You know, I read this on slashdot (one of the more prominent geek news sites - being mentioned on slashdot is enough to bring many lesser sites to their knees) earlier today.
The dominant opinion there (feel free to read it - the commentary is at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/07/28/1317203) is that it's a severe violation of freedom. That it may be, but it's consistent with current policy wrt signals monitoring. I assume that all of you have heard of Echelon, the system which monitors worldwide voice traffic. More of the same.
Now, IMHO, they should get rid of Echelon, which has gone from national security and branched out into industrial espionage. Or at the very least limit it. However, if they're not going to get rid of Echelon, and they're not going to get rid of Echelon, they're consistent in expanding their role to eavesdropping our email as well as our telephones.
As for the creation of the Federal Intrusion Detection Network (FIDNET), that's probably their way of bringing CERT's (Computer Emergency Response Team, a group at CMU) current role under their purview. I have my reservations about this. Working with selected corporations to detect intrustion and security breaches does imply that everyone else can go to hell - definitely not the case at CERT.
To publicly declare that one is going to begin monitoring seems somewhat ill-advised. It's akin to telling all evildoers to begin using strong cryptography. Not that any technologically savvy evildoers already aren't, but even the less savvy ones will be prompted to.
Not that cryptography is necessarily a hallmark of the evildoer, either - Debian (the group that assembles the Linux distribution that I use) uses a PGP keyring for individual identification (read Scheier, _Applied Cryptography_ 2ed for examples of schemes used for identification rather than straight-up transmission security). Of course, Debian is a fully open-source distribution; perhaps that degree of dislike towards corporations qualifies under a broad definition of evildoing :).
marco
(finger mpa at nuance.dhs.org for my public key)
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> Marco Anglesio | There is no premature anti-fascism. <
> mpa at the-wire.com | --Ernest Hemingway <
> http://www.the-wire.com/~mpa | <
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