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Thursday, September 14, 2006
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German Tor Network Just Fine, Tor Director Says.
While German police have seized several Tor servers, Tor executive director Shava Nerad says that Tor itself is not under attack, that the police haven't charged any Tor server operators and the organization expects the servers will be returned without incident.
We are simply part of a very wide net that they cast trying to track someone doing something illegal. It's not much different from what would have happened if the police were investigating someone who had made obscene phone calls where the police would have seized the logs of the phone company.
The police won't find any useful information in the servers, since none of the volunteer operators enable logging on the Tor servers, according to Nerad.
"In fact, that scenario of them checking for logs is worst case," Nerad said. "Likely, they just seized every machine with an IP which had touched someone doing something nefarious. They probably have no
idea that these were even Tor servers."
"I don't believe German police have a deep understanding of how an anonymizing system works and none of these routers have logs," Nerad said.
She fully expects that the servers will be returned, though the question is when.
"The mill of jurisprudence turns slowly, but exceedingly fine," Nerad said. "What happens is that this will all blow over, and they get their servers back."
Europeans value privacy and anonymity more than the United States, and there's no political moves in Europe to criminalize anonymity, according to Nerad.
Nerad learned of the seizures Thursday night, but the organization didn't send out a press release because they didn't consider it to be an attack on Tor.
But, now that the story has hit Slashdot?
"Now we are talking about it, otherwise there's no containing the brush fire," Nerad said. [27B Stroke 6]
2:34:29 PM 
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Court Declines To Hear Campus Wiretapping Challenge.
The FCC rules in question re-interpreted a 1994 law known as CALEA, which distinguished between telecom networks, such as the traditional phone system and Internet providers.
Under that law, telecoms were forced to make it easier for law enforcement to listen in on phone calls.
Civil liberties groups controversially agreed to the legislation, so long as the Internet was not subject to the technical dictates of federal law enforcement agencies.
In August 2005, the FCC announced the bargain was off.
The American Council on Education challenged the extension of the rules to college networks, but a district court panel voted 2-1 to allow the FCC to sometimes regulate broadband providers as telecommunications providers and sometimes as information services. (Ruling)
The upshot, according to my good editor Mr. Poulsen:
Universities and broadband ISPs will be on the hook for an expensive retrofitting of their networks with surveillance gear, while law enforcement agencies will enjoy much quicker and easier access to information like a user's e-mail headers and the websites they visit, or -- with a court order -- a real time feed of the target's entire internet stream.
The American Council on Education can now appeal the ruling (.pdf) to the Supreme Court, but that's always a long shot.
 [27B Stroke 6]
2:20:49 PM
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New Site Educates Political Speakers About Their Rights Online. The vast majority of political speech by individuals on the Internet is fully protected by the law and carries no risk of violating campaign finance rules. That is the key message of NetDemocracyGuide.org, a new Web site created by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) to educate Internet users about their rights and obligations under campaign finance law. Developed with the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, NetDemocracyGuide.org makes it easy for bloggers and other citizen activists to quickly understand the new campaign finance rules, and how those rules apply to them. [Center for Democracy and Technology]
1:46:30 PM
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Senate Judiciary Approves 3 NSA Bills.
The Senate Judiciary panel today passed three different measures that amend the law regarding the government's use of surveillance for foreign intelligence gathering, a response to the revelations about the Administration's end run around the laws to authorize warrantless wiretapping of Americans and a recent court ruling that found that program
unconstitutional.
The bills now go to the full Senate for debate and a vote, and according to the ACLU's legislative counsel Lisa Graves, Specter has moved to have his bill passed on a voice vote.
The committee, headed by Arlen Specter, passed 10-8 on party lines, a bill crafted by Specter in conjunction with the Vice President that, in its original form, made more radical changes to the nation's surveillance laws than the Patriot Act did.
Analysis here and here.
That bill is S.2453, the "National Security Surveillance Act."
I haven't yet seen the text as passed today, but will update as soon as I can.
The committee also passed, again along party lines, a bill by Senator Mike DeWine's (R-OH) called "Terrorist Surveillance Program Act of 2006," that likewise loosens restrictions on government surveillance and allows for warrantless surveillance.
Senator Feinstein's bill, which Specter also signed onto and voted for, includes some minor government-friendly tweaks, but re-affirms that all wiretapping must be in accord with FISA. That provision all but calls the current NSA program illegal, though Feinstein has not come out and said so.
The committee was never briefed on the extent or oversight of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of American citizens' communications.
The ACLU reacted immediately, saying that the committee should be investigating, not legalizing, the warrantless surveillance.
"Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee acted as a rubber stamp for the administration's abuse of power," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress has a right and obligation to conduct meaningful oversight on the unlawful actions of the president. But instead of investigating lawbreaking, the Senate Judiciary Committee wants to make it legal. We urge the full Senate to reject any attempts to ratify this illegal program."  [27B Stroke 6]
1:18:25 PM
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NSA Bill "Major Disaster," Mainstream Civil Lib Group.
The Center for Democracy and Technology's policy director Jim Dempsey, a longtime expert on national security law who testified to the Judiciary Committee on Senator Arlen Specter's NSA bill, described the bill's passage out of committee a "major disaster."
Specter's bill was drafted in concert with the Vice President's office, and Specter has championed the bill because the administration promised him that it would submit its warrantless wiretapping program to a secret court for review, though the bill makes that optional, and arguably makes the program legal, due to changes to the law governing surveillance.
What started out as Senator Specter wanting to rein in the president's program has turned on its head and is now not just a legislative ratification of the program, but an expansion of warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
It would allow the NSA to turn its vacuum cleaners on even domestic phone calls and emails of citizens.
And -- they do all of this in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion by defining all kinds of categories of surveillance to be not surveillance.
The bill is basically saying that any time you are targeting a foreigner, even if you are collecting calls to us citizens, that's not surveillance.
And anytime you are targeting nobody, but scooping up vast quantities of calls, that's not surveillance.
This bill goes light years or miles beyond the Patriot Act.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is such a complicated statute and so much of the weight of it is borne by the definitions, that I'm not sure the sponsors of these bills appreciate what they are doing.
The people who drafted this bill knew what they were doing, and it's been a very clever sell job.
[27B Stroke 6]
1:13:31 PM
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ACLU Hates NSA Bill.
The ACLU's senior legislative counsel Lisa Graves calls the passage of Specter's bill by the Senate Judiciary committee "incredible" and "stunning."
The Administration has taken their illegal conduct in wiretapping Americans without court orders in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Constitution and used it as springboard to not only get FISA changed to allow the Terrorist Surveillance program, but to actually, going forward, not give protections to American's privacy rights.
The bill would warrantless surveillance the rule, not the exception.
What's really a shame is that supporters of the bill don't know what they are supporting and don't know the consequences of the bill. We had a dozen hearings on the substance of Patriot Act last year, including several hearings on the roving wiretap provisions that are FISA's authorization for wiretaps.
Then the President went out on the campaign trail saying how great the Patriot Act was because it gave them access to terrorist cellphones. They could monitor their cellphones, roving from line to line.
Yet here we are with this bill that no one knows what it does, and they were supposed to get these powers in the Patriot Act -- the very rationale they gave last year for keeping the Patriot Act last year.
Now it turns out the warrant process is optional anyways.
They want to blow FISA out of the water by making it optional, and defining things that are electronic surveillance as not electronic surveillance and the Attorney General gets to do these massive certifications.
This is bad, bad, bad for the American people.  [27B Stroke 6]
1:09:06 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Paul Hardwick.
Last update: 10/1/06; 4:29:40 AM.
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