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."
If we gave them a list of keywords such as "amazing," "opportunity," "cash" and "enlargement," do you think they could go ahead and filter out all the spam while they're at it? A lot of that comes from India anyway, and they'd be killing two birds with one Carnivore.
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.
How are they going to find that message, or understand its significance? The NSA intercepted and decrypted a large number of Soviet diplomatic/intelligence messages in the 1940s (VENONA). Despite a large amount of work, the identities of many of the agents referred to in the messages are unknown.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The Times of India story lists several of these hotbutton words—Kashmir, Lashkar, Pakistan, Musharraf, Jaish, attack, kill, rocket— along with an assurance that those who send email using these keywords will be put under surveillance.
Then they put a link at the bottom to email the story to your friends!!!
I can barely catch my breath, I'm laughing so hard!
Interesting.
Your comment about finding new ways to spy on citizens is true although we probably will never know how much surveillance has gone on by various govenments against their citizens through the ages.
The fact that the current political climate is giving rise to privacy violations such as these should be of concern to Indians in particular and freedom-loving people everywhere.
However a country that miltarily occupies another nation usually isn't too concerned about minor things such as Internet privacy rights.
I believe you are correct that most Indians will not even know about these measures and that they can do something about them (even if they aren't affected at this point in time) due to more basic issues such as survival.
India has a carnivore clone ?. Well with 15 languages and even more encoding schemes for native languages I would like to see India government filter through this mess of Utf8,UCS4,IsCII, TScii (encodings). But personally I will say that india government is wating public money to slow down the currently shaky internet. But terrorism is a real threat and we have found to our error when our parliament was attacked. But monitoring email is no solution when people talk "onnu poda , chumma adipidi koodathe" (malyalam written in roman script) Well just wasting their time , and our money
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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
in India I'm sure they don't have the US rights the US people all love and enjoy, so the Indians are going to just have to deal with it.
All i would say dear sir is that It would be better if you were to read the Indian Constitution and the Indian Penal Code.
Wanted : A Signature.
I believe you are correct that most Indians will not even know about these measures and that they can do something about them (even if they aren't affected at this point in time) due to more basic issues such as survival.
:-)
;-)
Dude, we don't exactly live in caves here.
It is not like we are going to let our privacy be taken overnight. There are LUGs around the country which are also active in privacy issues.
But, at this moment, it is more important that we preserve our sovereignity and our integrity.
Benjamin Franklin's quote of those who compromise freedom for safety deserve neither sounds great, but when terrorists are out there waiting to wreck havoc, it isn't exactly that simple.
Democratic nations will preserve the interests of their people. There may be instances when it may seem otherwise, but ultimately the people will win. History has proved this to us, and Argentina is the latest example of this.
You said that a country pre-occupied with a war has little time for concern with such things as Internet privacy. True, but people are not going to keep quiet either. The amount of people involved in IT is *too* high in India to just ignore such troubles.
But anyways, they are not taking our rights just like that, not for now atleast
An attack was planned on our military in which we intercepted some messages. We were not sure of the target because it was referred to by a code word. We had the suspected target send a plain text message indicating the water desalination plant failed and needed parts. When the oposition reported the failure, we confirmed the codeword as equating to that base. Does anybody have the details on that incident? I think it was WW2 and one of the small Pacific Islands.
The truth shall set you free!
Midway
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Screw Burger, he had his time.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh CmdrTaco R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. Ia! Ia! CmdrTaco fhtagn. CmdrTaco R'lyeh fhtagn.
(I hate it when Babelfish sprouts tentacles...)
My experience is that the US is not really freer than a lot of other countries, and it is selective in which "freedoms" are really available. The US probably has as much or more economic freedom than most any other first-world place - that is, lower taxes and fewer bureaucratic obstacles to doing business. But in other freedoms, the US lags behind. The Sklyarov case is a good indication of that, as is the war on drugs and the rights that the police have to sieze property they even suspect is related to it, without so much as a court order. In much of Europe, small-scale drug use and possession is tolerated openly. In most other countries, there is more freedom of speech when such freedom threatens corporate "property".
I guess you're talking about procedural protections for people suspected of a crime; in that regard, the US has, or at least used to have, a number of safeguards that most other countries lacked. But that's changing.
That's a bad load of anti-Indian slander from 'Anonymous Coward'. Just about the only thing right in his post was that India should focus on improving life for her downtrodden.
Here's why the post's wrong: First: India is a constitutionally secular country, not a Hindu one. (I myself am an Indian Christian, a recent convert from Hinduism). The Caste system is illegal, and practising it prosecuted under Indian law. The implementation of these laws, however, is not thorough -- inefficiency and corruption plague the Indian administration and justice systems. (Though recently, things have been improving faster)
Secondy, as far as coveting Kashmir goes, the state of Jammu and Kashmir legally merged with India sometime in 1948. A UN resolution passed then, required Pakistan to withdraw it's forces, and let Kashmir come under complete *Indian* control. India was then to host a plebiscite over the entire state. However Pakistan never withdrew... and the rest is history. You can verify this here (see page 11).
Lastly, getting down to the main topic -- I think using a Carnivore-like system to promiscuously trawl for information without a court order is wrong. An analogy would be a policeman habitually entering into people's homes to check for thieves. And I also think that the spook (it must be one of ours) who released this to our media was simply indulging in wishful thinking (fundamental rights are -- we don't have that many supercomputers.
Back in the 80s, rumor had it that the NSA was filtering email and Usenet news for keywords, such as "bomb", "nuclear", "explosive", etc. The solution that many came up with was to overload the system by including such keywords in every message.
If you really want to counter-act such a system, always add some of the keywords on the list to your emails. Not even the government can afford to monitor every single email.
Also remember to encrypt everything. That raises the amount of work the government would have to do even more, reducing the number of messages they could actually monitor. I'd recommend PGP or GnuPG.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Excellent Link, Thanks! I was in crypto 25 years ago and forgot the details of that incident.
The truth shall set you free!