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Russian Cops to Monitor All Internet Traffic 224

Posted by Roblimo from the nothing-but-technology-has-changed-since-the-czars dept.
st. augustine writes "Just like the bad old days, only now with IP: according to this article in Mother Jones, Russian ISPs are now being required to provide -- and pay for -- 'black boxes' that copy all traffic to KGB, er, FSB headquarters. The big news is that now not only the FSB but 'seven other federal security agencies, including the tax police and the interior ministry,' are going to be given access. Hope that Russian crypto is as good as they say it is."
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Russian Cops to Monitor All Internet Traffic More

Russian Cops to Monitor All Internet Traffic

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  • Why the world needed the Soviet Union (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's like God (played by Beorge Burns) said in those Oh God! movies. 'Happy' cannot exist without 'sad'. And nor can good exist without evil. The Soviet Union was a magnificent yardstick against which nations could compare themselves against to see what they must never allow themselves to do.

    They routinely spy on their own people.
    They ban listening to non-state-approved radios.
    They do not allow private ownership of firearms.
    Theydo not allow private ownership of land.
    They restrict what you can read, or say, or worship.

    We must not ever become like them.

    Now, the Soviet Union is gone.

    And without a massive looming evil empire (China does not present the same level of menace in most people's minds [We trade with China, and call them Most Favored Nation].), the US and other free nations no longer have a model of evil to keep them on the straight and narrow. The result is a curtailing or rights our leaders and legislators once fought to protect. When 'evil' is gone, who needs the tools to say 'good'? Examples:

    Echelon/NSA/FBI/CIA spies on their own people. And mandates telcos to provide tappable [without having to notify telco] infrastructure to do it.
    Radio scanners that can receive cellular are banned, later extended to cover cordless phones. Radio scanners that can receive any digitally modulated audio transmissions are banned.
    More classes of guns banned. More hoops to jump thru to get guns mandated. More attempts to require gun registration and gun "permits".
    Gov't siezure of land, assetts, and property on mere suspicion of drug crimes (and now for MPAA/RIAA crimes). No property returned to you even when you're not found guilty of anything.
    Say "I can understand the frustration of the Columbine shooters" and get whisked away for mandatory "counseling" to correct your wrongthink. And jail for writing or distributing code (DeCSS).

    They are not gone after all. We have become them.

  • Re:*We're* not there yet... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...but not far removed, either.

    And getting closer nearly every day. Consider:

    • Increasing restrictions on the private possession and use of firearms in the complete absence of any evidence that such restrictions actually have any appreciable impact on crime: violent or otherwise.
    • Smoking: a completely legal activity, being increasingly regulated. Even to the extent that in some communities, restrictions on smoking on ones own property have been considered. And of course we all know what rights private property owners have if that private property happens to be a store, restaurant, etc.
    • Racial and ethnic "profiling." I'm not talking the "private profiling" that nearly every human being engages in as a matter-of-course (it's human nature), but officially sanctioned and admitted profiling.
    • Increasing use of, and acceptance by the public of, automated speed traps, substance-abuse check lanes, and video surveillance.
    • Prohibitions against free speech where said speech may be regarded as hurtful. (This all started with the so-called "hostile workplace" rules.)
    • Government control over the uses to which private property may be used. The acceptance of so-called "zoning laws" opened the door. Now you can be prohibited from filling in that mud-puddle if Canadian Geese fly over it once a year. Wet-lands, don't ja know.
    • So-called "drug forfeiture" laws that can result in your private property being confiscated and sold (to the profit of the Government) even when there is absolutely no basis for you being charged with a crime.

    And the list goes on. And on, and on, and on...

    Slashdotter's would be well-advised to read Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty by James Bovard. (ISBN: 0-312-10351-4). A truly eye-opening book. As I read each chapter I thought to myself "Wow! I can't believe we've fallen so far!" Believing that I had now "seen it all." Only to be astonished anew with the next chapter.

    What passes for a "free country" here in the U.S. these days would not be recognized as such by the heros that founded our Representative Republic.

  • Crypto is Illegal in Russia (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 06, 2000 @05:03AM (#1300994)
    ANY use of cryptography in Russia is strictly prohibited by law (even if it is 56-bit or even smaller).

    FSB managed to get the law passed through the Duma (Russian parliament) because they said that they are too far behind in that area and don't have the technology/people to even break the weakest algorithms.

  • Re:Another reason, but it'll be ignored. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 06, 2000 @07:24AM (#1300995)
    This post probably is incoherent and offtopic, but can't we, the slashdot community(!) use the supposed far-flung power of collaboration to take a stand on at least this one issue, and force the US and other governments to take action?

    Uh, oh... Dear me, you yanks are really funny people...

    It's quite amazing to see ./ 'community' react when something about China or Russia is mentioned - and of course, everything they do is 'against the freedom'. But yet, in your own HOUSE, you have shitloads of problems related to privacy and freedom - but you just can't do ANYTHING to stop the govt. Why don't you clean your house first, then start cleaning others?

    DVD, Echelon, DCMA, etc, etc, etc... So many problem you need to solve.

    Russians simply say "We're gonna monitor the traffic!" - and that's it. But at your place, you don't say "We're gonna monitor the traffic!" - you say "It's of interest for national security - we can not talk about that".

    And you both do the same thing, but call it different names.
  • ...the three Russian citizens who can afford Internet access.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • They just raised the budget another 1.2 billion dollars! Woo-fucking-hoo! The price of tolls will rise accordingly this month..

    The Big Dig is the biggest fucking disaster in this history of the state of Massachusetts, IMO. Bigger than that stupid nightclub fire a few decades ago. Bigger than the Hancock Tower, even. It's a gaping money pit that just keeps growing deeper and deeper. It's *well* over budget, well behind schedule, and well-rehearsed at pissing off every single commuter that's been inconvenienced by it for the better part of 10 years now.

    Will it ever be finished? I don't know. Nobody knows. I'll have entered college, spent 5 years here, and gotten my degree in less time than it'll end up taking, though, to give it some perspective. I probably could get another degree too before it's done. I guess all this time and money is making the mafia^H^H^H^H^H friends of the state government who run the construction firms really happy though.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • They are not gone after all. We have become them.

    You always were as bad as Soviet Union -- but now you have lost a "justification" for being as bad, and slowly coming to realization that you need to actually improve things.

  • The USA isn't frightened of invasion by the Godless Reds anymore (they can hardly kick ass in a country still barely out of the stone age).

    While Russians still haven't managed to make such advanced things as unprofitable companies with stock going up for years, they had companies' email addresses on ads long before US started mentioning anything Internet-related (even before WWW became mainstream, so there weren't URLs to mention). So even though economy is in ruins, "stone age" is definitely something from American propaganda.

  • Most Russians are at least decently educated, and probably wouldn't fall for ranting about superiority of the Russian people...etc.

    Nazi-like movements in Russia are well-known, however a lot of "Russians" aren't even Russians by origin, so those nationalists have really hard time getting support even among stupid people. Antisemitism however is very widespread.

  • Smoking: a completely legal activity, being increasingly regulated. Even to the extent that in some communities, restrictions on smoking on ones own property have been considered. And of course we all know what rights private property owners have if that private property happens to be a store, restaurant, etc.

    Restrictions on smoking are based on employee safety laws, the idea that if you are an employer, you cannot require an employee to work in an environment known to be health-threatening. And believe it or not, second-hand smoke is known to be toxic. If it makes you feel better, it's easy to put an anarchist spin on this: ``your right to poison yourself ends where my lungs begin.''

    California Labor Code 6404.5 [jwz.org], Smoking in the Workplace.

    Government control over the uses to which private property may be used. The acceptance of so-called "zoning laws" opened the door. Now you can be prohibited from filling in that mud-puddle if Canadian Geese fly over it once a year. Wet-lands, don't ja know.

    Uh, yeah, sure. That probably sounded better when Rush Limbaugh said it, didn't it?

  • To state the obvious, that's the weakest argument i've read in some time.

    It wasn't an argument, it was an insult. For it to have been an argument, the strawman to which it was a reply would have had to have been deserving of an argument. For example, not being absurd on its face would have been a good start.

    Consider yourself deservedly flamed.

    That was a flame? ``You keep using that word. I think that you do not know what it means.''

  • I think the American love of lethal firearms comes from the Bill of Rights and the fact that Americans used firearms to remove a large, well established British Army from the US from 1775-1781...with the help of the French, Spanish and Dutch...but we used our guns for alot of it.

    Alot of Federal and Confederate units at the start of the Civil War were also equipted with thier own rifles, and there is a tradition in the West of using guns to fend one's home and farm or ranch against preditors of the two and four legged variety.

    It's tradition.
  • Then maybe they'll learn the error of their ways and not monitor people's traffic anymore! If all of the Slashdot people stopped going to Russian sites, I bet they'd implement whatever we want them to!

    NOTE: This post not for the humor (or humour) impaired. Also, this post is not for anyone who doesn't know about Slashdot's tendency to boycott anything and everything they don't agree with.
  • Canada, AFAIK, is part of the international signals intelligence cartel that spawned Echelon. In fact, I recall reading that the British use Canadian spooks to spy on their local dissidents.
  • I suspect that the purpose of that law wasn't so much to register users of cryptography, but to provide a law which said users are virtually guaranteed to have broken, and thus allow for the arrest of people they can't prove to have leaked "state secrets" (a term which includes virtually anything the government wants it to).

    Of course, it'll only be used to round up the bad people. And those who get on the wrong side of The Powers That Be.
  • You are of course, hitting it right on the head.

    And just to head off those who complain that since the military could no longer be defeated by citizenry equipped with hunting rifles, etc. please do remember that guerilla tactics are still feasable. The US has been defeated by them before, and if it really comes down to it (hopefully it will not) they can be again.
  • The USA isn't frightened of invasion by the Godless Reds anymore (they can hardly kick ass in a country still barely out of the stone age). But they are scared silly that some boozy fool in the president's office will push the Big Red Button in a fit of pique. Okay so only one in ten nukes makes it to the USA without sputtering out, diverting to Azerbaijan, or blowing up halfway. But that is still a lot of nukes and some serious shit going down. So, the USA is going to tread softly around Russia, right up until those same nukes have rusted into radioactive junk piles.
  • Have the US take action?
    Well, in case you haven't noticed, the political fulcrum for the Clinton
    administration is just barely to the right of the Russian president, if at all.
    Eschelon has been doing for years what the Russians want to do.
    If you want to do something about freedom of the Internet then
    start here at home. What Uncle Boris and Uncle Sam are doing to
    destroy the freedom of the internet the big corporations are, with their
    phony patents to thwart development of free software and their buyout
    of weak or corrupt politicians in order to destroy consumer rights and
    redress.
  • As it was mentioned several times above, it was KGB that convinced everybody else in the demise of communism in USSR/Russia. And lest's call everythig by it's real name. That was not communism (or socialism for that matter) it was just regime where KGB rulled. They where the real rullers (owners) of the country. For a while the power sliped from their hands. Now they are back, whith the vengeance, so to speak.

    Now, i don't really know whether it is technically possible to monitore all traffic on the internet and i think it doesn't really matter. It is just first step. Most of the traffic on the internet is .com's crap and p0rn anyway (wiht the /. being rare exception). What they need is just basis for actions against whistle blowers and dissidents on the internet. So, all they need just to monitor the traffic to the sellected websites (about goverment corruption for example). The point is that now they can do it without asking anybody. On the taxpayers money and ISP's will have to comply. Hell i will not be surprised that from now on ISP's in Russia will be forsed to have spooks on their staff. And more to follow; unwaranted arrests and detention on the undifined duration of time, and so on.

    As to the question on at what extent this all possible here, in US. Let me just quote the father of (surprize, surprize) russian anarchism

    Powerful states can maintain themselves only by
    crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.
    --Mikhail Bakunin
    (1814-1876)

    Nuff said. Now you can moderate me down as a flaimbait. I don't fsking care

  • >governments who oppress civillians (chechnya?)

    Chechen military is well trained, armed and funded from abroad.

    One may agree or disagree with their goals (muslim world domination), but they are not defenseless civilians.

    Yes, this war happens in the cities and civilians suffer in Chechnya, as they did suffer in Moscow when three 9 stories apartment buildings were exploded during the summer of 1999 (before the military compain agains Chechnya started). Not a government building, like in Omaha for example...

    Of course tapping the Internet is very bad. Russian wisdom says though - "the severity of Russian laws is relieved only by the fact that they are not well enforced". Same can not be
    said about the US...

  • Anyway, how hard is it to simply prohibit using public computing resources to display things defined as pornography? For enforcement, employ the human nodes - if Joe Schmo views porno at his library, Joe is asked to leave. Debates as to what porno is would be relatively rare, especially if libraries drafted a quick policy on what porno is and isn't. These restrictions on intrusive "indecency" are a good thing - the definition of "decent" needs to be limited and tightened up

    This whole issue arises from government controlled libraries(you may know them as "public"). Libraries should not be run by the government. Non-profit and for-profit organizations should run them. The government has no incentive not to censor material available in its own libraries. Non-profit and for-profit organizations will censor material as the market dictates. Likely the market will dictate that some libraries have open access to everything(those used mostly by adults) and that some libraries have censorship(those used mostly by children). If library censorship really bothers you , then you should form a non-profit with some like minded individuals and build a library with open access to the entire Internet.
    Stuart Eichert

  • While traveling in England recently, I got a chance to see a British documentary on computers. It touched on the subject of pornography on the internet, and stated that the problem was being overblown. It said that the most that children could get access to was text, but downloading a picture was beyond the abilities of most, and seeing a video was near impossible.

    The documentary was originally made in 1995, and was still being shown late last year.

    Anything that is possible today, and that there is a demand for, will be made easy for all to use much faster than any government can react.

  • NASA administrators said today that they don't care if Russia implements their totalitarian spy system, just as long as it doesn't interfere with their obligations to launch the habitation module of the International Space Station.

    Back to regular programming...
  • ...no worse than ECHELON. At least they aren't pretending SORM doesn't exist! Hmmm, maybe I should've used AC for that msg...
  • I thought "Nazi" meant "National Socialist Workers Party of Germany"?
  • [grin] I had forgotten about that one.

    The story I heard was....

    One of Steve Jackson's employees was involved with LoD and got his fingers rapt by the Secret Service (not Jedger's boys, the original govt goons). The cops decided to checkout Mr LoD's office to see if any stolen AT&T files were present on the system. There weren't any, but while they were looking the cops found the entire text of Jackson's new "Cyberpunk GURPS" book and freaked out. They thought it was a manual for computer crime and confiscated the whole network!!

    What a bunch of lamers! Can't tell the difference between a Role Playing Game and real life! And they say Geeks are out-of-touch with reality! Bah, I dereide their truth-handling abilities.
  • Echelon, by the NSA and international affliates. Your local search engine will have more information.

  • Another reason, but it'll be ignored. (Score:3)

    by afeinberg ( 9848 ) on Sunday February 06, 2000 @04:37AM (#1301021) Homepage Journal
    We harass Cuba and Iraq for human rights violations, because it is popular. We're harassing Austria (and with good reason) because it is popular. What about Russia? The Evil Empire of my childhood has become ruled by weak governments who oppress civillians (chechnya?) the same way that other unpopular regimes do (Milosevic?) but we do nothing. Now this happens, and we will say nothing. Why? Russia has the potential to be a huge market, and already is. They have nuclear weapons, and we're afraid to take a stand on anything with them because of this. This post probably is incoherent and offtopic, but can't we, the slashdot community(!) use the supposed far-flung power of collaboration to take a stand on at least this one issue, and force the US and other governments to take action? Let's put our resources to good use, eh? Let's save the Internet.
    Andrew G. Feinberg
  • I don't know where Mother Jones picked up this crap but most part of the story is old. Second they are mixing two things in one. Third they are quite stupid to think that FSB is trying to hear everyone everybody. Fourth we have laws here, and while the system may work badly, it still works. And besides SORM-2 is as good as it is. A reglementation defining "rules of behaviour" between FSB and ISPs. For both sides.

    SORM one was a piece of crap. A big piece of crap. It made a wholescale scandal as it was completely wrong and stupid in every way. And it was presented as a technical spec. After nearly one year of long talks everyone came into SORM-2. It is just a formal reglementation for cases when FSB needs to hear someone. Well its not pretty but that's their right, as far as they follow the law.
  • There is one site in Russia that monitors the use of SORM systems and publishes uses and abuses of it (in Russian):

    http://www.libertarium.ru/libertarium/sorm

    They also have a small and very outdated english page about SORM:

    http://www.libertarium.ru/eng/sorm/index.html

    On what concerns Mother Jones story about Bayard-Slavia Communications. In the region where these company works, Volgograd, the local FSB department decided to "look over" the law. And tried to force the ISP to provide them even means to control his network! Presently things have not ended yet but the attempts to revoke the license have already failed. The Attorney has already agreed with some conclusions of the ISP and ordered to stop a series of acts until court.

  • It sounds a lot like CALEA, the federal law designed to ensure that the switched voice network remains wiretap friendly. I'm not terribly concerned about the NSA, the FBI is the agency that has a long history of abusing wiretaps and harassing dissidents.
  • This is a very interesting precedent because as per current FSB regulations:

    1. No government institution may by any means interface its computer system to the internet

    Anybody seen any email of anybody in the Russia state administration ;-) I have not...

    This FSB action basically will lead ssoner or later to the abolishment of 1 because FSB istelf will have to be interfaced actively (not passively like now) in order to follow traffic. And considering that similar wiretapping regulations exist in almost any other country in the world and will have to be enforced in the US in the nearest future this comes to be an overall positive sign. FSB has finally acknowledged that there is a worthy flow of information over the internet. And 7 other govermnent divisions have followed it. From there to interfacing themselves is just one step...

  • NSA monitors all text communication already,
    but doesn't censor.
  • From the article: "SORM is a normal system for locating criminals and tax evaders. The United States has such a system -- every country does," said Yelena Volchinskaya, a consultant for the State Duma Security Council, which is charged with evaluating the progress of SORM.

    Call me naive, but how does this sort of system exist in the US? Whic 3-letter acronym spy agency here in the USA is responsible (CIA, NSA, FBI, IRS)? If its going on in Russia, at least people now KNOW it's happening, unlike here in the US...

  • How is it that a network which nearly 'formed itself' is now becoming fragmented into different governmental domains? What are the implications of, for instance, a Russian agency monitoring incoming email, directed at a Russian citizen, which was sent by a US citizen? Is this espionage, if the email's information is of a sensitive nature? When governments begin monitoring an international network which is not centralized, they inevitably attempt to make it centralized. Perhaps the only answer to this is public availability of stronger cryptography - even that has now been restricted. And yet, in the end, you can't monitor everything, and the vault's walls break eventually. I'm just waiting for the deluge. - KMS, breaking his own rules and ranting, for a change

  • Uh, yeah, sure. That probably sounded better when Rush Limbaugh said it, didn't it?

    To state the obvious, that's the weakest argument i've read in some time. Consider yourself deservedly flamed.

    cheers,
    sklein


  • It wasn't an argument, it was an insult.

    In which case it contributed nothing.

    ....

    That was a flame? ``You keep using that word. I think that you do not know what it means.''

    Heat would have contributed nothing.

    cheers,
    sklein

    BTW, may i applaud your work on the Mozilla project?

  • You're right, the Judicial branch doesn't always take action on things. However, there are plenty of porn sites on the net to brin issue to this type of thing, and all it takes is 1 lawsuit or criminal prosecution for them to need to take action.
    I'm not saying to not concern yourself with such things, I'm merely saying that the usual /. FUD about how evil the government is and how oppressed we are, etc. are just a bit ridiculous.
    As for the protecting children stuff and the grey area... thats totally true, it is a grey area. Thats basically why we need to keep porn out of libraries, schools, etc. and allow it only in private surroundings. I don't care who you are, having porn popup on a screen with a child at the keyboard is an outrage. Some people in Congress just recognize this. I wouldn't call them evil oppressors (not that you have, I'm speaking more to the stereo-typical /. crowd).

  • Re:*We're* not there yet... (Score:3)

    by kevlar ( 13509 ) on Sunday February 06, 2000 @06:40AM (#1301032)
    I wouldn't go so far as to say logging will ever occur without a court order. Those legislations are the equivalent of not allowing nudity on television. That juvenile law especially, is to protect kids against pron, which _is_ known to have lasting psychological effects (mostly when combined with sexual abuse). I don't have a problem with that because I don't really see that there's a need for someone to lookup pron in a library or a school. I don't consider that a necessity.
    As for what appears to be all-out restriction of the Internet in exhibit b,c, I can't see that as passing and actually being enforced. See, we have this branch of government called the Judicial branch. Everytime something is unconstitutional, they nix it. So the only way something like this will ever come to effect (for more than a couple months) is if they write an actual amendment into the constitution. They're a long way away from taking a bold measure like that.

    I'm not worried. We've already seen the Computer Decency Act or whatever it was called. That didn't hold up as much... just a waste of Congressional time and money.
  • ...because this technology isn't confied to Russian citizens. If your email bounces through a russian ISP on its way to Japan or China or whatnot, guess what happens to it?

    I think it's time to add some Russian to my X-Jam-Echelon email header...

    On a side note, my 4096 public key is in the /. server. Use It.
  • The KGB did, and most of the west believed. And as you can see, all the media now including the internet are still in under control of KGB and private encryption is still illegal. However, it even for them it becomes harder to pretend free capitalist state. When will the west wake up and stop funding Russia, it will be too late, I am afraid.
  • My problem is that I spent under communism some 25 years of my life. Where did you learn about it?

    Unfortunately, communists rule - at present to some 40% of earth's population. And once you get them in, even if due to violence or due to honest mistake, they make sure that you can hardly ever get them out.

    Perhaps you can try to learn from Trotskij. He was communist - once.
  • That is highly probable. However, they cannot do with it much right now if you apply some good encryption on it. At this momend they will not drag you from your family block into an Alaska working camp for using it.

    Sure, there will be efforts to get access to everybody's pirvate mail through sneaky encryption legislative and the US citizens will have to watch that very carefuly, too.

    That will be another fight, though.
  • Jutst for information.
    Nazi = abbreviation of "Nazional Democratic Party"
    Germans read 'Z' same way as you reat 't' in the word National.

    Nationalism is therefore a long form of Nazism.

    Thereis some difference between patriotism and nazi-sm(onalizm).
    Patriots horor the land of their ancestors.
    Nazi-sts/onalists think to be honored to be born in the land of their ancestors.

    For instance, Austrians that I know are Patriots,
    But they seldom fly their flag above their house or sing their national anthem every day in school. And they will never tell you that their counrty is the best - even though some may think so.

    IMHO, many US citizens or French are may more Nazi-minded than most Austrians.

    Disclaimer: I am neither a Jew, nor Austrian.
  • If this is your idea of Communism, perhaps you should call it differently, because no initiators oc communism would agree with you.

    I had to study unwillingly for some 13 years manadtory Marxism-Leninism, and I assure, you that all the 'big' thinkers starting from Utopia, the French revolution thinkers, Marx, Engls, Gramschi,
    Trotskij - all were vicious enemies of anarchism.

    The dark side K. Marx:
    "The state is an organized form of organized violence of the governing class over the other classes"

    This is one of the basic principles of communism and plan for communist government. No idea about devoted service of government officials to their entrusted people. Communism made the most vicious inclinations of bad capitalist polititians into their program. Naturally, the more corurupt people US folk elects into the lead, the more they see the Capitalism to be the same as Communism.

    But that does not meant, that the two systems are equivalent.
  • The black box sits in the ISP office and obviously does some selection.
    A) random
    B) according to the selected text.

    The second point is, that the russian police will slow or block traffic without even thinking of being challenged. Who was in Russia knows, that police are the absolute masters. If they work, you must wait. If you dare to complain, you'd better show first that you are policemen of a higher rank.
  • This is not about hypocrisy, you nobody agrees that US should do it. Also we would condemn every government that does such thing, including our own.

    The difference is, that US folks can write to their representatives. Russians might as well write the KGB directly - just to get on their index of politically incorrect individuals, if not worse.

    Practicaly the only thing they can do is what they are doing: write perhaps the last free e-mail to the western agencies and hope that they will make pressure to stop funding Russia - and indirectly their black boxes.

    There are only two things that the Russian government will listen to: money and loss of popularity, because at this moment they want to look like a democratic government - until they become economicaly and militarily stronger.
  • This is really old. SORM has been "in the pipeline" for at least 1-2 years (if not longer). Encryption is also kind of forbidden (since like 4-5 years ago).

    Nonetheless, some US Internet and privacy experts find SORM-2 more disquieting than Echelon.

    "Echelon and its allied systems in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand take the technology as it finds it -- that is, Echelon is not coercive. It does not rely upon government-mandated surveillance features being built into telecom systems.

    Yeah, instead of using the stick, NSA and its kin use the carrot - how 'bout some free wireless spectrum for those who comply?

    The chairman of Citizens' Watch human rights group in St. Petersburg, Boris Pustintsev, called the move "the end of all email privacy."

    The feeble-minded are truly blessed - email privacy never existed!

  • What about those without responsible parents? There needs to be goernmental aid and assistance, but on an as-needed basis.

    It doesn't work on an "as-needed basis." You have to either ban everything for everyone or ban nothing. You can't simply block porn at Joe and Margie Schmo's house. Censorship a little at a time seems to work at first, but in the long term, it ends up being the same as if you had a wide-ranging law like the CDA. They just censor more one bit at a time.

    I call these laws "frog laws." Think about a frog when you drop one in hot boiling water: he's going to try to get out (and probably succeed.) But if you heat the water slowly, a few degress at a time, then the frog will sit there and not put up a struggle. CDA was hot boiling water. These new bills are water being heated slowly. The end result is the same: your rights end up getting cooked and eaten for dinner.

    And, FWIW, I think that people who aren't responsible shouldn't be parents. Raising a child is a vast responsibility. If you can't handle it, give the child up for adoption or whatever. But don't come crying to me when you can't be responsible enough to raise your own damn child.

  • I sympathise and all with your emotional response, and I think it's probable that there are no dissenters that this is a Bad Thing(TM). But I've got to disagree that what needs to be done is to ask one gang of oppressive governments to heel in another one. That applies to both the issues of Chechnya and other immediate wars and the issues of civil liberties.

    The U.S. and all its partners, as is pointed out in the article is up to the same tricks with Echelon, the only distinction being that there is no monetary damage caused to the ISPs by Echelon. I found that a really weird quote from the Washington policy wonk - sort of like talking about the difference between two muggers "Hey A is better than B because A just beats up his victims but B beats them up and then demands a quarter!". Yeah, it's true it's worse but it's a slim difference and if it's being used to justify calling on A to intervene on one's behalf against B then it's just plain dumb.

    The only way we're going to ensure our rights and liberties is if we are organized and active and there's no place to start like home - join the EFF or some other citizen based organization that will lead the way under your direction - don't expect any government from above to do anything for you. When we've got our own house straightened out then the rest of the world will have to do its own thing. Democracy begins at home and our lack of it has created a shattered, starving Russia run by the freaking mafia.

    The same sort of deal applies to human rights in other countries, I find it sickening to hear our leaders making crying noises about human rights in China when we're busy stuffing weapons into the hands of genocidal fuckers in Indonesia. If they were saying that they were going to stop sending military and financial aid to tyrants I'd be happier, but complaining about this sort of thing just preserves the illusion that the problem is with other countries.

  • This link doesn't verify anything. Hell. you can't even get to the home page hosting this link.

    Anyone can post crap like this.
  • I think that this article exposes some of the real differences between what is happening in various nations as a response to the internet.

    In the US we have legislation like the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act which places clear restrictions on tapping private data transnissions in the US. There have already been some punative lawsuits that have reuluted in large court settlements under this act. We also have arguments about just installing the ABILITY to tap communications in various transmittal devices, and a wide use of relatively secure cryptography.

    In countries where basic human rights seem to never have been established we have the banning all encryption, and requirements that all transmissions be recorded, PERIOD.

  • How many firearms related crimes do you think occure in the UK?

    Shot, knifed or beaten, you are still dead.

    Suicides by gun are rare in England, however the actual suicide rate in England is essentially the same as in the US where most suicides are by gun. Switzerland has the highest gun ownership per capita in the world, but one of the lowest murder rates.

    Crime rates have nothing to do with gun ownership.

  • DVD, Echelon, DCMA, etc, etc, etc... So many problem you need to solve.

    Haven't you noticed the many and lengthy discussions of ALL aspects of this issue on Slashdot, be they in the US or elsewhere?

    How many stories have we had here regarding the US aspects of DVD encryption? How can you pretend that this is not being addressed on slashdot? Ditto Echelon and DCMA.

    The selective view you expose is amazing. The worst abuse regarding DVD decryption occurred in Norway with the arrest and interrogation of Mr.s Johnassen. The DCMA is the result of efforts to bring the US copyright system into parity with the rest of the world, particulary at the behest of Europeans and the WTO. Echelon not a solely US endeavor; several European nations INCLUDING your Britain are participating.

    Issues of government intrusion aided by technology are universal, and have been discussed here no matter where they have been occurring.

    Claims that US participants are ignoring these problems in the US in this forum are so utterly without basis in fact serves only to betray a myopic prejudice against Americans.

    The fact is that these issues are universal, and need to be discussed no matter where they occur.

  • Monitoring internet traffic is not a new idea and is certainly not a new practice. I believe that most governments conduct routine monitoring of internet traffic - perhaps not to this extent, perhaps to a greater extent. Consider that the Russian government has allowed knowledge of the monitoring to become public - in the US, such monitoring is kept secretely under wraps by the NSA - nobody knows to what extent the NSA is monitoring their connections to the outside world. I think, given the choice between telling and not telling the people, telling people is certainly better. This is not trouble because everyone knows that anyone who controls larger servers can monitor large amounts of traffic that flow through them (these people aren't in the government, just admins/etc. of corporate/educational networks). So monitoring is not a new thing, we all assume that it takes place and besides, we can encrypt anything that we don't want the government to know about, and even use anonymous secure proxies (such as anonymiser.com) which encrypt standard web browsing and ftp. In short there is no real problem.
  • Transmeta Corp. has secretly worked on a VLIW implementation of quantum gates which can decypher all known crypto schemes known to date. A code morphing layer designs and runs a suitable quantum VLIW code from a plain C crypto cracking program. The innovative separation of low-level quantum programming from high level crypto cracking allows for adaptation of well established methods for crypto cracking, and is able to run free and proprietary cracking systems. Transmeta officials have accomplished a near room-temperature demonstration of their cracking solution in KGB headquaters in August, 1999.

    It has been known that Transmeta, in accordance with their relationship with leaders of the former Communist Party of Russia, has received funding for research and development of these new technologies from KGB. Linus Torvals who is the acclaimed creator of Linux kernel and one of the prominent employees of Transmeta, also works closely with KGB and is a technology advisor for FSB.
  • According to the book "The Puzzle Palace" (sorry, don't remember the author), the NSA has been monitoring Internet traffic for years.

  • Uhm... deja only tracks Usenet; anything posted on Usenet is already public. I'd assume that you were joking but it's possible that you aren't.
  • Britian, US, Australia and Canada have laws preventing agencies such as the NSA from monitoring their own citizens. No problem, pay a 3rd party to do it for you.

    Canada monitors U.S. / Britian, U.S. monitors Canada / Britian, Britian monitors U.S. and Canada... toss Autralians into the mix someohow and you might just figure out there isn't a government on this planet worth trusting.

    Course, since nobody trusts politicians why should this be a suprise?

  • Most of the conflicts that one would envision between US citizens and the government do not involve tanks, air strikes, and heavy mounted machine guns. The arms and armor used would be fairly close to what the dedicated armchair warrior could obtain legally.

    However, the opposing force would probably be small, highly trained teams of commando types. These people are generally all-around bad motherfsckers who are stronger than you, faster than you, work better as a team, and have a full range of recon and intelligence assets to back them up.

    Until the bulk of the American citizenry are ready to pick up guns and stand behind you, armed conflict with the government is a purely symbolic gesture.

  • Aside from the fact that they dont have a NAP in Russia, and that commercial networks are only going to route information to where it needs to go. The Internet is a big network of switches, not hubs. Your email is not being routed from Orlando, through Moscow, on it's way to Denver.

    Now to the really funny stuff. Does anyone have any idea how much money it would cost to monitor everything that comes through the pipe in Moscow alone? More than they have. I really have a hard time believing that the NSA can do it, because it's such a monumental task. I figure, though, if the CIA can sell cocaine to fund itself, than the NSA has probably gotten the heroin end of the deal covered...

  • So I believe UNIX passwords are stored in plain text?
  • Does it bug me that various governments around the world want to snoop on my private communications? Yessir! Is there anything that will stop them? I seriously doubt it.

    I think that we need to take a serious look at the way that we think about communicating over public media. When you send something out over the internet, you have no control over who reads it along the way. The same goes for cellular phones, and to a lesser extend conventional phones as well.

    Why on earth is it illegal for me to record a cellular phone call, for example? After all *they're* the ones bombarding me with *their* photons. Why can't I just record what they are? It's silly.

    If you want to keep something private encrypt it. By default you really ought encrypt everything. Why not?

    I seriously believe that we as a community have to get over the "BigBrother/BigCorporations/MrIdiotWithAScanner is watching me" complex in situations where we can easily keep them from doing so.
  • Traffic does not, as a rule, take the weirdest routes. Packets with neither a source or destination in Russia will probably not go through Russian routers. That's not to say that they couldn't, if the Russian router happened to be the nearest working path, but if your ISP is in Alabama and the computer you're connecting to is in Massachusetts, then chances are pretty strong that no machine in Russia is going to see the data.


    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • So if the new computer you are thinking of getting promises improved FSB bandwidth, READ THE SMALL PRINT!!!

    Bob.

  • Unfunny Business (Score:3)

    by rjh ( 40933 ) <rjh@sixdemonbag.org> on Sunday February 06, 2000 @04:54AM (#1301059)
    This is another example of governments using a sledgehammer where a scalpel is more appropriate, and in the process are bludgeoning everyone to death except their lawful targets.

    Information security is a reality nowadays. Want to browse the Web securely? Use https (but don't forget to verify the certificates). Want a secure remote login? ssh. Want to keep your EMail safe from prying eyes? That's why God (er -- Phil, I guess) gave us PGP. Want a secure VPN? IPsec.

    The tools exist, and when used properly these tools are guaranteed to give the signals-intelligence agency of your choice a migraine headache. (Notice: using the tools properly is hard. It's far easier said than done, but it can be done.)

    People who use the Net to commit crimes (or as an aid in committing the same) are probably tech-savvy enough to (a) know they're being monitored and (b) to use these tools. So I don't see that this Draconian measure will have any significant effect on computer crime.

    It will have a chilling effect on the communications of law-abiding citizens who are not tech-savvy, though. As a rule, they either don't know these tools exist, don't know why they should use them and/or don't know how to use them -- so they get their civil liberties raped over a cheese grater, all in the name of apprehending criminals who are smart enough to use basic information-security techniques.

    Gotta love it, huh?
  • In Germany, all mobile phone providers where required to 'upgrade' their relay stations with decryption/listening devices.

    Also, as an ISP you are required to install and maintain at your own cost remote access devices for 'big brother'. I.e. a dedicated ISDN link with access to your customer db. (I am not sure, though, if the latter is being enforced. Haven't heard about it for a while, but we got 'the letter' about 2 years ago.)


  • :-)

    Good one. I never realized how useful highly generic domain names are for practical jokes.

    Good thing this wasn't moderated up, or you'd be /.ed!

    BTW,
    " Sorry, but yor IP address has been logged.
    You don't have access to this page. Get lost. "

    was the "yor" on purpose?
  • This link doesn't verify anything. Hell. you can't even get to the home page hosting this link.


    Sure you can. Maybe it isn't what you expected, but...

    Anyone can post crap like this.


    Hey, what do you mean? If it's on the Internet it must be true.

    The Internet automatically fixes any lies - that's why web servers crash so much. If two web sites contradict each other, the one holding the lie crashes (I guess NT server's users lie a lot more).
  • No, no, not CSIS. It's the CSE - Communications Securit Establishment. The NSA's (very) little brother.
  • No amount of cryptography will suffice, as the technology for cracking just keeps getting better and eventually, any shceme will succumb to a brute force attack.

    What is needed is the complete seperation of the Intenret from national or local regulation, the establishment of a completely Internet based government, which would then become soley responsible for the maintenance of the worldwide communications channels.

    This would prevent crackpots in the Durma or the U.S. Congress from banning subversive and anti-status quo statements. And even if regional governments owned the hardware, they couldn't touch the data without massive international conflict.
  • I dunno, but I'd think it would take alot of media to hold the amount of data that goes through russia (or any other country).
  • Does this mean I can run RC5 on my low power laptop :) ?

  • Regardless of the mystical shroud around government spooks, I really question the feasability of this kind of monitoring ... the rate that we are pushing data on the backbone is astronomical, and we have achieved that by reducing the amount of packets that must be processed. Technologies like CEF or flow switching on Cisco routers speed packet processing up by touching as few of them as possible and switching as many as possible through ASICs. This doesn't give you a whole lot of room for surveillance equipment.

    The only place for feasible monitoring would be on Ethernets or Fast Ethernets that connect server farms, and that would require the placement of monitoring devices at every server farm ... not likely to go unnoticed.

    This is true if the monitoring agency wants to monitor ALL traffic, but why not just grab TCP header info on new connections?
    I don't think that any government particularly cares to read all the slashdot comments I'm reading today, but if they have the URL's i'm using, they can go back at any time and recreate what I was doing.

    The headers can't be more than 10 or 15% of the throughput on a line, which dramatically decreases the hardware needed to monitor a connection.

    The other question is how many interconnects are there into a country? Yes, you can always use an international phone call to create your own, but usually there's only 3 or 4 external switching points (in Canada, there's Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver for most everything) as everything tends to congregate in star-type networks. With only 3 or 4 physical locations, it sure makes it easier to monitor as well!
  • The next stage is to provide a second level of indirection to your secure browsing so that you remove even the details of where you are going to. For example anonymizer.com [anonymizer.com] provide a service where all your web surfing behaviour is only between you and them via encrypted requests that are then redirected to the site that you want to really see. The authorities will then only know the number and approximate size of your page hits, but no definitive information can be gleaned from this.

    There was another site that I saw recently, but I forget the URL that had a sequence of servers providing this service and which would scramble routing information between servers thereby making it very difficult to backtrack along packet paths any further than the first 'secure' server.

    Once you extend this to cover all common protocols coupled with strong encryption in both directions (on top of whatever normal encryption that would be used between you and the client if you where surfing normally) then you arrive at a situation where snooping is very difficult.

    Of course the authorities could then put these servers on a black-list and block traffic to them, but what if there was an open-source module that could be optionally compiled into any sympathetic server in the world that would provide this service? Every time that they would block one site, there would be hundreds more available offering the same service...

  • Oh wait, that's us.

    No one EVER saw anything like this coming in Russia, of all places. That would be like Massachusetts raising taxes.

  • Um..Since the internet is a huge network if someone monitors 1 part of it arent they monitoring the whole thing? So now russia will be monitoring the whole world. Since traffic usually takes the wierdist routes some has to go through russia. Does the law say anything about monitoring just russia's citizen's traffic or ANY traffic that passes through russia?

    (they couldnt inforce it but the day russia and the US trade secrets on eachother's citizens I'm screwed :)
  • Read article first. 1.5 million russians online..not 50 million
  • It seems to me that this is why the US shouldn't be restricting the export of strong encryption. Aren't we better off making strong encryption availible to dissidents in those countries whose governments we are most concerned about?

    I understand that Chinese students in the U.S. were sending news about the Tiananmen Square massacre over BitNet to Beijing, and that news was faxed all over the rest of China. And yet, somehow, our NSA believes that, in the unlikely event that they can contain domesticly developed encryption technology (you know, all that encryption developement that hasn't been driven overseas yet by our silly laws) within US borders, US national interrests are best served by keeping this technology out of the hands of Russian and Chinese dissidents.

    But wait! Billy C. has changed our policies. Now it is only dissidents in countries like Iran and Lybia that are to be denied the fruits of all that advanced encryption technology that's only availible here in the good old USA (right?).

    I'd suspect that the governments of Lybia and Iran paid him off to keep thier dissidents from getting strong encryption, but I don't think he has enough of a clue about the real benefactors of his regulations to know that he could looks for such a source of income.

    Why do I always have to feel embarrased by the elected officials in my own governement? I suppose we elected them, so they are the governement we deserve. But still.. Why?

    Oh well.

    Adrian
    • Hope that Russian crypto is as good as they say it is.

    Here in Russia all security-aware people use international open-sourced strong crypto, not GOST or something like - because it's proven to be strong.

    OpenSSH, SSL and PGP are strong enough to use even here, in Russia :)
    I don't know any popular program which use GOST except latest versions of ARJ.

  • One definiton of a police state is a country where everybody is on probation.

    The problem with a plethora of bad laws that are largely ignored and selectively forced is that it results in a stiuation where everybody is breaking a law.

    Once this happens, the exectuive branch has complete freedom to arrest anyone they don't like. The internal rules they make on whom to go after become the effective laws of the land, rendering the legislature moot and making the judiciary a rubber stamp. And any civilian that any policeman, bureaucrat, or executive branch politician doesn't like can be sucked into the system on a charge unrelated to the grudge.
  • Doing that would reduce the load on the Russian section of the net.

    This would reward them for their misbehavior by reducing their ISP operation costs (helping to pay for the bugging equipment), reducing the amount of traffic they have to filter, and reducing the dilution of the signal they are after (Russian Dissident communication) by extraneous material (such as American animated advertisements).

  • The problem with "Just ignore it" (Score:3)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Sunday February 06, 2000 @05:16AM (#1301082) Homepage Journal
    Many people say, "So what is we are being monitored? Just use encryption and ignore it, nothing much will happen anyway."


    Sorry, you are missing the point. As is the case with many extant laws, what happens is this monitoring becomes one more way "the powers that be" can trip you up if you come into their notice.


    Consider: Some agency decides they don't like the look of you. So, they go fishing for an excuse. Maybe you use encryption, maybe you don't have your vehicle registration in your car, maybe you aren't carrying your drivers' license while you are out for a walk. Whatever it is, it becomes the hook for further investigations. Given enough time, they WILL find something wrong.


    The solution to bad laws is to repeal them as quickly as possible, before they dilute the good laws. As a wise man says, "If you add a bucket of dirty water to a bucket of clean water, you get dirty water."

  • OK, try this sometime. Put a hardware IDS on a Fast Ethernet feed, ask it to cap all packets across the wire, and load the FE 80%. See where it starts to fall apart.

    Now, take an Internet router, connected via OC-3 or OC-12 (dunno if Russia is doing OC-48 yet, but likely), with several circuits feeding it, and try to find the place where you would put a device that is going to pull traffic off and write it anywhere. The router can't redirect all traffic, because it doesn't have the buffers, memory, or processor to do so. I haven't seen any kind of transparent hardware tech that would sit on an OC-12 and copy all bits running through the wire.

    Regardless of the mystical shroud around government spooks, I really question the feasability of this kind of monitoring ... the rate that we are pushing data on the backbone is astronomical, and we have achieved that by reducing the amount of packets that must be processed. Technologies like CEF or flow switching on Cisco routers speed packet processing up by touching as few of them as possible and switching as many as possible through ASICs. This doesn't give you a whole lot of room for surveillance equipment.

    The only place for feasible monitoring would be on Ethernets or Fast Ethernets that connect server farms, and that would require the placement of monitoring devices at every server farm ... not likely to go unnoticed.

    I think this might be the Russian gov. blowing smoke. It doesn't strike me as a technical possibility right now.

  • I haven't looked closely, but I don't think that Russia (or any part of the former USSR) is going to see a lot of transit Internet traffic anyway.

    As to the work-around, it would be trivial to assign high routing metrics to all traffic originating from Russian Autonomous Systems, and even easier to blackhole the country entirely. However, it is unlikely ... the whole point of the 'net is universal connectivity, and you would have to do something very scary to cause the rest of the world to muck with your traffic.

  • Yep. I don't agree with the overreaction, but tapping an individual line, or creating software or hardware to watch a user's radius logon, grab the IP assigned, and sniff all traffic at the source is trivial.

    'Course, it's trivial in the states, too. I have been called at a NOC by the USAF, among others, and asked to detail account usage, provide info, etc. If they have a warrant, and they want an IP sniffed off the wire, (and they want to come down w/hardware), nobody has any probs with that.

    I don't think it is big news, however. There are many, many countries where it is not necessary to inform courts or get permission before setting up surveillance of voice lines, and one would not expect that restrictions be placed on the surveillance of an internet connection in those countries. This seems like a logical extension (although a particularly expensive one, in that it requires dedicated hardware) of Russia's current surveillance activities.

  • The ability to tap a line on both Nortel (DMS?) and Lucent (5ESS, etc) phone switches existed long before Oklahoma City. It has been a legal requirement for as long as I can remember.

    At one time, Congress was wondering about requiring the same for Internet routers, but were told that it wasn't feasible ... perhaps that was the post-OK-city law?

  • Didn't a bill pass after the Oklahoma City bombing that forced phone companies to install back doors in all digital switches that they put into use?

    This is of course "to protect Americans from terrorism".

  • The ability to tap a line on both Nortel (DMS?) and Lucent (5ESS, etc) phone switches existed long before Oklahoma City. It has been a legal requirement for as long as I can remember.

    As I recall, this new law required the phone companies to make it easier for the feds to perform the tap remotely, and will less assistance (if any at all) from the phone companies themselves.

    In other words a veritable blank check if the feds wanted to abuse the abiility to do so (and I suspect they do).

    The point being, that infrastructures like this seldom (if ever) go away.

    Why is all AC in this country 120V 60Hz? There's no law that says there has to be such a standard, but once it was in place, it stuck, as is the case with all technical infrastructure.

    Now I can't speak for you, but the idea of a less-friendly, elected governing body (never forget that Hitler was elected by popular vote) inheriting such technology terrifies me.

    For that matter the thought of Bill Clinton listening to phone sex calls using that technology is pretty frightening too.

    Say "it can't happen here."

    I dare ya! :-)

  • This CNN article [cnn.com] may shed some light on that inquiry. In China, all users of crypto were supposed to "register" with the gov't in some little federal office somewhere. Well, the 8 million people didn't show up to register, and no one did much of anything :o).

    It wouldn't surprise me if the Russian situation succumbs to the same fate. Most of the time surveillence is just a scare tactic, but citizens have to take each one seriously to defend their privacy.
  • And, FWIW, I think that people who aren't responsible shouldn't be parents. Raising a child is a vast responsibility. If you can't handle it, give the child up for adoption or whatever. But don't come crying to me when you can't be responsible enough to raise your own damn child.

    Ideally, we could (and probably should) deal with it this way. Practically, we may not be able to - irresponsible will always be parents, and it'd be an invasion of the very rights we value to stop them.

    I tossed in the quoted sentences primarily as a second thought - there are going to be people who can't control their children. I don't have any easy answers to this, and there may not be any. When I wrote it, I was almost thinking more of economic assistance - which we already have. Whether or not we want to keep that is a whole other issue. I meant to imply that there are options (mainly economic) for assistance in raising children, not that we need more. As far as government-assisted censorship goes, I consider this to be altogether intolerable. The gov't shouldn't circumvent the parents' wishes, though, on either side of the "free speech" spectrum.

  • Re:*We're* not there yet... (Score:4)

    by MrHat ( 102062 ) on Sunday February 06, 2000 @07:25AM (#1301106)
    Everytime something is unconstitutional, they nix it.

    That magical place called the judicial branch doesn't always nix these things on their own. The opinions of representatives have always been at least partially influenced by their constituients (that is, the voting body or state/city responsible for electing them). An apathetic attitude of "they'll fix it for me" is one of the first steps toward governmental control. If citizens don't control things, the gov't will have to.

    Those legislations are the equivalent of not allowing nudity on television.

    Now, about the porn thing - I firmly believe that viewing porn at a public library or school is a little (ahem) outside the realm of free speech. This is a reasonable limitation of expression - I wouldn't do it, and would probably be a bit dismayed if people could. The language in the bill, however, is much broader than this. The bill calls for a local determination of "decent", differing from site to site. What's legal at one location may not be at another, and local/corporate interests could easily make their way into the filtering. Even worse, locations may just rely on some NetNanny crap that filters out all pages with the word "breast" in it. Anyway, how hard is it to simply prohibit using public computing resources to display things defined as pornography? For enforcement, employ the human nodes - if Joe Schmo views porno at his library, Joe is asked to leave. Debates as to what porno is would be relatively rare, especially if libraries drafted a quick policy on what porno is and isn't. These restrictions on intrusive "indecency" are a good thing - the definition of "decent" needs to be limited and tightened up. Nudity is on my television alot (HBO). It's voluntary, though, and within my definition of good taste. (Okay, so HBO was a bad example ... heh...)

    ...to protect kids against pron

    "Protection" of kids is a very gray area, infinitely granular depending upon the circumstances. I've known parents who abhor violence yet accept nudity and even to a certain extent pornography. Even a certain kind of pornography. I'm trying to tread lightly here, but I really do believe in a minimum of involuntary governmental control and a delegation of this authority to parents. What about those without responsible parents? There needs to be governmental aid and assistance, but on an as-needed basis. Wait for a parent ask for specific limitations on Internet access for their children - it shouldn't be forced down everyone's throats.

    I probably left a bunch of holes in this, but there's a pretty simple central idea - there are easier answers to fostering control over indecency than federal restrictions and mandatory purchases of approved "filters". Those of us with good judgement shouldn't be forced to use some "filter" instead.

  • *We're* not there yet... (Score:5)

    by MrHat ( 102062 ) on Sunday February 06, 2000 @04:45AM (#1301107)
    ...but not far removed, either. If you take a look at the EFF site [eff.org], there's a link to H.R. 1501, the Juvenile Justice Bill. If you remember the CDA, this should be old hat.


    Exhibit A:
    SEC. 1402. NO UNIVERSAL SERVICE FOR SCHOOLS OR LIBRARIES THAT FAIL TO IMPLEMENT A FILTERING OR BLOCKING TECHNOLOGY FOR COMPUTERS WITH INTERNET ACCESS.

    Exhibit B:
    Senate version, 401-406 - formation of industry cartel to restrict access to First Amendment-protected content that some find offensive.

    Exhibit C:
    Senate version, Section 1504 - mandatory ISP provision of filters


    Yeah, we're not logging it yet. BFD. Prohibiting information from libraries/public institutions and forcing private companies to comply is a giant step toward Russia's situation. In fact, logging that information is the next logical step toward compliance with censorship. Before we sit back and laugh at Russia, let's take a good look here at home (in the US).
  • There are several similarities between proto-nazi Germany and Russia in it's current state.
    Both are formerly powerful, well-to-do countries. Both have fallen on extremely hard times, and both because of some obvious turning point. In the case of Germany it was losing World War I, and for Russia it was the fall of the Soviet Union.
    In situations like this, easy answers are very attractive.
    I'm not saying that Russia is going to turn into the next nazi Germany, and I hope it won't. Most Russians are at least decently educated, and probably wouldn't fall for ranting about superiority of the Russian people...etc.
  • ANY use of cryptography in Russia is strictly prohibited by law (even if it is 56-bit or even smaller). But everyone in Russia ignore this law and use any crypto programs they want. I live in Russia and use PGP, for example. This law and SORM-2 offend against the Constitution of Russia and they don't works really.

    There was the case, when small russian ISP won the lawsuit vs FSB, when FSB tried to use SORM-2.

  • Hi, All!
    This story is 2 years old. There is a SORM-1 tech rules for ISP, according to it, ISP must start spying for some user on cops requiring with judje permission. You cant get ISP license without it.

    But, 2 years ago, cops (KGB mostly) wants to require SORM-2 tech rules from ISP. Really, it includes leased line from ISP to KGB, and transparent traffic passing throw it. In Russia, leased lines is dear, so providers protests against it, referring to Constitution. But there is a better way. My boss gives a box of vodka (20 buttles) to local KGB office, and gives them some free accounts for their children. (KGB officers themselvs are too stupid to use the Net.) So all was happy.
    If you are interesting in this story, I will say you a story about my user sending a letter to Eltsin, and KGB reaction about this.
  • What's the total bandwidth of Russia? Wouldn't the government have to double that, and dump it into one pipe to the authorities?

    I know I pull about 30MB of data a day. Assuming that 50Million russians are on the net, and they pull 30MB per day...

    That's 1,500 Million MB per day. Down one pipe. Into some government building somewhere.

    I pity the poor flatfoot that has to read all that :)

    Peter Doege

    pbd84033@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu

  • Oh the outrage, Russia is going to monitor net traffic. When the US tries it we're ticked off, but it has a different quality when it's an "oppressive government.
    Likewise, when the IETF discussed wiretapping people expressed suprise that the government they were getting the most pressure from was not an "oppressive" government, but the US.
    Governemtns seek more power. All governments seek more power. We have a constitution that protects us somewhat, but don't expect the government to follow the spirit of it any further than it has to. Yes, individuals in government generally believe in limiting the governments power, but as a whole it seeks power.

    Condeming Russia for this in hypocrisy until we assure that the same thing isn't and won't be happening here.
  • The old secret police did not have relational databases and datamining tools to give them a realistic shot at making any sense of the data they had collected. The information that will be woven into the data they collect will be far to interesting and far to accessible to go untouched.

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