Dancing Spychief Wants to Tap Into Cyberspace

[NoodleyAppendage]

Source: Wall Street Journal

Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. “This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Part of the lawmakers’ ire, they have said, is the paltry information the administration has provided. The cyberspace security initiative was first reported in September by The Baltimore Sun, and some congressional aides say that lawmakers have still learned more from the media than they did from the few Top Secret briefings they have received hours before the administration requested money in November to jump start the program.

Read more: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/01/13/dancing-spychief-wants-to-tap-into-cyberspace/

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Welcome to the fascist state and end of democratic rule. It's been fun...see ya later Constitution & Bill of Rights.

[madeline_con]

1. Impossible.

"... the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States ..."

Edited to add:

From the article:


"In the past six years, McConnell says, U.S. intelligence agencies have stopped “many, many” terrorist attacks."


You cannot indiscriminately attack a sovereign nation,” he says, adding, though, that if the U.S. can pinpoint his location, “we’ll bring it to closure.”

:puke:

O.K. you caught me! I email Osama all the time. :eyes:

[NoodleyAppendage]

2. Not impossible. Ever heard of Echelon? Total Information Awareness Network?

How about those fiber optic line taps with special top secret room at the San Francisco AT&T hub? Why do you think the telecom companies are pushing for retroactive immunity if this sort of wholesale keyword filtering isn't going on?

It's pretty obvious that they have set up this sort of wide-scale search capability already.

J

[madeline_con]

4. Look at the reality.

If they have keyword capability, for instance, there is enough said here on DU alone (in 1 day) to keep them sifting for months, with words like terrorist, Bin Laden, Iraq, Al Queda.

I stand by my contention that it's impossible to sift through it all, unless they have a specific group they are "listening" to.

[NoodleyAppendage]

6. It's not keywords alone but the congregation of focus information.

Imagine a dynamic graph of nodes in which words of interest must be connected between parties or coincident with each other to raise the alarm. When describing the BFEE web wiretapping it was revealed that they wanted to know who was talking to supposed terrorists and then iteratively the individuals talking to the people contacting the primary of interest. This sort of branching node network is likely to be behind target wholesale searches.

You may convince yourself that it is impossible, but Poindexter didn't think so...even left to develop it with private industry. McConnell doesn't think so, as evinced by this article. And, the Brits don't think so because they've been using it's older brother, Eschelon.

Those who do not understand the technology are destined to be dominated by it.

J

[Hydra]

12. This was already being done in the 1980's

Military Tech is generally 20 years ahead of what they let us play with. I didn't believe that until I saw it myself. Some of the "prototypes" being talked about now existed 20 years ago.

Imagine this- 10-15 supercomputers(hell, why not more?) recording the data I am typing right now. That data is recorded on optical chips, and any data being sifted can be watched in real time.

You are given a threat rating based on your income, your activities and hobbies, who you associate with, political views and and previous violations that were logged but not brought to your attention(run any red lights lately with cameras on them?)

Based on this, they can moniter at you at any time. As long as you aren't any significant threat, you mostly get left alone. After all, there are millions of you little troublemakers out there. OTOH, they may just decide to make an object lesson out of you, and they have all of that "classified evidence" to use against you, assuming they don't just order the Judge to throw the book at you.

This is population control at its best. And now they are telling us, "Big Brother is Watching"

[SusanLarson]

3. This is likely already going on

This is why they wanted access to the telephone company backbone switches. This is also quite likely what Qwest refused to allow them to do.

[C_U_L8R]

5. That's not protecting cyberspace

that's an invasion.

[MidwestTransplant]

7. We must destroy liberty in order to save it.

[havocmom]

8. Back in the US. Back in the US. Back in the USSR....

Why was news censorship, spying on citizens, limits on personal speech, secret arrests, interrogations without oversight, imprisonment without charges and open trials all bad when the old Soviet State did it, but just fine and dandy with the GOP when the new American State does it?

[NoodleyAppendage]

9. Because true democracy is only an illusion. n/t

J

[Javaman]

10. I just finished re-watching 1984 with John Hurt...

There were TV screens everywhere and who ever big brother really was, was able to contact you right on the spot if you weren't following party line.

What keeps the government from launching a spy-ware program that locks into every computer in the US and when certain words are typed in, it sends an alert to the state dept? nothing at all.

I'm waiting for the day, when it will be required and won't be spy-ware at all, but it will be your, "PATRIOTIC DUTY".

life during war time. We have always been at war with eastasia. Oh, yes, brother, you are holding up 5 fingers.

[havocmom]

11. Another growth industry, besides torches & pitch forks, may be carrier pigeons

Thinkin I should learn how to raise them. I like birds anyway ;)

[NoodleyAppendage]

13. Invest in PGP. The feds HATE it.

Pretty Good Privacy encryption on a mass scale would seriously thwart this Echelon-like effort. The Feds could monitor or listen in, but it would take them months...if not years to decode the info.

J