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US Intelligence Chief Defends Attempts To Break Tor
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Arik Hesseldahl writes that James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, says that the NSA tried to penetrate and compromise Tor, but it was only because terrorists and criminals use it, too and our "interest in online anonymity services and other online communication and networking tools is based on the undeniable fact that these are the tools our adversaries use to communicate and coordinate attacks against the United States and our allies." It was all legal and appropriate, Clapper argues, because, "Within our lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, we use every intelligence tool available to understand the intent of our foreign adversaries so that we can disrupt their plans and prevent them from bringing harm to innocent Americans. Our adversaries have the ability to hide their messages and discussions among those of innocent people around the world. They use the very same social networking sites, encryption tools and other security features that protect our daily online activities." Clapper concludes that "the reality is that the men and women at the National Security Agency and across the Intelligence Community are abiding by the law, respecting the rights of citizens and doing everything they can to help keep our nation safe.""
and I don't even live in the states
The people that work in the NSA are a bunch or criminals. From the top leaders down to the last analyst.
They're undermining democracy this is the reality. The few good men that worked there and that tried to expose all the illegal acts going on (including of course Snowden) were ostracized, kicked out and prosecuted.
Fuck them, Osama should have droped a couple of 747s on their HQ instead of the WTC. He'd done a great service to democracy.
The rest of the world just sees the US committing hostile acts on every citizen of the planet, and also that the US is undermining freedom and communication across the world. You have to stop what you're doing, because you're wrecking everything, and your "justifications" are hollow.
Stop it.
Now.
James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, says that...the NSA tried to penetrate and compromise Tor, but it was only because terrorists and criminals use it, too...
Well, he's right. As far as that goes. Trouble is, there's a disconnect between investigating terrorists/other criminals and wholesale spying on honest citizens. One can only suppose the term "honest citizen" is a term entirely alien to their comprehension...
In a combined statement the FBI, DEA, and Homeland Security announce a startling discovery: terrorists and criminals use cash. As a result, law enforcement agencies are seizing cash and "near cash" equivalents such as bank accounts from all US residents. Quoting law enforcement officials, "We have only just learned that cash can be used for criminal and terrorist activities. We hope the public understands the eminent danger of these systems and cooperates with these seizures. Our goal is always to prevent harm to the public and once we learned that cash was used by nearly 100% of all terrorist and criminal activities in some form or another we knew we needed to act."
I wouldn't trust Tor at all if national intelligence agencies didn't expend considerable resources to break it. Competition is what drives this technology forward.
What dilemma? Freedom has responsibilities, and so does protection of privacy and rights.
These "justifications" are just B.S. designed to ramp up fear so funding gets extended.
You are all being played as suckers and you really should think about taking your country back.
Also, any so-called "IT" staff that go along to implement this - you are collaborators of the worst kind, shame on you.
provided it isn't abused... oh wait ...
Why?
. . .currently in the biz, the means to preclude future tyranny in all this are unclear. Maybe if the House of Representatives maintained anything like its original proportions, we'd have enough people actually elected by voters in place to give us more of a warm fuzzy about the oversight.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Actually, a better "analogy" is that they work hard on making sure that cash can't be used anonymously. Each transaction must be monitored (serial numbers on every bill, cameras in every ATM and store), and controlled (demanding proof of ownership for depositing cash at a bank, removing the possibility to actually use cash for buying travel documents).
Much like they are working hard on trying to make sure Tor can't be used anonymously.
c++;
The same argument can be made about cars, trucks, planes, trains, fertilizer, guns, etc. It's not IT specific.
Also, thinking about prior art is willful infringement. This one goes to 11. Don't even look at it.
The same thing can be said for opening all the letters, listening to all the phone calls since the postal office actually allows anonymous letters and the phone companies anonymous calls. Some even operate anonymous public phone booths, the bastards!
To put it another way: free speech means some folks will say things that match your opinion (a "good" thing!), but sometimes, they dare to say stuff you don't agree with! And the latter can't be allowed.
Or, for the mandatory vehicular analogy, a car can be used to bring kittens to an orphanage, or to plow into an orphan on the street and splatter it over the pavement.
That's not a problem with the tool but with the user. And the reason James Clapper here wants to forbid you to use encryption is pretty nefarious, even if he claims to want only "your good". So he and his agency should first learn to behave before telling us what to do.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Anyone else feel that is NSA says they tried to compromise Tor but didn't, that means they know someone's about to release something that shows they were working on it.. and I'd guess they have not failed.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
The automobile has brought more harm to innocent people than Tor ever will. Every technology has unintended consequences.
Our government explicitly says, privacy is a threat to our safety, and it is the duty of our government to prevent privacy from being possible at all costs.
Go ahead, people. Keep voting for the republicans, because at least they are not democrats. Oh, I mean, keep voting for democrats, because at least they are not republicans. NOTHING is going to change that way. They'll keep boning us up the ass with this "oh noooo... can't have privacy.... TARE! Fnord! War on TARE!!!!"
Actually y'know what? Fuck y'all. YOU are responsible for this. Not me. I have not voted for either major party in DECADES. YOU... YOU are responsible for allowing this to happen. YOU have gotten the government you deserve, you half-wits. Sadly, I am the one who has to suffer for you turds voting for the jackasses (Bush, Obama, whatever) who allow and enable shit like this.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
... just as soon as he's done serving his sentence for perjuring himself in front of Congress.
" But on the other horn, there really are people out there who will use these technologies to bring harm to innocent people--for the greater good, of course (or for a profit). These people will use technology against our best wishes."
There's no use for Tor that is against my interests. None. It's just speech going down wires. You may not like the kiddie diddlers discussing their kiddy diddling, or the terrorists discussing.... well nothing, because terrorists have no reason to use it... but its all just speech. Acts are not speech, people like Clapper pretend that saying things terrorists might say is the same as committing an *act* of terrorism.
" are abiding by the law, respecting the rights of citizens and doing everything they can to help keep our nation safe"
No they're not. They hacked domestic communications on Tor too. No political candidate exists now that doesn't have an NSA folder full of their dirty secrets. Which means that liars like Clapper can/have been shaping US politics to be pro-military. They've certainly been interfering in Europe's politics, EU Commission pretending that US spying on Europe is a US *domestic* issue, FFS.
If you accept that democracy is the basis for stable countries, then he's destabilized the US.
Safe? Safe from a free democracy?? That's what General Alexander has done.
You can see it when the ex NSA Chief dresses up in military garb and jokes about killing critics. You can see how far away from a free democracy you've gone.
And that is the price of freedom. Some will abuse it. There is no moral dilemma; you don't compromise others rights for some imaginary sense of security. .
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't blame IT staff. The human animal is predictable. 99.9999% of them don't want trouble and will do morally shadowy things to avoid it. Saying no to the NSA gets you trouble a la Lavabit. I stand by Ledar Levison, but he has more balls than I ever would. (Of course I don't run a secret email service.) It also teaches us an important lesson. The weakest point in any internet security is the bag of meat responsible for it.
I've got news for you, friend. Information has never harmed a single soul. It takes action to do that. Information doesn't kill people, people do. The NSA does not preempt terrorist threats, and even if they did, the cost to the rest of our lives is too much. They've inundated themselves with data and can't make sense of any of it until after the actions have been performed. Besides, folks could just send post cards with stenographic messages on them, or any other low-tech solution. Tor and darknets wouldn't need to exist if we didn't feel insecure.
More folks die of heart disease every year than over fifty 9/11's... 2,996 died in 9/11. 597,689. Two Hundred Times More, Every Year! If the NSA wanted to protect us they'd be making tastier health food. Over six times more Americans take their own lives every year than the Terrorists did in their worst attack against us. The threat is fucking pathetic, and those spreading the fear narrative should be fired. Humans have deep psychological, evolutionarily encoded, desires to protect our lives and those of women and children even more. This is psychological warfare.
I know it sounds cold hearted, but we can put a price on a human life. We can look at the lifespan and the benefit to society that life may contribute, and quantify a life to some degree. This is not to dehumanize people, but to put into perspective the ethics of fearmongering. A few thousand died at the hands of terrorists, but now hundreds of millions suffer every day at their loss of privacy. The aggregate suffering is far greater than that of the worst tortures to the few. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. IMO, It's better not to live in fear of your government for your entire life than to say, lose a limb. I would give up my left leg to end this NSA spying on me, and all Americans. What I really fear that they are turning more people against us every day!
Privacy is worth something. We need private space to be fully human, and as our lives deal more and more online that privacy needs to be extended online as well. Folks wouldn't be encrypting shit if they felt they could trust the networks.
The NSA is wounding us deeply. Their actions make them seem like the other secret police we fought against. We didn't need such a police state since we were brave and good people. Soldiers took up the call to fight for our nation because we had honor. The NSA is stripping away our honor. Many would not fight for us because of it. The NSA is a Threat to National Security. These fearmongers are injecting poison into the veins of our country. They will not ever decrease the dosage, and if we let them continue, they will increase it and destroy our great nation from the inside out.
Think for a second about the lengths we've got to because of the pathetic terrorist attacks. Now, what if the NSA really did try to protect us from real harms we face? The NSA would monitor everything you ate and tax you if you more if you ate "unhealthy" food, whatever they deem that to be. The NSA would be monitoring every vehicle location and remotely shutting folks down cars. They'd be preemptively sending cops into your home to make sure your bad-day didn't turn into a suicide.
We have secret ballots for a reason. The invasion of privacy must end.
I disagree. TOR's solely purpose is to provide anonymity. If they remove that aspect, all that's left of TOR is adding delays to your network connections and allowing exit nodes to sniff your traffic. There is no value left, thus they're destroying it.
Also, considering LOVEINT, there's no reason to assume that you're just anonymous to everyone except the US agencies. The NSA agents have no reason why they wouldn't sell any intel to the highest bidder, since there's no traceability nor accountability (remember that the agents only got caught because they confessed; somebody selling the same info would never do that). I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of US companies that'd love to get their hands on the intel the NSA collects.
The pope has the infallibility thing, in which he tells us when he's infallible, so we don't go confusing his regular fallible musings.
How about Clapper? When do we know he's telling the truth? Could he not wear some kind of special hat on the rare occasions when he's speaking truthfully on matters of great import? I'd suggest he wink when he's not telling the truth, but he'd be winking so often during congressional hearings he'd seem to be having a stroke.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
"we use every intelligence tool available to understand the intent of our foreign adversaries" I do not think the word foreign means what you think it does. Foreign if you look it up in any dictionary and then apply it in context to the United States means non American citizens.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
He keeps using that word, but I don't think it means what he thinks it means.
I've erected a "Terrorism-Free Zone" sign in front of my building.
You know the kind where someone posts something like the story expecting to be -1 with 10 angry responses, but instead gets +5 funny for being bluntly so obvious that its not serious.
If the NSA did break it I would have fun making destroy_america_plan.tor or mall_of_america_attack_bitcoin_account.tor and have just a pic of the goatse guy for NSA's enjoyment. For the slashdotters who werent here 12 years and remember the goatse troll go google goatse.ru and let me know if that would be cruel and unusual punishment?
http://saveie6.com/
The problem isn't that those who wants to harm us communicate in ways we have problems listening to. The problem is that they want to harm us.
Our efforts on listening in on everybody so we can classify more enemies creates more people who hate us.
When followed up with drone strikes on mere suspects not convicted of anything, and people who are guilty of being nearby, we really fuel the fire.
Yes, the thought that possible enemies are communicating without us being able to listen in burns us up. But when listening in creates animosity which grows to hatred, it's counter-productive.
You don't get fewer snakebites by digging every nearby hill to find dens, and poke the snakes to find out whether they're agressive or not. You leave them alone, knowing that they are out there, and some of them may be dangerous. Co-existing works. Paranoia doesn't.
The analogy here is a bit stretched. Both cars and Tor are tools that can be used for good and bad,
but the former does not make it impossible for authorities to enforce the law when one is doing bad things.
Tor, on the other hand, allows pedophiles and whomever to use the tool for the bad without suffering
the consequences.
I am a crypto geek and a fan of Tor, but people just need to get their heads out of their butts already
and realize that this is a hard problem.
The tradeoff between the amount of anonymity you get and how well laws can be enforced is real and
choosing where to draw the line is nontrivial and subject to a lot of controversy. It is quite clear that NSA
and whoever else is doing these things have been crossing any reasonable line, but don't oversimplify the
issue at hand by making bloody car analogies.
He says they are. Now, give me one reason why I should believe him. Where's the oversight? Why should I trust him?
I'm in IT security myself, and "trust" is a big issue. Trust saves you time. If you trust an entity, you put some burden of security on someone else, the entity that you trust. E.g., you trust a CA and its issued certificates so you don't have to verify all the various certs out there yourself. We trust the CAs out of convenience and out of practicality. And in turn CAs are audited and checked constantly to ensure they are up to speed with their security. Still, security blunders happen. But at least there are means and ways to not only detect them but also to remedy them, and most importantly: It is your, and only your, decision whether or not you trust a CA. You can decide unilaterally to declare certs issued by one or even all CAs as untrustworthy for yourself (and yourself alone).
So we have oversight, security audition, breach discovery and unilateral opt-out (or even opt-in).
NONE of these features apply to the NSA. Hence there is exactly ZERO reason for me to trust that entity AT ALL, from a security point of view. I cannot audit them, I cannot determine the security of their setup, I cannot determine the actual scope of their work and most of all I cannot decide against trusting them.
Sorry, but there is no reason to trust him. On what? His word? Well, great, here's my word that I won't do anything stupid, dangerous or illegal. It's just as good as his. So he can stop spying on me now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh, wait, isn't that kinda their job? The value of TOR lies in it's inability to be cracked, why is anyone surprised that the NSA tried to crack it?
Now, if the report was that the NSA had been able to successfully crack TOR that would be noteworthy...
Ken
Why would you listen to a convicted felon if you don't want to listen to one not convicted yet?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On the one horn of the dilemma, we like privacy and want information to be free. So we embrace technologies like Tor, form darknets, etc. But on the other horn, there really are people out there who will use these technologies to bring harm to innocent people--for the greater good, of course (or for a profit). These people will use technology against our best wishes.
When you say "these people will use technology against our best wishes", which people are you referring to - the "people out there", or the people in the NSA, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Because shut up.
This is more or less a justification for any action the NSA might take.
They already have access to pretty much *all* communications in the world. I for one am sure glad that helped prevent the Boston bombings and the recent attack on the mall in Kenya.
If they are already unable to detect and prevent bad things from happening at the hands of terrorists, what justifies attempting to crack one of the few means of privacy we have left? In their rampant pursuit of obtaining *all* communications they have trampled the rights of individuals to any shred of privacy - and apparently accomplished absolutely nothing of major value before it happened. Sure, the ability to subvert communications world wide might let them track down a terrorist leader a decade or so later but is that enough justification for crushing the rights of every human on the fucking planet?
They used to do this stuff using human assets - actual members of the CIA going out and recruiting agents, analyzing data received, finding targets and then determining what to do about them, but when they came across the absolute "sexiness" of electronic spying, they cut waaaaaaay back on human spying, turned the problem over the NSA and cut the budget (more likely spend more on the NSA than they did on CIA employees and bribes to prospective agents). In the process they apparently decided it was necessary to spy on all American citizens as well, in violation of the law, as well as on all the citizens of their friends and allies.
I hope they have been unable to crack TOR, even though I don't use it, because its one of the few options people have for privacy, and I have yet to hear them provide any details on anything they have concerning terrorists actually using this technology.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
As long as we know that the NSA is doing this, I'm happy to have them as pentesters. Who better to help keep TOR's security top notch?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It only takes three words to sum up how untrustworthy the NSA is, "Pressure Cooker Backpack".
It is fascinating how there are so many initiatives to change the properties of the US government and the Constitution just because it has become harder for Republicans to win elections.
- Mark Levin's desire to add 11 new amendments to the Constitution.
- ALEC's efforts to repeal the 17th Amendment
- Movements in states to secede from the Union.
- Forcing students to vote in their home districts instead of where they live 9 months of the year.
- Requiring government-issued IDs less than a year old for voting, even as the offices that issue those IDs are being closed in poor and minority neighborhoods.
All because Republicans can't get a majority of Americans to vote for them*. It's even caused guys like Smitty to stop calling themselves Republican, hoping the stink of the Party of Reagan will somehow fade.
(*In the 2012 congressional elections, half a million more votes were cast for Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives than Republican, yet Republicans maintained a 234-195 seat majority. It was only because of red state gerrymandering that there is a Republican majority in the House, even as blue states move toward non-partisan drawing of congressional districts.)
You are welcome on my lawn.
Of course, because in National Socialist America, EVERYONE is a terrorist and a criminal.
It's impossible to rule a nation of innocents.
Gee, an organization tasked with intercepting and interpreting electronic communications wants to intercept and interpret electronic communications! Who woulda thunk it?
The NSA has certainly done a poor job keeping it's nose clean, but personally, I'd be rather disappointed if they weren't trying to de-anonymize Tor! Figuring out who is talking to who, and how often, called Signals Intelligence, is the bedrock of intelligence analysis (and has been even before the NSA existed), and in many ways is more important than knowing what they are saying.
In addition, if the NSA were to suddenly be hit with a clue-by-four by federal judges actually doing their job, they would need the de-anonymizing information to perform proper filtering of domestic communications.
You're stretching it too far the other way. Are you honestly suggesting we should be able to monitor the contents of all communications because someone *might* be using it to plan/execute a crime like sending child pornography?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Thats why most nations try to keep their domestic and foreign shield and sword agencies differentiated at some level.
Once people know their own their gov is listening in and it will be used in court they begin to alter their habits. The social contract falters.
They quickly work out they have the legal protections a random foreigner with a residence permit. No charming diplomats and skilled lawyers.
Gone are the easy days of signals intelligence, welcome the informants.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Just who is deciding who is innocent? They decide who is innocent, and do so without the constitutionally guaranteed protections for the innocent.
...
I agree with the poster above and oppose the surveillance state.
Am I still innocent now? Was I ever?
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
It gets to be a game of East Germany and West Germany. Who do you want to avoid been seen with to get in good with West Germany?
The rest of the world just moves around the East Germany aspect.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Every taxpayer is a collaborator. Every shopper is a traitor. All money is blood money.
I think the quote goes, *You're a roofer on the death star*
There are no innocents
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I am not suggesting anything, nor defending any sort of monitoring. I'm saying that figuring out
exactly what is the best way to proceed is a hard problem, and the typical slashdotter seems to trivialize
it, ignoring the fact that both sides have drawbacks. It is completely different from "banning Tor is like
banning cars omg freedom! my feelings!".
I completely understand the mentality of "we need to allow some bad to happen because the good
we get in exchange outweighs the bad", but one needs to acknowledge that this *is* a tradeoff and
complete anonymity does not come for free in a society. Exactly how much the society has to pay,
in terms of bad guys getting away and evil being done, I doubt anyone knows. But the US has many
enemies and I don't think it's easy to predict what will happen if they stop monitoring.
Honest question. During WW2 Bletchley Park and OSS routinely listened in on all radio communication. Private, Public, Foreign, Domestic.
They also tried to decrypt all encrypted signals, enemy and ally alike.
Was that less wrong then cracking Tor?
Stop making enemies by meddling in other countries' affairs to suit your own selfish gains.
Because he would have paid his dues to society. Similarly, if I were in a hiring position I wouldn't ever hire someone who I knew had committed a felony and not get punished. But I might, depending on the job, hire a convicted felon.
There is absolutely no dilemma here. Freedom is simply more important than safety, and anyone who would trade the former for the latter is a naive fool of the highest caliber.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
and the typical slashdotter seems to trivialize
it, ignoring the fact that both sides have drawbacks.
It's not hard to trivialize. If someone doesn't understand that freedom is more important than safety, then they're imbeciles to begin with.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
Let us not forget disenfranchised ex-felons that have lost civil rights. That is an ever growing, largely liberal and poor block of potential voters. But, of course they are criminals, and shoul suffer forever.
Silence is a state of mime.
Amen to that, being a non-US citizen I truly feel disconnected from what the US keeps doing. To the point where I am working my ass off to learn how to run everything myself (email,web, etc) using Debian/OpenBSD. And this is coming from a guy who had a US flag with a painted Harley in his room as a teenager.
The fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 changed the US in a truly bad way. It is kind of like the same story of every monopoly, after they reach total control it is like the beginning of the end. Kind of like what happened with Ancient Rome and Alexander the Great.
People misunderstand what a police state is. It isn't a country where the police strut around in jackboots; it's a country where the police can do anything they like.
Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do anything it likes.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
While I have no intention to collaborate with finding out private communications between US citizens, I don't see why the NSA would not try and break TOR. TOR is a communication system that would allow terrorists to communicate without being monitored, it is a job of a spy agency to get into those communication methods. It's like telling James Bond to not try to break into the safe of the bad guy to get the secret papers because, "breaking and entering is illegal and not nice".
There is nothing wrong with breaking TOR, because TOR doesn't deserve it's reputation if it can be broken. I'm glad that they've broken it and we know about it. I've always known that, while it had certain benefits, it has always been very susceptible to being compromised if you have enough assets and the will to do so. All they've done is proven it. Now we move on to something else, or we accept the caveats that working with TOR constrains us with.
I'm not worried about what they can do, I'm worried about what they do with their capabilities. The fact is that someone is going to be able to do what the NSA is doing, sooner or later. Let's make sure that it is the good guys who are doing it, and that those people who go into that field are responsible and honest people who understand the need for privacy in the course of normal events.
Exactly what someone who runs a secret email service would want us to think!
There's a difference between being a part of a system that you have no objective control over, and being complicit in specific activities that we have no way of having oversight over.
If I was a roofer on the Death Star, I might have no idea what the big crater looking thing was for. I'd think I was building a big battlestation, at best. Is it my fault that I didn't walk over to the other side of what was the size of a small moon and ask what they were building over there? Would I know a superlaser if I saw one? Hell no. I'm a roofer, not a turbolaser technician. I wouldn't know a superlaser from a thermal exhaust port.
it is very hard to break the law when you are the one making said law
FinCEN and FINTRAC has been around for a long time and tracks most large transactions in any monetary form. Lawyers, bankers, and even folks like real-estate agents are reporting entities.
Rod Taylor
Our nation's HUMINT services capability has completely collapsed. As a result of 9/11 and in a attempt to shore things up, Bush established the ODNI which only worsened the already extreme problem of bureaucracy hampering operations. With HUMINT severely hamstrung, the executives within the agencies decided that technology could simply replace it. Ubiquitous collections programs were given more and more and more money until the community literally couldn't spend it all so they came up with new, contrived requirements. If you have the capacity to collect on everyone and simply claim that you won't use it unless you find a tr'ist, well then why should anyone care. The leadership within the agencies can report great things to Congress and the money keeps coming.
Look, bottom line is that if we don't fix our HUMINT services and get them back into and effective operational state overseas, we're screwed. Chances are very slim that we will as such Intel ops are very risky and the agencies have become incredibly risk averse, but it is none the less the solution.
The NSA agents have no reason why they wouldn't sell any intel to the highest bidder, since there's no traceability nor accountability (remember that the agents only got caught because they confessed; somebody selling the same info would never do that). I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of US companies that'd love to get their hands on the intel the NSA collects.
Unlike Edward Snowdon spys within the NSA wouldn't go telling the entire world what they'd been up to. Also the NSA undoubtedly freely exchanges information with "partners". So a US company might find it easier to get hold of such information in London or Tel Aviv...
The whole god damned world seems to be out to hurt the U.S if you listen to these people. The U.S is psyched up on its on self-entitlement and is behaving like a violent bully, and it's time the world comes together and stand up against it.
Signature intentionally left blank.
"James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, says that the NSA tried to penetrate and compromise Tor"
OK; so, what movies, did Jimmy-Clap, download before someone walked in and saw?
If anything or anyone I could vote for had the power or interest to change anything about it, I would.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> I cannot determine the security of their setup
I think Snowden did a good job here.
To put it another way: free speech means some folks will say things that match your opinion (a "good" thing!), but sometimes, they dare to say stuff you don't agree with! And the latter can't be allowed.
Where the ethics gets tricky is "you" (be that an individual, a "majority" or vocal "minority") agreeing with an opinion or not may not be a good metric as to if something should be allowed or not in a society.
Something which is "popular" may be very "bad", whereas something which is "unpopular" may be very "good".
And the reason James Clapper here wants to forbid you to use encryption is pretty nefarious, even if he claims to want only "your good".
Very often those who seek to impose something on people "for their own good" are the most oppressive.
This should be modded informative, not funny. The reality is that if you're travelling with any large amount of currency, the cops can and routinely do seize it. They've even seized bail money brought to the police station. It's done under civil forfeiture laws, and you then have to prove in court that the money came from legitimate activities. Often at an expense that exceeds the value of what you're trying to get back.
Whereas it's easy to predict what will happens if they keep making such moral compromises in the name of short-term gain: the number of enemies will grow.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Actually, a better "analogy" is that they work hard on making sure that cash can't be used anonymously. Each transaction must be monitored
You know what the classic solution to all this is, right? Allow me a quote from a movie made a long time ago, called Enemy of the State;
Brill: In guerrilla warfare, you try to use your weaknesses as strengths.
Robert Clayton Dean: Such as?
Brill: Well, if they're big and you're small, then you're mobile and they're slow. You're hidden and they're exposed. You only fight battles you know you can win. That's the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time.
Guys... all their equipment is wired into the internet. A lot of it is the internet. And we're in a world where everything is increasingly interconnected and online all the time, everywhere. There's nothing they can do that we can't do too. They wanna watch us? We'll watch them. They wanna revoke passports overseas... I hope they don't plan on buying any plane tickets using credit cards. Frustrate them. Fuck with them.
Oh they'll call you a terrorist, they'll probably even throw in the word 'cyber' a lot, because they love cybering. But if you're good, and you're smart about it... they're gonna be hard-pressed to find you because you are one person in a target-rich environment. You can afford to pick and choose who, where, and when your engagements are. They can't. They're a fat blob of wires, ego, and data centers.
The NSA becoming this bloated piece of shit that tries to monitor everything is a major strategic weakness. They've moved off their primary focus. They've spread themselves too thin, trying to do too much at once, and this "NSA 2.0" they're rolling out has caused a previously impregnable organization to start leaking like a sieve. They're weak guys.
Let me be clear on this, because everyone's running around thinking the NSA is this unstoppable cyber super organization. They're fat, slow, and weak. They're exposed. It is just a matter of time before someone takes them to school on this. I'm not suggesting you do this. Or you. Or anyone. But the NSA has pissed off a lot of people, and we have enemies both foreign and domestic that want a little payback.
Well, meat's back on the menu guys. Anyone with an iota of tactical understanding realizes that when you try to be everything, everywhere, all the time... when you fight a protracted war... you exhaust your resources, your troops get tired, and then... then you lose.
The NSA is about to take a special kind of fall guys. Even if nobody gives them a helping push, they're going to collapse under their own weight. The intelligence cycle depends on timely analysis, accurate information, and good communication between analysts, management, and clients. Whenever you bloat up, communication increases exponentially, while the 'signal', the amount of useful information coming out, drops. We've all seen e-mail shitstorms in the office... there are intelligence community equivalents guys. The NSA is super-saturating itself and will render itself inert within a decade at the rate it is going... without any outside help whatsoever.
This isn't James Bond knowledge I'm working off of. There are people working at the NSA. And while I can't say what any one of them is doing, I know as a group that right now... it's a pressure-cooker environment. And if I had any way of validating that out there, I'd bet real money right now on it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Your "helplessness" is a result of conditioning.. And as they say, *Ignorance is no excuse*. Your response to my OP is very robotic, almost word for word, like all the others who respond to the idea of being responsible for your own chronic misfortunes. This system was built with your very own hands. Try as you might, you cannot deny it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If that served any purpose, then to show that
a) their setup is not secure (evidently visible by the fact that Snowden could get information out)
b) what is done there is against my interests (evident by what has been shown by Snowden)
c) what is done there is against the interests of any entity I'm responsible for (since it can be used for espionage, both against countries and corporations)
d) their actions lower the security of what I am responsible for (since they demand the security of systems and services being lowered or outright compromised to enable their snooping).
NONE of those results make me deem this entity trustworthy. In fact, the NSA is about the biggest threat to the security of any non-US entity (governments as well as corporations) I could currently identify.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't live in the USA either. But I don't feel safe. He's being fairly truthful that he's not breaking any laws in the USA. But what laws prevent him from doing all sorts of nasties to people outside the USA, including close allies like Canada? I get the feeling that they have a "no hold barred" attitude even to allies.
Well, the biggest blue state of all, California, now has an independent commission draw legislative districts. Also Washington.
There are 37 states where legislatures draw lines.
You're finally going to get to the bottom of that birth certificate thing, aren't you?
You are welcome on my lawn.
History or no, gerrymandering has become very much a red state phenomenon.
Since gerrymandering gives shrinking benefits over time, you'll even find that states like Florida and North Carolina and Texas have started redistricting every year because those darn minorities keep moving around. In the past, district maps were done every ten years.
You are welcome on my lawn.
How about we cut off the oxygen supply at the NSA HQ? After all, terrorists breathe oxygen too, and given the incompetence of the NSA, I'd be surprised if anybody in there WASN'T a terrorist.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
There's that Tea Party Patriot Logic for you.
I hope some people take the time to read Mark Wilt's post above. I couldn't have done a parody that good.
All that would be good, except in the states with the most egregious voter-suppression efforts, none of it is true. Check North Carolina's rules. They're the model for the nation and it is not possible to get that ID card at a police station, public library, local courthouse or at any on-line sites.
Finally, riddle me this, PatriotMan: Why have the states that are pushing these voter suppression laws not making any changes at all to the absentee voter rules.
How do you check someone's ID card when they vote absentee? And why isn't THAT a problem for these patriotic Republicans?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I thought it was about "stopping voter fraud". What does any of that have to do with "voter fraud"? Why should a student not be allowed to vote at their school and still have a permanent residence with their parents?
Why don't you admit that you're just trying to make it harder for students to vote because they tend not to vote Republican? I mean, at least people might respect you a little bit if you were just honest about the purpose of these laws.
And by the way, I'm honored that you would register a brand spanking new Slashdot account just to respond to little old me. Are you part of the Red State Trike Force?
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's high praise indeed, coming from you.
Thank you for not trying to dispute anything I wrote.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Tor was used in an attack complete BS.
You only need to do that here (Sweden) if you want to deposit large enough sums, I don't know exactly how much should be a couple of thousands of your so-called quids.
I expect this to gradually change within the next 10 years or so, though. I mean, handling cash in this day is suspicious enough when you might as well use a debit or credit card of some sorts, or pay with your phone bill.
c++;
Agreed, If I were to rank threats to my freedom in order, the US government would rank a whole fucking lot higher than all of the world's terrorists combined.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
It's "impossible" for the police to do their jobs if Tor is involved? Seems like it is an online equivelent of back rooms, alleys and basements. The police can update their tactics to include Tor with the other seedy areas, without breaking Tor for the oppressed revolutionaries living under a religious dictatorship, and other "good" uses of it.
Learn to love Alaska
Nice try, but absurd examples aren't going to make your mentality any less ridiculous.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
So far, terrorism has yet to target innocent Americans. They are usually after people in charge high-ranking officials and people that have damaged or attempted to damage their way of life.
Terrorist seem to operate much like our military does, innocents are just collateral damage in the way of their objective. Yet our overlords would prefer us to think that we are the target
Baloney. Terrorism is exactly the opposite. It's true that in the terrorists minds, all those people in the World Trade Center - even the Muslim children in the day care center had "damaged their way of life" if only by not being terrorists themselves. However, very few of those people had an active role in US policy. Even the attack on the Pentagon was more likely to get relatively un-influential people more than otherwise.
Likewise, any military officer who doesn't seek to minimize or eliminate collateral damage is not only subject to prosecution for war crimes, but is widely going to be considered incompetent. Whereas terrorists specifically seek to maximize collateral damage and consider themselves heroes for achieving it.
That doesn't mean that I think a high-ranking US official can do anything he/she wants just because "terrorists use it". Terrorists use highways and telephones too. They buy groceries and take-out food. Should we tap wires and setup checkpoints? Strip-search people in line at the checkouts?
Oh wait...
and the typical slashdotter seems to trivialize
it, ignoring the fact that both sides have drawbacks.
It's not hard to trivialize. If someone doesn't understand that freedom is more important than safety, then they're imbeciles to begin with.
I don't know if they can be counted imbeciles.
But the USA was founded on the concept of freedom over safety.
So if you want safe, you have the freedom to emigrate to someplace where different standards apply.
Or have we changed our standards that much already?
I don't know if they can be counted imbeciles.
I do. Even minimal knowledge of history should tell people that giving any humans so much authority simply isn't a good idea.
Or have we changed our standards that much already?
We're getting molested at airports, spied on by our own government, sent off to free speech zones, and punished when we protest without permits, among other things. Whether or not our standards changed, something is wrong.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
While I have no intention to collaborate with finding out private communications between US citizens, I don't see why the NSA would not try and break TOR. TOR is a communication system that would allow terrorists to communicate without being monitored, it is a job of a spy agency to get into those communication methods. It's like telling James Bond to not try to break into the safe of the bad guy to get the secret papers because, "breaking and entering is illegal and not nice".
There is nothing wrong with breaking TOR, because TOR doesn't deserve it's reputation if it can be broken. I'm glad that they've broken it and we know about it. I've always known that, while it had certain benefits, it has always been very susceptible to being compromised if you have enough assets and the will to do so. All they've done is proven it. Now we move on to something else, or we accept the caveats that working with TOR constrains us with.
I'm not worried about what they can do, I'm worried about what they do with their capabilities. The fact is that someone is going to be able to do what the NSA is doing, sooner or later. Let's make sure that it is the good guys who are doing it, and that those people who go into that field are responsible and honest people who understand the need for privacy in the course of normal events.
Actually if you read the docs that Snowden released the other day it shows that they can't compromise TOR the network protocols or infrastructure only the browsers script handling engine and cookie management when, (A) people leave no-script (whice the TBB comes with) disabled and (B) turn on javascript and (C) use out of date browser bundles. Over all if you use TOR correctly it does deserve its reputation.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Please make the calculations like I did and redraw every federal election (president, house, senate) in the past 50 years without counting Texas. Remove its electoral votes from total and remove them from each side. Remove 2 Texas senators. Remove Texas house representatives. Then recalculate results of votes on key laws. Redo votes and nominations on Supreme Court Justices based on the above changes. Review the SC decisions based on this new composition of the court.
Look at the results. Really I urge you, look at them.
Then go and sign the damn petition for Texas to secede from Union based on your own interests.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
They were at war too right? I mean, if the definition of right and wrong is determined by the lengths you are willing to go during a life and death crisis, then maybe thats the only kind of world you will ever have. Maybe right and wrong levels are best set in our best case world so thats the one we end up with. Rather than creating an environment best suited to battles of life and death.
I'm all for Texas secession. In fact, you could let the entire Confederacy go as far as I'm concerned. If I want to visit any of those places, I've got a passport and I'm willing to get my shots.
In regard to "the past 50 years", I'm not really too concerned about all that. What has Texas done for me lately?
You are welcome on my lawn.
He has run an agency which routinely violates the fourth and fifth amendments. I'm talking about billions of felonies, every goddamned day.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
it has become harder for Republicans to win elections.
In no way deals with the empirical question of whether the Progressive course alteration of the Wilson Era (of which turning the House into a Little Senate is one component) was a swift idea. If you actually think the two-party system is more than a façade for a de facto aristocracy, then you probably think me some GOP apologist.
You're way off base.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
"It was all legal and appropriate, Clapper argues, because, "Within our lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, we use every intelligence tool available to understand the intent of our foreign adversaries"
If another country did the same they would invade (if it has oil)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Figuring out who is talking to whom is a basic function of any functioning intelligence organization. We are talking spycraft going back centuries here... If they don't de-anonymize Tor, how are they even supposed to know if the communications are foreign or domestic?
I'm not saying the information cannot be mis-used, or that it's impossible for them to retain records they should not be retaining. All I'm saying is that an anonymous Tor utterly keeps them from doing one of their most basic jobs. They don't even have the opportunity to do the right thing (or anything, really) without knowing where the members are from.
I never said the NSA should have the right to spy on American citizens. They shouldn't. They've done a poor job not spying on Americans.
All I said was that to perform one of their most basic functions, figuring out who is talking to whom (this is a bedrock of spycraft, going back centuries), requires Tor to be de-anonymized. They don't even have the opportunity to do the right thing (or anything) without knowing even which country the traffic is from.
And it's not as if "the terrorists" are the NSA's sole reason for existing... they do, you know, spy on foreign governments (and their agents) too. I could see Tor being a very useful method for an agent to relay information home. It's certainly a lot safer than a courier chain. (Heck, I spotted one myself once, and I ain't even a spook... saw some guy putting a single paper INTO one of those real estate flyer boxes at a Metro station near DC.)
Again, it's not all about the content of the message. Spy agencies run into encryption they can't break all the time (steganography, hash tables, one-time-pads, whatever); it's an expected part of the job. Which is why so much effort is spent on at least figuring out who is talking to whom when.
As far back as 9/11, terrorists did not use email or cellphones, and they are even less likely to do so now. No, this surveillance is directed at the common citizen.
I find the idea that I am single-handedly able to overthrow a system which accreted over generations to be ridiculous. I understand that you might be saying that the mindset involved needs to change before change can happen, but to me "change" isn't enough. The system exists and is resilient because it co-opts people by working its way into a place where people need it. The Tea Party is trying to "change" things, and they look like assholes, but I will give them some props for knowing their goal and going after it. The problem is, they won't get their way without pissing off constituencies, and that is also why you really can't effect reform in other areas either.
You want to do away with government sponsored spying? Then don't support Social Security or Obamacare. Sound like completely different things? They are, but at the root of all of them is a reliance on government bureaucracy to solve our problems. It's just that other people find some problems more important than others. The problem with government is that you get an NSA for precisely the same reason you get a Department of Education: somebody who thinks big government has the power to make your lives easier and safer, the only difference is how they want the government to go about it.
Either you misunderstand the way Tor works or I fail to see what you are trying to say.
How do you propose police "update their tactics to include Tor"?
More Russell Brand.
Russell Brand is the new cowbell?
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
In the old days, the police didn't outlaw alleys because they could be used for bad, but the police participated in them. Send in agents to buy the illegal material, then trace it after they had it. Busting the guy in the alley was a secondary goal. Identifying the source was more important. So, send in people looking for the bad stuff, then bust who they can. Worked for hundreds of years, but "on the computer" breaks the police.
Learn to love Alaska
It already has resulted in a huge loss of faith in US companies. Without breaking any NDAs I can't go into much detail, but a few companies I work for already added the US (and a few other countries) to the "do not store data there" list.
Basically, the US are now considered about as bad as China as a partner.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In older times intelligence agencies would follow suspects, build a file, keep track of them, build a case against them.
Now sometimes it seems to me like they want a contraption akin to Google to give them all what they need to do their job, sometimes one feels they don't want to get to work properly.
if the chaps manning drones have a 9 to 5 job, hey, why they shouldn't?
People should remember that Osama bin Laden's technology usage was minimal. Most likely meaningful communication happens face to face or via more conventional channels, only a complete moron would take the internet for anything secure now.
Anybody with a bit of technical acumen knew that the net isn't a safe communication medium and that it is easily infiltrated, by undermining the very fundamental of (very imperfect) secure communications the NSA and its UK counterpart have put a clear marker in place: don't use the internet.
Which is fine for actual terrorists, who already knew that, but is not fine for the rest of us, since now other kind of criminals very adept at exploiting the Internet have confirmation of how dumb the NSA is for undermining secure communications.
We as a society will be owned by a cracker in ways we haven't imagined yet, and the seed of that failure will be the NSA's cavalier attitude regarding people's privacy and appeal to security by obscurity (no matter how sophisticated the obscurity is) by undermining standards that should be as safe as practically possible.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Lets burn books. magazines, and the evil contraptions that churn them out.
Lets stop radio broadcasts.And TV. And telephone. And telegraph for good measure.
And lets declare pigeon breeders criminals and destroy those terrorist animals, just in case.
And ban fire, so smoke signals can't be used.
Lets cut peoples tongues. And their hands so they can't signal. And gauge their eyes out (and block their ears).
Because any means of communication could be at the disposal of terrorists.
Don't you want to be safe or what?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.