DOJ proposes US data-rentention law.

John Young jya at pipeline.com
Sat Jun 22 22:02:19 EDT 2002


I appreciate what an honorable ISP admin will do to abide customer
rights over intrusive snoopers and perhaps cooperative administrators
above the pay grade of a sysadmin. Know that a decent sysadmin is on 
for about 1/3 of a weekday for 24x7 systems is a small comfort but
leaves unanswered what can happen:

1. During that time when a hero is elsewhere.

2. Upstream of the ISP, the router of the ISP and the nodes serving
routers, as well as at a variety of cache systems serving there various
levels.

3. At major providers serving a slew of smaller ISPs. In this case I
reported a while back of a sysadmin telling what my ISP, NTT/Verio,
is doing at its major node in Dallas: allowing the FBI to freely scan
everything that passes through the Verio system under an agreement
reached with NTT when it bought Verio.

No matter what a local sysadmin does with data, it remains very
possible that data is scanned, stored and fucked with in nasty ways
coming and going such that no single sysadmin can catch it.

End to end crypt certainly could help but there is still a fair abount
of TA that can be done unless packets are truly disintegrated and/or
camouflaged at the source before data leaves the originating box.

Pumping through anonymizers, inserting within onions, subdermal 
pigging back on innocuous wireless packets of the financial advisor
door, multiple partial sends, stego-ing, data static and traffic salting, 
bouncing off the moon or windowpane, what else can you do when
an eager beaver industry is racing to do whatever it takes to build
markets among the data controllers breathing hot about threats to
national security and handing out life-saving contracts to hard-up
peddlers shocked out of their skivvies with digital downturn.

No patriotic act is too sleazy these days that cannot be justified by
terror of red ink and looming layoffs.


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