Monday is Wiretap the Internet Day

Alien54 wrote with a link to a Wired blog entry noting that May 14th is the official deadline for internet service providers to modify their networks, and meet the FBI and FCC's new regulations. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires that everyone from cable services to Universities give them access, within certain parameters, to the usage habits of customers. "So, if you're a broadband provider (separately, some VOIP companies are covered too) ... Hurry! The deadline has already passed to file an FCC form 445, certifying that you're on schedule, or explaining why you're not. You can also find the 68-page official industry spec for internet surveillance here. It'll cost you $164.00 to download, but then you'll know exactly what format to use when delivering customer packets to federal or local law enforcement, including 'e-mail, instant messaging records, web-browsing information and other information sent or received through a user's broadband connection, including on-line banking activity.'"

suggestion

[toby]

Get a colo service, preferably in another country; OpenVPN to it and use a web proxy running on it. Not perfect, but better than nothing.

Interestingly, this is the same kind of solution often resorted to by residents of those countries usually tagged as 'repressive regimes' by the good ole U.S. of A. Make ya think, at all?

Re:suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Relakks.com? I used it for a little while just to see how it was, terrible the first month but surprisingly fast after the hype died down and they got their infrastructure running better. Was quite amazing to just browse the web and have everything loading pretty much as fast as normal cable, even with all the packets being routed from me to Sweden, the destination, back to Sweden and then back to me again. I was quite impressed.

Telecommunications services only

[J'raxis]

It's important to note that CALEA doesn't apply to "information services" or "electronic messaging services", only "telecommunications". Here are the relevant parts of the actual law [wikisource.org]:

SEC. 102. DEFINITIONS.
For purposes of this title--
[...]
(4) The term `electronic messaging services' means software-based services that enable the sharing of data, images, sound, writing, or other information among computing devices controlled by the senders or recipients of the messages.
[...]
(6) The term `information services'--
(A) means the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications; and
(B) includes--
(i) a service that permits a customer to retrieve stored information from, or file information for storage in, information storage facilities;
(ii) electronic publishing; and
(iii) electronic messaging services;
[...]
(b) LIMITATIONS-
[...]
(2) INFORMATION SERVICES; PRIVATE NETWORKS AND INTERCONNECTION SERVICES AND FACILITIES- The requirements of subsection (a) do not apply to--
(A) information services
[...]

Re:Limits on government

[boolithium]

Anyone can find the details here. http://www.askcalea.net/calea/ [askcalea.net]http://www.askcalea. net/calea/ Now I have read through this and there is one really disturbing term. Here is the summary statement. /* Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA) In October 1994, Congress took action to protect public safety and national security by enacting CALEA. The law further defines the existing statutory obligation of telecommunications carriers to assist law enforcement in executing electronic surveillance pursuant to court order or other lawful authorization. CALEA is codified at 47 U.S.C. 1001-1021. */ The verbage "pursuant to court order or other lawful authorization" is all through the law. Now I know what a court order is, and if a federal judge determines you might just be selling Vietnamese slaves on ebay, I got no beef with them checking up on your daily myspace blogs. In other words big brother isn't so bad, if he's kicking your school bully's ass. But what the fuck does lawful authorization mean? In my small amount of knowledge that college didn't destroy, I thought the judicial branch was the only one who could authorize court orderish kind of shit. All I can say to anyone monitoring without a court order is, if you get lawful authorization without a court, then so do the rest of us. "By any means necessary!"

Re:So glad I'm expat now...

[Antique Geekmeister]

Unless your email is encrypted, much of your domestic and almost all international traffic is already monitored via the spy rooms installed by the NSA in core backbone network provider's facilities, such as those installed at AT&T. And with the massive bandwidth and facilities available at such centers, and the truly abysmal security of many switches and routers including documented backdoors installed for federal use, it's easy to reroute other traffic to those rooms. So let's be clear: almost all unencrypted internet traffic is monitorable by the NSA. Even though it's illegal for the NSA to monitor most domestic traffic, there are no safeguards in place to prevent it, and with the US Patriot Act in place, all they or other federal agencies need do is mumble "terrorists" to gain unfettered access to it.

I'm afraid it's going to be difficult to coordinate protests with this kind of monitoring in place. And we're still seeing people say "but if it saves one life from terrorists", not realizing that it actually encourages terrorism by ruining trust in government and making people feel that only violent action might be effective.

Re:$164

[Anonymous Coward]

I found it pretty hard to believe that SC actually prevents free public access to its code of laws. While I don't doubt the original poster had a problem at one time, the code is available here [scstatehouse.net]. They go on to say that material from the aforementioned Web site "may be copied from this website at the reader's expense and effort without need for permission."

Re:$164

[Alsee]

In 1998...

There has since been a court ruling against copyrighting law. I did a Search of SC law for the term COPYRIGHT [scstatehouse.net] and only got five hits.... none of which have any relation to the "text from the SC law" that you quoted. Maybe the law you quoted did exist in 1998, but it does not appear to exist now. They may have specifically repealed it in response to the court ruling on the subject.

-

Re:Limits on government

[tignom]

The way I understand it is that the constitution limits the powers that the government has by enumerating them. It defines the upper limit of the power of the government. In contrast, the bill of rights defines the lower limit of rights that the people have by enumerating basic rights. People have more rights than are defined in the bill of rights. They are only limited by the law (the manifestation of other people's rights).

That's close, but not quite. What the constitution really does is grant the government powers by enumerating them. Some of those grants are quite broad. For example, the interstate commerce clause has been interpreted so broadly as to allow the government to regulate nearly anything involving the production and distribution of goods. But the important thing to remember is that the US government derives its power from its citizens and is innately limited to whatever powers we grant it. The government doesn't have any intrinsic powers for the constitution to limit.

Your explanation of these grants and the bill of rights as upper and lower bounds is a very good, concise description. I've never seen constitutional law boiled down to something that can be parsed by a mathematician before.