As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." He "married into one of the 100 richest families in the country" - the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.
"They are smart, they are creative, they are committed," Admiral Harris said. "They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." NYTimes
AT&T's attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable (click here for PDF).But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple Computer's OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11.
The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic.
"AT&T notes that the facts recited by plaintiffs are entirely consistent with any number of legitimate Internet monitoring systems, such as those used to detect viruses and stop hackers," the redacted pages say.
We have placed our monitoring devices at certain “target rich environments” on the Internet: the major switches and routers controlled by the carriers, the twenty or so hubs through which most of the world’s packets flow, most of which are located on U.S. territory. We have software, let’s say a package very similar to Snort, that can monitor and inspect these packets at around 2Gb/sec. Indeed, as we have seen, many carriers already have such monitors already in place and sell monitoring services to their customers (AT&T monitors). (Such tools are generally used to defend against a network attack based on patterns or signatures in the data.)
"I stand that ground because I believed, rightly or wrongly, that my country's interests and values required it."
"Wrongly!" one student boomed from the back. Sitting directly behind us, Maureen Dowd and Adam Nagourney of the New York Times, chuckled.
As McCain droned on, students became increasingly restless. One cried, "This speech sucks!" Several students walked out early.
Summing up the mood of the day, another shouted, "We're graduating, not voting."
U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker rejected a bid by AT&T Inc. to return the records that were given to the privacy advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation by a former AT&T technician. But Walker said the records would remain under seal until it can be determined whether they reveal trade secrets.Spying on your customers is a trade secret????
This archaic law(FISA) should be euthanized. Replace it with legislation that gives the president permission to order any surveillance deemed necessary, subject to only one proviso: If it is later determined that an intelligence-gathering operation was not ordered for legitimate national security objectives — if, for instance, it was designed to gather dirt on political opponents — then the culprits would be punished with lengthy prison sentences.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The recording industry on Tuesday
sued XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., alleging its Inno device
that can store music infringes on copyrights and transforms a
passive radio experience into the equivalent of a digital
download service like iTunes.
A front-page article in this morning's The Hill reports that Sen. Specter has finally made enough concessions to secure the support of the more right-wing members of the Judiciary Committee for his legislation that (along with a bill from Sen. DeWine) would render legal the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.So we're all good Amerikans now. We have now given away the "Fourth Amendment" without even a fight, without even a whimper from the Judiciary Branch and without even knowing what the "program" is.
They tell us that
We lost our tails
Evolving up
From little snails
I say its all
Just wind in sails
Are we not men?
We are devo!
Were pinheads now
We are not whole
Were pinheads all
Jocko homo
Are we not men?
D-e-v-o
Monkey men all
In business suit
Teachers and critics
All dance the poot
Are we not men?
We are devo!
Are we not men?
D-e-v-o
God made man
But he used the monkey to do it
Apes in the plan
Were all here to prove it
I can walk like an ape
Talk like an ape
I can do what a monkey can do
God made man
But a monkey supplied the glue
We must repeat
O.k. lets go!
- Devo, Jocko Homo (1988)
Tony Snow: Well, in this particular case, again, we're neither confirming or denying the existence of the program. The President was pretty clear --I mean, I'll just -- this is where I will reiterate the points he made yesterday, which is number one, we don't listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. You have all reported that, that the allegations in USA Today have nothing to do with listening in....via Holden's obsessionDana Perino: There is no listening-in on domestic phone calls without court approval...The government has no interest in knowing what innocent Americans are talking about on their domestic phone calls.
Stephen Hadley: I can't, sitting here, confirm or deny the claims that are in the USA Today story. But it's very interesting what that story does not claim. It does not claim that the government was listening on domestic phone calls. It does not claim that names were passed, that addresses were passed, that content was passed. It's really about calling records, if you read the story--who was called when and how long did they talk. And these are business records that have been held by the courts not to be protected by a right of privacy. And there are a variety of ways in which those records lawfully can be provided to the government.
99% of the time, politicians, both Democrat and Republican, and all of corporate media and polling firms will be using the words "WIRETAP", "LISTENING ON CONVERSATIONS" or some reference to audible communications. When anybody says "WIRETAP", BY LAW, they are not talking about looking at these NUMBERS going across AT&Ts backbone network. Nobody can hook a "WIRETAP" to a fiber. It is impossible. When anybody uses the word "WIRETAP" they ARE NOT talking about the current program. When anybody uses the phrase "COLLECTING NUMBERS" or the word "PEN REGISTER", they ARE talking about this program.
There is no wiretapping or listening or datamining of conversations. We are collecting numbers, using pen trap registers, according to law. We are not invading privacy, because there is no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' for numbers on AT&T's network. That's the law.
Before the PATRIOT Act, the government could only get a FISA pen-trap order when the communications to be monitored were likely to be either (1) those of an international terrorist or spy or (2) those of a foreign power or its agents relating to the criminal activities of an international terrorist or spy. PATRIOT 214 threw out this requirement. Now, any innocent person's communications can be tapped with a pen-trap so long as it is done "for" an intelligence investigation. The FBI doesn't have to demonstrate to the FISA court that the communications are relevant to its investigation. Nor can the court deny the FBI's request; if the FBI certifies the tap is "for" such an investigation, the FISA court must issue the order.That Section 214 lowered the standard for FISA pen-traps is even more disturbing in light of the fact that PATRIOT Section 216 expanded their reach. Unlike regular wiretaps issued under much stricter standards, pen-traps aren't supposed to collect the actual content of your communications, such as what you say on the telephone. Instead, they capture "non-content" information about your communications, such as the telephone numbers that you dial or the numbers of people who call you.Before PATRIOT, the statute defined pen registers and trap-and-trace devices solely in the context of telephone communications. But Section 216, which does not sunset, expanded the pen-trap definition to include devices that monitor Internet communications, without clarifying what portions of Internet communications are "content," requiring a full wiretap order, versus "non-content," which can be legally acquired only with a pen-trap order. At the very least, this change means that the government can use a pen-trap to see the email addresses of people you’re sending email to and the addresses of people who send email to you, along with the timestamp and size in bytes of each email. The FBI can monitor the IP addresses of all the computers you interact with over the Internet, or capture the IP addresses of every person visiting a particular website. Under the vaguely written statute, it may even be able to capture the URL of every web page that you read, although the FBI refuses to confirm or deny whether it has done so.
Network Architecture of Treason
(12/24/05)
So how would an agency go about surveillance on overseas Internet traffic on a massive scale?
First of all, one has to place monitors, probes or taps on the Internet. Where would one place them? That's pretty simple. Let's look at CAIDA's Internet topology map. http://www.caida.org/analysis/topology/as_core_network/AS_Network.xml
This shows a snapshot of the major "choke" points for Internet traffic as it exists today. There are not that many core points, especially if we are only concerned with international traffic.
(Post Post - Does this image look familiar??)
Let's just say that we want to set up monitoring on the top 20 nodes in this diagram. Now what does our monitor or probe need to look like in terms of compute power and storage.
For that we can go to a typical packet trace analysis of one the core carriers at this link.
http://ipmon.sprint.com/packstat/packet.php?040206
Notice anything interesting here? Link utilization for these links is minimal. These OC48 links can support up to 2.5 gigabits/sec but the utilization is barely more than 100 megabits per second. And the storage needed for these traces is minimal as well.
But do we have to monitor all that traffic? If we look at the application breakdown, we see that appr. 50% is http traffic. If we add email, the total is about 60%. That means that we're looking at doing deep packet inspection, etc. on only about 50 or 60 megabits/ sec. You can do that with an off-the-shelf $1000 Dell server. Storage is just as cheap. In fact, I found a little Powerpoint slide on the Internet that Amogh Dhamdhere from Georgia Tech did, illustrating the Sprint IPMON architecture.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2004/cs8803ntm_fall/amogh.ppt
So how does one spot a DoS attack or worm? Simply by recognizing a pattern or signature in the traffic. What is the difference between a malicious pattern and a certain set of words in an email or an http flow? Simple semantics…or semiotics depending on your philosophy.
