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Re: Whitehouse "dissident" web site monitoring?
On Tue, 12 Sep 1995 [email protected] 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)
>
>
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Not a lawyer on the Net, although I play one in real life.
**********************************************************
Flame way! I get treated worse in person every day!!