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"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. =====
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??
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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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
...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
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
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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
You must not have heard of a search function. Besides, AI can do some of the reading as well.
The question is, do you know why reality is shifting in that direction?
Every country, especially a large a powerful country, needs a fascist government every once in a while, just to teach the moron part of the population to value their freedom. US is long overdue:-)/.
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.
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.
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.
Notice that when people put phrases like "making bombs" and "weapons-grade plutonium" in their posts, they feel the need to explicitly add that they aren't terrorists. Because in the back of our minds we all know or at least suspect that everything we post on the web is being monitored, filtered and scrutinized for suspicious content, and we don't want any trouble, right? We claim to be free to speak our minds, but still we can't resist tipping our white hats to an unseen big brother who might not like what we said. There's a difference between freedom of speech and being sure not to say any of the wrong things.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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!!
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]
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.
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
I'm a terrorist and planning to overthrow the government. I just need a load of explosives and some weapons grade plutonium so I can make a dirty bomb to hold the government hostage until I can assasinate the president.
I am trolling
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.
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.
You're missing my point.
If the FEAR of being punished prevents people from speaking, then freedom of speech has essentially been revoked.
There are already people who are afraid not only of speaking, but of listening as well. The culture of fear that's being encouraged is as damaging to the overall political process.
You don't need to monitor everyone and throw them in jail if you can convince them that they will be.
Even if there's no real danger of arrest, and YOU know that and act accordingly, doesn't remove the fact that other Americans are keeping silent out of fear.
You can take the narrow view of "They're cowards, and can be left out anyway," but there's a very real danger.
If most people expect to be arrested for political dissent, then there will be little to no real resistance when it really does start to happen.
It's the frog in water analogy. Put a frog in lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat until it boils. If you go slowly enough, the frog will end up dead.
The fear of punishment for dissent is the leading edge of this process. It's whittling away at the people who might have stood up to oppression.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA