US Government to Monitor All of Cyberspace?

For our security of course.

From the Wall Street Journal

Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. “This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Ok, blatantly obvious privacy concerns aside I see this creating a slippery slope. By that I mean how long until this technology goes from being used to protect us from being used to protect us from ourselves? Eventually someone is going to wonder if its possible to use this to protect children by tracking or blocking visitors to kiddie porn sites. Then some administration down the road decides to do the same with sites that depict the denigration of women. Then another decides to do the same with hate speech and another cruelty to animals and so on and so on until eventually we're behind the equivalent of a moral Great Firewall of China.

To me that is the problem with such broad ranging surveillance initiatives. It's not always the government of today one needs to fear, it's the unforeseen administrations of tomorrow.

Plus there is always the chance that any such security initiative will be rendered obsolete by a sixteen year old kid in Micronesia a week after it's rolled out.

h/t to Donklephant

Privacy Vs Security

Over at Donklephant Justin Gardner has had some rather interesting posts regarding privacy abuses under current US Anti-Terrorism laws. I'm practically Libertarian about privacy. Largely I think that stems from growing up in the middle of nowhere with so much privacy that we could have sun bathed naked on the front lawn and nobody would have known coupled with the fact that I'm an only child. I'm just used to more privacy than most Americans. On that note it was largely The Patriot Act and the ease with which it could be abused that started me down the path to become a blogger. Since the Patriot Act it's only gotten worse. Take for example this article from the WaPo:

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department’s Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf....

The DHS database generally includes "passenger name record" (PNR) information, as well as notes taken during secondary screenings of travelers. PNR data -- often provided to airlines and other companies when reservations are made -- routinely include names, addresses and credit-card information, as well as telephone and e-mail contact details, itineraries, hotel and rental car reservations, and even the type of bed requested in a hotel.

The records the Identity Project obtained confirmed that the government is receiving data directly from commercial reservation systems, such as Galileo and Sabre, but also showed that the data, in some cases, are more detailed than the information to which the airlines have access.

Now combine that with this short list of abuses of current anti-terrorism law:

FBI apologizes to lawyer held in Madrid bombings: Link

Homeland Security saves America by busting a toy store owner for legally selling a Rubik’s Cube knockoff: Link

FBI invokes Patriot Act for Criminal Copyright Infringement: Link

Though warned in 2001 to use this power sparingly, FBI agents issued more than 47,000 National Security Letters in 2005, more than half of which targeted Americans: Link

Drug-tunnel bust aided by controversial provision of USA Patriot Act: Link

FBI Improperly Used Patriot Act to Gain Information on Citizens, Justice Department Says: Link

Search Records Requests under Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional: Link

Police invoked the Patriot Act when surreptitiously entering and searching a home or office without notifying the owner 108 times during a 22-month period, according to a one-page summary released by the Justice Department: Link

Police Log Confirms FBI Role In Arrests of anti-War Protesters: Link

Patriot Act smackdown: Librarians 1, FBI 0: Link

FBI Papers Indicate Intelligence Violations: Link

After 9/11: The War on Immigrants: Link

Patriot Act report documents civil rights complaints:
Link

ACLU, Muslims sue FBI over mosque surveillance: Link

Patriot Act used to round up “eco-terrorists.”: Link

Now stop and think of everything you've ever said via phone, IM, and email that you'd prefer to remain just between you and its intended recipient. Because if we don't draw the line soon, given the current march of technological innovation, eventually every argument with a girlfriend, every reaction to news of the death of a loved one, every remembrance of "how good last night was" will be on file somewhere. Now what bureaucrat do you trust with that?

Spy in the Sky?

From the WaPo:
Domestic Use of Spy Satellites To Widen

The Bush administration has approved a plan to expand domestic access to some of the most powerful tools of 21st-century spycraft, giving law enforcement officials and others the ability to view data obtained from satellite and aircraft sensors that can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings and underground bunkers.

A program approved by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security will allow broader domestic use of secret overhead imagery beginning as early as this fall, with the expectation that state and local law enforcement officials will eventually be able to tap into technology once largely restricted to foreign surveillance.

Administration officials say the program will give domestic security and emergency preparedness agencies new capabilities in dealing with a range of threats, from illegal immigration and terrorism to hurricanes and forest fires. But the program, described yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, quickly provoked opposition from civil liberties advocates, who said the government is crossing a well-established line against the use of military assets in domestic law enforcement. more

The Supreme Court already struck down using thermal sensing technology without a warrant so access to this technology would be of very limited use in day to day operations. I see much potential for abuse though and thats what should concern people.

Over at Captain's Quarters Captain Ed brings up this additional point:

Second and perhaps more importantly, American legal tradition has separated military and foreign-intel collection from domestic law enforcement, and for good reasons. The Posse Comitatus Act forbids the military (except the Coast Guard, for certain purposes) from acting in a law-enforcement role, except under emergencies specifically requiring martial law. This law keeps the federal government from usurping power from local and state authorities. Since these satellites were launched with strictly military and foreign-intel missions in mind, using them as tools for law enforcement may not entirely cross the PCA, but it gets too close for comfort.

Unless the use of the satellites is strictly limited to national-security applications, such as a counterterrorist operation or immigration enforcement (both of which are legitimate national-security concerns under federal jurisdiction), satellites should not be used as law-enforcement tools. We did not put those military assets in orbit to be deployed against the people of the United States.

Its really starting to seem to me as though there is an accidental war being waged against privacy these days in the name of security. Whats sad is that privacy is being eroded to fight symptoms of larger problems (badly waged war on drugs, crappy middle eastern policies, poverty etc etc). How much privacy are we going to allow to slip away before we start fighting the fire rather than the smoke?

And then there's corporate data mining.......

Digital Reputation

Thomas Friedman did an interesting piece (Behind the pay firewall)about one of the pluses and minuses of the information age.

When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer — and each of us so much more transparent.


The implications of all this are the subject of a new book by Dov Seidman, founder and C.E.O. of LRN, a business ethics company. His book is simply called “How.” Because Seidman’s simple thesis is that in this transparent world “how” you live your life and “how” you conduct your business matters more than ever, because so many people can now see into what you do and tell so many other people about it on their own without any editor. To win now, he argues, you have to turn these new conditions to your advantage.

For young people, writes Seidman, this means understanding that your reputation in life is going to get set in stone so much earlier. More and more of what you say or do or write will end up as a digital fingerprint that never gets erased. Our generation got to screw up and none of those screw-ups appeared on our first job résumés, which we got to write. For this generation, much of what they say, do or write will be preserved online forever. Before employers even read their résumés, they’ll Google them. more

I'm sort of fortunate in that I chose the handle (as it used to be called) Dyre42 sixteen years ago and then transferred it over to the internet once it became more widely available (and affordable) in that there really isn't much linked to my real name.

But my children will grow up with much of their lives being documented on the interwebs. In order to maintain some type of firewall between the real and virtual worlds they'll have to actually think ahead about what they want people to be able to find out about them online. And frankly that wasn't in the parenting manual that comes attached to the baby when its born.