White House to Propose System for Wide Monitoring of Internet

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

White House to Propose System for Wide Monitoring of Internet

December 20, 2002
By JOHN MARKOFF and JOHN SCHWARTZ




 

The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring
Internet service providers to help build a centralized
system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and,
potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The
National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," set for release
early next year, according to several people who have been
briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to
increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is
preparing the report, and it is intended to create public
and private cooperation to regulate and defend the national
computer networks, not only from everyday hazards like
viruses but also from terrorist attack. Ultimately the
report is intended to provide an Internet strategy for the
new Department of Homeland Security.

Such a proposal, which would be subject to Congressional
and regulatory approval, would be a technical challenge
because the Internet has thousands of independent service
providers, from garage operations to giant corporations
like American Online, AT&T, Microsoft and Worldcom.

The report does not detail specific operational
requirements, locations for the centralized system or
costs, people who were briefed on the document said.

While the proposal is meant to gauge the overall state of
the worldwide network, some officials of Internet companies
who have been briefed on the proposal say they worry that
such a system could be used to cross the indistinct border
between broad monitoring and wiretap.

Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who represents some of
the nation's largest Internet providers, said, "Internet
service providers are concerned about the privacy
implications of this as well as liability," since providing
access to live feeds of network activity could be
interpreted as a wiretap or as the "pen register" and "trap
and trace" systems used on phones without a judicial order.


Mr. Baker said the issue would need to be resolved before
the proposal could move forward.

Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the
President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, said
yesterday that the proposal, which includes a national
network operations center, was still in flux. She said the
proposed methods did not necessarily require gathering data
that would allow monitoring at an individual user level.

But the need for a large-scale operations center is real,
Ms. Olson said, because Internet service providers and
security companies and other online companies only have a
view of the part of the Internet that is under their
control. 

"We don't have anybody that is able to look at the entire
picture," she said. "When something is happening, we don't
know it's happening until it's too late."

The government report was first released in draft form in
September, and described the monitoring center, but it
suggested it would likely be controlled by industry. The
current draft sets the stage for the government to have a
leadership role. 

The new proposal is labeled in the report as an
"early-warning center" that the board says is required to
offer early detection of Internet-based attacks as well as
defense against viruses and worms.

But Internet service providers argue that its
data-monitoring functions could be used to track the
activities of individuals using the network.

An official with a major data services company who has been
briefed on several aspects of the government's plans said
it was hard to see how such capabilities could be provided
to government without the potential for real-time
monitoring, even of individuals.

"Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time
analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are
occurring," the official said.

The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet
wiretap system used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I
analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact,
it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller
feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole
Internet." 

One former federal Internet security official cautioned
against drawing conclusions from the information that is
available so far about the Securing Cyberspace report's
conclusions. 

Michael Vatis, the founding director of the National
Critical Infrastructure Protection Center and now the
director of the Institute for Security Technology Studies
at Dartmouth, said it was common for proposals to be cast
in the worst possible light before anything is actually
known about the technology that will be used or the legal
framework within which it will function.

"You get a firestorm created before anybody knows what,
concretely, is being proposed," Mr. Vatis said.

A technology that is deployed without the proper legal
controls "could be used to violate privacy," he said, and
should be considered carefully.

But at the other end of the spectrum of reaction, Mr. Vatis
warned, "You end up without technology that could be very
useful to combat terrorism, information warfare or some
other harmful act."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/technology/20MONI.html?ex=1041379167&ei=1&;
en=1d6a322654c9415b



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