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• Wednesday, May 16, 2007 01:08 AM

  @ Casual Observer

  Frontline on Domestic Spying

  A good program, but I don't think the show will scare many americans. Americans have chosen to be afraid of the wrong things.

  My comments on seeing the show:

  Yes, the massive snooping is worrisome. Loads of the Narus biggies seem to be ex-NSA or from associated places. But the practicalities of the Internet/telecom volume are that you will have a hard time grabbing all the traffic, and you'd be snowed if you could. NSA used to have the hottest machines on (or in their case, off) the market (first Crays, etc.), but they've been falling behind on the technology end, for many reasons. Nowadays, they buy commercial more and more, amd they need an order of magnitude more power to do surveillance of a given bandwidth. Google may very well have them out-MIPSed right now.

  Not to mention, IP with its decentralised backbones provides too many alternative paths for them to grab everything (which is why the gummint got the CALEA law to insist that ISPs have to provide the capability themselves. But I know just how hard it is even for the ISPs just to pick the spots to put in targeted taps to intercept a specific target.

  But that doesn't prevent them from vicarious snooping in hopes of catching one in ten (or one in a hundred) of the baddie's communications. The problem is that there's a lot of bad that can come from such snoops, and not much hope of it's being actually useful for anything, given the lack of anything near comprehensive coverage along with the lack of ability to analyse the data. They're snooping your shopping lists in hopes of finding a needle in one of the haystacks in the field, well knowing it could be in any of the others if it even exists (al Qaeda has gone a bit "low-tech" lately, from what I've read).

  The CALEA act is being faulted by some, I think unfairly. The CALEA act requires the ability to snoop a specific target, and pass on that information only. And the control of the CALEA wiretaps is within the telcos and IPSs, not in the hands of the gummint (unlike in some countries, I might add). The gummint needs paperwork or authorisation to get the taps in place, and as long as the paperwork is done (and probable cause is shown to a responsible third party), shouldn't be any issue with doing such taps (not to mention, the same facilities are useful for emergency location, such as when someone is missing or their car goes off the road; emergency locations seem to be around hald of all requests for LI services near as I can tell).

  What AT&T did in Ess Eff was not CALEA compliance. Most CALEA equipment I know of doesn't even have the ability for gregarious snooping (and why put such in when the law doesn't require it?; it costs money).

  More later, I guess.... it's late, and the NSA is homing in on my DCHP lease as we speak.

  Cheers,

  —Arne Langsetmo Read Arne Langsetmo's other letters
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