Image: Harry Campbell
In Brief
- The advent of computer-based telephone switches and the Internet has made it more difficult for the government to monitor the communications of criminals, spies and terrorists.
- Federal agencies want Internet companies to comply with the same wiretapping requirements that apply to telecommunications carriers. This proposal, though, may stifle Internet innovation.
- Furthermore, the new surveillance facilities might be misused by overzealous government officials or hijacked by terrorists or spies interested in monitoring U.S. communications.
More In This Article
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Sidebar
A History of Listening In
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Sidebar
Wiretapping Then and Now: Surveillance Gets Complicated
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Sidebar
Geography of Wiretapping
As long as people have engaged in private conversations, eavesdroppers have tried to listen in. When important matters were discussed in parlors, people slipped in under the eaves—literally within the “eavesdrop”—to hear what was being said. When conversations moved to telephones, the wires were tapped. And now that so much human activity takes place in cyberspace, spies have infiltrated that realm as well.
Unlike earlier, physical frontiers, cyberspace is a human construct. The rules, designs and investments we make in cyberspace will shape the ways espionage, privacy and security will interact. Today there is a clear movement to give intelligence activities a privileged position, building in the capacity of authorities to intercept cyberspace communications. The advantages of this trend for fighting crime and terrorism are obvious.
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10 Comments
Add CommentYou can prove anything with indeterminate premises.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat being the case, the First Amendment and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (Freedom of Speech and Unreasonable searches and seizures) are so explicitely worded such that these amendments demand a liberal rather than allowing an restrictive application of the same.
Individual liberties and rights are the core of these amendments such as the purpose of the same is to guard the same. With that being the case, governmental attempts to abrogate the same are,without a doubt, invidious attempts to abrogate these same rights and liberties for unreasonable and oppressive political ends and means.
It is astounding that Scientific American manages to devote an entire issue (September) to The Future of Privacy and fails to mention the NSAs ALREADY-INSTALLED secret rooms at AT&T, part of the warrantless spying program which has been the focus of major media coverage for over two years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour key article, Brave New World of Wiretapping by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, mentions NOT A WORD about the Electronic Frontier Foundations well-known lawsuit against AT&T and the specific technical documents which I provided showing how the NSA was making copies of the entire data stream at major Internet hubs. You pretend that the country is only discussing proposed future installations which have not happened yet:
IF the U.S. builds extensive wiretapping into our communications system, how do we guarantee that the facilities we build will not be misused?....Eliminating the role of the phone companies removes an important safeguard. IF we follow this course, we may create a regime entirely out of view of Congress, the courts and the pressand perhaps entirely out of control. [My emphasis]
Where have you been for the last two and a half years? Thats what the fight against retroactive immunity was aboutto expose and remove these illegal secret installations inside AT&T which are exclusively controlled by the NSA.
The authors seem to be strangely focusing narrowly on CALEA and phone conversations while ignoring the rest of Internet traffic, but even so, the Narus equipment used in the NSA spyingand documented in the EFF lawsuit--is fully capable of picking up VoIP traffic and openly boasts the capability of reconstructing conversations.
The omissions here scream out at the reader and assist the government in covering up its crimes.
Mark is right. Given the excellent credentials of the authors, I would have expected something more than a review, and a risk analysis of this "may" cause a problem. It has already happened, and now we need to come up with a solution that meets the requirements.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo it's not a problem because the process is kept secret, what's a problem is that it is still considered to be a secret when everyone already knows about it.
Then it's more a question of denial of what is obvious. But to whom?
It's not an issue for debate, what has happened, has already happened causing significant damage. That was the reason behind the Church investigation in the first place, and why FISA was created, the sheer naked abuse of power. The fact that some people are entirely ok with that abuse is beside the point, it is blatantly illegal even if it can be made legal after the fact.
One can argue whether that policy is correct in attempting to get the results it seeks to accomplish, and that seems to be the focus of the article, but there is a bright line in the umbra that is considered to be privacy between targeting specific individuals who have probable cause of criminal behaviors, and putting in a beam splitter that sends traffic two different directions in an optical switch that serves an immense number of people, and then using software to process that data. The question is not about what will happen, the question is whether any one behind the green door really cares, or whether the obvious, like Sadam really did not have any WMD (because we knew that before we invaded Iraq), or that OBL was planning on blowing up buildings, is simply ignored because it does not fit a specific agenda.
The Framers chose to debate in a hot stuffy room with the windows closed because they needed the mental space to create a master stroke of genius.
It had to take into account checks and balances, that's why the eaves were sealed, and they listened to why the Eagle sits high in a tree to warn of approaching danger. The danger was there and only the people can respond, or choose to ignore the situation.
The eagle of surveillance does not and should not care about the internal state of the nation, and the politics that go into decision making, that is for the law to decide and is already written knowledge and is subject to interpretation. Warning the people of immediate danger is something entirely different and a population must go beyond its fears to meet the risks that are real, not imagined.
The overview of privacy issues doesn't mention business secrecy. The temptation to gain lucrative insider knowledge of corporate planning and intellectual property is a large one. Often arguments are made never considering the possibility that some elements of our government occasionally do not have the morals of angels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are, of course, aware of the AT&T case in San Francisco and your role in
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisreleasing the documents that exposed the warrantless wiretapping occurring there and elsewhere. With others, we wrote an extensive study of the security concerns raised by the Protect America Act, and we used the wiretapping at the San Francisco office as a model for how the wiretapping might be carried out "Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the `Protect America Act'" IEEE Security and Privacy Jan/Feb 2008).
We are greatly impressed by the the courage you displayed in providing the AT&T documents to outsiders; without that, there would have been no knowledge of the extensive warrantless wiretapping that was already occurring before the Protect America Act. That said, we did not have room in this Scientific American article to cover all aspects of the current move to widespread wiretapping; it was our judgment that CALEA, and the threat of building wiretapping capability into the communications infrastructure that posed the greatest long-term privacy and security threat. But yes, the AT&T case is extremely important (and, of course, briefly, though indirectly alluded to in our article) and we are extremely grateful to you for your exposing it.
Sincerely yours,
Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau
I thank you for your personal compliments, and must hasten to add that your reputation as technical experts who are concerned about privacy rights is widely known. That makes the omissions all the more puzzling.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou refer me to your IEEE paper which does mention the AT&T case, but the IEEE paper is not mentioned in your article for Scientific American, which has a much broader audience. So the casual and uninformed reader of the latter would unfortunately never find out what the NSA has already done.
I should add that the editors of Scientific American had some responsibility to fill in the gaps in an issue devoted to "The Future of Privacy," but failed to do so.
just a note.....I am the guy Mark refers to...the casual reader who does not know of the AT&T secret room. It would have been good of you to note that in the article so that we, the casual readers, could at least be alerted to investigate a bit further. I'll do that now...thanks to Marks initial note to you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRipcord and Phil Zimmermann seem to be doing some pretty cool things in this space. I'd be interested to see what comes out of that relationship. Looks like Woz and McAfee are also involved.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile US domestic spying maybe restricted, the cooperative use of foreign spy agencies/services to target and intercept communications isn't. Given advances in search engine technology and voice recognition software, even encrypted communications can be easily tracked and cracked.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn summary, it only takes a couple of seconds for "someone" to find and funnel your private communications for monitoring and analysis, given key words or phrases.
Karen Franklin Barnett is a cuntt for installing a virus on my computer and spying on me with the spy equipment I built for her myself. Die you cuunt!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKen Trussell Rules!
Gardena Police sucks dog dick (but not as well as Karen Franklin Barnett)