Interesting People mailing list archives
more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 9 Jul 2006 19:20:45 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: "RJR RJRiley.com" <RJR () RJRILEY com> Date: July 9, 2006 7:08:20 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: RE: [IP] more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push For IP if you wish. It is inevitable that well healed parties will at some point manage toaccess information which is collected. For example, the Bells and AT&T are well known in the inventor community for being willing to go to any length
to do in inventors who try to enforce their property rights. What wouldstop the telecom's from using the wiretapping system for their own purposes?
Ronald J Riley, President Professional Inventors Alliance www.PIAUSA.org RJR"at"PIAUSA.org Change "at" to @ RJR Direct # (202) 318-1595 -----Original Message----- From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net] Sent: Sunday, July 09, 2006 4:49 PM To: ip () v2 listbox com Subject: [IP] more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push Begin forwarded message: From: Phil Karn <karn () ka9q net> Date: July 9, 2006 9:24:17 AM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push David Farber wrote:
But there's a piece missing. Crypto controls of course!
This is of course possible, and it's a bit surprising that this other shoe
has not yet fallen so long after 9/11. But consider that any push to regulate or restrict strong crypto would:1. Draw widespread public attention to the fact that the government cannot
break it;2. Be totally ineffectual since crypto is so widely available from so many
places in the world; 3. Go against the strongly stated public positions of many conservativeRepublicans during the "crypto wars" of the mid 1990s, when, coincidentally,
Clinton was in office and pushing the Clipper Chip; 4. Be totally ignored by precisely those people whom the government is supposedly most interested in targeting; and5. Be mostly irrelevant to what the spooks actually do when they vacuum up electronic communications, namely traffic analysis (who talks to who, when, where and how much) rather than acquiring actual content. Content takes too
much effort to analyze (and possibly translate), even when it's in theclear. Traffic analysis can be done automatically on a huge scale, and it
can be frighteningly effective. As an aside, I note that not much attention has been paid to the "where" part of communications. Cell phones -- even when they're not in calls -- make excellent physical tracking devices. Not even secure end-to-end encryption can change that. It's inherent in how they work. I have no actual information on this, but based on my knowledge of thetechnology and ongoing revelations of the government's insatiable appetite for data on non-citizens and citizens alike, I confidently predict that the next big revelation in the ongoing saga of massive government data- mining will involve mobile phone registrations. These are the short "I'm here and ready for a call" data messages that all mobile phones transmit every few minutes whenever they're on and idle. Even without GPS for augmented E911 positioning, registrations tell what cell sector you're in. These sectors can be quite small (a few blocks) in densely populated areas. At the very least, they're certainly sufficient to tell what country and city you're in.
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Current thread:
- more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push David Farber (Jul 08)
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- more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push David Farber (Jul 08)
- more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push David Farber (Jul 09)
- more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push David Farber (Jul 09)
- more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push David Farber (Jul 09)
- more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push David Farber (Jul 09)
- more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push David Farber (Jul 09)
- more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push David Farber (Jul 23)