The Electronic Police State

punditman says...What governments in the world are "the best" at electronic eavesdropping and violating their own citizens' basic rights to privacy? Punditman emailed the publishers of this worthy study (a downloadable pdf) for permission to publish it here. Hopefully these folks are who they claim to be. Punditman never heard back and is not sure why. So punditman is boldly presenting the document in full, with due thanks to www.cryptohippie.com. I think.

Have a non-surveilling weekend.

The Electronic Police State
2008 National Rankings

Most of us are aware that our governments monitor nearly every form of electronic communication. We are also aware of private companies doing the same. This strikes most of us as slightly troubling, but very few of us say or do much about it. There are two primary reasons for this:
1. We really don’t see how it is going to hurt us. Mass surveillance is certainly a new, odd, and perhaps an ominous thing, but we just don’t see a complete picture or a smoking gun.
2. We are constantly surrounded with messages that say, “Only crazy people complain about the government.”

However, the biggest obstacle to our understanding is this:
The usual image of a “police state” includes secret police dragging people out of their homes at night, with scenes out of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR. The problem with these images is that they are horribly outdated. That’s how things worked during your grandfather’s war – that is not how things work now.

An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.

An electronic police state is characterized by this:

State use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens.

The two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these:
1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.
2. It is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for
use in prosecutions.

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it – the evidence is already in their database.

Perhaps you trust that your ruler will only use his evidence archives to hurt bad people. Will you also trust his successor? Do you also trust all of his subordinates, every government worker and every policeman?

And, if some leader behaves badly, will you really stand up to oppose him or her? Would you still do it if he had all the emails you sent when you were depressed? Or if she has records of every porn site you’ve ever surfed? Or if he knows every phone call you’ve ever made? Or if she knows everyone you’ve ever sent money to? Such a person would have all of this and more – in the form of court-ready evidence – sitting in a database, waiting to be organized at the touch of a button.

This system hasn’t yet reached its full shape, but all of the basics are in place and it is not far from complete in some places. It is too late to prevent this – it is here. Our purpose in producing this report is to let people know that their liberty is in jeopardy and to help them understand how it is being undermined.

OUR RANKINGS

Firstly, we are not measuring government censorship of Internet traffic or police abuses, as legitimate as these issues may be. And, we are not including evidence gathering by traditional, honest police work in any of the categories below. (That is, searches pursuant to honestly obtained warrants – issued by an independent judge, and only after the careful examination of evidence.)

The seventeen factors we included in these rankings are:

Daily Documents
Requirement of state-issued identity documents and registration.
Border Issues
Inspections at borders, searching computers, demanding decryption of data.
Financial Tracking
State’s ability to search and record all financial transactions: Checks, credit card use, wires, etc.
Gag Orders
Criminal penalties if you tell someone the state is searching their records.
Anti-Crypto Laws
Outlawing or restricting cryptography.
Constitutional Protection
A lack of constitutional protections for the individual, or the overriding of such protections.
Data Storage Ability
The ability of the state to store the data they gather.
Data Search Ability
The ability to search the data they gather.
ISP Data Retention
States forcing Internet Service Providers to save detailed records of all their customers’ Internet usage.
Telephone Data Retention
States forcing telephone companies to record and save records of all their customers’
telephone usage.
Cell Phone Records
States forcing cellular telephone companies to record and save records of all their
customers’ usage.
Medical records
States demanding records from all medical service providers and retaining the same.
Enforcement Ability
The state’s ability to use overwhelming force (exemplified by SWAT Teams) to seize
anyone they want, whenever they want.
Habeus Corpus
Lack of habeus corpus – the right not to be held in jail without prompt due process. Or, the overriding of such protections.
Police-Intel Barrier
The lack of a barrier between police organizations and intelligence organizations. Or, the overriding of such barriers.
Covert Hacking
State operatives removing – or adding! – digital evidence to/from private computers
covertly. Covert hacking can make anyone appear as any kind of criminal desired.
Loose Warrants
Warrants issued without careful examination of police statements and other justifications by a truly independent judge.

For each of these, we assigned a value of between 1 and 5. A value of 1 indicates minimal development of electronic police state abilities in that area. 5 indicates a full operation.

THIS YEAR’S RESULTS

Our rankings for the year of 2008 show China and North Korea occupying the top spots as the most complete Electronic Police States in the world, followed by Belarus and Russia. Next, however, we leave communist and recently-communist states, with the UK (England/Wales), the United States and Singapore following closely on their heels.

We ranked 52 major states. The map below displays their rankings:

Nations depicted in Red are the most advanced electronic police states,
with an average rank of 3.0 or greater.

Nations depicted in Orange are strongly developing electronic police
states, with an average rank of 2.5 or greater.

Nations depicted in Yellow are lagging (but still developing) electronic
police states, with an average rank of 2.0 or greater.

Nations depicted in green are states that seem to be going toward the
electronic police state model, but not as quickly.



Our raw data may be downloaded here.

Here are the 52 states and their rankings:
1. China
2. North Korea
3. Belarus
4. Russia
5. United Kingdom: England & Wales
6. United States of America
7. Singapore
8. Israel
9. France
10.Germany
11.Malaysia
12.Ireland
13.United Kingdom: Scotland
14.Netherlands
15.South Korea
16.Ukraine
17.Belgium
18.Australia
19.Japan
20.New Zealand
21.Austria
22.Norway
23.India
24.Italy
25.Taiwan
26.Denmark
27.Hungary
28.Greece
29.Canada
30.Switzerland
31.Slovenia
32.Poland
33.Finland
34.Sweden
35.Latvia
36.Lithuania
37.Cyprus
38.Malta
39.Estonia
40.Czech Republic
41.Iceland
42.South Africa
43.Spain
44.Portugal
45.Luxembourg
46.Argentina
47.Romania
48.Thailand
49.Bulgaria
50.Brazil
51.Mexico
52.Philippines

THE 2009 REPORT

We will issue next year’s report toward the end of Q1. We welcome input from any and all reliable sources. (The information required to prepare such a report is not easy to obtain, and we’ll take whatever help we can get.)

We may be reached at: info@cryptohippie.com
www.cryptohippie.com

The Cable-Cutter Mystery

February 8, 2008

by Justin Raimondo www.antiwar.com

I was skeptical, at first, of speculation over the cutting of two cables linking the Middle East with the Internet, which had it as part of some Vast Neocon Conspiracy to isolate the region prior to a US military assault. However, when two more cables – this time, in the Persian Gulf – were mysteriously cut, I began to wonder …. In a piece headlined "Cable cutter nutters chase conspiracy theories," The Register goes out of its way to laugh off the prospect that what we are witnessing is a military operation, or the prelude to one, sniffing "there's little more than suspicions to work with" since we've yet to reach the damaged cables. Yet, given the sort of government we are dealing with – a regime that lied us into one war, and is not-so-subtly trying to finagle us into yet another one – why shouldn't we be suspicious? We'd have to be crazy not to be. The Economistfollows suit, sneering at "internet conspiracy theories" and denouncing the whole brouhaha as an "online frenzy" that is "way out of line." Yet one has to wonder: four cable cuts in the past week? I'm with Steven Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University, who avers: "As a security guy, I'm paranoid, but I don't understand the threat model here. On the other hand, four accidental failures in a week is a bit hard to swallow, too. Let's hope there will be close, open examination of the failed parts of the cables." First it was supposed to be a ship's anchor that caused the damage, and yet the Egyptians have said there were no ships in the vicinity, which they regularly monitor: besides which, that entire area near Alexandria is off-limits to all shipping. Another reason to suspect a deliberate act: this politically-sensitive region is an Internet choke-point, as ABC News points out. "The route connecting Europe to Egypt, and from there to the Middle East" is tenuous: "Today, just three major data cables stretch from Italy to Egypt and run down the Suez Canal, and from there to much of the Middle East. (A separate line connects Italy with Israel.) A serious cut here is immediately obvious across the region, and a double cut can be crippling." Yet theories that this incident prefigures a US attack on Iran don't comport with the facts: Iran, far from being isolated by the cuts, may have enjoyed better connectivity as a result of the events. The areas hardest hit were Kuwait, Egypt, and especially Pakistan – this last being a likelier target for isolation than Iran, and certainly more current Another, and far more plausible, theory is that the seemingly coordinated cuts resulted from efforts to tap into the cables – a spying operation. Go here for an exhaustive and very convincing case for viewing this as "special warfare." The Register cites Prof. Bellovin, but fails to note the real gist of his remarks. While he's skeptical of the above-cited link, which posits a scenario whereby the USS Jimmy Carter, present whereabouts unknown, uses its specially designed facilities to tap directly into the cables, Bellovin poses an alternative scenario: "If if wasn't a direct attempt at eavesdropping, perhaps it was indirect. Several years ago, a colleague and I wrote about link-cutting attacks. In these, you cut some cables, to force traffic past a link you're monitoring. Link-cutting for such purposes isn't new; at the start of World War I, the British cut Germany's overseas telegraph cable to force them to use easily-monitored links. One of the messages they intercepted — and cryptanalyzed — was the Zimmerman telegram, which asked Mexico to join Germany in attacking the US, in exchange for financial support and recovery of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Instead, public outrage in the US contributed to the decision to enter the war against Germany." "The problem with this scenario," he adds, "is that the benefit is short-lived: the cables will be repaired in a few weeks." Yes, but long enough to have accomplished – what? We can't know, of course, but Prof. Bellovin certainly raises some interesting possibilities, none of which can be discounted by clueless journalists who sniff at "conspiracy theories" – as if we have no reason whatsoever to suspect covert action, by the US or whomever, in that area of the world. As Prof. Bellovin and a co-author point out in this paper on the subject: "Attacks on the routing system, with the goal of diverting traffic past an enemy-controlled point for purposes of eavesdropping or connection-hijacking, have long been known." Given the context in which these cable cuts are occurring – heightened tensions in the region, and not only with Iran – I think it is probable that they are deliberate, and that the diversion of internet traffic for purposes of eavesdropping is clearly the intent. After all, ask yourself this question: which is more plausible, an "accidental" cutting of four cables in one week in an area of the world which is the current focus of US military and diplomatic efforts, or the scenario outlined by Prof. Bellovin? None of this is at all surprising. The US government currently claims the right to spy on Americans, in their own country, as well as when they're in communication with overseas individuals. They don't hide this, but proclaim it from the rooftops: does anyone doubt they are capable of commandeering the world's internet cable network in order to utilize it for their own purposes? You don't have to quaff the "conspiracy theorist" Kool-Aid to find this credible: a dose of realism will do. punditman says: Rule #1 when looking for the motives of crime: Who stands to benefit?

Interview with Naomi Wolf: The End of America

punditman says:

The evidence of the drift towards a distinct and dangerous form of 21st authoritarianism is everywhere folks, and--not for a millisecond to let Bush and company off the hook--its' tentacles are global in scope.

I keep harping on this drift towards fascism and nobody even bats an eyelash--much less drops by with a comment. Is this the state of fear (or indifference) in which we are now ensnared? Or, is this blog just a load of paranoid and derivative parrot droppings?

Now, listen to Naomi. She speaketh the truth (I recommend taking the time to listen to this interview. You may want to nurse it along with your bevy of choice).

Unimpeachably Impeachable

punditman says: With precious few in Congress willing to take the obvious next step, the Bushies will simply try to run out the clock. The fact that they may get away with it could spell the final death knell for US democracy (what's left of it).

by Ray McGovern from antiwar.com

Last week's four-part Washington Post feature on Vice President Dick Cheney removed any doubt in my mind as to whether he and President George W. Bush have committed the kinds of high crimes and misdemeanors that warrant impeachment.

While President George W. Bush bears the ultimate responsibility, the nature of the evidence against Cheney and his closest associates is so specific and overwhelming that it makes sense to impeach and bring him to trial first.

Subpoenas from Capitol Hill are flying downtown into executive office buildings like paper airplanes, but the potential for obfuscation and delay is immense, and the danger to the Republic speaks for a more urgent, simpler approach.

As hundreds are killed each day in the misbegotten war in Iraq with no end in sight, the same officials who brought us Iraq – with the vice president in the lead – are salivating for war on Iran.

There is a blizzard of possible charges warranting impeachment, and that is part of the problem. It's not only outrage fatigue, it is knowing how to sort through what Thomas Jefferson called "a long train of abuses and usurpations" to select the most heinous, when it is difficult to discern which of them most offends our Constitution and the rule of law.

Suggestion: From the most heinous, select just one for which there is ready proof – one not susceptible of the kind of diddling that has been so prevalent in Washington these past several years.

Why not focus on a high crime that the Bush administration has already admitted to, with claims it is above the law and the Constitution: electronic eavesdropping on Americans without the required court warrant.

This charge has the additional advantage of precedent. It was included in the second (of three) Articles of Impeachment voted against President Richard Nixon by a 28 to 10 vote by the House Committee on the Judiciary on July 27, 1974.

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