Carnivore In Living Color

joel jaeggli writes: "The Carnivore talk done by Marcus Thomas from the FBI at NANOG 20 is now online... you can retrieve it from: University of Oregon Videolab. This talk was meant for a technical audience, and the discussion and questions from the audience are very enlightening. Major thanks should go to the folks from Merit/NANOG for managing to schedule this talk, to Marcus Thomas and the FBI for their candor, and the NANOG crowd for asking the important questions."

Comments

Carnivore, et al., can be beaten.

[Siqnal 11]

A simple IP-level auto-negotiating protocol would be enough to stop all passive sniffers, while a few people exchanging their keys using an external channel (physically or maybe via encrypted email) could detect any MITM attack (since a MITM relies in being able to change the keys being used, and it would be easy to check if they don't match). It could protect any protocol, including UDP-based protocols, unlike TLS which can only be used with TCP-based protocols.

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Re:Carnivore, et al., can be beaten.

[Yardley]

The FBI is putting a black box between you and the Internet via your ISP. What this means is that your communication passes through this box. The FBI is now the Gatekeeper for whether or not your communication gets out and whether others communication (including the whole wealth of information from the Internet) gets to you. They know what you are looking at, what you download, who you email, chat with, or talk to. They know everything that you do on the Internet. And now the FBI also gets to decide if it wants you to have a connection at all.

Yes, people will say, no, that's not what the FBI is doing. They're just putting a black box in at every U.S. ISP so that they can monitor certain people's communications only after receiving a judges signature (by the way, in California the DEA has a deal under the law which allows them to no longer get a courts permission when phone tapping people accused of dealing drugs -- they can sign the warrants themselves). The FBI says they will use this technology sparingly. They say it's for our own good.

Do we really need our Internet communications being monitored? I think not.

I for one do not want a technology in place (at my taxpayer expense) which allows the government the ability to shut down the entire Internet at a moments thought.

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Re:A Crack in the Wall

[Yardley]

Carnivore is one part of the start of a very dangerous trend in the United States of America. It began with the War on Drugs, the middle and early eighties saw the start of routine unlawful search and seizure by government officials and the bribing of witnesses to imprison (often with life sentences) other individuals. Lately, government officials have decided that no communications by its citizens can go unobserved or unencumbered. Complete censorship of entire categories of speech is becoming routine through mandatory "filters" at school, in libraries, and soon at your computer. Now Carnivore. The end of private communications as we know it. Now the government will know that I am the one who wants you to know about what the government is doing & that I think it is wrong.

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Carnivoring MPEGs

[juliao]

Living outside the US, I have still followed the Carnivore debate with interest, since a lot of my traffic does go through US-Govt-controlled networks.

So the Government wants to have access to whatever "bad elements" send over the network. But will they ever be able to do it? This isn't voice we're talking about, this is data. Any "bad element" can encrypt it and make it unreadable by Govt officials in any useful timeframe.

And the Govt knows this, so clearly this isn't their objective. So what is? Mass scanning of John Doe's traffic? Must be.
Now let's look at their own site. An MPEG. How do you mass-scan MPEG files for BadThings(tm)? How do you mass-scan JPEGs? I'd like to know other people's view on this.

What's the right right?

[kfg]

Most people are thinking of this as a first ammendment right, and it is in one sense, but the REAL right at issue here isn't the first ammendment, it's the fifth:

You have the RIGHT not to give evidence against yourself.

Prior to actual charges being filed you have the RIGHT to protect yourself in any way possible from intrusion into your affairs. You may encrypt, code, obfuscate, and outright destroy anything you want to, for any reason. It is your RIGHT to have it assumed that all such actions are innocent of any wrong doing. You have a RIGHT to be secure * against government intrusion * into your papers.

Once charges have been actually filed you have the RIGHT to * shut the hell up. * This right to shut the hell up includes the right not to tell them your password, not to give them any key codes, the right not to tell them where you hid stuff, the right not to give a statement, the right not to utter one single blessed word. Speak ONLY to your lawyer.

Use your rights. Encrypt everything. Your laundry list. Your cat's birthday. Your phone conversations. Everything. Use as much personal jargon that will be meaningless to anyone but the intended recipient, ( which could be noone but yourself), as possible. Learn to use steganography and encrypt and code things before you embed them. Use assorted DIFFERENT encryption and encoding techniques.

Destroy everything that is of no more use to you. Don't just delete, destroy. Everytime you reinstall an operating system write 0's to the entire HD first. Eat memos. Just because you now have the power and the space to document your life in exquisite detail dosn't mean it's a good idea. Keep your house, real and virtual, squeaky clean. Throw away old phone bills. Throw away all financial records that current law, ( unconstitutionally), does not require you to retain. Throw away all reciepts except for those things that you WISH to be able to prove ownership of. When I say throw away I don't mean throw away or shred, I mean BURN.

Use cash. They hate that. They're making it illegal by bits.

If called before a grand jury or civil court where it is currently held that the fifth ammendment dosn't apply get a really, REALLY bad memory. Repeat after Reagan. " I don't recall, I don't recall, I don't recall."

These are your rights, use them or lose them