I came across a disturbing report from The Raw Story about National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell’s 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. The plan would give the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search.
What is even more disturbing is that the infrastructure to tap into Americans’ email and web search history may already be in place. The article refers to a November incident where 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. Mark Klein (the former AT&T employee) 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 in 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.”
How many other companies are storing data such as this? This is one of the reasons for the search engine privacy wars in July of last year where the four major search engines made moves to protect users privacy.
Another scary thought is that is companies like AT&T, Google and even the government have access to our most private information, could it not easily fall into the wrong hands – the hands of those who would look to use it for evil?
Advocates of this type of policy would probably argue that if you have nothing to hide, than you have nothing to be afraid of. However at what point do we say, “enough is enough!” When we have no privacy left whatsoever?
David Wallace
David Wallace, co-founder and CEO of SearchRank, is a recognized expert in the industry of search and social media marketing. Since 1997, David has been involved in developing successful search engine and social media marketing campaigns for large and small businesses.
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So what? The government knows you are surfing porn and resending the same chain mail you sent last week. Big whoop.
Either this means nothing (privacy itself isn’t really anything we need to protect in the forever bemoaning repetitive knee jerk fashion) or you are one of the people we need to track with this sort of behavior. Its as simple as that.
What is more important to us; safety and the ability to thwart kiddy fiddlers and terrorists or the certainty that out banal and dull emails and telephone conversations are kept secret from the people we choose to let protect us?
So Agent Smith, you seem to fall under the category of “why fear if you have nothing to hide.” I’m all for nabbing terrorists, kiddie porn freaks and the like. I think it is the “no warrant required” aspect that is a little scary. At least with a warrant, there has to be probable cause to prey into someone’s privacy. Strip away the need for a warrant and all are left naked.
Maybe that might not be so bad as far as online data goes but what happens when the government wants to put tracking devices on our vehicles so we can be automatically issued speeding tickets when exceeding the legally posted speed limits? Or maybe track the amount of energy we use or food we eat and fine us when they feel it is excessive?
Those may be extreme examples of government control but many a times, seizing control over something is a step by step process. A little here, a little there until before you know it, complete control is obtained.
I agree that it’s pretty hard to have privacy nowadays. About the “why fear if you have nothing to hide.” question, there was a debate on the Bruce Schneier blog recently and many arguments were quite relevant.
Now, how to protect? So far we used anonymity to protect privacy, but considering all this intrusion, it’ll be quite hard. Personally, I use obfuscation tools. It means that instead of hiding what I do, I’ll show what I do and what I pretend to do. For instance, to keep secret about the “Sex and the city» movie (I’m not fan), I heard they’ve made some fake movie scenes in public places. So you have no way to distinguish between false rumors and true rumors. You can do the exactly same thing about your web browsing.
Especially, I’m developing a FF plug-in that generates fake searches (see my website). The same thing can be done for every kind of traffic, not only web searches.
Definitely, we have to forget about anonymity…