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Keeping Your Data Private From the NSA (And Everyone Else)
Nerval's Lobster writes "If those newspaper reports are accurate, the NSA's surveillance programs are enormous and sophisticated, and rely on the latest in analytics software. In the face of that, is there any way to keep your communications truly private? Or should you resign yourself to saying or typing, 'Hi, NSA!' every time you make a phone call or send an email? Fortunately there are ways to gain a measure of security: HTTPS, Tor, SCP, SFTP, and the vendors who build software on top of those protocols. But those host-proof solutions offer security in exchange for some measure of inconvenience. If you lose your access credentials, you're likely toast: few highly secure services include a 'Forgot Your Password?' link, which can be easily engineered to reset a password and username without the account owner's knowledge. And while 'big' providers like Google provide some degree of encryption, they may give up user data in response to a court order. Also, all the privacy software in the world also can't prevent the NSA (or other entities) from capturing metadata and other information. What do you think is the best way to keep your data locked down? Or do you think it's all a lost cause?"
It stinks, but I can see if anyone's been intruding. So far it is totally secure.
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Those who worry are usually those who have something to hide or something criminal in the works.. Bottom line, you can't care about this, unless you do wrong or plan on doing wrong. That's kinda how I see it.
Is this a Dice thing or has this been going on longer? Smells like a pathetic attempt at SEO.
Only way you can keep your data yours while sitting at rest is to have it on your own servers and utilize proper encryption and security on those servers. That means don't use "cloud" anything unless it's on equipment you own, run your own email servers, etc. Remember that even doing this, emails that you send to other people can be accessed through whatever servers they use.
+++ATH0 NO CARRIER
I think that the regular postal mail is still protected from the NSA. They have to have a really good reason to open that otherwise the postal service gets real touchy. The nice part about electronic communication is that it is so easy to tap. in addition, I think as we have seen over in Iraq and Afghanistan that the SneakerNet approach does work. In this, someone creates a document or multiple documents, places them on a flash drive, and then either hand delivers or uses a courier. While most likely impractical for common documents in the united states, if someone was up to something that they truly wanted to keep secret they could employ this approach. Or be somewhere where the pneumatic tube system was still intact. Those things were so cool, I kinda miss them.
1. Use an email provider nobody's heard about.
2. Keep social network data private, more importantly don't post anything sensitive.
3. Don't engage in terrorism, they really hate that.
4. Somewhere between "get off Windows" and use a live disk, I don't think any OS is truly secure.
5. Don't save anything locally, keep your accounts hidden, no email notifications.
Wave at the black SUV outside your window as not having any traceable data may warrant suspicion in itself.
Move to SA (either one).
If you have a social media account, what the NSA does is not what would be most concerning.
Maybe it's like the alternative energy business: multiple types and multiple solutions that can form a functional patchwork.
You are looking for a technical answer to a problem that isn't technical. It is a people problem. We put these people in power and let them get away with this crap. Most people are to apathetic or sheepish to care.
Just game the system. I've started typing random shit in gmail before I do anything ... let 'em see lots of false positives.
You know, I'm glad nobody KILLED OBAMA. Durka durka, mohammed jihad. Monsanto sucks. Bush was a simpleton. Death to American cheese.
Gotta go, someone's at the door ...
That has some UI implications (i.e. gmail can't search the bodies of your encrypted emails). But still seems like a better idea to have your email on your client anyway; so why not have the search index there as well.
...if two of them are dead. Viva la revolucion! Or whatever.
On a more serious note: it's not private if you let it out of you in some manner. Want Cheetos? Pay with cash, and don't let the NSA learn about your high-caloric, high-sodium diet.
And stop googling, "How to make an atomic [insert whatever here]." It doesn't help your cause.
As with all things, assume that your communications are going to be monitored, whether electronic or not. I know, I know, it's not the answer you want; but the truth is...we put innocent people to death. If we are willing to do that, and not tear down our societies in an act of grief over the loss of a single innocent life, looking deeply within and without as to how or why we allowed this to happen, and how we can prevent it from ever happening again, then caring about protecting your privacy from the monsters waiting outside your door is the wrong approach. You're fighting Evil himself, and he aims to win by any means; if putting a gun to the head of one your children's heads to get you to decrypt your hard drive is what it takes, then he will do it, no hesitation.
I am John Hurt.
use Duck Duck Go for search
use NoScript and AdBlock plus in Mozilla Firefox for browsing
use MEGA for cloud storage if at all
use your own email address
use Tor for private browsing
keep what you want to yourself to yourself
The weak link of the chain is you. And they have very convincing methods to get what they want, especially if you have the habit of hiding your data in a suspicious way.
Live in a cabin in the mountains that is over 100 miles from the nearest cell phone tower. Also ensure that you have top cover so satellite surveillance cannot see your house. Add enough insulating material (dirt would be easiest) above your cabin so that there is little/no thermal footprint. And never leave your new found cabin, since cars and feet all leave tracks.
sudo make me a sandwich
If facebook, google are right to say that NSA did not have a direct access to their servers and that NSA actually had all emails and stuff that means that they were able to decipher all SSL / TLS encrypted communications or that they have the private keys of those big content provider. No ?
PGP. It's good enough for WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden and good enough for me
While one could attempt to encrypt everything that you send over the internet, and everything that you store in a "cloud", it simply isn't practical.
HTTPS (and other SSL/TLS-enabled network protocols) can protect the data going over the wire from snooping, but it does nothing to protect the data at the endpoints. In particular, if one of the end-points is a service provider your data ends up sitting on their disks in plaintext.
Email could be encrypted using something like S/MIME, but that requires that *everyone* that you send email to has an email certificate and is setup to handle S/MIME emails.
You cannot *ever* use any "free" internet service (anything from Google, Facebook, etc). Almost all of the data that you store on such services is stored in plaintext on the provider's systems. Even most of the for-pay services store your information in plaintext. Why? Because if the data residing on their servers is really encrypted, they cannot take any action on that data on your behalf. Google could not send emails for you if they cannot read your address book, for example. AWS cannot operate if it doesn't have the ability to read your data stored in their cloud. etc, etc, etc.
There are some cloud storage systems in which your data-at-rest on the provider's systems is encrypted. However, the only service that those types of systems can provide is to ship the encrypted data back to you where you decrypt it locally to do something. Even then, one has to check carefully to ensure that they are doing the key management correctly such that the only place that has access to the plaintext version of your keys is your local workstation. This does keep your data secure,but relegates the service provider to being nothing more than an internet-connected, encrypted hard drive. All computations performed on your data can only be done on your local workstation (i.e. no "cloud" services for your data other than the delivery of the encrypted data back to your workstation).
Basically, if you are performing any sort of communication over the Internet, or are trying to make use of any sort of hosted service, you are pretty much sunk. If you have lots of money and time, you can try to setup your own servers/cloud - and as long as you can prevent hackers from compromising your systems you can keep your plaintext data hidden behind your firewalls and export only services to the Internet - but that is a lot of work and money to do and it is notoriously difficult to keep all hackers out if you should become a target of interest.
For security purposes, I try not to communicate with other people. To stave off the loneliness, I have fractured my psyche into multiple personalities and just talk to myself.
The solution is encrypt everything (OpenPGP for emails, etc.), plus decentralization. If everyone either hosted their own email, or used a minor hosting company, then it would be much more difficult for the NSA to round up all those emails. Then, if even half the population used OpenPGP for emails, we could hide in the mass, and the NSA etc. will have no hope of reading all those emails.
As soon as you have just a few spots (e.g. FarceBook, Google-, Murdoch'sSpace) that host the significant majority of a certain type of communication, then you have a huge weak spot. Solution is decentralization and federation.
Use tools like Diaspora, StatusNet, Jabber, SIP, and email. Don't use tools like Skype, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Facebook, etc.
See also: http://autonomo.us/ and particularly Reducing vulnerability to massive spying with free network services?
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
This is the kind of crap that was held up as examples of why communist countries were so much worse than the US.
People, the government is supposed to work for you, not the other way around.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I think we can agree that the NSA is gathering ALL data including phone conversations. In order to get around that pesky 4th Amendment they probably encrypt the data until they get a key from the FISA court and/or congress. All of our moaning and whining probably won't change this. I, for one, intend to explore the use of a Raspberry Pi or a BeagleBone to make a voice scrambler. At least I can keep conversations with family and friends out of their hands. Any ideas on this?
The problem with heavily encrypted solutions is that they rely on human perfection. There was a story a few months back about Sabu. He eluded the FBI for months until, in a hotel room, he made the mistake of logging into IRC without using Tor first.
That was all it took. One non-Tor login, and the FBI had him.
Human beings are not designed for constant watchfulness. We make mistakes. We screw up. Even if *you* stay perfect, the person or persons you're communicating with may not, and if the FBI or NSA wants the details of what you're talking about, they can "break" the encryption at either end of the conversation. Maybe they can't find you -- but if they find the people you're talking to, they can still grab the info.
I'm not saying that all security is useless, or that there's no benefit to raising the bar. My point is that the solution to this is to *stop spying.* Because, in the long run, almost everyone screws up.
Q: Is there any way to keep your communications truly private?
A: No.
The NSA has worked on infiltrating highly secure military networks in the past, it would be foolish to think you can keep data away from them and use the Internet at the same time.
Perhaps things like inventing your own symmetric key end-to-end encryption software on the basis of combining existing technology and algorithms (+ hand to hand key distribution) or hooking up random number generators to your computer and producing and distributing OTPs may callenge and potentially annoy them for some time. That's about it.
So, in an effort to hide from NSA you go all out HTTPS. However, to avoid getting those pesky "this site is dangerous!!!" messages browsers show you on self-signed certificates, you buy your keys from any of the larger certificate authorities. Safe? Sorry, no. Almost all those CAs work under American jurisdiction, or on delegation from American CAs. Assuming NSA doesn't get the keys in other ways, all they have to do to get them is to ask the CA and the company would have to hand them over.
With those private keys available they can listen in on the HTTPS conversations in real time, and there is no way for the participants of the conversation to know this.
Amusingly enough, the safest bid (well, to hide from NSA at least) would be to use self-signed keys despite all the browser warnings.
If you still want to get valid keys, here is an interesting discussion on which CA to choose.
I use quadruple ROT13 encryption. I've never felt so safe!
I only use one time pads when tweeting.
...puts a crimp in the number of followers though.
What do you think is the best way to keep your data locked down?
Get out of the US now, and strive to overthrow the political/military/intelligence assholes who run it.
The question you have to ask with regard to HTTPS is where does the tunnel end and is there only one tunnel between the site provider and the user. The most popular CDN operates in a manner such that the data is unencrypted in their servers. There is a tunnel from the user to the CDN and from the CDN to the site provider but there is a small break in between. I have long been suspicious about that point.
So let me get this straight. You've got a military that spends trillions of dollars. You've got eight national defence organizations screwing with your own citizens. And a) you think that you can dodge an organization that has spent that many dollars purely to find you, and b) you think that you don't have a cultural problem?
Where do you think all of those funds come from? For every tax dollar that you spend, how much goes to military, para-military, and anti-crime organizations? How much of it winds up in actual crime? Are you spending more on anti-crime than you would on crime in the first place?
Maybe you should solve the actual problem. Maybe you should start electing officials who spend your money on things that you like, instead of things that you dislike. I can't vote for you.
And correct me if I'm wrong -- you see, my country earned its independence by asking nicely -- doesn't your country believe in violently fighting your own government to break free of restrictions to your freedoms? Have you forgotten how to do that? Your right to fight would seem to be the only freedom for which you do fight, and then you don't use that right to protect your other freedoms.
One of these days, you'll wake up to realize that you've kept the right, but eliminated the opportunity. What good is the right to bear arms when you can't get away with using it?
Really people, its for you, its for me, its for everybody. Everybody has something to hide. I have often told people they should encrypt their disk, they often say there is no real reason for them to use encryption but then you give some examples. Ranging from legal to illegal things they have.
For example do you want your mother to see your porn? I wouldn't care too much, but its probably for the best that she doesn't see all my porn.
How about movies or games you gotten from less legal places, you don't want the cops to find those.
Passwords and other general information like bank passwords. You would be surprised how many people save those in some txt or whatever. Your laptop being stolen could also result in your bank being emptied.
Face it, you have things to hide. Things to hide from all kinds of people. Its impossible for people to do only those things the law allows because the law is big and old. It spans many things that once upon a time may have indeed been bad but no longer are.
The reality is, you want to hide your stuff from everybody. And you fucking should.
What the hell do you think funds these programs? Unicorn farts?
Do you think it's bad now? How bad do you think it would be if the US government ever gains total control of the health care industry?
Gotta wonder about the cognitive abilities of people who rail about the NSA invading their privacy yet seem to love the idea of that same government in control of health care. Talk about literal prostate-exam loss-of-privacy.
In this case encryption does almost nothing for you. Solutions like Tor and HTTPS Everywhere don't do you any good if the newspapers are correct. According to the reports, the NSA has access to the internal networks of these companies, access to the data in its unencrypted form. It doesn't matter if what you send over the wire is scrambled because they have access to the unscrambled bits on the other end.
What the hell do you think funds these programs?
Deficit spending?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
With the advances of deep packet inspektshun comming to all platforms, the perceived notion of privacy and security becomes an illusion.
Don't be deceived
If your data is on an Internet-connected computer you have already accepted some amount of risk.
and FBI, Al Qaeda, Bin Lade, Ricin, and all hotword lists, from your buddies on slashdot ; )
None of those things will help you. To the NSA, the content of your email may be less important than with whom you are communicating. Yes, the care about the content of some emails, but their dragnet appears to be for network analysis -- sender, recipients, date, time, etc. The NSA almost certainly catalogs every DNS lookup you do. This is the stuff that is erroneously being referred to as metadata.
One possibly surprising way to keep your communications private is to read/post your communications to a very public forum. That way the intended recipient is difficult to determine. Keep the communication slightly covert -- a little steganography goes a long way if you can fly under the radar. Just don't trust others with your privacy.
Our rights are inalienable -- but only if we use them.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
We need a campaign to turn off http. Only https should be allowed, websites should be discouraged from allowing http access. Browser makers should help too, but having popups whenever someone goes to an http site.
Certificate-based encryption (like HTTPS) is only as secure as the certificates that sign sub-certs. If you accept certificates signed by a trusted CA, and that CA is compromised (i.e. controlled or accessible by the NSA, which all of them are), then you have no privacy, and all of your communications can be monitored without your knowledge or consent.
Here's a good writeup on how it works:
http://theorylunch.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/ca-mitm/
All services should be encrypted end-to-end as standard and have no method that allows any company to extract information without the direct action of the end user. If data needs to be exchanged between services, the same security measures should apply. In an International world, it would be the only way to restore confidence.
That said, all this may be a waste of time if the encryption methods have weaknesses that are only explotable under certain budgets.
Let me get it straight -- you want to keep NSA away from your personal data? NSA spends billions of dollars to snoop your data while Chinese government spend billions of dollars sending people to space trying to mine the resources from outer space. Which is more stupid?
Don't conflate the https/TLS protocol and the Certificate Authorities.
With DNSSEC and DANE you can create your own certificates and publish them in DNS. No Certificate Authorities needed.
You could...
Host your own mail server. Of course, you'd probably have to upgrade your internet service to a tier where incoming mail ports aren't blocked. You'd also need to have SSL/TLS support, ensure everyone whom you email hosts their mail on your server and that you can personally trust them. Not exactly practical.
Instead of Skype, use a decentralized chat system like RetroShare. Takes some doing to trade PGP keys with friends, but works.
Use an encrypted proxy for all of your surfing. Practical and quite easy.
Use encrypted SIP for VoIP communications. No idea how easy or difficult this is, haven't researched it.
Throw away your landline and cell phone. Goodbye 911 service.
The point is that the middlemen have proven themselves unworthy of our trust and we should seek to avoid them. The larger and more daunting point is that this breakdown of trust could ultimately lead to a society's collapse.
Go distributed. Go I2P. Go Tahoe-LAFS over I2P. Use DHT's as much as possible, over I2P.
Nope. You don't see it at all. Because illegal is not a synonym for wrong .
Over 2000 years ago, Sun Tzu pointed out that when the laws imposed by the rulers are aligned with the customs and ethics of the people, societies are prosperous and resistant to crime, war and rebellion. When the rulers lose the way, as the corporate overlords of the USA have, the people become unhappy and the society becomes progressively more fragile over time. Eventually a neighbor invades or a province revolts and the rulers are replaced, because nobody's willing to die to protect them anymore.
These root servers root packets to their correct locations....
So duplicates of these packets can be routed to any other location...
And analyzed for interesting material and then either saved or dicarded...
So, no, there's not squat you can do. All internet traffic in the USA, regardless of form or format is theoretically possible to search, analyze and store. There may not be enough capacity to save all of it, but the interesting stuff, I'm sure, is compressed, catalogued and stored.
Can "interest" be evaded? Probably. Encrypting within .pngs and .jpgs might work. Simple agreed upon coding systems in plain text might evade detection. Zipped and encrypted files, I expect, would all be saved for later processing.
Would allusion packed Klingon poetry get through? Navajo? Elvish? Hard to say. You'd probably take up someone's time though. Keyword flooding might work to overload the filters, but it's hard to say how much capacity is involved. Flooding might not work.
Partial separated messages would also probably work if there were no obvious semantic or other identifiable similarity. Tricky as well.
This is just off the top of my head. There are undoubtedly more effective ways to use internet communication in an invisible way, which unfortunately leads me to the conclusion that this effort is going to be fairly effective at catching stupid people and lax people, but not people who are either sufficiently bright, or sufficiently paranoid.
It obviously also doesn't have a lot of predictive power, otherwise two pseudo-Islamic nutjobs in Boston would have been stopped before they bought their first pressure cooker.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Even if we never send or receive an email, never access the web, and never make or receive a call, most of us can still be pretty accurately tracked. If you carry a mobile phone with the battery charged, you can be tracked by GPS, or by triangulation from nearby cell towers (even if your phone is "off"). If your car has OnStar or a similar service, it can be tracked as well. The government could use this to build a very accurate picture of where you go and who you associate with (e.g. what church, if any, do you attend? where do you work? where do you live? do you obey speed limits? etc.). This can lead to inferences such as ability to predict what political party you're likely to support, or whether you're likely to own a gun. Even if you trust the current administration to only use this data for anti-terrorism purposes, the very existence of the database of "who associates with who" will inevitably lead to abuse by a few bad apples (e.g. local law enforcement) in the government.
Over 2000 years ago, Sun Tzu pointed out ...
spot on.
Encryption and obfuscation. Also help out with the organizations that are flooding the internet with suspicious activity.
Personally, I can accept that with technology advancements, the speed of which crime / terrorism / evil can adapt and execute has gotten equally faster. Countermeasure that do not keep pace have been or will soon be rendered obsolete. Therefore, losing some privacy may be a necessary evil.
The problem is the lack of any checks and balances to prevent abuse. If the NSA has to access my phone records because they have credible evidence that doing so may prevent a crime, no problem. By the time they apply for and receive a warrant or wiretap, it may be too late.
But the NSA employee who happens to disagree with my political beliefs, or is screwing my wife, or merely wants to discredit or inconvenience me (or worse) because he thinks I cut him off in traffic... those are the missing protections that need to be put in place along with the access of my data.
You stereotypers are all the same...
you have been automatically registered on an elite list of wannabe bozos..thank you come again.
Software options compared to mainstream products courtesy of the EFF
http://prism-break.org/
The 4th's ban ban on general warrants (that's what it means when it mentions "warrants" in its historical context) strongly implies a privacy right. General warrants were authorization from the crown for its agents to search any person or premises they desired to, blanket authorization. The 4th amendment bans that. The government has to have specific cause, evidence already at hand related to a specific person or premise, to search at all.
That the government in general has no right to search means by very strong implication that you have the right to the privacy which results. What else is it but your privacy that the 4th amendment says the government can't intrude on? It's nonsense not to find a right to privacy as a necessary implication of our constitutional protection from general warrants.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Unfortunately, once they have the information, there will be a viewpoint from within an all powerful government to access it "because you oppose the law", meaning one of the entities in my subject line.
At that point, we are mere vassals, serfs, or subject to the all-powerful government unions, politicians, departments and their laws; and worse...their regulations not passed by congress.
In other words, for your expressed displeasure with the government, you data just might be used to silence you...one way or another.
Yes, I posted as Anon E Mouse.
If you are an individual (e.g. not an intelligence agency), and the NSA is actually interested in your communications, then you have far more serious problems than data privacy. If they are your adversary, you have probably lost whatever game you were trying to play.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Anyone?? Bhuler.. Bhuler... Bhuler...
Air gap.
I can put data anywhere, and have anyone do work on it, and no-one but me* knows what's actually being done.
*Assuming the NSA still considers factoring "hard".
Simple solution - have a public/private key assigned to each person id. Just need to ensure private key is secured..
Easier to fake arson than a flood.
I come here for the love
As a maximum-security ex-con, I assure you that whatever can be surveilled, is being suveillled because it's simply human to snoop. ATOMIC DIRTY BOMB will overwork the jerks.
... expect someone else to see it. It really is that simple. Anytime data leaves your network or has a means of leaving your network, expect that someone else can and is looking at it. Of course you can encrypt everything, use Tor, only go to HTTPS sites, etc, but as soon as you place or pull data from someone else's systems or networks, expect there to be a trail or log of that happening at the very least. This isn't conspiracy theory or whatnot, it's common sense really. Do I like it? No. Do I not like it enough to quit using the internet, phones, etc?? Hell no!!! I'm just aware (as I have always been) that if I use someone else's stuff, don't expect the experience to be fully private, that's all...
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
FBI already had him earlier but could not reveal that they could see everything.
But the cause will be lost of people just sit around and complain but do nothing to rectify the situation. Write you representatives, in both the state and federal government. Tell them how you feel and how you expect them to vote on such issues. If you don't like your representative run for office yourself. What is needed here is an actually privacy amendment to the constitution. But with the way politics works in this country getting a new amendment would be next to impossible.
>> Fortunately there are ways to gain a measure of security: HTTPS, Tor, SCP, SFTP..
Don't those all rely on SSL?
Do you REALLY believe that the NSA still hasn't cracked/can't decrypt SSL (or any of the stuff mentioned) yet?
I've been meaning for a while to write a guide for friends/family about this. I thing that first you really have to have an understanding of why this is happening, what the goals (hidden and obvious) are for those engaging in the spying, and determine where you stand on the subject before you can't make any sort of plan for implementing the level of privacy you desire. From there the entire discussion is about capabilities and methods. I will forgo the first points in the hope that the hacker mentality still thrives at least somewhat on /.
First, there was metadata,
Metadata combined with modern algorithms and big data can give it's owner just about everything on you. Here is what I consider metadata
(this assumes every point compromised except local, imagine NSL's etc)
IP - Your ISP will always know this. Circumvention includes tor, i2p, other anonymizing technologies. VPN does not secure your metadata. Wardriving. Rooted boxes.
MAC - Much less of an issue, can be spoofed easily. Usually not know outside of edge network devices or ISP.
Time - Heavily used but not well understood. Correlation of login times to compromised activity elsewhere holds up pretty good in court. The longer they've been watching you, the more dangerous to security this is.
Other machine identifiers (agent strings, cookies, DNS, etc) - mostly a software (and knowledge) issue. Have to be able to prevent DNS leakage, spoof agent strings, keep machine clean of cookies (including harder to find/remove cookie types like flash) If you are on windows... this is your most likely failure point.
Then, there was low hanging fruit.
Low hanging fruit: cloud services (webmail providers, social networking, cloud apps, cloud storage/computing, voip/txt chat protocols, etc) If you use these services you must expect them to be compromised and not private. You can choose to not use these services, or compartmentalize use of them (which is my preferred method). Data poisoning becomes more relevant here. Now, you can attempt to be anonymous while using them (say tails(tor) for facebook), but the data is still compromised. But if they can't tie my identity to X, why does it matter. Two reasons: one, because if you are using a service like that, all it takes is one slip up to tie everything to you, and two, because there are other ways beyond even time-data correlation to do so (writing analysis for example)
So, assuming you have figured out how to be relatively anonymous and encrypt your data (ssh, tcplay, dm-crypt, gpg) You self host as many services as possible, and directly connect to people/sites you "trust". You have in intelligence terms "gone dark" or "dropped off". I'm going to ignore the issue of DPI for the moment.
This is where the majority of people who care about privacy want to be. They want to be just enough of a hard target that it's not easy to grab up their info. This is what the 90's cryptowars were about. The ability to go dark.
The problem with this state is twofold: First, your data can still be retroactively inspected. So that AES-256 you think is nice and secure is finally cracked by the NSA (if it isn't already). Then they run it on gobbled up data from the past, and suddenly your encryption is worth jack. (save discussion of storage feasibility for another time, some of the math has already been done over on Schneiers blog)
Second, once you become a target for other reasons, they will resort to other methods. First with off-site but close compromise. Usually ISP. Then escalated to remote compromise (trojans, keyloggers, etc through 0-days or backdoors) If for some reason you are still safe at this point, commence black bag operation. While you are at work, they break into your house and plant a physical keylogger, audio bug, copy HDD, install trojan (MBR not encrypted? evil maid!) or any other number of growing possibilities. This boils down to your physical security. Think your ADT alarm system works? Think again (well, this depends on who you pissed off, normal
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
It would be a better world if we all had invisibility cloaks and never had to use common resources. Then, no one could detect anything we did!
Encryption is fine and dandy, but your metadata is still exposed. Unless you have a Tor for your mobile traffic, then your metadata is still effectively exposed in the clear.
First and foremost get off the cloud, run your own servers again. NSLs depend on "third party doctrine" to keep from being blatently illegal.
There are some technical solutions I can think of that would put a dent in content spying by making encryption easier/cheaper to deploy but it requires some technical development.
Browser support for TLS-SRP is critical. It is already in Apache and CURL and there are patches for firefox and crome. It offers secure website login without certificates and with huge anti phishing benefits as password you enter is not simply transported unmolested to an attacker and cannot be picked off by offline dictionary attack.
Browser opportunistic https upgrade.
A browser indicates via request header it supports opportunistic encryption. The server upgrades http session to https using a temporary RSA or ECDH key.
No markings in the browser (short of diagnostic tools) tell the user their traffic is protected or encrypted in any way. No padlocks, no https:/// ..etc. All newer intel CPUs have had AES in hardware and if you leverage session tickets the only extra performance penalty is additional round trips from what would ordinarily be required.
While this can be defeated with an active proxy passive easedroppers (optical splitters in secret rooms) get nothing but "metadata". It would at least prevent wholesale content spying but it is something that would need to be invented and developed much more than TLS-SRP which is mostly already there.
For the secret stuff ... go old school ...
Write on paper ... with CIA approved invisible ink (make it at home). Use you own chosen encryption algorithm ... then place in envelope and deliver to United States Postal Service.. Congress and corporations are trying to put them out of business anyway, so the popular thought is why would anyone use the USPS? Or invite someone else to function as a personal courier. Yes, it is slow, but it works well for the Mafia and other organizations, e.g Al Qaida.
Delivery will be a rental box instead of residential address. Box is changed every 2 to 3 months and paid in cash or prepaid debit card which is not linked to you.
These days ... few would suspect this slow but reliable communication. Even if the NSA intercepts and 'attempts' to read ... it will be too late ... as you will have had plenty of time to change to the next previously arranged encryption key.
"130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at
many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and
regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large
organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic
engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and
computers, etc.) To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would
require a long different social struggle. Those who want to protect
freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the
rapidity with which they develop, hence they become pathetic and no
longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be
futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological
system as a whole; but that is revolution not reform." -- Unibomber
of the " If you have nothing to hide " argument.
Continue treating us all like criminals or terrorists and perhaps we will actually become something you'll need to watch out for . . . .
If we simply man up and burn Washington D.C. and the NSA sites to the ground to send an unequivocal message about how we feel about their assaults on our Constitutional rights. I acknowledge that many polled in these shores would happily bend over for an anal probe. They are not my countrymen. The rest of us must reclaim our liberties from Washington or we will have to pay many more times in blood down the road to do so when more of the apathetic wake up.
Note: this is not a Left vs. Right issue. Both parties have been complicit in this. They are not our friends. They must both be cleansed.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
If you want to keep your data locked down the easiest way is low tech. Use paper, or something like it. Keep the amount of data small, and incinerate anything you don't need. Want to send something to someone? Go see them and hand it to them, or just tell them. Think cold-war spy vs. spy and you are all good.
NSA develop the SE Linux patch. LOL, they have had a backdoor into linux for how long?.. LOL
My LUG recently discussed this. Here's what we decided. ... facebook, G+, twitter, instagram ... pinentrest ... if you've heard about it on TV definitely avoid using. ... don't use a cloud service for this. Seriously. .com, .org, .net, .info or .us TLDs.
* There are different levels of "privacy"
* HTTPS has been broken for a decade. Governments have known this and abused it all this time. The 3rd party certificate model has always been flawed - prone to government meddling.
* Metadata about communications has always been provided to governments around the world. I worked on a telecom system in the early 2000s that shipped every header for every email to an EU data center. It was mandated by a law there. Not the email itself, just the header data.
* Don't use cloud services. Google, Apple and any other large/popular company is already providing APIs for self-service by governments around the world.
* Don't send email to anyone using popular cloud services. Your privacy is at risk.
* Don't use any centralized social network
* Avoid using proprietary software for security. Most of these work with governments (their largest paying clients) to ensure a back door certificate is available to decrypt. Don't believe me? Fine.
* Use GPG for email encryption. This requires some setup, trusted exchange of credentials, etc. Practice and use it **before** you need it. This is especially important if you are in a news organization.
* Use whole drive encryption - based on F/LOSS software. That usually means Truecrypt.
* Use a F/LOSS password manager. Er
* If you are directly connected to a network, you must trust that provider for most online security. Only "darknets" are truly safe online.
* If you need an internet server for anything that isn't considered "good" by the current government, get a domain from a different country and locate your data in a different country. If you don't want the USA government stealing your domain and redirecting traffic, do NOT use
Ok, in short, only use 1-on-1 encryption to people you know online. PKI is fine, provided that no 3rd party validates the certificates. Best to have swapped keys through a known-secure channel prior to use. Ssh and openvpn are your friends. HTTPS is not.
It is best to run your own services, on your own hardware, inside your own data center, on your own network. The next best way is to get a physical cage inside someone elses data center. NEVER use cloud providers or VPS providers if you care about security of the data.
If you want to launch attacks on others, any VPS is fine, even EC2.
There really is no want to be 100% secure/private on the internet today. It may be possible to sneak onto someone elses network, spoof your MAC, spoof your IP, spoof your OS and send nasty emails using a temporary account once or twice, but don't expect to get away with it if you
* drive a vehicle to the location
* live close to the location
* are dumb enough to not hide your OS and browser "finger prints" from others on the network. Every browser appears to be just a little different from others, even if they run exactly the same plugins (unlikely). The FSF has a tool to help you see this.
I am amazed today's slasdot crowd is not aware of I2P? Why? TOR is much worse!
It's a lost cause. Government spooks are not completely stupid. You can bet your last penny that OS makers and software companies that sell encryption software or devices have been invaded by agents and ways to get the materials are transparent and probably quite trivial for them. Companies may nor be aware that an employee is a government agent. Government agents are a lot more common than you might think. Chances are that you have know several over the years and never had a clue.
If a person or group is determined to get at some data you have, they will. The best you can hope for is making it a serious, expensive, pain in the bum for them to do so. There are different degrees of pain you can give them, where it costs a lot of time and money to decrypt your files. I believe in inherent laziness of people. If you have to get a government worker to think and actually fulfill a task, they are not going to be very pleased...
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Never have points when I need them! ABSOLUTELY right!
Three Squirrels
or crows?
1. Replace all law enforcement personnel who are trained in what they can get away with people trained respect the Constitution. Ban all former law enforcement personnel from ever working in a position of public trust again; place them on a Corruption Offender Registry.
2. Replace all courts who only listen to lawyers with courts who respect us all equally. Ban all former judges and lawyers from ever working in a position of public trust again; place them on a Corruption Offender Registry.
3. Replace all politicians who ignore the constitution with politicians who uphold their oath to the Constitution. Ban all politicians from ever working in a position of public trust again; place them on a Corruption Offender Registry.
4. Replace all incomprehensible laws with laws that any 8th grader can understand; keep all federal laws to 1 page (8 1/2 x 11, double-sided, typed in a 12-point font with 1 inch margins.) Keep all state laws to 1 page.
5. Replace all phone equipment (from headsets to switches) with open-source equipment that can not wire tap calls.
6. Replace all computer hardware with open-source hardware that does not have back doors built in.
7. Replace all computer software with open source software that does not have back doors built-in; Linux?
8. Replace all O&M (operations and maintenance) personnel who have willingly wiretapped anyone with personnel who will give their lives before betraying their fellow man. Ban all former O&M personnel from ever touching anything that uses transistors ever again. Place all former O&M personnel on a Corruption Offender Registry.
9. Replace all programmers who have built in back doors with programmers who will give their lives before betraying their fellow man. Ban all former programmers from ever touching anything that uses transistors ever again. Place all former programmers on a Corruption Offender Registry.
Unfortunately, this is not possible without two things:
First, a french-revolution style reign of terror, and
Second, ripping out all technology until we are back to the era of wireless telegraphs.
Loyalists
Slave Owners/Yankees
Fascists
Trade Unionists/Robber Barons
Anarchists
Fascists again
Socialists
Communists
Terrorists
There has always been a bogyman to point a finger at and get the American citizenry to do a little dance and wiggle for the ruling class. Wonder what the next one will be called? I expect it to be another class based one like Bankers/Welfare Leeches.
AES is broken...
http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/
In the specific case of not letting the NSA snoop on us, can't we just flag the US as damage and route around them?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
> Move to SA (either one).
South Africa? South America? Saudi Arabia?
There are more than two.
First off, given the fact that NSA created then cracked RSA type encryption about ten years before it was invented by RSA, all encryption should be considered cracked. I propose we make the next few months a "call a [Muslim | member of WAR | Tea partier | Socialist Workers Party | Wobbly | Other fringe group member] month]. Use a bogus code like:
Alice: The swallows fly over Tehran
Bob: Paris has many sparrows in the sky
Alice: The sky over Paris is glowing in the spring.
Bob: Springfield is a city in America.
Alice: In Springfield Homer prepares his couch.
etc.
Pump so much noise into the system as to make it useless.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I wonder what the implications would be if very very large numbers of people began sending each other email that looked like encryption but were just blocks of random characters formatted in groups of five characters each? The same goes for text messages, pages on web sites that may or may not have links to them etc. Of course really encrypting email would be better and the FBI is already wanting back doors to that.
Back when NIST (then NBS) was evaluating DES, the internal NBS analysis concluded the key length needed to be at least 64 bits. This analysis was passed back to D.C. Word then came down from on high that NBS needed to change its analysis to conclude the key length was fine at 56 bits. That exchange went something like this:
NBS: The DES key length needs to be at least 64 bits. Anything less would leave encrypted data vulnerable.
Three Letter Agency: 56 bits is secure enough.
NBS: You don't understand. A key length of 56 bits would leave the data vulnerable to a brute force attack. All the data encrypted using a 56-bit key wouldn't be secure. Everyone in the world who will use this "standard" - banks, businesses, governments, *everyone* - will believe their data is safe, when in reality it might be read by a group with sufficient resources. To be secure the DES key length needs to be 64 bits.
TLA: No, *you* don't understand. Your official opinion is 56 bits is secure enough.
NBS: *confusion, then dawning realization, then painful silence*
I'll presume that you're a troll but you drag out the age old "If you've got nothing to hide... argument" Here are a couple of issues with this argument. 1. Retroactive violation of new laws: Let's imagine that you're a smoker and that you smoke in your house. The government could pass a law saying "Smoking is not allowed inside any building. Anyone caught must pay a $500 fine." They can now either go back and look at their surveillance data and retroactively charge you for smoking in your house in the past
The problem there is not the surveillance, it's the retroactive law. It's fundamentally wrong that I can do something legal today, and then tomorrow the law might change retroactively so that I can be prosecuted for doing something that was legal at the time that I did it. It's irrelevant whether the evidence is from surveillance (covert or otherwise) or from witnesses who saw me (in public or in private), or by my own admission. If I can't travel back in time to change my behaviour, nobody should be able to change the legality of my past behaviour.
To see Barak Obama with his pants and shorts round his ankles being butt fucked by a 300 lbs man on the Capital Steeps of Congress at 4:30 pm on Tuesday next week would be the best thing to happen to the U.S.A. in 60 years.
Educate users and admins. This poster can help http://hellebaard.nl/publicaties/poster/poster-the-enemy-is-listening/
By its very nature communication is not private (at least one other person knows).
But let's look at what the NSA is said to be doing (I believe it): capturing meta data. Not the content of the message just the metadata. Most of the solutions above are about encrypting content. All the NSA is looking for is the network, and that is way more than enough. Consider the following:
Studies have shown that by knowing a few facts the identity of an individual can be reconstructed from "annonymized" data. Examples are a case where a myspace graph was deidentified (only the pattern of the nodes and arcs were preserved). This graph was then reidentified using data from facebook with a very high accuracy.
Famously a US Governor stated that his states medical database was annonymized and recommended that people join. A graduate researcher was able to identify the governor's records knowing only his date of birth, gender and zip code.
In the infamous 2nd Netflix challenge it was possible to similarly identify people.
The point is, it is the power of the meta data graph that enables you to identify people.
Furthermore, research at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (Galway Ireland) has shown that it is possible to reconstruct (or construct) groups of common attributes across multiple graphs without knowing the underlying schemas.
The net result is that given enough meta data I can create a graph in which I can identify the people I want to watch. Whenever I get new data I can see if anybody new has joined the groups of people I want to watch and watch them too.
From the simplest perspective this looks well and good as in "Great we can detect Terrorists." But a deeper question is "Who gets to decide what constitutes a group that needs watching?" I suspect that I can, given the amount of free linked data in the states, determine which gun owners probably have stockpiles of ammunition and have fundamental nationalist leanings. I suppose I could classify them as potential domestic terrorists.
I know I can figure out who the democrats and the republicans are.
The cat is out of the bag. I see no way to put it back. Currently all the security and privacy efforts I see are simply hand waving, smoke and mirrors. I have come to believe that once invasive technologies are out in the wild the only way for society to recover is to make them freely available. I used to have a fairly short list:
1. all publicly funded surveillance camera feeds should be open.
2. all public data should be published as linked open data.
3. all publicly funded research data should be public data.
and now....
4. all databases that law enforcement uses shodl be published as linked open data.
Lessee, all USA internet goes through root servers
Who on earth told you that?
First of all stop using unsecure windows and switch to Linux. Then use software like TrueCrypt (for hard drives), KeePassX (for passwords), XChat + VPN (for chat) and servers like Link-Net.org, HushMail.com (for email) Also you can encrypt your /home etc... There is many other ways. Including good hardware firewall/router like Ubiquiti ERLite-3 which is affordable 1gbps router with nice edgeOS gui and very good VLAN, Firewall, VPN features. Avoid using wireless router/connection. If you must use wireless keyboard/mouse use the ones that have AES 128-bit encryption there is few available. You can do lost more, all you need is a brain and not to be lazy =)
How much more explicit does it have to get?!?
Convenient enough.
I guess what we need to do is to make a lot of one-time pads, then encrypt them with a second one-time pad, or just PGP, then upload it. That should result in millions of files of encrypted digital noise, unbreakable because they only contain digital noise, in essence building a haystack within which to hide the needles. Like when there was a sanitation workers strike in NYC, with no garbage pickups, and some New Yorkers Gift-wrapped their garbage and left it in their old, unlocked cars, and the packages of garbage were then stolen by thieves.
Assuming those nutjobs were actually the perpetrators of the crime... something that I really don't believe.
My solution? Spread it around. Use different services from different vendors, and, if possible,in different countries.
Google can get an NSA letter demanding that Google tell them everything about Andy Canfield, and Google must comply. Yandex can get an NSA letter demanding that Yandex tell them everything about Andy Canfield, and the Yandex staff will laugh out loud. Yandex is based in Moscow. Yandex must answer to the KGB, just as Google must answer to the FBI, but the KGB and the FBI don't talk to each other.
Search engines in mainland China? Hard to read the prompts but secured against CIA demands. At the minimum use Google YouTube and Microsoft Bing; that way the NSA at least has to ask two different companies. I use Yahoo Image Search; that's three companies now. I'm still looking for a replacement to Google Translate.
Use different vendors for different services, preferably vendors in different countries, and all your information will not appear in a single unified database. Got some business? Spread it around.
Has anyone heard about this? I took a look a it a few years ago and even though it still has a bunch of improvements, the base is what we are actually looking for. I bet for this kind of projects, distributed and anonymous.
In my opinion, People all over the world should start using these encrypted social networks. Good examples are Diaspora (http://diasporaproject.org) or whispeer (http://blog.whispeer.com - currently under development). If they don't want to use those alternatives, they should accept the USA spying us or go into a deep bunker and deny to use any media.
Hey all,
Primal offers an innovation solution to the privacy dilemma. Read about it here in the blog post titled "The Myth Behind Personalization and Privacy" http://blog.primal.com/2013/06/the-myth-behind-personalization-and-privacy/
Feel free to comment here or on the blog.
Subject: net neutrality, [violated privacy and security of Internet users] Date: Friday, December 14, 2012 at 11:53 p.m. To: "Mr. President Martin Schulz" Dear Mr. President Martin Schulz, This evening, i am here to tell you that Facebook with its own iLike button, is putting at risk the World Wide Web and is violating the privacy and security of each user who uses the internet. All the guys / girls think that the iLike button is a way to say: I Like it. Really the iLike button is a backdoor! What is a backdoor? It is an unauthorized access on the computers of users, so that Facebook can will acquire data from users, violating their privacy and their security, so i am here to ask you to discuss in this regard to the European Parliament, concerning this damage created by Facebook. In the past, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that was at risk the privacy of German Public Administration, and European Union Public Administration. In Germany the iLike button has been removed from any website. I know that in other European Union countries, have failed to remove the iLike button. Today I am here to tell you President Martin Schulz: please ask the Italian government to make remove the iLike button from any website, even from that of Facebook. https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/presse/20110819-facebook-en.htm I hope to receive your reply as soon as possible, Yours faithfully, Paolo Del Bene
How can one validate that there isn't a shared public key in the encryption scheme (one that the NSA owns)? We trust services like gpg and pgp however I would also be dubious (unless I looked through and compiled an application myself) that any encryption software doesn't slap on a hidden public key allowing the NSA to decrypt this on the fly. How can we be sure?
Whatever happened to "spook blocks"? Chunks of words appended to e-mail; words that might trigger a snooping system reading your e-mail. The blocks were clearly labeled, so a person double-checking the "hit" would easily see they were meaningless. But they could trigger an automated check for specific words.
I think we should all do that again. :)
Spook block:
terror
bomb
airplane
secret