[PAA-Discuss] Big Brother Obama: US to Spy on Internet Messaging

[Lee Loe]

No to #1, Yes to #2. will send you some articles. One: Obama's Massive Power
Struggle with the American Military Machine; Two: Gorbachav and the Pentagon
(or something like that); plus one from, believe it or not, one that I am
told appeared in the HChron (we have quit taking it for financial reasons)
from the Washington Post 2 or 3 part report on Woodward's new book. Obama
needs us to "have his back." Lee Loe

  _____  

From: discuss-bounces at paa-tx.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at paa-tx.org] On
Behalf Of Ron and Kris Graham
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 2:51 PM
To: discuss at paa-tx.org; Deb Shafto ; HCJPP at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [PAA-Discuss] Big Brother Obama: US to Spy on Internet Messaging



Is there any doubt at all in anyone's mind that we are living in a Police
State? Is there any doubt in anyone's mind that Barack Obama is a stinking
fascist? We are living in a fascist nation, people. If you think voting
Democrat is going to change anything you are dead wrong. You will be
contributing DIRECTLY to the continuation of fascism, and I'm talking about
on a local, state and national election. It's way past time to wake up and
realize a coup has taken place in this country. STOP perpetuating the sham
that we live in some sort of democracy or representative republic. We have
neither. 

 

Kris

 

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/sep2010/wire-s28.shtml

 


Big Brother Obama: US to spy on Internet messaging


Regulations to target Skype, Facebook, Blackberry


By Patrick Martin 
28 September 2010


The Obama White House is backing new regulations that would compel popular
Internet messaging services like Facebook, Skype and Blackberry to open up
their systems to FBI surveillance, the New York Times reported Monday,
citing federal law enforcement and national security officials.

The threat to democratic rights goes far beyond anything envisioned by the
Bush administration. The goal is to make all forms of electronic
communication that use the Internet subject to wiretapping and interception
by federal police agencies.

In the past few years there has been a large-scale shift from conventional
telephone communication to Internet-based messaging, which is both cheaper
and more secure.

"Investigators have been concerned for years that changing communications
technology could damage their ability to conduct surveillance," the Times
reported. "In recent months, officials from the FBI, the Justice Department,
the National Security Agency, the White House and other agencies have been
meeting to develop a proposed solution."

This would include drafting new statutory language to bring providers like
Research in Motion, the Canadian-based company that makes Blackberry
devices, under legal controls similar to those established by the 1994
Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act.

That legislation required telecommunications companies to make their
call-processing systems accessible to federal government spying, whether the
calls pass through conventional phone lines or cell phone relay towers.

One of the biggest issues will be a government demand that communications
service providers change the structure of their hardware and software,
providing a "back door" for the use of intelligence agencies and ensuring
that government agents can break any encryption applied to messages either
by the service provider or the customer.

The Times article did not raise any alarm over the prospect of government
snooping on the private communications of hundreds of millions of people,
whether in the United States or in other countries. Nor did it quote any
objection to the proposal from civil liberties groups, although the American
Civil Liberties Union quickly issued a statement calling the plan "a huge
privacy invasion" that was "one more step toward conducting easy dragnet
collection of Americans' most private communications."

The only downside suggested by the Times account was the existence of
technical problems that might prove expensive and cumbersome for the
corporations that would have to comply with the new rules, and that the new
security procedures might create new opportunities for hackers.

FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni, who discussed the issue with the
newspaper, said that there was a consensus among police and intelligence
agencies that companies which provide encrypted communications would have to
retain the key to any encryption, rather than allowing their customers to
devise and hold their own.

"No one should be promising their customers that they will thumb their nose
at a US court order," she told the Times. "They can promise strong
encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain
text." In other words, encryption would protect the privacy of
communications, except when the government says otherwise.

This is the same stance taken by dictatorial governments from China to the
Middle East. The governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates
only last month threatened to bar Blackberry services in their countries
because Research in Motion refused to allow the local intelligence services
to monitor and intercept messaging.

The Times article gave two examples of government efforts to intercept
encrypted or peer-to-peer communications that ran into technical obstacles,
one involving a drug cartel, the other related to the failed Times Square
bombing earlier this year. These examples were chosen to support the claim
by the Obama administration that the buildup of surveillance is part of a
struggle against crime and "terrorism."

However, the Obama administration has defined "terrorism" so widely that the
term now covers a vast array of constitutionally protected forms of
political opposition to the policies of the US government, including
speaking, writing, political demonstrations, even the filing of legal
briefs.

The Times report comes only three days after FBI raids on antiwar political
activists in Minneapolis and Chicago, who could face charges of providing
"material support" for terrorist organizations because they have spoken and
written in opposition to US foreign policy in the Middle East and in
Colombia.

According to an attorney for one of those targeted, the dragnet was so
all-encompassing that FBI agents seized "any documents containing the word
Palestine."

By the same logic, any data packet passing through the Internet with the
word "Palestine" could be subject to interception, decryption, and storage
in a federal database where both the person sending the message and the
person receiving it would be permanently recorded as under suspicion of
links to terrorism. Other words suggest themselves as likely targets:
socialism, class struggle, imperialism, revolution, Marxism, Trotskyism.

The US national security apparatus seeks the power not only to spy on the
Internet, but to seize or shut it down entirely when that might seem
advantageous. Former CIA director Michael Hayden, interviewed by Reuters at
a cyber-security conference in San Antonio, Texas on Sunday, called for
giving President Obama, or any president, the power to shut down the
Internet. "It is probably wise to legislate some authority to the president
to take emergency measures for limited periods of time, with clear reporting
to Congress, when he feels as if he has to," he said.

Hayden was echoing a view that is increasingly widespread in official
Washington. In June, a Senate subcommittee approved a bill, introduced by
Joseph Lieberman, the right-wing Democrat from Connecticut, declaring the
entire World Wide Web a "national asset" of the United States and giving the
president the power to seize control of the Internet or order its complete
shutdown "for national security reasons."

The 197-page bill is entitled "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset
Act," or PCNAA. It has the backing of another top Senate Democrat, Jay
Rockefeller of West Virginia. Big software companies and Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) are supporting the bill because it grants them immunity
against civil lawsuits for any damage caused by a shutdown or government
takeover.

Also on Monday, the US Treasury Department issued proposed new regulations
that would require American banks to report all electronic money transfers
into and out of the United States, regardless of the amount. Up to now,
transfers of $10,000 or more had to be reported.

The new regulations were issued under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act, passed in 2004, which gave the treasury secretary authority
to require such reports to "combat terrorist financing." The new rules would
require banks to pump information on 750 million transfers a year into a
huge new database that could be mined by police, intelligence and regulatory
agencies.

The information accompanying a wire transfer usually includes the name,
address and account number of sender and recipient, as well as
identification such as a driver's license or passport number if required by
the money service. Banks would have to provide Social Security numbers for
senders and recipients on an annual basis.

These actions demonstrate that a turning point has been reached in the
erosion of democratic rights in the United States. A full decade ago, at the
time of the stolen presidential election of 2000 and the Supreme Court's
anti-democratic decision in Bush v. Gore, the Socialist Equality Party and
the World Socialist Web Site warned that there was no longer any
constituency for the defense of democratic rights within the American ruling
class.

For a decade since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, first under Bush, now under
Obama, the American ruling class has erected the framework for a police
state. At no stage in this process has there been any significant opposition
from any section of the political establishment.

Now the United States stands on the brink of major social struggles, with
tens of millions of working people seeking the means to fight to defend
jobs, living standards and public services. The American ruling class has
long understood that the real threat to its vast wealth and privilege comes
not from foreign "terrorists," but from below, from the working people who
constitute the vast majority of the population.

Working people must be equally clear-eyed: millions will now come into
conflict with the vast military/intelligence apparatus of the federal
government. What is posed now is a turn to political struggle, to the
independent political mobilization of the working class against the two
official parties of big business, the Democrats and Republicans, and against
the capitalist state itself.

 

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