Now we know why those 1000 are being held in NYC

[John Kozubik]

> 
> The obvious questions that come to mind are (1) How is it that the FBI was
> listening in on the calls of a thousand people at that time, and, (2) with
> this story in hand, how many of these poor victims will try to assert
> their [obviously violated] 1st A rights?
> 


In less dire times, certain capabilities have been suspected, as regards
monitoring and wiretapping technology in place for LEAs, etc.  It is often
maintained that any negative proof of their existence, eg. "I said thus
and such over the phone or in a chat room and nobody came to talk to me"
is due to an unwillingness of the agencies to tip their hand as regards
the existence of these technologies.

That is, it isn't worth it to prove you have real-time monitoring over all
telephone traffic just to catch a prankster in peacetime.

Although proving the existence and quality of domestic monitoring
capabilities is not a priority of mine, for those for whom it is, perhaps
now would be the time to start experimenting again.  The fervor with which
LEAs are now searching, and the desire to break open the case is probably
such that the existence of any domestic monitoring technology would be
allowed, indirectly, to become public knowledge.

You would have to be highly motivated, I suspect, as any "interesting
communication" would clearly land you in very hot water.  Further,
information about "small fish" technologies ("I sent a private message
between two of my own clients on EFnet that was intercepted") is far less
useful than big fish technologies ("I sent a weakly encrypted (56bit
symmetric cipher?) message over a point to point connection between two of
my own modems, across the PSTN").

Please note that I do not condone pranks of any kind, so if you do conduct
a test, send the message or communication to yourself.  (note that the
examples above are self to self communications)

---

On a related note, are there any provisions in the new anti-terror
legislation that would make such self-to-self "interesting" communications
illegal ?


-----
John Kozubik - john at kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com