6 posts tagged “national security”

Thrift store MP3 player contains secret military files

(CNN)  -- A man walks into a thrift store.

 It sounds like the opening line to a bad joke. And this case was a bad joke -- for the Pentagon.

Chris Ogle of New Zealand was in Oklahoma about a year ago when he bought a used MP3 player from a thrift store for $9. A few weeks ago, he plugged it into his computer to download a song, and he instead discovered confidential U.S. military files.

"The more I look at it, the more I see, and the less I think I should be," Ogle said with a nervous laugh in an interview with TVNZ.

The files included the home addresses, Social Security numbers and cell phone numbers of U.S. soldiers. The player also included what appeared to be mission briefings and lists of equipment deployed to hot spots in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of the information appears to date to 2005.

The New Zealand journalist who first reported the story was able to contact at least one of the soldiers by dialing a phone number found in the files. He hung up once she explained why she was calling...

Afterthoughts:

A minor rant: Who in the hell are these people that are storing confidential military files on MP3 players? Why is it so easy for said person to copy the files onto it? and in my life experience if one person is doing something at work, everyone is probably doing it. As I key this comment I would bet someone at the Pentagon is heading out to lunch with a thumb drive in their pocket. Sometimes I think my head is going to explode.

Obama team denies it will delay ‘Don’t Ask’ repeal
By CHRIS JOHNSON, Washington Blade | Nov 25, 3:14 PM

A member of Barack Obama’s transition team is denying media reports that the president-elect has decided to delay efforts to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” until 2010.

An Obama transition team spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the decision on how to approach repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which prohibits gays from serving openly in the military, would be made after more experts have joined the Obama administration.

“These decisions will not be made before the full national security team is in place,” the spokesperson said...

Mega maize project in Madagascar planned
21 nov 2008

The South Korean company Daewoo Logistics wants to use 1 million hectares in Madagascar to grown maize. The company also wants to plant palm oil on the island...

..."We want to plant corn there to ensure our food security. Food can be a weapon in this world. We can either export the harvests to other countries or ship them back to Korea in case of a food crisis...

...The project could end up creating more than 70,000 jobs on the island...

...a European diplomat in Southern Africa commented that "there will be very little direct benefits [for Madagascar]", adding that "extractive projects have very little spill-over to a broader industrialisation". "The deal Daewoo is negotiating with the Madagascan government looks positively neo-colonial and the Madagascan people stand to lose half their arable land...

Bush claims executive privilege on CIA leak
By Laurie Kellman – 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush has asserted executive privilege to prevent Attorney General Michael Mukasey from having to comply with a House panel subpoena for material on the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.

A House committee chairman, meanwhile, held off on a contempt citation of Mukasey — who had requested the privilege claim — but only as a courtesy to lawmakers not present.

Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, rejected Mukasey's suggestion that Vice President Dick Cheney's FBI interview on the CIA leak should be protected by the privilege claim — and therefore not turned over to the panel.

"We'll act in the reasonable and appropriate period of time," Waxman, D-Calif., said. But he made clear that he thinks Mukasey has earned a contempt citation and that he'd schedule a vote on the matter soon.

"This unfounded assertion of executive privilege does not protect a principle; it protects a person," Waxman said. "If the vice president did nothing wrong, what is there to hide?"

The assertion of the privilege is not about hiding anything but rather protecting the separation of powers as well as the integrity of future Justice Department investigations of the White House, Mukasey wrote to Bush in a letter dated Tuesday. Several of the subpoenaed reports, he wrote, summarize conversations between Bush and advisers — are direct presidential communications protected by the privilege.

"I am greatly concerned about the chilling effect that compliance with the committee's subpoena would have on future White House deliberations and White House cooperation with future Justice Department investigations," Mukasey wrote to Bush. "I believe it is legally permissible for you to assert executive privilege with respect to the subpoenaed documents, and I respectfully request that you do so."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Bush invoked the privilege on Tuesday...

Scooter Libby told the FBI in 2003 that it was possible that Cheney ordered him to reveal Plame's identity to reporters...

Full Story Here

Keep in mind that right now it looks like the price of oil will be between $130.00 $133.00 and $135.00 per barrel today.  Just 30 days ago, when this testimony was given, oil was $124.00 per barrel.

Real Time Price of Oil Click Here

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, about ten years ago, Osama bin Laden stated that his target price for oil is $144 a barrel and that the American people, who allegedly robbed the Muslim people of their oil, owe each Muslim man, woman, and child $30,000 in back payments. At the time, $144 a barrel seemed farfetched to most. Today, bin Laden is a mere $20 a barrel short of his target and there is little doubt it will be attained. I would like to impress upon this Committee that $144 a barrel oil will be perceived as a victory for the Jihadist movement and a reaffirmation that the economic warfare component of its campaign against the West is a resounding success. There is no need to elaborate on the implications of such a victory in terms of loss of U.S. prestige and our ability to prevail in the Long War of the 21st century. It is therefore imperative that the U.S. Congress do its utmost to forestall such a setback.

Deeply embroiled in a struggle against radical Islam, nuclear proliferation, and totalitarianism, the U.S. faces a crude reality: While its relations with the Muslim world are at an all-time low, more than 70 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and over a third of production are concentrated in Muslim countries. The very same Shi‘a and Sunni theocratic and dictatorial regimes that most strongly resist America’s efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East are the ones that, because of the market’s tightness, currently drive the world oil economy. While the U.S. economy bleeds, oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran—sympathetic to, and directly supportive, of radical Islam—are on the receiving end of staggering windfalls. In 2006, the United States spent about $260 billion on foreign crude oil and refined petroleum products. This year, with oil hovering over $125 a barrel, the figure could surpass $500 billion, the equivalent of our defense budget. At today's prices, foreign oil producers are extracting a tax of more than $1,600 a year from every American man, woman and child.

While we in the U.S., which enjoys a per capita income of over $40,000 a year, are feeling the sharp pinch of high oil prices, we should all consider the impact of these prices on the world’s poor. People throughout the world who live on $2 a day are suffering far more than we can imagine as their economies hemorrhage. This has profound implications for global security, driving regional unrest, increasing poverty, and nipping in the bud progress towards democracy. Countries that are still carrying debts from the 1970’s oil shocks, are being now looted by OPEC price fixing. In fact, we are witnessing a tremendous transfer of wealth from the world’s poorest to the world’s producers of oil.

OPEC, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, is deliberately keeping oil supply tight to prop up prices. Not only is Saudi production lower today than it was two years ago, despite the increase in demand, but the cartel has effectively deleted 2.4mbd from the global oil market in what amounts to an accounting scam. In 2007, OPEC expanded its member roster to include Ecuador and Angola – together the two had accounted for nearly 2.4mbd of non-OPEC oil. Yet, total OPEC production remained constant, allowing existing members to reduce production. This translates into a net reduction in non-OPEC supply with no equivalent increase in OPEC supply. This is equivalent to the production of Norway disappearing off the market . Further, while non-OPEC production has doubled over the last thirty years, as the graph below shows, OPEC production today is virtually identical to its production thirty years ago, even as the global economy has grown and with it demand for oil.

The flow of petrodollars from consuming economies to the coffers of producers not only casts a large shadow over America’s prospects of winning the war on terrorism but it also limits U.S. diplomatic maneuverability on central issues like human rights and nuclear proliferation. Perhaps the most powerful statement of the impact on America’s ability to accomplish its foreign policy goals came from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who in April 2006 told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:  “We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more, as Secretary of State, than the way that the politics of energy is . . . “warping” diplomacy around the world. It has given extraordinary power to some states that are using that power in not very good ways for the international system, states that would otherwise have very little power.”

One of these states is Iran. With 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves and the world’s second largest natural gas reserve, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems unfazed by the prospects of international sanctions against his country as a result of its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. At high oil prices, leaders of human-rights violating countries like Azerbaijan, Chad, Sudan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, too, can persecute their people with impunity. Another setback to democracy was delivered last May when Kazakhstan’s leader Nursultan Nazarbayev declared himself president for life. The control over a large part of the world’s oil and gas market allows Russia to bully its European neighbors, to play “hard to get” on Iran, and to undermine democracy in former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Georgia. Should Russia and other major gas producers like Iran go forth with plans to create an OPEC like natural gas cartel, we can expect further consolidation of power among the energy producers. Oil also lubricates the so-called Bolivarian revolution led by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, who is using Venezuela’s oil wealth to buy political influence in the Western Hemisphere and to consolidate an anti-U.S. bloc in the region.

U.S. diplomacy is further complicated by the indefatigable thirst for energy of emerging countries like China and India, which are becoming increasingly dependent on the very same countries the United States is trying to rein in. The growing appetite of developing Asian powers not only plays into the hands of the aforementioned rogue producing nations, but also feeds what could become a global competition for control of energy resources. Rogue nations like Iran and Sudan can now buy themselves the support of a third of humanity – not to mention the protection of Chinese veto power on the U.N. Security Council – by signing energy deals with China and India. India now at stands at a crossroads. As its electricity demand grows it faces three options. It can tie itself to Iran, the holder of the world’s second largest natural gas reserve, via the proposed 1600 mile long Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline. Last month, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad visited India and Pakistan in an effort to seal the deal on this project. The implications of such a pipeline should be very clear: decades long dependence of one billion Indians on Iran. Alternatively, India can continue to develop its coal reserves and expand coal power generation. This is a sound approach from an energy security perspective; however, India has been coming under global pressure – including that of the U.S. government - to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. India’s third option is to expand nuclear power development, in collaboration with the U.S. At this point, foot dragging in Delhi is delaying ratification of a nuclear agreement with the U.S. It appears that the Iranian option may hold sway. As the largest democracy in the world, India is a vital ally to the United States. Congress should explore all options – including encouraging India and Pakistan to pursue an alternative pipeline route from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan – to ensure that India does not tie its economic future to Iran.

Stripping oil of its strategic value

The unique strategic importance of oil to the modern economy—beyond that of any other commodity today—stems from the fact that the global economy’s very enabler, the transportation sector, is utterly dependent on it, with 220 million cars and trucks in the United States alone (today, contrary to popular belief, only 2 percent of U.S. electricity is generated from oil, and conversely only about 2 percent of U.S. oil demand is due to electricity generation.) With 97 percent of U.S. transportation energy based on petroleum, oil is the lifeblood of America’s economy. America is poor in oil relative to its need. It consumes one of every four gallons in the world but has barely 3 percent of the world’s proven reserves of conventional oil. The United States now imports over 60 percent of its oil, more than twice the ratio of imports before the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo.

Neither efforts to expand petroleum supply nor those to crimp petroleum demand will be enough to reduce America’s strategic vulnerability anytime soon. When the British Navy made the shift from coal to oil, then Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill famously remarked, “safety and certainty in oil lies in variety and variety alone.” To diminish the strategic importance of oil to the international system it is now critical to expand the Churchillian doctrine beyond geographical variety to a variety of fuels and feedstocks.

Oil’s strategic value derives from its virtual monopoly on transportation fuel. This monopoly, which gives intolerable power to OPEC and the nations that dominate oil ownership and production, must be broken. Not long ago, technology broke the power of another strategic commodity. Until around the end of the nineteenth century salt had such a position because it was the only means of preserving meat. Odd as it seems today, salt mines conferred national power and wars were even fought over control of them.  Today, no nation sways history because it has salt mines. Salt is still a useful commodity for a range of purposes. We import some salt, so if one defines independence as autarky we are not “salt independent”. But to most of us there is no “salt dependence” problem at all — because canning, electricity and refrigeration decisively ended salt’s monopoly of meat preservation, and thus its strategic importance. We can and must do the same thing to oil.

17 X 17

Today’s vehicles have an average lifespan of 17 years and, for the most part, can run only on petroleum. Every year 17 million new cars roll onto America’s roads. For a cost of less than $100 extra as compared to a gasoline-only vehicle, automakers can make virtually any car a flex fuel vehicle, capable of running on any combination of gasoline and a variety of alcohols such as ethanol and methanol, made from a variety of feedstocks, from agricultural material, to waste, to coal. (Alcohol does not just mean ethanol, and ethanol does not just mean corn.) Flex fuel vehicles provide a platform on which fuels can compete and let consumers and the market choose the winning fuels and feedstocks based on economics. In Brazil, where ethanol is widely used, the share of flex fuel vehicles in new car sales rose from 4 percent to 67 percent in just three years, and this year stands at about 90 percent. These cars are manufactured by the same automakers that sell to the U.S. market and entail no size, power, or safety compromise by consumers. The proliferation of flex fuel vehicles in Brazil has driven fuel competition at the pump to the point where the Brazilian oil industry has had to keep gasoline prices sufficiently low to compete with ethanol in order not to lose more market share, so low that it actually just received a government subsidy to do so. Competition in Brazil is working so well that a big Brazilian sugar and ethanol firm just bought out the distribution assets of Exxon in Brazil.

Expanding U.S. fuel choice to include biofuels imported from developing countries has significant geopolitical benefits at a time when U.S. global standing is eroding. Sugar, from which ethanol can be cheaply and efficiently produced, is now grown in one hundred countries, many of which are poor and on the receiving end of U.S. development aid. Encouraging these countries to increase their output and become fuel suppliers, opening our fuel market to them by removing the protectionist 54 cent a gallon ethanol tariff, could have far-reaching implications for their economic development. By creating economic interdependence with biomass-producing countries in Africa, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere, the United States can strengthen its position in the developing world and provide significant help in reducing poverty.

At this point, the fallacy that increased use of biofuels in general, and corn ethanol in particular, is driving world hunger must be addressed.  The primary drivers of price increases for food commodities spanning the spectrum from fish to rice (neither of which are used to make fuel) and beyond are the massive increases in oil prices -- raising the cost of distribution, labor, packaging and so forth; commodity speculation driven by a weak dollar and increased calorie demand from hundreds of millions of people in China and India who have risen out of poverty and bare subsistence. Further, despite corn ethanol production, the U.S. corn food and feed product has increased 34 percent over the last five years, and U.S. food exports overall have increased 23 percent on the year. America is clearly doing its share to feed the world.

The International Energy Agency has reiterated that biofuels are key to keeping the lid on an overheated transportation fuel market. According to Merrill Lynch, without the increase in biofuels production, oil prices would have been 15 percent higher, which at current oil prices translates into a savings of over $80 billion a year to the U.S. economy. The much derided biofuels program which has facilitated this $80 billion saving, costs the taxpayer $4 billion a year. By any reasonable standard it is a far better deal to send money to America’s farmers than to various petro-dictators.

Since we hardly generate any electricity from oil, using electricity as a transportation fuel enables the full spectrum of electricity sources to compete with petroleum. Plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) can reach oil economy levels of 100 miles per gallon of gasoline without compromising the size, safety, or power of a vehicle. The key is changing our thinking from miles per gallon to miles per gallon of oil-based fuel – it is not the total energy consumption of the vehicle which is the problem, it is the portion of that energy that comes from petroleum. If a PHEV is also a flexible-fuel vehicle powered by 85 percent alcohol and 15 percent gasoline, oil economy could reach over 500 miles per gallon of gasoline. Ideally, plug-in hybrids would be charged at night in home or apartment garages, when electric utilities have significant reserve capacity. The Department of Energy estimates that over 70 percent of the U.S. vehicle market could shift to plug-in hybrids without needing to install additional baseload electricity-generating capacity.

Thinking Out of the Barrel

A nationwide deployment of flex-fuel cars, flex fuel plug-in hybrids, and alternative fuels could take place within two decades. But such a transformation will not occur by itself. In a perfect world government would not need to intervene in the energy market, but in a time of war, the United States is taking an unacceptable risk by leaving the problem to be solved by the invisible hand. This is especially true since the energy market is anything but free. It is manipulated by a cartel, heavily rigged in favor of the status quo, and, as the case of the ethanol tariff shows, riddled with protectionism.

Every year that passes without Congressional action to ensure that new cars sold in America are flex fuel vehicles is another year in which 17 million gasoline-only cars start their 17-year life on U.S. roads, further binding us to foreign oil. On the grounds of national security and in the interest of stemming the hemorrhaging of our economy, Congress should take swift action to require that new vehicles sold in the United States are flexible fuel vehicles. Such an Open Fuel Standard would level the playing field and promote free competition among diverse energy suppliers. Choosing not to embrace an Open Fuel Standard, is choosing to preserve oil’s monopoly in the transportation sector, and with it OPEC’s growing stranglehold over the global economy.

Anne Korin is co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS) and editor of Energy Security. She is also chair of the Set America Free Coalition, an alliance of national security, environmental, labor and religious groups promoting ways to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. Korin focuses on energy supply vulnerabilities, OPEC, Africa, maritime terrorism, energy security, energy strategies and technological innovation. She appears in the media frequently and has written articles for Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, The National Review, Commentary Magazine, and the Journal of International Security Affairs. Ms. Korin has advised myriad high tech companies, and has worked on a wide variety of projects for corporations including Exxon International (Esso,) KPMG, and Goldman Sachs. She appears frequently on Capitol Hill and her advice is sought by members of Congress. Her education includes engineering degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and work towards a doctorate at Stanford University.

FBI's Net surveillance proposal raises privacy, legal concerns
April 25, 2008
by Declan McCullagh

The FBI director and a Republican congressman sketched out a far-reaching plan this week for warrantless surveillance of the Internet.

During a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, the FBI's Robert Mueller and Rep. Darrell Issa of California talked about what amounts to a two-step approach. Step 1 involves asking Internet service providers to open their networks to the FBI voluntarily; step 2 would be a federal law forcing companies to do just that.

Both have their problems, legal and practical, but let's look at step 1 first. Issa suggested that Internet providers could get "consent from every single person who signed up to operate under their auspices" for federal police to monitor network traffic for attempts to steal personal information and national secrets. Mueller said "legislation has to be developed" for "some omnibus search capability, utilizing filters that would identify the illegal activity as it comes through and give us the ability to pre-empt" it.

These are remarkable statements. The clearest reading of them points to deep packet inspection of network traffic--akin to the measures Comcast took against BitTorrent and to what Phorm in the United Kingdom has done, in terms of advertising--plus additional processing to detect and thwart any "illegal activity."

"That's very troubling," said Greg Nojeim, director of the project on freedom, security, and technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "It could be an effort to achieve, through unknowing consent, permission to monitor communications in a way that would otherwise be prohibited by law."

Unfortunately, neither Issa nor Mueller recognized that such a plan is probably illegal. California law, for instance, says anyone who "intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication" conducts electronic surveillance shall be imprisoned for one year. (I say "probably illegal" because their exchange didn't offer much in the way of details.)

"I think there's a substantial problem with what Mueller's proposing," said Al Gidari, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm who represents telecommunications providers. "He forgets the states have the power to pass more restrictive rules, and 12 of them have. He also forgets that we live in a global world, and the rest of the world doesn't quite see eye to eye on this issue. That consent would be of dubious validity in Europe, for instance, where many of our customers reside."

For its part, the FBI isn't talking. After we made repeated attempts to get the bureau to explain what Mueller was talking about, FBI spokesman Paul Bresson responded by saying, "At this point, I'm going to let the director's comments, in the context of the exchange with Rep. Issa, speak for themselves."

What step 1 appears to involve is persuading Internet providers to amend their terms of service and insert an FBI-can-monitor-everything clause. Informed consent is one thing. But does anyone actually read the fine print on their contracts with their broadband or wireless provider? If not, is that fine print good enough?

Informed consent is important because of the wording of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, which says providers may share the contents of customers' communications only "with the lawful consent" of the user. Otherwise, providers are breaking the law and can be sued for damages. And without consent, the FBI would bump up against the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches.

Originally, Congress seemed to take a liberal view of what constituted "lawful consent." When ECPA was enacted in 1986, a House committee report said "consent may be inferred from a course of dealing," and if "those rules are available to users," consent can be implied.

But that was written way back in the early, pre-Internet days of Compuserve and bulletin board systems. More recently, courts have interpreted ECPA more strictly.

The 2003 In Re Pharmatrak decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit offers one useful measuring stick. The court ruled in a case involving Web tracking "that it makes more sense to place the burden of showing consent on the party seeking the benefit of the exception." The judges approvingly cited a second case, which said "consent can only be implied when the surrounding circumstances convincingly show that the party knew about and consented to the interception."

The Federal Trade Commission, too, has taken a relatively strict view of informed consent. In its lawsuit filed against Odysseus Marketing, the FTC argued that it was unlawful for a company not "to adequately disclose" to customers that it was sharing information with third parties. The case ended in a settlement.

Translation: Obtaining "lawful consent" for FBI monitoring means making sure that your customers actually know what's going on and agree. Hiding it in the terms of service doesn't qualify.

But assume that the FBI can persuade Internet providers to include a prominent notice in every monthly bill, or some other mechanism that would be legally sufficient. Another problem is that even if the person who pays the bills consents to monitoring, other people may use the connection--think homes with open wireless connections. ECPA's legal protections follow individual people, not customer accounts.

Rewriting U.S. surveillance laws
Because the FBI would run into serious problems doing wide-scale Internet surveillance under existing state and federal law, step 2 may be necessary. That means rewriting U.S. surveillance law.

Issa said he wants to "craft" legislation that would give the FBI the power to look "for those illegal activities, and then act on those, both defensively and, either yourselves or certainly other agencies, offensively in order to shut down a crime in process." He worried about "national-security secrets and just the common information of private individuals" being at risk. In his response, Mueller said he wants Congress to "give us the ability to pre-empt that illegal activity."

"Looking for" a crime in process on the Internet can take multiple paths. If it's a denial-of-service attack against eBay or Amazon.com originating from Russian servers, it can be detected by measuring the amount of traffic without inspecting the contents each packet. But to detect fraud and "national-security secrets," as well as personal information being transferred, deep packet inspection would be necessary--roughly on a scale of the Great Firewall of China.

Needless to say, detecting "illegal activity" would soon be extended to copyright infringement and peer-to-peer networks. Under the No Electronic Theft Act, swapping music or video files is a federal crime, if the total value of the files exceeds $1,000. If the value tops $2,500, the penalties jump up to not more than five years in prison. And as Jammie Thomas found out last year, allegedly sharing 24 files can lead to $222,000 in civil penalties.

"I think you bump squarely into the Fourth Amendment when you get into the required waiver of constitutional protections to use a service," said Gidari, the attorney at Perkins Coie. "Why don't we extend it to include not criticizing the government? Which right is next? 'You may use our service, as long as you don't disparage Verizon?' Why not that one?...You've still got to have, at the end of the day, a constitutionally supportable legal process to get access to anyone's communications. This cannot be an end run around that."

The problem of how to "shut down a crime in process" and "pre-empt that illegal activity" is more difficult and, perhaps, more worrisome.

Here's what Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, had to say when I asked him to read the transcript of Wednesday's hearing:

    It certainly is Mueller's responsibility to explain what it is that he's looking for. But it seems that he's saying, essentially, that the surveillance society is the best society. A society in which the government has complete information about illegal activities and is able to enforce that. Throughout our country's existence, we've lived in a society where the government doesn't have perfect information.

    Is (Mueller) suggesting that there's a search capability using filters that would identify an infringing work and fail to deliver a message containing that work? Is that the choke point? If that is the case, how can that be done well? How about fair uses? How will the government tell whether a copyrighted work is sent pursuant to a license? Will it have a centralized database of licenses? How does he propose to have this work, so it only identifies illegal activities and doesn't overly choke?

    The FBI has some obligation to explain: what is it going to focus on here? Once you have the technology in place, will it then be used for more and more?

If you thought the tussles over Net neutrality were heated before, imagine a broadband provider throttling certain applications--and being able to blame that throttling capability on law enforcement. At the very least, it would be a wonderful excuse.

Which is why it's a shame, and somewhat troubling, that the FBI has chosen not to say what its director is proposing (and apparently will be working with Congress to write into law).

Odds of FBI-filtering legislation: Zero?
One possible germ for this Internet-monitoring idea lies in Homeland Security's so-called Einstein program, which is designed to monitor Internet mischief and network disruptions aimed at federal agencies. Not much about Einstein is public, but a privacy impact assessment offers some details.

Homeland Security Spokeswoman Laura Keehner said in a telephone interview that the primary focus of Einstein at the moment is protecting federal-government networks. "Obviously, the FBI could clarify or elaborate on what they said," Keehner said. "I do know that (from Homeland Security's perspective) we now first need to get our .gov in order. We need to concentrate on our federal networks...We're also bringing in the private sector to open those lines of discussion and figure out ways that the private sector can better equip themselves to stop any cyberincursions."

Another possibly related effort is the Bush administration's so-called Cyber Initiative. In January, President Bush signed a pair of secret orders--National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23--that apparently deal with detecting and preventing Internet disruptions. Issa is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which held a closed-door hearing on Thursday devoted to the Cyber Initiative--and, during the exchange with Mueller a day earlier, he said his monitoring idea was related.

The House Intelligence committee didn't want to talk. But a representative of the House Homeland Security committee chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sent us three bullet points in an e-mail message:

    1. Chance of a legislative initiative that would allow FBI to place filters to identify illegal activity at choke points on the .com space: 0

    2. We still have concerns and questions about the initiative, and we continue to do oversight.

    3. Legislation is not being considered for any of the new proposals, outside of the budget requests made by the administration.

Point No. 3 seems to relate to the administration's 2009 budget request, which asks Congress for $293.5 million to expand Einstein to the entire federal government.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is headed by Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, also held a classified hearing last month on the administration's Cyber Initiative.

But a committee aide told us, "The idea of filtering for criminal activity has never been discussed with us. Nor has any new statutory authority been discussed. In fact, the administration explicitly said it didn't need any legislation. Furthermore, the idea of monitoring nongovernment domains has never been proposed in briefings the committee has received."

It's true that, at least in the current political climate, legislation of the sort Issa wants to draft isn't likely to slide through Congress unopposed.

Still, it's worth keeping in mind that the FBI has a recent, and not very flattering, history of trying to expand the scope of surveillance methods. Bureau agents used so-called exigent letters to obtain records from telephone companies, claiming that an emergency situation existed.

In reality, there was often no emergency at all. The Justice Department's inspector general found similar abuses of national-security letters. The FBI also tried to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when it denied requests to obtain records.

Perhaps Mueller can provide a convincing argument for why laws giving the FBI "omnibus search capability utilizing filters that would identify the illegal activity" would be wise. Perhaps not. But when politicians weigh the idea of trusting the FBI with such broad and unprecedented authority, they should consider the abuses that have already taken place with far less powerful tools.