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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (62612)	12/21/2002 6:59:16 AM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The username you use to login to your ISP is meaningless to the IP address space - it isn't contained in any of the protocol headers... According to this Times article cited #reply-18359073, they're really after forcing ISP's to install government monitoring equipment on site and if this ever came to pass there would be no real way to even get on the net without being identified and traced. Not to mention Palladium and other initiatives being dreamed up to tag all computers of any type, ban sale of general purpose analog to digital converters (in the name of protecting Hollywood and the RIAA's content rights but it'll do wonders for privacy) etc. It's pretty hard for me to believe that such widespread monitoring would ever pass present judicial tests, though I suppose anything's possible especially if another major terrorist sucker punch hits the country. But if monitoring at the access points was done, I believe it's quite feasible on technical grounds to collect enough data to cause serious harm to privacy right there.

To: D. Long who wrote (62612)	12/21/2002 2:02:38 PM
From: MSI	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Here's the deal - in spite of any anonymization there is a session created between points with associated (even if encrypted) traffic. Such points as libraries etc. are "anonymized" but significant in terms of time-of-day, length of session, and type of content (such as whether encrypted or not), and if plaintext, such things as keywords (even if attempts are mede to make innocuous). But the greater skein of connectivity shows 98% are easily put into a framework of contacts, with context, whether news stories, emails, websites of various types, etc. You don't need 100% coverage -- with partial capture you can fill in some of the blanks. With greater capture you can fill in more of the blanks. The more blanks filled in the easier to fill in the rest, etc. To say NSA is overwhelmed is ... not true in the usual sense. Even Bamford says several generations ago specific equipment could monitor a million or more simultaneous streams, and many such units a major part of the country. Only a fraction need be scanned, in any event. And with digitial ascii data it's orders of magnitude faster. There are other issues that make it easier also, which I'll get into when I get back from some weekend chores ...