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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
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.
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...
So I guess our founding fathers were Terrorists then....
Actually, yeah, they kind of were. They attacked, tarred, and feathered agents of the government. Held ships captive and destroyed their cargo. They secretly met, recruited, trained, and distributed propoganda. They illegally stored heavy weapons (Lexington and Concorde came as a direct result of th British attempting to locate and destroy weapons cahes of powder and cannon). Remember, our rebellion started out as an insurgency more than an open war, and in its early stages there is not much of a difference between terrorism and insurgencies. Probably the only difference is thatour founding fathers did not go out and hurt innocent people or kill civilians. Their targets were always governmetn agents or those representing government interests. That, and they for the most part adhered to the standard rules of war (except for hit and run attacks and snipers/intentional targeting of officers). So, while they could certainly be labelled terrorists, they should not be confused with the terrorists of today.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Who wants to be disturbed by CIA/FBI when touching one's genitals?
Fans of Tom Clancy.
Thought thinks itself.
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.
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...
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