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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."
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
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
The Internet: Where men are men, women are men, and little girls are FBI agents.
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
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
But who's going to read all those logs? If there are 1 million people online at any given point of time, you're going to need about 1 million people reading logs. The task would be overwhelming.
Throw some nice 2048-bit RSA encryption in there, and the whole thing is impossible.
You know, it's stuff like this that the terrorists want. They want us to lose our freedoms to overzealous anti-terrorism laws, they want us to live in fear. Suggestions like this article must make Bin Laden smile.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
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.
What you have hit upon is a concept in Political Science known as the Carceral (spelling may be off). Discueed at length by philosopher Michel Foucault (pronounced Foo-co) The basic concept is that, because you are always subject to monitoring and can not know when you are being watched, you will always behave like you're being watched.
The idea was first set forth as a method of perfectly controlling a factory. The premise was that a manager or observer would sit at some central station observing employees who he could see but who could not see him. As the employees could be under scrutiny at any given time, they had no choice but to assume that they were always under scrutiny.
The Carceral is a prison, not for the mind, but of the mind. Have you ever stopped at a red light when there was no one for miles? That's the classic example of the Carceral in action.
We see this all around us, every hour of every day. The RIAA uses it to deter file traders. The Federal Government uses it to deter tax cheats. Walmart uses it to prevent shoplifting.
The online world is a different place, however. Security and scrutiny are something the individual has as much power to prevent as the observer has to employ. Use of sophisticated encryption systems is within the grasp of many users. Moreover, the huge volume of traffic does make monitoring even a meaningful portion hugely difficult.
Remember, the challenge is not to monitor all the traffic on the Internet, but to monitor enough that people will assume that you can monitor it all. Just as the RIAA can't sue every file trader, the Feds can't monitor every bit and byte that flows over the wires. That said, the RIAA can monitor enough to make you think twice about loading up a P2P client, and the Feds might be able to monitor enough to make terrorist organizations choose a less convenient, less efficient, and less sophisticated method of communication. That in and of itself is a victory.
The consequences for the rest of us will be just another casualty in this war on terror. Chalk it up there with free speech, privacy, and equal protection under the law.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
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.
Amazon.com does a pretty fucking good job of offering me other books I "might be interested in."
...
Well, I personally find myself often breaking out in laughter at some of the things they suggest for me. Granted, some of their suggestions are good. But others are truly bizarre, and I find myself wondering why they would link me to that.
Now, with amazon.com, I can just chuckle and go on to what I'm looking for. But when it comes to government investigators, such things aren't funny. You can end up in jail indefinitely without trial because of your "associations". Or, more subtly, you can be put on lists and locked out of things like potential good jobs because of the suspicion that you are linked to someone or something that the current administration doesn't like. And those links will be generated by software that's probably even flakier than amazon's.
Example: Some years back, when my wife was in grad school, she made friends with a Russian woman who was there (Boston University) on a scholarship. The woman discovered she was pregnant soon after coming to the school, and when delivery time came, my wife was handy and gave her a ride to the hospital. Even more fun, after the birth, my wife helped out a bit by doing things like picking up the baby pictures - and paying with a credit card.
Ever since then, we've been getting junk-mail catalogs for baby/children things, and the catalogs have followed the child's age. We mostly think this is funny, as do most of the people we tell about it.
But we are aware that there's a potential problem here. The databases show that we have a close personal connection to this Russian woman. Today that doesn't mean much. 30 years ago, it would have put us on some seriously-bad government lists. 20 years from now, who knows? Especially when you consider that, when the kid reaches 18 years, he will have a choice of which citizenship he wants to claim. Depending on how things go in Russia, he could well make the rational decision to be an American. Naturally, we'd welcome him and help him, though the clique in the White House then might not.
An even funnier part of the story is that we learned a year or so after the birth that the people at the hospital apparently had a bit of confusion. Since the mother was accompanied by another woman rather than a man, they put my wife's name in the "father/husband" slot. Her name could be a man's name, though it's usually female. And Boston-area medical people are known for their helpfulness towards people in "non-traditional" family arrangements. We've told some of our gay friends about this, and they think it's hilarious that my wife is "father to a Russian baby".
But we do have grounds to be nervous about what might happen when, say, Pat Robertson becomes president, and sets up a program to purge the nation of gays. Will the database say that we're part of the problem? I'd guess that they say this right now, though our current leader merely wants to prevent gays from getting married or insured, and isn't talking about jailing or killing them. And even if they figure out that the birth certificate is wrong, investigations would show that we do have gay friends.
If you look at the history of US government subversive lists, there's good grounds for worry here. Right now, we may think it's all funny. And it gives us lots of cred in "liberal" (and gay;-) circles. But we're both computer geeks, and know well how screwy databases can be. We've both worked on them and experienced the frustration of keeping the data sane. We understand how hopeless it is to expect government or corporate databases to contain only valid information. And we're following stories like this one
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Well, I'm a server programmer for a very large, very well-known massivly multiplayer on-line game. We're in the process now of developing the next generation of servers for this game, targeted to be released at the end of next year.
Our legal department has informed me that I am required by the provisions of the USA PATRIOT act to provide a back-door that will allow law enforcement to enter and view any conversation taking place in any of the servers, including private conversations, without being observed. I must also provide a way for the chat, including private chat, to be logged, and we must keep those logs for at least 6 months.
Since chat through our servers cannot be encrypted, there is no 128 bit option.
Big brother is watching you, friends.
Really, bin Laden could care less if you live in fear or spend all day high. All you infidels are going to hell anyway. What he wants is to affect American foreign policy. (Which is going to plan.)