Scott, Cpunks - While there certainly are serious problems with the Obama Administration acting like the Bush Administration, especially the Justice Department and National Security, this doesn't appear to be one of them. Try reading the WaPo article with the assumption that the reporter doesn't understand the technology as well as you do... i.e. the way you'd read most technology articles, and try to guess what they're _actually_ talking about. As far as I can tell, they're talking about Intrusion Detection, trying to look at the traffic pointed to *.gov to find out if it's safe or hostile traffic - not for political content, but for viruses and malware and break-in attempts. Because they're the NSA, they of course think they're the smartest dudes in the business, and maybe they are or maybe it's just ego - they at least have lots of practice being attacked by well-funded attackers as well as random teenagers. Remember that when they're talking "civilian" here, they don't mean "citizens' home internet connectivity" - they mean "Feds who wear suits, not uniforms"; the military has its own sets of network protection. The real public-network question here is how deeply they're going to look into the ISPs that are sending traffic to the feds through this system - are they just checking whois records and block lists, or are they also doing more intrusive checks on the people who contact .gov? If your kid's PC gets infected by a botnet and starts sending spam to the White House, will the NSA come knocking, or will your ISP just get a "please clean up yet another zombie" note? Also, how deeply are they looking at content? Are they going to use this to harass Feds doing politically sensitive work that doesn't share their political agendas? Or are they really just looking for viruses and bad Javascript? My guess is the latter, at least for the initial deployment. It's just that with the culture of secrecy and abuse, the civilian Feds may not trust them, plus it's crossing lines into somebody else's bureaucratic turf.
From: Scott Bennett <bennett@cs.niu.edu> Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2009 04:40:19 -0500 (CDT) To: or-talk@seul.org Subject: Bush's DHS program continues under Obama Reply-To: or-talk@freehaven.net After the demise of the constitutional republic, the North American Surveillance State continues to grow ever nastier, complete with an unconscionable slur on the good name of Albert Einstein. See the article at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070202...
The need for tools like tor and PGP/GPG ought to become more and more apparent to Americans as time goes on. Meet the new boss: same as the old boss. Joe Stalin, eat your heart out.