FBI Wants Records Kept of Web Sites Visited *Yawn*
February 7th, 2010I’m posting this to let those of you (who are submitting this) know that I don’t understand why you find it noteworthy.
With all the posts I’ve done on network surveillance, I’m getting story submissions about retention of URLs?
Guys, splash some cold water on your faces, break out the smelling salts, wake up.
It might be that what is already known to be in place and operational is too disturbing to comprehend. Is it comforting to read the limited hangout articles du jure, jump up and down and think, “Wow, at least they’re not officially admitting to be doing this yet”???
Of course, those who have been paying attention know that the situation is far worse than this absurd piece by Declan McCullagh indicates.
Absurd? Yes. Look at this:
The technical challenges also may be formidable. John Seiver, an attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine who represents cable providers, said one of his clients had experience with a law enforcement request that required the logging of outbound URLs.
“Eighteen million hits an hour would have to have been logged,” a staggering amount of data to sort through, Seiver said. The purpose of the FBI’s request was to identify visitors to two URLs, “to try to find out…who’s going to them.”
The purpose of this bilge is to implant the idea in the reader’s mind that capturing all of the URLs MAY NOT EVEN BE POSSIBLE!
I haven’t had such a satisfying laugh in a long time.
I’ll make this as simple as I can.
The NarusInsight Intercept Solution: This is carrier class equipment. Many ISPs deal with relatively minuscule levels of traffic compared to the types of networks on which Narus systems are operating.
Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine…And Fighting It by Mark Klein
Brand New 1.5 Million Square Foot NSA Data Centers (Utah / Texas)
The Ship of Fools is drawing nearer to certain oblivion. URL retention is an absurd red herring when placed in the context of what is already known to be in place at the carrier level, and almost certainly much closer to endusers as well.
Some will find comfort in the belief that there’s a meaningful difference between domestic law enforcement and national security cases. Might it be that the black world infrastructure isn’t used for domestic law enforcement? Fools will go to their graves believing this. Unfortunately, we must assume that the state will use (and is using) every tool at its disposal to maintain and expand its power.
I—and many others—have pointed out what’s sitting on the wire. Assumed to be the case by researchers for decades, with Klein/EFF/ATT/NSA, routine, illegal mass surveillance is an indisputable fact. URL retention is but a mere side show in the scheme of things.
Were not likely to know what’s happening inside the big top, at least not in the next 200 years.
Via: Cnet:
The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.
FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users’ “origin and destination information,” a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday.
