Obama May Back FBI Plan to Expand Wiretap Laws
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The original CALEA has had serious ramifications for security world-wide: telecommunications equipment manufactured for compliance with the US market gets shipped everywhere, enabling smooth surveillance for countries like Iran and Egypt. It also becomes a major vulnerability vector, the most public case being the Greek wiretapping affair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...).
It's interesting that the government is floating this with a straight face at the same time that they're seriously debating a nominal "cyber security" bill.
I can see the US government backing strong privacy laws and desisting from wiretapping in the future (not without trumpeting how noble it is for them to do so) if only to stop foreign hackers from easily spying on Americans.
How are you going to regulate IM wiretapping? I wrote a simple IM app as a sophomore in 1997. Will that be a criminal act?
People should be scared to lead because every little detail of their personal and professional life will become a matter of public record. They will have to essentially try their best to be Saints. That way no leader will ever have any real power to do anything. They will truly be public servant, nay slaves.
You trespass on us, we trespass on you. It's only fair.
The problem with this idea is that governments themselves would have to legalize "spying" on them, whatever that would mean after it's been legalized.
> That way no leader will ever have any real power to do anything.
That's a nice thought, and if you take it a bit further, you may end up thinking there should be no government at all.
Which is good, because I also miss the days where the man with the biggest club had the power.
Not sure if you've noticed, but those days haven't gone anywhere.
Then consider a place like Pakistan where politicians of nearly every political party are having their gatherings literally bombed by people with actual big clubs.
You're playing with hyperbole here and it's not helping the argument.
Edit: To be clear, the point is that something will have a "biggest club", and we want that something to be under the control of the population at-large and not under individuals. Having that "biggest club" under the tender care of "no one" is just a subset of the case of having it under individuals, after all the bleeding is done...
The WBC, the Tea Party, and the birthers aren't squashed by the club only because the government doesn't consider them a serious enough threat.
Anyone who is considered a serious threat is brutally beaten, tortured, detained, etc. whether or not their actions were noble (i.e. PFC Manning), or likely cases of mistaken identity, false accusations (Guantanamo, etc.), or living in the wrong part of the world (Iraq, etc.).
Of course, you also don't have to be considered a "real threat" either to feel the weight of the club. Simply act out of line with the law, regardless of whether the law is just or not, and you will feel it smashing down upon you. Just because we have fancy formal proceedings before we hit you in the head doesn't mean the club has somehow disappeared. Its impact is just delayed, that's all.
Past uses of the club included having the wrong color of skin or being of the wrong nationality (blacks a few decades ago, Japanese during WW2). All of these happened during times when we supposedly lived in a "free, civil and open society". The big club is always there, just sometimes it doesn't care about you.
Watch yourself. http://th05.deviantart.net/fs70/200H/f/2010/027/5/7/Obama__y...
This might surprise you, but I agree completely. I do feel that it's better on the average (at least for the U.S.) than the counterexamples you might see elsewhere of where government is ineffective or nonexistant.
Make no mistake, unless you're the one at the top you will be governed by somebody. Once you come to that realization the rest is an optimization problem of how best to control the damage.
In the process of acquiring the power to murder US citizens via targeted assassination, his verbalized position was that he would never abuse that power. That's a punch right to the face, while claiming it's not.
Obama was always obviously a big government politician. Who thought he was going to give back the massive expansion of power and spending that the Bush years delivered? Neither side wants to give anything up, they just want to fight over who gets to run it.
The only 'upside' I can see, is that the system is bankrupting itself. Police states are expensive and tend to destroy themselves (the only example I can think of that hasn't so far, is modern China, and that has required vast liberalization of their economy).
Superb analysis! I do believe that these power structures are not only expensive but also they depend on incomes via depleting resources - like energy, oil etc. So it's kind of double trouble.
The other one, well, whatever their deficiencies, not most of those things.
This is the sort of silliness ('they're all exactly the same!') that, with the help of the Naderites actually helped put a Bush administration in power.
There's no shortage of perfectly defensible complaints one can have with this or any other administration without having to resort to tinfoil hat ones.
There was a whole lot of extrajudicial killing of US citizens in the course of domestic counter insurgence between 1861 and 1865; Obama has neither made this legal (as if he could) or made it scalable in a way which it wasn't before.
Both the threat environment and the tools used in response have changed, and certainly in the modern situation the line between interstate war and domestic insurgency is much less well defined, as are the fronts in either kind of war. This does produce quite involved issues in how to deal with both, and how to deal with that (and the interactions, in either the internal or international case, between war and police functions.) And certainly there is considerable room to debate the appropriateness of the particular choices and policies of this, the previous (and, no doubt, the next, etc.) administration on these issues.
But lets not pretend that they are something they aren't, because that isn't helpful.
It has precedent all the way back to the Clinton administration (if not farther, I'm just going by my own memory), when Bill Clinton authorized cruise missiles to be used against "terrorist training camps" at least a couple of times.
Actually, there was a time when the U.S. used military force against its own citizens in a legal, but extrajudicial fashion: The Whiskey Rebellion (which even occurred on U.S. soil). There were at least no direct battle fatalities as a result, but that was due to the fact that the insurgents gave up.
From what I can see, Obama has not given Americans back one single freedom that Bush removed, in fact he has expanded and built on them.
Or, just imagine if that Bush monkey had been able to do the Hollywood USA, USA, USA murder of Bin Laden, sitting there sniggering (Insert Jon Stewart impression) like a nut job while the operation was executed, like Obama petty much did. (Lets be honest, Obama could hardly contain himself.) The left and rest of the planet would have gone mental.
Don't get me wrong, I do exaggerate to show the point, but we in the UK experienced something like this and you could see it coming a mile off. When Blair (remember the British gimp Bush had in tow?) came to power it was after Thatcher and the limp replacement, John Major (forgotten him? Most have). People were over the moon and expected much. With in 3 days it was pretty clear that we had just replaced one terrible regime with one while was moulded in its image, and just build on the questionable things the previous government did, and reversed nothing what so ever.
This pretty much destroyed my engagement with politics and I saw the exact same tragedy unfold with Obama. Its a real shame, and damning indictment of western politics. Frankly the whole thing is a sad tragedy.
That's certainly your privilege and right but surely you have to recognize it automatically makes any discussion of politics with you impossible or at least, deeply unproductive.
And my point is, very specifically, not that 'if you have misgivings about one side or administration, you ought to have none about another'. It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone? - it's a decidedly unfalsifiable position to begin with.
I actually feel empowered by thinking that way though, because it eliminates distractions (politics) in favor of actual meaningful actions I can take in my own community (building things, helping people, etc.). If politics is removed as a tool, then problems no longer look political and you can do something about them that is ultimately much more effective than voting (in my opinion).
Perhaps you're not familiar with the way campaign funding works. In short, the parties band together to increase funding that, while really only good for making it easier to get elected, and is therefore somewhat self-perpetuating (e.g., I need money to win, to get more money, to win, etc.) - it is still money, and people covet it.
Why can't he have worthwhile things to say about politics even if he's given up on voting? Actually, I suspect he'll have even better ideas now.
> It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone?
Tell me, what exactly was the distinction between voting for Obama over Romney? How would life be different now, had Romney won? Would it be better? Worse? Would Romney have done something to actually help with the economy, unlike Obama?
What about jobs then? Would Romney have "created" jobs better than Obama (as if jobs could be created by central planning anyway)?
Lumping Obama and Romney together as roughly equivalent is exactly what someone who sees things for what they are would do.
The gist is that the FBI push is a trial balloon—aka the changes proposed aren't expected to be introduced as legislation for many months. That said, if we push back hard through folks who agree with us in DC, like EFF and CDT, it may prevent the bad CALEA changes from ever getting introduced in the first place.
There were the crypto fights of the '90s, where the government tried classifying it as weaponry subject to export regulations, caused the open sourcing of PGP rather than subject it to the regs. That's probably the best example of an actual game-change that we drove through our pushback against the national security apparatus.
It's taken 10 years, but we've been striking some solid blows against the National Security Letter regime, with the ACLU and EFF working with folks like Nicholas Merrill of Calyx. But that's just trying to claw back from a godawful status quo post-PATRIOT Act.
SOPA isn't valid because we know that the MPAA/RIAA will keep trying to slip their policies through; we haven't hit a major realignment point yet on IP issues. But it opens up the possibility of a win, as long as our activist groups don't oversimplify, as a solid minority of HN pointed out with the recent CISPA debate.
But c'mon, we of all people know that rates of change are what matter, not the current state of things. Groups like EFF and CDT act as a force. The force at any given point can be and often is overmatched by content or national security. It's one of the reasons why I'm arguing that we can't just ignore the political world anymore. We need to more actively support these groups, offline as well as online.
They are our best defenses to continue to be able to grow the pie, and yet the old money of content or the government contract money of national security continues to make more sustained, ongoing arguments in their favor to our detriment.
That said, I would submit to you that the above position suffers from the same collection of blind spots which manifest in 99% of political positions (hopes?) of the e^x variety.
Chief among them is the habit of obfuscation, not just to others but perhaps to yourself, via lofty rhetoric. It's true, such rhetoric is far from unusual in the political sphere-- and far be it from me to argue against the general use of hyperbole-- but when its usage and another thing's absence occur together so frequently, one can possibly infer it's being used to distract from that other thing's absence.
I hope this doesn't sound confrontational or condescending; I suffered from this exact same intellectual disease for years before giving up politics entirely in 2011. Do I still have the same beliefs? Yes. Do I pursue political action/conversation? No, hardly ever.
The disease is the notion that politics in the agora can build into a movement capable of effecting highest-level institutional change, and the disease's symptoms are "fights," "game-change," "drove," "pushback," "striking," "solid blows," "claw back," "a win," "a force," "the force," "overmatched," "best defenses," etc.
The difference between politics and any other domain that uses this language is that in politics, The Good Fight is never over. It sucks you in, and you die trying, no matter what you're trying for. The only movements ever to effect high-level institutional change did not start in the agora, they were born into people. Be it for women or for blacks or for union workers (not literally, but they think of themselves that way, which, here, is the point), the only movements ever to effect high-level change had in their back pocket millions of supporters they didn't even need to persuade. Persuasion. Doesn't. Work. Even when it's successful, it doesn't work. Biggest agora political movement of all time were the anti-war protests of Vietnam and Iraq; neither accomplished a single thing.
But they sure thought they were accomplishing something at the time. Ballots and marches and protests and sign-waving and signature collecting and, yes, donation collecting. Fighting the fight, striking some solid blows here and there, what have you.
The thing they hid from themselves via their rhetoric, same as you, was that nobody knew how to end the fight. Nobody knew what it would take. (If you don't believe me, Roe v. Wade was 40 years ago. Let that sink in.) So they fought the way the system told them to fight the system: by attacking the system at its point of greatest strength: the public narrative. I can't believe the system would just lie like that, can you?
If there is a way to end this, it's via technology. They can't ticket you for jaywalking if you can fly. Next meeting, tell the CDT to take however many thousands they spend on lobbying or "awareness" (whatever that means) and start funding bittorrent-, darknet/meshnet-, etc.-based projects and startups. I don't know how many CS profs are interested in that kind of research, but I know how many are getting corporate funding for it.
Their IM services aren't encrypted by default, at least with their default clients. Therefore nothing stops law enforcement from requesting the data with the court order. And presumably they already collect literally all open communication anyway.
However anyone can of course use OTR, ZRTP and etc. with normal standalone clients through these same services. So they now want to request building backdoors into those protocols? Or they want to make encryption illegal? Or what is this really about?
From what I can tell, the proposal is that a judge would be order to order a technically-feasible wiretap, and be able to fine the company for not complying.
The problem is that "technically feasible" would be up to the judge, so the company would need to be able to explain via their lawyers why a given wiretap could not actually be implemented.
Eventually more and more companies will be severely limited in what information they can even with respect to information between any two end users. Most information will end up being limited to information the user chooses to share with the company hosting the service, such as preferences, publicly published information and queries to the service.
Right now encryption typically requires a user to seek out special software with encryption features, but my bet is that encryption will move down the stack to the operating system and browser in a way that not only encrypts private information on the device, but that guarantees encryption end-to-end between users over any service. Full disk encryption is already becoming more common. HTTPS and SSL are becoming the norm.
I'm looking forward to what fruit future research in homomorphic encryption bears.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephon...
We can talk about this at the next PolitiHacks meetup if you want.
Despite official's assurances at a number of points that this new policy wouldn't target smaller startups--and the article implying that this policy would mostly impact "companies like Facebook and Google"--it's hard to imagine $25,000 even registering with a Facebook or a Google.
Perhaps the small start-up need not worry about this new policy change, but it sounds like the medium start-up might.
Fines "starting" at $25,000/day. Where do they go from there?
Look at the fines that they are imposing on companies that don't comply with Affordable Care Act. Some will incur fines upwards of a $1 Million/day.
I think even Facebook and Google would feel $365 Million a year in fines.
One compels you to provide health insurance to your employees, the other requires you participate in a wiretapping program in the name of "national security".
Not to say anything about the outrageous cost of healthcare in this country...
What would happen if Apple or Samsung started selling cell phones that encrypted voice communications end-to-end and prevented any kind of intercepting? Would the government just ban them?
The only way the government is going to be able to snoop in on everyone's traffic is to make the use of cryptography illegal. I don't see how that can work, either, since it's sort of necessary for commercial transactions.
We'd love it if more interested folks got involved.
"Using encryption, ciphers and peer to peer messaging, Redact sends heavily encrypted messages from one phone to another without passing through any central servers. Messages you have sent or received can be redacted from both handsets at the touch of a button with no method of recovery."
I have my doubts on the wisdom of this specific plan from the FBI, but security implications seem only a peripheral concern for the majority of people complaining. It rather seems that people don't want to compromise on privacy and I don't get it. Generally speaking, don't we want wiretaps to be possible?
Warranted interception can be helpful, but at this moment, I am concerned more by the cyber war/terrorism rhetoric and its effect on my democracy (Canada, in my case) than I am by any threat of violence (we just passed a bill called S-7 that allows for 3-day holding without charge, and 12 month conditional probation without charge, RE: "terrorism"). We usually follow the US example, so I watch these subjects with interest, and have been amazed at the choice to walk people out of their own homes in Boston, at gunpoint, "for their own protection." I'd rather take my chances and protect myself against terrorism. (A person's home used to be his "castle.")
Yes, privacy (and encryption, for example) empowers bad people - but it empowers the good ones too. Two wrongs don't make a right; I prefer to keep my freedom and strength than live in frightened "safety." So: encryption it is, even though it costs.
I wish governments and concerned citizens could see how they are creating the very walls that alienate and anger.
(FWIW, Canada had a bill called C-30 on the table last year with similar interception obligations and fines, and even though the government could have just passed it, because Canada is currently a political dictatorship, a huge number of Canadian's stood up and figuratively shouted in unison: NO. All it takes is saying I'm not afraid: I'm not afraid of terrorism, I'm not afraid of guns, I'm not afraid of other people's freedoms; no, I won't give away any more of my dignity. In fact, I want it back.)
2. This is a power grab, not merely an attempt to maintain equivalent present powers. As people live increasingly more of their lives on or impacted by virtual systems, the power to monitor and abuse whole societies becomes significantly larger. If you have any doubts about this, imagine it is the North Korean government with the technology.
3. Private communication, the minimum of freedom of expression and closest to thought, of any kind is never a hindrance to prevent crime or its investigation. A crime and everything leading to its implementation (and after) has many consequences in the world. It is these effects that are critical and required for crime prevention and prosecution. If there was a technology to monitor everyone's thoughts at the same time, would you use it as part of the criminal system?
4. The costs are orders of magnitude larger to setup, grow and maintain such monitoring systems indefinitely instead of targeting crime prevention and investigation. That's your taxpayer money being spent.
5. If after all the above, the inevitable result is still for governments to have the potential ability to access all communication anywhere between anyone at any time, then to reclaim individuals' rights, they too have a powerful incentive to seek and create systems that achieve the opposite, including encryption. This will occur regardless of law, and the deeper the loss or perception of loss of private rights, the more widespread it will occur.
In short,
"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
I'm not sure about that. Wiretaps don't play much of a role in prosecuting violent crimes. White collar crime can be revealed through requiring regulatory disclosure. What's left?
Apologies if these are naive assumptions - would love clarification.
When selling or even possessing recreational drugs is a crime, and when search and arrest warrants are routinely served by paramilitary teams, talk of "the number of criminals arrested" is meaningless. America's legal system has become so broad that anyone can be arrested, and the obvious result of that has been that America has the largest prison population of any country in the world by an order of magnitude.
Law enforcement is not about catching all criminals, nor is it about preventing all crimes. The power we give to law enforcement must be balanced with the need to preserve a free society. The more power the police are given, the easier it is to enforce oppressive laws, and by extension to create oppressive laws in the first place. We limit the use of police power with complicated procedures and requirements for that very reason.
It is also the case that expanded law enforcement powers tend to disproportionately impact certain minorities due to the disproportionate attention given to those communities by the police. As things are now, there are black communities in America where a quarter of the men are in prison or have been imprisoned. It is a near-certainty that if the FBI's proposal becomes law, the new wiretapping power will be disproportionately applied to already-oppressed minorities.
"I understand that the situation is different in authoritarian countries."
The sad truth is that right now, nobody can truly know that they have never committed a felony. As an example, large numbers of Virginians naively believed that living with their boyfriend/girlfriend was perfectly legal; yet until a few weeks ago, it was a crime:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/03/virginia-weird-laws...
It is by the selective application of these surprise laws that the US government is able to achieve an effect similar to that of a authoritarian government. Obscure laws have been used to attack protesters in the past:
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/prosecutors-can-charge-g...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190419460457658...
Expanded police power means an expanded ability to engage in these sorts of tactics. It is not a stretch to say that if the police can more easily wiretap people, they can more easily identify protesters planning to wear masks or board ships. Perhaps some other obscure law will be invoked next time -- there are so many laws that the Federal government is not even able to count them all.
Same is with communications. We will have easier time in the short run, but a few years down the road we will face MSRB terrorists and criminals - that have learned to be ghosts due to the selection pressure. We don't want them to become smart and imaginative.