Internet devices threaten NSA's ability to gather intelligence legally

By Shane Harris, National Journal

Among the threats facing the National Security Agency are Al Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency, and eBay.

Yes, eBay, the online auction house. Not because its members sell state secrets, but because of a company that eBay purchased last year -- Skype.

Skype is an online service that lets people converse through their computers. Its 75 million users place voice calls over the Internet. The calls sound clear. They're free, because phone carriers aren't used. And because of the Internet's diffused architecture and its facility for privacy, Skypesters' identities, their locations, and the substance of their conversations can be undetectable. This is not what the NSA's worldwide eavesdroppers want to hear.

Skype and other widely used Internet communications devices, including e-mail, threaten the NSA's ability to gather intelligence and to do so legally. For more than four years, without warrants and by order of President Bush, the agency has hunted for terrorists by intercepting communications between people in the United States and people abroad possibly connected to terrorism.

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=33816&dcn=e_ndw

Who will protect us from those that are supposed to protect us?

Once Bush is removed from office, we must start dismantling the police state apparatus that he has built since 9-11.

Ah, but who’s to guard the guards?

And the absurdity lies in knowledge that those of a true criminal bent would make effort to hide their tracks long before the authorities sought to find them. The ones left in the net would be the dreamers and the legitimate protestors, those who seek to use the system as it's designed -- who are the intended target from the first, if we but recognze the tenor of the times.

he knows better than to trust technology. Time is not a factor. True believers are in it for the long haul, so a few days doesn't matter.

this was the short, pleasant looking guy with glasses -- you may remember him, I unfortunately don't have his name or a link to this statement -- but in answer to an American journalist's question about how the Taliban could hope to have revenge on the US, he replied: "The future is not long for he who waits for it."

That statement haunts the dreams I have for my children and their children's children. It echoes something Bill Clinton said in the run-up to the IraqAttaq, the belief that we need to be careful how we deal with people because we'll live in the same world with them 50 and 100 years from now.

don't become another at&t

the ONLY reason for this has got to because it threatens the PROFITS of the corporations. and since WHEN has the NSA cared a whit about legality? they are, as we speak, datamining domestic information illegally AND trying desperately to cover it up.

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Legal doesn't enter into the USA's Administrations' SOP.

It's more of a matter of what they can get away with.

Murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis ain't really "legal"

but they got away with it

So far . . .

(sigh)

MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, and Trillan all have the same features. Does that mean their owners work with NSA and Skype's doesn't? Technology, specifically the internet, just keeps tripping up spying on Americans.

These IM packages basically all use the same technology it's just tcp/ip.

Skype and other widely used Internet communications devices, including e-mail, threaten the NSA's ability to gather intelligence and to do so legally.

Is that sentence a bit unsettling. I would assume if they have a court order they could listen (legally). What exactly are they trying to say...that they are miffed they can't just listen to any and all. Oops, but they already do that by order of President Bush (as they so politely noted).

IOW...on the surface this article makes no sense. I think reading between the lines is necessary.

The other services you mention and most voice over IP services don't have encryption without add-on products.

instead of phone cards and Trak phones. IP numbers can be monitored and any data can be pulled off the net and reconstructed. Someone using a phone card can call from anywhere and is unpredictable.

Allowing all this secrecy and spying bullshit was a mistake in the first place. You can't run a democracy that way.