Is your government an Internet spy?

Do they know what you look at? Will they know where you’ve been? Is
Big Brother reading your packets in a similar way that they scan
overseas telephone calls? I know this sounds like an introduction to an
Art Bell segment. But, it’s for real and it’s true.

You can bet the U.S. government will soon be spending your tax
dollars in an attempt to read your e-mail. The government of England has
already made it clear that they want more eavesdropping. In the UK there
is a new piece of handiwork making an attempt to require all Internet
Service Providers to allow the British government tap into their
networks. For details, see Home Office’s Interception of
Communications report.

It’s not that difficult. Hackers and crackers do it all the time. For
those of you who don’t know the difference between a hacker and a
cracker, a hacker is someone that invents a method to break into
something. A cracker is someone that uses the tool or method a hacker
created to break into something. The hacker’s motivation is similar to
that of climbing a mountain. It’s there. It requires skill. It’s a
challenge. Easy to see that there would be more crackers than hackers.
The government of England will become a great big cracker. It will pay
one or more companies to become its hacker developers.

First let’s quickly review what the Internet is. Then we can better
discuss the logistics of how this will work.

As you may know, the Internet is a mesh of interconnected networks.
Yes, no one owns the Internet. But, there are people that do in fact own
huge chunks of it. MCI has a big one. Sprint has a big one. Cable and
Wireless bought a chunk of MCI’s to gain a bigger network. Then there is
AOL, AT&T and many others. Each of these is interconnected to the other
physically as well as on paper. The paper part consists of lengthy
agreements that allow the transmission of each other’s packets through
each other’s gateways.

What’s a gateway? A gateway is like a bridge or tunnel that your
packet drives over or through as it attempts to reach its destination.
The destination is a machine on a network located somewhere on the other
side of a gateway.

No single network can disconnect from the other for fear of having a
customer complain that they can’t reach a specific website or send
e-mail to their cousin on the competitor’s network. If we were to apply
some Internet Physics, we would discover the following: here comes a
deep thought, ready?

Each network depends on the existence of the other, to a degree that
is directly proportional to the specific amount of packets that contain
a destination on the other competitor’s network. This is rarely an equal
value at any one gateway.

Speaking of gateways, governments will place machines between
gateways to eavesdrop on your packets. They know where your packet came
from. They know where it’s going. The packet tells them this. They can
now wait (not much of a wait, really just milliseconds) and watch for
the return packets that are destined to be displayed on your screen.

How easy is this? It’s very easy. Someone is doing it at this
moment. More likely someone’s robot program. That’s how Net crooks
snatch a password or a credit card number. They find a machine that is
sitting on a freeway of packet traffic. There they eavesdrop on the
packets and attempt to find one that isn’t scrambled with encryption.
Encrypted packets they just toss. What they want is a packet that
appears to have that credit card number look. If it has the look, they
log it — that is, they store it for review, test or use at a later
date.

Most people know that you can prevent your credit card from being
packet sniffed. You never input your card number onto a web page without
double checking the little lock or key displayed on your web browser.

In our home, we often make web purchases. Nothing bad has ever
happened. The order taker on an 800 number or the slip you leave behind
signed at a cash register is more dangerous. That puts you at more risk
than entering your card number on an encryption protected web page of a
company that is “known-to-you.”

Most of us already possess and use encryption for limited Internet
applications. Like those which encrypt web data specific pages of credit
card transactions.

Yes, technology always has a way of coming to your aid. After all,
where there is a market, a solution will soon follow. So, let’s take it
to the next step. This would mean that we may someday see the next big
wave become encrypted websites and decryption browsers. Implementation
of encryption on all web page transmissions and requests. Or maybe
initially it will be just the requests (your clicks) or just the
response transmissions (the page data you requested that gets displayed
on your screen).

The Net won’t go away as a result of the Big Brother gang’s
eavesdropping. It’s very basic. The Net is bigger than all the Big
Brothers combined. Even the government of China cannot effectively
filter, stop, snoop or manipulate the Net effectively.