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Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist
schwit1 passes on this snippet from Public Intelligence: "A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity. The document, part of a program called 'Communities Against Terrorism,' lists the use of 'anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address' as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity. The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using 'software to hide encrypted data in digital photos' or other media. In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone 'overly concerned about privacy' or attempting to 'shield the screen from view of others' should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities. ... The use of PGP, VPNs, Tor or any of the many other technologies for anonymity and privacy online are directly targeted by the flyer, which is distributed to businesses in an effort to promote the reporting of these activities."
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt, Google CEO
"[There's an] error in logic that leads to short-sighted conceptions of privacy like Schmidt's. ... Google, governments, and technologists need to understand more broadly that ignoring privacy protections in the innovations we incorporate into our lives not only invites invasions of our personal space and comfort, but opens the door to future abuses of power." - EFF
Can you believe that the Internet was once considered a place to escape identity? Where anonymity reigned? It's pretty amazing in retrospect how quickly that changed, and the way people are now trained to reveal everything on Facebook and Twitter is creating a society that doesn't understand the value and the power of their personal information. They're willing to reveal all, to act as better products for advertisers and to avoid suspicion from overbearing governments.
These might be signs of someone being a terrorist. It's just that 99.9% aren't and you're basically taking away privacy from everyone by treating the use of such tools as being suspicious. It's exactly what terrorists want to achieve.
"Like privacy? You may be a terrorist!"
It's thinking like that which risks turning me into a terrorist.
I remember the loathsome brochures passed around in the Government during the Reagan / G.H.W. Bush drug wars years. They basically boiled down to
- anyone acting strangely might be on drugs, and
- anyone not acting strangely might be on drugs, and covering it up.
Sounds like the DOJ is falling down the same rathole once again.
Welcome privacy advocates to the Accused of Being A Terrorist While Doing Nothing Wrong Club. Take a seat over there next to the Photographers (because terrorists will really cart around a DSLR and tripod in their terrifying terroristic travels).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"Suspicious or coded writings, use of code word sheets, cryptic ledgers, etc"
To the average citizen, most programming languages would fit this.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
My grand parents knew friends who were arrested as they were suspected communists during the witch hunt years McArthur was going after people who simply had an opinion about the government...
Previewing comments are for sissies!
So this means that anytime I am at a public place and fire up a VPN to access work materials I am engaged in terrorist activities? Hopefully tech companies will shed some light over how absurd the FBI and DoJ are being on this.
"Suspicious communications using VOIP or communicating through a PC game" Seriously!? Communicating through a videogame? By that definition every single child who plays online computer games that allow them to talk to others is a potential threat. I wonder what that means for all those who play Modern Warfare and the like? Maybe they're TRAINING to be terrorists! The US lawmakers sicken me.
This is why everyone should use such tools and practices, all the time.
I guess I am a terrorist, where do I turn myself in?
.... for I relish in my privacy rights. I always try to hide what I do from others. I refuse to have an account on Facebook, or other social media tools. I guess this makes me suspect.
Forget that my Civil Liberties are being stripped away one chip at a time, and my right to privacy is a pursuit to my life, liberty and happiness, which is in the Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,[75] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
So I guess our founding fathers were Terrorists then....
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I think you are referring to Senator Joseph McCarthy and not General Douglas MacArthur. Right?
WALSTIB!
Apparently my employer could be a terrorist organization, because we use PGP and VPN technology routinely. Sure, the boss says it's for HIPAA compliance, but that's what you'd expect a terrorist to say, isn't it?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is obviously a fake flyer, where is your sense of humour people? Mention "Tripwire", seriously?
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Anyone accessing any kind of sensitive information (like reading email) at an internet cafe is exposing themselves to the possibility of every type of electronic snooping by criminals, up to and including laptop theft. It would be folly not to employ strong security measures when accessing the net under such circumstances.
This is like claiming people who lock their front doors fit a criminal profile, because they are trying to keep people from seeing what they have or are doing in their houses.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
There's a news story in Ann Arbor in which a pediatrician is accused of peeping involving a minor. Police confiscated his computer based on the investigation. That's great and I'm glad they caught the guy.
But....after analyzing his computer, the cops presented the "evidence" they found.
The detective was (can't find the news story right now, sorry) quoted as listing images, an electronic receipt to a child porn site and....the fact that the doctor deleted cookies and added other privacy measures to his browsing! The quote assumed that he must have been up to no good if he was careful about his privacy.
More telling. Out of the 200-plus comments on the story, none referenced this.
Rights become crimes, making more criminals out of thin air. Suddenly there's a lot of crime going on, so we strip more rights, to deal with all the crimes. It's pretty damn circular.
Porquoi?
At the bottom of the flyer: "Each indictor listed above is by itself lawful conduct or behavior and may also constitute the exercise of rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution." Don't let pesky details get in the way, JRIC...
We need the services of Jeff Foxworthy on this one!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
As well as anyone who left a cake out in the rain, I have heard.
Who wants to be disturbed by CIA/FBI when touching one's genitals?
Fans of Tom Clancy.
Thought thinks itself.
Or maybe THEY just want you to THINK that most people are complacent.
A useful metric for law enforcement organizations is what fraction of their work is self-generated, and what fraction is complaint-driven. When a police department responds to a call to 911 or a crime report, they're performing a service function. When they run a drug sting, they're doing self-generated work. Some self-generated law enforcement work is useful and necessary, but too much of it corrupts an organization.
The FBI was traditionally complaint-driven. Historically, their self-generated work didn't go well. The Red Squads and the investigation of the civil rights movement of the Hoover era are historical examples.
The FBI's anti-terrorism operation is mostly self-generated work. So is their Internet operation. (40% of FBI Internet investigative resources are devoted to kiddie porn. Most of the rest is "national security". Fraud on the Internet, about 4%. The FBI is soft on Internet fraud - stopping that takes real work, and results are measurable.)
Measurability is the big issue here. On their complaint-based work, law enforcement success rates are easily measured. There were N bank robberies last year, and the people who did M of them were caught. Success rate: M / N. Running a law enforcement operation on that basis keeps it productive and honest. Metrics for self-generated police work tend to be less meaningful. The US has had so little terrorism in the last decade that metrics for that are mostly have an N of zero.
Measurability was William Bratton's approach. Bratton headed the Boston PD, the NYPD, and the LAPD, and is generally considered to have improved all of them. He was big on measuring results, and put in systems to track, on a daily basis, how his cops were doing against crooks. There was a lot of software and mapping involved, and twice-weekly crime strategy meetings. In a big department, it was quite possible to have a whole crime spree before someone at the command level noticed a pattern. He fixed that. Focusing his cops on solving identified problems tended to keep his departments pointed in the right direction.
It's worse than that Jim!
They hired an evil professor to design an entire literature class about How To Implement Big Brother.
1984
Animal Farm
Brave New World
Minority Report
Fahrenheit 451
Harrison Bergeron (short story)
Your choice of five more.
Maybe some cop porn would make up for it though.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'd like to point out that I was, indeed, using a computer (with privacy tools) in an Internet Cafe in California (an airport, no less!) only last month, after having traveled an illogical distance and despite having robust residential Internet access.
While doing so, I did download content with extremely violent themes and military tactics. Indeed, the material enthusiastically described the ruthless, near-extermination of a freedom-loving people by a warlike, non-Christian foreign power bent on world conquest. The material was written by leader of these warlike people, and frankly I was rooting for him.
If I have to go to prison for reading Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War, so be it. Sic Semper...wait a minute...
Advice: on VPS providers
The average (US) citizen probably would not be able to say what a declarative sentence is without looking it up a dictioanry / wikipedia first. You outed yourself as a foreigner probably a sleeper cell terrorist.
(well not only in the US but that would otherwise kill the joke).
The Genie is out of the bottle and won't go back easily, if at all.
Examples: National Security Letters
"The Justice Department's Inspector General has reported that between 2003 and 2006, the FBI issued nearly 200,000 NSLs. The inspector General has also found serious FBI abuses of the NSL power."
(from: http://www.aclu.org/national-security-technology-and-liberty/national-security-letters )
Catch 22:
From: Susan Herman's book, Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy:
"A number of courts have declared that no one has standing - that is, the right to bring a lawsuit - to challenge eavesdropping programs unless they can prove that the government has been listening to their own telephone calls or intercepting their own-mails. That is a true Catch-22, when the whole point of secrecy is that the target is unaware of being the target."
Bingo!
Issue a NSL to an ISP for all web traffic of a particular person, erroneously accuse a person of {something}. Defense lawyer can't do his job, person disappears.
Most agents don't carry laptops...those who do?
Full disk encryption.
Smartcard access.
VPN back in to do anything.
Have those screen polarizers on them so you can't look at the screen for an angle.
Wait a minute, the FBI is full of terrorists!
Does anyone pay attention to history?
Seriously?
I had a public school education, yet i know how this ends.
Be seeing you...
Let me introduce everyone to those two important concepts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity
The problem is that while terrorists may indeed exhibit those behaviors, a massively larger number of people who are not terrorists also do. Like, oh, doctors, nurses, your insurance company, finance companies, any company that has trade secrets, any individual who has a sense of privacy, etc.
In other words, the positive predictive value of that test is extremely low. Nearly every time you report someone, you're reporting someone who is not a terrorist. In fact, I seriously doubt the pool of suspects generated by this would be any higher in actual terrorists than random selection would get you.
Maybe you have stumbled on how to the privacy problem. Create an open source, open project that puts the private lives of guys like Schmidt and Zuckerberg on line 24/7, so that they can't even go to the John without everyone knowing if its #1 or #2. Let cameras, cell phones, video recorders, monitor the activities of their family and friends 24/7. Better yet turn the entire exercise into a reality TV show and give prizes for the best submissions.
I don't know why, but I have this feeling that all of a sudden they would begin to have a different perspective with regard to online privacy.