Later, on the same day Kennelly's opinion was filed, the Department of Justice sent out Tice's subpoena. The date on the subpoena is July 20th, before Kennelly's decision was filed, but the issue in the Terkel case was so pregnant that it would be easy for the government to anticipate the ruling and only issue the subpoena to Tice if necessary. It has now become necessary, and the government seems to be moving to put pressure on Tice not to reveal information that would confirm the electronic surveillance program at issue in Terkel by threatening him with investigation and possible indictment.

27B Stroke 6: Government threatenning potential NSA whistle blowers

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

"Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.

27B Stroke 6 blogged this yesterday but didn't link the actual story they were quoting. Its worth clicking through to some of the other stories at the bottom of this story. Basically, the Atlanta Air Marshall Director has quit his job and is raising a public stir about bad policies at the Air Marshal's service.

TheDenverChannel.com - News - Marshals: Innocent People Placed On 'Watch List' To Meet Quota

The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping, CNET News.com has learned.

FBI proposes Internet CALEA

FBI plans new Net-tapping push | Tech News on ZDNet

It was data retention that emerged as the issue of most concern to the committee...

“Currently, there is no federal law and no industry standard. This is seriously hindering investigations,” said U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo. “If investigators can't get the information they need to connect an IP address to a person then too often the case hits a dead end. The perpetrator is not going to be caught, and the child victim is not rescued from a childhood of unfathomable sexual abuse. This is a terrible problem and we need to fix it and fix it now.”

The dipshits in Congress are planning to use child abuse as an excuse to turn the Internet into a surveillance system. They are gunning for a federal law this year that will mandate that ISPs maintain logs of everyone's DNS requests, IPs, and in and outbound email in the event that at some point in the future someone accuses you of some sort of wrongdoing. This applies to any kind of criminal accusation or civil case and not just child abuse, of course.

The Committee on Energy and Commerce

The judge in the EFF's surveillance case against AT&T handed out a last-minute homework assignment Tuesday -- a list of 11 written questions (.pdf) that attorneys on all three sides of the case "should be prepared to address" by Friday morning's oral arguments.

This is very suprising, IMHO!

27B Stroke 6 - Judge in AT&T v. EFF case looks critically at State Secrets claim

AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers' personal data with government officials.

AT&T rewrites rules: Your data isn't yours

noteworthy wrote:

By: Steven Bellovin, Columbia University; Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania; Ernest Brickell, Intel Corporation; Clinton Brooks, NSA (retired); Vinton Cerf, Google; Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems; Susan Landau, Sun Microsystems; Jon Peterson, NeuStar; John Treichler, Applied Signal Technology

June 13, 2006

For many people, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) looks like a nimble way of using a computer to make phone calls. Download the software, pick an identifier and then wherever there is an Internet connection, you can make a phone call. From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that anything that can be done with the telephone system -- such as E9111 and the graceful accommodation of wiretapping -- should be able to be done readily with VoIP as well.

Thanks for posting this. I've been doing a lot of VoIP work @ work and this is both certainly relevent and not something I've seen elsewhere. Having skimmed it, let me make two observations:

1. My interpretation of the FCC's limit of CALEA to "interconnected" and "broadband" VoIP is to say that CALEA compliance is only required if the VoIP provider is interconnected with the PSTN (which eliminiates the problems described in this paper) or the VoIP provider is also providing their customers with physical internet access (which also eliminates the problems described in this paper). My understanding is that the FBI knows tapping p2p VoIP is hard and they can't easily require it.

2. The reality that Internet CALEA compliance is hard isn't stopping people from trying. And, yes, I think that a single snmp message that configures a tap with nothing more then password protection is insanely insecure. With a designated physical tap network, with carefully crafted packet filters, this could be done, but how many times are people going to get that wrong? A lot...

Its worth noting that temporarily, these Cisco routers can't tap IPv6.

RE: Security Implications of Applying the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act to Voice over IP

The story about phone number stations posted to Craigslist has been mentioned here before. This is one of those interesting little mysteries. The hearsay only adds to it..

People have suggested that the messages are pranks, or are some sort of commercial gimmick. But at least one person, who is in the U.S. military, says he sent a copy of one of the messages up the chain of command and was promptly notified that it was classified and he wasn’t cleared to know anything further about it. I don’t know whether this is standard operating procedure for any encrypted message or whether it indicates that there’s something to be found.

Third phone numbers station: 678-248-2352 - Homeland Stupidity

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.

I wonder what their MySpace account is. I wonder if they want to be my friend...

New Scientist Technology - Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

There is "a need to double surveillance and investigative capability" domestically, the report said, so that authorities can "find ways of broadening coverage to pick up currently unknown terrorist activity or plots."

"Surveillance is absolutely crucial,"

"You can't not do it,"

Lessons From Canada: Snooping Works