And The Hits Just Keep Coming

The FBI has a new plan for intruding into our internet privacy. In an attempt to drum up support for a proposal to expand a 1994 law on law enforcement access to private communications on the internet, FBI Director Robert Mueller has been visiting with companies in Silicon Valley.

From the New York Times:

Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users.

Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie Caproni, were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several major companies, including Google and Facebook, according to several people familiar with the discussions. How Mr. Mueller’s proposal was received was not clear. ...

Mr. Mueller wants to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, to impose regulations on Internet companies.

The law requires phone and broadband network access providers like Verizon and Comcast to make sure they can immediately comply when presented with a court wiretapping order.

Law enforcement officials want the 1994 law to also cover Internet companies because people increasingly communicate online. An interagency task force of Obama administration officials is trying to develop legislation for the plan, and submit it to Congress early next year. [Emphasis added]

Now, I understand the challenge which the new technologies present to law enforcement, and there are some good reasons for enabling law enforcement to meet those challenges as long as there are some safeguards in place. I'm not so certain that those safeguards are uppermost in the minds of the FBI and other law enforcement officials. After all, that "court wiretapping order" is quite often the rubberstamp edition issued by FISA, often after the wiretapping has already been done. The FBI, via its own internal audit, admits that the process was abused thousands of times during investigations. The FBI still loves those fishing expedition trips, and that is what concerns me.

It also concerns several other agencies within the government:

The Commerce Department and State Department have questioned whether it would inhibit innovation, as well as whether repressive regimes might harness the same capabilities to identify political dissidents, according to officials familiar with the discussions. [Emphasis added]

Those political dissidents need not be located in places like China, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea. They just might be located in places like Houston, Texas or Topeka, Kansas or Temple City, California. Those political dissidents might be complaining about all the broken promises of an elected official and plotting to unseat the incumbent by putting up a primary challenger. Or they might be planning a demonstration in Washington, DC to protest the ongoing military activities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. They might even be sharing plans for the construction of (gasp!) GIANT PUPPETS.

Unless any proposal to update the 1994 law also contains clear, unequivocal protections consistent with the Bill of Rights, it should be a non-starter. Should be, but somehow I doubt that will be the case.

TMI

Most of you immediately recognized the abbreviation for Too Much Information, TMI, so welcome aboard. The episodes of normally functional, if not impressive, public figures putting up incredibly dumb communications on Twitter, Facebook and the like are pretty funny as those publicity users try to adjust to a whole new world.

The communication that made it possible for everyday citizens of Iran to maintain some hold on their government has given us all sorts of possibilities for direct lines among us people. Where media has dominated for much of our lives, at least attempting to portray itself as the real source for knowledge, that imaginary role has failed increasingly as the newspapers sell themselves to the highest bidder.

Suddenly the office seekers are finding out they can't establish a few trusted reporters to deliver their message to, and expect us to suck it in. Now they need to communicate. The results are enchanting. Who would have thunk it was important to him, not what he concluded about the peccadilloes of his party, but what Newt had for dinner. Twittering about hearing voices is a new way to claim sacred communication status among those who are so inclined.

A new standard for chatter is desperately being sought by the 'personalities' who thought they had their images covered. How diverting for staff, to try making a new sort of person up, some one sympathetic to keen observers and casual browsers at the same time. However, the field of online communications has real dangers for security personnel.

For the secret services in England, the communications of its operatives are suddenly making problematic their official security measures. His wife's online persona suddenly is a problem for having a casual social presence with friends that wasn't protected from sharing at large.

Personal details about the life of the next head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, have been removed from social networking site Facebook amid security concerns.

The Mail on Sunday said his wife had put details about their children and the location of their flat on the site.

The details were removed after the paper contacted the Foreign Office.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband denied claims security had been compromised, saying: "You know he wears a Speedo swimsuit. That's not a state secret."
(snip)
Former Prime Minister Sir John Major said the issue had been "overblown".

He said: "I know John Sawers. He's a very able man, he's a very able appointment. It's pretty unfortunate that this has happened, I think that is true.

"But I think when you're faced with leaving Iraq possibly too early, huge problems in Afghanistan, the mess in Pakistan, the depth of the recession, I think this falls a long way below those."

Sir John Sawers is due to replace Sir John Scarlett as head of the overseas Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

While most of the people I chat with are pretty well known to me, and their secrets are just that, all of us know that trolls like to wriggle in and try to find tidbits to make a hullabaloo about. One likes to accuse members of our circle of being twisted in some way, or having a seamy side that they alone have recognized.

What sort of motivation the nuisances operate from is a sad sidelight to the substantial support most of us find in online communications. What would be the national threat to anyone who carries on normal communications that may reveal security concerns is yet another wrinkle in the possibilities of our chatter. Your swimwear look isn't going to tear down anyone's marriage, most probably, but your address may make you vulnerable.

Online most of us have a rich and satisfactory circle of friends, associates, and like-minded social contacts. It's probably not a possibility for all of us, though, and the public exposure has to be obvious from the start.

In a public position, especially one that deals with security issues, there will have to be limits of exposure. Sadly, it appears that online life will have to stay virtual for anyone in a sensitive position.

In the groupings where I have conversations, we tend to let each other know when one of us is taking chances with some one who's been untrustworthy in the past. All of us have learned to wait and let any new member establish a persona that we recognize for basic consideration and reputable practices. Hopefully, this kind of protective attitude can be adopted by those in the field of security to those it needs to protect.

Try Life Without the Internet

The last two weeks have been spent having a gorgeous trip, indeed, as you all know who have visited my posts on my cruise in the Mediterranean. For me, it was a dream I really never thought I'd get, and I acknowledge that I am profiting from the economic disaster that brought prices down so low that I could do this. I have a lot to be glad about, and I am.

There was a big drawback, though, because the internet was priced so high that I would have had to stretch - big bucks that I didn't have free - to do what I am used to. I post every day that I can, sometimes twice and more. For that, I visit a lot of news sites, blogs and articles, and information that you are used to seeing here. Research is vital to giving sound views, and you readers and I expect to have a variety of sources, even the disreputable ones, to have a good idea of what our world is like.

On board, as is true of many purveyors of television access, Fox political advertising, which they call 'news', has gotten a foothold and those who checked the news were offered that channel as if it were valid. The Fox industry pays for that access, and gets access it doesn't earn by real reporting but by paybacks. Yes, Norwegian Cruise Lines has heard from me on their allowing themselves to be suborned into presenting a right wing point of view on par with news, a point of view that fewer than 20% of us have fallen for.

When factual research is expensive, it gets a lot less accessible to you and me; we suffer a blight on our overall knowledge that makes us vulnerable to wingnut paid ads.

Having had my access limited, I am passing on to you a warning. If price becomes the issue in internet access, we will lose our intellectual freedom. Just as health care has been lost to the profit motivation of our health care industry, our intellectual freedom will be lost if profits are allowed to determine internet availability. No surprise, that is what our telecommunications industry would like to accomplish.

Your days of all-you-can-eat Internet buffet may be coming to an end.

Probably not tomorrow, but soon enough, industry analysts say.

Cable giant Time Warner recently toyed with essentially putting meters on its customers’ downloads. It abruptly backed off in the face of a revolt that was organized — where else? — on the Internet.

Still, the company shelved rather than killed the plan. Experts say that changes in the way people use the Internet — and the way some gorge on its endless cache of data — mean current pricing systems could go the way of your dial-up modem.

A metered pricing system has been in effect in Lawrence for four years. While Sunflower Broadband has heard some complaints, for most Web surfers it has kept monthly charges flat. Some users have seen steep cuts in their bills, while relatively few have had to pony up extra bucks to devour gigabytes.

In the end, said the CEO of the Internet service provider in Lawrence, “it’s a matter of fairness.”

The change won’t come easily in a world where consumers have come to take cap-free Internet use for granted.

In mid-April, Time Warner set aside plans to switch Rochester, N.Y.; Greensboro, N.C.; San Antonio and Austin, Texas, to graduated billing based on how much a household uses the Internet.

“This is ridiculous,” the group Free Press said in an online petition. “Instead of meeting growing broadband demand, Time Warner Cable is gouging Internet users.”

U.S. Rep. Eric Massa, a New York Democrat whose district includes Rochester, threatened legislation to bar the change.

“It’s almost certainly just a matter of time before they attempt to overcharge all of their customers,” Massa said in a news release.
(snip)
Critics of a la carte Internet pricing say it doesn’t account for the speed and the ways in which usage has shifted.

People who constantly worry about going over their monthly limits might be less likely to try new innovations that require more bandwidth, said James Love of the consumer group Knowledge Ecology International.

“We’re all doing things now that we weren’t doing last year,” he said. “We don’t want something that’s going to make us reluctant to try something new.”

Patrick Knorr, the CEO of World Co., the owner of Sunflower Download, notes that even as the price of providing Internet service continued to drop as technology improved, demand for bandwidth went up faster.

The cost of public awareness is not a factor we can let make a difference in internet access. If ignorance is given free rein, this country will be a much poorer place. Without you telling me when I make an error, I would not be as much on my toes as I have to be with an educated audience. If it cost you to look up and check on your suspicion that you've seen another fact, or another view, than that I think is valid, would you still go to the trouble?

Look at my posts during my cruise, and you'll find most of the material is my own experience. I want to double, triple, and quadruple check on what I pass on to you, and at $.45 a minute, the time spent doing that becomes burdensome.

When we cut back on exploring for truths, we are not in top form. That would be a tragic burden to put on bloggers. We would have to be able to afford facts. When truth becomes expensive, we will all suffer ignorance imposed by our means. Nothing could be worse for us libruls who are going to stick to the facts as long as we can.

When facts are priced out of our reach, we will all be in big trouble. High priced internet has cut back on my access to those facts, and it's been troubling. It can't be allowed to happen. Firms reaching for profits will never be a good choice for determining what the public can and will say, learn, or think.

Without open internet access, Fox would go unanswered.