Bush's DHS program continues under Obama

[Bill Stewart]

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 at cs.niu.edu>
>Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2009 04:40:19 -0500 (CDT)
>To: or-talk at seul.org
>Subject: Bush's DHS program continues under Obama
>Reply-To: or-talk at 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/AR2009070202771_pf.html
>
>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.