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Cringely On Electronic Tapping
sckienle writes "Robert X. Cringely, the PBS one, has an editorial discussing electronic wire-tapping and the Big Brother concerns. There isn't any new information in the article, but he does a nice summation of the state of law enforcement today. This may be a good article to show your family, friends and congressmen."
From the China perspective this seem a funny situation for America. America say that everyone in America has freedom and to an extent that is very true, more so than other countrys. But then American citizens, writers, academics, so on, all claim that American military (DARPA being a department of which?) are using latest innovations to spy on people!
I am sure American army has many more important things to do than spy on its own people. And the main question are.. would the army really give up highly valuable new military technologies to the domestic guard anyway?
I cannot say much but I know that in People Republic Of China, we keep military and police very seperete. Although, being an 'academic', I do not need worry to such things so often...
-- Dr. Fu Ling-Yu, Internal Technology Consult; Tongji University, People Republic of China.
This is why programs like Nullsoft's WASTE are going to be so important in the coming years.
Networks of trust, wherein all communication is encrypted and idle channels are filled with random noise. Privacy may or may not be a right, but that doesn't mean you can't just fight for and have it.
Granted, Big Brother can probably crack most encryption given time and money, but what if EVERYONE is using encryption? Different kinds, as well (geeks using a number of home-grown variants, the masses using Microsoft whatever...). Decrypting everything becomes less and less feasible. Is that a terrorist or some kid playing CounterStrike? An mp3 "pirate" or just a randomly generared noise packet?
Encrypt everything. If they try to outlaw encryption, well... I'll get back to you on that one.
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This is totally new information to me anyway. What's really bizarre about this is the fact that supposedly they just slap a solaris install on these CLEA things. The SUN FTP server in solaris 8 for example has a flaw that can get you root in about 2 minutes, I know because one of my boxes got rooted this way just a few weeks ago when my firewall went down and I had accidentaly left FTP up in inetd (yes, yes, bad oversight).
In any case, have these law enforcement people heard of SSH or SCP or whatever? There is a repository of recordings and data and some Fed IT guy is FTPing it across the internet back to HQ for analysis?? Does that freak anyone else out?
Considering people scan the net for vulnerable FTP servers, I wouldn't be surprised if many of those boxes are rooted right now. Probably running an IRC bot or running attacks on other hosts.
I refuse to believe it's unsecured but my gut tells me it's probably true, knowing most IT people and knowing most developers. You'd think they would put a firewall in front of these boxes and treat them as highly secure boxes and then maybe VPN in and retrieve the information via a secured protocol.
Oh well. What a nightmare.
How exactly do you know that, Dr. Fooling You?
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
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> [...] Well... unless you are a criminal or gay or really ugly in the nude or read socially unacceptable books or masturbate or pick your nose and scratch your butt. But, we don't like people like that anyway.
When the video cameras in private homes do come, I'd say it's precisely the ugly gay butt-scratching nudists who have the least to fear when reading naughty books.
I mean, I'm nowhere near as uptight as the typical FBI guy, and even I wouldn't want to spend 8 hours a day sitting in front of a computer screen all day having to see the false positives the AI comes up with for human intervention.
While straight, I'm sufficiently ugly that I doubt I'd be worth watching. (But just to be on the safe sice, I'll take up butt-scratching. I think one scratch every chapter should be enough. Maybe once every couple of pages if it's really subversive stuff like Ayn Rand.)
As for you beautiful people out there, well, you'll get watched more closely. Sucks to be you. (But if you're so damn hot, what the hell are you doing reading Slashdot? Go 'way. This our turf! :)
I'm sorry, but that is a piss-poor excuse for not standing up to the current administration's land-grab on our civil liberties, and congress' spineless acquiescence to the same. This is tantamount to saying, if you don't have anything to hide, why do you have a problem with the police searching your house/car/person?
There are reasons why issues of civil liberties and constitutional rights tend to get publicized, exposed and worked out in cases involving people who (probably) did something wrong, and it isn't just because people are never wrongly investigated, accused or prosecuted. The reason we are less likely to hear about the innocent people who should have been protected by the law but were not is that the authorities have a vested interest in keeping them quiet. The victims often accept freedom from further persecution in exchange for dropping the matter, and more often than not noone in authority is punished for THEIR violation of the law.
As long as the government can't control what we think...
Yeah, tell that to Reverend Accelyne Williams. Oh, sorry, you can't - he's dead. Google his name and you'll end up learning about a whole lot of other people who were killed or otherwise violated when the Constitution let them down. But don't blame the constitution - it's hard to maintain your integrity when politicians keep pissing on you all the time.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Lets see here...
It's an invasion of privacy
It's unsecure with a direct connection to the net
It's being hacked
Private information is being stolen
It's being used as a tool by other countries
Our Goverment knows this yet it isn't fixed.
This is a dumbed down version of big brother. If you're going to do this or any type of wire tapping then why not make it secure at the very least.
Why do we let our goverment get away with this shit? I don't support funding any goverment to spy on me and/or listen to my private conversations since I am not a terrorist but if they're doing it anyway keep my shit secure and private.
I wonder if Orin Hatch knew about this and the intrusion into our citizen's privacy would he support small nuclear strikes on said servers and their admins? I would.
It's amazing our goverment can function at all.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
That flash reminds me of a book... Go read 'Lacey and his friends', by David Drake. It's a set of short stories about a really screwed up cop (reason why not included due to spoiler). Every room, and I do mean EVERY room, has a camera in it, and they're all recorded all the time. Yet a few people still (in the book, almost) get away with murder.
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
Actually, the PBS one is the one _we_ think of, but I remember reading an interview where he said it was used at Infoworld long before him, but he started using it for a column, using it exclusively, where before him it was used by many people at Infoworld as a byline.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Johnny Fever-WKRP in Cincinatti
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Any privacy concerns of mine have very little to do with law enforcement; at least they have to go thru background and psych testing before they get their positions. Communications companies dont test their techs this well, which is somewhat scary considering how much information they get access to.
Remember that recent case where the tech for the credit reporting agencies was stealing hundreds of thousands of identities to sell to criminals? It's just another case in point. In the information age, who will guard the guards?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.