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Pakistan Tries To Ban Encryption
An anonymous reader writes "Pakistan has a new Telecoms Law going into effect, which requires widespread monitoring of internet usage. In response, new reports are saying that the country is banning encryption, including VPNs, because it would interfere with the ability of ISPs to monitor internet usage."
...now I just have to get hold of a few Pakistani bank IP addys, set up some sort of listener, and...
Oh, you thought SSL would still be around after this little law gets into effect?
(obviously I'm kidding, at least about wanting to do any such thing. OTOH, there are quite a few folks who probably wouldn't be kidding at all).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
no more secrets. at all. this time I mean it. now go back to putting your secrets on the internet, in plain text!
The particulars may vary, but the essence is that you try to forbid people to have secrets from you.
Once you see it in this light, the paradoxical futility becomes clear.
That'll work about as well as outlawing prostitution has worked for the last several thousand years.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Didn't France ban encryption at least on some strengths years ago? I'm not too familiar with what happened after that, and a quick Googling is just bringing up old hits from when the ban was enacted. Anybody care to fill in the reality of what happens in such a case?
They might actually hide the location of Osama Bin Laden....oh, wait.....
Does anyone remember when an article was posted a while back highlighting techniques for practical stenography based encryption for network traffic? Does anyone remember all the snarky comments and derision because you would never need that kind of encryption? This is how it begins.
They're interested in content rather than b/w utilisation. I suggest you RTFA...no-matter how preposterous it may sound.
Right after hundreds of top secret governments docs are leaked.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...and I thought the US government was clueless.
By "interfere with the ability of ISPs to monitor internet usage", presumably they mean collecting all their customers' account numbers, PINs, login ids, passwords, etc.
The major effect of banning encryption would be to make electronic commerce impossible. If anyone alone the data path can intercept your names, numbers, and passwords, then people will learn very quickly that the Internet simply can't be used for anything that involves a transfer of money.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Remember that it wasn't that long ago that the U.S. was trying to peek in on you via the Clipper Chip. After being soundly trounced, they got a little smarter about it. The NSA owns the patent on DES. and can peek in on you anytime they like with your "triple DES encrypted" device. Comfy?
And us government contractors may also have to stop being able to do some work there as well.
In Ruritania we had better policy. We banned decryption.
You could encrypt as you like.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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In that case please send me all your personal information...
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
any bets this gives some idiot in the US Gov't an idea and they add this to the next save the children legislation.
Presumably you've forgotten the Clipper Chip?
This isn't about how much they are using the internet it's about what they are using it for. It's kinda hard to determine what a user is using the internet for if all their traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel leading out of the country.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
..with that..
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.
I hope they make good use of it.
As Pakistan turns into Talibanistan it will become a massive threat to the region.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
man...if this is this is the case...im closing all my bank accounts...don't want them GAS HOLES snooping around my account...and yes im from Pakistan. USA PLEASE INVADE US !
That'll work about as well as outlawing prostitution has worked for the last several thousand years.
Outlawing prostitution has worked, if your goal was to have a reason to arrest prostitutes....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Duh.
Gently reply
They're interested in content rather than b/w utilisation. I suggest you RTFA...no-matter how preposterous it may sound.
Instead of generic encrypted traffic now users will to resort to stenography. Just embed encrypted traffic in otherwise boring video streams and pictures.
I take it no one does any actual work over the internet in Pakistan?! How about banking, stock trades, online purchases? How ass-backwards is this country?
You forgot the last part. It should read: I can only say I'm glad they're on our side, when it is convenient for them to be.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
They have the internet there, you uniformed, racist, insensitive clod! It's Afghanistan where they have just a couple rocks and a donkey, some poppies, and AK-47 rifles.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Any company I've ever worked at has encrypted traffic outside the private network on a regular basis. It's just common sense. If you don't do it, you're potentially leaking all your plans to the competition. No encryption? That would be like businesses in previous generations sending all their interoffice memos on postcards.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not to mention that most Pakistanis do not have access to the internet, if they even have electricity at all. It's a desperately poor country.
Because after every terrorist exploit, the security agencies make threatening noises about Skype (most favourite) followed by Gmail and then mail in general. How to explain to our dumbos that banning automobiles is no solution to hit-and-run accidents !
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
Note that he never said HE had nothing to hide....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
That *is* their internet. You put your packets in the donkeys, whack them with the rocks, and away they go. The latency's a bitch, and there's pretty rough packet loss when the donkeys get concussed from the rocks or get lost in the mountains. Still, the bandwidth is surprisingly respectable.
This will just continue the trend of driving smart and educated Pakistanis out of Pakistan. The USA has a massive opportunity to welcome them with open arms. Are you a Pakistani who is well educated and fed up with corruption and religious hysteria? Please come and raise your family here in America.
Wow, way to make sure your country can never have any outsourcing jobs. No business with a clue would ever set up operations in a country where all traffic has to be open to corporate espionage.
They're going to be in the technological dark ages forever if this persists, vs. following India into the cheap outsourcing market.
Sure, since hardly anyone can read shorthand these days, that should work. I'm not sure how to get it encoded into e-mails & such, though.
It's not encrypted. We're just sending random, meaningless strings to one-another.
As long as you like goats in your porn, totally.
What if the government hands out the death penalty for possession of steganography software?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How do donkeys compare to pigeons?
Well of course the US would never introduce mandatory data logging logging and retention https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/house-committee-approves-bill-mandating-internet
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
Not to nitpick, but what you're talking about is called "steganography".
Stenography is entirely a different thing.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
They have the internet, and what's more they have access to Stack Overflow, which is why every last fucking one of them is posting absolutely clueless questions which amount to little more than `uhh..hello friendz...uh...i am to be writing iPhone/Android app...i need you to write full tutorial on my app so I can sell it on markety only bugs not working so also plz fix this email me yes?`.
Please make Stack Overflow only accessible via https!
Isn't this one of those countries that's supposedly afraid of foreign agents infiltrating their country and attacking their citizens? At least, that's the excuse totalitarian regimes always use for imprisoning and torturing their own citizens. I'd say this is a call for some actual foreign assailants to launch an attack on Pakistan. All internet traffic is unencrypted. Let's steal some government accounts and passwords. Let's read the government's emails. Let's hack into their public utilities and make 'em explode. There's all kinds of havoc that can be done.
Pakistan is evidently more concerned about its own law-abiding citizens than Chinese hackers, Russian mafia, and the American CIA combined.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Since all data can be represented in binary, two rocks is all you need. The donkey can then serve as the transport layer. The connection can be encrypted by picking up more rocks on the way.
Yeah, quit white-washing it. He was also a liar, a thief, and probably sexually got off on killing.
What's "encrypted traffic"? Did they define that too? Like, say, "every traffic we can't instantly read"? Then say sayonara to online gaming as well, twice so if it's a MMO which by default encrypts traffic to make cheating and botting harder. And pretty much any traffic that's not following one of the well known protocols, which also means no "nonstandard" remote control software, no file transfer, no streaming, no ... you get the picture.
Talking about streaming, how do you plan to sell streamed movies online if you must not encrypt them? I mean, just to make sure all those pesky pirates don't "crack" the protocol and implement their own solution? No need to offer any computer program that decodes it, as long as there is a TV that can, the protocol can be reversed if it is not allowed to be encrypted.
No VPN? How do you convince the companies to stay instead of moving to, say, India? It's not like it's a far move, and there's plenty of equally qualified staff there. And if we learned anything from corporate business, it's that relocating companies once we don't like the laws anymore is a matter of months. Tops.
Good idea? I kinda doubt it. And while it may work for Pakistan, I somehow cannot see this becoming reality in any country where business and entertainment are more dependent on the internet. Both companies and people would quickly get angry at the mere idea of trying to push something like that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Memo Australian Government: this is how you make your intergoogle filter work. It comes with the advantage of completely screwing up any credible e-commerce in the country, too, which is handy when you want your economy to be all about being someone else's quarry.
Athy, athier, athiest.
They have the internet there?
Our office in Islamabad gets a speedtest result of 100mbit from a local server, and gets between 20 to 32mbit to a server in the UK.
you mean steganography right?
Probably the one country I would say "Go for it", and not get my back all up about privacy etc...
I would, should I live in Pakistan, but I don't, and given all that has happened over say the last 10 years... Go nuts.
That said, nothing to say the government would actually act responsible anyway, or that this would actually be very enforceable. Odds are the people that want to do it would just become very good at hiding it.