Whitehouse "dissident" web site monitoring?

- ----------------------------------------------------------

      WHITE HOUSE MONITORING OF DISSIDENTS ON THE INTERNET


    The  National  Security   Agency   presumably   can   monitor
subversive  communication  on  the  Internet  without leaving any
trace  by  "sniffing  packets"  at  traffic  nodes.  For   purely
political  purposes, however, the White House may be forced to do
the monitoring in-house,  which  means  that  they  leave  traces
everywhere they go.

    With  just  a  superficial  search  for  such   traces,   The
Washington   Weekly   has   uncovered   intensive  monitoring  of
"dissident" Internet sites by the White House.

    It turns out that computers from inside the White House  have
kept  pretty  good  tabs  on information available on Whitewater,
Vince Foster, and Mena at a few key repositories  on  the  World-
Wide Web, a subset of the Internet.

    Just  three  such  sites:  "The   Washington   Weekly,   "The
Whitewater  Scandal  Home  Page" and "Whitewater & Vince Foster,"
were accessed 128 times by  four  computers  from  the  Executive
Office  of the President between August 28 and August 31.  If the
White House is showing a similar interest in other sites  on  the
World  Wide  Web,  that would amount to a monitoring operation of
considerable magnitude. Tim Brady of the  Yahoo!  World-Wide  Web
index  says  that his company alone has indexed approximately 725
political  sites.  That  monitoring  effort  would  be   nothing,
however,  compared  to  the  effort  required to follow all anti-
Clinton discussion on the Usenet, another subset of the Internet.

    The White House did  not  respond  to  an  inquiry  (attached
below)   asking  for  an  explanation  and  asking  whether  this
constituted "casual browsing."

    Interestingly, the week after the  White  House  snooping  of
files,  which included a series of articles by J. Orlin Grabbe on
Vince Foster's ties  to  the  NSA,  the  following  little  piece
appeared in Newsweek Magazine:

  "Conspiracy theorists perked up when Deborah Gorham told Senate
  Whitewater investigators in June that her boss, the late deputy
  White House counsel Vince Foster, asked her  to  put two secret
  notebooks  from  the  National Security Agency in a White House
  safe. The suggestion that  Foster  dealt  with  the NSA sparked
  feverish  speculation  on the  Internet that he was involved in
  espionage. The reality appears more prosaic.  The  White  House
  won't give details,  but  sources say Foster's files dealt with
  legal questions about national emergencies...."


    Does the White House follow anti-Clinton discussion on Usenet
newsgroups just as closely?  The White House posts press releases
to Usenet in collaboration with the Artificial  Intelligence  Lab
at   Massachusetts   Institute  of  Technology.  But  MIT  System
Administrator Bruce Walton says that the White House does not use
the  same  server  for  reading netnews.  It would be difficult -
although not impossible - to find the server that the White House
uses  for  reading  or  receiving netnews and check for traces on
that server.

    Readers may be tempted to post a threat to the President on a
newsgroup just to see if they get a visit from the Secret Service
the next day. That experiment is not advisable. It is a  criminal
offense.  But  Usenet  just might be a faster conduit for getting
the attention of the administration than the email  address  that
the White House has published for the president.





Attachment:



                      THE WASHINGTON WEEKLY
_________________________________________________________________

August 31, 1995

Virginia M. Terzano
White House Office of the Press Secretary
The White House


Dear Ms. Terzano:

    It has come to my attention that several dissident  sites  on
the  World  Wide  Web  have been visited by White House computers
this week.  Apparently,  all  information  regarding  Whitewater,
Foster, and Mena has been transferred to White House computers.

    Specifically, the sites,  

"Washington Weekly" (http://www.federal.com),  
"The Whitewater Scandal Home Page"
(http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~crow/whitewater/)
"Whitewater & Vince Foster" 
(http://www.cris.com/~dwheeler/n/whitewater/whitewater-index.html)

have  been  visited  by  White  House   computers   ist1.eop.gov,
ist6.eop.gov, ist7.eop.gov, and gatekeeper.eop.gov between August
28 and August 31, and a total of 128 files have been  transferred
to those White House computers. For all sites, this constitutes a
significant  increase  over  previous  access  by   White   House
computers.

    In light of this information, I have the following questions:

(1) Does this constitute "casual browsing" by White House staff, or
    is it, in light of the considerable time and effort spent during 
    regular business hours, part of a monitoring or intelligence operation?

(2) For what purpose is the information transferred to the White House used?

(3) Does the White House keep information from these web sites on file,
    and does the White House keep a file on the persons responsible for
    these web sites?

(4) Is the April 9 statement by David Lytel of the White House Office of
    Science and Technology to Amy Bauer of Copley News Service that the
    administration does not monitor anti-Clinton activity on the web still
    operative?


    Thank you very much for your cooperation in this matter.

Sincerely,

Marvin Lee
The Washington Weekly




Copyright (c) 1995 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)


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On Tue, 12 Sep 1995 an215712@anon.penet.fi wrote:

> 
> - ----------------------------------------------------------
> 
>       WHITE HOUSE MONITORING OF DISSIDENTS ON THE INTERNET
>       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^!!!

Unbelievable!!!  To add to this distressing truth, I have learned that 
the White House also subscribes to a number of newspapers and periodicals 
which are reviewed for things of interest to the Administration and to 
the President. I I I I I I ammmmmmmmmm shocked!


Ooops.  Dog bites man.
And do you really think the White House couldn't hire a couple of net 
gurus to sniff packets if they wanted to hide their "monitoring"(=reading).

EBD
 
> 
>     The  National  Security   Agency   presumably   can   monitor
> subversive  communication  on  the  Internet  without leaving any
> trace  by  "sniffing  packets"  at  traffic  nodes.  For   purely
> political  purposes, however, the White House may be forced to do
> the monitoring in-house,  which  means  that  they  leave  traces
> everywhere they go.
> 
>     With  just  a  superficial  search  for  such   traces,   The
> Washington   Weekly   has   uncovered   intensive  monitoring  of
> "dissident" Internet sites by the White House.
> 
>     It turns out that computers from inside the White House  have
> kept  pretty  good  tabs  on information available on Whitewater,
> Vince Foster, and Mena at a few key repositories  on  the  World-
> Wide Web, a subset of the Internet.
> 
>     Just  three  such  sites:  "The   Washington   Weekly,   "The
> Whitewater  Scandal  Home  Page" and "Whitewater & Vince Foster,"
> were accessed 128 times by  four  computers  from  the  Executive
> Office  of the President between August 28 and August 31.  If the
> White House is showing a similar interest in other sites  on  the
> World  Wide  Web,  that would amount to a monitoring operation of
> considerable magnitude. Tim Brady of the  Yahoo!  World-Wide  Web
> index  says  that his company alone has indexed approximately 725
> political  sites.  That  monitoring  effort  would  be   nothing,
> however,  compared  to  the  effort  required to follow all anti-
> Clinton discussion on the Usenet, another subset of the Internet.
> 
>     The White House did  not  respond  to  an  inquiry  (attached
> below)   asking  for  an  explanation  and  asking  whether  this
> constituted "casual browsing."
> 
>     Interestingly, the week after the  White  House  snooping  of
> files,  which included a series of articles by J. Orlin Grabbe on
> Vince Foster's ties  to  the  NSA,  the  following  little  piece
> appeared in Newsweek Magazine:
> 
>   "Conspiracy theorists perked up when Deborah Gorham told Senate
>   Whitewater investigators in June that her boss, the late deputy
>   White House counsel Vince Foster, asked her  to  put two secret
>   notebooks  from  the  National Security Agency in a White House
>   safe. The suggestion that  Foster  dealt  with  the NSA sparked
>   feverish  speculation  on the  Internet that he was involved in
>   espionage. The reality appears more prosaic.  The  White  House
>   won't give details,  but  sources say Foster's files dealt with
>   legal questions about national emergencies...."
> 
> 
>     Does the White House follow anti-Clinton discussion on Usenet
> newsgroups just as closely?  The White House posts press releases
> to Usenet in collaboration with the Artificial  Intelligence  Lab
> at   Massachusetts   Institute  of  Technology.  But  MIT  System
> Administrator Bruce Walton says that the White House does not use
> the  same  server  for  reading netnews.  It would be difficult -
> although not impossible - to find the server that the White House
> uses  for  reading  or  receiving netnews and check for traces on
> that server.
> 
>     Readers may be tempted to post a threat to the President on a
> newsgroup just to see if they get a visit from the Secret Service
> the next day. That experiment is not advisable. It is a  criminal
> offense.  But  Usenet  just might be a faster conduit for getting
> the attention of the administration than the email  address  that
> the White House has published for the president.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Attachment:
> 
> 
> 
>                       THE WASHINGTON WEEKLY
> _________________________________________________________________
> 
> August 31, 1995
> 
> Virginia M. Terzano
> White House Office of the Press Secretary
> The White House
> 
> 
> Dear Ms. Terzano:
> 
>     It has come to my attention that several dissident  sites  on
> the  World  Wide  Web  have been visited by White House computers
> this week.  Apparently,  all  information  regarding  Whitewater,
> Foster, and Mena has been transferred to White House computers.
> 
>     Specifically, the sites,  
> 
> "Washington Weekly" (http://www.federal.com),  
> "The Whitewater Scandal Home Page"
> (http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~crow/whitewater/)
> "Whitewater & Vince Foster" 
> (http://www.cris.com/~dwheeler/n/whitewater/whitewater-index.html)
> 
> have  been  visited  by  White  House   computers   ist1.eop.gov,
> ist6.eop.gov, ist7.eop.gov, and gatekeeper.eop.gov between August
> 28 and August 31, and a total of 128 files have been  transferred
> to those White House computers. For all sites, this constitutes a
> significant  increase  over  previous  access  by   White   House
> computers.
> 
>     In light of this information, I have the following questions:
> 
> (1) Does this constitute "casual browsing" by White House staff, or
>     is it, in light of the considerable time and effort spent during 
>     regular business hours, part of a monitoring or intelligence operation?
> 
> (2) For what purpose is the information transferred to the White House used?
> 
> (3) Does the White House keep information from these web sites on file,
>     and does the White House keep a file on the persons responsible for
>     these web sites?
> 
> (4) Is the April 9 statement by David Lytel of the White House Office of
>     Science and Technology to Amy Bauer of Copley News Service that the
>     administration does not monitor anti-Clinton activity on the web still
>     operative?
> 
> 
>     Thank you very much for your cooperation in this matter.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Marvin Lee
> The Washington Weekly
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Copyright (c) 1995 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help@anon.penet.fi.
> If you reply to this message, your message WILL be *automatically* anonymized
> and you are allocated an anon id. Read the help file to prevent this.
> Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin@anon.penet.fi.
> 

Not a lawyer on the Net, although I play one in real life.
**********************************************************
Flame way! I get treated worse in person every day!!

>Ooops.  Dog bites man.
>And do you really think the White House couldn't hire a couple of net 
>gurus to sniff packets if they wanted to hide their "monitoring"(=reading).

Yes, they are far too cheap to hire, they would go off somewhere and smochze the 
info outa folks.

If they ever want an anonymous proxy server they are wellcome to use ours.

Seriously folks I'm very pissed about the abuse of log file information. The 
Whitehouse restrict browsing privilleges to a chosen few. The attempt to make a 
big deal out of it could have cost someone their job (it didn't in this case).

If we are serious about privacy I think we should be very clear that we respect 
the privacy of Whitehouse staffer and staffers in the Senate and House. I'm not 
being partisan about this, I have put a lot of effort into getting participation 
from the right as well as the left. I've just not been very successful in that 
area.

	Phill

Phill wrote:

| If we are serious about privacy I think we should be very clear that
| we respect the privacy of Whitehouse staffer and staffers in the
| Senate and House. I'm not being partisan about this, I have put a
| lot of effort into getting participationfrom the right as well as
| the left. I've just not been very successful in that area.


	Sure.  I'll respect their privacy as much as they, and the
organizations they oversee, respect mine.  I'll use as the
respresentative organizations the IRS and the Social Security
Administration, which respects my pricvacy so much that they use
prison inmates to process paperwork.

	If I was in a nasty mood, I'd add the USPS.

	Sarcasm aside, they show no interest in other people's
privacy.  Why should we go out of our way to do anything but show them
how bad the situation is?

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume

Hang on a sec, what is meant to be the conspiracy?

I don't see any relationship to cryptography here. The material in question was 
published very publicaly. If you make a public statement about a person then 
they have a right to hear it. I see that the message on log file confidentiality 
is not getting through though.


I happen to know that the US government is very interested in hearing the views 
of its citizens, and also the views of citizens of other countries. They are 
interested in particular about views relating to the actions of the US 
government, what the government is doing and what it could do. "anti-president 
views" are of great importance if it is known why those views are held.

In my country we call that listening. I have just spent a couple of days talking 
with a group of people looking at how we can do that better. There is a 
considerable barrier to being involved in the political process, perhaps the Web 
can reduce that barrier. The problem being how to handle the massive amounts of 
input.


>    Readers may be tempted to post a threat to the President on a
>newsgroup just to see if they get a visit from the Secret Service
>the next day. That experiment is not advisable. It is a  criminal
>offense.  

DO NOT DO THIS.

The secret service is required by law to investigate every single threat. This 
costs a very considerable amount of money which comes from your taxes. There is 
no discresion in the matter. Hence the only method of reducing the number of 
alarms is to arrest people and make an example of them. Unless you want to be 
the example do not do this.


>have  been  visited  by  White  House   computers   ist1.eop.gov,
>ist6.eop.gov, ist7.eop.gov, and gatekeeper.eop.gov between August
>28 and August 31, and a total of 128 files have been  transferred

I don't know which those machines are, however there are a large number of Web 
browsers in the Whitehouse and there are a large number of staffers. There is 
also a Web browser outside the oval office for visitors to use while they are 
waiting. If you make it your buisness to print nasty material about people then 
don't be suprized if they read it. The material has probably been picked up by a 
search engine in any case.


There is no conspiracy here unless you are very determined to find one. Given 
the nature of the article it does not appear that a balanced view of the 
administration was being sought in any case. I happen to know that Newt 
Gingrich's staffers and Weld's staffers also surf the Web, are they "monitoring 
anti-Newt dissidents?", I suspect not. I don't get the impression that our 
anonymous source has sent a complaint in that direction. I spend a considerable 
amount of time getting people in power to listen to the net community. I get 
very pissed off when a bunch of conspiracy nuts try to make out that they have 
been doing anything wrong when they do.


As a matter of ethics I consider information in log files private. This was 
certainly considered to be the case in the Marty Rimm affair. The posting was 
clearly designed to intimidate the Whitehouse staffers into not visiting those 
sites, it was possible that they might have lost their net.access entirely as a 
result of the complaint. I consider the letter sent to Terzano to be unethical 
since the staffers had a right to expect their privacy to be preserved.


If people want to talk about cryptography and the President we can discuss 
whether he should put a digital signature on his press releases.


I think the use of the word dissident in the message is an insult, both to the 
dissidents in the Eastern Europe and other places who have suffered genuine 
persecution and to the democratic institutions and people of the United States.


		Phill Hallam-Baker

Not speaking for anyone else.