(NY Times, registration required) Internet Week Report: Bush Administration Plans Mandatory Government Internet Monitoring > December 20, 2002: The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users. The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks. [...] Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, said yesterday that the proposal, which includes a national network operations center, was still in flux. She said the proposed methods did not necessarily require gathering data that would allow monitoring at an individual user level. But the need for a large-scale operations center is real, Ms. Olson said, because Internet service providers and security companies and other online companies only have a view of the part of the Internet that is under their control. "We don't have anybody that is able to look at the entire picture," she said. "When something is happening, we don't know it's happening until it's too late." [...] An official with a major data services company who has been briefed on several aspects of the government's plans said it was hard to see how such capabilities could be provided to government without the potential for real-time monitoring, even of individuals. "Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are occurring," the official said. The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap system used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet."
Well.
I should imagine, given this administration's bent, that the only reason that they haven't formally included the monitoring of individuals on the internet in this plan is that it would be beyond even the capacity of the proposed Big Brother database to collate and deal with all that information. (Note: "formally". With FISA and the incredibly broad latitude it's been given, they can pretty much monitor almost anyone they want for no real reason at all.)
That said ... how on earth could you possibly plan a centralized security point to monitor a completely decentralized system? Quite apart from anything else, it would be a single point of failure if you could get it to work. And since you don't have centralized sources of attack -- or even well coordinated attacks -- there's nothing for it to track back.
Frankly, I think it's a partial red herring. If they can get some sort of system up and running, and make it look like it's doing what they say it does, it will be a lightning rod for attack.
For really dumb cyberterrorists, of course. But then, I'm sure there are more than a few really dumb cyberterrorists out there. Or enough young and stupid hackers and crackers to want to take up the challenge. They'll get caught, they'll get thrown in jail for epic amounts of time (the government will no doubt fight for the death penalty for those crimes for which they feel it appropriate, even when it is manifestly inappropriate) and they'll be a Salutary Lesson For Us All.
Or something like that, anyway.
Intriguingly enough, the original Big Brother plan, the Total Information Awareness site, is quietly fading away. Someone in the administration likely noticed that collecting total information would be just a shade easier for them if we weren't actually aware of what they were doing. Thus, in keeping with their withdrawal of actual useful information that conflicted with their political plans from the government's scientific websites, TIA goes into the shadows because it's drawing too much attention to itself. (You know the truly sad thing? These people are planning to collect every piece of nonrelevant information about everyone in the country that they can get their hands on ... and yet they didn't know how to keep Google from caching their site. For heaven's sake, Google tells you, right there, and yet they didn't do it. Yeesh.)
Posted by iain at December 21, 2002 01:33 AMComments
