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Patriot act search warrants can get all of us

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   http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/ZDM/big_brother_commentary_pcmag_040218.html

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/ZDM/big_brother_commentary_pcmag_040218.html

Big Brother Is Watching
How Patriot Act Search Warrants Can Affect All of Us Online

Commentary
By Lance Ulanoff
PC Magazine

March 18
— 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.


Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.



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