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Cubans Evade Censorship By Exchanging Flash Drives
concealment sends this quote from an article about evading internet censorship with the sneakernet: "Dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez on Saturday told newspaper publishers from around the Western Hemisphere that 'nothing is changing' in Cuba’s ossified political system and that 'the situation of press freedom in my country is calamitous.' But Sanchez said underground blogs, digital portals and illicit e-magazines proliferate, passed around on removable computer drives known as memory sticks. The small computer memories, also known as flash drives or thumb drives, are dropped into friendly hands on buses and along street corners, offering a surprising number of Cubans access to information. 'Information circulates hand to hand through this wonderful gadget known as the memory stick,' Sanchez said, 'and it is difficult for the government to intercept them. I can't imagine that they can put a police officer on every corner to see who has a flash drive and who doesn't.'"
The delivery speed of these underground blogs is actually not bad. A memory stick with 64GB of material -- a whole library that would take a lifetime to read -- can be walked across town in less time than it would take to beam it across Cuba's slow Internet. What's more, it can be read at one's convenience is virtually impossible for someone to snoop and see what they are reading (ala Facebook / Google / Feds). It is amazing at how fast data is moved around nowadays compared to the last few thousand years For example, the KJV Bible is 4.35MB in size and it used to take the scribes a year to make a single copy. It would also cost a centurion's annual salary. (I studied Near Eastern Archeology in school.) Now, many times that amount of data can be copied in mere moments. An entire "subversive" library in Cuba can spread like wildfire even at walking speeds.
I got this flash drive from a Cuban and was instructed to relay this message here.
Hello my friends,
I would have gotten first post if the stupid messenger got to the computer on time.
Regards
Anonymous Cuban
I can't imagine that they can put a police officer on every corner to see who has a flash drive and who doesn't.'"
Why not? The United States does. We already have given the police broad authority to stop and search people for flash drives, mobile phones, or other electronic gear without warrant or cause. If a "free" country like the United States can do this, what makes people think Cuba can't (or won't)?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I'm still not quite sure what this new-fangled device is they use in Cuba to pass along information. A "memory stick"? "thumb drive"? "Flash drive"? "removable" or "small" "computer memories"? This is all just too much, please explain using a car analogy.
Similar techniques were used in the old Soviet Union and former eastern bloc countries, called samizdat, except that with today's technology it's even easier. A US$40 64 GB flash drive can hold a lot of data, more text than a person could read in their lifetime, and to copy data from one to another would take only minutes. With a program like Truecrypt it even becomes possible to hide such incriminating data on it without anyone being the wiser. The only way to restrict this practice would be to ban or regulate all computers and computer equipment the way printers were, and I doubt that this is in any way feasible for Cuba.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
JumpShot
It might be worse in cuba, but that doesn't make what he said about the USA incorrect. Hell, I wish he wasn't correct.
No, the fact that there are not police on every corner makes the original statement incorrect. If you are seeing this, I'd like to know your zipcode. Hell, my apartment complex alone has at least a half dozen law enforcement officers living there, yet I never see them patrolling the sidewalk in front of my dwelling (and my car got broken into once). Hyperbole is one thing; pretending the exaggeration is fact is quite another.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Needs to be differentiated from uSDHC, which is what we modern subversives use - it can be hidden under a stamp, in a cheek,tucked in an unlikely place, or just left in the camera. Probably foolishly trying to hide their methods.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Cuban here (though I'm no longer in Cuba).
Be aware that Yoani is not real. Yes, the person exists, but her "opinions" are all paid for (or at least seeking a reward). She does not represent the views or the reality of the Cubans. She is not interested in giving Cubans access to information, she - just like the Cuban government - is at most interested in giving them access to propaganda. It is very hard to get access to information, because everyone wants to pick and chose what to give you. If you read her blog, you will probably notice this... almost poetic posts full of half truths in which any "good" thing is left unsaid.
This is one of the examples. It is true that sneakernet is a major way of exchanging data. It is even encouraged. One time, a government official, in a sickening display of ignorance, stated something along the lines of "everyone can access the internet, they just have to go to a library, ask what they want to know, and the librarian will download the webpage to a floppy". I used to carry not only usb drives, sometimes even up to 3 hard disks, in my pockets. Bringing a hard disk to a university, looking for an IT person and getting him to open one of the computers to insert the hard disk and copy everything they had was a regular occurrence. I was one of those IT persons... my desktop computer was permanently open, until we got an external enclosure just for that purpose. I tried once to set up a couple of "sneakernet stations" so people could come in, explore the ftp servers and download everything they wanted. You don't need encryption, unless what you are transporting is really illegal (a foreign news article is not illegal, child porn is) and you are high profile enough that the police may want to go through the effort of checking your data (unlikely, most don't even know what "data" is).
That said, encryption is illegal[1]. So one could argue that using encryption is more risky than not using it: a news article critical of the government is not illegal, the same news article encrypted is. This is moot, however... it is very unlikely that your data will be checked either way. I carried some data encrypted, mostly password lists or ssh private keys - it would have been highly irresponsible to carry my employer's data in plaintext. Of course, if you are carrying around your accounting book detailing how the CIA is paying you... you probably want to encrypt that, or even better, don't carry it around.
Regarding the export controls: probably the only area in which they are completely ineffective is in software and data. No one in Cuba cares about that. Copyright is ignored to the point that movies and TV shows shown in national television were torrented + "sneakerneted" to the TV station[2]. Same happens with software (to the despair of f/oss advocates). This is the main content of the underground networks: software, music, music videos, movies and tv shows. My hard disks used to contain a mirror of Debian and Ubuntu... and a copy of 1984 and Animal Farm that I was reading at the time, downloaded from the university's ftp server.
(I'm not defending the illegality of encryption, or the export controls, or that the police and the prosecution have too much power and that they can use their ignorance against you... Nor am I saying that it is ok because some of it is also a problem in the US. I am also not defending censorship. I'm just pointing out how deceitful Yoani is, and using the post to explain that the reasons encryption is not wildly used have nothing to do with the US export ban.)
[1] In very silly ways. For instance, to renew the "networking license" for the university, I had to state that no encryption was used, even though using https and ssh instead of telnet was mandatory to get that license. I know, I once stated "Yes, we use encryption, e.g: ssh, https,..." and the license was denied until I submitted the same form without that sentence.
[2] Funny anecdote, when The Fellowship of the Ring first arrived at the university network about 2 weeks after the release, I added a tiny mark during the opening credits, just to check how far it would spread... When it was shown on TV, I looked for that mark... and there it was.