Tuesday, August 6, 2013

When They Say The Three-Letter Agencies ‘Hoover’ Up Information On The 'Net, They Aren't Talking About A Vacuum Cleaner

Please read "FBI Pressuring Internet Providers To Allow Government Surveillance Software" ... The FBI is not even trying to hide its anti-Fourth-Amendment internet activities any more. If you have any serious secrets, don't transmit them, let alone store them, on the 'net, no matter how good your encryption may be.

Somewhere, the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover is cackling...

Oh, and... welcome to the United States of Surveillance. Bryan of Why Now suggests a new national anthem...

2 comments:

  1. One of my co-workers was head of Internet operations for an ISP that had a reputation for not giving in to government data demands. The FBI mounted an armed raid where they held the staff at gunpoint while their technicians installed black boxes in their NOC. They were then warned that if they touched those black boxes, their NOC would be seized for violations of blah de blah lawful interception yada yada destruction of government property and so forth. And if they even *told* someone that the black boxes were there, whoever leaked the information would go to jail for violating the FISA court order that they showed the NOC manager but did not allow him to actually touch.

    As far as he knows, those black boxes (or their descendants) are still there.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 'tux, this is not new behavior on the part of the FBI. Remember their "invasions" of some public libraries right after 9/11/2001, in which they demanded library users' checkout lists from the library, and that the librarians not tell anyone on penalty of charges and probable jail time? Librarians are more like net managers than you might imagine; these decided to inform only one group of lawyers to plead their cases before the courts. That group of lawyers was the ACLU, and that's where I found out about the whole business. As a practical reply, the librarians simply stopped keeping checkout records beyond a couple of days after turn-in, thus minimizing what the FBI would be able to collect in any given day's raid.

      As for the terrorists, they indisputably won as soon as our government started putting this sort of crap in place. We are no longer the America in which I grew up.

      Delete

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