Inside Comcast's Surveillance Policies 134
Monk writes "The Federation of American Scientists has obtained a recently disclosed Comcast Handbook for Law Enforcement which details its policies for divulging its customers' personal information. (Here's the handbook itself in PDF form.) All of Comcast's policies seem to follow the letter of the law, and seem to weigh customer privacy with law enforcement's requests. This is in apparent contrast to AT&T and a number of other telecommunication companies, which have been only too happy to give over subscriber records. According to the handbook, Comcast keeps logs for up to 180 days on IP address allocation, and they do not keep all of your e-mails forever (45 days at most). VoIP phone records are stored for 2 years, and cable records can only be retrieved upon a court order. The document even details how much it costs law enforcement to get access to personal data (data for child exploitation cases is free of charge)."
Secure your email (Score:3, Informative)
(Mac OS X 10.3+) http://www.joar.com/certificates/ [joar.com]
(Windows) http://www.marknoble.com/tutorial/smime/smime.aspx [marknoble.com]
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Hash: SHA1
re: http://www.joar.com/certificates/ [joar.com]
I read your MAC OSX article/how-to.
What? Not one mention or link to information on GPG http://www.gnupg.com/ [gnupg.com]
and/or PGP???
http://www.pgp.com/ [pgp.com]
I support and use the former and recommend the latter to my Microsoft locked-in friends.
What about enigmail http://enigmail.mozdev.org/for [mozdev.org] Thunderbird
or firegpg http://firegpg.tuxfamily.org/ [tuxfamily.org] for firefox?
Open your mind.
P.S. Note that this post is signed
Re:Secure your email (Score:4, Interesting)
As much as I really despise the centralized philosophy behind S/MIME and x.509, there's something to be said for avoiding the 'web of trust' models that lie underneath GPG as its currently used, because most users just don't want to have to deal with it.
Getting people to use encryption is always a tough sell, because most people, to be perfectly frank, lead lives that are so completely boring that nobody would ever want to read their mail, and they know it. Therefore, they're not going to expend much effort getting it working. Either it works all automagically, or they don't use it at all.
I've yet to see a GPG implementation that comes as close to being foolproof as some S/MIME implementations (like Apple's), once you get the certificates set up. Once you've received a signed message from someone, you have their public key. Once you have that, the encryption button is magically enabled, and you can send encrypted stuff to them. Even Sente's Mail frontend to GPG isn't that easy to use.
Re:Secure your email (Score:4, Insightful)
Or the flip side of the equation. Many are already placing already anything and everything about themselves on MySpace and Facebook. With so much information already public and available, what's to hide?
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Just because you think its boring doesn't mean the powers that be don't. (Your employer, random stalker, marketing company, and of course the government)
Its usually the mundane stuff that they could use against you ambiguously. Everyone breaks the law one way or another due to the nature of our complex le
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Hash: SHA1
I wanna like PGP, I really do... but tell me this comment isn't ugly. OK, now stop lying. Every time I see a PGP signed message I can't help but think how aweful it looks. What is the average user gonna wanna put up with that. Sure, you have the right software/plugins/whatever, it can be made to look better and be non-obtrusive, but the fact of the matter is, but default it's ugly.
IMHO, the biggest problem with X.509 certificates is cost. Sure, you can get a free
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(Mac OS X 10.3+) http://www.joar.com/certificates/ [joar.com]
(Windows) http://www.marknoble.com/tutorial/smime/smime.aspx [marknoble.com]
While I appreciate the idea and all, why? It's really not worth the time to encrypt my email. Do you think that if the feds are monitoring your line, they are just going to say, "Damn! He's encrypted. Let's move on to the next." I'm going to guess not. If anything, seeing that you email is encrypted might be enough to peak their interest to make you MORE
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Hash: SHA1
Nothing incriminating in your email? Not worried about 'them' monitoring your emails? Think again.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
Ben Franklin
And BTW, encrypting email only takes a few minutes to set up and no (perceptible) time when signing/encrypting a message.
- --
Bill Arlofski
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: 'email gpgpublickey@revpol.com
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"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
Ben Franklin
And BTW, encrypting email only takes a few minutes to set up and no (perceptible) time when signing/encrypting a message.
Uh, do you have something better than an overused Ben Franklin quote from over 200 years ago? How about something a bit more current, from someone who understands
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Re:Secure your email (Score:5, Insightful)
No
Do I care if they snoop in my email?
Yes
Will I encrypt my email because they're snooping?
No - in the case of confidential messages, they have always been dealt with cryptically.
Can I do anything about them snooping in my email - regardless if it's encrypted or not?
Absolutely not
Can we do anything about them snooping in my email?
We can try
I am such a low priority for them that as long as it doesn't disturb my day to day routine, I really don't worry about it. I don't even notice if they are even sniffing my packets.
It's like being robbed in your home when you're out. It doesn't matter if you have an alarm system or not, if someone wants property of yours, they will get it.
You can double lock your doors, put bars on the windows, pay for a monitoring service, or whatever, it will not stop a determined person from getting whatever they want to get.
That hassle of behavior is not worth it to me. Supporting a group or honest politician to stop the snooping is worth the hassle.
I'm not going to go downtown and walk across the street out of my way just to avoid the town crier (you know, every town has one, a crazy coot parked in the center of town that says the end of the world is coming). I will confront him if he confronts me.
Re:Secure your email (Score:4, Interesting)
Therefore the aggregate effect of large numbers of people using encryption would be to render large-scale electronic surveillance systems useless, since they are only practical for plaintext traffic. (In fact, you don't really even need to be using state-of-the-art crypto; if everyone were using even keys that took a few days to break on a supercomputer, it would prevent most types of high-speed/real-time analysis and force authorities to take much more fine-grained, targeted approaches.
Your argument against taking an individual step to prohibit mass surveillance is the same argument that many people make against voting: your action, taken singularly, has virtually no effect. It is only as part of a group that it is significant. But just as many people deciding to vote the same way can change a government, a large number of people deciding to make the snoopers' jobs (even slightly more) difficult would quickly outpace their resources available for the task.
I don't think the solution is either-or, personally. As concerned citizens, we need to vote. As people with technological knowledge and capabilities, we have a responsibility to not make it easy for those in power to abuse it, through our passivity.
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You can double lock your doors, put bars on the windows, pay for a monitoring service, or whatever, it will not stop a determined person from getting whatever they want to get.
But in this instance it is like having someone in your house at all times who is allowed to go through your stuff at any given time for any particular reason. They aren't suppo
Re:Secure your email (Score:5, Insightful)
This is similar to the idea that you should not let the cops search your home without a warrant even though you don't have anything illegal inside. The more it becomes assumed that only the "bad guys" that are asserting their rights and/or privacy, the more likely such assertions will be thought of as indicative of bad behavior in and of themselves. If the feds assume I'm a criminal simply because I encrypt my email, then they are not doing their job effectively.
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Hash: SHA1
I agree completely. Excellent point...
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: 'email gpgpublickey@revpol.com for my public key'
iD8DBQFHFDmYcBKMMWOpTtwRAq7UAKCwK8z82/ZijTot5Vr3Fjd6TUa4aQCgrvvK
5KnXXA9BewVkH+F7J4Voy8g=
=T/fD
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Re:Secure your email (Score:4, Funny)
This is similar to the idea that you should not let the cops search your home without a warrant even though you don't have anything illegal inside. The more it becomes assumed that only the "bad guys" that are asserting their rights and/or privacy, the more likely such assertions will be thought of as indicative of bad behavior in and of themselves. If the feds assume I'm a criminal simply because I encrypt my email, then they are not doing their job effectively.
Sure, but that is because having the police enter my house is intrusive. They track mud in, can drop anything anywhere and say that they found it there. That can't be done with email. Also, a warrant specifies exactly what they are looking for. Finally, items found in a house search is enough for prosecution. A quote from an email is not. Besides, these guys are not looking for prosecution, they are looking to identify and bust terrorism cells. They are looking to stop the next terrorist attack. They are looking to intercept supplies such as bomb making materials and replace them with something inert. Yes, an email will be evidence, but when it comes to terrorism, they require a open and shut case with multiple arrests. They don't want to pop you for looking for weed.
If the feds assume I'm a criminal simply because I encrypt my email, then they are not doing their job effectively.
I never said that. I said they would take a close look, wasting their time and doing MORE of what you didn't want them to do in the first place. If they can't get your email, they may listen to your phone calls. They may start tailing you. They may start investigating the people you email. Why? Because you thought it would be super cool spy stuff to encrypt your email to keep the evil G-Men out.
Besides, even the SS didn't really need to evesdrop. If they wanted information, they'd kick down your door, torture your little girl until YOU cracked, and put you on a train somewhere with a bunch of people with stars sewn into their clothing.
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It could be worth your life to write a letter that might be seen as having the seeds of treason.
George Bush is not going to have you executed if you look like you may be "seeding the seeds of treason". Hell, if that were the case, all he'd have to do is show up at a anti-war rally and shot the people carrying the signs calling for revolution! Why bother paying Comcast? The King of England read mail to keep himself in power. The feds read mail to prevent a terrorist from killing
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The other is a government trying to save the lives of its population from those who want an oppressive religion based world government.
Oh, give me a fucking break.
For starters, cough up some evidence that the "terrorists" want this world based Government you are talking about. And which "terrorists"? Many movements that our Government considers to be "terrorists" have no interest in the United States beyond our meddling in their affairs for whatever reason.
And once you've done that, convince me that we really need to sign away our rights to stop the "terrorists". You realize we have a few thousand nuclear weapons that can be delive
Re:Secure your email (Score:4, Informative)
You're kidding, right?
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And that I disagree with 100%! Fortunately, I have not heard of a case where terrorism laws have been used to prosecute non-terror related crime. The second that they are, the prosecutor should be tossed out on his ass, not the laws. Punish those that abuse the tools, not the tools themselves.
As for copyright, do you think that its right that the RIAA has more power to spy on you than the federal government? At least the governme
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Re:Secure your email (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Secure your email (Score:4, Insightful)
Just how many terrorists attacks have we had in the US? Why are you still knee-jerking on a crime that kills less people world-wide (including Israel) than drown in bath-tubs?
As for "they require a open and shut case with multiple arrests" WTF are you talking about? Do you know how many people in Guantanamo are part of "open and shut cases?" NONE. Do you know how many were even "picked up on the battlefield?" Hardly more than 5%.
How about the thousands arrested in NYC during the republican convention who were then just conveniently released without charges?
Recent history is chock-a-block full of cases where OUR government abused civil rights - when they couldn't find something legit to bust someone for, they stretched to find anything to pin on them - like popping you for looking for weed.
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Sure they can. They just create a nice real-looking email and paste it into their log. Maybe fix a few TCP sequence numbers and all set. On the other hand, if you encrypted your email, they wouldn't be able to do that without the key, which presumably you would only be forced to hand over once all the evidence was already on the table (ie, by a judge).
Finally, items found in a house search is enough
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The same is true of tapping my phone lines, it requires a warrant and for good reason. The same is true of requesting my DNA. You do not give the police or any investigating authority any intelligence voluntarily because when they are investigating you they are your enemy. It is estimated based on after the fact DNA testing that 30% of the people in prison
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I remember a quote from a police officer who was giving a speech to us soldiers at Ft. Hood about the dangers of drunk dri
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You cannot possibly be so naive as to actually believe that. [homelandstupidity.us]
And that's just one incident. HE PERSONALLY has experienced and documented dozens more. You really don't see what's right in front of your face, do you?
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I highly doubt there has been an administration that hasn't done it to be honest. But there was a time when they did so in shadows afraid of the power wielded by the people. Bush and company have ju
Re:Secure your email (Score:5, Insightful)
My stock trades are not incriminating either, but they are not sent plaintext. They are also not sent on my ISP mail servers. Sometimes data security is simply data security to prevent mis-use in the wrong hands. There is nothing incriminating, but my credit card order details is not to be made public.
There is a reason to encrypt some sensitive data. ID theft of credit card information is just one of the many reasons.
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There is a reason to encrypt some sensitive data. ID theft of credit card information is just one of the many reasons.
Very well put. Personally, I can't say my rights are being violated when nothing in my life
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How is the feds going to know any different? Often the only clue is the reciepent is orders@ameritrade.com or Ghadactv8st@gmail.com
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The GGP was stating that he would encrypt his email because the gov't may be listening. I said that was a stupid reason and actually counter productive.
Besides, I think the address is a pretty good clue! Also, I think the physical location of the recipient, say, Tora Bora Afghanistan, would be another pretty good clue to go on.
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Alright, that's a big extreme, but according the the current U.S. constitution, we still have a right to privacy and protection from unwarranted searches. Just because I don't feel like airing my dirty laundry doesn't mean that I'm one of the terrorists. There
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It's really not worth the time to encrypt my email.
It's free. It takes less time to get a key than it took you to respond to my post. Once you have a key, the email client encrypts for you automatically. Your time argument is extremely weak.
If anything, seeing that you email is encrypted might be enough to peak their interest to make you MORE watched, not less.
Terrorist this, al Qaeda that... you're using extremely tortured logic. (Pun intended)
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You are probably right, IF you have been tagged by authorities and they have reason to believe you've committed a crime or great reason to want to snoop in on you then they will probably scrutinize you more closely if you have en
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That's a bad idea. (Score:2)
If you have OS X 10.4, you can make your own certificates [afp548.com].
Yes, you can do this. However, it's a pretty poor idea.
S/MIME is designed to work with centralized Certificate Authorities. If you roll your own CA and issue yourself a self-signed certificate, you'll be able to sign stuff, but people who receive your messages will get a big "BAD SIGNATURE" error or warning, because they won't have your CA in their trusted chain. In order to get it to work, you'd need to get them the CA certificate, and they'd need to import it into their trusted root database. (Which is a
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That works for some applications. (Score:2)
However, for email, you may and probably do want to talk to a lot of people that you may never meet in person or communicate with any other way. This makes verifying a lot of individual fingerprints cumbersome -- but if you don't have any other method for proving authenticity, you create a massive security hole for MITM attacks.
So
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If you bittorrent, use a client that encrypts. and force it to only accept encrypted. Comcast techs are usually way way behind the ball and are easily fooled if you do a few things to protect yourself. Also, if you are not running it, get a copy of peer guardian and install it. every little bit helps. Their Internet Security goons are typically Ex-Cops first and IT people last.
another way to limit P2P detection, set your download and upload to be near identical. Yes it takes longe
How much it costs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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They'll just ask for a bigger budget next year.
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Comcast's charges don't seem unreasonable either, considering the amount of data they'll have to sift through to provide the information.
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That's why they always say it's for a child exploitation case.
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Misleading article (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this an attempt to improve Comcat's poor reputation among
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seriously, if this is the case i hate comcast quite a bit less. i just sort of assumed they were doing the same thing as att and verizon and rolling over for uncle sam.
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Local law enforcement is far removed from the latter.
While there is some truth to the common perception of local (eg, Middle-of-Nowhereville, MT) law enforcement having more in common with the Keystone Kops [wikipedia.org] than the Feds, the majority of urban police departments are quite professional and will continue to evolve.
They still haven't changed thier undocumented policies related to bandwidth limitations on "unlimited bandwidth" accounts.
As someone who lives in fear of the dreaded call [dslreports.com], the policies and procedures described in the handbook didn't even raise an eyebrow. It all seemed rather, well, mundane. The frontpage of /. elicited more of a reponse, for me.
btw - How would we know
PARENT IS TRUE (Score:2)
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comast high speed (Score:5, Funny)
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Quick and Dirty Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting read, especially considering the "Comcast Confidential" footer at the bottom of every page. That said, it's informative only insofar as it states there's laws to be considered, and makes clear the folks at Comcast insist on following them. Nothing in that document is very different than a typical publically-available TOS. Here's an excerpt:
As for the email policies referred to in the summary, Comcast does not store emails any longer than the subscriber chooses keeps them.
Put another way, Comcast doesn't store your emails. You do.
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You left out the part where a subscriber may elect to not use Comcast mail at all and elect to use another providers service such as Hotmail or Yahoo mail. Comcast does not have any record of these. It's hard to retrieve records that don't exist. I fall in that catagory. I don't use my ISP's email at all.
Quick and dirty is if you receive all services from Comcast. However if you only subscribed to Internet and used Broadvoi
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correction Vontage and all US VOIP Providers must
There fixed it. From you link..
"The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) is a United States wiretapping law passed in 1994 "
Vontage is US based. Where is Ekiga which ships with Ubuntu based?
http://ekiga.org/index.php?rub=3&pos=0&faqpage=x149.html [ekiga.org]
"1.1.4. What is it compatible with?
Ekiga is compatible with any software, device or router su
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Ekiga is just the client program that runs on your computer; it is to VoIP what Firefox is to the WWW. The client program isn't (generally) where tapping occurs; law enforcement does that in the network, where it's harder to detect. So the question isn't whether you use Ekiga, it's who do you use for an ISP,
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Yay for Viral PR (Score:2, Interesting)
Since when did policies matter? (Score:2)
Cox (Score:2, Informative)
Clarification please... (Score:3, Insightful)
Are they saying that comcast will hand over identity and ip records WITHOUT a court order? The only 'balanced' policy would be to turn over nothing to law enforcement without a court order and even then to oppose the order if possible.
Comcast's words are compared to others' actions (Score:3, Interesting)
Apples and oranges. "Monk" is comparing Comcast's words to AT&T's actions..
It's nice to know that Comcast is able to write a policy manual that follows the law, but surely a written policy telling employees to break the law would trigger a minor scandal.
Anyone who's ever been in a large organization is familiar with lip-service CYA written policies.
How seriously does Comcast take this policy? Do they give training sessions to the people who need to implement it? Do they back up or undercut the people who go "by the book?"
Verification (Score:1, Informative)
They also do not monitor outbound traffic at all unless for diagnostic purposes or because of a warrant. I was told, point blank, that they simply 'do not want to know' what is going on with their subscribers.
And to be frank, I can't say that I blame them. Collecting subscriber usage data is more of a liability than anything else these days.
Weight of authority? And anonymity isn't a defense (Score:1)
The law doesn't protect you (Score:2, Insightful)
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Like in Washington, DC.
OT: Guns in Iraq (Score:1)
The military isn't so stupid as to ban civilian ownership of all weapons; it would just make the population more exposed -- not just to foreign hostiles, but also to sectarian violence, and the usual criminal elements -- rather than safer.
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Yes, really. Ever hear the proverb, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"? It applies here. The Iranians will give money and guns to anyone fighting the Americans and/or the current Iraqi government. The people fighting the current Iraqi government and the American forces in Iraq will take money and guns from whoever will give it to them. That's really not that hard to understand.
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Bollocks. There's a fucking civil war going on in Iraq where Sunni groups are killing Shiites - and vice versa. Why the fuck would Iran want to fund the killing of Shiites?
See http://www.cfr.org/publication/9362/#4 [cfr.org] - "Some reports also suggest that Iran's interference in Iraq has included funding, safe transit, and arms to insurgent leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces", and also says Iran
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That there is violence in Iraq does not logically imply that any/all measures against some varieties of violence are useless.
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And the worst part is, when you ask them for the key to get you out of jail, they won't give you.
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- -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
- -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
By handing it over, it would be a violation of my 5th amendment rights.
Yes, perhaps they would
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And when they ask you for your key and you won't give them, they throw you in jail and keep you there.
Right, this is absolutely true. However, it doesn't matter a bit, because let's look at how encryption has changed the equation...
Situation 1 - No encryption. This offers no protection whatsoever, except for the 'small fish in a big pond' situation which may or may not be true. Your e-mails can (and will) be monitored, most likely not individually but by automated process. Computer programs will be able to data mine/archive/print out and send to your grandmother/etc absolutely all of your e-mail com
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Re:The law doesn't protect you (Score:4, Interesting)
They did a distributed computing project a few years back to break a 64 bit encryption method and it took them a little over 5 years. Most encryption keys these days are 128 bits or higher and every bit you add doubles the number of possibilities they'd have to check, so for 128 bit using the same level of resources brute force would take 92,233,720,368,547,758,080 years(assuming that the five years case was an average case). Computers are a lot faster than they were, but not that much faster.
To sum up, if encryption works at all, no one is going to get in without knowing your password, and the shows are bollocks. That said some encryption algorithms do contain backdoors for the US government, and some algorithms are badly written(WEP for instance), P may equal NP and the US government will probably have a quantum computer as soon as they're available so YMMV.
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They'll just sneak into your house when aren't there and install a keylogger on your computer to get your passphrase. It's not like they haven't done it before [news.com]
With that kind of power, why even worry about brute force attacks?
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Use linux with security options that would prevent the installation of a software keylogger. Then switch to Dvorak (or something else funky) and use a Das Keyboard (or leave the keys in QWERTY).
Unless they can gain access to your PC and bypass the security, they wont have any idea that its not QWERTY. Any hardware keylogger or bug they insert will produce "garbage" since they have no way of knowing that will produce 'x' instead of 'q'.
Oh and combine this with good home security s
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You really don't know how hardware keyloggers work, and you do not understand how easy it is to crack a replacement cipher (which is what a random keyboard would essentially be equivalent of)
And by the way, it's easy to pick up the electric currents generated by your
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And with a large enough sample of this "garbage" (which is smaller than you would think) combined with a *simple* frequency analysis would defeat this in no time flat.
Relying on a substitution cipher for securing information is the equivalent of thinking Kwikset l
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The best security precaution is continual awareness. If you're intimately familiar with all of your hardware and software, it's a lot harder for someone to install a keylogger. Would you know if someone came into your office and moved something around? You should. It requires an effort, though, to start paying attention to little things, so that you'll notice if something is amiss. And if you have a bad feeling, you need to act on it immediately.
W
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