From CUD I found this perhaps indictative of the thinking of more and more folks on the net

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Mon, 19 Jun 1995 23:21:46 -0500 (CDT)
From: David Smith <bladex () BGA COM>
Subject: File 3--Big Brother Covets the Internet (fwd)


               ---------- Forwarded message ----------


From: nyt () nyxfer blythe org (NY Transfer News Collective)




  Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit




  From Flatland, No. 12, May 1995, pp. 44-46.




                 Big Brother Covets the Internet


                         by Daniel Brandt


     "The Internet offers intelligence agencies an amazing
     potential source for information collection and for monitoring
     the activities of their targets. They not only can plug into
     communications through the names of senders and receivers of
     e-mail, but also through keyword monitoring of messages as
     they have done for many years. If you add e-mail to their
     monitoring of telephone and other credit card transactions,
     they can get a very complete picture of a given person's
     activities.


     "On my long trips to the United States for university
     lecturing and other activities, such monitoring enables them
     to know my every flight, hotel and car rental, and local
     contacts, not to mention my complete itineraries. All this
     prior to my flight from Germany to the U.S. Add to this my
     other calls and bank transactions and you ahve almost every
     imaginable detail. It is a perfect system for spy agencies and
     getting better all the time."


                               -- former CIA officer Philip Agee


     What the government giveth, the government can taketh away.
This message has been received by Internet watchers recently, as
Big Brother begins to confront the issue of online computer security.
Internet hacking is at an all-time high, the Pentagon claims, just
as big business is buying into the Internet in a big way. Something
has to give.


     "Hackers are even better than communists," says one Washington
activist who deals with civil rights and electronic privacy issues.
Several weeks later, on November 22, 1994, NBC News with Tom Brokaw
underscored his point with an alarmist segment by Robert Hager:


          A Pentagon unit is poised to combat unauthorized
     entries into some of the world's most sensitive computer
     systems. But despite all the safeguards and a computer
     security budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars,
     attempts were made to break into the Pentagon's computers
     on 254 separate occasions in the last twelve months
     alone, almost always through the Internet.... NBC News
     has learned that intrusions into the Defense Department's
     computers go unreported 98 percent of the time -- 98
     percent! -- often because no one is aware information is
     being pirated. Pentagon officials are worried the
     nation's security is being compromised.


     Only Joe McCarthy knows how Robert Hager came up with a figure
of 98 percent for undetected break-ins, and then pretended it was
worth repeating. Hager continued with his voice-over and began
talking about hackers breaking into one nameless hospital's records
and reversing the results of a dozen pap smears. Patients who may
have had ovarian cancer, Hager claimed, were told instead that they
were okay.


     If this were an isolated story, then the Newsgroup subscribers
on <alt.conspiracy> who reacted to Hager's segment, by speculating
that something must be behind it, might be dismissed for weaving
yet another paranoid thread. But here I have to agree that even if
you're paranoid, they still might be after you. On this story, at
least, NBC seems to be the mouthpiece for larger forces.


     "Organized Crime Hackers Jeopardize Security of U.S." reads
the headline in "Defense News" (October 3-9, 1994). This article
reported on a conference sponsored by the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a prestigious Washington think tank with
close connections to the intelligence community. Dain Gary from the
Computer Emergency Response Team in Pittsburgh, a hacker-buster
group funded by the Pentagon, claimed that "there are universities
in Bulgaria that teach how to create more effective viruses." Mr.
Gary did not respond to my letter requesting more information.




     The government started the Internet, and then over a period
of years it lost control. This was partly due to the unique
architecture of the Internet, which has its roots in a 1964 Rand
Corporation proposal for a post-Doomsday network. Rand's idea was
that information packets could contain their own routing
information, and would not have to rely on centralized switching.
Anarchy, it seems, is the best antidote to vulnerable
communications systems.


     Recently the government, due to a combination of tight budgets
and a trend toward deregulation, has allowed big business to take
over the main conduits, or "backbone" of the Net. Corporations
smell a huge potential cybermarket, and are investing money to get
themselves positioned on the Net. They want to be ready when it
comes time to harvest the expected profits.


     Today we have a global network with 30 million users.
No one is in control, and no one can pull the plug. If one
telecommunications company decided to shut off the segment of the
Net that they administer, other companies could simply route their
traffic around them. And if it weren't for password protection and
the "firewalls" installed by corporations to protect their local
turf from other computers, each of Internet's users would have
access to all the other computers on the Net.


     Passwords and firewalls don't always work. A hacker who
burrows in and obtains the right sort of access can watch the
passwords of other users fly by, and can capture them for later
use. In November 1994, General Electric's robust firewalls were
circumvented by hackers, according to a company spokeswoman, and
GE had to pull their computers off the Net for a week to revamp
their security procedures. In two other incidents, a group of
hackers calling itself the Internet Liberation Front managed to
break into systems. On one they posted a message warning corporate
America against turning the Internet into a "cesspool of greed."


     So Big Brother has a problem. But it's not so much a problem
of national security, except perhaps in the broad sense of economic
vulnerability. Defense and intelligence systems that are classified
are not connected to the Internet. When the Pentagon complains to
NBC about national security, what they really mean is that they
might have to forego the convenience of Internet contacts with
their contractors, and use other means instead.


     No, Big Brother in this case is not the Pentagon, it's really
big business. They're chomping at the Net's information bits, while
the computer security problem is reining them back. Until this
problem is solved, the Net cannot be used for serious commercial
transactions. Big business seems to be feeding scare stories to the
media, and the Pentagon is helping them out by raising the
time-tested bugaboo of national security -- the only surefire way
to scare Congress into repressive legislation. America leads the
world in information technology, and the Internet is potentially a
lucrative link in tomorrow's profit chain. If only those pesky
hackers would go away.


     The hackers that do exist are grist for the system's
disinformation mill, so if they didn't exist the system would
probably have to invent them. The bottom line for those whose
opinions matter is that the Internet has potential to help the rich
get richer. Hackers belong in jail, of course, but there's also the
Net surfer who's clogging bandwidth with idle chatter, or even
swapping copyrighted material with their friends. Frequently this
unprofitable silliness is subsidized by the universities. All big
business wants from these folks is consumption -- they may browse
through online catalogs and debit their credit lines, but forget
all this virtual community stuff. It's got to go.




     The way to reboot the system is to boot the little guy, and
the best way to do this has always been to let the government bash
some heads. The digital equivalent of this is the one-two punch of
the Clipper chip and the Digital Telephony Bill. Clipper is an
ongoing government effort to encourage the mass marketing of a
encryption standard that can be tapped by them. It was developed
with help from the National Security Agency (NSA), which is worried
about the emergence of encryption that can't be easily broken by
their supercomputers. The FBI's favorite is the Digital Telephony
Bill, which was passed without debate by Congress last October.
It forces telecommunications companies to modify their digital
equipment so that the government has access to wiretapping ports
when they come calling with a warrant.


     Warrants? When was the last time the intelligence community
took warrants seriously? Just in case a few of them get nervous
while breaking the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
of 1978 set up a secret court to issue warrants in situations
involving a foreign threat. This court has yet to turn down a
single request put before it -- even rubber stamps don't perform
this well. All it would take is a vague rumor of a Bulgarian virus
with Russian organized crime lurking close behind, and presto, a
secret warrant is issued to tap the Internet backbone so that U.S.
spooks can look for nasty digital germs. The judges aren't
competent to evaluate technical rumors, and with their track
record, no one pretends that they will call in their own experts.
Why bother, since the proceedings are secret and there's no
accountability?


     But then, who needs a warrant? According to reports, the NSA,
Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and
Canada's Communications Security Establishment, all practice what
might be termed the "sister agency gambit." They do this by
stationing liaison officers in each of the other agencies. When
they want to tap their own citizens without a warrant, they just
call over the liaison officer to throw the switch. Now it's called
"intelligence from a friendly foreign agency" and it's all legal.




     Particularly with the Internet, where jurisdictional problems
involve many nations, this sort of transnational cooperation will
be the rule rather than the exception. The excuse for monitoring
the Net today might be the security problem. Tomorrow the security
problem may be solved, one way or another, and the Net will be used
for commercial transactions. Then the excuse for monitoring will be
the need to detect patterns of commerce indicative of money
laundering, much like FinCen does today.


     FinCen, the Financial Crime Enforcement Network, monitors
Currency Transaction Reports from banks, and other records from
over 35 financial databases, as well as NSA intercepts of wire
transfers into and out of the U.S. This data is shared with the DEA
(Drug Enforcement Administration), CIA, DIA (Defense Intelligence
Agency), IRS, FBI, BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms),
and the Secret Service. FinCen, which began in 1990, is an attempt
to track, cross-reference, and apply artificial-intelligence
modeling to all the relevant data from government agencies. Now
they are floating a proposal for a deposit tracking system. When
the Internet begins carrying financial transactions, FinCen is sure
to be poking around behind the scenes.


     One characteristic of the Internet is that surveillance on a
massive scale is easy to accomplish. With telephone voice or fax
transmissions, the digital signal is an approximation of the analog
signal. Massive computing power, relatively speaking, is needed to
extract the content in the form of words or numbers. This is called
"speech recognition" for voice, or "optical character recognition"
for fax. Data on the Internet, on the other hand, is already in the
form that computers use directly. Moreover, each packet
conveniently includes the address of the sender and receiver.


     It's a simple matter to tap an Internet backbone and scan
every packet in real time for certain keywords. With voice and fax,
it's only practical to capture specific circuits, and then examine
them later for content. On the Internet, even encryption doesn't
solve the privacy problem, because the Net is also ideal for
message traffic analysis. A stream of encrypted messages between
two points could be detected by a computer, which then spits out a
report that's sure to attract attention. Each end of this stream
is now identified as a target, which means that other types of
surveillance are now practical. The Internet, in other words,
increases opportunities for surveillance by many orders of
magnitude, with or without encryption.


     Those who have the resources can try to befuddle the spooks
who monitor them by disguising their transactions. Shell
corporations, off-shore banks, and cash-intensive businesses will
still be popular with money launderers. Seemingly innocent
transactions will slip through the net, and for the most part only
the little guy without transnational resources will get caught.


     Which is exactly the point. The little guy on the Net is
surfing on borrowed time. There are too many pressures at work, too
many powerful interests to consider. The Net is too important to
the Suits -- if not now, then soon.




     If it were only a case of Us and Them, it would be easier to
sort it all out. But the self-styled Internet Liberation Front, and
similar types with hacker nonethics, are part of the problem as
surely as the greedy capitalists. Nor is it easy to see much hope
in the way the little guy -- the one who obeys the law -- has used
the Internet. The entire experiment has left us with 30 million
connections but very little public-sector content. Apart from the
sense of community found in Newsgroups, list servers, and e-mail,
not much is happening in cyberspace. And just how deep is this
community when the crunch comes? Not nearly as deep as the
counterculture of the 1960s, and look what happened to them.


     Rand Corporation, meanwhile, is churning out studies on
cyberwar, netwar, and information warfare. The Defense Department,
at the urging of their Advanced Research Projects Agency (which
started the Internet), recently signed a memorandum of understanding
with the Justice Department, at the urging of the FBI and the
National Institute of Justice. This memorandum anticipates a
coordinated effort on high-tech applications for "Operations Other
Than War" and "Law Enforcement." The game is on, and the high-tech
high rollers are getting it together.


     The neat graphics and sassy prose in "Wired" and "Mondo 2000"
magazines notwithstanding, the Net-surfing culture is more virtual
than real. Cyberspace cadets are no match for the real players, and
it's going to be like taking candy from a baby. Lots of squeals,
but nothing to raise any eyebrows. It's all so much spectacle
anyway. Guy Debord (1932-1994) summed it up in "Society of the
Spectacle" in 1967, when Rand was still tinkering with their
Doomsday idea:


          The technology is based on isolation, and the
     technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile
     to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular
     system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement
     of the conditions of isolation of "lonely crowds." The
     spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more
     concretely.... In the spectacle, which is the image of
     the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development
     everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than
     itself.


     Then again, the Spectacle does make for excellent Internet
watching, once silly notions like "information wants to be free"
are discarded, and the drama can be enjoyed for what it is.
Basically, it's one more example of something that happens
frequently in history. The little guy thinks he has created
something new and powerful. He's so busy congratulating himself,
that when the Big Dogs begin to notice, the little guy doesn't.
In the end, it's merely another dog-bites-man nonstory that won't
be found on NBC News. This just in: "Little guy gets screwed."


                         END END END


Flatland can be reached at PO Box 2420,
Fort Bragg CA 95437-2420, Tel: 707-964-8326.h