Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] was SE PA, Now B*g Br*ther

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] was SE PA, Now B*g Br*ther
  • Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:16:30 -0800 (PST)

Lynn, this ABC news article from back in March shows a little of about the
mis-use of info. Now, this homestead list is as close to a 'chat-room' as
I've ever come. I've read and this article mentions that most chat-rooms
contain sex stuff, and in twelve or thirteen years , I've never heard any sex
stuff on this site, but I guess this is still a sort of chat room, or similar
enough for this article to be pertinent.................bobford

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Commentary: Big Brother Is Watching
How Patriot Act Search Warrants Can Affect All of Us Online
Commentary
By Lance Ulanoff

RSS A recent Associated Press article about the FBI raiding an Ohio-based
chat host company's offices and confiscating its servers sent a chill up my
spine.

The FBI acted on information that someone may have used the service for
hacking. It was within its jurisdiction, obtaining a warrant for the search
and seizure. But it's what they could do with those servers and the
information stored on them that really has me spooked.

I've visited Internet chat rooms. They tend to be useless, annoying affairs
where, along with potentially interesting discourse, there are always a dozen
or so idiots trolling for online sexual banter. Spend three minutes in any
chat room and you're likely to get either a pop-up note or a direct question
in the live thread that asks: "ASL?" (Age, Sex, Location). It's annoying and
this intrusion usually drives me right out of the virtual room, but others
stay.

Chat rooms enjoy wide popularity across the Net, and I doubt we'll ever see
them fade away. I think this one, based in the Columbus suburbs, was pretty
nickel and dime. Even so, people who visit chat rooms of any size and scope
can become a pretty devoted bunch, so I'm sure the servers will show some
frequent participants. There are also hundreds of looky-loos — people who
drop in for a time, find nothing particularly interesting and then drop out,
probably never to return again.

A Suspect Until Proven Innocent

Now here's where the story gets scary.

These chat rooms' servers have IPs and probably e-mail addresses (if not much
more) stored on them about both the regulars and the "just-passing-through"
users. Since the FBI was looking for someone who may have hacked someone
else's computer through the aforementioned chat hosting service, everyone
came under scrutiny.

In other words, if you ever visited that chat room and participated (or maybe
just looked around) you're a suspect.

This brings me back to my concern about the FBI's (heck, any federal
agency's) technical acumen.

How good are they really about ferreting out the difference between someone
who may have done something to attack another user and someone who was just
hanging out? What if someone turned another user's system into a zombie and
it attacked another computer. Who will the FBI go after then?

Right now, I'm envisioning a series of frightening home raids where the FBI
confiscates personal computers from anyone they think may have been involved.

Powerful Patriot Act

This new Big Brother-ish environment is fueled, to some extent, by the
Patriot Act, which is giving federal authorities far more latitude in their
pursuit of cybercriminals.

I have no love for jerks that create viruses and attack or take over other
people's PCs, but I worry that the Feds now have more power than they know
what to do with. I believe this is primarily because they don't understand
just how twisted the thread of cyberterrorism can become and how hard it can
be to trace an attack to its correct origin.

Let's, for argument's sake, consider the possibility that the FBI knows
exactly how to tell the good IPs and e-mail addresses from the bad ones.

What about all that other information that's on those servers? There could be
home addresses, credit card info, personal e-mails, you name it.

Who gets to draw the line about what the FBI can see? A warrant to confiscate
a server is like giving the FBI a warrant to search every house in the state
of Maine. The level and kinds of information that could be on the servers is
certainly as varied as what you could find in a few thousand homes.

I Was Framed, I Tell You

It gets worse.

Now say some employee at the unfortunate chat host company has recently been
slammed by pornographic spam e-mail. A user was annoyed by the way he was
treated in the chat room, so he signed up the chat administrator (by using an
e-mail he got in a reply from the administrator) for a dozen porn services.
He did it so fast that the admin's spam and content filters have actually
missed some of the e-mails.

Joe Administrator deleted the e-mails as soon as they arrived, but he
accidentally left Outlook's preview pane open and a message or two, complete
with the porno graphics, loaded into his message window. One message happened
to contain a kiddie porn shot that had been passed around the Net so many
times that no one, including the porn company, realized it was an illegal
shot of a 12-year-old.

The FBI, in its analysis of the servers, stumbles across this image in the
admin PC's cache and finds that it was stored as part of his mailbox. Now
he's under scrutiny for trafficking child porn. This can actually happen.

See how scary it can get?

My words of warning to you are this: Think twice, even three times, before
visiting a chat room, message group, or any site where you are interacting
with hundreds of people you don't know. We all love community, and making
connections with other people is what drives this world. But as long as Big
Brother is watching, we're all at risk.

Discuss this article in the PC Magazine forums.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ZDM/Story?id=97296&page=1










Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page