Slashdot Mirror
Carnivore Comes To India
pamri writes: "India is getting its own version of Carnivore. According to this Times of India article,'...after investigations have revealed that Mohammad, alias "Burger," who led the Parliament attack, was in constant touch with his counterparts in Pakistan as well as within India through email ... The Intelligence Bureau (IB) has prepared a list of new keywords that are to be used to intercept mails emanating from IP addresses in India.'"
This sounds like a supreme waste of time. The sad part is, people wont agree with me.
Firstly, it's been directly stated by terrorists themselves (watch the video!) that transmissions to the lower-level parties involved which *contain instructions* usually don't occur until mere hours before the terrorist act. It isn't as if the terrorists know that they'll be bombing a specific target for months, they find out shortly before. This means that any flagged transmissions will have to be analyzed, which I guarrentee takes a longer amount of time than it does for some terrorist to prepare, ready himself, and carry out the final attack.
Secondly, these things are going to be spammed or encrypted into oblivion. See point one about time constraints, and then realize that India has a large population. If you scan every email for content and come up with 5 million emails per day that are flagged by the server, how long will it take to process that data? How long do they have?
Yikes. They'd have better luck issueing a statement like, "Mr. Terrorist? Please stop it. We'll give you penguin dolls."
It is just coming. Deep inequalities between nations and between different citizens of the same state are not new, but a complete and widespread awareness of these facts and the awareness of the fact that world as a whole has non-renewable sources of wealth, destroyed continiously by the rich will make democracy an option of the past. Totalitarian governments are coming in small steps, the first rules are applicable to strangers and terrorists, and states that thake those first steps are the richest or the most populated nations. But this is just the beginning. Fear it, get ready for it but don't fight it, resistance is futile and may reduce life expectancy drastically.
Natural language processing has come a long way in just the last couple of years. Astonishingly effective applications such as Sinope Summarizer are freely available; I can only imagine what an organization with the motivation and resources of the IB, NSA, FBI or CIA might have. I'd feel somewhat disappointed if their software weren't vastly superior to anything I've seen.
I'd imagine it might be based on Cyc or a similar dark project, and might achieve a 97% or better success rate at identifying questionable messages, with very few false negatives.
Assuming a billion emails a day, and five million of them being questionable, I'd suspect such a system could cull that number down to a few thousand—if the target messages were truly that few in number. As a matter of fact, I'd suggest that if sufficient computing power were available, to skip the keyword-scanning filter entirely, since such communications might be carried on with an alternate vocabulary substituted for hotbutton terms. Finding those messages requires more language processing intelligence than Carnivore would seem to have currently.
Keep in mind that India is the country with a right-wing fundamentalist Hindu nationalist government that practises a form of legalized Apartheid called the Caste system.
India has coveted Kashmir for decades and is carrying out a brutal military occupation against the majority Muslim Kashmiri population that is well-documented by international human rights groups and in violation of UN Security Council Resolutions.
Considering that both India and Pakistan have their military forces on high alert as I write this, with inflammatory rhetoric flying and threats of nuclear war, you can be sure to view anything that India's spy agency says to the press as probable propaganda and posturing.
That said, India should stick to doing more important things like feeding and housing its people. The number of people who don't even have a meal far outstrip -- by orders of magnitude -- those who use the Internet in that impoverished and backwards country. I'd be very surprised if many average people know what the Internet is, let alone have knowledge of subjects like digital privacy rights and the like.
Still, small details like those never stopped any country from finding new ways to spy on its citizens.
Goddammit, I am so fed up with these constant assassinations of Internet privacy anytime it is revealed that a terrorist group used email or cryptography to coordinate their attacks. I bet they also used telephones, cell phones, and snail mail to communicate as well. Why the fuck aren't these sodding politicians calling for monitoring of voice conversations and physical inspection of packages and letters? If they are serious about security why not go the whole nine yards? Speech recognition technology could surely make the former feasible. <sarcasm>After all, only those who are doing something wrong have something to hide.</sarcasm>
That bullshit never happens because most people, whether here in the US or over in India, wouldn't stand for such a blatant invasion of their privacy. Just because technology makes monitoring Internet communications an order of magnitude easier, doesn't fucking make it right! Whether it is listening in on a phone conversation, sniffing a packet, or tearing open a letter the intrusion is still the same.
It takes a nation of millions to wage war, but only a single man to commit terrorism. Until we address the factors that lead people to such desperation that they are willing to give their lives to cold-hearted violence, we will wage this war until we inevitably lose it.
We have always had the means to destroy ourselves - but terrorists have finally given us the motivation to do so. And like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, we are slowly selling out our treasured civil liberties for an illusion of security. And the day we lose this so-called War on Terror is when we have silently replaced the republics of the world with police states that hide behind masks of democracy and pay lip-service to freedom.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
Some of the independant project (such as altavore) seem to have fallen off the face of the earth.
.jpg/.gif/etc. out of the thin airport that wireless users using.
I'm intersted in putting together a set of tools that aren't driven by the FBI/CIA/TLA of your choice (and this has the distinct smell of the Justice department's distribution of INSLAW's PROMISE software to thrid world "justice processes").
Idealy, I'd like to see something like Rayeton's Slient Runner, Network Flight Recorder or Carnivore (who makes that software? I forget), but if I must piece together as set of tools using things like the dsniff suite of utilities, that's fine too. Ultimately, the goal is to be able to tap into any communication stream (file sharing, web browsing, instant messaging/IRC, e-mail (including SSL protected web mail), Usenet News, etc.)... NFR and dsniff make it fairly easy to add new protocol parsing/decoding to the survailed stream; however it would be far better if the project/effort were open source so taht an infinate number of monkies could add new protocols (a la Snort).
Some things that I think are missing, however, include things like RADIUS/dhcp/DNS services integration that would allow an authenticated and assigned IP address to be assigned a name by the LDAP lookup of the customer/subject name/ID.
One of the other projects I like is that little utility that apple guy at stanford wrote that grabs
I found it funny when Zimmerman expressed regret for his work on PGP after 911... least he could do is begin work on a project that could undo the potential damage (oh, wait, NA already did that for him...). Well, at least he could start a new project in the opposite direction...
my take on the current situation? open source and facism (and if you only know what that term means from it's connative meaning... look it up; the USA is currently heading straight into the loving arms of mother fascism) are *not* incompatable by any streach of the imagination... In fact, open source would do well to cash in on some of the defensive stock/security product hedging that is happening right now.
So, what do you guys thing? Up for the challenge?
I do speak Malayalam. Colloquially speaking, it translates to : "Move along. Stop quarreling for fun.". The "fun" bit is added only because there isnt an exact translation of the idiom. Quarelling for the sake of quarelling is more like it.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.