amounts of traffic rapidly
As mentioned above, both of these issues can be addressed at the server and do not require a limitation on clients. If all SMTP traffic is blocked except for the MS server, MS has the ability to do two things:
1. Verify the headers of all SMTP traffic before forwarding the messages
2. Limit the number of messages processed per day or hour
I would never use an ISP that used these restrictions simply because I want a great level of freedom, but at least these actions could be justified by the need to curb SPAM on the network. Disallowing competing email clients cannot be justified that way.
There is no comparison between a Private Company imposing a restriction on the services or products they provide or support and the Anti-Competative behavior of a company which prohibits the use of a competitors product when the use of such product has no conceivable relationship to or affect on the services they do provide.
Reminds me of all those fun hours wasted drawing cool pictures with LOGO.
On the other hand, one should never attribute to malice or evil what can be easily explained by stupidity and laziness.
You are talking about the same country in which courts upheld the expulsion of a six year old boy from an east coast school because he kissed a girl on the cheek? After all, a no tolerance policy is a no tolerance policy.
Most courts have ruled that changing the statute of limitations on a crime is a violation of the prohibition on ex post facto laws under the third reasoning. Other courts have said that if the statute of limitations in effect at the time the crime was committed has expired, a new statute of limitations may not be applied. These courts allow the statute of limitations to be extended if it has not yet expired when the new statute is passed.
Either way, the language of this law is obviously ex post facto and is unlikely to stand in court.
That is hardly a solution. In order to get a search warrant you need evidence that a crime has been committed. The whole reason for wanting to put back doors in encryption software is that law enforcement is unable to get evidence of a crime when encryption is used.
This second argument is specious for two reasons.
First, any law forbidding strong encryption without a back door could be binding on the sender of messages only. The receiver of a message encrypted without a back door could hardly be held legally liable for the action of another. Therefore, if the head of a terrorist organization outside of the US used strong encryption to send messages to terrorists inside the US, no law has been broken. The backdoor law is not extra-territorial and cannot ban someone outside the US from using non-backdoor encryption, and the receiver in the US cannot be held liable simply for receiving such a message.
Second, the argument assumes that law enforcement can somehow detect whether or not a message is encrypted using a backdoor program or not. The ability for law enforcement to archive messages and search through their contents is truly staggering, but it is not all powerful. It takes many many computer cycles to sift through unencrypted data searching for words or phrases in order to be useful at all. There is no indication that anyone would have the computational power to sift through archived messages to determine if a message is encrpted or not, yet alone whether it was encrypted with lawful or unlawful software. Making such a determination on the fly would be absolutely impossible.
Unless, of course, messages encrypted with compliant software contained flags set at specific bits to alert law enforcement to the presence of lawfully encrypted text. If that was the case, however, terrorist and other non-crypto-law abiding people could simply alter the open source code for their non-compliant crypto package to add the special bits. Law enforcement would still be unable to determine on the fly whether a message was lawfully encrypted or not.
That leaves them only one alternative. They would have to try to decode all encrypted messages on the fly in order to determine which were lawfully encrypted. That action in and of itself would violate the privacy rights of anyone whose message was decrypted simply to determine if it was lawfully encrypted.
Furthermore (or more precisely, once again), the ability to capture all messages and attempt to decrypt them on the fly in order to determine which where lawful and which were not is currently a technologically impossible task.
Criminals, on the other hand, will continue to use widely available crypto packages with no back door and will still be able to transmit messages without threat of law enforcement decrypting them.
Those of us in the US, on the other hand, have principles in the government (the VP for example) who have attempted to make information security and encryption illegal.
When I contract with an ISP I want to be connected to the internet at the highest possible speed and reliability. If the ISP is spending time and money subsidizing usenet or free home pages it makes it even more difficult for them to provide me with the level of service I require. I want my ISP to focus their resources on the service I am paying for and that is connection.
At the same time, I subscribe to a commercial usenet service and I want them to focus their resources on article completion and retention. If my news service suddenly started offering connectivity to its subscribers without charging additional fees, the news service itself would suffer. Most people would find that unacceptable and yet they expect their ISP to offer commercial quality news service at no additional cost.
I realize their is a historical backdrop against which most ISPs offer email, home pages and news groups along with connectivity. But the internet market place is evolving and maturing into a more service oriented place. Some things are worth paying for and if you truely value usenet you will subsidize its existence by paying for a premium service.
On the other hand, if SBC is continuing to offer some binary newsgroups and not others than their move cannot be seen merely as a move to improve quality of service for their customers, but must be seen to some degree as censorship. After all, they had to use some criteria other than cost or quality of service to decide which groups to offer or not.
Under these circumstances I think that their motive should not be applauded even though it will almost certainly allow them to increase service levels.
On a closing note, I used to use SCB/PacBell and their service is horrible anyway.
Even assuming that they can produce great full screen video with a 28.8 connection, there is no evidence that broadband will no longer be needed. They seem to AssUMe that the only thing broadband is used for is streaming video.
How will this miracle technology help me download the latest Linux Kernel in a few minutes over 28.8. It will not. Speed up my binary newsgroups downloads so I can get gigs of possibly copyright infringing binaries every day? No. Will it even speed up my web browsing so that I don't have to wait 30 to 60 seconds for CNN.com to show up? No, not that either.
Broadband is safe whether or not their claims are real.
Very well...here are a few more:
* DICK GREGORY: In 1968, the activist/comedian publicly denounced the Mafia for importing heroin into the inner city. Did the FBI welcome the anti-drug, anti-mob message? No. Head G-man J. Edgar Hoover responded by proposing that the Bureau try to provoke the mob to retaliate against Gregory as part of an FBI "counter intelligence operation" to "neutralize" the comedian. Hoover wrote: "Alert La Cosa Nostra (LCN) to Gregory's attack on LCN."
* FREEDOM RIDERS: In 1961, black and white civil rights workers boarded interstate buses in the North and headed south in an effort to desegregate buses nationwide. The FBI learned that when the freedom riders reached bus depots in Alabama, the state police were going to give the Ku Klux Klan "15 uninterrupted minutes" to beat activists with baseball bats, clubs and chains. The Bureau allowed the violence to occur; activist Walter Bergman spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, partially paralyzed.
* VIOLA LIUZZO: The white civil rights volunteer from Detroit-a mother of five-joined Martin Luther King's 1965 Selma (Ala.) campaign aimed at securing the right to vote for blacks. She was shot and killed after being chased 20 miles at high speed by a carload of four Klansmen. In the car was Gary David Rowe, a well-paid FBI informant inside the Klan; the violence-prone Rowe had played a big role in the beatings of freedom riders years earlier. "He couldn't be an angel and be a good informant," commented one of his FBI handlers.
* FRANK WILKINSON: A lifelong civil libertarian who led the campaign to abolish the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, his FBI surveillance file spans 30 years and 132,000 pages. Estimated cost to us taxpayers: $17 million. Wilkinson never advocated or committed violence, but the file shows that the Bureau burglarized his offices and encouraged beatings of him. The FBI once heard of a right-wing scheme to assassinate Wilkinson-but took no action to inform him or protect him.
* MARTIN LUTHER KING: For years, the FBI used spying and infiltration in a relentless campaign to destroy King- to wreck his marriage, undermine his mental stability and encourage him to commit suicide. The Bureau created dissension among King's associates, disrupted fundraising efforts and recruited his bookkeeper as a paid agent after learning the employee was embezzling.
The FBI utilized "media assets" to plant smear stories in the press - some insinuating that King was a Soviet agent. One FBI media asset against King in the early 1960s was Patrick Buchanan, then an editorial writer in St. Louis.
The FBI once hatched a scheme to "completely discredit" King and have him replaced by a civil rights leader the Bureau could control. The one individual named by the Bureau as "the right kind of Negro leader" was lawyer Samuel Pierce-who years later became the only black in President Reagan's cabinet.
King was hated and regularly threatened by white supremacists and extremists-but the FBI developed a written policy of not informing King about threats to his life. Why? Because of his "unsavory character," "arrogance and "uncooperative attitude."
* PETER BOHMER: For months in the early 1970s, this economics professor and other antiwar activists in San Diego were terrorized-with menacing phone calls, death threats and fire-bombings-by the Secret Army Organization, a right-wing paramilitary group. On Jan. 6, 1972, gunshots were fired into Bohmer's house, wounding a friend.
After a bombing months later, a trial revealed that Howard Barry Godfrey, co-founder of SAO in San Diego and one of its most active and violent members, had all along been a paid FBI informant. Godfrey testified that he had driven the car from which the shots were fired; afterward, he took the weapon to his FBI supervisor, who hid it.
* BLACK PANTHER PARTY: Some critics are denouncing the new movie Panther as an anti-FBI fantasy. But the hard facts about the FBI's war on the Panthers were published in 1976 by the Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Frank Church. Using paid infiltrators and faked documents, the Bureau routinely tried to goad militant groups or street gangs to commit violence against the Panthers.
In southern California, FBI agents helped provoke Ron Karenga's militant US group into attacks on Panthers and boasted about it in memos to headquarters. When the FBI learned that the Panthers and US were trying to talk out their differences, agents did their best to reopen the conflict. Four Panthers were ultimately killed by US members, two on the UCLA campus.
In Chicago, the FBI office forged and sent a letter to the Blackstone Rangers gang leader saying the Panthers had a "hit out" on him. The FBI's stated hope was that he "take reprisals against" the Panther leadership.
Although that plan failed, Chicago Panther chief Fred Hampton (age 21) was killed months later in a predawn police assault on his apartment. Hampton's bodyguard turned out to be an FBI agent-provocateur who, days before the raid, had delivered an apartment floor-plan to the Bureau-with an "X" marking Hampton's bed. Most bullets were aimed at his bedroom. The infiltrator received a $300 bonus: "Our source was the man who made the raid possible," stated an FBI memo.
Among the hundreds of schemes detailed in FBI memos were plans to contaminate the Panther newspaper's printing room with a noxious chemical; to inject a powerful laxative into fruit served to kids as part of the Panthers' free breakfast program; and to target smear campaigns at various Hollywood celebrities who had come to the Panthers' defense.
* CENTRAL AMERICA ACTIVISTS: Many recent news accounts say that FBI abuse pretty much ended with J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972, and that the Bureau has been in check since the Justice Department issued new guidelines in 1976. Not true. FBI disruption of lawful dissent has continued-though the terminology has changed, from counterintelligence (COINTELPRO) to "counterterrorism."
During the 1980s, groups critical of U.S. intervention in Central America were surveilled, infiltrated and disrupted by the FBI. Political break-ins occurred at churches, offices and homes-and material from the burglaries ended up in FBI files. In the guise of monitoring supporters of foreign terrorists, the FBI compiled files on clergy, religious groups and thousands of nonviolent anti-intervention activists. The investigation produced not a single criminal charge. The whole sordid story is detailed in Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI, a book by former Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan.
from the book Wizards of Media Oz.
However, there is evidence to support the fact that both filtered and unfiltered traffic are archived and later sorted.
This is not the case with Carnivore. The system captures all trafic on the network based on protocol. A court order to intercept the contents of John Doe's email could also result in the capture of your email if it happens to be crossing the same network.
After the packets have been captured they are filtered to present a set of emails to and from the subject of the court order, but your email and the email of hundreds of other innocent individuals is already sitting on the FBI's computer waiting to be misused or abused.
And the threat of abuse of that information is hardly miniscule. This is the organization that withheld thousand of documents in the timothy mcveigh trial, attempted to railroad Wen Ho Lee as a spy for taking his work home with him, kept dossiers on thousands of politicians, businessmen and regular citizens for political motives, murdered Randy Weaver's wife and son, and massacred 33 women and children at Waco.
On August 7, the court ordered the government to submit to the defense and the court a report "detailing how the key logger device functions" by August 31.
Their delay tactics have already resulted in the demise of the Netscape browser before relief could be granted. They know that if they can roll out XP and .NET before the district court can stop them it will be too late. You can't put the egg back in the shell. The district court will still be able to consider other remedies, but Microsoft will have already been successful in widely deploying new proprietary standards and other agendas such as new activation techniques, killing USB 2.0, strangling MP3, anddiscourage Linux/Windows dual boot systems.
Because these new standards and agendas will have been adopted by other hardware, software and service companies, the district court's ruling will have limited effect on the standards and agendas themselves.
Those applying for patents would benefit because they would not be granted patents which would eventually be ruled unlawful in court. They would then be able to apply for more narrowly drawn patents which do not infringe on prior art.
Owners of prior art would benefit because they would not have to spend time and money on court battles in order to establish facts which should have been established at the patent application level in the first place.
Consumers would benefit because they would not have to bear the increased cost of products and services due to patent lawsuits.
Slashdotters would benefit because we could spend our time contesting patent applications instead of ranting about bogus patents after the fact.
MSNBC has a longer story.
Fox News has a few words to say.
ABC copied the AP story.
CBS still seems to think the red tide is receeding.
Meanwhile the worm has knocked on my computer's door six times since I started this post. Uh, make that seven.
This guy's computer is infected and attacking me every 10 minutes or so. I went to his web page and found this resume which indicates the guy is a Windows2000 expert and Network Technician!
I have logged 27 attempt in the last 5 minutes from Sprint Broadband customers. This could really get annoying. The main problem I see is that even though I am not vulnerable to the attack, my ability to monitor for other attacks is being diminished. A determined hacker could easily attempt to slip in with all the noise.
I am logging about 50 attempts per hour and nearly all of them are coming from IPs within my ISP (61.x.x.x). This is a 5MB wireless network and it seems to be very busy tonight.
On the other hand, it is not necessary to defeat the DMCA in order to win this case in court.
I am sure a jury could be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this man wrote the program in question, however that is not unlawful under the DMCA.
What is unlawful, and what the charges allege, is the willful sale for profit of such a program. There is grave doubt in my mind that a jury could be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that he had anything to do with such sales. It was the company he worked for that sold and distributed the program and that is a strong case for aquital.