- Bush and his Machiavellian minions will no longer put
up with you roaming free into dangerous territory on the internet. You
need to be corralled, electronically tethered, kept away from sites promoting
conspiracy theories -- in other words, information the corporate media,
the official US Ministry of Disinformation, does not want you to read or
see. It's now increasingly obvious the Bushites want to lock us up in a
hermetically sealed informational box and throw away the key. All the information
they consider worthwhile will be pumped in through a one-way hole.
-
- During war, as they say, the first causality is truth.
And war -- all the time and everywhere people resist -- is what Bush will
deliver. It will be easier for him to accomplish this if you can't read
the truth, if you remain ignorant, or if you are obstructed from organizing
and speaking out on the internet against war and madness. Bush knows this
-- or, at least, those around him know this. The internet, regardless of
its trashy and lame commercial characteristics, is a nearly perfect medium
for organizing. It's a thorn in the side of neo-cons and fascists everywhere.
-
- Enter Dubya's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board
(CIPB), which the unelected one created with a flourish of his pen (another
executive order, a most popular way to rule vassals). The men and women
around Bush want to require internet service providers, ISPs, to build
a centralized network capable of monitoring where you go, what you look
at and read, what you write in your email -- and all in real-time. Of course,
they don't say this. What they say is they want to protect you against
viruses and terrorist attacks. They want to shield you from Osama bin Laden
and Saddam Hussein, who are everywhere, ready to attack, even on the internet
(Osama's cave in Tora Bora, don't you know, bristled with computers and
crack virus software programmers).
-
- CIPB is working on a report, "The National Strategy
to Secure Cyberspace," which it will release early next year. It is
billed as a strategy for the Ministry of Homeland Security and -- this
is the laughable part -- is subject to congressional review. Yeah, like
Congress protected us from Bush's totalitarian Patriot Act and the Ministry
of Homeland Security bill. What a joke. 99% of these folks are Bush co-conspirators.
When Bush tells them to jump, they ask how high. Your right to travel through
cyberspace without a snoop noting your every move is one of the next hoops
Bush will wave before an obeisant Congress. The internet is one of the
last bastions of resistance. Besides, some rabble-rouser posted the Anarchist's
Cookbook on there.
-
- Of course, converting the internet into a big Carnivore
system is one thing, while denying you access is quite another. Bush's
centralized system will make this a reality. Get labeled a malcontent,
a "security risk," or even a "cyber-terrorist" and
you can be easily barred from Bush's "secure, trusted, robust, reliable,
and available infrastructure." Say the wrong thing on a bulletin board
or forum and your ISP -- afraid of the government breathing down its neck,
yanking its business license, or sicking the IRS on it -- may terminate
your service. Hell, if things go as Bush and Clan envision most small ISPs
will go out of business, replaced by AOL, Comcast, and other rich communications
industry friends and big dollar contributors to Project Bush.
-
- Dubya wants to essentially authorize a Department of
Approved Internet Use within the Ministry of Homeland Security. This new
department will create and demand implementation of new network protocols,
take over the task of verifying IT vendors (so much for the conservative
idea of getting rid of big government), and issue security assessment and
policy tools (maybe Dubya can roll Microsoft into the Ministry of Homeland
Security, demand everybody use Windows instead of Mac or Linux because
Windows will be "secure" and adapt, at taxpayer expense, the
latest government mandated protocols). Don't worry about the cost -- this
idea comes from the guys who think a $200 billion war is nothing to sweat,
even if it wrecks the economy. Plus, a lot of the cost will be picked up
by the ISPs, which is to say you, the subscriber. Nothing like paying through
the nose to have the government turn your computer into a Carnivore box.
-
- Just in case you think I'm playing fast and loose with
the word "Carnivore," consider what an official with a major
data services company who has was briefed on several aspects of the government's
plans told John Markoff of the New York Times the other day, "Part
of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to
track incidents while they are occurring... 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."
OK, I inserted the required quote from a "respected" source,
so I guess we can all rest easier now. The idea of Bush squashing a (relatively)
free and unhampered internet has now broken free of the besmeared realm
of conspiracy theory. Hallelujah!
-
- So there you have it, in a nutshell. You can't be trusted
and you will never have privacy again -- not on the internet, not with
your bank or credit card transactions, medical records, not when you fly
on a plane or cross the border, and certainly not if you decide Bush and
his neo-con fascists are wrong about forever war and you decide you want
to do something about it. As it looks now, things are moving in a bleak
direction rather quickly. But even Russians under the yoke of Soviet communism
managed to publish samizdats -- typed on manual typewriters with multiple
carbons, since the photocopying machines were locked up and closely watched
by the state -- and news thus disseminated, people learned the truth.
-
- Somewhere buried in a box in the closet of my apartment
is BBS software on an old, dusty floppy disk. In the days before the web
-- when the internet was mostly confined to computer students, faculty,
government types, and other such privileged geeks -- a few of us dialed
into computers running BBS software. If Bush and his Critical Infrastructure
Protection Board bureaucrats have their way, we may be forced to return
to those less sophisticated days. Call it a dial-up samizdat where information
remains free. Of course, sooner or later, Bush will get around to making
this illegal, too. But where there's a will, there's a way. We may even
be reduced to sending CD-ROMs via snail-mail in the future. Or passing
them hand-to-hand under the cover of darkness. Truth refuses to be suppressed.
It will always break out, regardless of the technology.
-
- Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer
in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent online gallery. He can be
reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
-
- We highly recommend frequent visits to Nimmo's website,
Another Day in the Empire
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo01022003.html
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Paul Scigliano
pscigliano@webentrada.com
1-4-2
-
- Kurt, I just read your article about Bush's supposed
plans for the Internet, and let's just say that it's full of what we like
to call FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, yet does little to actually
document the claims that it makes.
-
- The men and women around Bush want to require internet
service providers, ISPs, to build a centralized network capable of monitoring
where you go, what you look at and read, what you write in your email --
and all in real-time.
-
- Can you show where the "men and women around Bush"
have stated this? Oh wait, you answer it in the next sentence:
-
- Of course, they don't say this. What they say is they
want to protect you against viruses and terrorist attacks.
-
- So we go from virus attacks to logging user activity
in real time. How on Earth are you able to make such a leap of logic where
real-time scanning for viruses suddenly equals logging activity in real-time?
Are you aware of what you are talking about and the technological implications
of logging user activity in real-time? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Let
me give a bit of insight into an ISP:
-
- I happen to be Director of IT services for a small ISP
(roughly 3500 users) and I can tell you that logging everyone's activity
and in real-time is pretty much next to impossible, and not due to financial
limitations but rather due to the fact that if we were to log everyone's
activity in real time, we would run out of space due to the size of the
logs in very short order. If you were to ask the largest ISPs to log all
their user's activities in real-time, they would run out of space due to
the size of the logs in about half an hour, not to mention any upstream
ISPs (those are ISPs of ISPs), who would log all the activity of all the
users of all the ISPs that they service. It's ridiculous.
-
- Oh wait, maybe we can just put sniffers on the Internet
backbone and let some giant Echelon-type of computers just sift through
the traffic logs. Good luck considering the amount of lag that such an
implementation would create. Echelon is designed to be placed at the local
ISP level at any rate, from what everyone has been able to tell.
-
- CIPB is working on a report, "The National Strategy
to Secure Cyberspace," which it will release early next year. It is
billed as a strategy for the Ministry of Homeland Security and -- this
is the laughable part -- is subject to congressional review.
-
- So they are working on a report that would make recommendations
and then the report is up for Congressional review. At this rate, any kind
of implementation of your so-called scheme would take place NO EARLIER
than 2005 at the rate that government runs. And this is the same government
that is currently in charge of managing such great examples of efficiency
like the INS (who gives Green Cards to terrorists after they are dead),
HUD ('nuff said), and handles Airport security, who decide that it is ok
to frisk little old ladies and pregnant women to prevent terrorism and
decides that containers at shipyards and ports don't need to be searched
for weapons. How odd.
-
- With that track record, do you really think that the
government is suddenly going to grow a set of large ones and actually decide
that they are going to take away the most favorite toy of some of the brightest
minds in the nation and the world? Think again.
-
- Your right to travel through cyberspace without a snoop
noting your every move is one of the next hoops Bush will wave before an
obeisant Congress.
-
- Actually, to play devil's advocate here for a minute,
you don't have any "rights" in cyberspace. You are paying for
a service and you are paying to use the equipment of a service provider
to use the Internet. ISPs are private companies and whatever rights you
think you have as to privacy go about as far as the ISP wants them to go.
Fortunately for everyone, ISPs are mostly run by people who value privacy
and freedom of speech greatly and go to great lengths to make sure that
those values are protected while you are using their service. But if an
ISP felt that you were using their services for illegal or harmful activities,
they certainly have the right to cancel your account just as you have the
right to find another ISP that might put up with you. We are not talking
about people that criticize the government or anything like that here.
We are talking about people that use the Internet for hacking other people
and companies, creadit card fraud, spreading viruses, and so forth. No
matter what you might think, those kind of people not only don't have any
kind of right to use the Internet for those kind of activities, but the
government and law enforcement would be in the right in trying to set up
systems to try and catch that kind of activity.
-
- If you can show any prominent web sites that have been
shut down since 9/11 and the declared war on terrorism due to the comments
that they have made that criticize the President and his policies, you
might be able to make a stronger point. But so far it just comes off as
nothing but FUD FUD FUD.
-
- Besides, some rabble-rouser posted the Anarchist's Cookbook
on there.
-
- And the funny thing is that there are web sites that
still have this kind of information on there and they are still running
strong (textfiles.com comes to mind immediately).
-
- Say the wrong thing on a bulletin board or forum and
your ISP -- afraid of the government breathing down its neck, yanking its
business license, or sicking the IRS on it -- may terminate your service.
-
- If the government were to do this and do it blatantly
there would be an uproar from the Internet community (which, whether you
want to believe it or not DOES include most people that run and maintain
ISPs) that they would be forced to back down considerably. So far, I cannot
think of ONE PERSON that has been kicked off from an ISP that I have heard
of because of something that they said on the Internet about the President
and the government.
-
- What I have seen though, are so-called operators of bulletin
boards deleting posts and banning users who post opinions that do not agree
with the views that the operator pushes. This has happened on sites ranging
from freerepublic.com to voxnyc.com to democraticunderground.com. The operators
of these kind of sites do not want people to argue with them-- you are
either there to tow the left or right line or you are out. Plain and simple.
As ISP operators, we could really care less what our subscribers say on
a particular bulletin board about the government. We will only get involved
if there is a criminal investigation and our help is required.
-
- Hell, if things go as Bush and Clan envision most small
ISPs will go out of business, replaced by AOL, Comcast, and other rich
communications industry friends and big dollar contributors to Project
Bush.
-
- This will never happen because there will always be cheap
ISPs out there and most people that know better will never go to a crap
company like AOL (or go back to it, as the case may be). If small ISPs
do happen to disappear from America, there will always be a cheap ISP to
access overseas, and whether you want to believe it or not, there are many
people that would move out of America if they had to in order to get to
cheap Internet service. And that's why it will never disappear from America
and that's why these regulations aren't going to make it-- no one is going
to stand for a system of regulations that make it impossible to stay in
business.
-
- Dubya wants to essentially authorize a Department of
Approved Internet Use within the Ministry of Homeland Security.
-
- ..... and do you have anything at all to back this allegation
up?
-
- How are they going to authorize people to use the Internet?
Are they going to require people to have government-issued Internet User-IDs?
Are you aware of the fact that most people still dial into the Internet
and all they need is a phone number and a userid and password? What is
the big bad government going to do in your eyes, require people to swipe
a User ID on their computer?
-
- This new department will create and demand implementation
of new network protocols
-
- So a new government department will replace TCP/IP? Are
you aware of what you are saying here?
-
- take over the task of verifying IT vendors
-
- If anything, vendors will have to meet security standards,
but the security standards have more to do with protection and privacy
than it does with logging the activities of the users of the IT product.
-
- and issue security assessment and policy tools
-
- We can only hope that they issue security assessment
tools for PC users. Maybe then they can stop catching viruses all the time
and stop getting their credit card numbers stolen on the Internet.
-
- (maybe Dubya can roll Microsoft into the Ministry of
Homeland Security, demand everybody use Windows instead of Mac or Linux
because Windows will be "secure" and adapt, at taxpayer expense,
the latest government mandated protocols).
-
- So... the same government that convicted Microsoft of
monopoly practices and the same government that supports Linux and Unix
(see http://www.nsa.gov/selinux sometime when you have a chance) is suddenly
going to make everyone run Windows? How are they going to catch people
that don't run it-- by personally inspecting each and every computer in
America? What are they going to do about graphic design shops that use
Macs to do graphic design? Throw them in prison? What about the Unix variants,
like Sun's Solaris, IBM's AIX, the BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc)..
are companies like Sun and IBM going to go from being traded on Wall Street
to being a haven for Internet criminals because the government wants everyone
to run Windows in your little deluded vision of the future?
-
- Plus, a lot of the cost will be picked up by the ISPs,
which is to say you, the subscriber. Nothing like paying through the nose
to have the government turn your computer into a Carnivore box.
-
- And THIS is what would bankrupt ISPs en masse. Of course,
this whole idea is so ridiculous that it hardly bears consideration except
to say that no.. ISPs would not pick up the bill and neither would the
users. We would simply ask the government to provide funds to the ISPs
for the rising costs.
-
- Let's take this little scenario a step further though
and assume that you are right. How is the government going to support the
cost of supporting millions of new Windows users? What about compensating
giant companies like IBM and Sun that now have to switch to Windows? Who
is going to implement Windows and replace the massive amounts of Unix (and
Linux) installations at banks, hospitals, government offices (yes, even
the government uses Unix and Macs), and places like schools? The answer
is no one will because the idea would be a disaster and everyone would
laugh in the face of the government and ask them if they have the billions,
not to mention the years, that it would take to replace all systems with
Windows.
-
- Think McFly, think...
-
- Just in case you think I'm playing fast and loose with
the word "Carnivore,"
-
- And you are....
-
- "Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time
analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are occurring... 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."
-
- The sad part is that Carnivore is still not able to even
come close to monitoring ALL Internet traffic in realtime, not to mention
even all American traffic in real-time.
-
- The idea of Bush squashing a (relatively) free and unhampered
internet has now broken free of the besmeared realm of conspiracy theory.
Hallelujah!
-
- So an unnamed source from an article by Markoff in the
NY Times (who is about as reliable and believable as the truth fairy--
this is the same John Markoff who participated in entrapping Kevin Mitnick
and wrote a very slanted book about the whole thing and the same John Markoff
who took a $750,000 advance on a book deal chronicling the whole affair)
suddenly validates the idea that Bush is about to restructure the Internet?
That's like saying a shooting star validates the idea that an asteroid
is going to destroy the earth. Please.
-
- So there you have it, in a nutshell. You can't be trusted
and you will never have privacy again -- not on the internet, not with
your bank or credit card transactions, medical records, not when you fly
on a plane or cross the border, and certainly not if you decide Bush and
his neo-con fascists are wrong about forever war and you decide you want
to do something about it.
-
- Again, please show ONE person that has been arrested
and held for posting something on the Internet that criticizes the policies
of the Bush administration. As far as Internet privacy is concerned, there
are advances made every day in encryption technology (look into PGP sometime)
as well as security of private records (look at the legislation behind
HIPPA sometime also).
-
- Somewhere buried in a box in the closet of my apartment
is BBS software on an old, dusty floppy disk.
-
- But you won't be able to run it if you are using Windows.
You're going to need DOS, which is illegal in your brave new world outlined
above.
-
- In the days before the web -- when the internet was mostly
confined to computer students, faculty, government types, and other such
privileged geeks -- a few of us dialed into computers running BBS software.
If Bush and his Critical Infrastructure Protection Board bureaucrats have
their way, we may be forced to return to those less sophisticated days.
-
- I guess you forgot that BBSes were also the target of
government raids, particularly the so-called warez boards. There were also
raids on boards that posted hacking/phreaking/anarchy files and the such.
-
- Of course, sooner or later, Bush will get around to making
this illegal, too. But where there's a will, there's a way. We may even
be reduced to sending CD-ROMs via snail-mail in the future.
-
- Or maybe we'll all just wake up and realize that none
of this is ever going to happen and that you have written quite possibly
the worst piece of FUD to appear in some time.
-
- Kurt, you seem like an excellent photographer, but if
you are going to write articles like this, please try to think of what
you are saying before making ridiculous claims like you have in this article.
You do nothing but make allegations and try to convince people that 1+1=5
in this article and have proved nothing beyond the idea that you are misinformed
and in being thus, you are spreading misinformation, half-truths, and frankly
are doing much more harm than good. There are legitimate concerns about
the current administration, but their designs on the Internet, at least
the ones proposed in this article, are NOT one of those concerns.
-
- In fact, let me close by addressing the fine people at
rense.com. I enjoy reading the many fine articles posted on the web site
and I find most of them to be very thought-provoking and well-thought out.
However, I can't imagine how in the world an article like this manages
to get posted on a site like rense.com. I doubt that my response is going
to get printed on the site along with this article, which is a shame because
I think a lot of people are going to read this article and become needlessly
scared. We are so far away from the reality posed by Mr. Nimmo that I would
say that this kind of article does more harm than good in that people are
going to focus on being concerned about something that is simply too illogical
to happen.
-
-
- Paul Scigliano
Director of IT Services,
WebEntrada.com
770-242-7272 678-886-7496 (cell)
-
- Reply
-
- From Kurt Nimmo
1-6-3
-
- While I respect Paul Scigliano's technical expertise
as a director of IT services, and understand his skepticism of the Critical
Infrastructure Protection Board (CIPB), I do believe he does not fully
understand the threat posed by Bush in regard to privacy. Obviously, as
Scigliano points out, the technical hurdles involved in real-time monitoring
of the Internet are immense, to say the least. The same can be said of
five-time felon John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness (TIA) system;
it is not realistic, the marrying of disparate and huge databases is an
awesome (and some think impossible) goal.
-
- Let's call it shooting for the moon. Both CIPB and TIA,
regardless of the technical complexities and hurdles, are icebreakers:
Bush and the Department of Homeland Security are essentially putting us
on notice, informing us of their wish to change internet technology --
and believe me, in the long haul, they have the power to change technology
through regulation and other coercive means.
-
- Moreover, lawyers representing Mr. Scigliano's colleagues
(at ISPs) are worried about CIPB. "This struck us as a bad enough
idea that we should talk about it," Stewart Baker, a partner with
Washington, D.C.-based law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP who represents
a group of ISPs, told InfoWorld (12.20.02). In fact, a few ISPs have read
a plan detailing a consolidated version of ISP network monitoring centers,
which allow ISPs to look at activity on their networks, down to the content
being accessed by a particular user. Is this science fiction? Or do these
ISPs know less than Paul Scigliano?
-
- Unfortunately, I believe far too many people are sincerely
naive when it comes to the government's desire to spy on its citizens.
A cursory look backward at the FBI's COINTELPRO should provide more than
enough of a history lesson -- the government (legally or illegally) will
go the extra mile to monitor citizens they feel pose a threat to their
political power -- from labor organizers at the turn of the last century
to civil rights advocates in the 60s to present day activists on the internet
-- including the likes of Jeff Rense and the writers he hosts on his website.
-
- Kurt Nimmo
|
