Big Brother Just Got Much Bigger
A few notable snippets (it is far too long to post in full) from an article found here.
I find this highly disturbing on multiple levels. First of all, as the article points out, this effectively is a wiretap on every computer in the nation (since the corporation involved is working with government officials, they are effectively government agents under the law). Forget wiretaps on phone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists overseas, this would impact every American with a computer.ISPS PRESSED TO BECOME CHILD PORN COPS
By Bill Dedman and Bob Sullivan
msnbc
updated 6:05 a.m. CT, Thurs., Oct. 16, 2008
New technologies and changes in U.S. law are adding to pressures to turn Internet service providers into cops examining all Internet traffic for child pornography.
One new tool, being marketed in the U.S. by an Australian company, offers to check every file passing through an Internet provider's network — every image, every movie, every document attached to an e-mail or found in a Web search — to see if it matches a list of illegal images.
Privacy advocates are raising objections to such tools, saying that monitoring all traffic would be an unconstitutional invasion. They say companies can't start watching every customer's activity, and blocking files thought to be illegal, even when the goal is as noble as protecting children.
But such monitoring just became easier with a law approved unanimously by the Congress and signed on Monday by President Bush. A section of that law, written by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, gives Internet service providers access to lists of child porn files, which previously had been closely held by law enforcement agencies and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Although the law says it doesn't require any monitoring, it doesn't forbid it either. And the law ratchets up the pressure, making it a felony for ISPs to fail to report any "actual knowledge" of child pornography.
That actual knowledge could be handed to the Internet companies by technologies like the one proposed by the Australian company, Brilliant Digital Entertainment Ltd. Known as CopyRouter, the software would let ISPs compare computer files — movies, photographs and documents — against those lists. Banned files would be blocked, and the requestor would receive a substitute file provided by law enforcement, such as a warning message: "The material you have attempted to access has been identified as child pornography." The attempt to send or receive the file could then be reported to law enforcement, along with the Internet Protocol address of the requestor.
One of the leading experts on electronic privacy in the U.S. says the proposal would clearly run afoul of the U.S. Constitution, essentially setting up a wiretap without obtaining permission from a judge.
"This would be plainly illegal in the United States, whether or not a governmental official imposed this on an ISP or the ISP did this voluntarily," John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology said after viewing Brilliant Digital's slide show. "If I were the general counsel of an ISP, I wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot pole."
A spokesman for Brilliant Digital Entertainment disputed that, saying the technology would be "non-invasive," would not compromise privacy, would be legal in the U.S. and elsewhere, and most important, would curtail the global proliferation of child pornography.
The makers of CopyRouter claim that it can even be used to defeat encryption and compression of files in the Internet's Wild West: the peer-to-peer file-sharing tools such as Gnutella and BitTorrent. Many people use those file-sharing systems for legal traffic, such as independent artists distributing their music, or software developers sharing open-source code. But others use them for illegal traffic in copyrighted music and movies. They also are popular for distributing adult pornography, which is legal, and child pornography, which is not.
Encrypted files on the peer-to-peer network could not be decrypted by CopyRouter, but the company claims it can fool the sender's computer into believing that the recipient was requesting an unencrypted and uncompressed file. The slide show calls this "special handling." This is done by changing the underlying protocol settings that establish how the sender and recipient exchange the file. This trickery, unknown to either the sender or recipient, would make it possible for CopyRouter to see the underlying files, calculate a hash value and compare the files to the list of illegal files, Brilliant Digital says.
This new program would also be problematic because of the strict liability nature of most child porn laws. If you have child porn on your computer, regardless of how you acquired it or if you even know that you acquired it, you are a felon according to the law. That includes people who fell for 4chan's recent "honeypot" prank (links were posted on forums purporting to direct a member to something innocent, such as a funny picture of GW, when in reality the hyperlink directed them to a fake child porn site set up by the FBI) or who thought they were downloading something "legitimate" from a P2P network such as Kazaa and ended up with child porn on their hands (such as the infamous "Cinderella" video that made the rounds back in 2002, masquerading as Disney's classic when in reality it was far different). Up until now you could generally rest easily if you inadvertantly encountered this type of thing, as most law enforcements have required a high burden of proof in their investigations. Under the proposed program, however, law enforcement agencies would have both the evidence and required burden of proof to execute a search warrant and seize your computer and all electronic media if you found yourself in that unfortunate situation (talk about being a double victim!).
While I don't advocate internet piracy, I think that there are far worse problems out there. Law enforcement agencies seem to agree with me, as the FBI has yet to press criminal charges against someone for downloading the latest Madonna song strictly for personal use - antiterrorism is a far more important activity, after all. This program, however, would revolutionize anti-piracy efforts overnight. Up until now anti-piracy has revolved around setting up electronic traps which can be easily disarmed by those pirates with the technical know-how. While this program's purported use is to search out child porn, it could just as easily search out pirated files. Given that piracy and child porn are both federal offences, I would be shocked if organizations such as the RIAA and MPAA didn't jump on this program if it was cleared for use in the U.S.
Most disturbing of all, however, is the program's ability to decrypt files without the permission of either the sender or the receiver. As a part of my perfectly legal business I routinely encrypt files before sending them electronically. Virtually every company does nowadays, given the threat of identity theft. This program has the ability to decrypt those files without my knowledge or the knowledge of the recipient. So if I'm placing an order on Amazon.com and type in my credit card number, it could be decrypted by a disgruntled employee. If I'm sending sensitive information to a client, there's a very good chance that information would be decrypted by the company since I would be sending it from a private computer and am not a large, multinational corporation.
Fortunately, this last aspect happens to be the one that is most likely to run afoul of the Constitution. Under federal law, the government cannot utilize a warrantless wiretap unless either the sender or the recipient explicitly permits it (the situation found when utilizing informants). If neither the recipient nor the sender are aware that the information is being decrypted and observed, let alone permit it, then any evidence derived from that wiretap would be impermissible in a court of law.
Eradicating child porn is a noble effort, much as preventing terrorism on home soil. It is not more important than basic individual liberties, however. The American people were up in arms when the Bush administration permitted warrantless wiretaps of a handful of Americans involved in terrorism investigations; I'll be curious to see how they react to the possibility of warrantless wiretaps on virtually every American when the issue is not so life-or-death in nature.
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Originally Posted by Erich von Manstein
