FBI drive for encryption backdoors is déjà vu for security experts.

Another concern is that wiretapping requirements in software have a tendency to be used not just by governments bound to the rule of law. For instance, TKTK was lambasted last year for selling telecom equipment to Iran that included the ability to wiretap mobile phones at will. Lost in that uproar was the fact that sophisticated wiretapping capabilities became standard issue for technology thanks to the US government’s CALEA rules that require all phone systems, and now broadband systems, to include these capabilities.

Government mandated technology stifles innovation and creates opportunities for mischief. The law won’t keep pace with technological changes no matter how hard they try. Privacy is a good thing. We seem to be turning fifth amendment guarantees upside down. Instead of being secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, it’s “give us the encryption keys and trust us to do the right thing”.  No. I. Don’t.

This will threaten open source projects that can use strong encryption like OpenPGP and OpenSSL. It also endangers other widely used commercial packages like Skype. Sucks.

The EFF, as always, has great coverage of this type of government overreach.

Rod Blagojevich: champion of cell phone security

Say what you want about the embattled Governor of Illinois, the guy’s been on the right side when it comes to mobile phone privacy. In 2006 Rod Blagojevich very publicly joined the campaign to protect consumers from “pretexting”—illegally hacking or fooling companies into disclosing customer cell phone records, then selling it over Web sites. His September 2006 letter to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission expressed concern that even when an old cell phone’s memory is erased, it can be restored using software easily downloaded from the Internet.

“More alarming are the examples of the types of information that are all too easily available: information containing a company’s plan to win a multimillion-dollar federal contract, an individual’s personal medical history, and emails about a firm’s software license,” Blagojevich wrote.

Multimillion-dollar federal contract, eh? Just what your typical cell phone user keeps on their call log—maybe next to alleged plans to sell off a vacant United States Senate seat?

I know this is an old story, but as Nelson would say…

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The US (not surprisingly)  receives the worst rating. We’re right up there with Russia and China.

Dodd’s Filibuster Threat Stalls Wiretap Bill – Politics on The Huffington Post
Senator Chris Dodd won a temporary victory today after his threats of a filibuster forced Democratic leadership to push back consideration of a measure that would grant immunity to telecom companies that were complicit in warrantless surveillance.

The article details that Shiite militias — which British troops “unintentionally” armed for years by failing to realize that the “security forces” had no allegiance to the central government — completely dominate the city. The militias are “strong enough to overpower security forces and brutal enough to behead women considered not sufficiently Islamic.” According to the police chief, “Basra has become so lawless that in the last three months 45 women have been killed for being ‘immoral’ because they were not fully covered or because they may have given birth outside wedlock” — Freedom is on the March — and “Shia militia are better armed than his men and control Iraq’s main port.”

Needless to say, the British, upon withdrawing, claimed — just as our government does endlessly — that they had achieved victory in Basra. The British General in charge of Basra “said the province had ‘begun to regain its strength’” and added: “I came to rid Basra of its enemies and I now formally hand Basra back to its friends.” But residents of Basra who live with the reality of what our invasion has wrought are quite emphatic about what has happened. From the BBC several days ago:

More than 85% of the residents of Basra believe British troops have had a negative effect on the Iraqi province since 2003, an opinion poll suggests. The survey for BBC Newsnight of nearly 1,000 people also suggests that 56% believe their presence has increased the overall level of militia violence.

 Winning Hearts and Minds. And Basra is one of the places being held up as a Success Story in light of the British withdrawal.

Aren’t you glad you know what “victory” looks like?

Then there’s the take down of Senate “leadership” offered by Harry Reid. He not only fails at attempts to curb unfettered wiretapping, but recently acts as an enabler to bring the President’s favored version of the FISA revision to a vote. Chris Dodd has vowed to lead a filibuster if it comes to the Senate floor. With democrats like this who needs republicans?

Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry – New York Times
But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

Anyone who would trust the government on this is a deluded fool

You would think that law and order fetishists in the modern wingnut movement would vehemently oppose and type of amnesty for law breakers, but somehow I doubt it.

NBC: Peer-to-peer costs corn farmers money
But the bigger issue here is that NBC wants the FCC to require ISPs to filter content. How this would work, exactly, is not explained, and as the public interest groups point out in their filing, “nearly any Internet protocol can be used to illegally transfer copyrighted materials—instant messaging, the Web, e-mail, and many other protocols are capable of being used for this purpose.” The groups also argue that such filters (assuming that they work well, and this is a major assumption) would hinder fair use and would basically put the FCC in charge of setting Internet technology policy. After the agency was smacked down by the courts for exceeding its authority when it came to the broadcast flag, FCC officials are probably not in the mood to tackle such a controversial new policy.

One of the most important points made in the reply concerns NBC’s charge that network neutrality (which this is all about) would prevent most “network management” tools from being used. Packet shaping, prioritization, deep packet inspection, bandwidth throttling—NBC argues that all of these tools would become illegal. This is a crucial question, since many of these management tools serve a useful purpose; does anyone not want VoIP traffic to be moved through network with less latency than, say, a P2P download?

Glenn Greenwald – Salon
This is one of those types of legal outcomes which — understandably so — can drive laypersons, along with conscientious lawyers, crazy. The result, on its face, is grotesquely unfair, outrageously so.

After all, the whole point of FISA is to make it illegal for the government to spy on us in secret. And yet spying on us in secret is exactly what the Bush administration did; that is the crux of the lawbreaking here. But precisely because it spied on Americans in secret rather than with judicial oversight, nobody knows whose conversations they surveilled and we cannot find out.

It is because of this illegal behavior that the plaintiffs are unable to show that they were subjected to this surveillance. To dismiss the case on the ground that the plaintiffs are unable to make this showing, then, is to reward the Bush administration with the ultimate prize (immunity from judicial review) for having broken the law.

Worse still, it means that if the Government breaks the law in secret, it can be immune from being held accountable in a court because no one individual can ever prove that they were directly and uniquely harmed by the illegal conduct, and thus would lack standing to sue. That result is as destructive as it is Kafka-esque, and it is what happened yesterday.

Seem to me to be the natural result of allowing a bureaucracy unfettered access to personal information. Basically Meuller had little reason to monitor what was happening after being handed cart blanche by Congress. Many other parts of the so-called “Patriot Act” are equally woeful. The goal of opening up information sharing between intelligence services and law enforcement was appropriate. But the wholesale abandonment of privacy as a value was a major failure that needs to be addressed in a major revision of the law.

Wasn’t this the program that the White House insisted was absolutely necessary to the safety of the American people? Or perhaps the Prez wants to cover himself for violating the law or better cover to continue violating the law? I guess Bush and Gonzales were for unfettered wiretapping before they were against it. It seems a lot like the roaches are heading for the corners because the kitchen light just came on. Let the subpoenas begin!

UPDATE:
More on this from Kevin Drum at Political Animal. Justin Rood at TPMuckraker has the letter from Abu Gonzales. Glenn Greenwald finds little solace and no cause for celebration in this annoucement.

In a disgusting fit of common sense in support of the US Constitution a terrorist loving, commie anti-christ judge on the ACLU v NSA case ruled:

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency’s program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

”Plaintiffs have prevailed, and the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution,” Taylor wrote in her 43-page opinion.

I’m sure the far right will be calling for her head any second now…

President Bush effectively blocked a Justice Department investigation of the National Security Agency’s warrant-less surveillance program, refusing to give security clearances to attorneys who were attempting to conduct the probe, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said yesterday.

Bush’s decision represents an unusually direct and unprecedented White House intervention into an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal affairs office at Justice, administration officials and legal experts said. It forced OPR to abandon its investigation of the role Justice officials played in authorizing and monitoring the controversial NSA eavesdropping effort, according to officials and government documents.

“Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels,” the office’s chief lawyer, H. Marshall Jarrett, wrote in a memorandum released yesterday. “In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation.”

In testimony yesterday to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales said that in matters involving access to classified programs, “the president of the United States makes the decision.”

If there was wrong doing in the handling of the NSA domestic wiretapping program, then this constitutes obstruction of justice. They don’t trust anyone to review what they’re doing. If it’s legal and appropriate, then they should have nothing to fear. Why are they afraid of an investigation by the Justice Dept.? When it becomes necessary to prevent an investigation by underhanded means, there’s something to hide

Big Brother is watching your packets. Anyone else notice how the concept of privacy is rapidly becoming quaint?

They leave open the possibility that the recently aquired MCI long distance operation be providing access to call logs to the NSA.

I find myself in a near state of shock, I actually agree with Joe Scarborough on the issue of NSA data mining of phone records. Crooks and Liars has the clip.