Re: National Security Backdoor in telnetd - all versions.

From: Nico Kadel-Garcia (nkadel_at_verizon.net)
Date: 08/28/03 

Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 13:01:35 GMT

H. S. wrote:

> BTW, er, IIRC, weren't such laws, which probit the use and export of
> such privacy tools, successfully challenged in the courts? I also seem
> to remember reading in the news that such laws were changed? amended?
> whatever, and such tools *were* allowed to be exported and marketed,
> keeping in mind the commercial/business gains? At that time, what
> changed that national security reasons were not important anymore?

They were challenged, when administered by the department of Customs.
Nothing changed nationally. Instead of dropping the regulations, they
were transferred to the department of Commerce, and are wending their
way all the way back up the court system *again* to where Constitutional
issues of free speech can be addressed with precedent.

Since then, the specter of terrorism has replaced the specter of the War
on Some Drugs as an excuse to ignore free speech (in publishing and
distributingn such code) and search and seizure, such as the rather
nastier bits of the so-called Patriot Act allowing far more invasive
monitoring under the guise of "National Security(tm".

And while Peter Clark, who heads up a national infrastructure department
in the federal government, has openly stated that programs such as the
"Carnivor" monitoring system were a bad name and a bad idea and not in
use anymore, the equipment is still in the locked little rooms in major
network providers and still gets visited by individuals whom the local
security staff are not *allowed* to log in the normal visitor guest
books. Guess who got surprised and startled by challenging their
presence without the co-hosting site's staff escorting them the way they
were required to escorrt *me* while I worked on some systems? I got my
wrist slapped for reporting them to the co-hosting site security people
when they refused to identify themselves.