Yesterday’s post cited an article from the WSJ entitled Iran’s Web Spying Aided by Western Technology. I added some commentary which I decided to pull out since the article has broad implications about government use of the Internet to spy on its citizenry.
The WSJ article does a good job talking about deep packet inspection. This part of the article especially got to me:
Countries with repressive governments aren’t the only ones interested in such technology. Britain has a list of blocked sites, and the German government is considering similar measures. In the U.S., the National Security Agency has such capability, which was employed as part of the Bush administration’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” A White House official wouldn’t comment on if or how this is being used under the Obama administration.
The Australian government is experimenting with Web-site filtering to protect its youth from online pornography, an undertaking that has triggered criticism that it amounts to government-backed censorship.
Content inspection and filtering technology are already common among corporations, schools and other institutions, as part of efforts to block spam and viruses, as well as to ensure that employees and students comply with computer-use guidelines. Families use filtering on their home computers to protect their children from undesirable sites, such as pornography and gambling….
…Nokia Siemens Networks provided equipment to Iran last year under the internationally recognized concept of “lawful intercept,” said Mr. Roome. That relates to intercepting data for the purposes of combating terrorism, child pornography, drug trafficking and other criminal activities carried out online, a capability that most if not all telecom companies have, he said.
Please read those paragraphs several times. The first sentance blew my mind. In my view, any government that uses this technology is inherently repressive, which includes all the governments mentioned subsequently: Britain, Germany, Australia and the US. Please note that this statement does not imply that these countries are anywhere close to being as repressive as Iran. But people in those (and similar) countries take their “freedom” for granted and ignore how that freedom is being eroded. The tool for that erosion is laid out in the last paragraph: the claim made is that we “need” to put these technologies in place to stop all those “bad guys” out there. Many in the technology world argue that the whole concept of “lawful intercept” is just a slippery slope leading inevitably to political oppression. The current Iran situation provides one more smoking gun for this argument.
The Guardian has a follow up article on this topic:
Yet while it’s system is extensive and the way it is used reprehensible, it is worth remembering that this is hardly the first time that this has happened – and barely any major technology company remains entirely free of taint. Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have all been accused of complicity in Chinese censorship, while China’s “great firewall” is largely the work of US networking giant Cisco Systems (for more on the firewall, this Atlantic article by James Fallows is worth reading).
Last year it emerged that Cisco had not simply worked for the Chinese government, but had also actively marketed its technology as a way to repress Chinese citizens. This Wired piece outlines internal documents showing that in 2002 Cisco had said it would help to “combat ‘Falun Gong’ evil religion and other hostiles”.
Elsewhere, every time filtering, censorship or spying takes place in Burma, Madagascar, Syria, Vietnam – or even closer to home – the chances are that some major company is involved somewhere along the line.
The “even closer to home” article is also worth a read along with the NY Times article it cites, since the topic seems not to have much traction in the US press, given all the news about Iran:
…the [NSA] appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants, according to the former analyst, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
He said he and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages. He said Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits — no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told — and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches…
The recent concerns about N.S.A.’s domestic e-mail collection follow years of unresolved legal and operational concerns within the government over the issue. Current and former officials now say that the tracing of vast amounts of American e-mail traffic was at the heart of a crisis in 2004 at the hospital bedside of John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, as top Justice Department aides staged a near revolt over what they viewed as possibly illegal aspects of the N.S.A.’s surveillance operations.
James Comey, then the deputy attorney general, and his aides were concerned about the collection of “meta-data” of American e-mail messages, which show broad patterns of e-mail traffic by identifying who is e-mailing whom, current and former officials say. Lawyers at the Justice Department believed that the tracing of e-mail messages appeared to violate federal law.
And let’s not forget that these intercept technologies can have the exact opposite effect of what they are intended to do:
Avoiding warrants for these cases sounds simple, though potentially invasive of Americans’ civil liberties. Most calls outside the country involve foreigners talking to foreigners. Most communications within the country are constitutionally protected — U.S. “persons” talking to U.S. “persons.” To avoid wiretapping every communication, NSA will need to build massive automatic surveillance capabilities into telephone switches. Here things get tricky: Once such infrastructure is in place, others could use it to intercept communications.
Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations.
Tags: Propaganda
