[Tech] Lisa 2005 - Day 7

LISA 2005 Trip Log: 12/09/2005
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Day 7 - Tech Sessions and Referreed Papers (Last Day)

Tech Sessions and Refereed Papers
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How Sysadmins Can Protect Free Speech and Privacy on the Electronic Frontier, by Kevin Bankston, Electronic Frontier Foundation

notes: EFF representative spoke about the legal ramification of electronic privacy.
The USA Patriot Act and the Internet:
-can get "whole online profile" with subpoena rather than court order
-pen-traps extended to the internet, but no clear distinction between routing/addressing/signaling and what is content
-reduced controls on national security related surveilleance like FISA and NSLs
-users cannot rely on the law to protect their online privacy, they have to rely on the SAs
-FISA gives forver gag orders on providers and forever no notice to target
-NSL; National Security Letter, legal "tool" of the FBI, no court oversight and minimal reporting to congress, no procedure to challenge, recent abuses by the FBI. Scary stuff, the FBI only has to prove to itself you are under suspicion to issue a NSL. Great question about the constitutionality of NSLs.
-DoJ is refusing to explain its limits of power in regards to electronic wiretap and do not have to report to Congress.
SysAdmins
-learn about the law
-teach users about tech
-minimize your logs (short-term retention policies, only keep what you need, review OSP best practices, develop procedures for dealing with legal requests)
-be the surveilleance gatekeeper (and the squeaky wheel), you can serve as a check against abuses of power
-support anonymizing technologies (like TOR)
FBI has stopped using carnivore.

links:

http://www.eff.org/osp

Tech Sessions and Refereed Papers
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Weblogs, Wikis, and RSS for System Administrators
by Jonas Luster, Socialtext, Inc.

notes:
Humans have a need to communicate and an amazing ability to adopt, adapt and improve upon new communication technologies.
Wikis, collaborative work, structure enforced by community standard, not code, fertile ground or wasteland theory?
If you provide an area for your users to contribute input, it can create a fertile area for ideas to grow.
Syndication, brings content out to the world, pushes it out.
If setting up an internal blog site, do not use a public blogging site. Also do not encourage syndication, as you could leak information out.
DSC; Disseminate, Syndicate, Collaborate.

links:
http://homepage.eircom.net/~kmgaughan/esolang/index.html
http://wordpress.org/
http://www.jluster.org/

WIPs
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10 Works In Progress on a variety of topics from VNCmanager, to network traffic visualization, to user education.

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Dinner - Casa Guadalajara; excellent Mexican food
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Post-Conference. LOPSA had a party, but it was low-key. We had found a small libation place not far from here. The selection was not great, but peach cider was purchased. We then sat on a balcony on the 8th floor until late talking of life, technology, privacy, our jobs, what we would like to see in technology, our 'first time'...using UNIX. I feel to sleep the moment my head hit the pillow because the exhaustion of the past week had finally caught up with me.