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FBI Wants Authority To Filter Net Backbone
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Apr 25, 2008 12:11 PM
from the say-please dept.
from the say-please dept.
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, writes "There are places where criminal activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the backbone data, which is already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
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Next on his list (Score:5, Informative)
I would say "Welcome to Soviet America" but the feds have had the "we can do what we want in the name of protecting the country damn the Constitution" attitude off and on since the 1700s.
Re:Next on his list (Score:5, Funny)
What, like French? Or just something tedious like Stephen King?
Cheers
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It's not a very subtle distinction. (Score:5, Insightful)
New system - skim through the LEGITIMATE transactions of EVERYONE hoping to find something criminal or actionable or
Fuck that.
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Re:Next on his list (Score:5, Informative)
That doesnt exist. They have the guns, money and data needed to control everything. Try building a private army to resist and see what happens.
We were given these rights, and people sacrificed more than you know defending these rights. Now we are flushing it all away for security (not a new concept) god (ditto) and 'protecting' the kids/grandma/your sister. (that one is kinda new).
In the good old days (retarded statement) there would have been bloodshed over something like this, and that is where balance would have been achieved. Revolutions are not fought and won in a voting booth.
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From my cold dead fingers (Score:5, Insightful)
will they pry my private encryption key passphrase.
Re:From my cold dead fingers (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:From my cold dead fingers (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'm sure there are worse things they can do to you. A lot worse than killing you; you're going to die some day anyway, but they won't get or need your encryption key after you're dead.
You talk like a brave man. But my money says they wouldn't even need a waterboard to get you to cough up anything they wanted.
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Public has a short attention span (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Public has a short attention span (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Public has a short attention span (Score:5, Insightful)
There, distracted yet? Now leave the man behind the curtain alone.
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What If... (Score:5, Funny)
Am I the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)
FY. (Score:5, Funny)
This is how it's done (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is how it's done (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's the slippery slope that bothers me. When we put up no fight for these small losses of privacy, what will we do when the larger ones come along? How de we roll back the intrusions once they're made?
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Remind me again... (Score:5, Insightful)
so much for probable cause (Score:5, Informative)
Too Late (Score:5, Insightful)
Which also means they never stopped the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program or Echelon, the NSA worldwide digital interception program or Carnivore, the FBI US digital interception program.
Man, I bet they've got petabytes of freaky porn by now.
FBI Wants Authority To Filter Net Backbone (Score:5, Insightful)
There are places where criminal activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country.
Yes, they'll solve all those murders, rapes, assaults, robberies, and other violence by monitoring the backbone.
While you're at it, why not tap all our phones and open all our postal mail as well? Hell, walk on into everyone's house looking for evidence of criminal activity! Why not?
Out smart em-thay... (Score:5, Funny)
e'll-Way ust-jay se-uay ode-cay.
Child porn is a big problem, take our word for it (Score:5, Insightful)
The FBI would have you believe that it is a huge problem worth drastically expanding surveillance powers over. Yet compared to the 70s, when (afaik) there was legal child pornography being produced and sold, what is the production rate for this type of material today? Are there really any child pornography sites on the internet where people can pay to download child porn? (please no links)
I also worry that the focus of law enforcement's "war on child porn" is shifting from the visual depiction of young children actually engaged in sexual activity with adults, to (1) pictures of naked children not engaged in sexual activity, and (2) material that is made by teenagers themselves. The original intent of having an exception to the First Amendment for child pornography is being distorted. This is especially true when you consider that CGI child porn that is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing is illegal to possess (thanks to the PROTECT Act), and that people are being arrested for pasting pictures of children's heads on naked adult bodies: http://www.theledger.com/article/20080418/BREAKING/453898235 [theledger.com].
Will my fellow conservatives please speak up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Liberty and Freedom do not care about political affiliations and political parties. If a federal practice is wrong, it is wrong regardless of which party does it. If we do not want Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama or Bill Clinton reading our e-mail, then we should not tolerate George Bush or John McCain doing it either. Doing so only undermines the very essence of the rule of law and the fabric of our democracy. It is the totalitarian regime that justifies itself through personality, not the free one.
We conservatives have many differences with our fellow liberal americans and we always will. However, the very thing that makes us American, the idea, as Jefferson said, "We are endowed with certain inalienable rights
What is going on now in our country is madness. America is not supposed to be a place where guys with machine guns are walking around train platforms, asking if you have a driver's license with federal approved features. America is not supposed to be the place where the government collects data on all of its citizens.
Yeah, the muzzies blew up the world trade center, and its sad that those people died. But, the British burned our nation's capital to the ground, the Germans sunk the Lusitania, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and captured an army of 80,000 men of ours. We've been attacked before and we'll be attacked again, and what makes America special is that we keep our freedoms, rather than surrender them.
There's a million dead soldiers rolling over in their graves because we have so easily surrendered every freedom they fought for. It's an insult to them, to our national heritage, to turn our country into some sort of crappy police state because a few muslims with box cutters give us the willies.
Support those candidates, regardless of party, that promise to end the Dept of Homeland Security, promise to repeal the USA PATRIOT ACT, and join me in a call for a Constitutional Amendment that bars the Federal Government from intercepting any electronic communications within its borders, unless it can prove before a court that those communications are with another nation with which the USA might be in a state of war.
Why just conservatives? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Why just conservatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the "new liberties" we've all gained in the last 100 years have come from the liberal side (think womens suffrage, almost the entire civil rights movement, the right to show belly buttons on TV, etc etc etc), along with most of the original liberties that have been protected (think ACLU, anti-discrimination, unions, free speech, separation of church and state, etc etc etc) The Democrats guilt comes mainly from their nanny state problem. The rights they've taken away are the right to not use a car seat or a helment, the right to keep unregistered loaded firearms under our carseats etc. Overall I think the balance has been a positive one.
Contrarily, the biggest most important rights that Republicans / conservatives were supposed to protect were States Rights with a small Federal Government. Republicans have not only failed miserably at this, but they've done a complete about-face. If any party has been the Big Brother party over the last 70 years or so, it's been the Republicans. Can anyone reasonably deny that?
So please don't swipe at the Democrats because you have to wear a seatbelt and can't put a Nativity Scene in front of a public firehouse. That's the pot calling the microwave-safe plate black.
Beginning with the sentence on madness, I completely agree with him. And I'll add that we need to jettison the current party system and re-do it. We disagree so strongly on the past, but it seems (hopefully) that there's more and more bipartisan agreement on our future.
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Re:Will my fellow conservatives please speak up? (Score:4, Interesting)
Which candidates would that be? Ron Paul? Dennis Kucinich? Maybe two or three of the candidates running for Congressional seats? The problem is that none of the major party candidates are running on that platform. As you correctly suggest, the two major parties have become opposite sides of the same coin, two wings of the same party.
No, the problem is in thinking that electoral politics is going to solve our problems. It isn't. It is fine to use it as a tool, but we also need to understand that the ballot is our weakest weapon.
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Re:There are places where criminal activity is c (Score:5, Informative)
Yes there are. The White House, NSA, Dept of Homeland Security.
Rule of Law. (Score:5, Insightful)
I want my country and constitution back. These people have a lot of nerve to ask me for money to be able to read my private papers and correspondence.
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Re:Rule of Law. (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider how different things would be if whenever the gov't wanted money, they had to come begging, hat in hand, rather than simply demanding and taking it as they presently do. Any highwayman can do that much -- and would probably spend it more rationally as well.
How'd I put it last week? Something like "Taking from one: theft. Taking from many: taxes."
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Re:Rule of Law. (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, they pay about one third of the taxes, which makes sense in a flat tax kind of way because the top 1% own one third of the assets in the US. [fairfield.edu] Now while that seems fair enough, until you look at the distribution of investment assets (that is assets that are actually earning money and are not necessary for the owner's day to day life) now the richest 1% hold 40% of the investment assets. [ucsc.edu]
Robert Reich has some words on this as well. [blogspot.com]
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Re:Rule of Law. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Rule of Law. (Score:5, Insightful)
"We want to film every major turnpike 7/24 so we will always have pictures of infractions when there is one that's commited." They already have for info, so don't need a warrant either, and since the legal status of a backbone done will be needlessly tangled, I'm sure they'll have no trouble getting it classified as a public place. Now encryption would to me, be considered whispering in a public place(so protected speech) but somehow, I doubt that's how the story'll go.
Parent
How about anoher example? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's another example that might be more obvious to the ordinary citizen:
"There are places where criminal voice communication is centralized: the telephone switches located in central offices across the country. All of the telephone network's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off the signals. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the content of all the telephone calls, which are already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
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Re:Rule of Law. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people want Federal intervention. Fine. Get a damn amendment passed.
I believe at least 90% of what the Federal government does exceeds there Constitutional authority. If we could somehow get the Constitution enforced, we could shed a whole lot of government fat. There'd be a big pile of useless bureaucrats looking for honest work, but that's their problem. I understand there's good money to be made picking lettuce in California.
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Vote and Organize. (Score:5, Insightful)
Get the word out and vote. Real change comes from knowledge. The Republicans are going to be run out of Washington on a rail but that won't matter if their replacements don't enforce the Bill of Rights. Vote for people who get it at every level of government, regardless of party affiliation. Write the representatives you already have and tell them what you think. People like RMS already have political action notes [stallman.org]. Join or form your own civic group to get the word out and organize effective rights defense. There will always be people who attack your rights because it makes their lives easier but everyone is always better off when rights are protected. Make noise and the right kinds of things have a chance of happening.
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It's not just the Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly it's not just a Republican or Democrat issue. The Patriot act, communications decency act, etc were all pretty bi-lateral. The Bush administration have clawed their way to a lot of executive privileges and trampling of rights, far more than any other president. However the Congress hasn't done much complaining. Where are the changes the Dem's promised when they took back the house?
There are a few individuals who are good on privacy and the rule of the constitution. This election cycle I can think of Paul (R) and Kucinich (D) as candidates who didn't get the attention they deserved since they weren't soundbite only types of people. Upholding the constitution doesn't seem to be generally a popular topic for people when they vote.
The EFF [eff.org] and EPIC [epic.org] are good places to visit regularly, especially EPIC's bill track.
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Re:Vote and Organize. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Vote and Organize. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans care about your rights and liberties, and the corporate media are going to continue to brainwash the public into thinking a vote for a Green or Libertarian is wasted, even though my opinion is that a vote for a Republican or Democrat is a vote for someone who wants me in jail, which is worse than a wasted vote.
When I vote, I'm aware that I tilt at windmills, but if I don't I can't see where I have much of a right to bicth about it.
As long as the corporates rule, plutocracy will reign and "freedom" will be meaningless.
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Act and Organize. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Rule of Law. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:5, Insightful)
But, since there is some illegal activity among the billions of data transactions online, law enforcement (specifically, the Executive Branch) insists on having access to all data.
I'm certain that some of the cars zooming down I-80 across Chicago are involved in some illegal activity. Does that mean that every car should be stopped and searched? It's possible that in one of the houses or apartments on my block there is something illegal to some extent going on. Should the FBI have open access to all the residences then?
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just yesterday, there was the sentiment expressed that hunting pedophiles should trump privacy. [slashdot.org] At one time that post was up to +4 insightful. Slashdotters tend to be very protective of online privacy rights, far more so than the average American, I suspect that the reasoning expressed in that post would have appealed strongly to most Americans. So all that needs to happen to make this go forward to for someone to say that the FBI tap is needed to stop the pedophiles and it's a done deal. Anyone who opposes FBI internet filtering is a child rapist. Any private citizen using encryption is a baby touching terrorist.
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is rapidly reaching a point where we'll all be afraid of what we say and do on the net for fear it'll go in our little yellow folder in some government office and used against us when we dare go against the group-think. How sad is it when we are rapidly approaching the day when our world behaves like that joke from Airplane II "Four alarm fire make way for GLORIOUS new tractor factory!". No matter how offensive and disgusting the power grab the media will be touting how great it is for us and most of the country will go along with whatever the TV tells them to. But that is my 02c on the subject,YMMV
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Email message:
Here's my vacation photos
a whole lot of mime-encoded binary that might have
a legal-looking jpeg header at the start.
How are they going to filter this exactly?
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, by "backbone" the slashdot article writer was also being presumptuous. The FBI director was talking about stopping bad guys at their "choke point", and Ars Technica gave their own interpretation of what he meant by candidly assuming he meant an Internet backbone (or "hub"). Yes the US government can and does access these hubs (illegally perhaps, that is something the courts may not have the executive power to decide). The FBI also presumably wants access to the information that the NSA does (talk about information sharing between disparate government agencies!). Alas, however, a "choke point" could very well just mean the initial spotting (or IP address, gateway, etc) of a botnet virus that could be garnered from more liberal eavesdropping laws. Let's not make assumptions (in the article topic) and take them as is.
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:5, Interesting)
George Walker Bush
Richard Bruce Cheney
Larry Edwin Craig
Oh, you wanted pictures, too. Okay. How about this one [indymedia.ie]? The big banner says it all.
The people who have the most to fear from this are the politicians. After all, if the FBI can snoop it, guess what will inevitably follow? One word: Net-Watergate. Your political enemies won't cave in to your demands on that anti-terrorism bill? Threaten to expose that they visited hot-young-underage-nymphos-with-bags-over-their-heads-and-bushy-underarm-hair.com on twelve separate occasions in the last year.
Yikes.
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Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:4, Interesting)
This sort of shit just brings it closer.
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