National Intelligence Director Wants To Monitor All Net Communications

Source: Information Week

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has developed a policy to monitor the Internet, but President Bush has not announced it yet.

By K.C. Jones
InformationWeek
January 18, 2008 03:19 PM


The federal government should be able to read all communications on the Internet, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell said during a New Yorker interview.

Lawrence Wright, who interviewed McConnell for a piece in this week's issue, said that McConnell has developed a cyber security policy that would include such a provision, but President George W. Bush has not announced it yet.

The New Yorker's Web site features a podcast in which Wright is interviewed and summarizes McConnell's views on the issue, as well as other intelligence matters.

"He's come up with a cyber security policy that the President has not announced yet but it would in many ways revolutionize the relationship between government and industry and also with American citizens," Wright said. "Every bit of information throughout the Internet could be monitored by the government. This is going to be a very thorny development."

Wright said that such a policy would require Americans to give up the presumption of privacy, but it may be the only way to protect transportation, security, and other critical systems that rely on the Internet.



Read more: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205901409

I know they have developed programs like 'omnivore' but come on. I dunno, sounds like fascist wishful thinking to me.

And they set up proxy servers to flag words that then flag all of the persons comments.

They're doing this anyway with many providers and search engines as well as sifting through what's aready on the internet.

What they search on would have to be very narrow for the results to be manageable, and they seem to be talking about 'all the information throughout the Internet', which includes not only email, but forums, web pages, blogs etc... Not saying they can't do it, and it's a horrible, probably unconstitutiional idea, but we're talking about extreme amounts of data here. I hope this gets nowhere.

Yes, they can do this, right now. They just put in their filter criteria for what to look for.

Now what you're saying will work when it means sorting through the data after they'veretrieved it(storage for what they retrieve will also be a bid deal). They'll be too buried in data they flagged as suspicious and dangerous and won't have time or resources to sort through it.

but yeah, I have some idea. And yes, my point is really about what do they do with the retrieved information: they will at some point need human eyes to verify and vet the results, and unless the criteria are extremely narrow, they will have an issue resourcing the people to do that.
:hi:

euphemisms or code words and phrases to cover their activities.

The people who will get caught in these nets will be the innocents who go off on a rant, still expecting the benefits of free political speech guanteed by the Constitution.

Of course, that is a thing of the past. What was it Bush said about the Supreme Law of Our Land? Oh yeah. "It's just a piece of paper."

To monitor a single OC196 backbones running at full capacity (9.6 Gbits/sec), let alone a few hundred... Then, setting up a private network to data mine even just filtered packet grabs into a indexable database sounds like something we are at least a decade away from being able to perform.

Once anything even close to this is implemented, there will be a surge in demand for third-party secure proxy servers. Locate them in Sweden and it would be very difficult for the U.S. Government to seize access logs.

What you say may be true to some degree if you assume they're actually using it for criminal investigations. But you should know better.

This is really a giant data mining apparatus intended to be used against political opponents. They either filter for a particular person, or they go fishing for suitable targets based on behavior, like posting or even visiting particular sites.

J Edgar Hoover would have loveed this because it would have been much easier for him to start "whispering" campaigns against such "enemies of the state" as Martin Luther King, Jr.

But easier to accomplish.

and up and running....

but constrained by lots of technical and human limitations, no doubt (cf. eg. shortage of translators like Sybel Edmonds?)

he should start by bugging the Supreme Court Justices.
If they approve this sort of shit then they should be first to live under it.

I can hardly contain my outrage. I am not surpriseed however.

This makes my blood boil.

I am posting via my handheld for now. Later I will really dig into this.

It' time for a Revolution people.

This can not, and must not be allowed to happen, or we are surely all doomed.

Monitor This.

Millions of people hate the United States. Duh.

What they are really trying to find is those photographs of the GOP leadership, um, "partying."

I've heard from reliable sources that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the caboose.

someone in the White House or congress may needs to "lose" a few million e-mails in the future.

to make us safe, do we really need that 'safety?'

OhioChick

Big Brother anyone?.. Everyone should have a copy of the book that George Orwell wrote in 1948, against the Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin... But you better get a copy before they are keeping track of everyone.. They may come to your house to ransack your library.. Orwell's 1948 was forbidden in the eastern block from 1948, to the Berlin Wall was taking down..

And today, it looks more and more that USA is the Soviet, specially with all this "we have to monitor, everywhere anywhere":. This would never be to the best, if the government wanted to keep a track of everything we are doing on internet..

The land of the free?.. Not anymore... You are building fences, walls, and now want to keep a track of everything happened on the net.. This a dictatorship in the making...

Diclotican

Sorry my bad English, not my native language

And Stop Apologizing for Your English......You Speak Damn Well! :)

Speaking for his agency, Mike is just letting us know that they'd prefer to do openly -- for reasons of conscience, perhaps? -- what they're already doing, covertly.

assholes...

Al Qaeda bin Bush Laden bomb anthrax White House Kucinich Edwards bohica militia mcveigh fertilizer WMD al-Zawahiri Musharraf bhutto assassination mujahideen isi cia nsa cheney khan plame aipac spies oil 9/11 hijack bali madrid london pentagon plane missile bomb attack

And look in the OP, we now know Agent Mike's last name.

The blatant lies uttered by Bush and this administration are not due only to their apparent idiocy but many, many years of having the freedom to make up any old thing and have it swallowed by a gullible public. The internet is growing into a severe threat to their freedom to subjugate us that they must deal with before this election. Expect shock, if not awe, in their attack on this glimmer of free speech very soon. These stories (cities blacked out via the internet, China hacking into sensitive data bases etc.) damn sure look like the first salvo of the final propaganda battle for total control of the internet and it's inclusion in the most sophisticated propaganda machine in the history of the world.

They sure as hell could never win an election honestly and never have nor would they ever allow the unwashed masses to do so.

Hey, Bush! Go fuck youself. Hopefully you'll be tortured when you leave. If we're lucky, you'll get shot before you leave.

then give it to cuba? bad rubbish is what they are.

Imagine a Net where everyone used hard encryption rendering the ceaseless efforts of fascists to control free thought useless.

PGP. Get it. Use it. Give them the finger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

J

where Chinese Democracy thrives.

Who will, after the full story of the Bush Administration gets printed?

was to put power in the hands of the citizens.

We're supposed to push the "i-believe" button and think that everyone with access to this ability at the CIA is going to use it for fair or truthful purposes to protect the American people? Hogwash.

Yes, they do exist.