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Wiretapping the Web Easier Than Ever
theodp writes "All the trends are toward easier to tap, says an EFF attorney in MSNBC's recap of last week's 5-0 FCC vote to require broadband and VoIP providers to provide Uncle Sam with wiretapping backdoors and a recent Court decision that stored e-mail is not protected under a strict reading of wiretap laws. Civil-liberties concerns aside, MSNBC notes the FCC is also exploring its Internet regulatory options, including placing tariffs on online newspapers and requiring e-tailers to process 911 calls."
if you use verizons voicemail service, they store the calls, does that mean verizon can listen if they want to?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
How about a really cheap encryption for VoIP services: Modem communication.
Many winmodems are essentially sound cards attached to phone lines, and there's been a lot of work getting those devices to function as useful modems under Linux. As a result, there's probably a lot of Free code out there that handles encoding the data stream to the audio samples that are sent over the phone line.
Why not adapt some of this code to perform such communications over the VoIP audio stream? The data source could be a low-bitrate MP3 or ogg stream piped through handshaking and encryption code adapted from OpenSSH.
An excellent example of the adaptability of F/OSS.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
As I have said before on my site, there is ample reason to believe that the police are the "standing army" that our founders warned us of. Let's look at what our founders worried about, what the police and military are today
Standing army of our founders' day and age:
The police of our day and age:
No knock raids, unprecedented surveillance, military grade equipment, they are a paramilitary, not "peace officers" anymore. Don't ever, ever make the mistake of assuming that they are peace officers anymore. Between their militarization in tactics/armament, and the legal powers that put us at a distinct disadvantage, they are closer to an occupying army than what they were originally created to be.
If you think that gun control is "common sense" yet you are worried about issues like police powers then ask yourself who you would really trust with a gun. The police, many of whom are neurotic, egotistical control freaks (that's why they are attracted to positions of power, surprise, surprise....) or your neighbor? How about your own family and friends. People you can trust.
See I trust the latter, because I come from a law enforcement family that has former law enforcement from both the state and federal agencies. I have seen many more law enforcement officers in personal settings than the average person so I have a good idea of what the personality types are. Trust me, people, especially those who think gun control is a good idea, these are often some of the last people that deserve a state sanction to abridge your liberties while carrying a firearm.
The best thing that could happen to our civil liberties would be for the average citizen to be able to own any weapon that the cops can use, for the government to not be able to register those weapons and for the people to have a right to use force to resist unlawful arrest. Oh wait, unlawful arrest basically doesn't exist anymore because who are you to tell a cop that they don't have a legitimate reason to detain your unconvicted (probably felon) ass? See my point?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
What about those of us who run our own mail servers? Is the government going to demand to have a back door into my Linux box in the basement, or am I safe?
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
so they can't just tap into you for no reason at all
That's the arguable point. They can tap you for no reason at all. They just can't do anything official with it.
Where's the "This is bad because" deal?
It's not about catching bad guys or fighting crime. It's about harassment. You're not like them. They are not like you. Look back over history. People with power derive buttloads of amusement from watching plain citizens get run in circles. It's _FUN_ to drive somebody nuts. It is much easier to drive someone nuts if you can wiretap them.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
In the US, there are supposed to be certain 4th and 14th ammendment rights which guarantee that the states and the federal government can't randomly start collecting information on someone for politically motivated persecution and prosecution.
Unfortunately these rights have been slowly being undermined in part because we have never seen a supreme court opinion (IANAL) which clearly states exactly what is protected against here. One of my real gripes in Roe v Wade (yes, I am pro-choice) is that the Supreme Court never actually stated what the right to privacy meant. The closest they got was to state that not everything one does to one's own body was protected, but that abortion within certain limits was. This was, in my opinion inadequately explained and left a huge amount of gray area for privacy rights in general.
In my opinion, 4th amendment rights (and hence 14th ammendment rights, which use mostly the same language but directed at the state rather than the federal government) are the most nebulous rights we have, but I don't think that they should be. The idea seems clear-- that the government should not be allowed to do arbitrary surveilance for the purpose of arbitrary persecutions or prosecutions. I.e. such surveilance should have judicial oversight, except where there is a compelling interest (perhaps for example airport security) to do otherwise.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I know I'm paranoid, but that doesn't mean they're not out to get me. I sometimes wonder about the delays with IPv6. It's got built-in point to point encryption that can be enabled by default at the IP level, rather than having to support it at the application level. It would make any point-to-point connections secure, and I'm afraid we'll start seeing government mandated proxies so that wiretapping can be insured. Unfortunately, as soon as that happend, we will have lost...
"GnuPG, PGP, and the like are only useful for communication between nerds."
That does seem to be the case. I've never received a PGP communication where I didn't personally guide the sender through key-creation. I don't think that should be an accepted limit though -- it's still useful to get through to people that if they don't use GPG, their emails will be read.
In some cases it can be very easy. For example if you work someplace with a nasty "email isn't private" policy, it can be quite easy to convince your friends and family to encrypt when they hear that your boss and the IT department will be reading their emails. For some reason people don't bother because they don't believe it'll really "happen to them", and they become quite different when they realise that an actual person is reading the email that they just sent.. they just assume it's as secure as postal mail, and if anybody doesn't encrypt, it's because they have no idea whatsoever of what's actually happening to the email.