US to Monitor All of Cyberspace?
For our security of course.
From the Wall Street Journal
Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. “This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”
At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Ok, blatantly obvious privacy concerns aside I see this creating a slippery slope. By that I mean how long until this technology goes from being used to protect us from being used to protect us from ourselves? Eventually someone is going to wonder if its possible to use this to protect children by tracking or blocking visitors to kiddie porn sites. Then some administration down the road decides to do the same with sites that depict the denigration of women. Then another decides to do the same with hate speech and another cruelty to animals and so on and so on until eventually we’re behind the equivalent of a moral Great Firewall of China.
To me that is the problem with such broad ranging surveillance initiatives. It’s not always the government of today one needs to fear, it’s the unforeseen administrations of tomorrow.
Plus there is always the chance that any such security initiative will be rendered obsolete by a sixteen year old kid in Micronesia a week after it’s rolled out.
h/t to Donklephant
All information? ALL information? Personal email? Bank transactions? Medical records? Internal records of corporations and political parties? Ingoing and outgoing information by foreign governments (many allied), including their intelligence and law enforcement agencies?
I am at a loss for words. The level to which this is unconstitutional, impractical and a diplomatic disaster waiting to happen is mind-boggling. If you combine this with the idea that warrants are apparently a quaint notion of the past, the right to privacy is effectively shot to hell.
Furthermore, we are not, believe it or not, the only people who use the American networks, people all over the world, and their governments and corporations, do as well, and they might have something to object to the matter.
Besides that, the massive nature of the information that is being transmitted through the American networks, by far the biggest and most active on the planet, makes reliably tracking such information and sifting the useful from the useless a task of herculean proportions. You’d need a full time staff just to deal with the kitty pictures.
This is very serious. Big Brother-like.
"For our security": That’s how the smart big governmentists do it. "it’s for your own good, just throw your rights away please."
Part of this is cronyism, guess who runs the s/w companies running these companies. The FBI wasted 100’s of millions on a database system and computers that don’t work. Maybe the government should get rid of 486’s before they scourer the Internet with MSNBC to catch a predator.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1434275,00.html
The above system was a contributing factor to why 9-11 happened. The article states that MULTIPLE upgrades failed.
Lynx nails the biggest (non-privacy) problem with this idea: there’s just way too much data flowing across the web.
But there is a simple solution. All you have to do is put the entire US population on the Homeland Security payroll full time. That gives you enough people to sift thru everything. (And to think I saw something yesterday which was caustic about East Germany having had 10% of their population working for their secret police! We could leave that totally in the dust!)
And then there is the secondary problem that the Federal government does not exactly have a stellar track record for accomplishing large data processing projects. Figure this one to be years late. Not to mention vastly over budget.