[Infowarrior] - New US plan for Internet surveillance in the works

[Richard Forno]

(I'll have more salient comments later this week as I learn more, but from
what I've seen here and been briefed on elsewhere, this is a disaster for
all involved on a variety of issues from privacy to implementation to
network survivability...........rf)


US drafting plan to allow government access to any email or Web search
RAW STORY
Published: Monday January 14, 2008

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/US_drafting_plan_to_allow_government_0114.html
 

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for
cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps
look like a "walk in the park," according to an interview published in the
New Yorker's print edition today.

Debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ³will be a walk in the
park compared to this,² McConnell said. ³this is going to be a goat rope on
the Hill. My prediction is that we¹re going to screw around with this until
something horrendous happens.²

The article, which profiles the 65-year-old former admiral appointed by
President George W. Bush in January 2007 to oversee all of America's
intelligence agencies, was not published on the New Yorker's Web site.

McConnell is developing a Cyber-Security Policy, still in the draft stage,
which will closely police Internet activity.

"Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean
giving the government the autority to examine the content of any e-mail,
file transfer or Web search," author Lawrence Wright pens.

³Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation, he said,"
Wright adds. "Giorgio warned me, 'We have a saying in this business:
ŒPrivacy and security are a zero-sum game.'"

A zero-sum game is one in which gains by one side come at the expense of the
other. In other words -- McConnell's aide believes greater security can only
come at privacy's expense.

McConnell has been an advocate for computer-network defense, which has
previously not been the province of any intelligence agency.

According to a 2007 conversation in the Oval Office, McConnell told
President Bush, ³If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single US bank
through cyber-attack and it had been successful, it would have an order of
magnitude greater impact on the US economy.²

Bush turned to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, asking him if it was true;
Paulson said that it was. Bush then asked to McConnell to come up with a
network security strategy.

"One proposal of McConnell¹s Cyber-Security Policy, which is still in the
draft stage, is to reduce the access points between government computers and
the Internet from two thousand to fifty," Wright notes. "He claimed that
cyber-theft account for as much as a hundred billion dollars in annual
losses to the American economy. 'The real problem is the perpetrator who
doesn¹t care about stealing‹he just wants to destroy.'"

The infrastructure to tap into Americans' email and web search history may
already be in place.

In November, a former technician at AT&T alleged that the telecom forwarded
virtually all of its Internet traffic into a "secret room" to facilitate
government spying.

Whistleblower Mark Klein said that a copy of all Internet traffic passing
over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco
office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance
had access -- via a cable splitting device.

"My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was
hard-wired to the secret room," Klein. said "And effectively, the splitter
copied the entire data stream of those Internet cables into the secret room
-- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing,
everything that goes across the Internet."

"As a technician, I had the engineering wiring documents, which told me how
the splitter was wired to the secret room," Klein continued. "And so I know
that whatever went across those cables was copied and the entire data stream
was copied."

According to Klein, that information included Internet activity about
Americans.

"We're talking about domestic traffic as well as international traffic,"
Klein said. Previous Bush administration claims that only international
communications were being intercepted aren't accurate, he added.

"I know the physical equipment, and I know that statement is not true," he
added. "It involves millions of communications, a lot of it domestic
communications that they're copying wholesale."