Slashdot Mirror
Ten Steps You Can Take Against Internet Surveillance
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Danny O'Brien writes for the EFF that as the NSA's spying has spread, more and more ordinary people want to know how they can defend themselves from surveillance online. 'The bad news is: if you're being personally targeted by a powerful intelligence agency like the NSA, it's very, very difficult to defend yourself,' writes O'Brien. 'The good news, if you can call it that, is that much of what the NSA is doing is mass surveillance on everybody. With a few small steps, you can make that kind of surveillance a lot more difficult and expensive, both against you individually, and more generally against everyone.' Here's ten steps you can take to make your own devices secure: Use end-to-end encryption; Encrypt as much communications as you can; Encrypt your hard drive; Use Strong passwords; Use Tor; Turn on two-factor (or two-step) authentication; Don't click on attachments; Keep software updated and use anti-virus software; Keep extra secret information extra secure with Truecrypt; and Teach others what you've learned. 'Ask [your friends] to sign up to Stop Watching Us and other campaigns against bulk spying. Run a Tor node; or hold a cryptoparty. They need to stop watching us; and we need to start making it much harder for them to get away with it.'"
Good idea, but can't really see that catching on, unfortunately.
Less money for these countries could mean less money for privacy invasion agencies.
Step one: Don't post on forums.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I would have thought using Tor would be the last thing you'd want to do, taking into account the fact that most of the .onion sites are now massive honeypots.
Speaking of SSL, is Slashdot ever going to support it for anything more than the login page?
Especially Slashdot.
Better to vote out the scum that runs the country: All of them.
Re-elect no one.
End perpetual war. Bring the Army back within the borders. Allow Japan, South Korea and Australia to take the lead in their own defense. Disband the obsolete Joint Military Command, NATO.
when i use https://slashdot.org/ i feel more secure, even if it redirect me the http:/// because it do that in a secure why...
According to news reports, there are around 1000 analysts at NSA engaged in surveillance. Let's assume half of them are looking at foreign traffic and half at domestic traffic. That's 500 analysts for 350 million population, or 1 analyst for every 700,000 people. What makes you think you are special enough to deserve their attention?
Personally, I'm much more concerned about the way commercial organizations are spying on us. I think the loss of privacy to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and other social media is much more creepy than some secret government bureau knowing that I called my parents 3 times last week.
Of course, there are those that worry about cops knowing when they are calling their drug supplier to set up a buy, but all indications so far is that the data is not available to regular police organizations.
Step one: Don't post on forums.
Step Two: Terrorists Win.
When you opt not to speak out against the government out of fear of reprisal, then you effectively have lost your right to free speech. Forums like Slashdot need to embrace the use of proxies like Tor, etc., instead of shutting them down with giant ugly off-red pages saying "Blocked!" Anonymization services like Tor are invaluable for creating a safe haven for free speech; in countries like Iran, North Korea, United States, France, Iraq, and Egypt, people are being harassed, arrested and imprisoned for chastizing the government for being a police state. We need websites to publish information about these governments' activities for the world to see, and sites like Slashdot that block Tor and similar technology are simply enabling those governments to build a digital iron curtain around themselves to lock down political dissent.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
More like "Steps to take to get on an NSA watchlist". Maybe use IRC a lot in your spare time.
Ah! A fellow isolationist. I with you brother, that makes two of us.
Wear unattractive clothes, don't wear makeup, stay sober, don't flirt, don't leave drinks unattended, don't be out after dark, don't be out alone, learn to cook, find a good husband, teach others what you learned.
Don't use the network. No matter what you do to prevent it, there are holes if you are well funded ( and have the fear of the 'law' behind you )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe I'm naive or ignorant, but what can a normal user do about e-mail?
Most e-mail from ISP's runs over port 25, and it all gets logged by logboxes and tappers. I don't think the default for an MTA is port 465 or 587, but still 25. If I'm wrong. please correct me.
What should be done here, can someone inform me. Is there something a user, admin or mta-developer should do here?
I read my mail over imaps and pop3s, and store it on my own-hosted imap server. But what to do about smtp-traffic?
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
I favor perpetual war. Other than that, his ideas seem good.
Careful! I think that other guy is a government informant ...
Quit voting for mega-corporate bitches like Obama or most Republican candidates. Quit voting for those that support the police-state policies of Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations. Make people aware of what is happening to their freedoms. Raise awareness.
Start by closing your Slashdot tab.
Step three: online petitions and celebrity videos count for nothing. Write, call, fax and email (all of them!) your locals that get to play in DC.
Considering the number of things the NSA has completely missed (e.g. Boston bomber, Snowden, Bengazi, etc.) I'm beginning to wonder if the NSA really has any decent spying capabilities at all. What if this is much like a Banana Republic, were the government puffs up it's chest and parades around a bunch of military men and equipment to try to scare it's citizens into line. But actually they are totally outnumbered by the citizenry, have very little real power, and they know it.
All these "leaks" about the NSA spying on everyone in the world could just be a desperate attempt by a government that realizes it has very little real control over people to try to keep people in line. Sure, they might be collecting a lot of data, but storage and analysis may be such a monumental task that they can really only figure out things in retrospect, which really doesn't give them much advantage over classic investigation techniques. But hey, some tech companies are probably getting rich over this.
From one of TFA:
Promote CryptoParties to rebellious 13 year old girls. Declare success if rebellious 13 year old girls demand to attend your parties.
Hanlon's razor tells me that is just a bad wording, right?
The video on the EFF site gives instructions for downloading a Vidalia Bundle for Mac - but this doesn't exist on the Tor website. The only downloads that I can see available are the 'Tor Browser Bundle' which is an auto-launching Tor node and browser combination.
So you can't run a node without a Tor browser window open all the time?
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
... switch to alternatives like the ones proposed in http://prism-break.org/. Won't be fail safe, but will be some steps closer. And will add enough a bit of sand in the NSA machinery. In some point they will have to choose between snooping only on "easier", in the open, targets, focus in very specific people, or try to cope with the amount of people using open and with safe encryption people (and risk meltdowns because people sharing lolcats in encrypted channels)
Why is the EFF suggesting that people run Tor nodes? It has already been leaked that running a Tor node automatically makes you a "terrorist" and a target to the NSA. Seems kind of counter-productive to me.
Half of those are paranoia. The other half should be used anyway, if only to defend from the Nigerian Stealing Apparatus.
Add to that list: if you receive a call from Microsoft trying to fix your computer, hang up.
Are you nuts?
What sort of people run TOR nodes? Have you been following the news?
You'll be straight on the authorities' list of very-likely-some-kind-of-crimials. Probably a terrorist, drug addict/dealer, paedophile or pirate of Madonna/Boys-R-Us/One Direction/Lady Gaga music.
Stick Men
I saw a news story yesterday saying that Snowden has dirt on Intel but hasnt released it yet. Chances are good that your processor is probably compromised. Its a no-win deal here.
In instances like these, I find it best to do what my uncle taught me to do: roll up into a defense ball.
No one wants to eavesdrop on a naked, crying, obese man laying in the fetal position. No one.
By the way, thanks NSA for forcing us to censor our thoughts in our head, before we even write them down and tell them to someone. I couldn't have imagined that we'd come to live in a totalitarian-like world (at least that how it feels when you apply censorship in your head) just a few decades after the Iron Curtain was torn apart, and that this totalitarian world is being brought forward by a western country that formerly championed free speech and freedom in general.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
As a true isolationist, I don't want anything to do with you two!
That's a lot, surely they could sum up this complex issue into a neat 3-step article.
If you use "excessive" methods to hide, then you may be flagged as suspicious, because typically mostly criminals and terrorists take such extra measures. Better to act mostly average and fill up your traffic with BS chatter like "OMG ponies!".
Table-ized A.I.
They forgot the most obvious, Do NOT use PRISM firms, like Facebook Twitter, Skype etc
Considering the number of things the NSA has completely missed (e.g. Boston bomber, Snowden, Bengazi, etc.) I'm beginning to wonder if
Back up the fail train there. The NSA wasn't tasked to find the Boston bomber, the FBI was. And they did. Bengazi is a figment of the tea party's over-active imagination -- there's no evidence that anything other than poor judgement and incompetence at a local level occurred. And Snowden... well, that's the only thing you mentioned that has any weight. The NSA management was warned about him long before "the incident" by Homeland Security. They ignored that warning. The case can be made this was a mistake -- but it seems from the after action reports online they're addressing their structural/organizational deficits that allowed it to happen post-incident. The fact is, there's always a risk of a defector, no matter how good your agency is. Every major intelligence agency from every major government in the world has had it happen. This is not a statement on the overall competence of the NSA as an intelligence organization.
What if this is much like a Banana Republic, were the government puffs up it's chest and parades around a bunch of military men and equipment to try to scare it's citizens into line. But actually they are totally outnumbered by the citizenry, have very little real power, and they know it.
That's pretty much the working definition of law enforcement everywhere, man. There's only 1 police officer for every, what, 10,000 citizens? It's a practical impossibility for the NSA to do all the things the tin foil hat brigade claims they're doing -- monitoring everyone's cell phones, everyone's e-mail, the entire internet... and just to keep things interesting, doing all that while cracking foreign powers' high level cryptography and military communications systems. To do everything they claim they're doing, even assuming their technology is twenty years more advanced than the civilian sector equivalents, would imply multi-trillion dollar budgets per year to sustain and a workforce vastly higher than the numbers available suggest.
Sure, they might be collecting a lot of data, but storage and analysis may be such a monumental task that they can really only figure out things in retrospect, which really doesn't give them much advantage over classic investigation techniques. But hey, some tech companies are probably getting rich over this.
The data collection is a massive operation because the data being sent only has data retrospectively; When they identify a potential suspect for development, based on those "classic investigation techniques", without that infrastructure they're starting at day zero. But if everything is logged, they can proceed immediately with looking into his/her background and recent communications. In the intelligence world, there are three things that give an asset value; Timeliness, accuracy, and analytical support. It does you no good to find the terrorist after the bomb has gone off, it does you no good to identify the wrong person, and it does you no good to have all the information that could have met the first two criterion if nobody analyzes it and suggests a course of action (arrest, drone strike, whatever).
Once you understand that the analytical side of the intelligence cycle is the real bottleneck here, you quickly realize that the NSA can't possibly care about your marijuana stash, or even the warrant for your arrest. To develop leads and maintain a solid intelligence cycle, they can only focus on a tiny fraction of the data they're pulling in... so unless you're a .01%'er in the world of terrorism, counter-intelligence, spying, or foreign military... forget it. They don't care.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The government has never shown that spying on millions of people has netted them any real valuable information, such as preventing terrorism. If the NSA wants to know that I am going to visit my grandson on the weekend, who cares? Most things that most people communicate about, whether on the phone or on the Internet are so mundane, that if the NSA would pay attention to all that, they would all die of boredom. There are thousands of websites where hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have made negative comments about our government.
If the government wanted to arrest everyone that has made in some cases some very nasty comments about Obama and his administration and other politicians, they would need a huge army of goons willing to do the dirty work and would overcrowd our prisons to the bursting point.
Instead of wholesale spying on everybody, the NSA could concentrate its resources on targeted surveillance on people that are already suspect of suspicious behavior or that they may be warned about by other governments. If they had done that, they could have most likely prevented the Boston Marathon bombings.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
According to news reports, there are around 1000 analysts at NSA engaged in surveillance. Let's assume half of them are looking at foreign traffic and half at domestic traffic. That's 500 analysts for 350 million population, or 1 analyst for every 700,000 people. What makes you think you are special enough to deserve their attention?
Okay, let's look at those statistics more closely.
500 analysts for 350 million people continuously is 500 analysts for roughly 1 million people per day each year, or roughly 1 analyst is spending an entire day looking at 2,000 people. Each year. So there's a 1-in-2,000 chance that sometime this year, an analyst will be pawing through your online behaviour.
(Of course, if you assume that the analyst spends 1 hour on each person, it drops to 1-in-250 chance that sometime during the year you will be "analyzed" by an NSA agent.)
Now consider the power of computers. Is it reasonable to think that 1 computer could collect and analyze the E-mail and online speech of 2,000 people in a single day of compute time? Assuming you put certain keywords in your online text ("I'm going to kill some time this afternoon by watching the presidential debate"), how likely do you think it will be that you win the 1-in-250 chance?
Let's add in ambiguous laws. The recent trend is not to charge people with doing harm, but conspiracy for doing harm. One recent news report told of a couple of people charged with "conspiracy to join Al-Qaeda". Note that these two people didn't do a terorrist act, they didn't contribute to a terrorist group, and they weren't even a member of a terrorist group. They were talking about joining a terrorist group. People are commonly charged with "conspiracy to grow marijuana" (google has many links).
We've reached the point where you can be arrested when no overt crime has been committed.
There's a recent news story where, for the first time, the DOJ is informing a defendant that they used NSA/warrant-less surveillance to gather evidence. They used mass surveillance to get enough probable cause to apply for a real warrant which resulted in evidence of a crime.
The important bit of the previous is that the DOJ was conflicted about revealing this information. The prosecutor felt that it was only a "procedural decision", since no evidence from the mass-surveillance warrant would be introduced at trial. (A couple of lawyers in the DOJ argued for disclosure.)
All evidence indicates that they analyze everyone's online presence all the time, and use that information to pick-and-choose people for prosecution when no overt crime has been committed.
Sock puppet, begone!
Use American Indian smoke signals.
Remember the Occupy movement? We seem to have forgotten everything that stood for in favor of the NSA. Funny thing that. Perhaps only so many battles can be fought at once, but I think that was a better starting point. After all, they are in bed together.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Do all encryption on YOUR end ONLY. Never give away unencrypted datastreams or keys, ever!
Technically, it's feasible. Not always convenient, but feasible.
Using any of the above might raise some flags, but to use all 10? Are you kidding me? You might as well just set up shop at your local NSA office..
"use anti-virus software"
Just come out and say it. Don't use Windows.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I think one of the biggest risks is drive-by infections. I have been thinking that running my browser as a different (underprivileged) user might be a nice added layer of insulation. You could add that user's group to your extended group list and still get all the files. But it could not get at yours.
Back up the strawman train there. The GP was pointing out that the information gathered by the NSA failed to prevent the Boston bomber, and
prevention is what the NSA claims that its massive surveillance program does.
In reality, what it does is undermine democracy. What if the NSA discovered some embarrassing material relating to Dianne Feinsteinn and is using it to blackmail her to support the NSA? How do you know that it hasn't happened? The answer is that you don't and that's why democracy has been undermined. What would Herbert Hoover would have given to have the information that the NSA has?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
We get a long list of complicated half-measures from 10 years ago, especially the idea of using Tor to access commercial email providers that like to capriciously ban Tor users.
If email metadata is such a concern (because metadata=data), then does it help all that much to have people try to adjust to using PGP? I don't think it does. Giving the wiretappers the Who and When (and even Subject) of our communications doesn't jibe with the underlying goal of stopping surveillance.
The only really good encryption in this environment is the kind that effectively encrypts the Who, When and everything else... and doesn't limit you to Web browsing the way Tor normally does. TAILS already recognized the value of using I2P for comprehensive privacy, which is why they started including it in their distro years ago. The "downside" is that the other end has to use I2P as well (but that ensures end-to-end encryption, so its also a big plus).
Tor is outdated and dangerous to use because it encourages illusions like: a) 1024bit encryption is 'enough'; b) an elect group of core nodes can provide cover for everyone else (I2P makes everyone a router); c) the insecurities of the whole everyday Internet and PCs can be rectified by installing a small app, and you don't have to make technical demands on people you're communicating with.
In short: Use I2P for communications (it has a DHT-based email system, and you can even torrent fully over it) and use it with an OS built for privacy and security like TAILS or Qubes. If the recent exploits against the Tor Browser had occurred against a Qubes user, there is no way they could have discovered the user's real address or other info. That, plus put a secure open source firmware on your routers (its been revealed that the NSA breaks into routers more than anything else; garden variety crooks will probably be following suit).
Nah. Posting here is fine. The SNR is so high NSA decided it wasn't worth bothering to filter through everything.
Bark less. Wag more.
Read the article, and a number of things SCREAM out.
1) FUD about passwords, specifically designed to encourage people to use weak passwords, or to store their passwords in easily found locations.
If you tell people that most passwords easily fall to hackers, too many people think "to hell with this bother" and go for easy to remember passwords. The PROBLEM with passwords is twofold.
- people using encryption systems where the 'encrypted' password is an obtainable object, allowing reverse-table methods where people create massive databases of commonly used passwords, and their equivalent encrypted forms. Systems like Truecrypt do not have this flaw.
- people told that passwords need to be obscure in a non-Human readable, re-memorable fashion. This is untrue- a long phrase in plain English is PERFECT, so long as the phrase is UNIQUE, and non-searchable. There is NOTHING inherently weak in a password that ONLY uses alphabetic characters, so long as the phrase is long enough, and UNIQUE. PS obviously, never ever type your phrase into Google to see if it already exists. Google records ALL search terms, KNOWING that sometimes the search is testing the 'strength' of a password phrase. Google a password phrase, on it goes onto the NSA master-list.
2) The terrible terrible advice to encrypt using the utilities provided by Apple, Microsoft and Google. This ONLY provides casual protection against other ordinary people with access to your computer. Any official body has access to files encrypted this way.
O'Brien the shill does mention Truecrypt in passing, but he'd look way suspicious if he gave no reference at all to this proper encryption solution. But O'Brien the NSA shill carefully makes no mention that Truecrypt can handle ALL normal OS encryption duties.
The NSA has great spying capabilities. It just isn't using this ability to find terrorists.
If everyone were a node and there was just no telling what packets would come out of anyones box, then they basically would not be able to use IP addresses anymore.
They can't be assed to spend 10 minutes to set it up, thereby having it for the entire future.
That or they choose, for other reasons, to use a mobile platform to which OTR messaging happens not to be ported yet. Webmail also has well-known problems with PGP. Or have those been solved yet?
Recommending tor for safety is like telling someone that if they paint themselves orange and shout at the top of their lungs, nobody will notice them in a crowd.
Let's face it, tor is pretty much synonymous with "pedophile, drug user, crook". Despite its best intentions, it's like painting a huge target on your back for the spies to focus on you, not "oh, this one is using tor! our efforts have been foiled!".
What is the rationale behind Slashdot's business decision to make SSL available only to subscribers? And why does it continue this policy even after Google's announcement of AdSense over HTTPS last month?
Unless you happen to live in a country that requires individuals to file income tax returns online and refuses to provide a paper option.
How ludicrous that suggesting an end to global military occupation is now labeled "isolationist". There are many ways for nations to interact besides militarily.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If friends and family use webmail, how can they use PGP over webmail without giving a private key to the webmail provider? Mailvelope doesn't work in Safari or IE, and Chrome Web Store apps don't work on Chrome for Android.
Best of all, have a PGP/gpg web of trust
Which requires expensive travel to participate in key signing parties in other cities unless you only want to communicate with others living in the same city. Sure, you can trust that someone is the person described by a particular government ID, but that's orthogonal to how much you trust her to sign others' keys.
When you vote against the incumbent in a general election, all you get is whatever candidate from the party currently out of power is best at pandering to its base in the primary election. You can't vote against all incumbents in the primary because the polling place gives you only one party's ballot.
Umm, are you thinking of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI for decades?
But if 1% of American households run an exit node, that's 7 million on said list. I doubt the authorities have time to follow 7 million exit nodes at once.
Who exactly has been a victim because of reprisals from the government for speaking their mind? And Snowden doesn't count since he actually broke a law that has nothing to do with the freedom of the press. Drake also broke a real Law when he first disclosed information on the NSA program years ago. What individual or group has been targeted for their posted political ideologies? And secondly why do the ignorant masses think they are important enough that the government will even notice them? I can see if you are planning an armed insurrection you might be worried that you have to start planning all over again because the NSA is on your tail. The government might be collecting data but they do not even come close to having the sheer manpower that would be required to analyze and act on the data collected. People seem to be forgetting just how much data we are talking about here if the NSA is actually doing all the things they are accused of. Even the most advanced keyword algorithm would spit out millions if not billions of hits a day that would require a human analyst to follow-on.
We'll use our smartphones to take pictures of our genitals. every 10 seconds, in HD. and randomly we write "terrorist stuff" on our skin. poor NSA workers have to view each of them, print them and show them to their managers.
Can you recommend a country as well as a walkthrough for getting a resident visa in that country?
Considering the Government's mishandling of just about any other IT related project (healthcare.gov anyone?), gosh, I could just about believe it's nothing but bluster and show. Almost.
As much as my comment was a jest, pure and simple;
There's no such thing as a "terrorist", the term is a confabulation, a nebulous entity somewhere between "opponent" and "boogeyman".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
He's another Hoover, they are all the same, aren't they? But really, yes. I did mean J. Edgar.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"That's pretty much the working definition of law enforcement everywhere, man. There's only 1 police officer for every, what, 10,000 citizens? It's a practical impossibility for the NSA to do all the things the tin foil hat brigade claims they're doing -- monitoring everyone's cell phones, everyone's e-mail, the entire internet... and just to keep things interesting, doing all that while cracking foreign powers' high level cryptography and military communications systems. To do everything they claim they're doing, even assuming their technology is twenty years more advanced than the civilian sector equivalents, would imply multi-trillion dollar budgets per year to sustain and a workforce vastly higher than the numbers available suggest." This being Slashdot, I would hope that people here would take into consideration automation of the information gathering process. The ration of analysts to citizens has almost no relevance. At a reasonable bitrate, you could records every telephone conversation made in the US on just a few racks of equipment. All text-based communication storage is trivial. It is all about access to the infrastructure. That does not mean they are capable of producing actionable intelligence, but they are most definitely capable of collecting everything and running some queries against it. If the data is being queried, even if it is not included in the results, the data is being unlawfully searched.
Yeah, that's why you have to vigorously defend your trademark.
Nice democracy/republic/free country you have there. Since it's your government, and they're working with your tax dollars, you might not want to make things more expensive for them. You might, however, want to cut their budget, and vote them out, and impeech them, and whatever else you do when you both check and balance your government.
sheesh.
Use end-to-end encryption - You should, but it's undermined by how much you trust both ends.
Encrypt as much communications as you can - But software defaults often do not.
Encrypt your hard drive - And then when you forget the key, your data is lost forever. There is currently no solution.
Use Strong passwords - Nope, use long passphrases instead.
Use Tor - Do NOT use Tor, it's also undermined by how much you trust the other end, which is to say, don't trust.
Turn on two-factor (or two-step) authentication - Do it, I dare you. The problem is most people use the same device for both steps, thus undermined.
Don't click on attachments - This should be a "NO DUH", always save attachments and let the antivirus program scan it, and even then, never open anything that you didn't ask for.
Keep software updated and use anti-virus software - This should be a "No Duh" but there are no functional antivirus products outside of Windows. Windows Antivirus products do more passive harm than good, often having super-bloated user interfaces, large memory footprints and killing the power savings on laptops.
Keep extra secret information extra secure with Truecrypt - again, unless there is way for people to recover the keys, this will never catch on.
and Teach others what you've learned. 'Ask [your friends] to sign up to Stop Watching Us and other campaigns against bulk spying - Not entirely useful.
Run a Tor node - And this is where I must say "NO, and ARE YOU INSANE?" Last thing you need is for law enforcement to come knocking at your door because some pedophile uploaded childporn through your Tor node. No. Just No.
For reasons stated above Tor has been deeply undermined and should not be used for any purpose. Tor needs a better way of telling the connecting nodes where they exist geographically, so that routes never start or exit in the same legal jurisdiction. Having your average joe run a Tor node while they are under survailance will just create a dragnet operation against all the traffic that goes through it.
What needs to happen is Tor needs to be redesigned so that it acts as a cryptographic "layer" on top of the existing internet, and not simply used as entry and exit points for warez and pedophones to hawk things. It may hide the criminals, but it paints everyone who uses it as a criminal, not as law abiding.
Perhaps one way of establishing how trustable an entry or exit node is would be to send out various types of DNS queries through Tor that would normally clue as to the legal jurisdiction. For example the pirate bay is blocked in some countries, so if the DNS for TPB doesn't match where it actually is, or is unresolvable, that probably means that exit node can't be trusted.
At any rate, it's probably better to hide in plain sight by simply not doing sneaky things that can be traced in the first place. If you have something to hide, you should probably not be sending that data over the internet and are better of encrypting a usb stick and mailing that. Most software and media pirates are not the targets of such surveillance ( Your tax dollars are work, are fighting counterfeit tiffany silver and nike shoes instead.) The most recent news about Silk Road also proves that people who wish to stay hidden to do illegal things aren't the brightest people in the world at all.
Back up the strawman train there. The GP was pointing out that the information gathered by the NSA failed to prevent the Boston bomber
Strawman? That word... I do not think it means what you think it means. A government agency that wasn't tasked to assist with the case didn't come up with anything. In other news, the Army Corp of Engineers failed to find him too. Shame on them.
Show me where the NSA was assigned the job of catching them, and then maybe you got something. How ever you got a +5 with such a glaring inconsistency is beyond me.
In reality, what it does is undermine democracy.
So let me get this straight... the NSA is secretly changing your votes to put a puppet president in place? Or... they're arresting people in secret and deporting them to foreign countries? Nope. Umm... infringing your right to bear arms? No. Fifth amendment? Nope.
Dude, democracy isn't being undermined because the NSA turned on a packet sniffer somewhere. This is like saying Obamacare is the "worst legislation ever", and forgetting that bit about Japanese internment camps during WWII, Jim Crow laws, and ... well the list goes on. Take off the tin foil hat and go forth into the sunlight, my basement-dwelling armchair revolutionary. Is the NSA there to stop you from protesting? Nope. The NSA gathers information. That's it. That's all. Maybe they gather too much... but all you can say about them is they invade people's privacy... a right nowhere guaranteed by the Constitution. That's a terribly inconvenient fact, and I urge you to use the as-yet uninfringed by the NSA rights to go out and change that, if you feel so strongly about it.
This kind of logic is like blaming the dash cam in the police car for beating someone up. "Yes, your honor... that camera beat the everloving shit out of me." ... Guh. Fail.
What would Herbert Hoover would have given to have the information that the NSA has?
*facepalm* The NSA was around during the Hoover days. The government just denied its existance until relatively recently.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That's a strawman. Neither I, not the GGGP said that the NSA was tasked with catching the Boston bombers. There is no point arguing this further with you since you clearly have a problem with your reading or comprehension skills.
And your knowledge of the US constitution is clearly lacking. You never heard of the 4th amendment? Just because it doesn't use the word "privacy" doesn't mean that a right to privacy is not granted by this amendment -- as the supremes have acknowledged.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
From TFA
you can make that kind of surveillance a lot more difficult and expensive
Which means, that unless the problem is addressed at the political level by removing surveillance, you will just work to increase your taxes.
When the computer industry was "young", there was little likely hood the NSA had co-opted your developers & SW providers. Now?
With every update you need to wonder if it contains a new backdoor at the request of the NSA, asked via a "security letter", which makes disclosure illegal.
Examples in linux abound as vendors stumble over each other to provide secure-boot distro's, complete with windows-like service managers (systemd), that move config control out of scripts where you can see what they are doing, into binaries, that you have to verify come from a source that is likely too large for most of us to audit -- not to mention the problem looking for a backdoor that might be very well hidden these days... (ex. pre-solved factoring keys for AES encryption), etc... You got the latest certs downloaded from *where-ever* (needed for https and such)? How many aren't already cracked?
I wouldn't have a problem with the NSA's spying, *IF* they didn't share anything not related to national security -- but our entire justice system is predicated on law-enforcement being 'human' and needing warrants to search private stuff -- but now? The NSA doesn't need those, and any info it finds is shared with generic, domestic law enforcement. It's already been seen that the FBI has been getting info dumps from the NSA that it's been using to start determined "take-down" efforts against *persons*. I.e. they just watch the people they want, and find some excuse to 'legally' find out the info, OR, find something else to bust them on.
Of course it's been well documented here on "/.", how both foreign visitors and US citizens lose their constitutional rights when they are at a border -- losing laptops and having decryption keys demanded.
What crap!.
One rectifying solution would be to have any illegally leaked evidence taint prosecution of someone for *any, "hidden", charge*, for some number of years (whatever statute of limitations might be).
By hidden, I mean things they'd have to probe into to find out -- not armed robbery or such...
It sounds problematic, and the details would have to be ironed out, but between that, and the profit motive for "charging" a "rightless" property with "crimes" instead of the person, our legal rights as citizens are falling below western standards and down into the "outcast/illegal/brutal" regimes that we supposedly "invade" for....
Who's gonna invade us to save us from our government? I think the only ones with the ability to save us are "us".
"use anti-virus software"
And what if the anti-virus vendors have deals with NSA? This question was raised by EFF.
And their family, burn their house the ground. Repeat until no longer needed.
If you don't have a security clearance post and educate people all you can. If you do have a security clearance welcome to the new digital East Germany :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
> doesn't mean that a right to privacy is not granted by this amendment
You may want to read the whole constitution again. It doesn't grant people any rights, only the government.
Make sure you have full messenger contact lists and use the terms NSA and GCHQ a lot :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Overwhelm the bastards
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Quantum encryption
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, how many times can you guys talk in circles, here?
His point is that the NSA has justified all of the institutionalized violations of privacy because it somehow prevents terrorism (and for while, they were claiming they've stopped over 50 acts of terrorism when it turns out it was actually only two . . . and maybe not even that), yet with all of this surveillance and violation of people's rights, they weren't even able to stop an angry teenage boy with a pressure cooker.
You keep saying they weren't "tasked with this case", which has fuck all to do with anything. The FBI was tasked with hunting the kid down (and it took the shutdown of an entire city and yanking people out of their homes at rifle-point for several days to hunt down the teenager). The NSA and all of its nefarious sister organizations were tasked with preventing attacks. You know, the thing they keep using to justify their disregard for the Constitution. And, yet, they were not aware of this pending "act of terrorism".
But go ahead and reply with "but the NSA wasn't tasked with this case" for the sixth time.
Ding!
Police can't prevent crime
Robber: Hand over your wallet.
Undercover cop: Bang you're dead.
Crime prevented.
NSA act as a deterrent against would-be terrorists
Why do you hate America, you just told all the terrorists that the NSA cant stop them.
Expect a mass terrorist wave now, thanks.
The FBI never asked the NSA for information on this person or engaged any NSA resources
FBI: Are terrorists going to blow up Boston today?
NSA: No
FBI: How about today?
NSA: No
FBI: What about New York?
NSA: No
FBI: Tomorrow?
NSA: No
FBI: Miami?
NSA: No
You're a complete tool if you expect us to believe this is what you believe happens...
Back in the real world, the NSA CLAIMS it can prevent terrorists, as justification of all the bad/illegal stuff they do.
It's therefore part of their job to do this even if the FBI or any other agency dont explicitly ask them in advance.
The NSA ran out of room? What would it take to flood them overwriting data with random media? A day everyone leaves their phones on Youtube kitty videos? Is it even possible to overwhelm their storage with the cell network? With the Internet?
Is this what data caps are really about? Surveillance, anti piracy, and monetization?
As far as encryption goes, it decrypts somewhere.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I like the way you think. In fact I was just using the same reasoning the other day when talking to my wife. There are guys out there that beat their wives everyday. Since I only beat my wife once a week she really has nothing to complain about and should be happy and content.
The whole thing was not even a consulate, but rather, the head office for a weapons running operation for rebels in syria, chemical and biological as well. Former Rep. Kucinich(D) is on the record voicing concern. Google it
You call them "leaks" as if to imply their release was intended by the involved agencies. It wasn't. Leaked documents have illustrated how similar tactics were employed to cast doubt on wikileaks, claiming it was a cia plot. You really expect us to buy into this argument you're having with your sockpuppet?
Bullshit, the bill of rights is not about what government can do. More about what it can't
This isn't even controversial. The idea is to collect information and use it retroactively to target people. This thread is full of shills like yourself, trying to emphasize some concept of the NSA's ineptitude rather than the evil of what it is doing.
Most anti-virus programs take a signature of a program of file that is suspect. I gave up on them and did the following.
I wrote a program that takes the md5sum of my computer's system. Weekly (at first it was daily), I redo the checksum file, I transfer it to a flash drive, and from there I read it to compare against a previous scan. Any md5sum difference is flagged. Its my way of creating a signature for each of of the files on my computer.
And it is fast in execution (about 10 minutes for a full / scan). If you have more files than I have, your timing may be longer.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
here's some more steps you can take. never use an anti virus based in the usa, or western countries. they use antiviruses to scan for more than just viruses. dont think that other western countries wont sell you out. sweden, czech republic, slovakia, finland, croatia, malta, cyprus, romania, are all dirty. most u.s allies share information. dont use any browser based out of usa or allied countries. dont use any search engine based out of usa or allied countries. dont use voip services based in usa or allied regimes. dont use any messenger service based out of usa or allied countries. dont use any cell phone made by usa or allied countries. this includes south korea, japan, and taiwan. youre probably better off not using a smart phone at all. dont use any operating system based out of usa or allied countries. and finally, stop buying crap from western multinational corporations. you cant complain about internet surveilance, and then run out and buy an iphone, or a bmw. the nsa, and fascist european intelligence agencies get their money from these corporations. if you buy their crap, you just support their authority over you. by the way, iphone tracks your gps movement. i used to use skype, avast, norton, avira, windows, google, chrome, nokia, but i abandoned all of that. not only is it harder for the u.s regime to track me, but i also saved myself a lot of money by doing so.
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Tor was originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and is funded by the U.S. Government. For those of you who trust it, I have to get in Tiffany Grant as Asuka bitch mode and yell, "ARE YOU STUPID OR SOMETHING???"
There's also the fact that the terrorist threat isn't as significant as they want us to believe it is.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!