FBI Wants Authority To Filter Net Backbone 413
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."
From my cold dead fingers (Score:5, Insightful)
will they pry my private encryption key passphrase.
Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This is how it's done (Score:5, Insightful)
Remind me again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Who is we?
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.
Re:Public has a short attention span (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:Public has a short attention span (Score:5, Insightful)
There, distracted yet? Now leave the man behind the curtain alone.
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?
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.
Re:From my cold dead fingers (Score:2, Insightful)
EXACTLY. Let them read my nonsensical jibba-jabba.. there are damn near unbeatable encryption algorithms that exist today.
My attitude is, if you're not smart enough to encrypt your sensitive data, then you've got it coming. It seems that the US bounces back and forth between a nanny-state and the big-brother state. People, you have to take care of your own, you simply can't trust ISP's, routers, google, the girl that swipes your visa at the corner station, etc etc etc.
Heads up people, its comin' atcha
Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:3, Insightful)
If our only hope is wireless mesh, then we have had it. Mesh is one of those really cool, but over-hyped words...and I shudder every time I hear it. Mesh on a large scale like that would be one huge cluster...and if by cluster you mean cluster $%^&, then yes, that would describe what would happen perfectly.
Transporter_ii
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].
Re:It's only a matter of time (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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?
Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:5, Insightful)
We won't have those citizens organizing against us (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what they say anyway - and it might even be what they really mean. But the uses of this technology will expand and it's just a matter of time until what the monitors are looking for are "undesirable elements" as defined by the administration in power.
Imagine what J. Edgar Hoover would have done with this ability. How about Richard Nixon; breaking into the DNC to gather information got him in trouble - if he could have accomplished the same thing with a wiretap or two do you think he'd have hesitated?
Our Founding Fathers put limits on what government could do, insured the privacy of private spaces and generally did a pretty good job of creating a system that would resist the abuses of a power mad wanna-be dictator. It's sad to see these protections being dismantled; history is being ignored and it's going to repeat itself like it or not.
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.
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?
Re:Rule of Law. (Score:2, Insightful)
Try something new. Vote the Party out of office. That would be the first step.
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.
Why just conservatives? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank god for modern CPU technology! (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
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.
The muzzies? (Score:2, Insightful)
How about "Al Qaida?" It's more accurate than "the muzzies," it's less wildly broad in who it blames for 9/11, and it's even shorter to type. But maybe it doesn't achieve your goal of projecting hate at the whole of the Muslim world.
Re:Rule of Law. (Score:3, Insightful)
Our last chance to save the Internet that has transformed our lives and culture through the use of Net Neutrality laws is quickly disappearing. Very soon, it will be too late. It may already be too late, in fact.
Re:Vote and Organize. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or is it just that the internet is relatively new technology [compared with the telephone and mail].
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.
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.
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."
Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:This is how it's done (Score:3, Insightful)
WE DO NOT receive our rights from the crown, nor the presidency or Congress. They are given rights by the breath we take and the blood in our veins.
Act and Organize. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And how do we break the backbone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just food for thought.
Re:How about anoher example? (Score:3, Insightful)
You gotta go low tech for best analogies.
"There are places where criminal voice communication is centralized: the post offices across the country. All letters and packages, legal and illegal, flow through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off the letters. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the content of all the letters and packages, which are already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
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]