FBI Head Wants Strong Data Retention Rules 256
KevHead writes "Speaking at a conference of international police chiefs, FBI Director Robert Mueller called for strict data retention guidelines for US ISPs. Echoing DHS head Michael Cherthoff's assertion that the Internet was enabling terrorists to telecommute to work, Mueller went further and said that the US needs stricter data retention guidelines. '"All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims," Mueller said. The solution? Forcing ISPs to retain data for set periods of time.' If that happens, how long before the MPAA and RIAA start asking to take a peek at the data too, as they have in Europe?"
ugh.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ugh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, ObL *is* laughing is ass off... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. make some attacks to high-profile targets in US and its allies
2. see how those people will (slowly but surely) erode their civil liberties and transform _their_ countries in the same kind of totalitarian theocracies as Taliban-Afghanistan
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
PS. too bad those intelligent, enlightened, Spanish people saw right thru our plan and threw Aznar off.
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DUDE! (Score:2)
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Re:DUDE! (Score:5, Insightful)
No no - just drugs and terror.
See, poverty, illiteracy, AIDS, pollution, hunger, disease - and those you didn't mention like genocide, etc., are too hot politically to be fought, for they provide no gain to the government.
Drugs and terror... and let's go ahead and add child porn... allow the government a "war" that can be used to justify reductions in personal privacy, massive amounts of data collection, and emboldening of the Executive.
Those other "wars" are just hippie rally-cries. Duh.
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1984 (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the progression.
Re:ugh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ugh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the police can keep up a steady trickle of arrests of people like this, the "war on terror" can be kept going indefinitely.
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Um, could you? I could pretty easily lay my hands on a bunch of propane cylinders (it'd just take about twenty trips to twenty different hardware stores), but I don't know where I'd get my hands on any explosives (maybe I could roll my own from som
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Convert to Islam
Re:ugh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ugh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ugh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And I must challenge this constant assumption of cell of killers surrounding you and plotting your deaths.
WHERE ARE THEY? It's been five years, for chissakes. On 9-11 itself, they could only get enough manpower to take 4 planes instead of the 12 they wanted. And they can't ever pull that trick again.
Occam's razor, kids. They aren't there. There are no "terror cells" full of brown people saturating the country. It's a truthy crock. The "terrorists" we've kidnapped gave us nothing but lies under torture, which gave us endless terror warnings.
They ain't there. Stop snivelling! BUSH IS LYING. He has no intel at all. We have no humint in these groups, the people we're torturing are nonentities or innocents that we've used as proxies for our anger. All the "facts" Bush has sold us on, from the "terraist cells" to the Iraq terror to Iran to Korea were garbage. We got hit with a simple trick on 9-11. That's it. We don't have to stop the planet to find the evildoers. They are DEAD. We however are making millions of people who hate our guts on a daily basis in Iraq, so I guess it's a goddamned self-fulfilling prophecy after all.
Data Retention... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I worked in a prison as a health care worker a few years ago. During that time I learned that this prision hospital was run by sex offenders. Prisons are run by the inmates if people outside them do not know. This prison hospital in Nashville Tennessee had its "rock men" (prison laborers) all being sex offenders. During that time I learned a lot about sex offenders.
The general profile of a sex offender is someone who cannot control their impulses sexually in some area. Generally they are fairly charism
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They probably have caller ID...
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An FBI that doesn't pursue a party preffered lobbyist line is an FBI that is dangerously out of control? It seems to me that they have been pretty effective of late, not that it would require any great effort, there seems to be quite a few blatanly corrupt targets for them aim at (and they might be aiming pretty high), and come December
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And in other News (Score:2, Insightful)
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Then I hope they checked for patent infringement...
who owns the data? (Score:2)
Supplying free SAN's to ISP's as well? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just imagine an OC-3, you are talking about a lot of storage space.
Re:Supplying free SAN's to ISP's as well? (Score:4, Interesting)
Number of taps: 31
Cost per tap: EUR 9.500 (US$ 11.900)
Compensation per tap: EUR 13 (US$ 16)
How much was that SAN again?
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It seems most of North America, Central America, the Carribean, East and SE Asia, Australia, the South Pacific, and West Africa uses a period. Europe, South America, South and East Africa, the French part of Canada, and a few traitorous places in Central American and the Carribean use a comma. Since the "period" group includes China and India, I would hazard a guess that more people in the world use the period rather than the comma.
I wonder how it feels for a European wh
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Ok, I can see not reading the article. The articles are sometimes long. I can even imagine not reading the summary... the summaries have lots of words in them, too. I can even see blindly clicking the link without looking at the headline. But... dude... you managed to skip the article, the summary, and even the text "FBI Head Wants Strong Data Retention Rules" that's up at the top of your browser window. (hint: "retention" means "retaining it until they ask for it", not waiting until they request a "ta
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why? (Score:5, Insightful)
With the AT&Ts "collaboration" with the NSA, and CARNIVORE, one would think the government already has all the tools they need. Are they now saying that's not enough? That's kind of pathetic, don't you think?
It will never be "enough". (Score:5, Insightful)
When every search / posting / IM / etc from you is available to elected officials (and may be accidentally "leaked"), they hope that most people will self-censor their activities to only items that would be "appropriate".
Should you ever take a stand against the elected officials, they will have access to your records
It's all about maintaining power and control.
Re:It will never be "enough". (Score:5, Interesting)
The first step is to try it out on politicians (they are public figures, after all), with the information being freely available to anyone who wants it. No FOI requests, just a wget (or similar) from a webserver. Severe penalties if that information is not available. Naturally, servers do go down, and that's fine, but that information should be available within 24 hours of it being recorded.
If they are willing to do that, then maybe they could be allowed to do it to the public. I think there would be a severe reduction in stupid laws if politicians (but not other members of the public) were subjected to them during a trial period, with the general public being able to see the results.
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What evidence? Something along the lines of: "Log all network traffic of 300 million Americans, forming vast haystack, in which is one terrorist needle that you can't find, therefore it doesnt' work." Something like that?
I don't suppose that tracking and focusing on known terrorists, or communications with sites with kn
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
They already have a lot of data, but that's not what it's all about:
"Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the Internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Monday."
So, it's not just Terrorists (TM) anymore, it's the "disaffected" they're after.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2574462
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you're not with us, you're "disaffected."
KFG
mod up (Score:2)
If I had mod points, would mod this comment up.
Are we such cowards that we let the administration get away with this?
Are we such cowards that we are afraid of justice (habeus corpus)?
Are we so lazy we want to hand over our duty of vigilence to the police? We are citizens; it is not our duty to pay attention to the country and notice threats against it?
Are we so terrorized we will give up our power to a 'protector government'?
Bah!
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No, it just may mean that they aren't doing what you think they are doing in the way you think they are doing it, if they are doing anything at all.
There are plenty of cases where people "know" the government is doing things, which are false or absurd. Fake moon landings and some of the wilder stor
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It's news like this that makes me appreciate the movie V for Vendetta. How many of you now read this news and not think 'What a load of bullshit!'.
How to retain this data... (Score:2, Funny)
There's no rule about how to store it, is there?
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I get a really really good compression ratio
I'll leave it to the govmint to try and extract it; I tell them they can recover lost data from /dev/random!
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Answer to unwanted data retention is poisoning (Score:5, Interesting)
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It may not be illegal yet, but you realize that the dude in the whitehouse just signed a bill that could effectively suspend habaeus corpus - for US citizens?
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Add to "to do" list for new Congress (Score:5, Informative)
Add stopping this to the list of "things to do after the Democrats take over Congress".
Don't forget to vote, everybody.
And remember, as one leading Democrat has said, if Democrats control either house, there's going to be "oversight, oversight, oversight". Look how much has come out with the Republicans in charge: everything from the plan to divide up northern Iraq amongst oil companies to the CIA's torture program. There has to be more stuff we haven't heard about. Look forward to people like the FBI Director testifying under oath before Congress. Coming soon to a C-SPAN channel near you.
You might also want to volunteer to be a poll watcher, especially if you're in a state with Diebold voting machines.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's still important to get out there and vote so that you can help keep that Congressi
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-b.
One of my most favorite quotes (Score:5, Interesting)
-Cardinal Richelieu (French Minister and Cardinal. 1585-1642)
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I don't think the vile Cardinal had to convince a jury of his peers, and answer endless appeals through several levels of appeals courts.
Wrong outcomes are still possible under the American system, but I think your odds are much better than under the French monarchy.
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"If you're reading this notice, you're not WORKING!!!"
Wouldn't it be cool.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is logically false. I can give you a theoretical and a practical example. Theoretically, any information is more helpful than no information. The only practical exception would be polluting good information with bad information, but since this information would be logically separate from existing information, this problem would not exist.
Practically, have you ever tracked down a hacker at your company? Logs are the BEST place to do this. Look fo
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They can have that right, as long as I have the right to do everything in my power to secure the systems under my control. If not, and I have to leave a backdoor open for them, then I might as well just give up and switch them off, as they'll be wide open to anyone with knowledge of the backdoor.
Part of the solution... (Score:2, Interesting)
Republicans or Democrats in office will not matter. The US has started down a road that has no end (at least not a pretty one).
So if you can't change them, change yourself. Come be part of the solution [anonet.org].
The Fifth Wave* (Score:5, Interesting)
However, by one tiny chip of compromise after another, one infinitesimal shift to accommodate a "reasonable response" after another, a group of people can turn into "The (choose ethnic group) Problem" and suddenly it's okay to treat people as things, the only capital crime there is. You never quite know where you cross the line and suddenly you have become the enemy your grandparents fought war, bloody war to prevent from turning the future into a long night of horror.
Will you have the courage to say "NO" to the new Gestapo? They're just nice guys like you who have a job to do, y'know? Or will you draw a line somewhere and say "At long last, Mr. McCarthy, have you no shame?"
(*Title refers to the short story in The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Find it and read it. Was a school experiment designed to show how good people could turn into black, black Nazis and why there were no Nazi's in Germany after the war. Scares the tar out of me, more so as the days go by.)
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This is utter bull. The crimes are plan
Re:The Fifth Wave* (Score:5, Insightful)
We're all very glad of that over in the UK, by the way. Otherwise, just imagine how much money the IRA would have been able to raise from American donations! Fortunately, the US government always took a very hard line on this and made sure that their citizens were not responsible for funding a terror campaign against their own allies.
Helps after an attack has already happened (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the terrorists will be using encrypted messages or coded messages which don't appear to be anything special (you know those -1 Slashdot comments are for something), this will help retrace the terrorist's online activities after people have died in a terrorist attack. My guess: lots of porn and a few messages to E-mail accounts which no longer exist.
It's just that there are so many disposable E-mail accounts available and the easy access to Internet cafes. If someone is using a disposable E-mail account and an Internet terminal which is paid for in loose change (usually used in airports), how are you going to track that person down one month later? What if the terminal is outside the United States?
Not to mention free Linksys brand wireless Internet access which is available in most areas.
Any government fighting terrorists needs to setup its own terrorist propaganda websites which make use of Microsoft Internet Explorer's many vulnerabilities. Spyware for the spies. Microsoft's poor security practices not only hurt you, they also hurt the terrorists. Of course terrorists using Firefox screws us all.
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Which is precisely why we don't need it. After the 9/11 incident, the US intelligence agencies were able to conclusively prove, from data collected before the incident, that it had happened. We do not have a data collection problem, so any
Hats off to the modern spy state (Score:5, Insightful)
So the EU enacted its spy state law last year, while people said, "even the states does not go that far". The EU Data Retention Directive wants (it needs to be ratified by individual countries) to track every phone call made, every email sent, every web site visited, every cell phone location, and hold this data for over a decade. The data would be available to non-governmental organisations (private firms). Anonymous internet usage would be banned. Anonymous prepaid mobile phone cards would be banned. All this, of course, to save us from terrorism and organised crime.
And the UK has constructed a surveillance system that beats anything ever built by the soviet spy states. Every public urban space is monitored, recorded, tracked. The only privacy you have is in your home, where you are safely under house arrest, unable to do anything to damage the interests of the state.
It was just a matter of time before the FBI asked for the same powers. What police force would not? It's a copper's wet dream. Every one of us stinking criminals-in-waiting tracked like cockroaches in a pen. No more crime. No more disorder. No more rebellion.
UK Data Protection Rules (Score:3, Informative)
Please read the article before quoting... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Please read the article before quoting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say, for instance, that the logs for my telephone show a number of calls to a satellite phone in Afghanistan. Suddenly, I'm a suspect the next time a bomb goes off within about 150 miles of me. What am I saying to this person in Afghanistan? Well, actually, it's my sister who went over there as part of a red cross relief effort, but the local police don't know that and while they're holding me to confirm it, my employer is asking questions.
Questions like "What sort of a person is this who was arrested last week and hasn't been heard from since? Best replace him."
After that happens, it's rather hard to get another job. A common interview question is "Why did you leave your last job?" and the honest answer ("I was arrested and held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act owing to poor evidence") tends to put off prospective employers - chances are they stopped listening after the word "arrested" and now just want me off the premises as quickly as possible.
While *theoretically* a good idea... (Score:3, Informative)
Phone companies do it, after all...
It is nevertheless impractical for ISP's to do the same because there are several orders of magnitude more simultaneous connections than there are with phone companies because phone calls typically last on the order of minutes, while individual IP packets take less than a fraction of a second to transmit and they are done. One could track entire TCP streams, but even those can be over in less than a second, and it wouldn't be helpful for tracking things like UDP or even raw IP. It would require absolutely huge amounts of data storage to chronicle even a single hour's usage in entirety on a major ISP, let alone keeping it around for days or weeks.
On Liberty: (Score:5, Insightful)
There are 2 questions, really:
If you're looking for a guess, I don't have it. All I know is that it bothers me when the government's fear of people they can't even identify is enough reason for them to start "monitoring" the 300 million people in our country that they can identify. I don't know how much liberty one has if they are aware that everything they type, or every call they make, is "monitored". Is that liberty? Does that make anyone feel safer?
European Data Retention and the *AAs (Score:5, Interesting)
Civil torts (ie, copyright infringement) are way outside the ballpark by anybody's measure, so it'll be a long while before they wheedle their way into this. They will try, but Big Content doesn't hold quite the same disproportionate influence in the EU that it does in the USA. So, from a US point of view, I think that you have much more to fear from data retention that EU citizens have, given that AG Gonzales explicitly mentioned copyright infringement in his reasons for pushing this turd of an idea.
Not saying that the data retention doesn't suck - just that the existing fears of abuse are more than enough the scare the bejesus out of me without imagining what *AA snooping would be like. I've yet to be convinced that it's not the usual government trick of "let's spend lots of money (better still, other people's money) on a problem, and rely on the traditional public belief that the government is tackling something because it wouldn't spend billions to accomplish nothing".
--Ng
It won't work (Score:4, Insightful)
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I know what you're saying - and I agree - that legal protections aren'
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Not if it's been collected under the aegis of the EU Data Retention Directive, it can't. Now, Germany is free to pass whatever laws it sees fit. If it wants to retain data for 20 years, it is free to pass such legislation. But the EU DRD is ultra-clear, which
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I never thought it was. And as a tool to fight terrorism, it seems a very limited one.
Dear FBI, (Score:5, Funny)
thank you,
everyone
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You mean like SpamMimic [spammimic.com]? Steganography in spam is a pretty common trick in these times.
With the sheer volume of spam flowing across everyone's routers, 1 or 2 messages in a group of 900 per-day, would be easily missed.
And who is going to pay for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but I am not going to waste my resources storing every email every one of my customers has received from now until kingdom come. Unlike Google, I don't have the spare cash sitting around for that kind of storage space. Make it a law and I bet you see a surge of ISPs basing their servers offshore to protect their investment (customer privacy mainly).
Secondly, the privacy concern
So the FBI reading my sarcastic emails to friends and family is going to help us catch a bunch of terrorists who, last I heard, had one webmaster who was stupid enough to get himself arrested in Germany? I've got news for you guys: Teenagers, CEOs, and computer enthusiasts coordinate things through the internet. I imagine terrorists prefer suicide bombing training camps or mountain hideaways for their secret conferences. Besides, we haven't heard anything of Al Qaeda declaring Jihad on Microsoft over Netmeeting or even MSN Messenger, so it is highly doubtful that they have tried to use them.
As far as 'terrorist websites' go, the FBI just needs to get some of their buds at the CIA to break into the server and plant a basic hit reporter. Figure out who is logging in and making changes, and you've got your man.
Google fans will kill me but... (Score:5, Interesting)
You know.. Gmail..
Here is the deal (Score:4, Insightful)
It is the guy from the FBIs job to demand that our freedoms be observered and monitored. It is his job to lobby politians to pass laws to make his job easier and minimize the tax burden of his department. Its the politians job to take him seriously, concider the facts and then tell him bollocks. If he fails to do this it is your job to make it very clear that this is unacceptable, and then not vote for him in the next elections. If he gets in, then thats democracy, and the freedom that you thought was important, was clearly not that important to your fellow countryman.
Its perfectly possible that, despite living in a liberal democracy at the moment what the people want is to live under the rule of a paternal dictatorship - people are stupid. If thats the case, then democracy will let that happen. All you can do then is either raise a militia or leave. I guess you could always try and educate people, but thats never worked in the past
The simple solution to online terrorists (Score:2)
From TFA:
The simple solution was already revealed [slashdot.org].
own some stock in a data storage co? (Score:2)
Spin, not security (Score:4, Insightful)
This is about control of disaffected people [reuters.com] not fighting real terrorism.
And what's with the comment about not needing to "speak with anybody else" - are the FBI scared of shut-ins [wikipedia.org] now?
How long? (Score:3, Insightful)
So the ISPs are retaining the info, but not long enough for the Feds to do their job right, so they are asking for them to keep them longer. Well how long? Why are the Feds so slow? Will they want to extend the retention length again if the time table they recommended isn't long enough?
Ecncryption (Score:3, Interesting)
If I was to commit a crim over the Internet, I'd encrypt any data transmission I'd use.
Then all they have is the ip/domain I talked to. It's not quite a crime to talk to someone.
Republicans (Score:2)
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Internet Sites = Phone Numbers (Score:2)
Phone companies keep track of who calls who when in a record called the "pen register". These records are readily available to government investigators; all they need to do is tell a judge they're going to look, and no justification is needed. To actually listen to your conversations, they need to justify a court order for the wiretap.
The Internet equivalent (more or less) is what web sites you visit when. So the Feds (from this point of view) just want
Freud ? (Score:2)
Now is that a typo ?
If they can identify the offenders, surely they would prevent future victims ?
Or maybe it's a Freudian slip, because they know it won't prevent anything, but maybe, just maybe, enable them to exact retribution after the fact. And it's instilling the notion that they are
They're not holding all the strings (Score:2)
We've seen what happens when we give the government everything it wants... abuse, lies and deceit. I don't hate the government, I just hate the corrupt, power-hungry people running it.
Now let's try something different, an actual democracy in the US..
Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these kind of laws and "guidelines" aren't being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we a
sigint is a doomed technique (Score:2)
There's nothing law enforcement can do, no law that can be passed, that guarantees they'll always be able to listen in on bad guys. Even if they get this thing rammed through, it's not going to do any good, because smart bad guys will know what the law is and what is required to be retained. They'll work around it.
And bad guys aside, there's also the issue of innocent people. I'm not talking about just the collateral damage of people losing their privacy and saying "what a shame" or "how dare you do thi
We don't delete for no reason (Score:3, Insightful)