Am I being spied on or am I paranoid?

[OregonBlue]

A few days ago I downloaded Filseclab Personal Firewall. Used WHO IS to find out who was being denied. One of the denials was from 69.20.1.77. Went to the site, it is ferret.bls.census.gov.

CPS - A joint project between Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of the Census.

It's a report on: Health Insurance Coverage Status and Type of Coverage for Poor People in the Poverty Universe.

Anyone have any idea why they would be attempting to access my computer? So is the monitoring of our computers being done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Bureau of Census?

Am I just being paranoid?

[Quakerfriend]

1. No, you are not pranoid.

We installed a Firewall several weeks ago, and I discovered that the DoD has been hitting my firewall several times daily.

[OregonBlue]

2. I guess anyone who posts here is being monitored? Or is

everyone? I just thought it was interesting that his came from Census Bureau. They must have records on everyone!

[Quakerfriend]

5. I would love to see a thread with info on everyone who has

fairly good proof that they are being 'monitored' by the government.

And, kudos to that group in Fla who is sueing *co. for illegally spying on them.

[EVDebs]

10. Monitored, audited, harassed... eom

[LeftNYC]

3. How do we find this out? nt

[Quakerfriend]

6. If you have a firewall, you can check the addresses of anyone

who is trying to access your computer. There are literally people hitting it every second- From India, China- everywhere.

[gulfbreeze]

21. How does one check it?

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. The question is not are you paranoid, but

are you paranoid enough?

[FranzFerdinand]

7. here are some of hte .gov and .mil sites...

that show up on my statistics...

5 0.01% 1 0.00% 32 0.00% 0 0.00% gk-central-25.srvs.usps.gov
1 0.00% 1 0.00% 10 0.00% 0 0.00% n021.dhs.gov
6 0.01% 0 0.00% 0 0.00% 0 0.00% wps2.hua.army.mil
3 0.00% 2 0.00% 64 0.00% 0 0.00% cits-bc2.region1.ang.af.mil
2 0.00% 2 0.00% 64 0.00% 0 0.00% ce.wuerzburg.army.mil
1 0.00% 1 0.00% 10 0.00% 0 0.00% gate7-norfolk.nmci.navy.mil
1 0.00% 1 0.00% 10 0.00% 0 0.00% wakko.whs.mil

that DHS.GOV is a little concerning...

[C_U_L8R]

8. Just imagine the freeper's little heads exploding

when they figure out that they are being spied on too...

and they voted for these fuckers,
bwhahahahhahahahahaha

pop pop poppity pop

[rd_kent]

23. HA! But isnt it for their PROTECTION???

We'll see how protected they feel then!!!

[EVDebs]

9. TIA offshored outsourced and privatized in the Bahamas

""It began as one of the Bush administration's most ambitious homeland security efforts, a passenger screening program designed to use commercial records, terrorist watch lists and computer software to assess millions of travelers and target those who might pose a threat.

The system has cost almost $100 million. But it has not been turned on because it sparked protests from lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, who said it intruded too deeply into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Bush administration put off testing until after the election.

Now the choreographer of that program, a former intelligence official named Ben H. Bell III, is taking his ideas to a private company offshore, where he and his colleagues plan to use some of the same concepts, technology and contractors to assess people for risk, outside the reach of U.S. regulators, according to documents and interviews.

Bell's new employer, the Bahamas-based Global Information Group Ltd., intends to amass large databases of international records and analyze them in the coming years for corporations, government agencies and other information services. One of the first customers is information giant LexisNexis Group, one of the main contractors on the government system that was known until recently as the second generation of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening Program, or CAPPS II. The program is now known as Secure Flight.

This is not a big surprise. I'm sure we'll see more of it.""

from www.zmetro.com/archives/000901.php

Oh, and check the conservative hiring preferences of our intell agencies:
Time magazines' Aug. 4, 1997, article Kingdom Come by David Van Biema, page 52: "The FBI and CIA, drawn by a seemingly incorruptible rectitude, have instituted Mormon-recruitment plans". With the original CIA's leadership being made up of mostly Knights of Malta (Wm Donovan, Wm. Casey, Angleton, Dulles, McCone, etc., etc.) you can see the inherent conservatism of Mormon and Catholic organizations and their agendas taking precedence within the ranks.

Any analyst with access to the databases who wishes to do someone harm and put them on a list has the power within these agencies to do so. Take the case of the FBI's Robert Hanssen, an Opus Dei member. Who could he have screwed-over on a whim, besides the entire country ?

[leeroysphitz]

11. You are paranoid, BUT are you paranoid ENOUGH?

Seriously. That is the question. We are all a little paranoid of this gov. these days and rightly so but do we take it seriously enough? Are we accurately assesing the cpabilities and corruption of these people?

What WOULDN"T they do if they COULD do anything?

[TahitiNut]

12. It's the "New Firewall User Syndrome"

I've seen this repeated and repeated over the years as more and more people connect to the "always on" broadband and DSL internet connections. The fact that your fiewall is detecting, blocking, and logging such traffic tells you it's working. In 99.999% of the cases, such traffic poses absolutely no problem, even without a firewall. If you're not running an internet server, you haven't inadvertently installed a Trojan Horse, and you have no buffer-overflow exploit vulnerabilities in your socket software, there's nothing to be overly concerned about.

From the beginniing of (internet) time, folks have "felt" their way around the net ... scanning for active systems and mapping the net. It wasn't until the Great Luser Flood of the early 90s that this exploration activity was of much concern to anyone.

[salvorhardin]

13. Wrong

The IP address for ferret.bls.census.gov is 148.129.75.6

69.20.1.77 happens to belong to a server owned by Rackspace, a web hosting and dedicated server provider.
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=69.20.1.77
http://www.rackspace.com

[OregonBlue]

17. I copied the info. I'll go check again!

[madeline_con]

18. GOEBYTES says.....

"We are unable to locate the address 148.129.75.6 at this time."

[salvorhardin]

20. That's because it does not respond to pings.

It's is an active website though.
http://148.129.75.6

BTW: That site is to download the DataFERRET (Federated Electronic Research, Review, Extract, and Tabulation Tool) used to browser the DataWeb.

http://www.thedataweb.org

[Warpy]

14. Most of us who post on DU and use firewalls

have discovered DOD hack attempts a couple of times a day. Whether or not this is true of all computers online and for what purpose, we don't know.

What I do know is that I won't be intimidated by it.

They can rescind my rights only with my permission, and I will never give them my permission.

[ohtransplant]

15. Being paranoid doesn't mean you're not being spied on.

I'm pretty new to this firewall stuff and don't understand why my broadband company Warner cable) keeps hitting my firewall.

I'm sure it's nothing...?

[madeline_con]

16. ferret.bls.census.gov.

A ferret. How cute.

I think if you're posting on DU, they have you in their "records". But that's just IMHO.

[salvorhardin]

22. That site...

That site is to download the DataFERRET (Federated Electronic Research, Review, Extract, and Tabulation Tool) used to browser the DataWeb.

http://www.thedataweb.org

[mainegreen]

19. I wouldn't worry. These large entities are always exploring.

IBM hit my firewall the other day, and somehow I don't think IBM is spying on me. If the government was spying on you do you think they would hop directly from an IP address recognizable as theirs, or do you think they would route through alternate machines, say at a university or some server they have running up in an office in Montana? Seriously, if the IP says 'government' it is just a bot, plain and simple.
In fact, if you are getting government bot hits, I'd say that means they aren't spying on you. You should worry when those hits disappear!

[EVDebs]

24. RNC bragged about datamining.....Govt does it too... No protection anyway

As you can see from who've they given the datamining jobs to (ChoicePoint , the company Greg Palast reveals was behind the FL vote purge of blacks and had a similar scheme in Latin America exposed) they already got caught with loose-ness in handling the data securely, with bank customers being warned their identities were at risk of being stolen.

If the Government ITSELF was in charge of this and assured the security on US soil, this TIA project might have flown. Now it's been privatized and the data is spread to the wind to the four corners of the world. Anyone in India, at the many real estate loan processing 'back offices' where loan files are readily accessable, can see US citizen's full financial histories complete with SS#s, credit card #s and, well, you get the picture. It's all there. They SAY it's protected but it really isn't:

""...Alan Paller, director of research at the Bethesda, Md.-based SANS Institute, said the California law is probably necessary because of the kinds of crime that are occurring. A group in Russia and Ukraine has been acquiring customer data, extorting money to prevent its release and then selling it anyway. Paller believes some companies are paying off the extortionists in an attempt to contain the damage.""

California leads way on ID theft legislation
http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2002/0,4814,7672...

So it looks like if the private firms can't secure the data, the federal government ought to step in with some protections against abuse.

BTW, Microsoft's NSA backdoor:

Expert disputes charge of Windows backdoor
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/13/backdoor.idg/

""But respected cryptographer Bruce Schneier, president of Counterpane Systems, a Minneapolis-based cryptography and security consultancy, noted that if the NSA wanted to compromise Microsoft's CryptoAPI, which supports the encryption of data in Windows programs, there are easier ways. The NSA could convince the company to divulge the secret-key portion of its signature key, for example; get Microsoft to sign an NSA-compromised security module; or install a module other than CryptoAPI to break encryption strategies."

Easier ways indeed ! "You have no privacy. Get over it." --Scott McNeely, CEO, Sun Microsystems. Sorry Scott, there is still a Constitution to defend, whether BushCo does it or not.