FBI wants to move hunt for criminals into Internet backbone

Found on Ars Technica on Thursday, 24 April 2008
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But while Fusion Centers centralize law enforcement efforts, they do not centralize the criminal activity. There are places, however, where such activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these "choke points," and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data.

What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the backbone data that is already being siphoned off by the NSA in order to look for illegal activity.

I want to point out that this centralization of legal and illegal activity at network hubs will be a persistent part of all of our lives as we live more and more of them online. Thus the government's desire to tap those hubs and filter them for criminal and hostile activity will never go away.

Of course, and if you put a GPS sender on every civilian, you'll be able to hunt criminals more efficiently because you always know where everybody is and was. However, at the same time, you put million of people under suspicion. You have to treat every single person as a possible criminal; in essence, you need to create a police state. Everybody agrees that China violates the basic rights for personal freedom and expression, but in the end, the FBI plans to do the same: monitoring everything what the people it should protect are doing. In the beginning, they will justify it with the fight against terrorism and child porn. Then drug trafficking. Then murder. Then fraud. Then speeding tickets. This would be the birth of Mutivac (from Isaac Asimov).