Upon exiting the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin supposedly replied to a group who asked him what sort of government the delegates had created: "A republic, if you can keep it."
I would say that is becoming the nature of the free and open Internet. We have one: If we can keep it.
As reported April 23 on CNet news.com, it appears the drive to the total surveillance police state by the Bush/Cheney regime is still in full force. FBI wants widespread monitoring of 'illegal' Internet activity
This can be construed from the testimony of FBI Director Robert Mueller's testimony before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.
Never stopping at asking for too little when it comes to illegally intruding into the privacy, lives, and communications of American citizens (or even asking first at all, seems), Mueller was not asking for much:
Mueller seemed to suggest that the bureau should have a broad "omnibus" authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks as well.
The surveillance should include all Internet traffic, Mueller said, "whether it be .mil, .gov, .com--whichever network you're talking about." (See the transcript of the hearing.)
In response to questions from Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, Mueller said his idea "balances on one hand, the privacy rights of the individual who are receiving the information, but on the other hand, given the technology, the necessity of having some omnibus search capability utilizing filters that would identify the illegal activity as it comes through and give us the ability to preempt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point."
In other words, all he asking for is to be allowed to listen to every bit of data and communication, eavesdrop on it, and decide if it sounds illegal.
Now what about that pesky Fourth Amendment's guarantees against illegal search and seizure, the one that has always required warrants through a judicial process to eavesdrop, spy, wiretap, etc.
If any omnibus Internet-monitoring proposal became law, it could implicate the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. In general, courts have ruled that police need search warrants to obtain the content of communication, and the federal Wiretap Act created "super warrant" wiretap orders that require additional steps and judicial oversight.
FBI wants widespread monitoring of 'illegal' Internet activity
Of course there is evidence that even asking permission to spy on Americans all the time is really just an ex post facto act by this administration, as the article at CNet points out. The Einstein program may already be doing just that.
Einstein, which DHS calls an "early warning system" for cyber-incidents, is described in a Homeland Security document from September 2004 as "an automated process for collecting, correlating, analyzing, and sharing computer security information across the federal civilian government." It's still only in place at 15 federal agencies, but Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff requesting $293.5 million from Congress in next year's budget to roll it out government-wide.
The round-the-clock system captures traffic flow data, which currently includes source and destination IP addresses and ports, Internet Control Message Protocol data, and the length of data packets. According to an internal 2004 privacy impact assessment (PDF), "the program is not intended to collect information that will be retrieved by name or personal identifier." Members of the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which coordinates federal responses to cyber attacks, analyze the downloaded records once per day in hopes of detecting worms and other "anomalous activity," pinpointing trends, and advising agencies on how best to configure their systems.
Congress worries that .gov monitoring will spy on Americans
Back in 2001 the FBI supposedly responded to criticism about their then plans to eavesdrop on Internet traffic. At that time, the program was called "Carnivore".
Carnivore is specialized software installed on an Internet service provider's network under federal wiretap authority. Used in criminal and national security cases, it is capable of keeping tabs on a suspect's e-mail, instant messages and Web surfing activities.
Privacy and civil-rights advocates argue that the system violates protections against unreasonable search and seizure in the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment. Former Attorney General Janet Reno ordered an independent review of its inner workings after a stir in Congress.
FBI Renames 'Carnivore' Internet Wiretap (2/14/2001)
Of course it was interesting then to look at the FBI's take on the negative response to their spying.
The name change was to have been rolled out in conjunction with an internal Justice Department review of Carnivore to be presented to Attorney General John Ashcroft soon, an FBI official said. But the change was leaked to a trade publication, Government Computer News.
"Had it not been called Carnivore, it probably wouldn't have stirred as much controversy," Bresson said. He said the new alpha-numeric "doesn't stand for anything."
There is, of course, plenty of evidence to suggest that eavesdropping on all Internet and telephonic traffic has already been in place for years. It has been widely reported, as in the Salon article linked to below that "Two former AT&T employees say the telecom giant has maintained a secret, highly secure room in St. Louis since 2002. Intelligence experts say it bears the earmarks of a National Security Agency operation."
Is the NSA spying on U.S. Internet traffic?
June 21, 2006 | In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once employed at the center.
In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only government officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security clearance are admitted to the room, located inside AT&T's facility in Bridgeton. The room's tight security includes a biometric "mantrap" or highly sophisticated double door, secured with retinal and fingerprint scanners. The former workers say company supervisors told them that employees working inside the room were "monitoring network traffic" and that the room was being used by "a government agency."
I have written before about the looming threats to the openness and free flow of information on the Internet by the corporations which control the pipes. Their primary goals right now seem to be primarily aimed at interfering with the flow of traffic for several reasons.
First, a trend which has become most obvious over the past six months, ISPs have been repeatedly discovered to be interfering with traffic in order to throttle it. The reasons here have opened a serious debate because the tremendous growth in file sharing, especially with distributed file sharing systems, are producing heavy traffic loads that are threatening the ability of the connections provided by ISPs to equally provide bandwidth to all their customers. A small minority of users use massive amounts of bandwidth to access and download large masses of data, mostly video, music, and entertainment oriented downloads. The controversy has been over the techniques used by the ISPs, most visibly recently Comcast, in managing this problem. ISPs such as Comcast have been criticized with modifying TCP/IP packets, which is a serious threat to the integrity of the fundamental communication mechanism used for all Internet traffic. For now, Comcast has responded to the criticism, but mainly on procedural grounds. The problems with bandwidth overload remain.
Comcast agrees not to interfere with file-sharing
Second, they want to leverage the traffic as it passes through their final segment they own which connects you to the Internet. They are already experimenting with modifying the packets as they pass through their routers in order to insert advertising that would be delivered to your web browser, embedded in a page you requested. But it will be advertising that was NOT on the original page you requested.
One has to wonder just why they will stop there, when the same technology will make it very easy to not just insert ads, but to delete content from pages they may in their infinite wisdom decide you don't need to see, no longer leaving such decisions up to you.
Third, many vendors are now working with ISPs experimenting with software that drops cookies and keeps extensive records of every Internet site you visit, all your activities while connected and browsing the web. Of course this will reinforce their ability to target you with advertising. But it also shows just how intrusive to any concept of privacy these uses of the technology are, and what a threat they are to any remnants of privacy and freedom of communication on the Internet users might expect in the days and years to come.
Unless of course, as should happen, we resist the efforts of government and corporations to turn the Internet into just the next generation of television.
What does that mean? It means that THEY control the content. They control the presentation of ads.
One of the most egregious examples of what I am referring to is the recent plans to deploy the controversial Phorm system by three of Britain's largest ISPs.
Open Letter to the IC on the legality of Phorm's advertising system
RELEASE: 17 March 2008
The Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) has today released the text of an open letter to Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner (IC) on the legality of Phorm Inc's proposal to provide targeted advertising by snooping on Internet users' web browsing.
The controversial Phorm system is to be deployed by three of Britain's largest ISPs, BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media. However, in FIPR's view the system will be processing data illegally:
* It will involve the processing of sensitive personal data: political opinions, sexual proclivities, religious views, and health -- but it will not be operated by all of the ISPs on an "opt-in" basis, as is required by European Data Protection Law.
* Despite the attempts at anonymisation within the system, some people will remain identifiable because of the nature of their searches and the sites they choose to visit.
* The system will inevitably be looking at the content of some people's email, into chat rooms and at social networking activity. Although well-known sites are said to be excluded, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of other low volume or semi-private systems.
More significantly, the Phorm system will be "intercepting" traffic within the meaning of s1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). In order for this to be lawful then permission is needed from not only the person making the web request BUT ALSO from the operator of the web site involved (and if it is a web-mail system, the sender of the email as well).
And as a second example, as reported in the Wall Street Journal:
Watching What You See on the Web
CenturyTel Inc., a Monroe, La., phone company that provides Internet access and long-distance calling services, is facing stiff competition from cellphone companies and cable operators. So to diversify, it's getting into the online-advertising business.
And not just any online advertising. The technology it's using could change the way the $16.9 billion Internet ad market works, bringing in a host of new players -- and giving consumers fresh concerns about their privacy.
[Inspection Box]
NebuAd's 'deep-packet inspection box' tracks users' online moves.
CenturyTel's system allows it to observe and analyze the online activities of its Internet customers, keeping tabs on every Web site they visit. The equipment is made by a Silicon Valley start-up called NebuAd Inc. and installed right into the phone company's network. NebuAd takes the information it collects and offers advertisers the chance to place online ads targeted to individual consumers. NebuAd and CenturyTel get paid whenever a consumer clicks on an ad.
This technique -- called behavioral targeting -- is far more customized than the current method of selling ads online. Today, it's an imperfect process: companies such as Revenue Science Inc. and Tacoda Inc., which was recently bought by Time Warner Inc., contract with Web sites to monitor which consumers visit them, attaching "cookies," or small pieces of tracking data, to visitors' hard drives so they are recognized when they return. The targeting firms feed the data to Web site owners, who use it to charge premium rates for customized ads. But the information is limited, since the tracking companies can't monitor all of the sites an individual visits.
The corporations have even begun experimenting with techniques that are totally contrary to the agreed upon standards and rules of Internet traffic which have allowed it to function as a hardware and software independent medium of communication, based on adherence by all participants to the rules of the game as embodied in the various standards documents.
Request for Comments
In internetworking and computer network engineering, Request for Comments (RFC) documents are a series of memoranda encompassing new research, innovations, and methodologies applicable to Internet technologies.
Through the Internet Society, engineers and computer scientists may publish discourse in the form of an RFC memorandum, either for peer review or simply to convey new concepts, information, or (occasionally) engineering humor. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) adopts some of the proposals published in RFCs as Internet standards.
One of the worst things they are experimenting with lately is interfering with DNS.
DNS is the name system that underlies every piece of communication you begin in your browser when you type in the name of a web site. Every computer attached to the Internet has a unique IP (Internet Protocol) number, in the form nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn. Humans don't think like that, machines do. When you type in www.dailykos.com in your browser, your browser goes out and talks to the nearest DNS server, asking basically, "Hey, I want to talk to KOS right now. What's his address?" And the DNS server faithfully checks its tables, and goes and asks its neighboring DNS servers up stream if it does not recognize that name, until it finds the name on record, and the IP number associated with it. E.g. right now a traceroute tells me that www.dailykos.com resolves to 208.122.51.48. That info is returned to your web browser, and used to connect to the web site, and began the exchanges of data packets that results in presenting you with the web page you requested.
Now ISPs are starting to toy with hijacking DNS traffic, and redirecting it, for similar reasons to those stated above, in this case taking your typos and redirecting you to advertising.
Verizon defends redirecting typo traffic Says that program is meant to help users who misspell URLs
Verizon is standing by its program of redirecting typo traffic to their company’s own search page, and claims that the redirects are valuable ways to help their users search the Internet.
Although Verizon has been implementing its redirect program on a trial basis in several Midwestern states since June, it came under particular scrutiny earlier this week when ConsumerAffairs.com reported that mistyping URLs while using Verizon’s FiOS service results in getting redirected to Verizon’s own search engine. This led to some accusations by Web journalists and bloggers that Verizon was "shamelessly hijacking web browsers" and was trying to "goose up their revenues via advertising."
This is so serious an issue that I note that Vince Cerf, one of the acknowledged fathers of the Internet, has weighed in on it with serious concern in the NNSquad.org forum on Net Neutrality.
More info on ISP DNS redirections
It may be worse than that. If the diversion is really through
fabricated DNS responses, applications such as email could be at
risk. V
I would urge anyone interested in these issues of Net neutrality and freedom to check out both the NNSquad Network Neutrality Squad and The PRIVACY Forum, both maintained by Lauren Weinstein, an well known and respected advocate on these issues.
I could go on and on. The bottom line is, the magnitude and number of threats continue to grow daily to the integrity and the freedom of the media that you, the DailyKos reader, blithely assume will be there each morning when you login for your daily dose of political upheaval and news and truth, something so sorely lacking in the traditional media, which seem have abandoned all pretense of actually reporting what is going on in the world.
I personally get a little quesy feeling in my gut every time I try to go to www.dailykos.com, and for some reason the site refuses to load. It is impossible not to always have that niggling moment of fear that the corporate and government powers have finally decided to attack their critics by shutting them down.
So the threats are real.
Will the medium that has fostered the growth of the NET Roots in politics die just as it was gaining its maturity? We got to where we are because of the revolutionary nature of the Internet, the vast freedom of expression that it has fostered, what I consider the greatest revolution in communication since the invention of the printed book.
What sort of world of open communication do we have? A free and open neutral Internet. If we can keep it.
Don't for a moment think in your wildest dreams that this does not scare the pants of your government and corporate masters. They will do anything to control the medium.