Slashdot Mirror
"Dark Alleys" on the Internet
nokilli writes "Sounding the alarmist tone many of us became used to in the early days of the web, The New York Times has a story that talks about "national security" concerns over the myriad ways in which two people (i.e., terrorists) can communicate using the Internet today [NYT=Kneel before Zod]. They're talking about monitoring chat rooms, email servers, etc. I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD."
Just force the game provider to hand over all logs ? :)
they can monitor everything they want, but it will be in vein. There are so many avenues for communcation they can't monitor everything..
They may not need server access to monitor your chat session in your MUD. Simply monitoring your incomming / outgoing data should be sufficient. :)
Remember, even encryption can be broken
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD."
It's called sniffing.
Either on the wire, or if the MUD software encrypts traffic, on your end (via trojan) or the server end (via court-order).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Anyone writing on technological matters in a popular publication should be required to have a modicum of a clue.
Call me old fashioned.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
It would make a lot more sense to focus on effectively handling the data available than simply adding to the flood of data already at hand.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Just more waste of government money.
when communication was considered a good thing.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
>>I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
The clerics in obscure level 50 corners of all MUD games are FBI agents. Did you not know that??
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD."
They put a packet sniffer on the ethernet cable? Because your mage, my cleric, and the impossible to reach corner of the dungeon are not actually in a mythical world of make-believe, but just linked structs in heap memory? You retarded?
If you don't have anything to hide than what do you have to fear?
Oh yeah, I suppose since in a few years it will be rights infringment to use a copyrighted name in a negative sentence that there is plenty to fear. Call me Rossi The Prophet if someone ever attempts to pass such a law =)
But maybe they would use monitoring for something less evil? How about unknown public opinion polls? "57% of AIM users said they were displeased with last nights bombing of Iraq, a poll of all AIM conversations has found. More on this at 11."
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
To try and tap every conversation throughout the many internet communications outlets is as futile as trying to tap the hundreds of phone lines and overhearing conversations on streets (nevermind needing court orders). Big Brother is big but the populace is bigger. There is no way to create a large enough agency to not only collect but also analyze the data that would be collected.
It's a concern but not a very legitamate one.
-Teiresias
After that, we should destroy cell phones, especially the ones that have 'no contract' that can be picked up at a local drugstore, used for a week and then be tossed away.
Our Modern world has just made it to easy for those 'evil ones' to communicate about destroying us. We should foil all their plots by going back to pre-80's technology levels. That will show them!
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Now we know what Deathifier wants to use his island for:/ 1759253&tid=209&tid=187
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/14
(It's a joke, laugh! No offence meant to Deathifier...)
What worries me is not government monitoring of the internet. We already know that this goes on to some extent and if we really want to communicate privately, using an unencrpyted email or an IRC chat room isnt the way to go about it. The majority of us are knowledgable enough to communicate with some degree of security.
My main concern is their definition of a 'terrorist'. I have no problems with law enforcement agencies going after real, or suspected terrorists, but I do disagree with the slow creep of the word to include people who have different opinions then the government.
Then again, I'm more paranoid than most. Probably nothing to worry about. Probably...
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
> I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring ..by adding a chip to your keyboard?
> my mage as it talks to your cleric
Sigh, I wish people wouldn't make this analogy. I really wish more people would get involved with other parts of the internet like IRC, Usenet, etc. and see that there is a lot more than a web browser and an email client. And I'm not just talking about your grandma who uses AOL. There are many new techies that are unaware that such things exist, I talk to more and more of them all the time. Its a shame.
Adding more sources to the Echelon type systems isnt that hard. It is just usual sigint, tapping and eaves dropping etc. The rest is just using great applications to harvest out the interesting parts.
:_)
Yes, I believe it wouldnt even be hard to monitor your mud session
Somehow I don't think terrorists play MUDs.
More seriously though, this problem is insoluble. Not that that will stop them from trying and sacrificing a lot of liberty meanwhile. If you're smart enough to rig a car bomb, you're smart enough to use encryption while planning it. Illicit communication can always be disguised as arbitrary binary data.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Me and my tinfoil hat fear this is already being done.
Therefore I use Trillian with SecureIM enabled as often as possible.
Sniff this SSH packet -- see if I care.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/technology/20cov ert.html
Or, consider most MUDs are transmitted in plaintext, and a simple sniff on your connection would be more than sufficient.
No, the real tricks should be information hiding, all messages stongly encrypted, sensitive or otherwise, and simple knowledge of where not to communicate. Wonder if crypto hidden in the least significant bits of a scan of a point and shoot 35mm picture of some random "family" photo would ever go noticed. I hope you don't think your chatting in the open in an "obscure" MUD location really helps you any.
If not now, when?
Lets just say the use a game of StarCraft to send cominication back and forth. Heck even if they are sniffing the information it will be tough to realize the context that the message is in. Or just use good old US Mail to send them a CD with the software for a different method of cumication all togeter. Or heck you could just post it as a troll on slashdot, in wide public eye.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD."
Terrorists play MMORPGs? Man, no wonder those folks online are always so mean!
-Diomedes
As for Diomedes, you could not say whether he was more among the Achaeans or the Trojans.
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD
That trivial to do: you could monitor the packets passing along your connection to the MUD by going to your ISP. Or they could go to the administrator of the MUD and get access.
I'd be more worried about two people conversing in a language that the intelligence community doesn't have enough experts in, who are personally known to each other and who meet in person in a remote location. All this worrying about people using the Internet for communication isn't going to be worth anything if the "evil doers" just communicate in person.
If you remember FBI spy Robert Hansen you'll recall that he was copying information from the FBI and then communicating it to his handlers using... a dead letter drop.
John.
cops will be assigned to watch carefully all table knives because they eventually can be used to kill.
Everyone knows the NSA has legions of bored fourteen year olds constantly monitoring all MMORPGS.
Thats why whenever you get a monster to yourself suddenly *BOOM* kill stealer.
New York times is one of the terrorists: They have been ranting Proof: ( Register At NewyorkTimes ) about this for quite a long time - I even got the message about Mr. Blair used his visit, his first ... ...
I read the internet for the articles.
..."I was a Munchkin for the Mob."
"Quick, level up to 50 so we can go on that elite dungeon raid and plan our next attack."
"Well, the uprising would have happened last week, but it took me longer to level my mage than I thought it would."
Seems improbable.
Besides, I'm sure their guild names would be a dead giveaway...
Hey baby, my mage wants to talk to your cleric. He's at level 50 and he's dying to have be part of a random encounter with you.
I am sure this will be mentioned by others but as long as you are still telneting to reach your MUD then all of the text you type runs unencrypted through the net between you and the MUD server with just about as much security as email or unencrypted IM. Even if you did encrypt the communication I am one of the tinfoil hat types that believes that the government has those Billions of dollars worth of supercomputer for such a reason and if they REALLY wanted to read that conversation that they could. You might as well get used to the fact that you should never send something electronically that you wouldn't want the government to read or that would incriminate you. That is the only way that you will ever be 100% safe.
Storage is cheap, and it is quite easy to automatically analyze a conversation for key phrases/words. A human analyst could then take the time to listen in on interesting recordings.
Yeah, right.
...when you've got private garden paths? :) I use OpenVPN to build my own private network between friends and family. It's getting easier to do, it's encrypted, and it's sweet as hell once you have it up and running. Just imagine having a virtual network cable between your house and your friends and families homes and you've got the idea. It works on *nix, Windows and Mac OS X. Give it a try.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
This is the type of fear mongering (government's wish, media's job) that keeps giving the state more and more power; to monitor more, have less legal accountability, sidestep the courts alltogether, and do pretty much whatever else they know they shouldn't get away with because "it's a different world now, and terrorists are everywhere".
I call bullshit. There aren't more terrorists than there were decades ago; the country is not more dangerous. The rights and freedoms in the west are the crowning achievement of civilization, and it makes me cringe to see how quickly these freedoms are taken away. Secret courts and shadow governments? They exist in the USA! It's no secret! You can be held for years without knowing the charges against you.
Dark Alleys of the Internet... come on. If I write my note on a piece of paper and deliver it to my friend, I challenge any spy agency in the world to (covertly) intercept that message.
Fear is a manipulation tactic.
I've studied steganography for maybe a couple weeks, and have already built a ruidmentary system (Thinking about making something more advanced into an open-source project). If it's so easy to homebrew secret means of communicating secretly encrypted data, then how much use is it to monitor chat rooms?
Not that terrorists are usually that covert, honestly... But if they needed to be, they could. That is, of course, pretending a system like this wasn't an excuse to monitor a society which has grown less and less loving of its government.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
encrypted spam? There is frequently junk in spam that looks like noise, but encrypted data also can look like noise. If you send out a million spams and just make sure that a couple of them go to the people you want to get the message...well, there ya go.
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
How many different ways can I have a (nearly) real time conversation on the internet? Let me count the ways...
Jabber, IRC, e-mail, telnet BBS, OGG streaming, MSN, blogs comments, FTP text files, watermarked photo, web cams, GoToMeeting.com, MUDs, chess tourneys, internet faxing, slashdot, VOIP, SSH, SMS, P2P....
Did I forget any? Oh yeah, someone could make a custom protocal.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
So somehow we now believe that omnivore/carnivore/eschelon cannot be somehow modified to snoop into chat rooms, MUDS, MMORPGs, Slashdot Comments, or anything else?
Come on people! If its electronic and not encrypted, then its wide open!.
but could you imagine all the false positives from snooping in games?
PC1: alright, so we attack at dawn!
PC2: Exactly, you guys blow up the market place and create general panic, while we go in and take over the base.
National Security Administration lackey: Umm, I think we have something here!
If the whole problem is terrorists meeting in metaphorical dark alleys on the internet, what about them meeting in actual dark alleys in real life?
We must eliminate all alleys, entryways, nooks, corridors, subways, booths, cul de sacs, and anywhere else two terrorists might converse without being observed! In fact, we should eliminate all private residences -- nay, all buildings! -- lest terrorists hide in or behind them and discuss their nefarious plans. And forests! Where better to have a conspiratorial chat than deep in the traitorous woods, obscured from the eye of Justice by terrorist-loving trees?
Burn the cities and forests! It's the only way to stop the terrorists! Because nothing is more important than stopping terrorists.
Right?
The enemies of Democracy are
so yeah, if I were a terrorist.. I'd just start meeting my counter-parts at some dumpy bar.
I'd like to see you log a conversation of two drunk Iraqi nationalists IRL. good luck..
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
Zod will always use what is at hand. Few people know that kryptonite makes many common email protocols possible, yet it can be used for ill, particularly if Marlon Brando was your Dad on an ice planet.
Hammers don't kill people, mythical elements kill people. Please make a note of it.
who said anything about encryption? how about talking in code. Using the MUD reference here.. You could talk as if you are roleplaying.. but in actuality you are planning a terrorist attack. The Shire == LA, Town Fountain == specific building, town armorer == specific target .... who knows... but the possibilities are endless.
I don't think that our privacy should be sacrificed as the expense of fruitless investigations.
that is sufficiently bizarre that the code breakers will try to decrypt it just on the off chance that something else might be hidden in the supposed text. (During wwII composer alban berg's music was inspected for encoded messages, until they realised it really was just music)
never mind if it's salted with random characters or typos.
now if everything was encrypted......
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Even simpler, go to a random internet caffe every day, use a random chat cleint on a random server using passphrase convenied in advance. Why make it complicated when you only need good legs or a good trnasportation system in a good metropole to avoid wiretapping ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
S'already working, since there are no terrorists other than those the government deliberately allowed to act. The 'terrorism' bugaboo is just a way to trick people into being heavily controlled. But you know that already.
You're not paranoid. It's simply that you're not stupid.
The question is, do you know why reality is shifting in that direction?
-FL
How difficult is this to install on a windows box? Can I talk a complete idiot in the US through it from Europe?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
what's the point of monitoring more if you don't have the system in place to make sense of the information you gathered?
there are indications that we had monitored and gathered enough intelligence to (at least) be concerned about 9/11 before that day. we weren't able to piece it together.
as long as increasing monitoring is simply about gathering more information but not about making sense of them, it seems to be nothing buy a political move to increase accountability but not the actual safety/security.
The more extraneous crap they monitor, the higher the noise to signal ratio. Kerry mentioned in the debates that there were hundreds of thousands of hours of unexamined surveillance tape. Of course there is! The best thing you can hope for with the growing mountain of surveillance output is that after the next attack, the cops will be able to look at the tapes and say, "Oh, yeah, there go the terrorists..."
The intelligence community needs men on the ground, deep cover agents in the places where the terrorists are recruiting. By the time they are sending encoded messages to each other in secret areas of the net, it's already too late. Getting rid of Ashcroft helps too. They just don't come any more incompetent than that.
PGP a message then steganographically insert it into an alt.binaries.whatever post. This makes it easy to anonymously broadcast a message worldwide that can only be found and retrieved by its intended recipient, but can be picked up at any convenient time, from pretty much anywhere.
I'm no expert on steganography, but my understanding is that automatically detecting its present depends on statistical anomalies that presumably wouldn't exist in a well-encrypted message (which will appear to be random noise).
So to catch terrorists and drug dealers we just sit on our asses behind a computer screen?
What if they use a pencil, a paper and fold that paper and conceal it anywhere in the REAL WORLD like most terrorists do and all of our lazy ass new generation of investigators still think that "if it is not on the Net, then it doesn't exist".
How do you think the IRA functioned all these years? With faxes? Making a deal with an ISP?
No, by meeting face to face... you know, physicaly meeting. You remember that practice?
I tell you, the real modern intelligence is today on the field more than ever, while the non 1/3 world countries are too busy expecting it to be on TCP/IP.
It's articles like that that confirms those rogue nations that we are a bunch of incompetent fat idiots that should be taken out for gross incompetence. Elmer Fudd style.
Ever been shocked by things like "Our anti-missile systems could not catch that 50's era type of soviet made missile because it wasn't smart enough to get confused by our counter measures."
Well that was in 1991 already. We are still getting ready for a WWIII with an ultra modern theoretical ennemy when in fact a simple under developped country can bring us to a standstill.
Wanna block a telephone system for a nation? Bomb the main offices! Don't waste time reading Phrack for years.
Wanna really have fun? Go after the power grid and see those IT and NSA guys look stupid.
No guys, we really need to set our priorities.
I think that the message here is much more ominous than what the surface story tells. The young man simply stated his great dislike for the United States government that is in place. He also made a flip comment about himself being a pilot of one 9/11 planes that crashed into the towers. I only see a crime here if he actually did the task. What are we becoming here in the US? It scares me to think that if I say that I hate GWBush with a passion that I will have the FBI crashing down my door. This smacks to me of totalitarianism (or however you spell that). Don't even THINK of hating us or we will take you down! It seems to me that this will go a long long way down the road of stopping anyone from questioning this government if they happen to think they are doing something wrong. Is the strong suggestion that your opinion of someones elses actions is wrong so wrong itself? I fear for the future of a people that are suppressed in this way. The scary part is that most of the people don't see it happening around them. They truely think this is a 'defensive' measure to secure 'their' lifestyle. What did this kid do to hurt anyone? NOTHING! He though something, spoke some words and went about his life as normal. There should not be a penalty for not agreeing with someone else and trying to change their position with words. Isn't that what the US is supposed to stand for?
What's to stop me and my fellow conspirator running a private protocol over a standard transport, with data and control interspersed in any way we see fit? And then run encrypted data over it?
I bet I could even come up with a way where the protocol itself changed from time to time on the fly.
Shaheed
Just use BugMeNot.com and read the New York Times (and over 43,000 other sites) without disclosing your personal information.
This is best done when fear is in place. --You don't have to be aware of accurate information on everybody. You just need instant access to accurate information on everybody. That way, you can make your quotas of public beatings and arrests without hassle. This, by itself, provides the impetus for the good sheep to stay good sheep.
Harvesting begins shortly. Please stand by.
-FL
Why the heck would I try to get to the level 50 in some game to talk securely? There are several ways to exchange data that is encrypted to such level that no one (and I mean no one) can decrypt it even given all the computing power in the world. Yes, most of these only work when the scheme is pre-arranged before the first message is sent, but while this may impact commercial organizations needing to send secure data to an employee who does not have the key to begin with how does that impact a terrorist? Sending undecryptable messages is childlishly easy without resorting to online games.
Do not look into the laser with remaining eye.
I'd especially like to see how the Alliance is going to spy on me and my Horde buddies when they can't even understand what we're saying.
Consider that the FBI and other 3 letter agencies have compiled extensive watch lists of people they consider to be "national security threats."
Further, under the powers of the Patriot Act, as well as other FCC regulations, LEOs (law enforcement organizations) have a selective group of people to target. All they have to do is monitor your ISP/Cell/Home Phone lines. Any communications that you have that cause red flags will then cause other people to be added to their lists and so on.
The way these models work is to have a basic monitoring in place of probable targets, and then step it up if anything 'suspicious' occurs.
---
"become a government informant, spy on your friends and family - fabulous prizes to be won" Red Dwarf "Back to Reality"
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
This whole "war on terror" is misguided. Finding existing terrorists and listening to them talk online WILL NOT STOP TERRORISM.
You can't fight terror with force because as much as you may disagree with the terrorists' goals, to them and their followers they are freedom fighters. If you were a freedom fighter rebelling against what you thought was an unjust foreign force, would them invading your half of the world make you give up? No, you'd fight harder than ever and this time you'd recruit your friends. Would knowing that your communications might be intercepted stop you? No, you'd just find new ways to communicate.
I wonder what percentage of our "defense" budget goes toward lobbying politicians to try to make policies that don't piss off half the world. That'd do more against terrorism, and for our defense, than any war.
$8.95/mo web hosting
The autorities also have a time problem since their monitoring storage is of finite size (exabyte?) and can hold only a small fraction of traffic.
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
First point: I can be any level the data store says I am. Woo! I'm level MAXINT! If you think being level 50 is special, you need to get out more.
Second point: There's no such thing as an obscure corner of a MUD. Challenge an admin to find you, and he'll be able to "teleport to you" in seconds.
Third point: it's all moot anyway. Law enforcement can quite easily pay to have MUD source code patched to log every action.
After reading this we are all dumber ....
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Of course, anyone looking to plot a terrorist attack is simply going to talk over unencrypted communications channels using plain words like "bomb," "sarin," and "subway." They wouldn't think of using pre-arranged keywords, metaphors and euphamisms.
Responsibility is the punishment for compentenc
They're not gonna need every line tapped and thousand upon thousands of people listening. The right amount of propaganda and everyone will suspect everyone else of being a traitor and untrustworthy. Your neighbor will do the work for them by monitoring everything you do and reporting it to them, while you do the same to them. And whoever reports the other to the thought police first will be the "winner" of the neighborhood spying contest.
Paul
They're certainly in a dark alley of the internet. The parts I ordered from PartsPC were dead on arrival. They're now saying that I'd have to pay them a few 'fees' to return the parts and get a refund. The refund wouldn't even be what I paid for it, it'd be about 30% less due to 'market pricing'.
Anyone have an idea of what I can do here?
Also, can I dispute the charge with Visa? (using a Visa bank card)
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Any attempt at comprehensive surveillance is a joke in this day. If I've met with a person even a single time, I can just converse via innocuous post-cards or emails using code words for the sensitive pieces. If spies can publish sensitive data in magazines and newspapers with the expectation that only the intended recipient will actually understand the message, what chance does any government have of monitoring the "dark alleys"? I mean, those people talking in dark alleys could be speaking in code, as well.
A war on terrorism is going to turn out the same as the war on drugs, except that drugs always have a market, but the US government is creating a market for terrorism. And what a perfect time, since former Soviet satellites are selling off their weapons at Low, Low Prices! Both battles are against decentralized, self-organized groups. No one ever wins those kinds of wars by fighting, although hegemony works pretty well. Assimilate the competition to disarm them, like the Romans did, and The Church, to a large extent. But it's too radical a strategy for most governments.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Let's explore an inane analogy...of course the net has dark alleys, and Gotham-like recesses and ghettos and city centers and mesas and pastoral pastures and green forests and mountain peaks and an extension of reality, a realm for the imaganation for humanity called the Internet. It's just a medium! And yes, humanity has terrorists, a cancerous evil. This isn't news. It's a modern day reality, and we're dealing with it. Secret combinations of people, the underworld, plot and execute and it's morbid to watch it on the news, and yet it's real. And yet they're right here, perhaps perusing Slashdot, browsing placidly. But I believe no matter where they are, just like anything these secret combinations can be cracked. We'll win this war because they're cowards.
If not.. then they can monitor you no matter where you are in the mud.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Here's a "Dark alley of the Internet" for you, the author of the article:
http://sec.gravito.com/crash/test20.html
That's scary. That's the reality of the Internet. I can crash your browser whenever I like it. It's why others say to "get Firefox".
Now get back to class and come back to write for your college newspaper here in a week when you're next "assignment" is due. I'll start by teaching you about TCP/IP fundamentals, sniffing, MitM attack, and subpeonas to servers hosting chats, all of which can and are used to track down Terrorists.
You'd be surprized to know what technology the government really has. My guess is they probably had that capability for about 10-15 years now.
# fuser -v
#
Of course, that would be playing directly into the hands of the terrorists and will give them exactly what they are looking for.
Truly, honestly, the only way to defeat these terrorists is not to combat them directly, (I am not saying we should cease efforts to stop them) but to combat them indirectly by taking away their power. We need to fight global ignorance, we need to teach acceptance of one another's differences, we need to learn how to respect one another, from the heads of every nation to the most downtrodden of people on this planet.
Of course, I honestly doubt that our species is ready, willing or even capable of doing that in this day and age. Perhaps one day we will and what I have said won't seem like some impossible dream.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
You can try and listen to everything but then you will spend all the time eliminating false positives.
More data doesn't automatically imply better intelligence. Quite often it just dilutes the good stuff that you should be paying better attention to.
100% security is impossible. The good guys have to get it right every single time; the bad guys just have to get it right once.
(Isn't that correct NSA?)
Some days, I feel like a mugging victim on the Information Super Dark Alley...
FBI casts level 9 memory wipe.
You remember nothing.
You are sitting at a computer. You are looking at a geek news site. Get up from the computer?
When nouns are verbified, only verbers will have nouns.
no one's yet thought of embedding rasterized text in a Quake III skin, setting the "Auto-downloading" option, and hoping that some building disappears in the middle of the night.
;-) The problem with all these "realistic" games is that they are reaching the point of "simulation".
_ _________
If you're really talented, build a map in something like BF1942 and use the mockup to execute your plan to ensure all goes well.
Now if I could just keep the plane level in BF1942 or FlightSim 2005...
________________________________________
"If it absolutely, positively, needs to be blown up over night..." --U.S.A.F.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
I can see it now - the FBI will get high-level characters in EQ2 and WoW so that they can look for terrorists in-game.
With a sniffer, a tiny fragment of code which decodes the protocol used by your game, and perhaps some decryption routines to get around the probably ill-designed obfuscation the game designers put in place, the same way they do everything else. It's not hard. It's the same way you sniff any other traffic. Do you really think the FBI has thousands of McJobbers actually running irc clients and manually creating account in web forums and reading posts? They just sniff the traffic, it's all IP. Only red flags from the traffic logs warrant further manual investigation that might involve logging into the discussion medium of choice in a traditional fashion.
11*43+456^2
Homeland Security, protecting America by spying on Americans and detaining citizens indeffinately without a warrant.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You must not have heard of a search function. Besides, AI can do some of the reading as well.
Now, here come the naysayers, well if you were abiding the laws then you have nothing to hide. Sure maybe now I have nothing to hide, but lets say we give up our privacy and the christian theocracy that is taking over the US gets what it wants by making blasphemy illegal I sure as shit want pricacy so I can say whatever I please about religion. What if it becomes illegal to criticize our leaders? I'd rather protect my privacy now, so I don't have to worry about going to jail for speaking my mind later on.
Here is my bit for you all to think about... A hell of alot more than 6000 people died to give me the first amendment and a right to privacy. I don't see why these 6000 deaths should reverse there sacrifice.
Step 1. encrypt secret message.
Step 2. embed image into the pixel data of an image from your digital camera. Something like a picture of your car. Something unique that can't be compared with another one found online.
Step 3. Send email to your recipient.
Step 4. recipient replies to message saying how much they like your car.
Step 5. recipient retrieves encrypted data from image.
Step 6. recipient decrypts message.
Not only is your message encrypted, but it is encoded into an image in a way that can be completely arbitrary.
Tell me how someone would be able to get your secret message, or even know that there is one there to begin with?
Embedding binary data into images is extremely easy and is impossible to distinguish visually from the original image(from what I was able to tell from testing). I'm wondering why we never hear anything about this? If anyone has any thoughts on why I am just being paranoid I would like to hear them.
kyjello is too damn smooth to make a signature.
Installation on a Windows box is trivially easy--they built a standard Windows binary and an installer that sets it all up for you. There are still configuration details, so I wouldn't give it to your mom with a "Check this shit out!" admonition, but anybody with half a clue, or a little help, can be up and running in about 60 seconds.
If you want to use a pre-shared secret (symmetric passphrase) encryption instead of PKI, it's even faster.
The latest version of OVPN has a "multi-client server" mode that allows an admin to set up a single VPN server, kind of like a VPN concentrator box, that can maintain tunnels with an arbitrary number of remote hosts. This is REALLY nice, because setting up a new remote user only requires that you give them the installer, your server's public key, and that they generate a key pair and send the public part to you (pick a method).
OpenVPN really, REALLY is the bomb. Try it out sometime.
In my opinion, if we need to monitor every phone call, filter every email, or lurk in every chat room, we've already lost. What happens to free speech when you know that Big Brother is watching? It goes away.
That's why I like the new encryption tools we have at our disposal. In essence, they ensure a safe haven of free speech. Despite the fact that terrorists can use stealthy communication techniques that go under the NSA's radar, so can the average Joe.
After all, wasn't the mindset of the founding fathers that the people could overthrow the government if they found it to be tyrannical? Ensuring free speech, the right to assemble (greatly aided by unimpeded communication), and the NRA's favorite right to bear arms provide an well-needed check against the government's powers: empowering the citizens. Sadly, many of us are willing to yield these rights.
It makes me think of Ben Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The government just needs to announce that terrorists are illegally trading copyrighted music and movies ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
The US government should switch its efforts to why all these 'terrorists' are targetting it. There's gotta be a reason, and the reason isn't because the US "is a shining beacon of freedom." (why aren't they targetting Holland? Sweden? Finland?).
Catching these terrorists isn't gonna solve the problem: more will popup immediately to take their place. But if the US started to address (and fix) why they're being targetted (their utter arrogance towards other nations), most of this will go away.
Monitoring this .......
It's by far not impossible to monitor 2 people using the Internet as a medium. The things that make it tricky are:
;-] )
Non-instant communication, an obscure and Not-Public forum etc. And determining exactly who to monitor.
In the MUD example of "The Cmdr" it is quite easy once you KNOW who you have to listen to as ip-packets are being sent to each other no matter on what level you are and how hard is is to reach.
But truly secure communication is rather simple actually...
1. Generate a "One-Time Pad" using a TRND (True Random Number Generator" for use in the vernam Encryption.
2. transmit the Pad stored in an obscure file format and encrypted using a 4096 bit cipher or better.
3. transmit the Vernam encrypted message in any way you like.
there you have it. IF you obey the rules given for Vernam encryption exept the part about transfer of the pad as you do not meet in person.
this would give you virtually 100% secure communication.
why is that?
Anyone wanting to listen to you talk would have to:
1. know that you are talking about whatever he is looking for.
2. Intercept the Pad transmission.
3. Break the encryption on the Pad
4. find a reader for the fileformat (which CAN be home made
5. intercept the Vernam encrypted message
These things combined with the fact that you can use Old-School CodeMorphing eg. Out for lunch tomorrow = heading north into the woods.
Is going to give you enough time to execute whatever paln you have _well_ before ANYONE has even a remote chance of knowing it.
Good or bad, It is in the eye of the beholder. Don't confuse luck with skill.
Patrick McGoohan, star of the 1960's TV series Secret Agent Man (AKA Danger Man) later went on to write, direct, and star in a show called The Prisoner, which basically amounts to a paranoid Orwellian nightmare mixed with the whimsical trappings of Alice in Wonderland.
In one episode, titled Hammer into Anvil, the protagonist, Number Six, who is constantly being spied upon by the sinister forces who control his mysterious prison (called only "The Village), decides to turn the tables on the chief warden (called "Number Two"). He begins to send secret, encoded messages to nonexistant entities, indicating that he is not really a prisoner, but a mole sent to determine the strength of Village security and staff.
Eventually, he drives the current "Number Two" to a nervous breakdown. It's one of the best episodes.
It seemed somehow relevant.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
You should be gathering intelligence from inside the terrorist circles. You do this by recruiting the proper archeotype to infiltrate and become a fake terrorist.
It shows a professional level idiocy to desire to listen to random people's conversations in order to gather information on terrorists. I wish the intelligence agencies would shut up and do their job instead of publically saying the equivalent of,"Well golly gee, we really don't know what we're doing so lets shut down GPS, the internet and telephones because terrorists use these."
God spoke to me.
This story has the same irrational hyping as the old Y2K stories. Here's a snippet:
"There has always been the possibility of meeting in dark alleys, and that was hard for law enforcement to detect."
Now, every computer terminal with an Internet connection has the potential to become a dark alley.
The first quote rationally points out that unmonitored communication has always been a fact of life. (Thank goodness.) The second sentence seems ominous, but of course-- every alley gets dark every night. It isn't like all other communication channels are tightly controlled and the internet is this critical missing link.
We have been hearing crap like this for some time now. The thought here is that if the government can't intercept a communication then that communication must not be allowed. Will privite meetings in closed rooms be next? I'm sure the government would like to intercept everything, a great step towards a police state, but that doesn't mean they should get to. I'm sure they would like me to fly nude after submitting to a cavity search and whole body xray. When privite communication becomes illegal only criminals will communicate privately.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
Isn't this what carnivore and the other FBI program was created for. I mean Carnivore has been around for years now, and most email traffic is already scanned and checked by the NSA, through routing the messages to England, where the laws allow for such actions.
I don't know why this is a suprise to anyone. It's been happening for years. They'll probably set up search programs to go through the databases they've stored on everyone, looking for keywords. The problem is, everytime a keyword is found out, the terrorists will word for that keyword; hence, the search for the keywords becomes useless for the purposes of finding terrorists.
All this program would do is put us one step closer to having video cameras throughout our house, being monitored by some government agency. The tapes will be inadvertly given to corporations, allowing new marketing campaigns to be produced for each American.
"The real usefullness would be after the fact," is exactly the point. Governments aren't going to prevent crime by catching somebody in the act, they're going to collect enough info that they can threaten to charge sombody with looking at child porn unless they rat out the "bad guys" they are "laundering money" for.
"We have nothing in common, your attitude annoys me, and your political views are appalling."
>> ...only criminals will have encryption.
Well that prove that then, Goverments are Criminals.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Ok, sure, I'm a conspiracy theorist, but let's assume that the government's motives are pure, and look at this logically. It just doesn't make much sense.
Let's assume for the purposes of this discussion that the government's motives are 100% pure. It spends billions of dollars annually attempting to log/decrypt/analyze all communications data in real-time to weed out terrorists and make the world a safe happy place. A noble attempt, but hardly efficient.
The obvious solution, of course, is to have less terrorists in the first place. The government needs to work harder at fixing the core issues, and not just their symptoms. This issue cannot be fixed with technology, any more than spam can be fixed with technology. (My apologies to geeks everywhere.)
It is a socio-political problem. If even a small portion of this energy/money/thought was used for foreign policy adjustments, research into terrorist motivations, etc, etc, we'd be better off.
So, to sum up:
1. Less terrorists.
2. Less waste of technology resources.
3. Profit!
Doesn't mean people aren't out to get you...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If I recall correctly, during cold war USA used cherokee language as encryption and soviets never managed to broke that.
You can still do the same thing with different languages and dialects:
Männähän huomen ottahan päiviltä se puskalan yrjänä.
That's plan written in finnish dialect, two or more people discussing about killing george bush tomorrow.
Even native finn would have to read that twice to understand what it says.
If you only studied the language, the true meaning wouldn't open by reading the sentence alone,
you'd have to have lot of knowledge about the culture too to understand that sentence.
Some say that rauma-dialect sounds more like french than finnish if you hear it spoken, but that doesn't really apply for written language I guess.
With obscure language and obscure enough place, you don't need encryption to transfer confidential messages.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
I see you've been playing World of Warcraft a little bit too much lately, eh, Taco? ;-)
You know you have no life when every Slashdot story has a virtual world analogy.
Now to get back on topic, don't you wish Blizzard would develop a Skype-like protocol to allow secure in-game communication with headsets? My hands get tired of typing so much.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Ok think of this..
Say you legalized Marijuana..
Now you have XX many people who don't care if the government is watching as that's the only bad thing they do. Well bad to some wellness to others.
Remember Cryptonomocon? The best message is binary: 1 or 0. Prearrange your message to appear somewhere, anywhere (AOHell, rec.arts.nascar (heh), Slashdot Anonymous Cowards, whatever), and wait.
There's no way of knowing what message means 0 and what means 1, let alone what 0 and 1 imply.
Steganography? Hardly.
Now, delivering detailed instructions is a lot harder, but still child's play. Like XBox Live, for instance.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Anyone at level 50 would be more concerned about stealing The Armor of Thor from the Evil Elf king, than trying to blow anything** up.
MUD junkies are so predictable.
(**Anything IRL, that is.)
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
So it's only an FBI trick to get access to high level areas on MMORPG.
FBI: We need to access those high level players talks.
Everquest Admin: I can't let you cheat.
FBI: Read USA PATRIOT Act, you insensitive clod!
Sorry if I don't get what Slashdot subculture is about.
My city: Barcelona.
I was an elf for the Keeblers.
It seems you've been leading a double life Mr Nokilli. In one, you go to work, read slashdot, and lead a fairly regular life. In another, you're a genderly confused level 50 cleric named "Muffins" with a fetish for elves.
One of these lives, Mr Nokilli, has a future. One, does not.
/ban *!*@*.gov
solved
Let's see, something like 40% of the US is on the Net - that's, what, well over 100M? And they're on how many chat channels, and sending out how many emails a day, and some large percentage is encryptying their messages....
And then there's spam, with random words.
So, how many Evildooers(tm) has Carnivore caught? And just how many FIB, er, FBI agents are there reading the algorythmically-detected Evildooer Messages? Soviet-era Bulgaria, I have read, had about a quarter or more of its citizens *officially* spying on each other. We've got how may tens of thousands of agents? And how many of *them* are on Important Missions To Save Civilization As We Know It, like busting folks for medical marijuana?
FDR: We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
GWB: Be afwaid. Be vewwy afwaid.
At least we're no longer at Code Fuschia (danger of gay marriage being legalized).
mark
Here's a link to the article where you don't need to register:
On the Open Internet, a Web of Dark Alleys
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
"brute force attack"
I hope you were suggesting that my spelling was correct. I would hate to see you go to prison for suggesting that the US is something other than a democracy. ;)
This has been a long-running cliche on the net, and definately has some grains of truth. I wonder how many people actually have this job though (posing to catch the pervs)... it would really suck up to the point where you bust the bastards. Perhaps in the future this would be done better by an advanced bot. Recording the logs would still allow for evidence, and you wouldn't need a real person to pretend he/she likes the backstreet boys *brrrr*
Gilligan, the sum of the eggs in the basket, will not affect the baking of the cake. Ginger
Remember along time ago when if someone was a newbie on IRC or was totally clueless, they were refered to as AOLers? Well, the time has come. They are all over the place and it is because of them that the internet is turning out the way it is now. Call me cynical, but I enjoyed the internet alot better back in the 90s when if you had a modem and knew what the internet was, you were considered a geek. The internet was alot more primative back then, yes, but it was filled with techies and was pure.
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
The best security is front door security. Stop the threat right at the front door. Also having multiple layers behind the front door is essential for defending against skilled attackers. Following this insane path of "lets monitor everyones brain waves so we can stop terrorism" is just taking a step backwards and forgetting about what security realy means.
>> You know, it's stuff like this that the terrorists want. They want us to lose our freedoms to overzealous anti-terrorism laws,
... Sad thing is, these people probably don't even know it themselves, and would deny it if the thought ever occured to them. What, Pres. Bush and advisors doing it the communist way?! How's that for a statement?
>> they want us to live in fear. Suggestions like this article must make Bin Laden smile.
What scares me is when it becomes normal for people to include "national security" in their vocabulary, especially people in government. To think that this is happening so few years after the wall finally broke down (you know, that concrete thingy that used to be somewhere in Europe)
What we really need is so basic: Freedom of speech, human rights, and free movement of people and goods. Not the opposite - we know what happens when you restrict any of that; history has taught us that lesson over and over again.
I always thought that sniffing, hijacking, etc was just too much effort for federal burocracy. Wouldn't the preferred technique be:
1. get court order by invoking draconian security/copyright/terrorism law for the day
2. drive to ISP's colocation facility
3. leave with the server in question, and a few extras, too (just in case)
4. litigate!
It is violation of the DMCA for them to monitor your "Encrypted" Evercrack chat. They would have to use a neuclear powered decryption weapon to circumvent anti-piracy/cheating measures in the game.
There is no freedom of speech if you are too afraid to speak.
I had a boss who recoiled in terror when I referred to George W. Bush as "The Shrub" He started babbling about getting into trouble with the authorities.
Mind you he was a hand wringing milquetoast incapable of standing to to or for anything, but that's beside the point. Fear of recrimination, even recrimination that had not even been hinted at, kept him from criticizing the government.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Your possible responses to this new "information age" are:
1) Live in fear and dread over the power this medium gives to "bad people"
2) Try to pass laws and cripple communication so people can't use the technology effectively
3) LEARN THE F**KING TECHNOLOGY and USE IT WISELY YOURSELF and REACH OUT AND LISTEN AND LEARN FROM OTHER PEOPLE
The internet has revealed what is wrong with our society. We are all a bunch of exclusionist, ignorant assholes who don't want to listen or learn from each other. We love companies and governments and power and status. IDENTITY: the things that seperate us, rather then the things that bring us together. We fear change because we don't see that we change every day and that we are changers rather then any fixed identity. We stop ourselves from feeling powerful by focusing all our resources on the negatives of the new technology vs the benifits.
"Today a joint operation of the automated robotic forces of the Canadian Mounted Police arrested the whole of Quebec.
A detailled analysis of the voice/langage-patterns found them using a mix af french and english (also known as frenglich) that hit the 94% threshold in the Terror-Analysis-Network AI TANIA) from the CIA-NSA, automatically launching the preventive attack of the robotic tanks on the Northen Province.
Our King George W the First declared today "these few early bugs in the software got easily fixed - and we already see the wonderfull results of"....
[...]
As you can remember most of Los Angeles got arrested last month when the new system in place catalogued hispano-americans of the city under the Immediate Terror Repression Act, with more than 5000 deaths of the MegaWatt Tasers(tm) shot from the Los Angeles Automated Drone SurVeillance Force.
Most death were caused by explosion of the surgically implanted ID/Phone/PDA/Ipod sytems we all enjoy nowadays. The Nokia-Apple Corporation blames second rates power packs..."
Oops, sorry...was daydreaming again
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
If they see each other every day, no attack. If one is absent, *boom*.
And I thought I had "Oh, shit!" moments when waking up from oversleeping...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
...that the government has snooped into my e-mail conversation with my mother and now will tell my wife what I'm planning on getting her for Christmas. The bastards.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Try pre-1480 levels, before newpapers, books, and the the first printing press.
Oh, before I forget...
Jon, the grits are heated. Please send Natalie's pants.
So I'll be trying this over the holidays... Thanks
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
After all, they can still get together and meet in person. Obviously we also need to eliminate all modern transportation systems, too.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I mean, really, how many hundreds of times now since 9-11 have we had "LOOKOUT, dangerous tarists sneaking up on you, they are gonna do this and that and the other thing, but our fearless leaders have called this magenta alert so now plz pass the new homeland enabling act law and cough up a few hundred billion more for our esteemed business colleagues and..." and nothing happens except they pass the homeland enabling act and transfer your money into the pockets of already billionaires. sweet deal for them!.
They still manage to keep passing law after law after law, by invoking the magical word "Terrorism".
hegelian dialectic at work and proof again that if they keep pushing it through the mainstream and "embedded" newsaganda drivel the globalist goons will get what they want, which is to get the various peoples to "demand" to lose their freedoms. It's a double win for those megalomaninac turkeys.
The best defense is to laugh at them, call their bluff, refuse to cooperate, call them liars to their face whenever they push that horse crap, and use the tools we have now to further spread the truth and to resist any efforts to squelch that..
9-11 was a controlled inside job like the Reichstagg fire, yet most people still accept the governments wild freeking tin foil hat conspiracy theory on it, with no questions asked.. Sure it was a conspiracy,no one denies that, and part of that conspiracy was western white guys in black business suits and high ranking dot mil "officers" looking for that retirement "consultant" dot mil industrial complex contract.
The evidence is out there, and they have already been proven to be chronic serial liars. How many decades went past before people finally understood that pearl harbor was allowed to go down to get the US into WW2 faster? How many decades went past before the truth about the so called "gulf of tonkin" attacks became known? How long before they admitted reality about agent orange, and now gulf war syndrome and when will they admit DU is a WMD? when will the mainstream news sources actually do their freeking JOBS?
answer=NEVER
This is the same mass peoples fake out routine, and the big bucks media is always involved, because at the tippy top levels in the mass media, it's controlled by globalist technofeudalists who cooperate with these schemes and are part of the coverups. The give the orders and it flows downstream. Same as in so called "government" FUD RULES THERE.
Here is a reminder from past editor at the NYT John Swainston at his retirement speech, pay attention to this:
"The business of the journalist is to destroy truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
He went on to say: "There is not such thing at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone."
ROFL. I bet the terrorists could just communicate in Arabic or whatever their native tongues is.
I mean look at the Iraq war - the US sent tons of soldiers there but hardly any of them could speak to the locals at all.
Anyway, the US Gov doesn't really give a damn about terrorists - why else would it be in Iraq instead of actually going after Osama?
All it's bothered about is staying in power. And the way to that is through the US people.
Look at what the US Gov does, and not what it says. The "war against terror" is does hardly anything to discourage terrorism, if anything it encourages it. The Patriot act does hardly anything to prevent terrorism - it's just a way of controlling US citizens.
Iraq had fewer links to terrorists than say London (aka Londonistan) had. Atta and the other 9/11 pilots were linked to a Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg.
But no the US Gov went for Iraq instead and never revealed the real reasons why.
Don't forget Someone set up us the bomb!
I seem to recall a murder there, recently, that revealed some sort of cell. But, yeah, it probably wasn't important, or terrorism.
Best Slashdot Co
The problem with a one-time pad is the pad itself. It's a dangerous thing to have in your possession and could be mathematically flawed or compromised in other ways.
In World War II, the Russians recycled pages because of shortages in specialty inks and papers.
Only the stupid, and therefore those deserving to be collared, will drop into their favourite AOL chatroom, and say,
"Greetings! Somebody set up us the bomb! Today we launch all nukes, to destroy Amerika, for great justice! Come die with me in glory!"I am guessing, and just guessing, lay-dees and gentlytypes, that the conversation of the crafty will go more like,
EvilDoer no.1: "Yo!"EvilDoer no.2: "Wassap!"
EvilDoer no.1: "Yo! I just went out with your cousin's roommate!"
EvilDoer no.2: "Awesome!"
EvilDoer no.1: "Yo! She is slammin' hot!"
EvilDoer no.2: "Yeah, I'm going out with her cousin next week. I'm taking her to visit the museum on Pennsylvania Avenue at 4:20 p.m."
EvilDoer no.1: "Sweet! Maybe we can hook up there?"
EvilDoer no.2: "Right on, bro! Far out!"
And how exactly is that going to get flagged for review? Ain't no encryption better than a good set of noodle maps.
Just hazarding a guess.
The MPAA and RIAA are just going to make it harder for the govornment to find suspicious encrypted material with new improvemnets and developmnets in the p2p world regarding encrypted ,hash IDs and proxy chaining filesharing clients and protocols .
The NSA will be flodded with encrypted data on a daily basis once these clients go mainstream and everyone trying to avoid a lawsuit will be using them so it will be like finding a needle in a haystack .
eom
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD."
Well, unless your favorite MUD is running over SSL they will just read your conversation out of the network packets.
:)(smile)
There's stories all over the net about left-leaning activists, like Quaker peace activists, that have been targeted by Homeland Security as "potential threats" to the country, and are being forced to go through strip searches every time they attempt to fly.
You'll have to use Administrator.
The password is on a yellow sticky, on the left side of the monitor, the one that says "admin".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The people who run these agencies want more budget money so they can hire more of their friends and become the rulers of their small little piece of the graft.
You can always explain any nevarious plan better when you look at it for what it is:
Greedy buerocrats looking for more budget money.
Fortunately the Bush Admin is bankrupting the US (I am not really happy about this) so they won't have their unlimited money for long.
If you could just hear the Chinese Students here at the university trying to speak english, you would know that speech recognition will never get you any intelligence. Talk about a speech recongition system nightmare!!
Attempts to learn anything by monitoring everything are ignorant. You cannot learn what the terrorists are communicating without knowing who the terrorists are. It's impossible to assume that everyone is a terrorist and try to figure out what they might be saying to another. The internet is just another form of communication. There are so many ways to communicate that already exist, not including the ones that don't exist yet, that monitoring everything is ridiculous. Should the government start monitoring every method of communication? It's impossible. Anyone who is a terrorist is not going to be a terrorist only on the internet with other means of communicating available. The only way to intercept terrorist messages on the internet is to know who the terrorists are before they send their messages. They have lives somewhere that can be investigated. If the two persons suspsected are identified, then monitoring their communications is simple. Whether they use snail mail, a MUD, or anonymous cell phones, it can all be intercepted covertly.
I've always been told not to complain about a problem without a solution. Here's my solution. Identify a few terrorists. This we've done already. Next, monitor every way for those particular people to communicate. Internet, snail-mail, MUD, whatever. They're talking to someone. Identify that someone. Rinse and repeat. Monitoring a 100 million people when only 10,000 of them are terrorist is inefficient, and down right stupid.
The people working for out government do not need more information. They need better information.
OT: In Orwell's 1984, it wasn't just the monitoring that allowed them to catch everyone, especially thought-crimes, is was that the children were raised to look for suspicious behavior in adults and to report it. The technology had little to do with it. Now, where's my tin-foil hat...
So how about a social answer to our terrorist problems? This is going to sound horrible, but terrorists are people too. They have minds, consciences, and hearts just like every else does. Why don't they feel bad about killing people? Well, what does it take for you to not feel bad about killing someone? How about, if they didn't treat you like a human being? How about, if they didn't care if you were dead or not? How about, if they didn't care whether or not you had a place live or food to eat? The American government's policy toward most muslims is that they don't care, whether they're alive or dead, have a place to live or food to eat, and generally don't treat them like human beings. What the terrorists want is not us dead. They want to be treated like people. They want American foreign policy to change, because right now, they aren't treated like human beings. Just look at our holding of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba if you have any doubts about the American government's feeling towards them. Terrorists killing people is their way of making a statement, because the government won't listen to any other form. If we listened to what they had to say, they wouldn't need to kill people to communicate to us that they're unhappy with the situation.
Both sides are wrong. Killing people, for any reason, is wrong. It's a useless vicious cycle. They kill us because we refuse to listen, so we kill them for killing us, and they kill us for refusing to listen about how they don't like being killed. And before someone says 'But we didn't kill them first!', we did. Causing someone's death by being negligent is just as bad as pulling the trigger. Inaction is still an action.
I'm probably going to be modded flamebait, but the ideal government is going to include online forums just like this one so that they can get the people's opinion on issues and find an ideal compromise. The ideal government will be honestly willing to listen.
--Start Rant-- Don't like my solutions? Tell me yours. If you don't have one, then shut the fuck up about mine. Don't bitch about a problem unless you take the time to think of a solution. --End Rant--
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
packets... filters... lossy algorithms...
*wakes up*
Gawd for a moment I dreamt I was the NSA...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
11 88 92 19 41 69 85 96 75 20 31 64 32 44
Next time you hit on that cute female Druid in your EQ2 guild, remember there's a good chance it's an obese 57 year old cross-dressing FBI Agent named Milton.
Is there a good open source elliptical curves program around? I've got a book and I'm looking at writing one but I don't want to be duplicating effort.
I am trolling
Look what the US did was not terrorism, it was in fact a revolution, and there is a distinct difference. If you don't understand that you are either dumb or being obtuse on purpose to prove a point.
Although I know we often take the subject of monitoring our communications systems as a joke and reply with sarcasm the threat of terrorism networks using the internet is a harsh reality.
Back a few months ago when the first postings of beheadings on the internet appeared in the news with my morbid curiosity I went out looking for the video of Nicolas Berg being beheaded (many conspiracy theories about this particular video). But the way that I actually got the video was weird. There was a chat system and whenever you said the keyword (I think it was beheading or something like that) there was an instantaneous response with a link to the video, this website was supposedly run by non-terrorists with images of the American flag with some pro-patriotic text but in the actual chat room... with the keyword event reply from the chat system I assume it was in fact a site run by terrorists as a distribution mechanism for their videos. The video seemed to be hosted by a legit US business that just happened to have its web server compromised.
So every once in a while we see news reports of someone being beheaded and the video being leaked out, on the internet, not to independent news organizations but directly to the internet. There is an opportunity to actually track down these murderers but it seems like the American government is doing nothing about it.
There is almost a direct relationship between the individuals that h4x0r the web server and upload the video and the actual beheadings themselves. We have an opportunity to actually find these anonymous killers. Maybe we should be alright with some monitoring of our communications systems if it curbs terrorism in any amount.
The details are easy to disagree over. The grandparent is trying to make a case for changing the way we think about the problem. It's parallel to treating the cause instead of the symptom. Don't just give a person pain killers when what they need is physical therapy. Don't give a person glasses when they could reverse their eye problems with daily exercises. Don't give the homeless food when what they need is jobs and education.
No discussion of specifics will be fruitful if we can't agree on the possibility that our enemies are justified.
Look, saying "I am not a terrorist" is not going to do anything to make people believe you are not one. I think instead people add that qualifier when posting just as part of their argument. I have a hard time believing it's all done out of fear.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey, I just have to have my EQ2 Wizard throw around discussions about his "nukes" and "nuking" stuff, and suddenly I see all kinds of responses to my requests for group members. I don't care if the people in my group are all FBI agents. FBI tanks absorb damage as well as any other toon.
Author == Moron.
Thank you.
Very good description of S.O.P. for "USA" govt.
The most troubling part of this to me is it comes from the angle that there is an expectation that all communications from "bad guys" can be monitored. If we operate under the expectation that all communications can intercepted we're just setting ourselves up for failure.
The simple act of sending a postcard, or a flag flown on a balcony at a specific time, or a stalled car at a specific point on the road with it's left turn signal on or...
Doesn't our own government use covert means of communication that they think can't be intercepted? If we have them, others do too. Focusing on high tech ways to monitor people who'll use low tech, or no tech, is another example of the arrogance of technology. We need to have many, many layers of security because none of them will work all the time. We can't check all the shipping containers, but we can control communications??
[insert sig file here]
Because it's spot on correct. Things you do on one side of the planet most certainly affect the other side. In this case, they can capture the data but it takes so long to do something with it that it's worthless.
Addressing this problem the "easy way" isn't going to work. We are going to have to look at our society and the economic structure of our entire country.
It's going to take more effort than the usual pork-barrel spending...
Most of the MUD codebases I have looked into have all had this nifty feature to log what players do, should the admins start suspecting foul play. It'll keep track of where the players go, what they say, emote, do, pretty much everything.
Sniffing MUD logs and trying to stifle communication is a losing proposition and a terrible waste of valuable resources that would be better spent doing other things to secure us against terrorism, such as enforcing boarder controls and checking the contents of shipping containers, not to mention airline freight.
$ show log
> TerroristMage1 grins wickedly
> TerroristMage1 "The chair is against the wall."
> TerroristMage2 smiles broadly
> TerroristMage2 "What color is the wall?"
> TerroristMage1 "Brown"
TerroristMage1 looks at the physical list in front of him. It just so happens item "chair" on the "brown" list maps to "Detonate Dirty Bomb in Ashcroft's Front Yard."
Fat lot of good having the MUD logs would do anyone.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Encrypted (or stegged) spam has already been done, and discovered. If you'd see this BlackHat talk, you'd know.
4 -s peakers.html#kret
Nobody's Anonymous--Tracking Spam and Covert Channels
Curtis Kret, Researcher, Secure Science Corporation
http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-04/bh-usa-0
If you had my real name, you'd use an alias too.
In an obscure AOL chat room...
Congressman47: Are you or have you ever been in contact with terrorists or others who wish ill upon the USA?
ChipMonk89: d00d U R such a l@m3r!
BigSenate55: Is that some sort of terrorist hoo doo talk?
Congressman47: I'm not sure...
NastyLady69: Any lawmakers in the room want to get nasty?
click here
Congressman47 left the chat room
BigSenate55 left the chat room
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
...the terrorists have already won.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
It was revealed today that some terrorists had conversations in a private home, highlighting the near impossibility of monitoring everyone's communications at all times.
George Tenet could just as easily have noted how we do not yet know everything that everyone is thinking and we have not figured out how to prevent crimes by monitoring individual's brain waves for possible "dangerous" ideas. If we had this equipment we could eliminate all crime and free thought. Think of how secure we would be then.
Certainly in a free country having free unmonitored conversations isn't such a terrible thing. It isn't fair to just say the magic word "terrorists" and use that as an excuse to remove all privacy and freedoms.
Coding Blog
The Internet is a point-to-point communications system. They'd have to inveigle a sniffer into every route. Even if they took 100% of the traffic on all of the backbones and well-connecteds, they'd still be 50% short of getting anything.
Terrorists are going to communicate. Stopping them from communicating isn't the way to stop terrorism. Stopping impressionable kids from wanting to be terrorists is.
Q: What are the odds that a person correcting a spelling error in a post will make a spelling error?
Is that you?
I fear I must come out in the open and announce to all agents that THEY are on to US. No more trolling slashdot with our secret messages for this alley has been lit up like the yard of an obnoxious neighbor with too much discposable income who insists on subsidizing the electric company by generating so much light and heat that it doesn't even snow in their vincinity.
But I digress.
We now must move to plan B. As a reminder, Plan B has nothing to do with entering crappy setganographed photos into Worth1000 contests. It also does not involve the creation of fake open source projects on SourceForge or the submission of obscure bugs to Bugzilla. It defnitely does not consist of using google search terms to communcate in the referrer fields of our personal web pages.
Please burn this message after reading it.
If you had my real name, you'd use an alias too.
World of Warcraft has a fully-customizable and programmable interface and I'm sure someone could write up a chat encrypter for it that would look like gobbledygook to outside players. Heck, WoW already sort of does this internally- the two factions can't talk to each other, it looks to the other faction like nonsense. Since I love this game so far, and know a little bit about encryption, I think I'm going to have to get on coding that =)
Doesn't mean you are doing trhe right thing.
even if (doing the right thing) => (targeted) is always true, it does not follow that (targeted) => (doing the right thing)
I wonder how one can interpret the chatting most guys (gals???) do on multiplayer games like UT 2004 where there is a lot of Killing, Bombing, taking down the plane, exploding the vehicules and what not other "conversation" that may look like someone is planing something very wrong... Anyway, good luck to whoever is paid for listening, I feel for the americans these days, they are loosing their freedom (really basic rights actually) ... the problem with all this listening is that at some point they *NEED* to "find" something to justify their pay checks... as all humans they can see whatever they want... so make sure all of your conversations are very peaceful in the middle of all this violence!
They can just Google the information they are looking for.
Better yet, automate that so all possible information is searched every x amount of time and then return the top hits.
Use whatever keyword(s) you are currently investigating and you now have a way to effectively narrow down possible information of interest.
You have an actual person viewing results and then determing if there should befurther investigation.
And I am sure Google would be willing to provide the storage as well with their new Google GRID (http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/).
and they think its a good idea, keep those evil terrorists/communists/peopleWeDontAgreeWith/ out
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
Simple, they won't, they'll make the IMMs do it. our MUDs always had snooping features, so does yours.
The trick is to rememebr, ther is no
They are NEVER going to be able to prevent electronic communication entirely in the information age (sorry for use of hokey catch-phrase).
I mean, hell, the terrorists will just make up their own language, or speak in Morse or binary or Tolkein's Elvish or something else that the computers cannot quickly parse through considering the volume of information online.
By the way, if Akmed is listening: "The chair is against the wall. John has a long moustache."
The NSA and other gov't organizations have been collecting information for years. You don't have to monitor ALL of the dark alleys; instead, you monitor chokepoints of suspected activity, decrypt and decode these messages and search your computer bank for logs that have nicks and/or similar phrases to gain more information on the person and his recent past activity/personality. People often keep similar nicks or other "tells" and even military can't perform every communication flawlessly much less terrorists. Once a red flag is raised a collection of logs helps to identify the terrorist and connect them to others.
For those people worried about being monitored the same arguement applies ten-fold: there isn't enough manhours to monitor every corner of the internet. Why would they monitor you? This doesn't forgive the fact that the government wants to violate our privacy by looking through our library records, etc... let them monitor public channels.
I agree mostly with the rest of your post except that it doesn't present a solution as much as a whole new problem of how to get "less terrorists in the first place."
However:
Quote: "Let's assume for the purposes of this discussion that the government's motives are 100% pure. It spends billions of dollars annually attempting to log/decrypt/analyze all communications data in real-time to weed out terrorists and make the world a safe happy place. A noble attempt, but hardly efficient."
The thing that many people don't realize is that there are a lot of hoops that have to be jumped-through before monitoring takes place. Sure, legislation makes it easier, but there isn't an all-consuming communications monitoring and decrypting monster in place (cue Anonymous Cowards, tin foil hats, and the like), but that the idea is often times to monitor known terrorists. A lot of those Gmen geeks are privacyphiles themselves. I attended a conference recently where I witnessed a few members from one of the biggest government organizations absolutely tearing into members of another over security issues and privacy concerns. Not everyone is John Ashcroft.
It isn't always about capturing new terrorists, although that is a bonus. Oftentimes, these monitoring systems are developed and put into place to quietly monitor known existing communications to get insight into their attack plans, and to creat that socio-economic insight that allows us to see what, when, and also sometimes why. To me, that is extremely efficient compared to just guessing or walking up to a guy with a bomb strapped to his chest and politely asking why he is about to blow himself up. Agreed, though, that monitoring any and every citizen for the hopes of catching a terrorist would be inefficient indeed.
After September 11th, an al-Qaeda webspace was being monitored. Different parts of what was being monitored was registered using a Yahoo account, which the U.S. already had access to. They were quietly leaving things the way they were and simply watching what was going on, listening to potential attack strategy, dates, and enemy locations. Some good-intentioned American citizen used the password hint question and correctly guessed the Yahoo password, logged in, deleted everything, gained the password to their website and then hacked it to show some sort of patriotic message. All communications stopped. That was an example of targeted monitoring that often occurs (of course ruined in this case by good intentions.) Not all monitoring is about going after the vanilla citizen to weed out closet terrorist intentions.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
Red States?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
While I admit that it is inefficient on a global scale, I will attest to this being possible on a smaller scale having much more computing power than I. While maybe not the Internet in general, an isolated suspect network is very much filterable, even with a few terabytes of information (which is nothing. We had a terrabyte storage machine as a doorstop once.)
I was in a forensics mockup situation where the mock situation dealt with terrorists. Using standard Forensics software, I fed it a word list and pulled up evidence, even from deleted files on the target machine. Sure, "attack" "bomb" "infidel" and such and such were on there, but so were things like "Blair" and mis-spellings of words, and that actually pulled up more information than "bomb" or "weapon" did. It didn't take much time to index the machine and do this search.
Of course communications could be more veiled than that, but if you are on a targeted machine (as you seem to know, most of the monitoring is targeted and is not done on random citizens for the hell of it, so this is more for the general audience than a reply to the parent post), the INTEL guys are going to make it their business to pour over poems, symbols, etc. to find those communications.
With just one machine, a pre-prepared list of words, and a targeted attack, I pulled tons of information off of the target machine. Now, throw a more sophisticated suite at it, more computing power, and a growing list of words based off of those found on seized machines, and the hit/miss ratio goes up.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
they tell the company to send them a transcription of all chats..or ELSE!
or else what?
or else they will send FBI agents..and all that implies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What about messages that are only meaningful if you read them aloud, like this one:
"I am we Todd did. Sofa king we Todd did."
Infinite combinations, really.
But now your spam gets filtered by the spam filters.
Can we get a setting for stories with NYT posts so I don't have to see the constant whining about their registration? Suck it up and deal or don't post NYT links. I doubt anyone from their paper is hearing your complaints and for us they're gettin' old.
No sig for you!!
How hard is it to cross reference the info and come up with a statistical likelihood that they are a threat? Google doesn't have someone reading every search link.
You don't have to like it, but you'll still have to live with it. They can't take your free will... so use it! (especially if everyone can see it)
More to the point is that if TerroristMage1 is a known lead, you can tap all the communications of said person on the MUD, figure out whom they are talking to, and get IPs there, which might lead to more information. If TerroristMage2 were unknown to your choice of TLA, this would be a big find, and they could be monitored as well.
... and all of their contacts, ad infinatum?
Yes, but for every "terrorist" that person is talking to, he or she is probably talking to dozens if not hundreds of uninvolved people. Are you going to sift through all of their communications too
Ubiquitious Communications Monitoring isn't going to be very effective against terrorism. First of all, its never truly "ubiquitious", nor will it be anytime soon even at current technological levels, so there will always be groups small enough to stay under the radar and not be noticed.
A Terrorist cell of three or four people is too small to pick up this way except through random dumb luck (which can't be counted on), yet they could potentially destroy an entire city.
On the other hand, no political movement of three or four has the power to do much of anything (it must grow far larger than that). This sort of surveillance and control of communication is very effective at tracking nascient political movements as they become widespread, like, say, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the conservative movement of the 1980s, and the anti-monopoly movement (for example, the anti-patent, anti-copyright, anti-trust movements) of this decade.
This isn't about stopping terrorists or protecting the little guy against some random meyhem or atrocity. Its about preventing the birth of new political movements unappetizing to the current administration. The former is no threat to the Bush family et. al. (though it is to the rest of us to a small degree), but the latter, which would empower the rest of us, is a certain threat to the ruling cartels, sooner or later. That is what they are interested in stopping, and that is what this sort of ubiquitious monitoring CAN stop.
So, while terrorism won't be stopped this way, political reform probably will be stopped, and our ability to organize and disseminate information that runs counter to whomever is ruling at that time (probably the current bunch, since it is under their watch that this nonsense is being deployed) will be very effectively neutered.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
America is a big target, so they want the world to fear.
And are culture is starting to premeate through theirs, and our culture promote relegious tolorence*.
oh yeah,
And the US helped the Jews.
*Some would disagree, but I think as a whole we do.
I can look at an intersection and see a catholic church, mormon church, Jewish Temple, and a 'born again' church and they get along fine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Interesting. I just dug out the presentation I heard on Stego. This is not new and frankly, I am suprised that people don't hear about it except perhaps you aren't into anything nefarious, or in an employment position to catch those doing nefarious things. In fact, among child porn traders, this is a sad method where one image is inserted into another and used to "covertly" trade those images. (I can't think of the major case in which this was used... but there was a major child pornography case where this was an issue)
I have used a forensics suite that was able to detect many of the images on the machine with embedded data in them. The images were extracted and then cryptanalysis is necessary to decrypt. Frankly, I wish I remembered how it was able to detect those images, because they weren't compared against known images. It found them, and even presented what program was likely used to hide the data.
Some common steganalysis programs:
- Stego
- Jphswin
- S-tools
- Hide in Picture
- Stegdetect/Stegbreak
- OutGuess
There are three types of stego:
Substitution - Replaces redundant/insignificant data with covert data.
Injection - Inserts covert information into parts of overt files that are usually ignored.
Generation - The covert text itself is used to generate the overt message.
The program I used was able to find an example of each, IIRC.
But, the short of it is that this is being used:
"Lately, al-Qaeda operatives have been sending hundreds of
encrypted messages that have been hidden in files on digital
photographs on the auction site eBay.com....The volume of the
messages has nearly doubled in the past month, indicating to some
U.S. intelligence officials that al-Qaeda is planning another attack."
- USA Today, 10 July 2002
"Authorities also are investigating information from detainees that
suggests al Qaeda members -- and possibly even bin Laden -- are
hiding messages inside photographic files on pornographic Web
sites."
- CNN, 23 July 2002
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
I say... is your wife a bomber?
Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, saynomore, knowhatimean...
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Sorting through it is easy, just use Google Desktop (tm).
The swallows are coming in springtime.
I say, The swallows are coming in springtime.
"Embedding binary data into images is extremely easy and is impossible to distinguish visually from the original image(from what I was able to tell from testing). I'm wondering why we never hear anything about this? If anyone has any thoughts on why I am just being paranoid I would like to hear them."
I suppose I should also add that, in the article itself, "Shortly after Sept. 11, questions swirled around steganography, the age-old technique of hiding one piece of information within another. A digital image of a sailboat, for instance, might also invisibly hold a communiqué, a map or some other hidden data. A digital song file might contain blueprints for a desired target."
The article itself mentions it, and it is in the widely-read NYT. So, perhaps some of your questions would be answered were you to read the article. I am not trying to be an ass about this, but it would seem as though it would perhaps answer some of your questions.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
The web will be impossible to monitor. Millions of emails to scan would be too much of a monumental task to analyze and read each one of them. Simply impossible. For humans anyways. If computers were brought in, they may be able to do it but it would take a lot of time to scan everything communicated over the internet.
There are several constitutional issues here -
Under Katz v. US, 389 US 347 (1967), the Supreme Court held, in a 7-1 decision, that unauthorized electronic eavesdropping consitutes an unreasonable search and seizure in violation of the 4th Amendment. Accordingly, in order to engage in wiretapping, the authorities must have a search warrant. And, for a search warrant to issue, there must be probable cause (See 4th Amendment - "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause"). What does this mean?
Probable cause means just that - is it more probable than not that a particular person has engaged in criminal activity, or that elements of a crime might be found in a certain place (See 4th Amendment - "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized")
Mere suspicion that criminal activity is afoot does not equate to probable cause. It would appear that the blanket suspicion that criminal conversations take place on the internet, including the near complete inability to describe who is to be surveilled or what conversations are to be seized, cannot support an exception to the Warrant Clause in order to engage in wholesale surveillance.
In response to Katz, Congress enacted the Title III wiretapping act, giving federal and state authorities sweeping authority to wiretap. But even under this legislation, wholesale monitoring cannot avail itself.
This Act authorized the Attorney General, or similarly authorized official, to apply to any federal judge for an order allowing the interceptions of wire or oral communiations to gather evidence of certain enumerated crimes (essentially any felony involving incarceration of 1yr or more).
Probable cause, however, is still required. This showing of probable cause requires identification of the offense being investigated, that it has or will imminently be carried out, and a specification of the place and personto be surveilled, and a description of why other, lesser intrusive means cannot practically be used. In the event these elements are satisfied, a judge may issue a renewable 30-day order authorizing electronic surveillance. But in order to safeguard rights, the target of the surveillance must be given notice that he or she was monitored within 90 days of the termination of such surveillance.
The Act says surveillance should cease as soon as the info described in the warrant is obtained, and that monitoring officials should turn off surveillance whenever they believe something nonrelevant is transpiring.
There are a number of criticisms of this legislation. First, it allows continuous surveillance so long as the warrant is renewed - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, therefore intrusion becomes much more invasive than other means. Second, it may include innocent communications. Finally, the judges issuing the warrants often exhibit little restraint.
This Act has not been challenged under the 4th Amendment, although the Supreme Court has implicitly recognized its validity in two cases. It's requirement of a showing of probable cause still poses much difficulty for the open surveillance of all electronic communications, especially because "terrorist" will not satisfy the particularity requirement of the 4th Amendment.
It gets worse. Sec. 2511(3) of Title III authorized the President "to take such measures as he deems necessary to protect the Nation against actual or potential attack or other hostile acts by foreign powers, to obtain foreign intelligence information deemed essential to the security of the United States, or to protect national secutiryt information against foreign intelligence activities."
It is unclear whether and when the President may conduct warrantless wiretaps to protect national security. But Congress has given similar authority in other statutes. For instance, in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, government officials may authorize wiretapping without a court order if the surveillance is directed at communicati
One thing about online games, though, is that you're not guaranteed privacy. Game sysops can monitor any room in a game without the players knowing. What terrorist would risk accidental exposure because some MUD manager might get bored and start looking around for entertainment?
Besides, how many terrorist would even want to spend time in Everquest? They'd either react violently to the environment and crawl mumbling into a corner or it would consume their lives and they'd spend all their free time killing things online instead of in the real world.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Are there different departments on this? Perhaps different countries (I'd imagine Canada might have something similar).
While I'm guessing the majority of victims to be female (and thus the majority of impersonations), what happens if you get two agents trying to tag each other. That is, one is playing the "male part" and the other the "female part" and both suspect the other of being a criminal - has that ever happened?
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
The same technology that can monitor newbies in the fluffy-bunny level can monitor the Uber players in the jeweled-dragon level: a packet sniffer and protocol analyzer.
Edith Keeler Must Die
...make your quotas of public beatings...
Barney, is that you?
Freedom: "I won't!"
SILC is basically like IRC, but with secure key authentication. public key cryptography for private messages. Channel crypto, etc.
It's what I use, and it's probably a popular choice of organized crime and terrorists.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Do you think they are aware of this new trend whereby people meet up in person and talk... Surely this is a threat to national security!!!
For heavens sake yes 9/11 is a tragedy in which thousands of people died. 3000 in America and 300,000 in the middle east... but they dont count do they. As long as Ma and Pa Baker feel safe that a doity Ahrab isnt going to fly a plane into their trailer park in Nebraska...
kin242.net
Most New York Times articles are available without registration. There's a service that provides links that bypass it. Just go here, submit the original URL, and you get back a URL that bypasses registration.
Ok so you are deferentiating between the written word and the spoken word. I still don't see the difference. So he wrote some web site stuff. If it was malicious code that attacked other machines, I would have to back off. But putting your words in writing on a web site is tantamount to speaking them aloud in my eyes. Where is the harm? I might not agree with them, I might not like them, but they are still just words. Since when is writing words for a web page synonymous with 'offering aid to'. That's a stretch in my eyes. A website cannot go out and prostelatize. A web site requires people to go to it. Because my palm pilot can run a personal web server, and I write my docs in HTML for compatability, and I write "I hate bush", am I now a 'enemy combatant' because I 'ran a hostile website'. Don't you see what is happening? The picture is being painted to make a simple act look heinous and overtly hostile when it is nothing more than a simple protest to show his oblique opposition to the current administrations actions. I too am diametrically opposed to many of this administration's actions, if I speak out about it, or write it up in a blog, what will happen to me? There should not even be a question as to that answer. It should be nothing. This article shows that the is clearly not the case.
Here is something that I was taught a good number of years ago, and I have yet to find very many instances where it is not true. When you interview someone, the clothes they wear on that first meeting will be the best clothes they will ever wear in their career with you. It will never get better. So if you think they are on shaky ground in the interview with that, then you better toss the candidate. What does that have to do with this issue? The same thing applies to a news article. The news agency is always going to use up their best 'clothing' for the main article. There isn't going to be a lot more behind it for more articles. If there was more or better facts to see, they would have used them. An employee is not going to wear better clothes after they are hired. A journalist is not going to present better facts after the first article.
To state that there must be more that we don't know is only admitting that it looks outwardly wrong UNLESS there is more to it. I agree wholeheartedly. I am going to make the assumption that there IS NOT any more to it, because there generally isn't. In fact generally speaking, what you read is usually more than what the truth really represents. Someone has already 'fluffed' things to make them more enticing. So I think this IS a big red flag that we have to face in the US. We cannot speak out unless it is in line with the administrations belief system. What is that belief system? We can only draw lines where we see things like this take place. We now know that helping someone the administration doesn't like, build a web page is an arrestable offense, and a bad offense at that.
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There is no freedom of speech if you are too afraid to speak.
#1: your boss was a pussy.
#2:You have freedom of speech so long as speech is not prohibited. If someone is too much of a coward to speak their minds, without fear of government prosecution, then that's a personal problem.
Some people are afraid of heights. That doesn't mean I'll be arrested for standing on the top of a mountain.
In the next few decades, centralized communication (computer to ISP to computer) will be replaced by direct communicatin (cell phone to cell phone), or if not, at least desentralized (cell phone to nearby cell phone to far away cell phone). Even if they do manage to get a monitoring system instated, it'll be obsolete in a matter of years.
But it doesn't matter, because there's no way they can get away with something as blatantly 1984-ish. You think the millions of twenty-something girls want the government listening in on their phonesex with far-removed boyfriends?
What a freaking laugh this rag is!
First they pump up the volume about Iraqi WMDs, courtesy of the neocon groupie Judith Miller, now this.
In fact, they've been running stories IIRC about how "bad" the Internet is (child porn, identify theft, credit card fraud, ad nauseum) for years.
It's called "morons in the paper industry scared of technology" and "wannabe dictators".
Fuck the New York Times - and the rest of the so-called "journalism" crowd.
There's a saying, "Those than can, do - those that can't, teach."
Well, "those that can't do or teach - write about it." Sums up "journalism" perfectly.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
http://news.com.com/On+the+Internet,+a+web+of+dark +alleys/2100-1028_3-5497820.html
I think we should make some sort of recommendation to all people who post stories with links that have mandatory registration.
Quite frequently, a search on http://news.google.com will provide an alternative source with the same article without the silly login.
Beetle B.
That's funny, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has them the same (Choose 'Unemployment Rate - Seasonally Adjusted'; the astute reader might also want to compare Clinton's second term with Bush's first).
Note also that there are an increasing number of nonworkers not captured in these stats (NYT Archive reprint).
#!
What about physical dark alleys? Two terrorists could walk into a dark alley and talk. And no one would hear them!
How is this any different? People can talk online and the government might not hear it. But two terrorists can just as easily meet in person and not be heard.
Why should the Internet be any different?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Think about this: how much anti-american sentiment is expressed on Slashdot every day? If someone were to say "Tommorrow, we bomb the Pentegon at 15:30 EST" but wraps it in sarcasm, babble, etc how many here would really take it seriously? Maybe if they did it in humor?
The terrorists are better served if they don't hide in the dark alleys of the net -- that is where the feds are looking. Blend in and hide in plain sight. THAT is what we should fear.
Think I'm full of bull? Consider this: did I make the bombing the pentegon statement earlier in this message because I was making a point in the post or because I was communicating with terrorists? The point is you don't really know. If I were on some hidden radical islamic site saying it you'd be a bit more sure. Plain sight is where the FBI needs to look.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
The stove is on too high, we don't want to burn the biscuts. Oh yea, also The magic bananna jumped over the lazy dog.. Pass it on.
I can see it now, they got enough folks to read it all.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Not only is this way too Big Brotherish, but there are times when the government can't listen.
Suppose I'm arrested for dealing crack. I e-mail my lawyer (encrypted if I have half a clue), and say, "I'm not sure they can convict me, but I want to cover my bases anyway, since I did do it. I want to rat out my supplier in return for immunity." This is covered under the attorney-client privilege, and cannot be used against me.
Similarly, if I afterwards e-mail my priest, informing him that I've been dealing crack to schoolchildren and would like to repent for my sins, it's also privileged speech. (Actually, it's a bit dubious; what I say in a confession is privileged, but I'm not sure saying something before a confession is, though I believe the courts have often held that if you think you're making a confesswion, they'll view it that way.)
Same goes for when I e-mail my doctor, telling him that I'm a chronic cocaine abuser. Patient-client privilege means you can't bug our conversation and use it against me.
There are times when Big Brother can't listen to me, as much as it'd like. And though it seems we're on a slippery slope, civil liberties haven't been completley outweighed by fear of terrorists yet.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Just use this line on the girls...
If you don't swallow It's like the terrorists have already won!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
It's just a form of intimidation. Call uit deterrence if you want it to sound nice. Simply put, the idea is that people make a little risk/benefit calculation before deciding tro break the rules. If benefit > risk of getting caught * harm of punishment, I go for it.
The problem with this model is that it assumes that (1) the "bad actor" is making a rational calculation, and (2) that we can actually measure the harms as he calculates them.
Problem with (1): people do not act with mathematical rationality (not that there's anything wrong with that...usually). If I measured the full costs and benefits, I really wouldn't ahve that second cup of coffee. I wouldn't buy that lottery ticket, etc.
Problem with (2): Cost/benefit for stealing $50 looks different for a healthy person, a starving person, and an addict in withdrawal.
That sounds great, that's all we need is a "98 pound weekling" foreign policy. I can just hear you teaching this to your children: "Son, last night a great number of hornets built a nest just outside the front door. You need to walk very slowly when you leave so as to minimize the number of stings that you get." "Why don't we just get rid of it Dad?" "Well son, if we started to remove the nest the hornets would get incrediblly angry and it would be a little dangerous, and besides, a couple of stings every day aernt so bad. We should be thankful that they only sting us a little."
What a load of crap. Anyone that subscribes to the "Pay the mafia their 'insurance'" mentality and thinks that it brings them security is only fooling themselves.
False security is in no way a substitute of freedom. Cowboy-up man.
Analysis wouldn't be that hard. Almost none of it would be done by hand. You'd use software to scan for anything suspicious and only make humans look at the suspicious activity.
Suspicious activity could include everything from certain IPs and keywords to text that seemed likely to contain hidden codes.
I've done a lot of AI-related coding and I think this project, while requiring a lot of computing power, would not be that difficult. It'd be on par with creating a Google for chat logs.
Not that I'd support anyone actually doing this. I just think it's better if people remember that this CAN be done and thus remember that they should be afraid of this being done.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Just post the secret text up on the online version of NYT.. No one will read it there..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
And i'm using my karma bonus just to let you know.
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
Look they quote some dirty jew in from israel, cant help but notice that the whole thing is retaliation of jews against muslims. must they all jews be dead.
By monitoring the plain text you're sending and receiving as you play while it passes through one of a dozen routers between you and the MUD server? You've never heard of Carnivore, have you? Just because to you there's a logical virtual world created which "contains" you and this other guy as you chat away, you're not really "there." you're just three IPs (you, the other guy, the server) and you're all passing traffic on various ports in plain text. The only things that matter in this scenario are: IPs, Ports, Text. Level 50? Doesn't matter. Elf? Nope, doesn't matter either. Grand Wizard? Sorry, no, also doesn't matter. IP. Port. Text.
If you meet somebody on IRC you can connect to them directly with DCC (DCC stands for Direct client-to-client). No intermediaries, no servers, just you and the other guy. Now suppose DCC comes with built-in 2048 bit encryption. This is not two guys playing everquest talking about making pipe bombs (again, in plain text...), this is bigger. This is more along the lines of what the government doesn't like: secret communications they can't listen in on but are right under their nose. Tangentially, I bet that a lot of terrorism is organized on IRC networks.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I think the government with this "war on terror" is trying its damnedest to piss up a rope. The volume of information that passes over wires across the net is far too voluminous and far too chaotic to produce any tangible results, in my opinion. If there are any, I suspect they will appear after the fact, as they once again try to piece together what led up to an incident, rather than exercising any degree of competency in preventing it in the first place. Then, just as with Bush's "but we THOUGHT there were weapons of mass destruction," they'll change the spin..."see, look at all the information we have now with our ability to spy on absolutely everyone, for absolutely any reason" They'll conveniently leave out the fact that it didn't help accomplish a damn thing, and we'll go on believing that it's all necessary in order to produce results that we'll never see.
The allusion to dark alleys is a gross canard meant to obscure the fact that the internet is the body and soul of interpersonal communication on a planetary scale. This is unacceptable to big business. It really is unacceptable to have communication among large bodies of the worker class anywhere as far as business is concerned. The idea that the 'common unwashed herd' of 'uncontrolled rabble' or 'classless individuals' could talk amongst themselves about anything other than bodily functions actually horrifies the business class. Look how businesses discourage communication in the workplace. Look how wages are kept secret one from another and how employees are coopted into participating in there own scamming. "Why if you tell your co-worker how much you make, your co-worker will be jealous and hate you!"... or so the story goes.
Remember "The Man With The Hoe" from poet Edwin Markham, where the wealthy contemplate the 'dumb terror' will rise up and strike them. Now how is that 'dumb terror' going to rise up if he cannot talk. But look! If this creature, this being created in the image of God actually possesses a soul given by that same God and a mind given by the same, then how can he really be 'dumb' unless the poet meant that he was forced into not being credibly able to speak by the class that oppressed him and make him do labor that the rulers would not or could not perform.
No, communication amongst we the lower classes is that which to be feared by the rulers. It is no accident that false 'issues' and red herrings will be raised in order to stop our communication. Democracy is messy. It is better we suffer many would be criminals among us than to burn down the fine structure that is the internet on the specious excuse of 'getting rid of a few mice'!
I don't know about internet and network security, but anyone can talk on the phone withouth being eavesdroped by NSA or FBI using an application such as the one at http://www.raseac.com.br. There is even a freeware!
Look up "Alternative 3" to get a general idea of what's in store. --Or play Halflife 2 for the cartoon version with 'War of the World' aliens standing in for whatever the heck is coming down the pike.
Neither version is too far off the mark, I'm afraid. It's going to be interesting times, to say the least! I sort of hope I live long enough to see the monsters land! The subconscious of the world has been preparing for this for the last hundred years or so.
Oh yeah. --A tip from a survivor of WWII I spoke with today. When the enemy army advances, don't run with the mob in the opposite direction. If you do that, you guarantee being on the wrong side of the front-line, which is going to catch up. Being bombed and shot at sucks. The advice of this old European damme was to stay put, keep low, and let the army advance past your position. She only had to hide for about two days and then the coast was clear. After that, it was just a matter of riding out the war for the next few years.
I don't know how that advice applies to current plans and technology. But it's the pattern of thinking which counts, I suspect. If you think out of the box, then you're not boxed in!
-FL
-FL
The dogs are barking, yet the camels are silently walking the desert. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
Coincidentally, one of my favorite recipes for remote Windows work involves OpenVPN plus VNC--usually RealVNC server on the Windows boxes, and (whatever) VNC client on my Linux machines. Surprisingly responsive, especially when you set the VNC options that disable windows-dressing GUI crap like background picture, etc. Beautiful for helping friends and family out remotely--as long as they have network connectivity, you're solid gold.
Doesn't work so well for helping with DSL installations, but...
All of this talk about how the US is "messing with their oil wells" is ridiculous. People forget in this equation that America is the largest customer of mideast oil and I frankly think we could get better service than having a bunch of muk-muks slam planes into our buildings, drive bomb loaded busses into our buildings, push our citizens in wheelchairs off of boats, and of course blow up our planes.
If Arab terrorists wanted freedom, they would have signed the Oslo deal and gotten a Palestinian state. There would be freedom of speech in arabic places. The hardliners in Iran wouldn't be overturning Democratic reforms.
The fact of the matter is that Arab terrorists believe that Democracy is evil and freedom is literally a sin because it goes against fundamentalist islamic law. I actually asked a mullah on the American islamic web site why there was no separation of church and state and his response was that islam is a practical religion that serves all needs, therefor, there is no need for other religions.
Nope, terrorists do not want freedom. What they want is absolute power. They want to destroy western civilization, as they have been trying to do since the first muk-muks invaded France in the 700s (and were stopped at Tours). Pretending otherwise is ignorant.
I take Bin Laden's statements as the bs that they are. You on the other hand have proved yourself a fool. Hitler used to say all the time that he did not want war, if only we would meet his demands. You argue for appeasement, just like Chamberlin did in 1938 when he carved up Czechoslovakia to avoid a war.
This is my sig.
Jesus Fucking Christ!
Haven't you heard of the fucking "Preview" button? Can't you proofread your fucking post at least once? This isn't fucking IRC, for Christ sake.
That should fucking be "for Christ's sake". Fucking sorry. I guess I should have fucking clicked the fucking "Preview" button, and proofread my fucking post at least once. :)
The way out is to avoid these vendors and use only Free or Open Source Software. Check the code yourself or hire someone you can rely on to do so. See points 29 - 32 in the European Parliament resolution on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications.
That applies to all software, not just mail.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
There was an episode of The West Wing in which a girl came and asked for a posthumous pardon for her grandfather who had been accused of being a spy and convicted of some lesser related charge, but the government couldn't convict him because it didn't have enough evidence. However, she wanted his family name to be cleared because her father was going to die in the next 6 months and he had felt his family's name had been tarnished because of the event.
Upon investigating, it was found that this person was in fact a spy, and people had been killed because of him. The character who found this out was shown classified documents (with the classified information blacked out) proving that he was in fact a spy. This evidence had not been presented in the court trial however.
The reason? It would have let the enemy know that we had broken their cryptography, and it was determined more important to keep it a secret that we had broken their crypto than to convict a single spy using the decrypted evidence, because keeping that information hidden would allow us to continue to easily monitor their communications. (The lesson to be learned here is to never assume that encryption affords privacy. So long as you assume so, you are setting yourself up for a trap.)
The point this episode made was that we typically only hear about the government's failures, and even that only if we're lucky. Do you really believe we would hear about their successes? The cost of that information being made public would be astronomical from a national security standpoint.
It's interesting to note that part of the reason we won the cold war against the Soviet Union was that Reagan had convinced them that we had a functional SDI program when in fact we did not. Wars are not won entirely by battle, they are won by information and disinformation as well.
I don't know if the episode was based on an actual event or not, but it's an interesting philisophical point to think about nonetheless.
That said, I still don't support the idea of monitoring everything. I'll take liberty, and the risks so inherent thanks.
Keith D.
You are correct. I agree with you on nearly all of you points. I did not read that he 'offer to aid their communications' but perhaps writting literature for them could be construed that way. I also do believe that if the young man had a demonstratable 'intent' to eventually carry out an act of terrorism, that steps would need to be taken. I think that a protest against our government and an intent to cause harm to it are distiguishably different acts.
Where does my fear come from? I personnally don't think we had ought to be in Iraq any longer. I was for the initial war, I was for the occupation in the beginning. I have changed my mind as I watch the death tool of young American men and women rise at what I consider a staggering rate. I think if our president continues to handle the situation as poorly as I believe he has that it is my responsibility to speak out against his actions. I just see this arrest as a small step in the direction of giving the government the precident of being able to suppress any such condesention by flagging it as 'aiding and abbeting'. In my opinion, I think that they are increasingly taking the stance that anyone who disagrees is a 'bad' person and needs to be taken down. It is scary to me, because of how I feel about what is going on. I don't feel that I can speak freely without reprocussions. That, in my eyes, is a sad state of affairs.
I personally want to thank you for your level headed, fact based, non accusational response. It is a true joy to me to be able to speak to someone about this kind of stuff without them becoming obsessively angery. Thank you.
Please, define "freedom". If you mean by "freedom" such economical and political system that USA has, then I agree with you. It's not what the terrorists want. However, by "freedom" I meant more something like "autonomy", freedom from oppression as a nation, freedom from political, military and economical pressure from outside states.
The society they want certainly isn't one in which I would choose to live, but somehow I still feel that I would rather be oppressed by my countrymen than the richest, most powerful (and unfortunately currently also the most dangerous and least intelligible) country in the world.
Here you may have a point, but your other comments confuse history with modern politics, and see issues very one-eyedly. US of A has killed in its wars more innocent civilians than any terrorist group or all of them combined will ever be able to kill.
concerns over the myriad ways in which two people (i.e., terrorists) can communicate
the abbreviation "i.e." (or Id est, in its full latin) means "that is to say" or "in this case". the best way to remember it is to imagine it stands for "in essence". I think the abbreviation you're looking for is "e.g."; Exempli gratia, meaning "for example."
--The Klif dv