Comments on: Appeals court upholds Net-wiretapping rules

Bush administration's Net surveillance plans receive boost from appeals court, which refused to overturn rules.

[ralfthedog]

Useless

Anyone who wants to can communicate by use of Freenet and PGP in total anonymity, and with no chance of anyone other than the intended recipient reading the messages.

All this lets the government do is read honest peoples mail.

[ralfthedog]

Useless!

Anyone who wants to can communicate by use of Freenet and PGP in total anonymity, and with no chance of anyone other than the intended recipient reading the messages.

All this lets the government do is read honest peoples mail.

[kamwmail-cnet1]

Skype calls are encrypted

And it's NOT run on servers inside the US.

[unknown unknown]

RE

Skype has said they will comply with requests by law enforcement for wiretaps (how? I don't know). CALEA doesn't apply to Skype calls conducted completely over the net since they aren't "not managed". The encryption Skype uses is proprietary so it's security hasn't been verified.

[vamega]

BAH...!!!

This is just a thing to cause a loss in privacy so that big brother knows what you are up-to.
Skype inst run on servers that are inside the US. Skype encrypts everything that it transmits. Anyone who is planning something will most likely use strong encrytion. So just what is the point of all this.

[zxocuteboy]

So I Guess AT&T Will Be Happy

This sucks, i guess AT&T will be happy for this i am sure will play well for them... Check out there documents here: http://zxo.blogspot.com/2006/05/wired-publishes-att-nsa-documents.html

[Earl]

Good & Bad

Good in the fact that if they wiretip enough they will find out how P.O. the people are about haveing their privacy taked away.
Bad in the fact that they have tryed to rewrite the Constitution for years,but now they can bend it to satify.
We are now building the type of country that (true) American have fought agaist for years.

[fhowden]

net wiretapping

The things we must do are:
1) Vote 'em out of office asap.
2) Start sending digits from pi or e divided into 5 digit groups, prefferably to e-mail addresses in SW Asia. Headers should read something like "The Council must study this message carefully and decide if this is truly a random number."

[Earl]

question

The big question is who,(or for that matter can)determine what a person means when their taking to another person?

[forceflow307]

if you dont, the terrorists will win!! not to mention those damn commies!!

"standardized broadband intercept capabilities is especially urgent in light of today's heightened threats to homeland security and the ongoing tendency of criminals to use the most clandestine modes of communication."
criminals use bathrooms too, but so do the rest of us. you could use a bathroom in an illicit way (place to sell weapons to "freedom fighters", hold people indefinitely without reason, maybe even as a torture chamber, all of which are definitely illegal (unless, of course, youre the governement)) but i can probably say that most of us dont want the governement videotaping us taking dumps. just a thought

[MisterFlibble]

Questions for Declan McCullagh...

Now, I'm seeing conflicting news stories about what this all means and what the FCC is after here,is this just about VoIP and the parts of broadband that connect with VoIP and other internet telephony, ofr is this a wide vast unfettered net put on the whiole internet, including any aspect of broadband? And how does this work, what are they looking for when they do this taps, and what are these taps capable of doing, including what do they have the ability to do outside the scope they are going to supposedly be used for? Is this not even WORSE of an intrusion on our privacy and our rights than Gonzles's wranglings for data retention. Just what will they have the power to do with these taps, will they be able to monitor what people do online, where they suf, and such, in real time?

I thank you in advance if you see this and reply.

[malynj]

Education perspective of CALEA

One of the things we have been told at the University level, is that we would have to provide the ability to access the real-time data stream of an end-user. That is, essentially a network monitoring port, that would see all data to/from the end-user. The catch is that the initial regulations were not clear on how this had to be setup.
One site of information on this a document written up after a May 2006 meeting:
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EPO0628.pdf , where they indicate that only the gateway edge device for a network would need to have this capability.
That doesn't mean that this won't get reinterpreted later to have to go all the way back to the end-user connection to catch internal network traffic, which is how Universities originally interpretted the original ruling.
Here is an earlier document indicating what Educause believed the CALEA order may have required:
http://www.educause.edu/CALEAFrequentlyAskedQuestions/9357
After the August 2005 order, they indicated a technical requirements document would be released in the October 2005 time frame, but I don't believe that document was ever released.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions with the regulation from the FCC. They arbitrarily extended covered entities, but then did not provide guidance on how to properly comply. The May 2006 document listed above seems to indicate that a third-party-provider could perform these functions for a University or other provider, but with such vagueness in the regulation, I don't know that a third-party provider would even know what to do yet to even offer their services for sale.
For more information from an Education perspective see:
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=645&PARENT_ID=698&bhcp=1

[MisterFlibble]

Why worry about net neutrality, when this will do FAR MORE damage...

... to the freedom of the intenet. Man, we, the consumers just can't win. Strike that, this isn't about "winning", but rahter about preserving the freedoms and our democracy that we are on guard to protect. In the stories Cnet has reported on this story, they've neglected to report before this decision that Janice Rogers Brown was one of the judges, they instead only focused on the "goobeldegook" judge, which made many think it was going to be struck down. Had Cnet reported that Brown was hearing this case, I would have told you right off the back that this was going be upheld, she's paying Bush back for getting this gig she has now on the DC appealettes court, and she's a freaking nutcase, to boot. She doesn't deserve to be a patent clerk, much less a judge. Congress had good reasons to have not wanted to nominate and approve of her, but because of the GOP senators bulling there way to forcing a nuclear option, she got on the bed. Unbelieveable. She should have recused herslf from this case, being it's what Bush and the DoJ are pressureing the companies to comply, which is why they had Kevin Matin right this up for the FCC. Well, people get what they voted for, I guess, but I didn't vote for these people, and don't deserve their actions.

[MisterFlibble]

Why worry about net neutrality, when this will do FAR MORE damage...

... to the freedom of the internet. Man, we, the consumers just can't win. Strike that, this isn't about "winning", but rahter about preserving the freedoms and our democracy that we are on guard to protect. In the stories Cnet has reported on this story, they've neglected to report before this decision that Janice Rogers Brown was one of the judges, they instead only focused on the "goobeldegook" judge, which made many think it was going to be struck down. Had Cnet reported that Brown was hearing this case, I would have told you right off the back that this was going be upheld, she's paying Bush back for getting this gig she has now on the DC appealettes court, and she's a freaking nutcase, to boot. She doesn't deserve to be a patent clerk, much less a judge. Congress had good reasons to have not wanted to nominate and approve of her, but because of the GOP senators bulling there way to forcing a nuclear option, she got on the bed. Unbelieveable. She should have recused herslf from this case, being it's what Bush and the DoJ are pressureing the companies to comply, which is why they had Kevin Matin right this up for the FCC. Well, people get what they voted for, I guess, but I didn't vote for these people, and don't deserve their actions.