If you are an ISP, big or small, you have dealt with issues tracking attacks. Its fustrating as hell. It usually takes hours to get talking to someone with clue sitting on top of the network the attack is coming from. Sometimes it takes hours for someone to talk to you.. :) When language barriers or large time differences come into play, it gets even harder. Attackers can use this to their advantage, especially if they are limiting themselves to a small time window for their attack. Everyone who has spent time working at ISPs has dealt with this, myself included.

A solution to this problem _is_ necessary. Its a "facilitation of communication" problem at its heart, not a "monitoring" problem. At the molment, I still have the taste in my mouth given by the Barlow articles I blogged earlier, so I have my doubts as to the intelligence community ability to solve this problem for us given their past record and methods of operations. The better route may be for the ISP/communication providers to come up with a cross-communication strategy themselves.

As long as the intelligence people have a way to request/demand information from the ISPs/comm providers (given some sort of thumbs up from a judge) about activity of a given user/ip/whatever, and get it fast, then they will most likely be happy. If they cannot achieve their end goals, they will create a solution for us. They would be very happy if the commercial sector solved the problem for them. It would remove their incentive to turn the screws.

If there was some central US NOC structure.. And it had a staff that rotated between people working in all the ISPs that parcticipated, the government had its folks there, and it was open for review.. And it acted as a communication center between ISPs and not just the ISPs and the TLAs. That would be sweet! Now, on the other hand, if there was some NOC in Langley connected to a bunch of sniffers sitting in every ISP, that was clouded in secrecy, that would not be nice. That would suck. If the latter would up happening, I picture people like Decius, Renka, and myself standing between racks of core/access routers and a bunch of spooks with black boxes going "No! No! Fuck you! This is bullshit!" and getting arrested cognitive dissident style, and being proud of it. I have no fear of that happening really. Not only would be be completely unconstutitional, but I am confident there are more then enough people in the ISP community willing to take a personal blow to keep it from happening.

So, while the users get pissed about this.. The ISPs should be communicating with each other, about how to communicate with each other. I'm sure there are a bunch of NANOG people coming to the same conclusions.

All the comments below are from Decius. They are in line with my views, and they point several things I don't, so I'm just going to leave them appended to this.

This is where I would normally put a page break.. :)... [ Read More (0.8k in body) ]

Draft of National Stratedy To Security Cyperspace (RE: Bush Administration Propose System for Monitoring Internet)

] You are a member of the Settlement Group if you are a
] person (or entity) in the United States or its
] Territories and Possessions who purchased prerecorded
] Music Products, consisting of compact discs, cassettes
] and vinyl albums, from one or more retailers during the
] period January 1, 1995, through December 22, 2000.

The music industry might owe you $20, no joke.

BTW, this is why feds always advocate biometric technologies even though they aren't cost effective.

TIA Flowchart

] "But since Sept. 11 and the government's expansive
] campaign of monitoring and detention, people are turning
] to the 82-year-old organization to help safeguard their
] liberties. Among them are conservatives who made the
] phrase "card-carrying member of the ACLU" a political
] insult, but who are signing up. "

This is good to hear... Conservatives spent a decade talking smack about the ACLU because the Christian right likes perpetuating misconceptions about the first amendment with the goal of establishing religion. This obviously conflicts with the general conservative notion of upholding "individual liberties." This is the most central contradiction in modern conservative thought. Of course the Libertarians have been saying that for years.

ACLU Membership up

] "Urge Your Representative to Co-Sponsor the DMCRA! "

There is a law on your side... You ought to support it.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Action Center

] "If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before
] passage, here is what will happen to you:
]
] Every purchase you make with a credit card, every
] magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription
] you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or
] receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank
] deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you
] attend all these transactions and communications will go into
] what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized
] grand database." "

This is a little more juicy...

You Are a Suspect

"The fact that we're having this discussion at all is a symptom of the polarizing effect that Bush and his top dogs have had on the United States since assuming office and even more so in the hard-right free-for-all that followed the Sept. 11 attacks."

Ted Rall IS the mainstream voice of American communism, and as with all political extremes, unsubstantiated paranoid conspiracy theories are par for the course on ANY day, regardless of any "polarizing effect" offered by the current environment. The radical left is almost indistinguishable from the radical right, especially in this regard.

Having said that, I *LOVE* paranoid conspiracy theories, and this is a particularily GOOD one. A political link to the Ron Brown plane crash! A missing black box! This is the stuff that the Art Bell show is made of! So, I heartily recommend this one. Imagine if its true! What can we expect come 2004? Oh, the drama!

Yahoo! News - THE (POSSIBLE) ASSASSINATION OF PAUL WELLSTONE

Bowie: "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

David Bowie looks forward to the next music revolution.

David Bowie, 21st-Century Entrepreneur

"At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool we've ever had. At its worst, it can make people dumber faster than any media tool we've ever had. The lie that 4,000 Jews were warned not to go into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was spread entirely over the Internet and is now thoroughly believed in the Muslim world. Because the Internet has an aura of "technology" surrounding it, the uneducated believe information from it even more. They don't realize that the Internet, at its ugliest, is just an open sewer: an electronic conduit for untreated, unfiltered information."

Global Village Idiocy

Einstein had socialist-anarchistic leanings.

New Details Emerge From the Einstein Files