[Re: [s-t] Details on the AT&T/NSA wiretapping]

[Eugen Leitl]

[from somelist]

>  That's what it appears we are up against, folks. Real-time semantic data
>  monitoring on a huge scale. A scale beyond what most of us can even
>  comprehend. It's scarey.
>
> http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/8/14724/28476

DailyKos just got around to noticing that EFF had sued AT&T?
The suit was filed in January!
 http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_01.php
No wonder the Republicans are winning; their opponents don't notice
what each other are doing.

Yes, this type of monitoring is why Gonzales said:
 "'It would have been difficult, if not impossible' to amend FISA to
 provide the wiretap authority."
 http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Congressmen_tear_into_Gonzales_over_NSA_04
06.html

Gonzales never elaborates on why, but it appears to be because FISA is about
granting individual wiretaps one by one, and that isn't how this stuff works.
If he filed even the retroactive wiretap requests FISA permits, he'd be
filing
hundreds or thousands or more per day, which would cause a bit of notice as
to what he was really doing.

And this would explain why the other day he said he "can't rule out"
domestic wiretaps among U.S. citizens:
 http://www.krqe.com/expanded.asp?ID=14679

Because they're already doing it, since that's how this stuff works:
it hoovers up everything it can get into its maw and looks for patterns.

An unattributable source remarks that they can't really be hoovering up
*everything*.  Maybe not, but they can pick selected major links, most
of which will probably have some purely domestic traffic on them, too.

Also, while semantic on the one hand can mean simply selecting ports
from packet headers, semantic to NSA has also for many years meant
pattern matching on message data contents.  So if the former type of
semantic monitoring, perhaps in combination with IP address information,
is used to select data for the latter type of semantic monitoring, we
have a plausible mechanism for what this wiretap system is doing.

Is that really what it's doing?  Maybe EFF's lawsuit will result in
an answer to that question.  I doubt we'll ever get one directly from
Gonzales.

The scary part is that Gonzales' stonewalling can't really be intended
to keep terrorists from finding out this is going on.  We know some
well-known terrorist organizations have competent technical people
who could do the same analysis DailyKOS just did.

So who is he trying to hide it from?  Could it be... Congress?

Which means he doesn't trust Congress or the public to agree with what
the administration is doing, and he thinks the solution is to do it anyway.
Which means he and his boss are subverting the Constitution.  Which is
exactly what high crimes and misdemeanors are about.

Restore the Republic: impeach Bush.

> -ken

-jsq

	[Yes.  I can readily believe that they can sort traffic by IP
	 address and protocol.  If they have a target list, this
	 hardware looks capable of keeping track of the activities of
	 those targets.  Up to, and including, "anyone who visits
	 Moveon.org" or even "dailykos.org" ---p*zz*]

----- End forwarded message -----
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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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