Slashdot Mirror
Passive E-Mail Monitoring Leads To Arrest
www.2advanced.net writes "The world's first arrest resulting from passive monitoring of electronic communications is being reported by Globe Technology. In the article, sources reveal that 'an e-mail message intercepted by NSA spies precipitated a massive investigation by intelligence officials in several countries that culminated in the arrest of nine men in Britain and one in suburban Orleans, Ont. -- 24-year-old software developer Mohammed Momin Khawaja, who has since been charged with facilitating a terrorist act and being part of a terrorist group.'"
For those of you who have no idea where Orleans is in Ontario, its very close to Ottawa (minutes away), and about 2 hours from Montreal and 3.5 hrs from Toronto, making it an ideal spot to plan terrorist action in Canada. Ottawa is a couple hours from the US/Canadian border, and for those of you who have never driven the distance, it's a very somber drive, with extremely easy access into the United States. I knew a rum-runner once who would move liquor out of the states at an alarming rate through the St. Lawrence River border; a hardly monitored area concerned more with tourism than security, then. Today, it's a different story, I'm told.
is this echelon and the aquinas router combined? Who is runing the show, if not the WTO? We must all watch ourselves carefully, for there are malicious entities out to get us. Those who would choose safety over liberty deserve neither.
That's just horribly scary. I'm not sure which part is worse, email monitoring (sure, they SAY it's passive...) or the terrorist activities.
Though it really surprises me that the NSA would actually take responsibility for passing along tips.
Generally they just pass stuff to the other three letter organizations and they take it from there.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
It seems like YRO, I mean, they were monitoring his email, they probably are monitoring ours!
seems Googles new "free" email service could be abused like this as they will still retain emails even if you close your account
of course we trust google now, but as they are a US based company this will seem like a goldmine for Asscroft and his chums who will have unprecedented access via the magic word "terrorism"
Yeah right, like any terrorists would use unencrypted email.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
That the NSA can just listen in to any/all communications like that. Makes me wonder if they're listening to me right now.
MABASPLOOM!
I for one welcome our new NSA spy Overlords!
E-mail to your muthas! WORD!
Today, we must FEAR those EVIL Canadians and their rum-running abilities. In fact, we have to use our "army of cryptographers, chaos theorists, mathematicians and computer scientists" to defeat just one of those crazy canuck masterminds.
As long as the monitoring is "passive" and my GMail inbox is only being read by machines...
EOF
sig: sauer
Would the NSA investigate if PGP or similar encryption was used?
Whatever the NSA is doing to monitor all the traffic, I'm sure the RIAA and MPAA are drooling at the prospect of using this technology to catch so-called copyright violators. Civilian applications for a military technology, natch!
This is the last thing we need - "justification" for more widespread surveillance and other privacy intrusions.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Ha. The NSA has communications experts. The job of the NSA is signals intelligence and decryption.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
It is so easy to monitor InterNet plain text communications, that I ALWAYS presume its been done since the start of the Net.
A computer hacker who allowed himself to be publicly identified only as ''Mudhen'' once boasted at a Las Vegas conference that he could disable a Chinese satellite with nothing but his laptop computer and a cellphone
That is so cool if it is true. Have the phreakers been hitting comm satellites? Anyplace to find overviews of how they do it?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Mohammed Momin Khawaja, who has since been charged
I imagine that every person in the USA that has the name of Mohammed has an FBI profile waiting for him. It kind of stink that so much terrorism is associated with this name - I realy enjoyed Alli the boxer fight he was the greatest. Now for everyone that has the name of Mohammed you have a civial duty to not get in trouble so the name Mohammed isn't accoiated with teriosm. Hell everyone with a name has a duty to not comit terrisom.
All be good...
Although this news is probably bad for YRO issues, there may be an upside. If the NSA is packet-sniffing e-mail traffic, then maybe they will be motivated to find a way of reducing the amount of Nigerean printer cartridge enlargement spam messages. If we are really lucky, they may even share the solution with us all. Of course, it is also possible that the guys at the NSA may all suddenly become hung like donkeys, NOT!
No wonder these guys keep getting foiled, if they're stupid enough to use unencrypted email. I'm assuming that the NSA doesn't yet have the ability to routinely brute-force all encrypted mail passing through its doors...
Ydco co
For me everyday is Echelon day :)
Seriously though, I haven't heard of any organized "silent protest" for a long time.
Does the NSA really have so much computing power that it's useless to even try to bother them?
You took the long way pal. Ottawa to Toronto in about 3.5 hours if you drive fast, and 4.5 if you drive slow. Branford? Eeek. That's further than an hour from TO. Ending up in Hull is a bad sign... HEHE Just don't get arrested there!!!!!
*pow* *pow*
Golly, headlines like these sure make me glad the United States is just as keen as ever on ensuring that every citizen is afforded due process, has equal access to the law, and that all of the constitutional safeguards protecting our civil liberties will remain in full force.
I know I'm relieved. This type of activity might be really dangerous in the hands of a government that didn't believe in its citizens rights and privacies.
The Dalai Llama
I know that I, for one, would certainly sleep better if Ashcroft were head of the NSA...
My sig could be your sig!
Considering the way that Ashcroft et. al. have widened the scope of any prosecutorial powers they have, it seems like "e-mail sniffing" will become more widespread as time goes on.
Finialy people might figure out that email is trivialy easy to monitor it's sent clear test to a well defined port. Switching gear can creat a span based upon that easily enough. This is why all email should be encrypted and with strong encryption.
As to finding out the terrorists great, just remember that the US was founded by people that could be called terrorists.
No sir I dont like it.
Oops... I hope they dont monitor
You're old school? I beta tested the motherf***ing abacus!
Orleans is part of the city of Ottawa- they almalgamated in Jan. 2000, but it's still not part of the postal system yet.
It's been a huge blow up about the man being arrested- apparently they took one of his brothers out of school (Ottawa U) to question him, and brought in the entire family for questioning on a raid. It's kind of a touchy subject around here right now.
Apply American laws to events occuring in America. The United States is big, but it's not everything in the world. How DARE they presume to police the world and its communications.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
I've often wondered just how fast their turn-around time was once you started using words like Great Satan, infidels, chemical, Bin LaCARRIER LOST
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
I forsee many nations, corporation, and individuals learning how to souce route their network traffic, and avoid US routers.
This sounds like Echelon stuff. Is "Project Echelon" a real deal or is that a bed-time story for the tin-foil hat crowd?
The Dalai Llama
they're listening to me right now...
My sig could be your sig!
Well, I've probably got a ton of fans at the NSA due to discussion of privacy issues, security, and how to design systems that disallow monitoring that I've send through AIM/ICQ/mailing lists and other non-secured messaging systems.
Seriously, I'd say that it's a pretty reasonable bet that AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo are routinely monitored. They're easy to data-mine (heck, the commercial data from that *alone* is phenomenal -- if people hear on a show that "Debora Mullins and Sandra Walker will be possibly starring in 'Shredded Metal 2', and there's a mass of messages saying "Debora Mullins sucks", that'd be awfully useful to the production company.
As for the NSA/CIA/FBI, messaging services are frequently used, easy to log and data-mine (no speech recognition necessary) systems that provide no end-to-end encryption that pass through a single point -- in the United States.
Jabber is the only reasonably well-designed IM system I've seen, and nobody *uses* Jabber, sadly enough.
May we never see th
The BBC (and everyone else) has been running this story about a US/UK operation to use Osmium Tetroxide in a chemical attack. Given my recollections of the Sarin gas attack on a Japanese tube station a few years back, I'm willing to have my email read if it nails fsckers preparing to do this.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
specifically I mean? What with the Maher Arar business & the people at Guantanamo who turn out to be taxi drivers, Project Thread etc arrests for terrorism concern me a bit these days because my faith in the competence of the people making these decisions is not all that high. I'm waiting to hear that the guy has been deported to Syria by accident (is that the new code for "shot while trying to escape"?), and turns out he was innocent but it's OK, the Syrians promised not to torture him too much, so move along nothing to see here...
Maybe he is a terrorist, who knows - and if so this is a perfect example of how security-apparatus heavy handedness is counterproductive
Are we not jumping the gun here?
How do we know if these guys are even guilty?
Iraq was supposed to have weapons of mass destruction.
Now look at the mess the US is in.
Trust is something I won't give away to any organization that can't respect my rights to privacy.
I don't care if they are monitoring mine, I'm not plotting against anyone. And if I were, I'd deserve to be caught.
Anyone against total control by the federal government and the establishment of a totalitarian New World Order is a TERRORIST.
Anyone who supports the Bill of Rights, owns guns, and/or has any skills other than turning on a TV is also a TERRORIST who needs to be promptly destroyed by the authorities. PERIOD.
Support the government and the New World Order at all costs!
I know this story is probably going to get a lot of people riled up. However, it is still my understanding that the NSA goes to great pains to avoid intercepting any communication that comes from a U.S. citizen. They are strictly prohibited from doing so.
If you are a U.S. citizen, your main privacy concerns should be with the FBI and the DoJ with their powers granted by the Patriot Act.
Here we go, - on with the thinfoil-hat!
A computer hacker who allowed himself to be publicly identified only as ''Mudhen'' once boasted at a Las Vegas conference that he could disable a Chinese satellite with nothing but his laptop computer and a cellphone
:)
Good to know that there are NSA folks at Defcon
FYI. The original email-intercept story was reported in the Sunday Times.
Time to send a PGP encrypted e-mail message to yourself that reads:
;-)
Dear NSA:
Stop reading my e-mail.
YOu may be an Anonymous Coward to /., but you're not anonymous to the NSA. You could have posted under your own id and raised your karma.
The quoted article seems kinda wierd to me.
The article starts off with a diabolically, highlighting the boast of a mysterious hacker who works as NSA. No names are quoted. The whole thing is given a hollywood-esque charm (the hacker known only as "Mudhen" (mud hen? duh!), a charming pseudonym for NSA - Puzzle Palace).
After adding sufficient soundbites to attract reader's attention, besides making one thing is it one of those devious secrets about NSA, it suddenly changes tone and highlights the achievement of NSA "spies". Charming. Other gems:
"army of cryptographers, chaos theorists"
"that may have pulled in the first piece of evidence"
"massive investigation in several countries "
And then finally a quick rundown on TCP/IP.
One could almost mistake it for communistic propaganda, if only it hailed the fatherland (or the motherland) as well...
ps: don't forget, there are no facts or figures mentioned anywhere in it well.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
There is no need to fear evil Canadians. There is a very significant need to fear apathetic Canadians.
Our politicians still don't think we have a terrorist problem. Our politicians think the Americans are the cause of all their terrorist problems. Our politicians think that if the Americans would just be nice to everyone all the time, everything would be just fine.
So, while we raise taxes for 'anti-terrorism' the money actually goes into a big pot and is spent on anything but solutions that the government finds unnecessary.
I'd ask anyone outside our borders who actually cares to forgive the average Canadian - we currently don't have a viable center or right-of-center party for whom to vote. Ostriches on the left, and book-burning, bible-thumping fanatics on the right.
In the meantime, the US shouldn't trust any person or vehicle coming across their northern border.
Why is the NSA spying on other country's citizens?
I thought the NSA was only there to spy on Americans and it was the CIA's job to keep tabs on other counties...
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
We need a group of people to start discussing how cheap Viagra, a larger penis, and low-interest home mortages can be used for terrorism. Blip! Suddenly all the spam vanishes off the internet. I always hoped the NSA could be used for good as well as evil.
We are writing you to inform you that we [insert goverment dept. here] have classified evidence that has led us to believe that a [insert citizens name here] is conducting activity related to fundamental terrorist groups while using your companies infrastructure
we therefore request you as the designated keeper of that infrastructure have available for our inspection [every piece of data you want] within 7days
failure to comply is subject to interfering with a investigation , obstruction of which may hold you liable to serious prosecution
sincerly
Mr AshCroft
DOHS
Read the last line:
"As soon as a packet is flagged, investigators would apply for warrants to assemble the packets and read the messages' contents."
So that means my secret falafel recipe is safe right?
when the most interesting thing to you about the entire story is the fact that there is now an IT job open in Ottawa.
Citing anonymous sources in the British intelligence community...
Officials at the NSA could not be reached for comment.
Err, where does NSA take responsibility for this?
The really scary part is the inevietable push to give civilian law enforcement access to the same info. And in the current climate, I doubt saner heads can prevail. Haveing a bunch of your citizens killed has a way of putting a country into belt and suspenders mode.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Ok, folks, it's not as though the NSA is full of mindless zombies who blindly devote themselves to the particular ideology of whatever administration is in power at the moment. They are smart people with a job to do, or at the very least, they just really like playing with problem solving. They really, really don't care about your e-mail...unless, of course, they should.
Just think that every time one of these big corporations sends your personal data overseas for processing it goes through these filters.
> (sure, they SAY it's passive...)
what, exactly, is "active" email monitoring?
Anyway, in most countries, you don't need a warrant
to monitor internaltional communications...
even the criminals don't use it ;)
By the way, last I checked Canada is in North America, so I'm not sure who you're insulting here.
Several years ago I taught some workshops to teachers to let them learn the joys of email. I made apoint to show them that email was not sure and anything written can be read by anyone with some knowledge. After sending some emails back and forth as a class, I logged into the mail server and showed them what they had written to each other. Even though they were upset that I could see the email, they walked away remembering the message:
Don't send anything in the email that you don't want printed in the classified ads of the local paper. Because sending email is like sending a postcard. Every postman between here and there can read what you've said.
What makes me wonder is that these "terrorist" were sending email that was unencrypted? [tinfoil hat] Or maybe, the NSA were able to get backdoors to encryption technology and that what what is passively being listened to. [/tinfoil]
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
OTOH, if the NSA has a good spam filter they use before reading my mail, i'd be happy if they could share the technology with the rest of the world.
Just look at this guy's name.
Mohammed Momin Khawaja
Consider the number of known Al-Queda operatived who have the first name Mohammed. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the NSA, FBI, and CIA routinely monitored the communications of everyone in the western hemisphere who has an Arabic name.
They can't have that much spam to weed through.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
*BOMB* ./ effect *BANG* works on the NSA facilities...*PANG*, *KILL*, *SMASH*, *CRUSH*
Lets *CRASH* see how the
Not on the monitoring, but on the bomb that almost was can be found here
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
"They that would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Ben Franklin
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Just a'wonderin'
-nsa: you are a terrorist
-shmo: what?
-nsa: what country are you from
-shmo: what!?!
-nsa: "what" ain't no country we ever heard of... they speak english in what? [enter large guns] say "what" again. we dare you, we double dare you. english, motherfucker, do you speak it?
-shmo: yes
-nsa: then you know what we're saying.
-shmo: yes
-nsa: what does America look like?
-shmo: w-w-white...
-nsa: go on
-shmo: fat...
-nsa: does America look like a bitch?
-shmo: what? *BANG* NO!
-nsa: then why you trying to fuck him like a bitch?
-shmo: no!...
-nsa: yes you were... yes you were, and the only person America likes to be fucked by is Uncle Sam
|plastic....or gasoline?|
Thanks for the link. You answered my question before it even got posted.
The Dalai Llama
My sig could be your sig!
How about this: one country would spy on another countires citizens and that country would reciprocate circumventing any pesky laws and human right issues. I think this is the actual basis of Echilon.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
let's hope that this brings some light on Canada's shameful immigration/refugee policies.
Canada let's just about anybody in. Come to the border and claim "refugee" status, they have to let you in, with a "promise" to show up for an hearing.....
right...no wonder this country is full of extremists
bigger penis = bigger WMD. Not sure about the other stuff though.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
My favourite in devious encryption is currently Spam Mimic
If you were scanning all e-mails, would you put your resources on mails that looked encrypted or those that look like junk mail?
While the USA (as well as any country that won independence from the "old world") was founded by terrorists, the countries of Europe were founded by brutal dictators (except Ireland; they really were founded by "terrorists"). It's all in how you look at it. That said, I'll go with the terrorists than the brutal dictators any day. Erin go Bragh and One Nation, Under God. Neither flag shall bow to any earthly king.
I find the slashdot reaction funny... when the NSA is sniffing packets that basically pass through their networks, it's bad, but some guy driving around with a computer and wireless gear is cool.
And that's on top of all the arguments about whether broadcasting information through the Internet is/should be/isnt/shouldnt be private.
Can you be accused of being a voyeur if the person you're looking at is walking around in public naked?
The article says it took an army of cryptographers to put the message back together. I'm thinking this is more of a journalist fudge given the rest of the article.
Was this guy using SSL for his mail (end to end)?
Better yet GPG?
I don't think the NSA could crack a 2048 bits GPG key. Not in a million years.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
So, his position is open, right?
OK, everybody should look up Echelon and read about it. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has heard of it.
Also, the Canadian agency responsible for signals intelligence (equivalent to the NSA) called the "Canadian Security Establishment" is known to be a participant in Echelon collection.
You are being watched.
Why is it assumed that this message was intercepted as a product of monitoring ALL traffic as opposed to the idea that one of the correspondants in question was already being specifically monitored?
n/t
How quick the fascists moderators have gotten to this post for daring to go against the party line.
Think they might be thanking you for your insight? I tried Jabber last year no one I know was using it. I gave up on it.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
Wars are super cool! Let's fight them forever so we can forget how we're being BENT OVER AND FUCKED UP THE ASS by this administration!
(Metaphorically, of course, since Bush hates fags.)
... and that you do not honestly believe the US govt. is keen on ensuring every citizen is afforded due process & etc.
... funny definitely, but not insightful.
Why was this modded as insightful?
Sanford Wallace missing for at least two weeks. Presumed picked up by CIA spooks; questioned for Al-Qaeda ties.
Yeah, instead of monitoring and intercepting it themselves, they have other countries do the dirty work and pass it back to them via eschelon.
Just because you're hiding in another country, don't think that you're safe from US justice.
The same US justice that lets multimillionaire CEOs who commit massive waves of fraud go free if they happen to be friends of the administration?
The same US justice that invades a sovereign country for demonstrably false reasons?
Ooooh I'm scared. So is my friend Osama.
One of the big pushes after 9-11 was for all of the intelligence agencies to "cooperate."
When I was in the navy we conducted counter narcotics patrols off the coast of Colombia and Panama. Since the military is not allowed to engage in law enforcement (that pesky Constitution and all) we simply had a Coast Guard team (they're Dept of Transportation and not Defense, so they *can* do law enforcement) that took care of the actual boarding of vessles and law enforcement. In fact, it had to be the Coast Guard person on watch who initiated the request to investivate/board a vessle. There was no "official" cooperation between the military and the Coast Guard on this, but when you get orders on the secure circuit to "think about getting to these coordinates in exactly 12 hours" which result in the Coastie on watch saying "Oh hey -- there's a boat... let's board him!" can you deny that there is unofficial cooperation going on?
(There were further stories about SEALS and other special forces folks who were officially discharged from the military and transferred to "another agency" for two weeks at a time in order to engage in "direct action law enforcement" before "deciding to reenter the military." It's call "sheep-dipping" and is just one more thing for the tin-foil-hatters to worry about...)
I suspect that this is probably what's going on with the NSA et al. If the agency in question either thinks/knows they're looking at a US citizen, they can just drop a pointer to the intel in the inbox of an agency who *can* legally handle it (Oh geez -- I wonder where *that* lead came from?). Or there are teams of "not officially NSA folks" who just happen to be working at NSA alongside the others who are legally allowed to investigate US citizens (similar to Coasties on US Naval vessles for counter-narc activities).
Take your pick as to the method in use or make up another, but I am pretty sure it's going on and will not be going away anytime soon.
= 9J =
[sings]Blame Canada[/sings].
;)
Go on, you know you want to blame us! You blame us for everything that goes wrong with your country!!!!
Oh for ALLah's sake! I can't believe the waY OUR governments spy on us. Any AraB, AS Ever, is a suspect. This is going too fAR Even for Bush. It won't BE LONG before they'll be trawling slashdot looking for hidden messages. I certainly won't be moving TO the US any time soon.
Apathetic Canadians are no worse than apathetic US Citizens. US politicians have no problem with terrorists, as it only creates more jobs (defense spending == jobs). More jobs means less to complain about, and (finally) less to complain about leads to apathetic citizens. The US voting system allows far more control and granularity on whom we put in office, and frankly I think US citizens (in general) are far less likely to pay attention to important issues and vote along issue lines.
Already the US presidential race is about taxes. What makes taxes more important than international policy? And if someone starts talking about international policy, someone else will start bringing up the abortion debate again. (( Note Ralph Nader, while not officially running, is trying to talk about international policy, but is doing it in such a confrontational way, that he is easily marginalized as a zealot. )).How are Canadian polititicans different? Less population to try to lull into a sense of contentment / less active military force in countries where people feel they need to retaliate? Basically the same issues on a slightly smaller scale, with a higher per-person tax base. Oh, yeah, and they have to know two languages.
I feel for you, but your problems are not unique - after all, you are in North America, too.
I'm Allen Zadr, and I approved this messageKinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
1. You're spot on.
2. Welcome to the 2st century journalism.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Fess up! Canada's insideous evil OOZES down over the border like Maple Syrup!
Eat at Joe's.
Having this kind of of spying operations to root out terrorists and other evildoers is exactly what we should be applauding, not fearing.
Yes, what a great idea! There's no way this power can possibly be abused! Just like the PATRIOT Act!
My guess is that encrypting your email makes it easier for the NSA -- only a tiny fraction of email traffic is encrypted. Outside of the tinfoil hat community, very, very few people bother to secure their email, so the simple act of sending an encrypted message (which can be spotted due to the low information content of cyphertext, or due to specific comments in the message header) probably flags you for attention.
And if that message is routed from an IP address in England to a cybercafe in Pakistan then so much the better. And if mail from the same address was sent to a known bad-guy last week then better still -- and before you know it, your door gets kicked in and several burly men are asking you questions about the half-tonne of fertilizer you just purchased.
"and being part of a terrorist group."
Does this scare anyone else? Who determines if the group I belong to is a terrorist group?
We are.
In communist Vietnam, suspected criminals "are vanished".
High profile criminals (e.g. Nam Cam et al.) get a theatrical trial, then get the proverbial bullet, since the cost of a bullet is less than feeding and guarding a prisoner until death by old age.
I realize this is a broad generalisation, but this is what happens in most cases. That being said, I doubt communist countries (the few that are left) are likely to be used as bases of operations by terrorist groups.
Of all public email systems, I'm sure Hotmail would be the most difficult for the NSA to help themselves to the insides of...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I do not know if the guy is guilty or not. A trial will tell us, in due time.
...etc. all these are misused terms in these confusing times.
However, the media coverage of the whole thing sucks.
His father, Mahboob A. Khawaja, has been detained in Saudi Arabia, where he is a professor at some university. The media reports that the father wrote articles critical of the West's meddling with the Muslim World's affairs. He wrote a book called Muslims and the West.
How is that relevant to anything? Is it an attempt to tie genuine legitimate criticism to terrorism somehow?
I did some searching on the father, and found quite a few articles, most of it critical to the Arab rulers than anything else. Seems he places blame where it belongs, whether in the West or in the Arab world.
This reminds me of the terms "terrorism", "anti-Americanism",
This whole thing about "guilt by association" got to stop.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Did you bother reading the somewhat brief article?
The people picked up were in Britain and Canada. It said nothing about them being US Citizens. It did, however, state that the nature of discussions was of terrorist activity (presumably against the US or US interests).
Conveying this to the Canadian and British authorities is a reasonable activity for our National Security Agency. If you want to talk about due process, perhaps you should watch to see what Canada and Britain do with them.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
It wouldn't be scarier if we knew this sort of things was being planned through email and nothing was being done at all to monitor or stop it?
I had a sucky sig.
If it goes through the US it is subject to our laws. We can't have data lines running through our land without paying attention to them. Just like if you are a foreigner passing through our country, you are subject to our laws during transit, and so is your data while it is in transit.
If you don't like it, don't route your data through the US. I doubt that an email sent from France to Spain goes through the US, so that isn't monitored (under that justification anyway). If it goes through the US, it's probably fairly safe to assume it affects us somehow.
By the way, in general, I worry somewhat about the loss of liberty during these times, though I think it has been exagerrated to a degree.
Way back when, the Stones had a strangely prescient song called "Fingerprint File", partial lyrics follow:
Hello, baby, mm-hmm
Ah, yeah, you know we ain't, we ain't talkin' alone
Who's listening? Well I don't really know
But you better tell the SIS to keep out of sight
'Cause I know they takin' pictures on the ultraviolet light
Yes, uh huh, yeah, but these days it's all secrecy; no privacy
Shoot first, that' s right... you know
Bye bye.
Right now somebody is listening to...... you
Keeping their eyes peeled...... on you
Mmm, mmm, what a price, what a price to pay
All right. Good night, sleep tight
SIS = Special Intelligence Service (UK)
If you didn't notice, they arrested terrorists -- you know, the guys who murder innocent people. The system is working. Why are there so many negative posts?
Pay these guys no mind. They don't understand the failsafes involved that take care of their kind quite handily. They see an exploit that works on desktops and assume it can be applied to spy satellites. My guess is he's got a few dozen zombie machines and thinks he can SYN flood some telecom satellite with an IP from a chinese block.
These people are idiots. Don't encourage them.
when exactly did a religious/ethnic minority become exactly equivalent with a group of individuals participating in a plot to mass murder as a first step down a slippery slope?
See, not all Muslims have been rounded up. You can even preach militant islam in the US. Had plenty of time. Not a whole lot of goodwill towards Islam standing in the way. And yet it isn't done.
The funny thing is when you say everything is the begining of the end of freedom, who's going to believe you if you happen to be right. Dial down the hyperbole.
I've worked with a number of NSA and CIA developers in the past (in telecom/datacom, not with the govt itself), and, unsurprisingly, none of them were stereotypical 2600 readers (stringent security checks being what they are). Already I find the G&M -- hardly the most reliable source to begin with -- wandering into "Enemy of the State" territory.
-tWB
Does anyone believe this is actually the first arrest vs. the first one where the monitoring was acknowledged? I strongly suspect there have been more arrests before this, albeit using different evidence.
Today is the day our digital rights go completely downhill. If they aren't already gone.
2. What makes you think that the encryption systems available to the general public aren't easily cracked by the boys in Virginia and Maryland?
1. You can not brute force a 256+ bit encryption. It'd be like every atom of earth (2^171) solving at 1THz (2^40) for a million years (2^45). So it must be an algorithm attack.
2. A lot of encryption theory is developed outside the US or in academia as theoretical mathematics. They do not have a monopoly on intelligence, or on trying to crack them.
3. Most encryption protocols rely on well published, well researched topics, like difficulty of factorization as opposed to multiplication. For them to have it would imply that a) such a solution exists and b) that they, but not anyone outside of their community would find it.
4. Most encryption protocols are vastly overengineered compared to the threats. Like, e.g. an opponent with a million times more computing power (-20 bits) or capable of instantly rejecting 99% of the keys (-7 bits) would have nearly no influence on the difficulty.
In short, there's every reason to believe that your favorite three-letter agency will capture the input before encryption or after decryption, due to a flawed implementation, unsecure handshake or through a man-in-the-middle attack than breaking the encryption/algorithm itself.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
*sigh* or was that Magic Lantern?
It seems to me that as (1) 90%+ percentage of all canadians live within 100 miles of the US border, (2) they have no culture of their own, (3) they could use some Texas "know how" in addressing their multi-lingual issues, and (4) attendance at local "hockey night" events is being severally eroded by the internet... that Canadians should just quite whining, endure a few months of total spanish immersion, and resolve themselves to their destiny as the 51st USA state, eh?
IMHO (of course).
Ok! We have proof you DO monitor email traffic. Add some sniffers for the various 419 scams.
I got a better idea. How about we stop terrorism by fixing the problems that cause it? Turning the world into a police state is obviously not the solution anyone wants and, so far, has only led to more terrorism. People are not born wanting to fly planes into buildings, so what has driven these people to such a level of desperation that they're willing to sacrifice their lives to kill thousands of innocent people?
There are in many key types, such as RSA which relies on prime number factoring difficulties, where there is no published proof on how hard it has to be to crack the keys, (and no proof on how hard it has to be to find a previously-unknown weakness).
No one has published how to easily crack RSA for long key lengths. A smart mathematician working for NSA could have solved the problem years ago if they can keep a good secret.
And quantum computing seems to be on the horizon as well, and I would not put it past NSA to be ahead of the pack on this, and with quantum computing, you may find all existing key lengths falling to brute force attacks, because problems that were previously solved in exponential time may become linear, and the world may have to move to a completely different scheme if increasing key length only linearly increases the time to crack the key with a quantum computer.
A totalitarian regime is so much easier when you have access to tools like the NSA provides.
1.) expect to be evesdropped on for EVERYTHING that is not encrypted, wether you're IN the US or outside of it. Use STRONG encryption whereever possible.
2.) expect weak encryption to be easily broken--it's prettymuch a given that the NSA has hardware *specifically designed* to break or brute force crypto. they employ many of the worlds greatest mathmatic savants out there, do not underestimate their capabilities.
3.) All your base ae belong to U.S.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
= 9J =
Knowledge formed from the playing of Tom Clancy Video Games does not hold much water in the real world, son.
So, when my friends and I are amusing ourselves by tossing around in email hypothetical approaches to terrorism ... we really ought to be billing the NSA for our research efforts! Kewl, beer money!
It's all well and good when the bad guys get caught...right up until the definition of "bad guys" gets changed. Yesterday there was an article about the DOJ labeling pornographers as "bad guys." There's no logical end. What's to stop someone being labeled as a bad guy for not going to church, or not supporting the government, or not going along with whatever intrusion-of-the-day on your privacy? It's not that big of a change from where we are now.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You have to dump the bombs in storage before you order new ones. And the amount of weapons being built and ordered is generating revenue - and jobs - more in some sectors than others.
Why does the senate refuse to Ratify the Land Mine Treaty? Jobs in the Land Mine manufacturing facilities.
Why does the senate refuse to Retify the Kyoto accord? Because companies threaten that they would close or have to lay off workers if they had to pay for the environmental protections being requested.
Yes, I know that this is a simplistic view - but I believe it makes a valid point. Apathy is bred through contentment.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Let's examine the facts, shall we? Where did the terrorists who killed thousands of Americans, British and CANDIANS base their operations from? The USA. Which country has a government in power with deep ties to Saudi Arabia, the source of most terrorist funding? The USA. Which country has abducted Canadians and sent them to be tortured in Syria? The USA. If anyone should be watching their border it is Canada, because the facts clearly show that the US is a dangerous terrorist haven, a country that has no respect for the rights of non-citizens (and in some case, US citizens too) who are simply travelling through their country. You are obviously a rational guy, and if the facts don't sway you, then I would say that you are more concerned with pushing your political agenda (ie: to put a mindlessly pro-US, right wing government in power) than you are about the security of either Americans or Canadians. If a right wing government such as the Canadian Bulliance had been in power last year, Canada would right now be spending billions of dollars supporting the useless war against Iraq rather than the war against terrorism. How would that have made anyone safer?
Actually, if you look at the Palestinian suicide bombers a lot of them are well-educated and middle class (by Palestinian standards). Some were not even particularly religious. In fact I believe some of them were even university students studying subjects like law. The 9/11 suicide bombers - quite a few of them were well educated and came from relatively rich families. Despite the hatred they nutured for the West they spent years studying in Western universities, getting Western friends and even girlfriends. This takes as much intelligence as any good spy in a foreign country. To hide your true self, blend in, become one of the enemy. They even learnt how to fly planes. A suicide bomber has to be smart to succeed. They have to be someone who can act on their own. Once they are set loose they are on their own. They have to negotiate their way to the target. They have to be able to act well enough to blend in to the crowd to do the maximum damage. If something goes wrong they have to negotiate the obstacles by themselves with no one to help them. Of course there is a lot of psychological preparation as well (brainwashing) but that's nowhere near the same thing as stupidity.
Of course there are stupid ones as well but that's true for everything.
I've never ever heard anything at all reputable, or even anything that had any evidence whatsoever to go with it, that indicated that any secret group has the ability to decrypt strongly encrypted public key email.
So why do so many people believe the NSA can decrypt encrypted materials?
Of course, encrypted emails don't have the destination encrypted (so they can see who's emailing whom) and I don't think the subject is encrypted. And, of course, with PATRIOT, the government can (and I'm fairly sure does) track every single origin/destination combination of every email sent in the US.
But some mysterious ability to crack encrypted mail? I very much doubt it. They probably have enough cpus churning to get many many PC-years per day, and I'm sure they are using all the latest tricks to speed up cracking, but even so there's no way anyone's decrypting your 2048 bit key messages without a major breakthrough in mathematics.
Gee, ten terrorists prevented from following through with their plots. It only took twice that many to pull off September 11th.
But everybody on Slashdot knows that passive monitoring isn't good counter-terrorism. It can't possibly achieve anything positive.
I realize that the real answer may be classified, but I'm interested in informed speculation as well.
Is the monitoring with the cooperation of the ISPs who control the gateways/routers? Is it mandated that they have the monitoring taps? Or is it unknown to them (NSA are tapping into the signal unbeknownst to the ISPs)?
(I think this has a known answer.) Is is true that pretty much all intercontinental traffic goes through the USA? ARe there any routes eg, Europe to Asia, or other continents that are just direct routes not passing via the USA?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Maybe this is just me, but even if they were using encryption, all the NSA needs to do is to break the Key once and then store it, all future communication will easily be able to be decrypted, without the use of much computing power.
So the issue is breaking the encryption the first time. Considering that only a very small fraction of a percent of people use encrypted email, it would be easy to break only those keys, once.
If any orginization had the ability to do this, I think it would be the US government. They spend millions of dollars just to see something blow up (bombs, missles, etc) A Patriot missle costs $2.3 million. For that price, I could create a beowlf cluster with a decent abilty to crack encryption, and store keys. I think there budget is much higher then that.
is that Mayan?
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
makes me wonder whether the guy just crawled the net for some news to post with that "www.2advanced.net" nickname and it's a web hosting provider!
- Suspected terrorist, who's been watched by UK anti-terrorists for months, buys hundreds of kilograms of Ammonium Nitrate
- Task force raids suspect's home
- Suspect's computer found on premises
- Task force opens Outlook, looks in Inbox, Sent Items
- Incriminating email to or from Mohammed_Momin_Khawaja@?????.ca discovered.
Sounds to me like someone is trying to spin this as justification for email surveilance.Jobs for the right kind of people. Military-industrial-complex types. Friends, donators and the like-minded. I don't see Haliburton filing for bankruptcy!
.
People get so sucked into thinking that we generally all sink or swim together. Fuck the ordinary schlub! There's never been a better time to be rich in America. The policies (ie tax cuts to rich and war spending) have succeeded according to plan.
The powers that be only care about whoever put them there. And that doesn't mean the voters. If they benefit, its as much by accident as it is on purpose. It means the donators, the corporations, unions, sympathetic industries, etc. It's all about who's side you're on and how much you can bring to the dance.
As long as there aren't riots in the streets (and increasingly even if there are) they really do NOT care how the average chump is doing. Hell, most folks don't even vote anyway and the powers that be prefer it that way. The economy could be -and is- totally in the shitter and, as long as the right people are doing OK, everything's cool.
"The War On Tara" has been greatly beneficial to some and that's all that really counts. Four, five, six billion a month? Hell, fifty billion! Who's counting anyway? It's just money between friends.
(Yeah, and don't be conned, none of us are one iota safer than on Sept 10th.)
No, I can't deny that cooperation is going on, because it is, and it's perfectly legal. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the military from conducting law enforcement operations itself, but it specifically permits the military to SUPPORT law enforcement agencies to conduct LEO, especially drug related ones. See the link for more info.
By the way, I was in the Navy as well, and participated in many, many of these operations. The fact that the Navy was actively cooperating with the Coast Guard was widely known and unclassified.
Sean
You must have missed all those films of suspected terrorists beaing blown to pink mist outside of the US. All your base are indeed belong to US. Here, unlce sam seems to be content sucking tax money from you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not that it cant be broken with their resources, but they wont bother unless there is a good reason to waste the resources on you personally...
Not that most my email is THAT private, ( i know better then that ) but its the principle.. Its no one elses business what my correspondence is about.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
N/T
It's hardly paranoid to think that a spy agency might actually be interested in, you know, spying on people.
There were factions inside the NSA that really did want to weaken or kill DES, according to Steven Levy's Crypto. And, given the tactics the NSA had used with regards to commercial crypto in the past, it was actually pretty surprising that they stood up and did the right thing for a change.
All I hear is "planning a terrorist act".
These days, planning a street party can be a 'terrorist act'. Handing out pamphlets in Washington, despicting GWB as a sheep, explaining why he's such a nut, could be a terrorist act.
Mooning the traffic on an interstate could be a terrorist act.
Anybody know?
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
"The Corporate States of America"
Land of the free gift with purchase.
Home of the Whopper.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Hi. In case you're wondering...you're a fucking idiot.
What if you, or your wife, ended up killed or injured as a result of these towelheads carrying out their plans? Would you still say "OH THANK GOD WE PRESERVED THEIR PRIVACY! YAY!!!" I mean..jesus christ. Are you that fucking retarded?
Like I said. You = Grade A Titanic Bag-Of-Hammers Idiot. That, or French.
Ah, but the internet is supposed to be a world of ends and your acceptance of something different is sad. Your services and your "server" are not really needed with excellent quality MTAs packeged with reasonable default values in free software and with always on networks. It is possible for everyone to run their own email server and for those email servers to use encryption by default. All that would then be possible is brute force attacks and traffic analysis. It is outrageous and stupid that the government would spend money pouring over innocent people's correspondence. You should not accept this state of affairs nor should you teach people that sending email is equivalent to publishing a classified ad. If you accept it as so, you will never help make things better.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What were they thinking ?
If they wanted to make sure that nobody ever read their emails (NSA or others), all they had to do is mention viagra in it !!
between NSA and their British equivalent - GCHQ? - that we would monitor British citizens for them and we would allow them to monitor Americans, and then pass on relevant information to one another. I don't know if this is correct, or just imaginative fiction, but it would neatly circumvent some of the legal prohibitions.
Emphasis mine. I've done lots of these, and never was the USCG officer asked to "leave CIC to avoid violating the PC act". Providing intel support for drug LE ops is specifically permitted by the PC act as amended.
Sean
"The" economy now measures corporate profit more than citizen welfare. The numbers have been cooked so mightily for so long, that only the numbers which make those politicians in power look good are counted. For a simple example, "unemployment" does not count those who have stopped looking for work, which of course means all the spongers, nor the 1M military staff, who produce very little (and destroy a lot), and many other discounted people who are not employed. Of course, jobs are essential to citizens' welfare, but they're only indirectly linked to the economy, filtered through the crooked government accounting.
"The ship of the Sun is steered by the Grateful Dead."
--
make install -not war
1) There is no such thing as security...one can be cautious but never totally safe.
2) There are ways the country can become more "secure" without taking away our privacy. (I used secure there to make you feel more safe)
just my two cents.
Military jobs work against an economy of production. In fact, that's their only point. They produce weapons and actions that destroy capital, either dead-end unused (preferable) or maximized destruction (last resort). Calling those jobs "productive" means Typhoid Mary was productive, a medical services marketer. While accurate, that view ignores the vast calamity in the economy of the plague she caused. The military is not a viable jobs program, although it is often cynically abused as such, for its short-term and immediate optical illusion.
--
make install -not war
Congratulations,
You have just figured out why very few people in Canada read or like the Globe and Mail any more. It was once a great, albeit conservative, newspaper. No its a rag.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Why not? The Internet was originally developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, and is--today--governed (ultimately) by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce has effectively outsourced management of the Internet to ICANN--but have no illusions: the U.S. government paid for it, and they have no (and should have no) qualms about taking advantage of that.
Does that make you uncomfortable?
If you're not a U.S. citizen, it might be a bit chilling to think that U.S. officials might be peering at your email. Well, hey--they're routinely photographing your house with satellites, too. You can start wearing tin foil hats and worrying about Little Black Helicopters--or perhaps you might reflect on the fact that the U.S. government, and particularly the U.S. Department of Defense, has spent billions of dollars on technology that they let you use, for free. The Internet is one example, but there are others: the LORAN network (Long Range Aid to Navigation), GPS, the U.S. Naval Observatory time servers, and the International Ice Patrol (keeping track of icebergs in the North Atlantic) are just some that spring to mind.
The U.S. military isn't a fount of altruism--they have uses for GPS and the Internet too. But the fact that the U.S. taxpayer foots the bill for lots of stuff that the rest of the world gets for free might, might, suggest that we're not the incarnation of evil that some people overseas ([cough], [cough], France) would suggest.
While the terrorist threat to the US mainly emanates from the White House through its terror-amplifier, Canadians are threatened by attacks on the US. The economies, cultures and communications are as intertwined as head-conjoined twins (or maybe conjoined head-to-back :). While the actual sabotage might take a while to ripple across the border, the terror itself is a media virus, disrupting the management of society. And the White House trade and foreign policy components of the unified mediasphere is especially threatening, as it wrenches out of control in the terror winds. It's better to work with the US to fight the terror itself. Especially because, as much more reasonable people, with much less directly in harm's way, Canadians help keep the US sane, which we are obviously incompetent to manage without help. Our kinder, gentler nation to the North is *the* essential partner to dispel terror, especially when considered in its own interest.
--
make install -not war
You intend to send multiple messages to one person to reveal the whole message... you'd better be prepared to ALSO send the messages to 10,000 other email addresses too. If you cheat and send the same person 100 messages, and don't send them to anyone else, that looks like you're puposefully trying to hide information in that channel. Carnivore might pick up on that.
But if you do one->many like a real spammer, you'll probably be missed in the noise...
Here's a better technique:
Create a dictionary that maps the "whitening" noise words to an integer. (that is, create a table of such words which is used for encryption and decryption).
Encrypt your message using some PKI scheme (or just symmetric encryption with a shared key). Convert the encrypted binary message into integers (maybe use 16-bit groups and use numbers ranged 0-65535, or whatever), then use the corresponding word in the whitening noise. You could fit a 40 character encrypted message in 20 garbage words. The garbage words would appear to be distributed randomly, as real garbage words should.
More impressive whitening filters try to create plausible two-word combinations weighted by occurance to fool more powerful filters. You can combat this by purposefully using an existing SPAM mailer's whitening filter. You can use a sort of arithmetic/range/huffman DECOCDING to convert the encrypted message back into the chatty phrases by treating the whitening filter as the "word frequency" tree from an arithmetic/huffman coder. Then you "recompress" the words on the other side using the fixed frequency model into the encrypted binary which contains the message.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"Land of the Complacent, Home of the Fearful."
first off, the method you outlined has some decent merit to it. it looks tremendously tedious, but it would work pretty well.
:end generic rant, sorry for the slideways on some issues
Here's another method--just use file sharing and put your seekrit msg inside some songs/videos. Stego on steroids. It won't matter who else downloads, only you and your email recipient friend know to even look for it. I think between the video part, the audio part, and the ability to insert some random data that will only show up as artifact noise, that this might be possible. You could create particular artifact noise and have it referenced to your normal alphabet/language of choice, then encrypt that. And even the unencrypted words could be within the context of a one time pad.
I'd like to see anyone krak that.....
The other way is what they have been doing anyway for millenia in muslim countries, they use trusted couriers and word of mouth. They keep it inside their religion, and family. Not fool proof, but so far it's been giving the spooks fits. The other thing they have done is gone to the independent cell method, there IS NO terrorist "central command" anymore, not anything of note. That's one thing that any agency can't deal with, very small independent cells down to the ultimate, the cell of one. It cannot be stopped, and no need therefore for messages, encrypted / obfuscated or not..
Begin generic rant just cuz I can:
Now, too bad that NSA (who I am sure actively monitors every single post on slashdot, so they will read this in the clear) won't reveal the identities of all the white guys in suits who had prior knowledge and involvement in 9-11. Like, hey NSA, remember the airline PUTS? RING A BELL DOES IT? Yas know, the ones that paid off for some millions yet NO ONE CAME TO COLLECT THE MONEY YET BECAUSE THE OPTION BECAME PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE? How about THE FATCATS WHO GOT WARNED TO NOT FLY THAT DAY? AIN'T THAT A TAD SUSPICIOUS? How about THE CONNECTED FATCATS WHO DIDN'T SHOW UP FOR WORK THAT DAY IN THE TWIN TOWERS? WHO ORDERED NORAD TO STAND DOWN, WHO CHANGED THE RULES RIGHT BEFORE 9-11? WHY WERE PILOTS ALLOWED TO BE ARMED FOREVER UNTIL JUST A SHORT TIME BEFORE 9-11 AND THE LAW WAS CHANGED? WAZZUP WITH THE COMPANY RUNNING AN "EXERCISE" OF ' HIJACKED PLANES SMACKING INTO BUILDINGS ON 9-11", WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE IT'S A COINCIDENCE? HUH?
Stuff like that, there's dozens of interesting un answered questions out there, that seeminly no one in our glorious government "intel" agencies seems to be able to figure out.
Scuttlebutt has it that entire small obscure "connected" companies seemed to take the 9-11 day off, but it's hard to find that story anymore... hmmm.. gee whiz...hmm..wonder why that is...
Who bought 'em NSA? Who put in those orders? Why not make that info public? Oh? what's that you say? It's VERY IMPORTANT WHITE GUYS IN SUITS WHO GIVE YOU YOUR ORDERS WHO BOUGHT THEM?
thanks, we knew that
US intel=paid off and scared hypocrites. Most of them honest and patriotic, I don't intend to demean them on that score, but I will call a spade a spade here, because it don't stop them from being scared - scared into "going along to get along". A lot of them know there's serious high level treason-yes, I said treason- going on, yet only a small handful have had the balls to come forward. Non-boat rockers almost entirely. I have yet to meet anyone connected to any civilian or military agency in the government who isn't aware of serious malfeasance occuring, usually on an ongoing basis. To a man (and woman) they say you "don't rock the boat" about crookedness you might become aware of, because at a minimum it's a career buster, all the way up to you get disappeared, and everything in between.
You won't get em to say it on many internet forums,not too often anyway, no one will admit to being scared at work, etc, but you will hear it sometimes in meatworld if you are persistant and can build some trust.
9-11 = the modern reichstagg fire
I love these on-line discussions about tracking the TERRORIST threat. Sorry if this is hard to read, it's in the ARABIC font. Man, sometimes I just want to declare JIHAD against my browser. You'd think I'd have better things to do than read Slashdot articles. They're written so well that they're KILLING AMERICANS free-time all over the country. But, what are you going to do, HIJACK our internet connections :) Hey, editors, this article is the BOMB!
Gotta go, someone's at the door.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"However, the media coverage of the whole thing sucks."
Welcome to the age of control by disimformation.
The media, government and the 'terrorists' are merging into one inseperable mess. No one has credibility anymore.
Do I believe anything in the media anymore?
No, hardly a thing. I treat it all with extreme scepticism and avoid mainstream 'news' which I consider sheep fodder.
Do I believe my government about anything?
No. Not a thing, my government have lost all credibility. In fact the general rule is to believe the opposite which generally turns out to be the case.
Do I beleive that Al Q perpetrated the 911 attacks?
I don't know. On the balance of evidence I would say not. Who the fuck are Al Q anyway? Most of the alleged hijackers turned out to be fake. My disbelief started on Sept. 12th when they found a paper passport in the ruins of a blast that melted steel.
In fact to elaborate on this theory we have a paradox. Either the blast was hot enough to melt the steel (which is the official theory of collapse - as opposed to the more believable option that the towers were brought down in a controlled demolition) OR it was not hot enough to burn a piece of paper. One of the stories MUST be untrue.
Do Al Q and other terrorist orgs even exist? Or are they convenient political inventions?
Who knows, I dont even think the government do.
There are so many pieces of the official line that just don't fit together one has to question the whole caper.
I cannot think of a news story from the last 3 years which can be categorised as fact. I cannot think of a story which after publication has not subsequently been called into question, lies and fake evidence exposed or reporters retracting their stories.
Perhaps this erosion of public confidence is intentional, but like the story of theboy who cried wolf, when my government tell me there is 10 mins until my city is nuked I won't give a shit, I'll just go for a walk in the park.
The last 3 years have made me more sceptical than ever. One day something REALLY bad is going to happen and the government and media won't be able to instil any belief from the people to prevent a catastrophe. The lives of those who die will be as much on the conscience of sensationalist journalists and lying politicians as the terrorists who planted the bombs.
Evidently they are confusing packet headers(envelope, as they call it) with e-mail headers.
And the counterexample to the second statement is NAT(Network Address Translation).
However, lighting up your shoes in the cabin is foolish. I just wonder if he couldn't have found a more discrete method of detonation...
You could definitely miss something if you blinked at 10 Gbits/sec or whatever it runs at...
Everyone thought ES5 was the RIAA
that the NSA can scan your email. Other may not.
Not the *only* thing. If the land mines were the only deterrent, North & South Korea would have achieved "unification" some time ago.
Tactically, land mines are, at best a delaying weapon. They keep enemy troops busy doing mine clearing and caring for wounded (mine clearers) while you pick them off with more effective weapons. Without that backup, a mine field is just a road with extremely nasty speed bumps and potholes.
The OP's suggestion that it's the land mine manufacturing lobby that was preventing the US from banning them is open to interpretation.
The original point has some validity though. Though it's evil and short sighted, one method to force start a country's economy (in the short term) is to start a war. It artificially generates a heavy demand for a commodity (weapons) in a very short time, and it focuses economic growth on R&D and manufacturing. It's the sort of quick fix that the masses love to see, and the politicians even more so --if they can swing the manufacturing facilities and jobs into their own local ridings (or whatever you call them in the USA).
Let's be granted back all our privacies and let the terrorists kill us instead. It's a win-win situation.
No more checking luggage at the airport, that's an invasion of privacy. No more background checks on people applying for visas, don't want to invade their privacy. No more asking people for identification, best if we not invade their privacy. And then, some Saudi gets a visa without providing identification to the authorities and smuggles guns or explosives onto an airplane. Well, better to give up our lives than a little privacy.
Now, I know a lot of you probably agree 100% with the above paragraph, but for those of us who aren't Libertarians we would at least feel much safer with some security checks in place, even if we lose a little privacy.
I do wonder if Ben Franklin's opinion would change if he were alive today, though. A lot of shit has happened over the last 200+ years, most of it our (i.e. United States) fault. But we can't go back in time so we have to deal with it. This is why there will never be peace in Israel. Fucking Palestinians are still living in the past, along with a lot of the rest of the eastern world. I do have sympathy for the Palestinians losing their land, but the Israelis are NOT leaving, so their best bet is to negotiate some kind of peace with them. But I guess they like sending their sons over the wall strapped with bombs. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
And one more thing, Michael is a fucking faggot.
-1, Troll/Flamebait bitches
prizops to GNAA, especially Lysol
Awesome. I was waiting for the alarmist 1984 reference. That is what you were getting at, right? The personal attack suggests you're pissed by my post. So, you take it personally that a bad guy was caught by the good guys? The terrorist foolishly believed that his unencrypted emails wouldn't be intercepted. But, they were, and he was caught.
BTW, received is spelled with the 'e' before the 'i'.
sig: sauer
Which is worse?
A. Giving extraordinary powers to a government whose motives are unknown
B. Having your parent/sibling/child/friend killed in a bomb explosion on a bus
I don't know which is worse, but C. Sex with a mare is definately the best.
SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) uses strong cryptography and the protocol is designed security in mind. http://silcnet.org.
A little science article I read a few years back demonstrated how a DNA based brute force decryption can be achieved in a simple test tube. It works by giving every possible combination and a process of elimination of the results narrows down the correct answers.
So somehow, somewhere the NSA has a team of scientists and big vats of programable DNA combining to give them all the answers they want, it just takes time to sort through all the answers.
...and try analyzing the situation. Terrorists and their leaders are just as full of propaganda as their targets (the US and her allies).
"They didn't go to England and kill thousands of citizens in order to scare the English into leaving them alone."
This is true, but it is also true that the English didn't have the enormous forward strike capacity that the US posesses now. A guerilla war against a force with long supply lines was possible then. Reverse the situation: if England could have mobilised 3 carrier battle groups against the American insurgents, the US would be saluting the Union Jack right now. It can also be said that the English never killed thousands of people in the process of "liberating" them (or searching for weapons of mass destruction, or "enforcing UN resolutions" without direct UN support, or whatever the excuse is this week. If the US is so keen on enforcing UN resolutions, why are there no sanctions against Israel?). No incident is isolated from the rest of history; the US would do well to remember this.
"It was also very well known who they were..."
Osama Bin who? Yasser somethingorother? Whats-his-name Bashir? Who precisely are you calling anonymous? The terrorist leaders are identified, and well known to their adversaries.
"...as they acted quite publicly with their intentions, and even sent a nice note to England lining out their complaints and putting their names on the bottom."
Sending signed notes "is a broken business model, gone the way of the horse and buggy" (to quote many a poster on slashdot). Their intentions have been stated quite clearly in many a video broadcast by the US's own media networks, and, compared to the US's stated objectives, have remained remarkably consistent.
"Terrorists target civilians, remain anonymous as often as possible..."
Boston Tea Party? Dressing as indians (sorry, native Americans) and raiding tea merchants isn't an anonymous attack on civilians? In both cases the majority of those actually involved in killing were/are largely anonymous: the American Revolutionaries were guerillas with no uniforms; the ability to blend into the general populace protected them, much like it did the Viet Cong (The notion that combatants MUST be identified by a uniform is a western concept). So, when faced with overwhelming force guided by an authority that cares little for the demands of the populace, what exactly are the options? Put on a uniform and get bombed to atoms, or work in secret and attack soft targets? Its easy to see which is the more effective strategy, and only an idiot would choose direct confrontation. The "Axis of Evil" may be zealots, but they are not idiots.
"...and their goal is often annihilation rather than separation."
These terrorists have clearly stated that they consider the US to be an occupying force in Saudi Arabia (and Israel in Palestine); anyone with any sense of perspective can see that the same opinion is growing in Iraq (where the US is insisting on democracy on its own terms - would the American revolutionaries have accepted democracy on England's terms? I doubt it). A superpower with a history of installing and supporting oppresive regimes is simply asking for annihilation in the eyes of those it suppresses.
I am not condoning actions of terrorists, but neither I do not support US foreign policy. As long as the US continues to impose its cultural imperitives and economic agendas it will make enemies. How the "land of the free", the self-proclaimed champions of democracy can justify supporting dictators and not expect to attrect hatred is mind boggling.
Maybe they could change the charges to "Being an idiot and not encrypting everything!!" really it surprises me that people dont use encryption atall, all it would take is for a widely used program (outlook) to ship with encryption built in and turned on by default, all transparent, and we would have to worry about a thing. Well the same goes for pop-up ads - widely used browser incorporates decent on-by-default blocker, the advertising industry would give up.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
If I send a postal package, and it happens to go through a transit country, it is under their jurisdiction. If say a dog trained to find drugs reacts on it, they will detain it and open it.
Providing a secure line of communications is each country's duty. To use an old email analogy, it's not the US's fault if everyone is sending postcards arouhd.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Let's scale it down a bit for comparison: say you have a room in your house you're not using, and you like to accomodate people who need a place to stay but can't afford a home of their own... you nicely let a couple of people in. Very good.
Now, assume your neighbour tells you he has reason to believe your guests are actually theives casing his house, and all he asks is that you do a background check for a criminal history... something almost all landlords do anyway.
You don't do the check, your neighbour's house gets robbed. Do you owe an apology now?
We've already found Al Queda cells in Canada, and had one (luckily foolish) guy try to drive a carload of explosives across the border. We've still got our collective head in the sand.
So I say that *YES*, we owe an appology to our neighbours. More than that, we need to shape up. I'm not saying we should be the scary police state that I see the US becoming, but we need to at least start enforcing some basic security policies.
It has nothing to do with feeling inferior (I don't) to the US because we have 1/10 the population, far less economic clout, and have trouble enjoying our own culture as it is drowned out by the flood coming northward. I'm reasonably happy to be a Canadian, and don't particularly want to move, thank you very much.
Now here is an interesting application for Bayes filtering. Why bother ranking spam when you can use it to filter and identify terrorist email content. Even if the terrorists are using covert words for their actions as long as you can build a database of previous emails (from other groups maybe) you should be able to start ranking the likelihood of any email being about the subject.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Hmmm, i wonder what kind of targetted adds would terrorists be receiving....
Sorry. Next time I'm sure they'll have the British agents do it. You have heard the rumors about areas inside of NSA facilities being designated as foreign soil so as to get around Constitutional issues?
In Clinton's original push for Anti-landmine legislation, he ordered that the pentagon look into alternatives to landmines in the DMZ. While alternatives may not be easily obtained - there are some really intelligent people in the Pentagon (and there are nimrods, just like any organization). I find it impossible to believe that alternatives, even expensive ones would require more than our current alternative (37,000 full-time personel).
Ultimately, North Korea is one of the reasons - but the Korean DMZ is an anomoly, not a policy statement. Heck from a certain point of view, these landmines can be a gift from the US to the Korean people (both sides), and we just leave them with a promise that we'll take them out when both sides agree that they are no longer necessary. Again, simplistic, but it's an idea.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
His shoes were packed with plastic explosive, require an electronic detonator, yet the stewardess says she saw him trying to light his shoes with a match? Am i missing something here?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Don't forget the 138 countries that they have to put troops in. I don't know what gave them the right to put military bases in 138 countries. Using a big stick isn't a right to protect "their" natural resources.
The NSA has had the mission of monitoring ALL communications that it can touch. That is just one part of its mission. In fact, the other is to try and secure our computer systems against intrusions (hence no MS is allowed directly on their networked systems ).
The patriot act was not about giving CIA and NSA access to communications. It was about giving that info and a great deal more, to DOJ and the current admin in a unmonitored fashion.
The media always does it's best to scare everybody, on a daily basis about everything, not just terrorism and Iraq.
Very few people seem to care anymore. The remaining issues are Halliburton is evil and Why are our troops still there?
Halliburton bashing has become a broken record that (it seems to me) very few people pay attention to anymore (NPR broadcasts aside). And the troops issue will very likely be taken care of in 12 weeks when we cut Iraq loose (doing what the world has been asking us to do).
What are the candidates themselves saying (look at thier ads). Most of them are about taxes.
Yes, Bush had some blurb about leadership through the Sept 11 tragety, but even that was shifted into a debate about whether or not images of the WTC should be used in political ads. (thus, "I approved this message").
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
that's why I said start with noise (and video) artifacts as representations for letters. Or number sequences, and that would add another couple layers of random looking obscurity. No text gets put into the files, zee-ro. Even if you noticed the artifacts, what are they supposed to represent? Suppose they represented easy to remember pictures, icons, that in turn mean something else? And the entire message could be placed into a lot of different audio/video files, and those might be accessed using a one time pad as well to keep the correct order.
I think they (US and various government spook agencies) are good, real good, have smart people and good technique (benevolent or not, just good 5Ii115 )their boxes certainly better than any group of joe or achmed schmoos can cob together, but I don't think they are invincible in either finding nor unencrypting messages. Heck, one could conceivably come up with a messaging system that relied on all negatives, in *not* receiving anything in some sort of agreed upon sequence that could be randomized, and the not receiving could be very openly broadcast or disseminated. Way too many techniques out there to make absolute statements methinks, one way or the other, besides "nothing is 100% fool proof".
If my asshole neighbour asked me to run a background check on one of my guests, because he thinks they're theives, I'd tell him to mind his own business and then rob his place myself just to teach him a lesson.
'How the "land of the free", the self-proclaimed champions of democracy can justify supporting dictators and not expect to attrect hatred is mind boggling.'
"We're the good guys." "If you're not with us, you're against us." It's a black and white issue, so pick a side. When you give people only 2 choices and hide the facts, what do you think they're going to choose? It's nearly impossible for you to know you're brainwashed.
A giant egg shell near two miniature twin towers... And that on Eric's 23rd Birthday! How foolhardy can you get!?!?
The USA does lots of things, some of which might be construed as causally connected to empowering despots and tyrants. But in every single case, the actions of those tyrants and despots are governed by free will. The USA does not "pull the trigger" so to speak, even if it provides the gun. There is a huge difference. Please cite credible sources that US citizens hacked innocent people to death with machetes. In turn, I will show you credible evidence that Saudis killed three thousand Americans.
Aren't you just above the law, since nobody is policing you? Ah, the irony of righteousness.
im the op not the poster you replied to :-p
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Actually I was refering to the situation in Iraq...
A united front of Shia and Sunni is worse than the "worst case scenario" of civil war between the two...
Wow... really... wow.
People talk about other people wear tinfoil hats all the time but this is the first time I've ever actually read the rantings of an honest to god tinfoil hat wearer.
Do you also believe we never put a man on the moon? The earth is really flat? The holocaust never happened? Aliens at area 51 helped us build the first microchips in exchange for their freedom and a good pension plan?
Mozilla Thunderbird has made a considerable effort to make S/MIME easy to use. Although not enabled by default, it's just a preferences checkbox away. I vaguely remember hearing that they came a hair's breadth from making it the default.
I certainly have noticed a significant increase in the number of S/MIME signed emails from Mozilla email clients showing up in the various newsgroups that I subscribe to.
Once they get to a certain level of installed base, it'll be fairly easy for your average internet user to not even notice that they're using S/MIME. This has the potential to go way beyond the short lived fad that PGP turned out to be and get to the point where many emails get completely encrypted automatically because both parties have sent signed messages to each other in the past.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Wow- modded as flamebait...
:p
/. crowd seems to liken the Internet to a "big free open highway" at some times, but then at other times they behave like nobody should ever be able to look at the highway and see what is travelling on it...
That's what you get!
Yeah- I'm basically with ya- this doesn't bother me.
I love how a lot of the
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
Actually, in order to keep your actual message content clean while still adding lots of noise for the NSA to filter, spookmime.el will add the spook words to the MIME boundaries in your messages.
n m"
You end up with stuff like this:
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="counter-intelligence-Legion_of_Doom-bVC
in your mail headers and mime boundary lines like:
--SDI-Saddam_Hussein-NSA-DScyP
Of course, this also means that nobody ever asks what this wierd stuff at the end of your email is for, but it also keeps your employer from asking the same question.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Passive E-Mail Monitoring Leads To Arrest
I'd better lay off that passive email monitoring for a while.
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
The difference between a freedom fighter/patriot/revolutionary/guerilla and a terrorist is that they fight the military and politcal structure of what they consider to be an oppressive occupier. A terrorists kills children by blowing up ice cream parlors.
To put it in simpler terms, freedom fighters fight people trained for combat. Terrorists are cowards who attack the helpless.
Only on
an army of chaos theorists, naked and petrified
The world's first arrest resulting from passive monitoring of electronic communications
Indeed. And I guess all those arrests that have resulted from wiretaps somehow don't qualify as passive, monitoring or electronic communications.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I think Orleans is as much a part of Ottawa as Gloucester or Vanier is. I've lived in Ottawa before and that's really not saying much. Downtown Ottawa is really a city by itself. Sure places like Kanata are part of Ottawa, but they are really *not* part of Ottawa... but maybe a few minutes away. They each have their own style, design, and municipal gov'ts.
Bin Laden's radicalism has nothing in common with traditional socialist/communist/anarchist agitation. He's not merely a fervent anti-globalisation protestor -- he's a religious bigot with a massive grudge.
As much as we enlightened ./ers hate seeing complicated issues in black & white terms, we have to realize: ultimately, they want to kill/convert us all.
And when that's done, they'll start fighing amongst themselves.
But I'd prefer not to let it reach that point.
Guilty until proven innocent by secret police reading our mail? This is the "freedom" we're fighting to protect?
Careless apathy is why station bombings happen regually in careless soft countries like France, but never happen in organised, proactive countries like Spain. It is why lazy New Zealand tourists are targeted in nightclub bombings while tourists from careful countries like Australia are completely spared.
Next time you see the World Trade Center towering over the manhattan horizon, smile and salute the exemplary united states foreign and domestic policy that prevented those towers from suffering the same tragic fate as the CN tower.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Wow; a complete and total ass who thinks he's right AND funny. Never seen that before.
"My arguments are that percieved dangers of terrorism are far overstated and that our essential liberty is undervalued. The chances of me being killed by my wife are much higher than my demise being at the hands of terrorists."
This is a good point, although by choosing the example of your wife, you weaken it. There aren't many good ways in which a few billions could be rerouted from "the war on terror" to placate your wife. Nor would special powers in law enforcement prevent this (although I'm reminded of the beginning of Minority Report...)
A better example would have been automobile accidents or gun ownership. Both cause tons of deaths which could be prevented by a deprevation of freedoms and an increase in government power and discretion.
At least, they do in the USA. Handgun deaths are far, far more scarce in England than in the USA, largely because England does not grant as much freedom as the US does in this respect. The US Constitution tells us that particular freedom is more important than the safety which could be bought from its removal. As we speak, more and more Americans are becoming convinced that the Constituion is outdated in this respect, and that this freedom is now less important, while the safety is now more important. This is a debate of degrees, not principles, else it's one where England comes down on the side of safety, not freedom.
You refer to England as one extreme on this dichotomy, and I think that perception may be the root of our disagreement. Both the US and England are just slightly on the freedom side of moderate, all things considered. Sure, they're far freer than East Germany or Russia was, but if you're making that comparison, then Bush and the PATRIOT Act are also highly permissive and liberal.
Prostitution. Drugs. Driving really fast. In general, people seem to agree the we can give up these freedoms in exchange for some more safety. I'm not saying I agree with them, just that England is not the pure bastion of Freedom that you make it out to be. On the principle of freedom, it is no better than the US. On values and degrees, it is simply different. Sometimes it leans farther towards freedom, and at others towards safety.
As for the NSA, I agree there is probably a temptation for them to get the most out of their powers, I simply disagree as to whether or not that is a bad thing.
The chemical in question is toxic, but I have carefully read the
MSDS for it ( do you even know what an MSDS is ? ) and
it's quite clear that your claim that this chemical will "melt out
eyes" is bullshit, pure and simple. The primary danger is
pulmonary edema, but in any case the danger has been
exaggerated, both by the media and by you.
Spineless fools like you who so gladly welcome scum like
Ashcroft and Bush make me want to puke.
Benjamin Franklin said it best : "Those who would trade freedom
for safety deserve niether".
for the Alberta Clipper. If the
the USA sealed the border against
this terrorist organization, our
home heating oil and natural gas
prices wouldn't have spiked this
winter.
You seem to think surveillance of email is where it ends. How
sickeningly naive.
What this is really about is consolidation of power.
Personally, I think the US Gov't. has perpetrated far more evil
than all terrorists combined.
Only someone who is not in touch with reality thinks the US Gov't. is interested in _protecting_ its citizens, anyway.
Who the fuck do you think you are, you sanctimonious prick ?
And by the way, your arguments are those of an ill-informed
child with little or no understanding of the true nature of the world.
Actually, it is insightful. We could have a roaring, hugely successful economy while the majority of people is unemployed. Imagine ACME, a US corporation. ACME has 50 US employees, all executives or lawyers and 1000 employees in India, including engineering and middle management. The products are made in China by non-employees. ACME (we'll say) sells a billion a year, making a profit of $200 million.
Now you might think, "Who buys their products if the majority in the US is unemployed?" Probably ACME sells to corporations or governments. Or maybe they sell to the minority of affluent consumers in the US. Or maybe they target the economically desperate with high-interest loans, goods on time payments, etc.
Prosperity for the US does not equal prosperity or employment for US residents.
Corporations like affluent people because they spend money freely. Corporations also like desperately poor people because they sell labor cheaply and buy things on very bad terms out of desperation.
So much criticism is based on incomplete understanding of hindsight.
Somalia - did the right thing, but buggered off when the heat was turned up.
The US only went into Somalia out of guilt over what happened in Rwanda. (The French are most guilty since they're the ones who kept supplying arms to the Hutu even though they knew what was about to happen and were most active in blocking any action.) When the Rwanda genocide was about to occur, it was assumed this was just going to be another African civil war where a couple of million people die over a few decades and no one cares (e.g. Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan right now). Instead 800,000 people were killed in just a few months and so people took noticed and things were very different. It seems to me that food aid has only allowed despotism to florish because dictators can always beg for food and aid.
The Baltics - by this you mean Kosovo, of course, where the US had to be convinced to do anything by the NATO allies - the US was almost dragged kicking and screaming into that one, so I wouldn't hold it up as an example of the US doing the right thing of it's own accord. Did you know that the Serbs had been doing the same nasty things that they were doing in Kosovo to deserve getting bombed in places like Bosnia and Croatia for about 6 years before Kosovo? Ever heard of Srebeniza? Did you miss all the rape camps and mass graves in Bosnia long before Kosovo? The US role in Kosovo is a matter of "about time" in the rest of the world.
The rest of the world can kiss my ass on this front. It just shows the hypocrisy of the Euros and the rest of the world. The US wasn't dragged kicking or screaming into intervening in Bosnia/Kosovo. The US first tried to get Europe to do something about the problem because Europe had been talking big about assuming a greater role in their security. It was only after the Euros showed themselves to be impotent cowards that the US went out of its way to intervene and even pulled an end run around the UN to do so (Russia was threatening a veto). The Euros didn't cry about unilateralism then because it benefitted them. But what the fuck were the Euros doing that whole time? If the rest of the world was so fucking concerned why the fuck didn't they do something? Hypocrites. This is just another example of the US providing security and protection for the Euros and getting lip in return. Name me single fucking country that isn't selfish. People everywhere institute governments to look out for their interests. Dictators and bad governments look out for themselves.
Nearly all the shitty things the US did during the Cold War have not been repeated. Different time, different actions. My family did a lot of shitty things when we fled Cambodia, a lot of things we ordinarily wouldn't have done if our survival wasn't at stake. Given the depth of the dirty tricks the USSR resorted to, the US had to do some of that shite. The US hasn't overthrown anyone since the fall of the USSR with the exception of Saddam. In short, our wrongs don't make our rights wrong.
Given the reaction of most of the rest of the world to the liberation of Iraq, I doubt very much that they would want the US to free any other oppressed peoples. That's the inconsistent behavior that pisses me off. Most of the rest of the world was making money off Iraq as it was and didn't want things changed. They'll shut up about 'unilateralism' when it's done unilaterally for their benefit. Granted some of that hate comes from dictators having rallied their people against the US (Egypt, Saudia Arabia, globalists, etc...) but the US isn't the cause of all the world's problems.
But of course, don't listen to me. I'm just a whiner. No one else in the world could possibly share these opinions. All that terrorism is just the result of "evil" or jealousy or something...
Nice. You imply that terrorism is a complex problem that is being dealt with simplisticly. Guess what, the world's other problems are just as if not more complex and you can't simply say, "It's the US's fault" either.
Trying to convey messages in Spam would probably be uphill work. It's bad enough trying to find real emails in my Inbox! Imagine trying to find an email that looks like spam in an Inbox full of the stuff! It would be like looking for a particular piece of hay in a haystack.
For communications where destination and partly the origin are to be obfuscated, short-wave radio works exceptionally well and is suited to covert spies as special equipment is not required to receive the transmissions (any old SW radio will do). Encryption is acheived using a one-time pad normally.
Official threat to Homeland Security
University of Surrey - http://www.surrey.ac.uk
Funny you should mention that...I have thought of the fact that a War Time president can stay in office somehow (I forget what the rule/law is) and thought of how funny it would be to watch the reaction of the "left" if W trid to invoke that because of the war on terror (which has no foreseeable end in sight).
:)
Of the current candidates (that I am aware of) I think that Bush will be the toughest on facing down the threats to our country and our way of life. The only thing those that oppose/hate the US seem to understand/respect is strength and force. Appeasement just seems to make them want more...and you can't negotiate with those that simply want you dead because you aren't like them....the only thing you can do is keep them at bay or destroy them. Sad but true.
Make no mistake...this war is a war of religion and Bush seems to have a handle on it...like him or not.
P.S. I like W in case it wasn't already obvious!
I'm waiting for somebody to get arrested because of sniffed emails and then it'll turn out that he was playing a wargame-by-email or something and then the government will have some serious egg on their face. It'll happen, just you wait.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
That makes you a troll.
That is what you were getting at, right? The personal attack suggests you're pissed by my post. So, you take it personally that a bad guy was caught by the good guys?
Not quite, I was simply pointing out that some things are private and you might want to limit monitoring to protect that privacy. I'm sorry that you take the notion of your sister having herpes as a "personal attack". Herpese is a disease that can be inherited but is always embarassing. Giving the state powers to read drug perscription records may indeed prevent mistaken medication, but it also gives clerks access to information you might want to keep to yourself. What clerks can do with that is well demonstrated today.
Kiss my ass, troll.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.