One just needs to look at the US and the whole fiasco that Carnivore has created to find out that this will be much more difficult than it appears... ;) -----Original Message----- From: Michael Newbery [mailto:Michael.Newbery(a)telstrasaturn.co.nz] Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2000 3:58 PM To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: Internet Surveillance At 11:22 AM -0500 6/11/00, Joe Abley wrote:

I'm trying to look at the operational impact of legislation in this area. Ignoring the philosophical debate about what is and what isn't appropriate about surveillance in general, or about police powers to gather evidence from ISPs:

[After not a lot of people responded, Joe attempted to shame us into replying. For the record, I'm too busy (excuse #2)]

+ suppose the police have sufficient cause to be suspicious about the antics of one of your customers that they obtain a court order which entitles them to "tap their internet traffic". Suppose you decided (or were compelled) to facilitate the "tap".

o what is reasonable for them to tap? Incoming (to-customer) e-mail? Outgoing (from-customer) e-mail? A complete packet dump?

Email, probably. A complete packet dump could present problems. I would be unwilling to do anything that would cost us money--without appropriate recompense---or that would impact network performance---in any event. I am unwilling to slow my STM-1024 down to V.24 speeds so I can wiretap.

o would you be happy letting someone from the police connect her own equipment to your network in order to gather the evidence the court order entitled them to collect? Would you prefer to do it yourself?

In general, no. I doubt their laptop has a suitable STM-1024 interface. Where possible, yes, under our supervision.

o would your company expect to be reimbursed for the time spent facilitating the "tap"?

Of course. Actually, I'd expect that my company could and therefor should just write the cost off to civic welfare, but I think that a struggling ISP might not appreciate having to stump up overtime for several people to make the tap work.

o how easy would it be for you to insert something in your network to capture all packets to/from one of your customers? (scale of 1 [trivial] to 10 [impossible])

1-10. It depends on which customer and where in the network.

+ suppose all interception of network traffic was prohibited across the board without a court order; i.e. you were compelled to shift your customers' traffic blindfolded, and were absolutely not allowed to look at it. Would this be feasible? How much troubleshooting would be impossible under these kinds of conditions?

Depends on how it's worded. In the extreme case, if I can't look at my customers' packets, I (my routers) can't read the address headers and the packets never make it past the first RJ-45! I would consider the wording in the current radio regs for amateurs has the right flavour. In the event that you intercept communications not intended for you, you are required to act as if you had not in fact intercepted the communications. In particular you must not communicate them to a third party. What's the statement? "Hard cases make bad law"? I shudder to think how to draught legislation that accurately and unambiguously sets out the rights and obligations of all parties and also keep up with technology. Let's just promote PGP a lot :-) -- Michael Newbery Technical Specialist Telstra Saturn Tel: +64-4-939 5102 Mobile:02-939 5102 Fax:+64-4-939 5100 --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog