4/26/2008: Security News Brief: New Legislation Aimed At Wide Spread
Illegal Websites :

The FBI on Wednesday called for new legislation that would allow
federal police to monitor the Internet for “illegal activity.” The
suggestion from FBI Director Robert Mueller, which came during a House
of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, appears to go beyond a
current plan to monitor traffic on federal-government networks.
Mueller seemed to suggest that the bureau should have a broad
“omnibus” authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-
sector networks as well.

The surveillance should include all Internet traffic, Mueller said,
“whether it be .mil, .gov, .com–whichever network you’re talking
about.”

In response to questions from Rep. Darrell Issa, a California
Republican, Mueller said his idea “balances on one hand, the privacy
rights of the individual who are receiving the information, but on the
other hand, given the technology, the necessity of having some omnibus
search capability utilizing filters that would identify the illegal
activity as it comes through and give us the ability to preempt that
illegal activity where it comes through a choke point.”

In response, Issa said: “Can you have someone on your staff designated
to work with members of Congress on trying to craft that legislation?”

If any omnibus Internet-monitoring proposal became law, it could
implicate the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of freedom from
unreasonable searches and seizures. In general, courts have ruled that
police need search warrants to obtain the content of communication,
and the federal Wiretap Act created "super warrant" wiretap orders
that require additional steps and judicial oversight.

In addition, it’s unclear whether “illegal activity” would be limited
to responding to denial-of-service attacks and botnets, or would also
include detecting other illegal activities, such as online gambling,
the distribution of “obscene” images of adults engaged in sexual acts,
or selling drugs without a license.

To be fair, Wednesday’s discussion of the plan was geared toward
cybercrime and the Bush administration’s classified “cyberinitiative,”
which includes a shadowy program known as **Einstein. (see explanation
below)

Some politicians have already raised concerns that even Einstein,
which is described as dealing only with government networks and not
private ones, could infringe upon the privacy rights of American
citizens. It’s already in place at 15 federal agencies, but Homeland
Security has said it’s still preparing the necessary privacy impact
assessments for a proposed $293 million governmentwide Einstein
expansion.

Issa, for his part, referred on Wednesday to malicious attacks being
undertaken by foreign and domestic hackers who want to “take control
of computers” and harvest the national-security secrets and private
information of government agencies, private companies, and individual
Americans.

“What authorities do you need to monitor, looking for those illegal
activities, and then act on those, both defensively and, either
yourselves or certainly other agencies, offensively in order to shut
down a crime in process?” Issa asked.

In response, Mueller said he would be happy to have his legislative
staff work with members of Issa’s committee on creating a bill for a
broader-reaching surveillance system.

Issa suggested that perhaps the FBI already has the power to seek
voluntary private-sector partners that would like to be “defended” by
its agents, provided that they give the FBI their consent. Mueller,
however, wasn’t so sure, saying, “that’s going to require some
thought.”

** Einstein, which DHS calls an "early warning system" for cyber-
incidents, is described in a Homeland Security document from September
2004 as "an automated process for collecting, correlating, analyzing,
and sharing computer security information across the federal civilian
government. The round-the-clock system captures traffic flow data,
which currently includes source and destination IP addresses and
ports, Internet Control Message Protocol data, and the length of data
packets. Homeland Security says the setup has helped reduce the time
it takes for agencies to share such data from four to five days to
four to five hours. The next step is to hire more analysts and enable
the analysis to occur in real time, DHS says.
Source: Internal Company News Wire via Security News Brief