(Also available in blue.)
Can you say overreaching and intrusive?
The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.
Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.
...
Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.)
That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.
Pro-domestic spying types would surely say, "If you have nothing to hide..." But in this case, I don't think it really matters. Here's why:
In a telephone conversation afterward, Ohm said that full-pipe recording has become federal agents' default method for Internet surveillance. "You collect wherever you can on the (network) segment," he said. "If it happens to be the segment that has a lot of IP addresses, you don't throw away the other IP addresses. You do that after the fact."
"You intercept first and you use whatever filtering, data mining to get at the information about the person you're trying to monitor," he added.
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"What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who attended the Stanford event. "What they're doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets."
Read that again to yourself. "Intercepting EVERYONE and then choosing their targets."
It's a short article, only 2 pages in length but it's a good read, especially the part about minimization:
Federal law says that agents must "minimize the interception of communications not otherwise subject to interception" and keep the supervising judge informed of what's happening. Minimization is designed to provide at least a modicum of privacy by limiting police eavesdropping on innocuous conversations.
Doesn't sound like that's the case here, does it?
First they came for Al-Qaeda.
Then they came for insurgents.
Then they came for the homegrown terrorists.
Then they came for.....
In case we get multiples on this story, I'll try to collect them here.
c|net: FBI turns to broad new wiretap method
Update - Running out for some errands. Even if this slips off the page, I appreciate those who tried to add some visibility and ask that you blog it on your own pages and sites. Don't let a story like this get passed over tomorrow simply because it wasn't on the front page today.