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CIA Researching Automated IRC Spying
Iphtashu Fitz writes "CNet News is reporting that the CIA has been quietly investing in research programs to automatically monitor Internet chat rooms. In a two year agreement with the National Science Foundation, CIA officials were involved with the selection of recipients for research grants to develop automated chat room monitors. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF for their proposal of 'a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping ... The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention.' How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother? The abstract of the proposal is available on the NFS website."
Even if its able to spy on private chat rooms on major networks, they wont be able to spy on thoose who dont want to be spied on... Its relatively easy to set up your own IRC server, and control exactly who has axcess to it so the feds are left outside alone...
> Join: NotWithCIA [notspying@user128a85b.cia.gov]
<l33th4x0r> and i h4ck3d into the NSA and compiled gentoo on it
<l33th4x0r> it was awesome
<l33th4x0r> like a beowulf cluster of beowulf clusters
<myPPburns> how long did that take?
<l33th4x0r> like 2 days
<myPPburns> no, I mean compiling Gentoo
<l33th4x0r> yah, like 2 days
<myPPburns> who is that new guy? NotWthCIA?
<l33th4x0r> dunno, never seen him before
<myPPburns> cool nick tho
<myPPburns> I'm gonna go hack WoW l8r. make myself king orc!!!
<l33th4x0r> yah, im gonna go post a letter from osama on drudge
<l33th4x0r> watch the media fr33k out
> Quit: NotWthCIA (OSAMA DETECTED! ALERT! ALERT!)
Just avoid the rooms with the *CIA_Chanserv* bot running
/mode +b #haxxor *!*@*.cia.gov
eclecti.cc
ICQ is owned by Odigo, an Israeli company.
received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF for their proposal of 'a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping
Sheesh... years ago I did a crap 1 liner in BitchX that took the conversations in one channel and msg'd them to another. Can I have some money, too?
Trolling is a art,
My irc script supports ROT13 encryption.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Isn't that what Echelon does already?
I mean, filter certain keywords, and associations from ALL communications (IRC included?)
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I'll just use my tinfoil gloves to IRC then (and reinforce the hat some too)...
I wonder if slashdot will be able to unmount them?
If you didn't have a reason to enable SSL on your IRCD or on your client, now sounds like a GREAT time to do so!
Where men are men,
Women are men,
13 year old girls are FBI agents,
and that guy who never says anything is a CIA bot.
Unknown host pong.
Seriously, how can one possibly do anything with all that data that comes in...
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
IRC is special when compared to Instant Messenging. IM tends to be a one on one thing, something that requires third parties to be invited to.
IRC tends to be much bigger. There are channels and private messages. Plus the big thing about IRC, are the channel modes +i and +s. So if they're talking bots to monitor all channels, yeah right, they're not going to hit the right ones.
Time for a cryptography architecture to become default in chat apps. "Flying dutchman" data arrangements would be very easy to do in chat rooms, because everyone has to receive the commonly-viewable chatter anyway. P2P chats like Waste seem to be getting more popular as well.
Of course, nobody who has anything to hide knows anything about botnets.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Does anyone know if theyre allowed to "spy" on foreign citizen? If i chat on an european server with fellow europeans i cant see any way that they should be allowed to "spy" on me?
Smpl, jst fl thm (c nd nsf) by nt sng vwls. sy!
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
So basically they received 150k to develop a logging bot? Not that it existed for the past 10 years... I sure hope their technology is more sophisticated than that. Even then, I don't think they'll get usefull info monitoring public chat rooms; its not like terrorists go to #terrorism to chat about their next plan.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
...will fix that, no prob.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
The only reason the government gets technology like this developed is intelligent people will do anything for their degree or grant money. Until we all stand together and refuse to help Americans spy on other Americans or any one else in the world our rights will continue to slowly errode because of people like the researchers at Rensellaer. Really, they are the ones who need to be punished by ostracizing them from the scientific community and their neighborhoods to make it clear that any one who accepts tax dollars to further the goals of Big Brother are not welcome in our hearts or minds as comrades.
Posthuman since 2001.
* digid slaps CIA-bot around a bit with a large trout
asl?
arabic suicide legions? , actively seeking liquidators?
And just wait till their lurkbot gets cybered a few thousand times
To become the most leet release crew on Usenet. They had the "24" isos before anyone.
Isn't that considered interstate wiretapping?
The last time I checked, federal law said you needed a warrant to do that.
http://silcnet.org/
The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on.
> How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother?
<musicfan> Hey, anyone got The Smiths - How Soon Is Now.mp *THUMPTHUMPTHUMP* "FEDERAL COPYRIGHT CZAR SQUAD! PUT DOWN THE HEADPHONES AND STEP AWAY FROM THE IPOD!"
*** Disconnected
I don't see how people can be upset about monitoring chatrooms, unless they were actually doing something questionable with that data. As most of IRC is a completely public network by design, there is no expectation of privacy. And it's also well-known that your IP address is exposed to all those on the server.
IM conversations are a different matter, though. There, the network is private, run by a company, and the expectation is that the conversations are private as well. It might very well be illegal for AOL (and other IM networks) to be monitoring individual IM sessions.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Key your channel, make it hidden, make it invite only with a bot set up to invite people, and run it on a secure network like Linknet using SSL to connect.
It is amazing that anybody is naive enough to believe that any computer connected to the internet has any privacy at all. The only question is one of "Big Brother"'s resources and priorities...
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
They are just trying to find the best quotes and submit them to bash.org
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
I've been wondering for years why I don't see any chatroom bots built on Eliza or Alice. It seems to me these could be much more useful in both advertising and gathering information.
Has anyone ever tried this?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
The CIA/FBI et cetera have been onto the IRC seen for a long time. What's new? Automated logging instead of people? They would be crazy not to log channels now. Technology has been there for a while.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Big Brother is watching j00
these what if's have already happened, just not the CIA doing. NSA monitors all intercontinental data traffic already. including im's. /shiny tin foil hat
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Would fund one PhD researcher for 1.5 years here. You cannot do very much with that, especially if people are trying to hide.
Seems to me this is more a shot in the dark.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yeah, but you don't have physical control over the pipes between yor server and all your clients. How do you think your bits get sent back and forth? I just have to put an intercept between you and your clients to grab all the data I want.
This would be some sort of program that can sit on an ISP's trunks, and grab all traffic that looked like IRC traffic and dump it in a log. Since it is the CIA, (And they are in theory, the Intelligence 'Offense') it might be a small embedded hardware solution that has a built in microdrive. It would be very handy to have a CIA controled operative slip in to a NOC in a hostile country, snap it onto a trunk in an unobtrusice location and pick it up a month later.
American Tinfoil hat people, relax. The FBI is the group spying on you, not the CIA.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
In the nineties, those bastards developed an automated tool that could autonomously punch the monkey. Very scary indeed.
a/s/m?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
From the article:
... The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention.' How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother? The abstract of the proposal is available on the NFS website."
"CNet News is reporting that the CIA has been quietly investing in research programs to automatically monitor Internet chat rooms. In a two year agreement with the National Science Foundation, CIA officials were involved with the selection of recipients for research grants to develop automated chat room monitors. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF for their proposal of 'a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping
What the CIA is trying to get a piece of the electronic spying pie now? That is the NSA's job!!!
Anyone who thinks that the CIA doesn't already have systems to automatically monitor email, chatrooms etc - needs to read a bit more on intelligence technology. This would fall under "Echelon" anyhow.
The NSF might lack the tools, but I sincerely doubt that the CIA are developing these sorts of very basic tools. More likely, the NSF aren't given access or information on the extent of CIA information gathering.
Also, I imagine such a news article makes the public likely to believe that the technology isn't already in active use.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Mine supports ROT26. In fact, I'm using it now.
The CIA aren't allowed to operate on USA soil, if I remember correctly (plus I'm not American). So... I suppose they would have to limit themselves to spying on foreign-based IRC servers only.
How does this marry with spying on US citizens, in the US, but connected to foreign servers? This sounds like a giant minefield as far as I'm concerned.
The CIA is still being semi-passive here. It's shady seeming, but I think if you can join freely, they can as well.
This surpasses basic monitoring of clear text protocols like irc but it still doesn't have the ability to monitor where you must actually be a part of a community. If you use irc over SSL, you're in the clear from passive and undetectable monitoring. This obviously gets around that but it means that they will have some interesting people poking around with people who normally do the poking on networks.
The rand corp goes one step further and seeks to hire people to become members of groups by being an outright spy. Pretty interesting stuff. It was on cypherpunks a while back.
It should be assumed that if you don't use encryption, it can be monitored. If you use encryption (irc over ssl, silc, etc) in a broadcast medium (for an entire room), you should assume it's monitored also. It would just have to be monitored by an agent of some sort.
It's all about the threat model you're up against.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
I would have thought they had this one nailed ages ago!
San Francisco Photographers
I've always assumed that AIM conversations were subject to some kind of monitoring, if just the most cursory scanning for certain keywords. Why else would all traffic need to go through AOL-controlled servers?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I had a nightmare the other night that the NSA was after me for posting pictures on the Internet that made fun of George W Bush.
Correct, at least as far as public rumors about secret government spying software goes. However, the Carnivore project is FBI. The FBI doesn't work for the CIA, so why would you expect them to actually work together?
Also, technically, the FBI are just federal cops, as opposed to state cops or local cops. The CIA is an intelligence agency (spies), and so they might not want the exact same sort of application. You can't simply get a court order to slap Carnivore on an ISP's lines when the ISP in question is say, in North Korea.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
They have to pretend to be "researching" things they've had in operation for decades to keep us regular folks from getting too suspicious.
They'll probably announce in a couple of months that IRC monitoring was not feasible due to the super-complicated technical problems inherent in logging plain text.
It's easy to understand why I'm upset. You might understand the next time you pay your taxes. Remember that a fraction of your hard work is going to pay for your government to listen in on your conversations. Many people are making a living at it. I think they and my government have better uses for my money. I did not ask for it, I don't like it and I don't want to pay for it. it's also well-known that your IP address is exposed to all those on the server.
If you don't mind that kind of thing, perhaps I can interest you in a few personal services. For the low price of $50/hr, I'll log all of the communications from your "exposed" IP address, cull what I want, damage your reputation by questioning your peers if I note anything suspicious and even charge you with crimes if you happen to say the wrong thing. Most of the work will be automated but I take no responsibility for the information being stolen by insurance companies, employers and other organizations that have a direct impact on your quality of life. By freedom of information, I'll be sure to let people know that I'm investigating you but I'll tell them that I'm an official government agency, so they won't question my motives and will instead turn their suspicions onto you. Sound like a good deal?
Pay up!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You're a completely off-topic troll, but just in case anyone's interested, there's a K5 story about that.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think it has been in place for a long time. If you mean they are going to go public about it, then yes they will "CLAIM" that they are starting it.
All you really need is the servers at a few of the nodes to be running logging software, and it wouldn't even need to be running in the context of the IRC server - it'd just need to be tracking the inbound and outbound traffic. It wouldn't catch everything, but you'd get a fair amount of it and probably get enough to tell you what areas needed more examination.
Similarly, I assume that just about everything on Usenet is monitored and saved by at least a few agencies domestic and foreign, if not more. How much would Giganews charge for a full feed? That's not going to be a lot of use against one-way traffic, but discussions would almost certainly be trackable.
As with many things the information stream itself is relatively easy and inexpensive to get access to, but extracting good information out of it is likely to be harder. I wouldn't be surprised if a big chunk of the money they're giving out is related more to the analysis of that sort of information stream (and existing store) than to the simple acquisition of data.
fencepost
just a little off
The CIA should be operating in public spaces - there's little expectation of privacy in public. joeschmo can watch IRC traffic, so spy007.exe should be able, too. The control points on this activity lie at a slightly deeper level: we need a definition of "public" vs. "private" on the Internet that can work in courts and congresses as well as in compilers and chatrooms. And the CIA, or any organization (government, corporate, NGO or otherwise) must abide copyright constraints, which include right to copy personal info (including message traffic) for the express purpose in the license. In the case of the CIA, that means info that is read from public data must be either immediately discarded, for the purpose of separating data relevant to an operation from that which is not; or, if stored, it must be directly relevant to an operation. That further requires the CIA define the scopes of its operations sufficient for Congressional oversight to second-guess decisions of what data to retain.
;) will say that once the CIA is operating at all in this medium (it surely already is), the finer points of policy and law will be given mere lip service, and abuse will be the norm. Unfortunately, the CIA has Americans over a barrel: their legitimate service is essential, while their unaccountability is lethal, in the survival of our society. This issue doesn't change that dilemma, though it forces the issue - and ought to pressure exactly these kind of delineations. Since the current purges at the CIA seem likely to merely institutionalize the Iran/Contra CIA abuses to the exclusion of any legitimate control, we who understand these issues can at least understand their workable boundaries, and enforce them ourselves, for ourselves. Like comprehensive crypto for messaging, which defines an expectation of privacy, whether defensible from CIA codebreaking filters or not. It's all we've got, and will be harder for the CIA, or any other prying eyes, to casually violate, either on the Net or in a court.
Of course, cynics (like me
--
make install -not war
I mean really someone can look at my computer and know what I am doing on it? That isn't fair, its like being in public and having other people see you. Just wrong.
I just wonder which of us is the sicko. The one snooping? or the one browsing/chatting?
Jeoin
If you read the RFC for IRC, you'll see that they have planned for a secure model. The only problem is that no one uses the mode.
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
How can it be recent law if the PATRIOT Act II has never been passed by Congress and signed into law by the Pres. IMHO, only conspiracy theorists believe it exists.
...is a Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans to run that shit.
Throw-back.
Welp, another CIA project destroyed by IRC channel modes. Although I suppose if they make these bots in to porn offer bots it may work... even terrorists would fall prey to PARIS_HILTON_XDCC1 ....
I personally welcome our CIA...you know, this is getting to be really old and boring. I say "F@CK the CIA Overlords" We're all moving to Canada!
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
Okay, so one of the largest and most complex intelligence organizations in the world is dropping $150k on getting a college to make a really complex chat logging system. How lame is that. Shouldn't the CIA have their own people that specialize in this kind of thing? Also, why are they getting the NSF to help fund it? $150000 is peanuts to these folks. They have a $40 billion or so budget. If something is this critical to "national security" doesn't it deserve more than .0004% of your resources?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
logs can be edited way too easy. They shouldn't be allowed as evidence, hence can't be used to get warrants or anything.
GG CIA, you lose.
I like muppets.
So that's massive amounts of money, countless hours of research... for what. An eggdrop bot?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
It wont take more than a couple days of monitoring all of that teen angst and drama for the computer to commit suicide.
Actually, this would not be that bad an idea, if only, IF ONLY, our government actually represented th average citizen, and NOT the corporations and the investors.
Until we can control our govts, something like this is just a bad thing.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
8 years old thinking he is in a world of warcraft irc chat room (8yr)
Cia agents program (cia).
cia: heard you have accumulated a lot of weaponery.
8yr: Yes I have enough to blow the empire bastards away.
cia: when are you planning to attack.
8yr: when they least expected, although I was looking for a common day.
cia: 9/11 7/5 12/25?
8yr: I was thinking summer when I have more spare time.
cia: ????
8yr: I have other duties appart blowing people in pieces.
cia: really?
8yr: I train my friends in this holy war thingy.
cia: Oh well time to go....
cia robot release a busting order against the poor child, thousands of dollars wasted and terrorist still at large because they use person to person meetings and snail mail, everyone seems to forget they didnt have the chance to be raisen with computers or video games.
On a whim, I cobbled together a very basic chatroom scanner using Access (for storage), mIRC, and some VB a few years ago.
Basic scanning, and parsing is very easy to do, and then you just need some "ai" in the background to scan the data and report/perform an action when patterns are matched.
I'm sure the feds are looking at a much more serious creation than I was, but I'm sure the concept's similar. The scary thing, to me at least, is that they're probably going at it from a server level, so they could monitor everything, instead of just public channels.
What amazes me is that you people think that since this was announced publically that it hasn't already been going on since the creation of IRC.
Wake up people! Big brother has been watching longer than most of you have been alive.
The abstract of the proposal is available on the Need For Speed website"
WTF?
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF ...to develop a cyborg powerful enough to topple MJ12 and maintain UNATCO's cover.
This called "Democracy" looks like a facist government. Soon they will be arresting the opposition in a distant island, and invading countries without convincing reason... This reminds me...EOF
I thought the CIA was supposed to be restricted to overseas matters and not domestic. Pehaps they want to monitor French chat rooms.
Para-Protect used to monitor IRC channels as part of a service which would tell you which miscreants were discussing the state of your org's network security.
Mind you, if you were worth your Nerdgear 'got root' t-shirt, you'd not be discussing such things over plaintext IRC, and you'd stick to discussing such things only on invite-only SSH'd up talkers.
1. Setup foreign IRC server with specific terms of service
2. Catch CIA spying
3. ???
4. Profit!
So... the CIA will be purchasing bash.org?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Lot of people joking about bots on here. Honestly, why run a bot in every room when you can just partner with the university, institution, or company that hosts the server.
Shady CIA type: We have some evidence of terrorists using your services for communications. Mind if we tap in? We'll pull your funding if you do not comply or let the public know
University: sure. No prob.
And yet this does NOTHING for security. No one in their right mind would use IRC or a publicly accessible server for secure communications.
Just as long as they don't shut down my anime channels. I'd have to go get a membership with netflix and warm up the DVD burner.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Last time I looked there were only "chat rooms" on AOL. IRC had channels.
Most ircds I've used have built-in SSL support, and all you have to do is make encrypted connections a requirement for getting onto the network, and you'll be fine (until your encryption gets broken). I might add that quite a few ircds will also mask your IP address, so it'd take a court order (or a secret national security letter) to get ahold of that.
How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother?
You mean they're not already?! Then what the hell did I download gaim-encryption for...?
~
~
~
-- INSERT --
As an Australian, my working knowledge of the CIA must come from my own research (ie, reading Tom Clancy novels). These seem to indicate that the CIA is not legally allowed to operate within the borders of the US ('operate' I guess means carry out surveillance, assassinate, etc).
Is that true?
The Nazis would have loved this technology. Back then the scapegoats were the Jews - I wonder who it will be in this decade.
That would be a huge invasion of privacy.
You should check out the "In Soviet Russia" or "Imagine a beowolf cluster" bots that inhabit Slashdot.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Now I'm a heavy advocate of civil rights and all, but I don't see how this is really such a terrible, dangerous, run-and-hide-big-brother-is-coming thing. If they're evasedropping on public channels then what's the big deal? If you voice your intentions in a public space everybody has the right to listen. Most people really won't have anything that interesting to listen to anyway. And I'm sure they're radars will be scanning for those l33t d00ds and crazy terrorists anyway. Good riddance to them.
Been tired of the kids monkeying around on IRC years ago and switched to Jabber. Good luck in monitoring my conversations on private servers with SSL connections and end-to-end PGP encryption. Distributed networks of servers like email or jabber (and unlike msn messenger, yahoo, aim, icq etc) seem to have other advantages, besides the "load balancing".
/. about "encrypted" usb-flash keys that kept password in plaintext on the key.
Or good luck to listening to my Skype conversations. Although, knowing that Skype is closed source and proprietary, I have absolutely no guarantee, that their claim of AES encryption gives me any protection/privacy. Just recently there was thread on
Or couple of years ago, I've had to convince my boss that "security" of MDaemon on Windows does not exist. I sat to its password files, noticed something peculiar about them and broke the "secret algorithm" in about 4hrs. Passwords were not even xored, they were summed[1] with "secret" and encoded with base64. The secret was "The setup process could not create the necessary system accout MDaemon".
Robert
[1] you know: (passwd[n] + secret[n]) & 0xff
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
My biggest beef is not being spied, but the darn as??oles on yahoo that boot. I'd rather the CIA spent it's time cutting off their fingers.
That, and the hundreds of p0rn bots that keep messaging you with http links..
Bring back MSN with moderators!
"Evil thrives when good men do nothing"
Good thing I only talk to myself, and post to Slashdot, which is basically the same thing.
A related proposal, involving "uniformed" police to monitor chat rooms, was announced June 9th 2004 Cyber Cops to Patrol Internet Chat Rooms We polled over 100 IRCops and Server Administrators and posted the results at: Chat Network Operators and Users Wary of Uniformed Police Presence
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
ZIEG HEIL !!!!!
"The more I read /. The more I hope that the tin foil hat brigade is right in their fears. That way it wont be long until they are rounded up then I won't have to hear them yell "Big Brother" this and "1984" that."
Read about "The Boy who cried Wolf" by Asop.
That's why the "Tin Hat" birgade is routinely ignored.
Of course a stopped clock is right at least twice, so they might chance upon something. But will anyone listen?
Time to switch to XMPP (AKA Jabber) and its
End-to-end encryption extension.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Its something your'd figure they would have been doin for years even though its a waste of time.
Its better to pose a terrist and find the others and then see who there talking too.
Let me be the first to say BOMB BOMB BOMB BOMB BOMB free vi@g.r@ for cia ops!!!
Is it just me or does this article seem naive? It's hard to believe that they don't already have the capability to spy on IRC and IM. A thirteen year old could write something to do this.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
If you read it, you will notice that the NSF and the CIA have awarded these guys $150k to write something that is, in essence, a glorified eggdrop bot.
Granted, their analysis techniques will probably be more than say, a perl script parsing the channel logs, but I mean, who is looking at these grants and deciding this is a valid spenditure of funds?
I can think of at least a dozen people off the top of my head that could write something similar within a couple of days, without spending more than a few bucks in Starbucks coffee and Twix candy bars...
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
1. use a bnc
2. chan mode +s+p+k+n+t or +i
3. use encryption in your chats - give your group the key on aim and use it on irc
wget http://www.bash.org/?latest
then they cat it and grep for words like terrorist, osama and whatever buzzword/bushword is in the media that week.
Wanna get nasty? - DaNasty
I dont work or am at all associated wiht them, but this is a perfect time to mention Secway's Simp.
:D
www.secway.fr
There is simp for yahoo messenger, msn messenger, icq, and AIM. There is also a symmetric key proxy only version for linux/unix/bsd.
Simp provides very strong encryption for your chatting. It uses a 2k RSA public/private key arrangement to authenticate, and over the RSA link it exchanges a AES-128 symmetric key.
There is no concievable way to break this, so you can be pretty sure your conversation is -totally- private if you do your key exchange properly (in person or some other way so you know you're talking to the right person)
Simp is totally free (while there is a pro version you pay for wiht more features, simp 'lite' is nag free)
For voice skype is also a good option and uses nearly the same key arrangments as simp. You can IM with skype as well as send files(file sending is unencrypted in simp lite, need simp pro for encrypted file xfer) and chat, and it is all encrypted with AES-256. It uses a RSA key when you add someone, but not sure how you can exchange keys in person if privacy is a must.
Sorry for the rambling tone of the post
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
No and no. We should not roll over when our government abuses us against the principles it stands for. Domestic spying is not a routine government activity, such as schools roads or incarceration of felons, and should be censored.
The more I read /. The more I hope that the tin foil hat brigade is right in their fears. That way it wont be long until they are rounded up then I won't have to hear them yell "Big Brother" this and "1984" that.
How do you know that I won't be the one sending you to the camp? That way, I won't have to listen to trolls like you telling me to shut up and take it.
If you don't believe in the things you read here, why don't you go start your own conversation site and leave this one alone?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm a netadmin for a small IRC network, and I really don't think they would be able to pull this off. All the traffic between our servers is encrypted, and clients have the option of connecting with SSL. And we, the opers, can see whenever anyone connects or disconnects from the network, and we can also ban them from connecting. Nothing that isn't part of our network or its services package could join a channel without being visible. Whatever they tried to do, it would be easily detected and blocked if necessary.
Of course, if they try to do this on the ISP level, that's a different story. But again, all inter-server traffic is encrypted.
#terrorism. thats hilarious.
All anyone needs to do is protect themselves. You can connect to most irc networks via ssl, and if you PM between people on ssl connections, you're safe. Also if you talk in a channel set +z, that would be for SSL only users. Also, setting channel modes like +s (secret/unlisted in the /list command), +i (invite only), or +k (key protected, need key to join), would protect any outside users from seeing/entering your channel.
If a user would do the above, then the only way their IRC usage could be monitered would be if the server admins allowed them access server side, which most networks sould not allow.
Note that the +z channel mode is used in the ircd used by the protium irc network which is based on ircu with the nefarious ircu patch.
-- d0nk` (irc.protium.org / #protium )
:(){
Paluminum.net
1) If they don't already have a hardware-based cracker, they have the funds to build one. [just one?]
2) If they see your conversation is encrypted, will they less interested or more interested?
I am sure that is HISTORY. After all, all of the major IM chat programs log what you say (not just on your computer).
I don't run a Jabber server, so I don't know how that is handled, but I bet there is an option.
To start with, how would they sort through the massive amounts of IRC traffic, the vast majority of which is some sort of banal, everyday conversation? Any type of automated system would be problematic at best, and if they're doing it by hand, I think our job shortage is solved, they'd have to hire millions of people.
This also, of course, raises privacy concerns, in that many Internet protocols very much blur the line between public and private communication. A search warrant is needed to listen in on a conversation you hold in your home, but if a police officer overhears you planning a crime in a restaurant no such requirement is there. Where is the line drawn in this case? Is a public IRC channel public or private communication? What about a restricted access channel? A private message on a public channel to one person? Current laws are really not set up to address these questions, and we need to think about them.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
This is why we should all grab a copy of PGP and start figuring out how to use it in an efficient way.
b /publickey.cfm
Here's my key.
http://www.justinpfister.com/blogwebsite/justinwe
Is this serious?
The only reason that I can think of is that they want to do this to use petrifying Americans so they do stupid stuff like attack Iraq when it was more than probably their fault that the planes crashed to begin with. They just needed some way of taking over Iraq to gain control of oil without it looking like they were doing that. On the issue of oil, if you want to have a look at it, Europe is strongly trying to get the oil prices to also be in the Euro which would mean that the US dollar would become much less traded. If the US have control of major oil countries they can also control the governments and the bodies that decides on what currency oil is sold in.
All in all its just another way to petrify Americans to give the government another way to control them.
With the massive recent investment in "anti-terror" technology (Total Information Awareness, for one), combined with ongoing projects such Echelon, you would have to be pretty foolish to think that the US government wasn't recording just about every phone call, satellite transmission, email, fax, etc.
You'd have to be foolish too to think that whatever ordinary encryption methods you use would even slow them down, let alone stop them.
The hard part isn't intercepting and decrypting any signal they want. The hard part is separating the wheat from the chaff. There isn't (I assume) any good software yet, or enough analysts, to process all the chatter. But if "they" want to zero in on you specifically, you should either 1) bet your sweet ass that they know every packet that goes back and forth, or 2) kiss it goodbye.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
1. Get grant money from government
2. Install multiple eggdrop bots with logging enabled on government servers
3. ????
4. Proft!
Serial killers don't get caught because they (usually) kill random people they don't have a connection too.
Something like 90% of murder investagations involve people that are connected somehow. The cops find all the people who are connected to the victim and start from there.
If you drove to a new city and randomly killed someone and no one witnessed it, you probably never be caught. If you ice your girlfriend then the cops are going to be looking real hard into you in the first 10 seconds of their investigation because you two have a connection.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Carnivore is the FBI's toy. Carnivore is great when you can get a court order to let you put it on an ISP's trunks. It is pretty useless when the ISP is say, in North Korea.
FBI = Cops. CIA = Spies.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You assume that encryption will protect you. Go get any cryptography handbook, and the first thing it will say is that it is impossible to create an algorithim that is capable of producing unbreakable code. The goal of encryption is to make it so someone cannot break it in a certain time period.
If you are relying on SSL and consider yourself immune to spying, you are in for a suprise. If they want to spy on you badly enough, they can. It just takes more work with encryption.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The choice...
-Get something secure
Or...
-Get some spything going, knowing script kiddies will hack it and spy on people for fun and profit. Politically-connected spammers might even buy 50 million valid Email addresses at once!
I wish I was in Japan, where the right of encrypted communication is in the constitution or something...
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
/os akill add +0 *@*.cia.gov no.
Karma: Negative (Mostly affected by dorm trolling)
Quit being so dramatic. If everyone was consulted before spending something then nothing would ever get done. The CIA is part of the government, and they are just trying to do what they were created to do. The fraction of money being spent on this is probably less then a penny out of a hundred dollars of your tax money, probably much less. So maybe spending a thousandth of a single percent of their budget on an IRC bot is silly, but they have every right and even a responsibility to do so.
IRC is a public discussion forum. It's no more anonymous then any other internet
This isn't like tapping your phone calls where you know who is on at least one end of the conversation. It's monitoring a public chat server, much like usenet but in real time. Just like monitoring foreign newpapers this is something the CIA should be doing. Think of it like monitoring letters to the editor.
And not just because of Big Brother. Because we can't do these things effectively.
I will wager that IRC chats will be considered to be public, the same as cops eavesdropping on a conversation in the park or going though someone's trash when it has been set on the curb for pickup. Neither actions require a warrant,and can be done at any time.
If you don't want the government listenting in on your IRC chats, either get a private IRC server, or go crypto. It's already a wellknown fact that law enforcement, intelligence, vigilantes and other entities already snoop on IRC channels, so how is this a suprise to anyone?
You just spent over 100,000 US dollars to invent the automated chat client. I'm not sure why you didn't just snag eggdrop for nothing.
Oh wait.
Don't bother to sniff out terrorists. Don't bother stopping criminals. Stop the researchers. Make them the targets! Yeah.! Because of those researchers, I'm losing my ... what am I losing? I forgot...
-- No sig for you!
Now that they're actually talking about it, how long have they already been monitoring IRC? I have been told intelligence agencies are up on the curve by years. However given the recent intelligence blunders of the last three years or so, I can't help but question that assumption.
John has a long mustache.
Of course you could...
Use the turn-taking nature of human audio and text communication makes it very easily to statistically extract who each member in the chatroom is talking with
Once you extract who knows whom you generate graphs of social interaction and come up with a pretty cool picture of the social network
Unfortunately IRC geeks mostly irritate each other and rarely speak twice.. the research would only show You would see CmdTaco as an unconnected node at the edge of the network.
How about writing some Eliza-like programs to put bullshit messages into various IRC channels and screw up the spookbots. Send them through various anonymizers.
This is _just now_ coming to light?
At my job (in the private sector) we monitor hundreds of IRC channels TODAY to gather intel'. We do it using basically the same software we used close to TEN YEARS AGO at another company.
Will they create a bot to mod their own submissions up on bash?
[o]_O
Has it occurred to anyone in the various government bureaucracies that terrorists don't need chat rooms, Web servers, or any particularly advanced communications technology whatsoever to plan and execute an attack? A simple phone call or (*gasp*) snail mail is all you need to start something. Sounds more like the Feds are running out of obvious things to spy on so they're reaching down to the bottom of the barrel.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It seems the CIA is simply trying to automate what is currently being done by humans. Nothing incredibly new or exciting about that. It is what computers are for, after all.
In a previous life (4 years ago) I have fielded calls from the FBI asking how to monitor IRC conversations. They were particularly interested in DCC.
I've said for years that this was going on. After all, most things you find on IRC are really MIT experimental Bots created to research human interaction and psychology. How else could you explain the utter lack of intelligence on most IRC servers?
--
...using encryption over the internet without a license becomes a felony?
IRC social network monitoring and visualization software here. Taken from the summary of this previous Slashdot story. Thought you might be interested.
They need a research grant hack up an eggdrop? ;)
Geeezzz, now we have bots listening to bots! I just KNEW that there was no intelligent life out there! Now I even have proof of it...
And what this with all these clueless people thinking encryption is going to save them? Encryption is good to keep your neighbor from reading your email, but "states" (as in national governments) have all the computing horse power they need to read what ever they want. Remember the Cray I super computer? NSA has serial number 2 siting in their museam. Think about what that means for a minute...
Remember the thing they called DES? Yea, that one. The one that was designed around the US governments special cracking hardware, and also designed so that the software approach would take a LONG time to do the same operation. Not to mention that its a 56 bit key because 64 was harder to break with their machine in real-time. Using 56 bits made sure they had your ass before you were done typing.
So you think your big "private key" is going to do you any good? They have *databases* of every key combination already generated just waiting for you to use your favorite key, so they can retrieve their matching key pair.
And if that does not work they have people that can waltz right through your machine, install something, and be gone before you even know they were there. I admire those guys! lol If they want you bad enough your ass is theirs, and the fastest way to get their attention is likely by using the very encryption that you think they can't break. If you want to go on believing your safe, that's your choice, as I have no such illusions.
I can still sleep nights because those guys are actually looking out for us not looking for ways to throw honest people in jail like many people think. As long as the courts are balancing things you have nothing to fear except your own paranoia.
Wasn't too hard, was it?
it's #funfactory. From the very little time I've spent in IRC, this is the place where terrorists are recruited and nurtured.
Slightly OT, but anyone else cleaned out the entire #irckids back in the 90s with OOB packets, or was I the only sadist?
FB.
This is nothign new, anyone that thinks it is - is simply delusional. For the tin-foil hats, NO, it's NOT blanket coverage of the ENTIRE damn planet. Not possible. There are physical limitations on just how much can be collected.
The dictionaries can take raw packets from wherever.
Bots don't write tell-all books when they're fired for questioning the lunacy of their boss's agenda.
That is *ALL* they're allowed to do. By law, the CIA is prohibited from spying on US citizens. Not that that stops them, of course, they weasel around that restriction.
And by law, every computer should have embedded technology that records all keys pressed on the keyboard, and even the time elapsed between key presses, and every mouse stroke, and every mouse button pressed, and everything displayed on the screen, and every instruction processed by the CPU, and every data on the hard drive, and all this information should be transferred over mandatory satellite connections directly to the government, which would have a data center that would make the all of the top 500 computers in the world look like one of the transistors in a chip you find in a two dollar calculator that doesn't work, and this data center would be a grid of supercomputers that each would be a single-system image grid of 100,000 computers, each of which would have 64 processors, 100 terabytes of RAM, and 100 terabytes of disk space, and this system would advanced search technology to monitor every single computation occuring in the world, and it would cross reference all network communications occuring in the world, and it would figure out, through extrapolation, interpolation, triangulation, some incredibly complicated computations, and psychohistory (an emerging field which uses mathematics, an incredibly detailed history of events in the world, and knowledge of the position and velocity of every single subatomic particle in the universe) and modeling technologies, what each individual is doing at any moment in time, and using that information, it would deploy automated robots which would arrest, convict, and put to death any and all violators of any law, no matter how big or how small. So, suppose you charge a friend one cent to cut his hair... The system would detect this six days in advance, and before the person even comes up with the idea of violating the law, a robot would show up at his house, break down the whole front wall, go inside, and blow his brains out.
This would allow the government to better control its subjects. In other words, by leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions.
They are creating this to monitor for terrorist activity right?
How long before it's used to monitor for dissenting comments towards the nationalist regime?
"We are at war with terrorist states Winston and we have always been at war with terrorist states; is that correct Winston?"
Isn't that what MS had been getting paid :-)
for all these years ?
Please mod up. IRC is plain text and therefore extremely loggable at nearly any point along a trunk.
zosxavius photography
Anybody with half a brain isn't going to discuss illegal or terrorist activities on a client-server based architecture. When I have something private to say on IRC I always intitiate a peer-to-peer DCC chat session first. What the hell were they thinking?
Waihopai, INFOSEC, Information Security, Information Warfare, IW, IS, Priavacy, Information Terrorism, Terrorism Defensive Information, Defense Information Warfare, Offensive Information, Offensive Information Warfare, National Information Infrastructure, InfoSec, Reno, Compsec, Computer Terrorism, Firewalls, Secure Internet Connections, ISS, Passwords, DefCon V, Hackers, Encryption, Espionage, USDOJ, NSA, CIA, S/Key, SSL, FBI, Secert Service, USSS, Defcon, Military, White House, Undercover, NCCS, Mayfly, PGP, PEM, RSA, Perl-RSA, MSNBC, bet, AOL, AOL TOS, CIS, CBOT, AIMSX, STARLAN, 3B2, BITNET, COSMOS, DATTA, E911, FCIC, HTCIA, IACIS, UT/RUS, JANET, JICC, ReMOB, LEETAC, UTU, VNET, BRLO, BZ, CANSLO, CBNRC, CIDA, JAVA, Active X, Compsec 97, LLC, DERA, Mavricks, Meta-hackers, ^?, Steve Case, Tools, Telex, Military Intelligence, Scully, Flame, Infowar, Bubba, Freeh, Archives, Sundevil, jack, Investigation, ISACA, NCSA, spook words, Verisign, Secure, ASIO, Lebed, ICE, NRO, Lexis-Nexis, NSCT, SCIF, FLiR, Lacrosse, Flashbangs, HRT, DIA, USCOI, CID, BOP, FINCEN, FLETC, NIJ, ACC, AFSPC, BMDO, NAVWAN, NRL, RL, NAVWCWPNS, NSWC, USAFA, AHPCRC, ARPA, LABLINK, USACIL, USCG, NRC, ~, CDC, DOE, FMS, HPCC, NTIS, SEL, USCODE, CISE, SIRC, CIM, ISN, DJC, SGC, UNCPCJ, CFC, DREO, CDA, DRA, SHAPE, SACLANT, BECCA, DCJFTF, HALO, HAHO, FKS, 868, GCHQ, DITSA, SORT, AMEMB, NSG, HIC, EDI, SAS, SBS, UDT, GOE, DOE, GEO, Masuda, Forte, AT, GIGN, Exon Shell, CQB, CONUS, CTU, RCMP, GRU, SASR, GSG-9, 22nd SAS, GEOS, EADA, BBE, STEP, Echelon, Dictionary, MD2, MD4, MDA, MYK, 747,777, 767, MI5, 737, MI6, 757, Kh-11, Shayet-13, SADMS, Spetznaz, Recce, 707, CIO, NOCS, Halcon, Duress, RAID, Psyops, grom, D-11, SERT, VIP, ARC, S.E.T. Team, MP5k, DREC, DEVGRP, DF, DSD, FDM, GRU, LRTS, SIGDEV, NACSI, PSAC, PTT, RFI, SIGDASYS, TDM. SUKLO, SUSLO, TELINT, TEXTA. ELF, LF, MF, VHF, UHF, SHF, SASP, WANK, Colonel, domestic disruption, smuggle, 15kg, nitrate, Pretoria, M-14, enigma, Bletchley Park, Clandestine, nkvd, argus, afsatcom, CQB, NVD, Counter Terrorism Security, Rapid Reaction, Corporate Security, Police, sniper, PPS, ASIS, ASLET, TSCM, Security Consulting, High Security, Security Evaluation, Electronic Surveillance, MI-17, Counterterrorism, spies, eavesdropping, debugging, interception, COCOT, rhost, rhosts, SETA, Amherst, Broadside, Capricorn, Gamma, Gorizont, Guppy, Ionosphere, Mole, Keyhole, Kilderkin, Artichoke, Badger, Cornflower, Daisy, Egret, Iris, Hollyhock, Jasmine, Juile, Vinnell, B.D.M.,Sphinx, Stephanie, Reflection, Spoke, Talent, Trump, FX, FXR, IMF, POCSAG, Covert Video, Intiso, r00t, lock picking, Beyond Hope, csystems, passwd, 2600 Magazine, Competitor, EO, Chan, Alouette,executive, Event Security, Mace, Cap-Stun, stakeout, ninja, ASIS, ISA, EOD, Oscor, Merlin, NTT, SL-1, Rolm, TIE, Tie-fighter, PBX, SLI, NTT, MSCJ, MIT, 69, RIT, Time, MSEE, Cable & Wireless, CSE, Embassy, ETA, Porno, Fax, finks, Fax encryption, white noise, pink noise, CRA, M.P.R.I., top secret, Mossberg, 50BMG, Macintosh Security, Macintosh Internet Security, Macintosh Firewalls, Unix Security, VIP Protection, SIG, sweep, Medco, TRD, TDR, sweeping, TELINT, Audiotel, Harvard, 1080H, SWS, Asset, Satellite imagery, force, Cypherpunks, Coderpunks, TRW, remailers, replay, redheads, RX-7, explicit, FLAME, Pornstars, AVN, Playboy, Anonymous, Sex, chaining, codes, Nuclear, 20, subversives, SLIP, toad, fish, data havens, unix, c, a, b, d, the, Elvis, quiche, DES, 1*, NATIA, NATOA, sneakers, counterintelligence, industrial espionage, PI, TSCI, industrial intelligence, H.N.P., Juiliett Class Submarine, Locks, loch, Ingram Mac-10, sigvoice, ssa, E.O.D., SEMTEX, penrep, racal, OTP, OSS, Blowpipe, CCS, GSA, Kilo Class, squib, primacord, RSP, Becker, Nerd, fangs, Austin, Comirex, GPMG, Speakeasy, humint, GEODSS, SORO, M5, ANC, zone, SBI, DSS, S.A.I.C., Minox, Keyhole, SAR, Rand Corporation, Wackenhutt, EO, Wackendude, mol, Hillal, GGL, CTU, botux, Virii, CCC, Blacklisted 411, Internet Underground, XS4ALL, Retinal Fetish, Fetish, Yobie, CTP, CATO, Phon-e, Chicago Posse, l0ck, spook keywords
SILC is a good example.
...simply by opting for encryption, as the presumption of guilt becomes more heavily ingrained into the collective psyche of those who think they're making a positive contribution to the so-called "war on terrorism".
I find it ironic that for monitoring the Internet there is no need for speech recognition, and given its popularity as a communication medium, it has actually made the government's eavesdropping tasks that much easier.
Weizenbaum is also the author of the Eliza program, in which a person interacted via a keyboard with a simulation of a psychologist. It is considered the mother of all chatbots. Many people, including many experts, were taken in and thought it was a real person. This finding disturbed Weizenbaum.
Weizenbaum's thoughts on these subjects can be found in his book Computer Power and Human Reason. We had it as a text book at MIT and I would argue that it should be required reading for all scientists and technologists.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~mckenzie/clirc.html
Been working on it for 6 months without multi hundred thousand dollar funding from the govt. It's not just an abstract - it works, and does more . . .
Isn't electronic eavesdropping (ELint) NSA's job? This looks again like internal competition within the intelligence community!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
All MSN Messenger messages go via Microsoft's servers (not directly to the end user as with normal ICQ, for example)... Who's to say that they don't log/watch/grep/wahtever all of it already anyways?
If the CIA were to use a robot developed by a research institute, this will be a well-behaved bot. As soon as it detects a robots.txt nick in some IRC channel, it will quietly stop spying and go away.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I don't doubt that this is insightful, but it is also funny, I mean are you really going to set up a private IRC server, and invite only crackers to it? You might just as well make everyone wear a tinfoil hat with a "cracker" icon on it, and honk a horn every time a policeman walks by.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Maybe though think that terrorists are using IRC as well as websites etc to coordinate stuff. The must be trying to explore every avenue eh! Now as long as the terrorists don't find out what the CIA is up to and change tactics! oh wait... nm.
a man, a plan, a canal, panama
I've seen a demonstration if this kind of software. They're far more advanced than some plain-text packet sniffer. The program logs on as a user, and then monitors not only what is being said, but to whom and by whom. It can identify which individuals are at the "hub" of which conversation, and the keywords that are associated with that conversation at the current time (so its topic). Incidentally, the systems were tested by having them log in to IRC channels as users. The chatters weren't notified since this might modify their behaviour.
We started talking about IRC sniffing and no more than a quarter of a page below we're already discussing how to become a successful serial killer. Perhaps these feds are right after all.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
The feds can legally get the to, from and subject headers from email, more requires a wiretap legal procedure, but that is never rejected.
Stenograph your porn video clips and put them on p2p, boost the feds per case database beyond a petabyte.
Hide in plain site:
We begin bombing in five minutes
[I am secretly after more natural language research, purely so I can speak to women, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday and for the rest of my life....
I also have shares in database companies just in case all this stuff actually works, and I work in a database company on language [computer language admittedly] parsing tools.]
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
[Allegedly]
Look where it got them.[well some money for a start]
Seriously though all this is dual use stuff, where can we start to see visible signs of this stuff working?
Database companies shares go up.
Google indexes and cross references IRC and can search for patterns summarising a whole thread as pattern number 3 (reminds me of a joke about telling known jokes by number, but one has to tell it right) original patterns are brought to peoples attention as news, so they do not have to ever go to the chatrooms.
New patterns are so few that slashdot posts them for freshmen to analyse them. Sounds like a game we all could play, where are the new modes of conversation comming from and identifying them they could be spread quicker... flash talk rather than flashmob.
World Trade Center..
Actually the Freedom Fighters used everyday code words for their targets.
Actually is the problem with speach analysis not the sounds, but the context, if there was an up to date state of the IRC, analysing speech could get a whole lot better (maybe).
Recognising way of speach 'defects' so the computer/mobile phone could tell you why your girlfriend/wife hung up again.
Just searching, but must of AI is searching and the algoritms were worked out in the 60s, just technology (hardware) is catching up.
Just me throwing out half connected prose, because by the time I have thought it through properly noone will be reading the thread. sigh.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
... where the men are real men, the women are real men, and the little girls are FBI agents.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
No, the only reason they get technology like this is because we allow them to ask for it. You think that if they offered enough money (say $157,673) that some company wouldn't jump to make this same product for them? Should we boycott IBM because they sell computers to the government which they then use to crack codes or monitor the Internet (Carnivore, etc)? Should we boycott Smith and Wesson because they make guns for agents to use? No, we should tell our government that they are not allowed to do these things. Making of tools should not be punished; commiting bad/wrong acts should be disallowed, especially in a government "by the people, of the people and for the people".
Nathan's blog
It's undergone some problems, but the IIP would make this project hard to keep going. Link for those interested. It's a neat idea that hasn't gotten much support.
Must be a new record for an article being rejected and then being posted.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Uhm.... They can watch footage at like twice or thrice the speed (with fast forward) and only slowdown (annalize) the parts they think are suspicious.
NSA isn't allowed to spy on US Citizens.
That's just their official policy.
If they want to or need to, such policy will be disregarded.
Besides that, they have plenty of computing power to crack encryption.
Want/need REALLY secure secure communications? Use encryption that uses HUGE ASS NUMBERS!
That's all worthwhile encryption is--a mathematical transformation of plaintext to ciphertext using...HUGE ASS NUMBERS!
How huge the numbers are depends on two factors: the level of security desired and the processing power of the computing device i.e. generating 512/1024/2048 bit RSA keys would be TOTALLY INSANE on a 1981 IBM-PC operating at 4.77Mhz.