Slashdot Mirror
Russians Order Mobile Phone Encryption Removed
PenguinRadio writes "The Moscow Times is reporting that Russian security officers (The FSB, formerly the KGB) ordered all mobile phone providers to switch off their encryption systems for 24 hours, so the police could eavesdrop on all calls. An alert, either an exclamation point or an unlocked padlock, was sent to the phones in question. This is the second time such an order was given - the last time was after the hostage crisis involving Chechnya fighters in a Moscow theater. At least the Russian has the courtesy to warn all their phone users that this was going on. Not sure what the standard FBI procedure is on something like this..."
So should we just resort to random police raids? I'm sure they would find plenty of illegal stuff, but at the same time I really don't want some police person coming over to my house when I'm trying to have dinner with my family. This is pretty much the same thing. I don't want to have to worry constantly that I'm doing something slightly illegal and will get in trouble on a technicality.
Paint.NET, a Free Image Editor, with Source Code Available!
"o one cares about you and your puny little life and conversations. But you would certainly care if someone was planning on blowing up your train station or office building."
I agree with you here. The Gov't isn't going to blackmail you. However, if the gov't can get in, why couldn't somebody else?
I think the privacy moans and groans are overrated, but I did have a nice little scare when the RIAA announced it would start to sue P2P users. I want my privacy to protect myself from them. I'm not worried about the USA knowing about my personal life (they do anyway, duh.), but when encryption is ordered to be turned off, suddenly I'm open to the world.
"Derp de derp."
No one cares about you and your puny little life and conversations. But you would certainly care if someone was planning on blowing up your train station or office building.
Ever heard of INSLAW?
That's why they do this. To find out who is planning to do bad things that hurt lots of people. They certainly don't care that you are having a fight with your wife and calling your girlfriend to make arrangements to stay over tonight.
You obviously don't get it. You probably never will. Do you pay your bills using postcards? Or do you send in checks using envelopes?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
NICE troll. I also love how it's moderated "insightful." People are so fucking stupid sometimes.
Let's get cameras put in our houses too. I mean, if you're not doing anything wrong, then who cares? Your life is normal and boring, the FBI won't care about you! So it's all ok! Don't worry your pretty little head about it.
Quote: "They certainly don't care that you are having a fight with your wife and calling your girlfriend to make arrangements to stay over tonight."
What if I were some fledging politician rapidly gaining popularity for my almost rabid support for privacy and constitutional rights, young enough to still be idealistic and uncompromised by lobbying?
Then my fight with the wife and subsequent visit to the girlfriend become quite relevant to The Powers That Be (TM).
Don't laugh, this is the kind of stuff the FBI dabbled in under Hoover.
Privacy is privacy. There must be checks and balances to ensure that powers are not abused. These checks now do not seem to be sufficient (or existent, in some cases).
There's a reason we call it "erosion" of rights. It's a slow, insidious process - but that doesn't make it any less threatening.
At the risk of sound trite, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
And it has quite an effect showing terrorists how their connection can be eavesdropped.
Agreed... Though probably not the desired effect.
"What? Those bastards can disable our nice secure channel any time they want? Well then, time to buy a few third-party end-to-end crypto devices that not only can't they disable at whim, but can't tap when it hits a landline either".
Yeah. Great idea.
When the hell will people learn that the "real" threats to our safety (not counting "stupid" criminals who barely escape a Darwin nomination) have enough of a clue not to trust any form of privacy they don't have direct control over?
Today they only care if I want to blow up a train station or office building.
Tomorrow they'll care if I plan to murder a single person.
Next week they'll care about rapes.
A month from now it will be any felony.
Next year, if I call up a friend to say I'm running late, but I'll speed a little to make up the time, I'll get a ticket mailed to me.
A generation from now, I'd hate to see what happens to my kids if they decide to make fun of a "Bushism" that the President has said. Its an extremely slippery slope. A police state is not worth the small level of extra security you may (or may not) get.
Nope. Sorry. I don't care whether or not the government is trying to track me specifically, but frankly, given a chance, I would rather risk a train station exploding than live under a tyranical goverment that does what it pleases, such a government could easily off people at a faster rate than terrorists can and I want those checks and balances IN PLACE.
With what you suggest, I think it the equivalent of federal agents being able to search anyone's house, for any reason at all, without oversight. If they wanted to, I'm sure they can find a lot of stuff to nail you with if your opinions are out of favor with the current administration, say you're a Democrat or Libertarian when there is a Republican in office.
Quite frankly, there was a warrant system for this sort of thing.
I don't care if you think that most everyone leads a boring life. That doesn't matter, what does matter is a goverment that thinking they can barge in everywhere without cause, without due process and quite frankly, possibly humiliate or blackmail anyone they please.
By announcing publicly that they're going to be tapping everyone's cellphone for the next day or two, they will have denied Al-Queda or whomever it is they are worried about the ability to make secure phonecalls. So maybe, if the organisation was about to pull a terrorist attack, they wouldn't be able to coordinate their actions and would have to abandon the attack. Alternatively, maybe the point of the exercise is that the people of concern would be forced to use alternative, more vulnerable means of communication (landlines or face-to-face meetings).
What do you guys think?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The difference is the general level of hassle and red tape, as well as accountability. Of course if you're up there in intelligence I'm sure you can unaccountably "tap" the land phone network at will using more advanced systems (Echelon and whatever's come since come to mind) - but if you're just part of some FBI field office trying to handle an immediate situation akin to the Chechnya incident the landline option means you have to get authorization and go on record for doing it, and you have to be precise about what you're tapping, and you could be delayed by all the BS. If you can tap the airwaves easily (supposing you have a laptop that can crack the effectively 54-bit encryption of a GSM call on the air), you can do it without the fuss and without being accountable.
Don't forget also that finding the right landline call to tap might be a needle in a haystack problem, but finding the right cellular call can be fairly easy if you're on-site near the caller, since you can just look for strong enough signal strength to be within a given radius of you physically, and furthermore even triangulate the signals' positions.
11*43+456^2
They can already do this, in fact at least one phone companies policy on E-911 involves making modest upgrades to their basestation network to allow triangulation of customer devices to lead police or EMS units to the phones location when a 911 call is made.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Unfortunately for us a majority of the population is not willing to pay that price.
But I agree. What's the point of having laws if you have no freedom to begin with?
Laws are made to limit freedom to keep everyone safe. But some people believe that its okay to make laws saying I can't drive my car or fly in a plane because its possible for that car or plane to crash into them. Those people are dumb. That's why natural section exists.
Unfortunately we've overgrown nature's laws and seem to think we're smart enough to write our own. And now look at the results. Just brilliant.
" So should we just resort to random police raids?"
But why stop there? Such a half-ass effort will surely miss far too much illegality. The only good solution is to have daily (or even more often) police inspections of every home, office, person, vehicle, etc. And just as an added precaution, we should install video cameras on every street, in every ally, and in every room of every home, office, or other such structure. From there, all the visual information could be fed into a lovely Oracle database, having been sorted by an advanced AI system. That way, any and all illegal acts are caught on tape, and the law-breaker can simply be put in jail, or perhaps even more simply, to death. Since we have it right on tape, there's obviously no need for a trial. And since those who break the law deserve to be caught and punished, no one should have any problem with this. After all, you're not doing anything illegal, immoral, or undesirable, right?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The situation is quite the same here in Estonia, the unwilling former Soviet republic. All three GSM operators are required by law to provide equipment that allows the defence police to tap into any phonecall. Until recently this was simply a legal requirement, but at this point all three (if I'm not mistaken) have actually purchased and set up these systems. The legal side of listening to a specific phonecall is a completely separate matter.
I'm sitting just now in my office in the center
of Moscow, and my phone doesn't display "No encryption" alert. It was so during Nord-Ost musicle hijacking, but not now.
BTW, it is not very comforting to think that
somebody in the same bus with you might carry
2 kilo TNT bomb, which would explode when somebody
send SMS to it.
Latest bomb in Moscow was apparently done
via some remotely controlled ignition and
explode when they tried deactivate it.
Wasn't a main point of the PATRIOT act that providers of any communications couldn't notify the suspect if eavesdropping was occuring? Turning off encryption would be as good as admitting that, so it's probably illegal to notify.
On the other hand, I live in the goddamn middle of Atlanta, and I can't get a Sprint PCS connection without climbing on a building or something...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...