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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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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.
I don't want "it all". I just want our government to respect our rights and our Constitution. Is that too much to ask?
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).
Those who worry are usually those who have something to hide or something criminal in the works.
You won't mind me wiretapping your phones, installing caneras in your home and adding keyloggers to your computers? You're not a criminal with anything to hide, right?
That's silly. Privacy is a constitutional right -- so important that it's part of the original Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments). To state that the desire to MAINTAIN your right to privacy means you have ill intent to "do wrong" (whatever the hell THAT means) is saying that nobody has any rights whatsoever -- since whatever is "granted" is as easily revocable and ostensibly temporary.
Furthermore, what constitutes "wrong"? Who's the judge? It's a moral characterization to actions of an inalienable right afforded by our founding fathers. Your statements simply don't make sense.
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 ...
I DO want it all. I want it all. I want it all. I want it all. And I want it NOW!
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
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.
Then you're looking at it wrong. Everyone has a right of privacy, and everyone is entitled to care (or not) about preserving that right. When a portion of a government tries to stomp on that right they've done a serious injury to you, and while you're free not to care about it, I'm also free to care a LOT about it without being faced with the accusation that I must "do wrong or plan on doing wrong" because I care about my rights.
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.
Actually, privacy isn't mentioned in the Bill of Rights at all. It has been inferred though not explicitly mentioned.
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
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." Cardinal Richelieu.
See, when your government spies on everything you do, sooner or later someone will come along and decide that since they already have this information, they can use it for other things.
If you don't grasp this, I suggest you read more about Joseph McCarthy -- America is entirely capable of political persecution as any other government.
Bottom line, with your attitude, you deserve to be dragged off in the night, because you're part of the problem with the complacency and people not seeing what's really wrong here. That's kinda how I see it.
Since you're not part of the solution, you are the problem.
Twenty years ago, the US would make jokes about "papers please" and the Soviets. Now, that's just normal routine.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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
ok, but shipping takes a few days...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Your an idiot.
/facepalm
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
Or you're a tea party supporter trying to start a nonprofit.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The old 'if you are innocent you have nothing to fear' argument. I thought that one went out of fashion when the German Jews realized that being innocent is no defense again tyrants.
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?
Wait, you don't have a social media account, Comrade? Why are you being anti-social? Don't you like our society?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
Hint: It's the part that indicates the list isn't all inclusive and that reserves all rights not enumerated therein to the people. Or is that too far in for you to read?
Is not their problem if you feel that you don't have anything to hide. You could be committing 3 felonies a day without being aware of it. Anything that you did in your past could be used against you, even if not a matter of national security, or against some friend to frame you if they think you did something wrong. And could be in your side to prove that you are innocent, something that could be costly if even possible.
And not forget that the **AA are in bed with them, the wrong you did could be having a background music in the video you took in a birthday party or that silly theme that you were singing with your friends when drunk.
Don't think just in the present, and your precarious today's safety, Things will change. And for worse.
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.
And the next time the US chastises another government for this kind of thing, they'll get told to blow it out their rear.
As you say, Google, Microsoft, et al have established the precedent they'll be willing to do this ... so every other government is going to tell them they want the exact same level of monitoring, and will expect to get it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Security concerns are not about common people, or even criminals being tracked. It's aboud political opposition being tracked.
Snowden said he could listen in on conversations of anyone he wanted, including powerful people, and proceeded to do so as a test. No one came to get him for doing so without a warrant.
Among hundreds, maybe thousands of agents, it's trivial to insert an operative to listen to opposition.
He says he has data ready to release in case he's arrested. I hope it includes embarrasing conversations of said powerful people. Maybe then these jackasses will wake up.
All people want is a system design that tracks and records everything the government does, as it tracks and records everyhing we do, from Twitterers to opposition discussing political planning.
That currently does not exist.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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 or they can put you on a list of people to watch and then catch you smoking in your house.
2. If this is your stance that you have nothing to hide.... I presume that you don't have shades. Why don't you post your credit card statement on your front door for your neighbors to inspect "Hey, you've got nothing to hide". In fact let's make your browsing history completely public. How about your health records?
You may nothing to hide but I suspect you're also not eager to share your personal details with the world.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I only use one time pads when tweeting.
...puts a crimp in the number of followers though.
We get it. I believe the reason that there is no right to privacy, the right to be left the hell alone, guaranteed in the Constitution including the original Bill of Rights is that no one of that time could have been reasonably expected to foresee that it would ever become an issue. The technical means for mass gross intrusion, and the present extreme degree of police state, could not possibly have been imagined at that time. One can criticise the oversight as a failure of imagination, but nobody is perfect.
OTOH, the failure to recognize the problem and provide a new Amendment to banish it in modern times is an egregious failure of the system.
While in theory I agree. Then again what the government is doing is criminal. Did you not see the /. post yesterday about relational metadata and how it can be used. It was a very interesting read, and I actually did RTFA. It showed how innocuous data mining like this could be used to identify people, in this case the data was used to show how seemingly innocent data could point to potential threats in this case it was Paul Revere.
I can fully see how this can be used to stop terrorist attacks, but so far we have finger pointing from every corner that says our intelligence community has had prior knowledge of several potential attacks and neglected to follow through. It is far more likely this will be used against law abiding citizens. What if I am a law abiding citizen but I begin speaking out against the injustices the administration is committing in the name of fighting terror and they use my data to pin point and come after me. I've committed no crime other than I could be labeled a terrorist for speaking up for my rights.
The way I see it it's just another way the government can abuse or circumvent checks and balances that were put in place to protect our rights.
Do you honestly want your government to know every minute detail of your life?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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?
Everybody does something criminal. On the average of three felonies a day.
http://kottke.org/13/06/you-commit-three-felonies-a-day
Want some bread with your water?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Wrong, wrong, wrong! And wrong!
It's a common fallacy spouted by those who foist surveillance on us. See here, here, or any other of the many hits when you search for privacy "nothing to hide"
It goes right along with the "privacy and security are mutually exclusive" fallacy.
People like you that are trading your long-term liberty and privacy for a current sense of security are going to rue this day eventually. These essential freedoms need constant vigilance. Many of our forefathers died defending them. They're rolling in their graves now seeing how so many are nonchalantly pissing them away.
Here's your homework. Go read the Constitution of the United States of America. No, really. Read it line by line and understand why some say it's the most important and influential document created in the last 1000 years.
And don't say it can't happen here. It just did.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The parent should be modded up. It's factual, relevant, and worth remembering.
The problem is that your right maybe someone else's breach of freedom. That's always the issue.
E.g. You eat peanuts, the guy beside you is allergic. He has to leave the event because he can't be within 20 metres of peanuts...
Collection of information can protect citizens from crooks but also impede on said individuals privacy. Which one is more important? Is there a balance?
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.
This presupposes that privacy is a right, rather than a privilege.
This is part of the reasons we have so many problems with government. At the time the US government was formed the premise was:
The people have all the rights; the government has no rights at all, except those granted by the people through the constitution.
For most people today the belief similar, except they swap people and government.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
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/
How would you interpret this:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What part of that do you feel authorizes the government to collect detailed information about our private lives? Or do you think email is not "papers" because it's stored electronically and that if our founding fathers meant for email to be included, they would have had the foresight to include electronic document storage?
Or you're a tea party supporter trying to start a nonprofit.
Or a political advocacy group illegally trying to file as a non-profit.
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?
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.
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.
This presumes that reading the worlds gmails and facebook posts will actually stop terrorism, just as you presume that somebody who has a mythical allergy to being within a 20 meters radius of peanuts would venture beyond the assured safety of his home.
Tell me if this isn't a more exact definition of privacy than simply stating: "People have a right to privacy."
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
That's why DHS was monitoring the anti-war protestors in Boston instead of looking for terrorists with bombs, right?
Because TERRORISM!
Face it, the jokers in power aren't Republican or Democrat. They're authoritarians.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Okay. Tell me your name and where you live so I can get started.
I don't want "it all". I just want our government to respect our rights and our Constitution. Is that too much to ask?
That depends on which Constitution you are referring to. If it is the one written as a founding document of the United States, as written, with a long period of interpretation and decisions in the courts, then that isn't too much to ask for. If it is the same constitution, ignoring the long history and results of jurisprudence, but with a strong added dose of common misunderstanding and possibly fortified with fringe theories, then that probably is too much to ask for. The only thing you are likely to get is the first, but many people desire something like the second.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
fuck the peanut guy thats evolution telling you that you lost.
let me give you a small tidbit as to how many US parties respect our rights and our constitution. It's a number slightly less than 1, and it's an integer. There are very, very few individuals in any party that do respect them, and the majority does not.
The problem with that amendment is the "against UNREASONABLE searches" bit. With the culture of fear created after 9/11, a significant portion of the population feels that this is reasonable if done in the name of fighting Teh Terrorists(tm), which has thus far made the surveillance at least appear constitutional.
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
Which one is more important?
Privacy, obviously. Anyone who says otherwise is a naive fool.
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!
Nowhere in the Constitution is the government granted a power that overrides privacy. Taken together, the 4th and 9th Amendments should guarantee that privacy is a right which may only be overridden by a warrant issued based on probable cause.
The government powers should be read as follows:
Order Deny, Allow
Deny from all
Allow powers as written in Constitution
Unfortunately, it's been re-interpreted as:
Order Allow, Deny
Allow from all
Deny as few powers as possible without causing a revolt
Or anyone targeted by McCarthy's hearings.
When the statement is made similar to "Those who worry are usually those who have something to hide or something criminal in the works," they are speaking directly to government surveillance on a massive scale. If I'm not significantly breaking the law I'll just look like background noise. It is a valid position to take based on privacy alone. If you are specifically targeting one person, then that's a completely different argument and completely unrelated to what is happening here. You are interested in your target. You have invested of your own funds and time to spy. If your target is not a criminal, what is your return on that investment? You are likely interested in damaging your target in some way. Conversely, the government's intention is not to damage its target. It is targeting everyone because that's easier than targeting people individually where they would need separate warrants for each case.
Personally, I don't agree with it because it erodes rights, and at some point, unless history has taken a new turn that it never has before, this government will become so corrupt that it will need to be replaced or significantly modified. What the State will do with the information it has and is still collecting at that point is to defend itself in its current form by attempting to destroy its opposition or to control the citizens with tyranny. People who read history books can see this coming and are opposed to this erosion of rights. Those who live in magic pink pony land defend this erosion of rights because they somehow think that the human race has evolved beyond the point of repeating history.
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"
This kind of argument re: "the person watching will be bored/frustrated" may have worked circa 1948, but nowadays computers can do the work. When there's something useful then the computer signals it. No muss, no fuss. I'm always stunned by how many people refuse to get into the 21st century with their thinking on this issue.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The problem is that your right maybe someone else's breach of freedom. That's always the issue.
E.g. You eat peanuts, the guy beside you is allergic. He has to leave the event because he can't be within 20 metres of peanuts...
Collection of information can protect citizens from crooks but also impede on said individuals privacy. Which one is more important? Is there a balance?
Ok, first, the government cannot give you Rights. Rights cannot be taken away. (see YouTube for George Carlin) I know, it's called the Bill of Rights, but it's not. It's a list of vaguely defined privileges each citizen is given and can be taken away. Yes, legally taken away through the Courts or legislation. Sorry, it's true.
Everyone deserves to have the same privileges, the problem is not everyone wants the same things and not everyone can (as in "able to") exercise their privileges either by choice, illness, injury, birth defect, etc. Are they being oppressed or denied anything? No, they just don't want or can't use a privilege granted them by the government. To use your example, the guy eating peanuts in a public place with no expectation of privacy or primacy can do so unimpeded. If someone gets near and has an allergy, you already gave the civil outcome to that, he moves away from the peanut source and continues exercising his privilege of being at the same public event. The guy with the allergy has to be more aware of his environment, but his "rights" are not impinged because someone else at the same public event is eating peanuts. There's no law against eating peanuts.
Finally, can there be a balance? Sure, as long as all parties get along. As long as people are educated about what their PRIVILEGES are and what the difference is between them and RIGHTS. They learn to find ways to live with each other rather than kill each other. They mature in their world view to incorporate the viewpoints of others. We the People are the government in the United States, something our recent political discourse seems to have forgotten to mention. It's not an US versus THEM situation because WE ARE THEM AND US! We just need to find a way to protect our privileges without wiping out all the ones that protect our freedom.
I do not like what's happened to the United States since 9/11. I think we went completely off the hinges and instead of pulling back once the major conflicts were over we plunged deeper into the paranoid abyss. When FISA gets taken out of the picture something bad is going on. BTW, the NSA can break just about any commercially available encryption out there (Hi boys! [waves]), so the "goodluckwiththat" tag for this story is absolutely fitting. You'd be better off hiding data in wheels of cheese like the guy above.
Sure, but remember:
1. The constitution doesn't GRANT rights, all rights are thought to be 'natural' born rights everyone comes with when they hit the atmosphere here on earth. So, privacy is an right by birth. Unless the govt/state passes a law limiting that right, you have it.
2. The constitution (again) doesn't grant rights, but instead enumerates the limited powers the government is supposed to have over you....the bill of rights is there giving special note to some rights, but you had them without the bill of rights...just just are there to special attention to those they mention.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........