How to Become a Supervillain

plasmastate writes "Learn German. Proceed to SuPerVillainizer. Launch the SuPer Villainizer Conspiracy Client V 0.9 Beta. Join selected conspiracy. Proceed to Terrorism Information Awareness. Savor sweet, sweet irony." Send us a postcard from Guantanamo Bay.

Comments

Re:About the project.

[BigBadaboom]

I would hate to know that I was involved in making a terrorist not be stopped, possibly causing people to be killed

You are assuming that the best way to locate terrorist cells is to troll millions of emails looking for keywords.

I doubt very much that many terrorists are located that way. Which is why (to me at least) that systems like Echelon are really intended for this purpose. Real time trolling for emails seems to have a more nefarious purpose.

In this instance they are talking about Swiss ISPs being required to keep all emails for six months. This data would presumably only be searched in response to a subpoena relating to specific emails.

Therefore I doubt this project is going to affect the ability of Swiss law enforcement to track terrorists. All it's going to do is increase the size of ISPs email archives.

Re:German?

[GypC]

Groundless? Get your head out of your ass!

I think Robert Kagan said it best:

...if Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are lying, they're not alone. They're part of a vast conspiratorial network of liars that includes U.N. weapons inspectors and reputable arms control experts both inside and outside government, both Republicans and Democrats.

Maybe former CIA director John Deutch was lying when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Sept. 19, 1996, that "we believe that [Hussein] retains an undetermined quantity of chemical and biological agents that he would certainly have the ability to deliver against adversaries by aircraft or artillery or by Scud missile systems."

Maybe former defense secretary William Cohen was lying in April when he said, "I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons. . . . I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out."

Maybe the German intelligence service was lying when it reported in 2001 that Hussein might be three years away from being able to build three nuclear weapons and that by 2005 Iraq would have a missile with sufficient range to reach Europe.

Maybe French President Jacques Chirac was lying when he declared in February that there were probably weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that "we have to find and destroy them."

Maybe Al Gore was lying when he declared last September, based on what he learned as vice president, that Hussein had "stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."

Finally, there's former president Bill Clinton. In a February 1998 speech, Clinton described Iraq's "offensive biological warfare capability, notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs." Clinton accurately reported the view of U.N. weapons inspectors "that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons." That was as unequivocal and unqualified a statement as any made by George W. Bush.

Clinton went on to insist, in words now poignant, that the world had to address the "kind of threat Iraq poses . . . a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists . . . who travel the world among us unnoticed." I think Bush said that, too.

So if you like a good conspiracy, this one's a doozy. And the best thing about it is that if all these people are lying, there's only one person who ever told the truth: Saddam Hussein. And now we can't find him either.

The descritption sounds a little odd

[Deagol]

But I think that the underlying principle is sound.

I wish I could link to another /. post of mine, but I can't find it. I ranted a while back about wanting to start "Project White Noise" after yet another article about how Bush-n-Ashcroft were wiping thier asses with the US's constitution.

It's inspired by the old USENET "spook fodder" method. Fill the 'net with suspicious-looking traffic for the sake of decreasing the S/N ratio of various 3-letter agencies' snooping efforts.

The first and obvious protocol would be email. My goal would be to have email accounts in every country both sending & receiving messages to & from every other country (anyone want to calculate the permutation on that?).

Message payloads would include: legit messages, automated gibberish messages (fortune, spam generator, eliza bot, etc.), and purely random data. Each of these types could be sent: plaintext, public-key encrypted, symetricly encrypted, and encrypted with a one-time-pad (generated on the fly then tossed when sent, rendering the data non-recoverable).

Ideally, each white noise client would get a list of participating email addresses from a source (P2P network, perhaps) and send the messages at random intervals in the background whenever connected to the 'net.

I haven't solved the problem yet of routing truly legit mail through all of this. I guess the ultimate goal of this would be a distributed, peer-to-peer version of the Mixmaster network on steroids.

Then there's all sorts of fun you can have with other protocols and subliminal channels. There's a Phrack article on sending covert data in the payload of ICMP ping packets. I've often thought of using plain old HTTP. You send a line of ASCII-encoded (possible even encrypted) data file to a remote server in a GET line. The remote user massages the lines of data from the log files to reconstruct the data sent (works through corporate firewalls that allow web surfing!).

I'm all for catching bad guys, but I draw the line at wholesale monitoring of citizens. As I stated in a post long ago, I would rather risk dying in another random act of violence (of the 9/11 caliber) than be forced to live in a police state. I'm sure those who lost loved ones in the attacks wouldn't likely share my view, but what makes our country truly great is the freedom its citizens have, and eroding those freedoms cheapens the value of those lives lost on 9/11.