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Former FBI Agent Calls for a Second Internet
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Feb 27, 2008 08:58 PM
from the it-became-necessary-to-destroy-the-internet-to-save-it dept.
from the it-became-necessary-to-destroy-the-internet-to-save-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Former FBI Agent Patrick J. Dempsey warns that the Internet has become a sanctuary for cyber criminals and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure Internet. Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials. The problem is various legal systems are unprepared for the fight, which is why he claims we must change the structure of the Internet."
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Submission: Former FBI Agent Calls for a Second Internet by Anonymous Coward
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Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that many countries just want to forbid things, with regards to the internet, rather than adjust to a new way of looking at crime committed through the internet.
If it turns out that law enforcement can't or won't adjust to the speed in which cybercriminals operate, maybe the only way to help prevent crime is to educate the users, or even help write better software (against spoofing etc.).
Parent
Two Words: Anonymous Layer (Score:5, Insightful)
Soooo how are they going to stop people from encrypting data and obfuscating it?
Soooo how are they going to stop people form implementing a "slow drip" protocol through random nodes which is also encrypted?
There is absolutely no way to police the Internet without significantly impacting response times, etc. QoS will suck and they will still never be able to touch 99.99% of the "criminals".
Parent
Re:Two Words: Anonymous Layer (Score:5, Insightful)
"You were hiding jews in your house ? Prepare to die !"
Accountability means that you are accountable to someone. That someone can easily abuse his powers; Hell, even the finnish police, the police of the state repeatedly voted the least corrupt in the world, began abusing the kiddie porn filter immediately after it was implemented. There is no authority worth the trust accountability requires.
Unfortunately, in Real Life, accountability is a neccessity. While it inevitably leads to abuses, lack of it means us violent monkeys live up to our murderous nature and rape, kill and loot each other. That's why we have governments, nation-states and courts of law.
However, it is impossible to murder anyone in the Internet. It is just as impossible to rape them, or cut a single hair from their heads. It is impossible to even rob them - altought it is possible to spy on them enough to gain access to their online accounts, which is one of the reasons why I don't have any. In fact it is impossible to do anything except say something nasty to them.
So, why would we need accountability in the Internet ? Who, exactly speaking, is actually being hurt by the spam, botnets or porn ? No one.
No, this "accountability online" is simply a guise for tracking down the people who leak nasty secrets of politicians and corporations, in order to punish them and thus cause a chilling effect. Internet and especially the anonymous protocols working on top of it - such as Tor and Freenet - are every politicians worst nightmare: an information propagation channel they can't block. "The truth shall set you free", so is it any wonder that every overlord in history has tried to prevent it from getting out ?
A democratic society - indeed, any free society - needs an anonymous communication channel with no accountability of what you say. If that is also useful for criminals, then that is simply the price you have to pay. The alternative is freedom of speech a la Soviet Russia: you are free to pee on Lenin's statue while shouting "down with communism", but you'll be sent to a Siberian labor camp for it.
Parent
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I quoted the word "cure" because I know there's no "cure", but treatments could be developed that would minimilize a pedophiles impulses and thus allow them to lead a normal and productive life. Putting them in prison or on Dateline is not the solution.
Parent
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
No, no! Its a multiplier so it would have 4th life. Which raises the question of what happened to 3rd life?
Which is why I will be producing the new online sensation "5th Life: Search for 3rd Life"
Dont even get me started on the currency conversion.
Parent
Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
He can't have a legislative solution, so he comes up with a technical one.
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
Parent
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
The whole idea is that in Soviet Amerika, Second Internet spys on YOU!
Parent
Cybercrime can be stopped without monitoring! (Score:5, Insightful)
The article talks about hacking into bank accounts and identity theft etc. So if the government wants to crack down on this, why don't they just mandate that banks have to send their customers a bootable read only flash drive that contains a basic operating system, browser, SSL certificates and a one time pad? It wouldn't matter how badly some clueless moron's computer was trojaned to hell, because the bank would only accept connections from the booted flash drive.
You can't get mugged on the internet. You can't be coerced on the internet. Criminals need YOUR COOPERATION.
The U.S. could also stop using checks like every other civilized country, because they're a ridiculously huge security hole and a huge pain in the ass compared to direct bank transfer. But all of this would make too much sense, because none of it involves more government monitoring of its citizens.
The land of the free. Where no laws must ever tell corporations what to do, but citizens must compensate for their ineptness by being spied upon.
Parent
Re:Cybercrime can be stopped without monitoring! (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't get mugged on the internet. You can't be coerced on the internet. Criminals need YOUR COOPERATION.
Well, that is almost true. With certain Windows exploits, you can be doing perfectly normal things on your PC and still become infected. You can even have a firewall and anti-virus/anti-spam spam filter.
Unless, of course, you think that "cooperation with criminals" means "I don't digitally arm my computer to the hilt with every possible kind of protection, down-to-the-second patches, and anti-hacker voodooo ninjas." Just because my house is not surrounded by a moat filled with hungry pirahnna, does not somehow mean that I am cooperating with thieves. Next you're going to blame women for being raped...
Parent
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
VPN (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Restricting to VPN (Score:5, Funny)
Pedo 2: 13, f, nyc. u?
Pedo 1: 12, f, nyc 2!
Parent
Re:VPN (Score:5, Insightful)
While they are in prison or once they get out?
Or are you going to keep convicted criminals in prison because it "would be a step in the right direction"?
Or keep them permanently on public "* Offender" lists?
If rehabilitation rates are so low and nobody really gives a damn, why not just execute them like they do in China? Since obviously "everyone hates them so much".
The only big difference between you and a convicted criminal is you haven't been caught yet.
Is copying stuff a criminal offense yet?
Parent
Um, no (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's going to happen.
Re:In other words ... (Score:5, Informative)
That said, I agree with your conclusion.
Parent
Re:In other words ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The reasons of the different parties vary, but they are all pushing consistently for the same outcome -- a monitored and controlled internet. Most worryingly, their lobbying and scare tactics are increasingly getting results.
First, everyone under the hat of IFPI and the various Recording and Movie Ass. of wherever are in the game as their business model is evaporating. They want more restrictions and more monitoring, so that they can eat into your consumer surplus better. Most other copyright and related rights owners jump on this bangwagon, as they have strong vested interest in having their monopoly to be extended in various ways.
Then, there are the newspapers and the TV -- in addition to belonging in the first group, they feel their revenues are being eaten by a random collection of bloggers, aggregators and other uncontrollable internet evils that deliver more targeted and interesting commentary faster and at lower cost. Besides, their relevance as propaghanda tool (and their position as "the fourth power") is also threatened, and they'll fight hard to keep it.
Finally, there is the government. The establishment want to know more about you so that they can tax you (and, in general, manage you) better. Surveillance is always a boon to them, and anything that can bring more is very welcome. Especially lobbying groups like those above, who make seemingly "legitimate" cases for more surveillance and control. But it doesn't end there. The internet is also a threat to the establishment in that it allows exposure of their questionable activities; it keeps track of their past deeds. This threat makes the life of the establishment politicians hard, and they'll fight to remove it. Bribery is a big source of income, and threats to it are hardly welcome. Finally, the internet allows "fringe politicians" and large groups of people to gather behind a cause quickly and efficiently. This tends to make, among everything else, lobbying less efficient, and decrease the amount of legal bribery income.
And, this push against the free internet is happening everywhere. Draconian internet laws have sprung fast virtually everywhere in the past year or two - the US, Eastern and Western Europe, Australia, Japan, Korea, which suggests what happens is not a random process at all.
Parent
Ummmmm, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Any time you have a new community or resource to exploit, there will be criminals. However, calling it a sanctuary is hardly apt. I can think of more than a few places that are a sanctuary for criminals, yet you won't see the government razing those neighborhoods and starting anew, would you? Besides, who gets called a criminal?
and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure Internet.
Ummmm, no. What he means is that they want to form a new network that can routinely be filtered, scanned and probed with no means of anonymity (already going away) or flexibility.
Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials.
How about figuring out how to deploy a network within your own agency first, that agency employees can actually use?
Actually, yes. (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, the internet is a sanctuary for cyber criminals. You don't find cyber criminals holding up armoured trucks at gun point, regular meat criminals do that, you find cyber criminals on the interwebs. That's why they're cyber criminals. The intertubes are a sanctuary for cyber criminals for exactly the same reason that the FBI is a sanctuary for corrupt FBI agents.
I totally recommend creating a second internet, and a second FBI, a second stock market, a second local primary school. Everything.
No one thing should get all the cred for harbouring criminals. If people want to be paranoid and really stupid, let them be paranoid and really stupid and have a good laugh at their expense.
Parent
Re:Ummmmm, no. (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, last time I was in Washington, I saw a few. One of them is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the other one is on the opposite end of the Mall.
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Re:Ummmmm, no. (Score:5, Funny)
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to the FBI.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I care about speed, anonymity and integrity of data.
That annoying "internets" word will be real! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That annoying "internets" word will be real! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
While we are at it why don't we create new cities (Score:5, Insightful)
Since major cities have more crime than before why don't create new cities.
As opposed to extraditing murderers, mafiaa members etc is easy with respect to "traditional" crimes?Why hire competent people who technology as tools and adapt your law enforcement agency when you change the world around you to adapt to your incompetence?
And for those who says "Think of the children": No law can effectively parent your child for you. Do you damn duty.
Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
Also... (Score:5, Funny)
Good idea..but (Score:5, Insightful)
Second Nigeria (Score:5, Funny)
Security is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind an overhaul on DNS and SMTP to slow some spammers and other jerks down.
The real problem is the diverse nature of laws between different countries and the strong enforcement in some places and near zero enforcement elsewhere. Think about it, someone in Russia can do almost anything outside their country and not be prosecuted. In other places, we have parts of the Internet filtered because of some lame moral code.
I just wish these people who don't understand the spirit of the Internet would take their marbles and go home.
Mr Dempsey, head of the internets (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh that's just great. So just because poor mr Dempsey woke up one day believing that someone wasn't ready for a fictional fight then we all should just drop the world's communications infrastructures and rebuild it according to mr Dempsey's vision. For the sake of those poor unprepared legal systems, of course. And also the world's safety. And the children, now that we are at it.
What mr Dempsey is advocating is nothing more than taking over the control of the medium. No one has it and he wants it badly, claiming that it's in everyone's best interests to be controlled by an overreaching, totalitarian organization. Well guess what mr Dempsey, the internet works great just as it is and no one benefits from having a righteous mr Dempsey, head of the internets, fighting the fight that those poor, fictional legal systems are supposedly incapable of carrying out.
International crime means new internet? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, he goes from acknowledging that there's a jurisdictional problem and a speed problem when it comes to law enforcement to creating a new "verified" internet where you have to "prove" who you are? Umm..no.
And he goes on to hit every hot topic in security today: DDOS, identity theft. spam, etc. And then, he makes the claim "the fact is that Internet crimes are almost always international crimes." And he doesn't back it up, rather gives anecdotal evidence of a hacker in Russia using computers in Thailand to steal data.
I am not a security expert (and I'm not pretending to be) but this "sky is falling" mentality is crap. Most identity theft (the act of stealing) is not done over the internet, its done locally. Yes, selling lists of thousands of SSNs and credit card #s happens over the internet, but the thievery itself doesn't.
In fact, this would make things worse: you're creating a global ID. Once someone steals your global ID they can do whatever they want. And once again, your ID wouldn't be stolen over the "new" internet, it would be stolen because you didn't shred a document and someone went dumpster diving.
This doesn't solve any problems.
i'm gonna go build my own internet! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:i'm gonna go build my own internet! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Digital Immigrants vs. Digital Natives (Score:5, Insightful)
The next generation of investigators will be digital natives. They'll have grown up with the web, email, blogs, message boards, IM, flickr, youtube, social networking, and the like. They won't all have CCNAs, but they'll have a sufficient understanding of how people use the internet to know when to bring in forensic experts.
The transition will be difficult. The digital immigrants with extensive investigative experience and the digital natives who are novices in their profession will have to cooperate and exchange their knowledge and wisdom, and in the meantime, some criminals will slip through the cracks. That's the price of progress.
spam is just a special case of "cybercrime" (Score:5, Funny)
--
Patrick J. Dempsey, your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting international "cybercrime." Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from nation to nation.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) legitimate Internet uses would be affected
(x) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) it will protect us for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) users of the Internet will not put up with it
(x) microsoft will not put up with it
(x) the police will not put up with it
(x) requires too much cooperation from criminals
(x) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) lack of centrally controlling authority for the Internet
(x) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) asshats
(x) jurisdictional problems
( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) huge existing software investment in the Internet
(x) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
(x) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) extreme profitability of international crime
(x) joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with criminals
(x) dishonesty on the part of criminals themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
(x) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) sending email should be free
(x) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) i don't want the government reading my email
( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
( ) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
(x) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Common but fallacious reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Changing X would fix that problem.
3. Therefore, we should change X.
With no regard for whether X has any value of its own. Open your eyes and look outside of your own field before you decide to change the world in your favor.
ummm (Score:5, Funny)
I think Mr. Dempsey misspelled 'all'...
typical law enforcement drumbeat (Score:5, Interesting)
I see this now in almost every arena of law enforcement... and for good reason. It *is* getting harder to do low enforcement. The thought process is something like this: "As law enforcement, we know we're failing; we can't really stop the criminals, so let's treat everyone as a suspect." Basically enforcing laws is a traditional behavior. It is the way to maintain stability and control on society and in a similar way that traditions maintain cultural norms. Traditional behaviors are the antithesis of innovation.
Technology is changing at a breakneck pace, and increasing in the speed of change. It is hard, nigh impossible for large, bureaucratic, rules-based organizations to keep pace with innovation in technology, and the concomitant adoption by criminals.
The disturbing thing is that instead of law enforcement innovating to keep up with the demands of the job, many in law enforcement have lobbied successfully to change the rules of the game. This is most true in the United States over the last five years with the tired dirge: "give up your liberties or the terrorists will win".
I think the correct solution is to change the way we do law enforcement. Change the people who do it. Make smaller, more nimble organizations. Change the speed with which law enforcement operates. Remove entrenched, non-technical savvy deadweight from organizations. Incorporate the latest technology. Change quickly with the rest of society and keep the fundamental principles that make open society possible and successful.
And for christ's sakes, please stop degrading people by forcing them to take off their clothing and shoes to board an airplane. I know, it seems totally off topic, but the same idea we can't really stop the criminals, so let's treat everyone as a suspect.
At first I thought he was crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
After reading the article, however, and carefully thinking about his ideas, I've concluded that he is instead an idiot.
Has this man never heard of Metcalfe's Law [wikipedia.org]? His second, registration-only internet will be about as popular as BITNET [wikipedia.org] and Telenet [wikipedia.org] are these days. (Yes, Virginia there were globe-spanning networks before the Internet. It's true!)
While he's at it, he might as well call for a second telephone system, one that only allows people to say nice things.
In light of the real issue: (Score:5, Funny)
I call for a second FBI.
Buggy Whip FBI (Score:5, Funny)
And no criminals will ever figure out how to wire around the cutoff switches. Then cops can just go back to being lazy again. Oh, and by the way, we should let the cops trample all over our rights that we discarded because protecting those rights was too much work.
I feel safer already. Don't you?
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Score:5, Insightful)
Heinlein wrote about this decades ago - "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Great read, and extremely relevant.
On a Related Note (Score:5, Funny)
Former FBI Official Imaj Oke stated today that We need a new earth due to the massive amounts of crime and terrorism on this one.
"Our current planet is so rife with criminal activity that we need to populate a new planet that will be restricted only to fully law abiding citizens." He said at an interview earlier this afternoon, "Once we have established the new planet the old one will, of course no longer be necessary and will be dismantled for parts."
Oke went on to describe the technical merits of the new planet stating that life on the planet would be fully controlled by benevolent corporate monopoly interests to ensure that nobody's intellectual property is infringed.
Exactly what we need! (Score:5, Funny)
We've already got an RFC for this (Score:5, Funny)
Can't he just recommend that routers check for the "evil bit"? It would be about as effective and much easier.