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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."
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.
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.