FBI Wants to Tap The Net

Majik was among the stream sof people submitting this story about the FBI wanting to tap the net. Makes carnivore look like a baby monitor since this tracks all packets, and would be placed at key locations on the net.

I don't remember who said it, but

[Scott Lockwood]

Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.

Great...

[don_carnage]

The next thing you know, they'll want control of all major routers; It's just one more step to bring the Internet under US control. Welp folks, it's time we built our own network...

Authentication?

[jiheison]

They can tap whatever they want. Can they PROVE, based on a few packets, who is sending the information?

Without stronger security/authentication in general, this will be useless for the purposes of stopping actual criminals.

Performance, price to consumers?

[weez75]

It's pretty clear that everyone is going to scream about how horrible this is for privacy. Granted, it will be frightening in its approximation of of Orwell's Big Brother but don't overlook that this will slow internet traffic down considerably. Imagine peeking in on every packet sent! Further, to accomodate this I have a feeling the cost will be passed down to you and I--the taxpaying public. I see farms of servers collecting and storing data, offices filled with high-paid IT staff and IT forensic specialists. So, to recap: bad for privacy, slows down the net, and we'll pay for the privilege of being spied on. I'll have say this isn't in our best interest...

Get in the habit of using Crypto now...

[Bonker]

And make this unfeasable for real production use.

Breaking 2048 bit DH compression on one packet or transmission is feasible, given time and a (very) powerful computer.

If the FBI were to have to crack even 2-5% of the billions of packets that went through their system, however, it would make this system completely unworkable.

Use PGP or GPG. Sign your messages. Let other people know that you prefer messages sent to you in encrypted formats. Surf and download from sites who use SSL. It's not that hard, and once you get in the habit of encrypting data, you'll feel safer and more secure.

Re:What's the big worry?

[jiheison]

Because having something to hide is not the same as being a criminal. I'm sure you can think of a few things that someone may want to keep private, other than evidence of their involvement in a crime. There are many things besides breaking the law that can get you singled out for harrassment and persecution in this country.

Carnivore *IS* a baby monitor...

[EvilAlien]

Carnivore *IS* a baby monitor. Just be glad there aren't video cameras all over the place like in London, that'll give you the Orwellian feeling you've been craving.

It shouldn't really be that shocking that a device like Carnivor exists, is used, and has analogs in other jurisdictions as well. The Canadian RCMP have something like that. They don't have an equivalent to Echelon, but then again Canadians are passive and wouldn't dream of plotting to overturn our ineffective government. No need to spend money on that, might as well setup more social assistance programs to help "refugees" setup a few more terror cells.

Centralized network means single point of failure

[techmuse]

One major problem exposed by this idea is that the Internet will suddenly have a single point of failure (and slowness) where all of the packets have to go through. Do you like your Internet slow and vulnerable?

What would this accomplish?

[elliotj]

I don't understand the utility in doing this anymore than the libertarian opposition to it.

I would assume that any self-respecting bad guy will be using good strong encryption to protect any sensitive data. That would make the resulting packets read like garbage until decoded, which would make sifting through the data stream very difficult indeed. So widespread, readily available encryption will make this of little use to the Feds.

And I don't really worry about the threat of 'big brother' watching me any more than I currently worry about crackers getting at my stuff. Afterall, the measures one should take to protect yourself today (using SSH instead of telnet for example), will also protect yourself from being snooped upon by the government. So there's nothing new here.

The big concern is the tax dollars will be wasted by the feds to put this in place.

It's all about the Benjamins...

[sterno]

It's a paraphrase of Ben Franklin and the original quote was:

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

For some reason this quote keeps coming up a lot lately. I wonder why :)

Massive amount of Money

[thetechweenie]

I highly doubt that the FBI could pull this off. First of all, the budget for something like this would be huge to say the least... Secondly, the FBI doesn't have the engineering staff to support something of this size. Your talking about putting huge clusters at all of the NAPS. Even then they won't get info that doesn't pass through that NAP. What's going to stop terrorists from using a VPN? This sounds like a major waste of money, and a flawed solution...

Re:Get in the habit of using Crypto now...

[Rogerborg]

• If the FBI were to have to crack even 2-5% of the billions of packets

If even 2-5% of active voters wrote to their elected representatives telling them to knock this on the head, it would get stopped and stopped hard. That might be a more achievable goal.

Connecting the dots

[rossjudson]

If you ever wanted to know why encryption and privacy are important, intersecting generic packet sniffing and the DMCA should tell you. The citizenry must retain some ability to defend itself against bad law. I suppose it's the same issue as guns -- rights granted which were originally intended to ensure that the government can't disarm and dominate the people.

Without the ability to act private and say what we want, the corporate interests controlling the congress will enact more and more bad law, creating a behavioral minefield in our land of freedom.

Does a citizen have a right to hold a private conversation?

Perhaps the FBI can use its packet sniffing capability to identify pockets of resistance to the DMCA. Black helicopter forces can be dispatched to deal with said resistance.

Or, much scarier, they just might pass additional laws that make it illegal to conspire to defeat the DMCA. The packet sniffer will detect your illegal motions, even inside the room.

Re:Centralized network means single point of failu

[EvilAlien]

Distributed collection, perhaps distributed storage and forwarding of data over (possibly) private network. Collectors targeted to IPs under suspicion. All these means is more efficient data intercept orders with the sniffers already deployed. This would cost a helluva lot of money that should be spent on education or given back to the tax payers. Boxes that do this stuff aren't cheap.

Port mirroring or silimar tactics would be used to send copies of data to the collectors. Another big question raised by this is will these collectors be accessibly on public address space? How will they be secured? When (not "will") they become targets for crackers, info-terrorists, and hostile foreign governments?

Re:What's the big worry?

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Why does everyone here get all worked up about the governement watching us if they truely have nothing to hide?

You've got it backwards. The question should be:

Why is the government all worked up about watching us if we're not criminals?

Net Architecture

[Rocketboy]

Doesn't this seem to imply a radical change to the architecture of the net? How far has the internet gotten away from its original ability to route around damage because there weren't any single locations that all packets had to travel through in order to get to their destinations? Isn't that what the FBI wants to do -- remove that ability to bypass damage so that all packets have to go through a few choice locations they regulate? And doesn't that imply that a very few terrorist acts against these traffic monitors could bring down the entire Internet?

Just curious...

Re:Performance, price to consumers?

[Rogerborg]

• Imagine peeking in on every packet sent

Why would you need to do that? The idea is just to route every packet through a couple of points, then you look for packets to or from a.b.c.d.

It seems achievable (or at least sellable to a gullible legislature). The funny ha ha is that it introduces insane vulnerabilities into the 'net. Picture the effect of taking out one of these monster router farms.

Re:Centralized network means single point of failu

[Rogerborg]

It's unthinkable that terrorists would dare to target such a potent symbol of US power and authority.

No... wait... that was before September 11th.

This proposal is vile and ahborent in moral, technical and security terms. Three for three.

Re:Great...

[Tackhead]

> The next thing you know, they'll want control of all major routers; It's just one more step to bring the Internet under US control.

Hey, it's nice to know we Americans are finally catching up with our freedom-loving friends in Russia and China!

I was beginning to worry we were gonna be left behind on the information superhighway!

Information is useless without interpretation

[Flower]

So they capture all this traffic. Now tell me how they are going to verify it, prioritize it, put it in context, act on it, etc., etc.. Oh and how will they get to use that information sans warrant.

I can just see it now. Start sniffing on an ATM backbone and analyze those packets 48 bytes at a time. You go G-man!

ELINT has its uses but some perspective is needed here.

Re:What's the big worry?

[count_dooku]

Why does everyone here get all worked up about the governement watching us if they truely have nothing to hide?

Because we have something called The Bill of Rights that was designed two centries ago to limit the power of the federal government. See Amendment no. 4 [findlaw.com]. [findlaw.com]

How would you like if if the Police stopped by every day and searched your house without a warrant? You have nothing to hide, right, so what's the worry?

I'll tell you the worry: Where is it going to end? Can they listen to my phone conversations? Make me take a lie detector test? Force me to turn over my PGP keys to some type of gov't clearinghouse?

--

This is much more sinister that it seems

[cosmosis]

As any student of history will tell you, giving the FBI this much more power fares badly for all of us. McCarthyism anyone? The first thing they are going to do is gather up information on anyone who ordered any books on any belief or activity they don't like - including drugs, computer security/hacking, anarchy, libretarianism, free-thinking, etc. So if you frequent any sites of this ilk or bought any nooks from Amazon like this you will be tagged by the FBI as a suspected terrorist.

After a while, these people will be rounded up and questioned, intimidated and possible detained. And if the current set of laws that just passed gets any worse, then you might even get jailed without due process, and incarcerated for life based on these information retrieval practices. Sound ominous so far? It should. This stuff is right in line with Nazi Germany too. Lets just hope they don't start lining us all up and shooting us because we are "terrorists, hackers, druggies", etc. Never forget that it was Orrin Hatch who called for the Death Penalty for anyone caught using drugs.

Re:Lamers

[aka-ed]

'The goal might be to get companies that use packet data to have those packets go to one place for purposes of wiretap and other intercept capabilities," Baker said'

That would just be a matter of duplicating the packets; the Feds would presumably need to provide the bandwidth for getting that traffic load to their own network.

But I must say it's disturbing that many seem to think the worst thing here is the possible degradation of network performance...

Re:waste of time

[Tackhead]

> What a useless waste of time on the government's part. I mean really, let's say they manage to tap the whole internet, that's what, 1, 2 billion using it? Okay, most of those people doing things like "hi how's it going emails". Let's say there's an equal distribution of 1 terrorist for ever 100 000 legitimate users. Oh yah, they're going catch them. What, doing a word search on the packets?

Conclusion obvious: Because it's plainly obvious that this will not locate terrorists, the logical conclusion is that finding terrorists is not why they want to implement this.

Re:Whoa, this is getting confusing!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not illegal when they do it. Only when one of the non-annointed does it. It worries me quite a bit that there is not one "double standard" but rather reams and reams of double standards that are coming into reality.

Reminds me of a South Park episode where Everyone sues Everyone. In one scene, Kyle's father - the lawyer - is explaining something to Kyle. Kyle asks "But isn't that Fascism?" His father replies, "No, because we don't call it fascism."

Be very afraid.

Brouhaha

[stuccoguy]

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.

Re:Go ahead.

[Unknown Poltroon]

No. I want the govt to do its fucking job, and maybe INVESTAGATE SOME LEADS instead of reading my e-mail.

So, next step

[einhverfr]

Use IPsec for security, maybe over an L2TP tunnel if NATs are involved. Then they can only map connections on the IP layer...

Re:Honeypot for Feds?

[Gertz]

Get real here. The problem is that the federal government does NOT have the right to search people without due cause, process, and describing exactly what is to be searched. Read the fourth amendment.

I personally want to be able to view look at a politicial site and not be profiled by my government. I want to buy stuff on Amazon.com and not have the government look at it. I want to be able to use email to talk to my wife, my lawyer, my pastor, and my doctor without worrying that my messages are going to be searched, scrunitized, and read by people who don't have a time to get a warrent.

Being searched automatically, without notice or due cause, and having no private communications just sucks. Yes, it's going to cause problems, and yes people will die because of them. How can we though, in good concense take away the freedoms that so many others have died to protect?

And yes, privacy, AKA, the right to be left alone, is one of those rights. So is not being searched without cause and process. Lets talk about how what the government is doing is completly illegal, immoral, and just plain criminal. Unless of course, criticizing our government and asking questions of our leaders is a 'terrorist act'.