AT&T creates secret room where ALL OF ITS INTERNET TRAFFIC gets copied for the government to peruse at will
The whistleblower is the technician, now retired, who installed the wiring in the room. He described his shock that he was hooking up "the big brother machine." Not only has the government partnered with several telecom companies to copy telecom traffic (only Qwest communications refused to collaborate), but Bush is pushing for retroactive immunity for the telcos that "may or may not have" collaborated.
Please see Keith Olbermann's intelligent and scating critique
Olbermann makes many good points, but one of them is that now the Bush administration has information it could look at to see who looked at porn, who bought what on eBay, and (chillingly, for me) who donated to Democrats.
I really don't put it past the government to target everyone who watches al Jazeera, a high-quality news network comparable to CNN and in many ways more substantive as it lacks the "breaking news" drivel and gossip news. This is the same government that allegedly traced falafel sales to find suspects. I suspect that this government might have had me on some secondary screening list for a while because between 2003 and 2004, when I was attending anti-war protests, I had a good, long run of 4 "random" screens.
What is most amazing to me about all this is that I'm really not sure Americans care. This "secret room" whistleblowing happened over a year ago. Those who read the news and care about politics are paying attention, but I'm sure more people are thinking about Heath Ledger. Sometimes I think it is the immigrant kids and the kids who payed attention in US History who are most sold on the idea of the US as a constitutional nation and the rest think it is a commercial nation, a christian nation, a white nation, or whatever else seems descriptive and contextually convenient.
It's one thing to try and design technologies that provide adequate affordances for flexible, privacy maintaining behaviors that don't get in the way. That largely gets used with immediate privacy concerns in local, everyday life in mind -- will my parents discover my drinking pics? Will I want the potential employers I wrote to this week seeing this? But the scenarios of domestic traffic surveillance seem too large and abstract for people to grasp. They feel that they're not doing anything wrong and this belief that their behavior protects them is maintained by a government who has media mouthpieces that will construct the case of why public, surveillance-enabled crackdowns are justified -- why they are wrong. But more sinister is the uncertainty that lingers when much of what the government might do with the data is unknown, unaccountable, and unprovable. My experience with secondary screening, for example is part of this.
What are we to do then? Encrypt all of our internet / phone traffic as a matter of technopolicy, in a way creating code that preserves constitutional rights? Would there be some body that had the key to decrypt and would do so if given warrants? At least such a public office would be more accountable than relying on megatelcos and their armies of well-funded lawyers and paper shredders.
Other ideas?
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This notion of encrypting everything is a really interesting issue to me. Recently, in much discussion about our email here at UCI, many of us have switched to using gmail. There is huge concern, however, over what it means to use gmail for us, for our students and so on. Often, the response given is to "just" encrypt it all. Personally, I don't see this as a workable solution and wonder why it has come to this. People didn't (and don't) encrypt snail mail and diaries, they often don't even lock them, but yet, they are protected whereas email and online journals are not... hmm... curious.
BTW, Savannah is my dog, and she is the one with the blogger account, not me -- Gillian :)
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