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.'"
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
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.
What the hell? You think spying on everyone so we can maybe catch a few terrorists is acceptable in a country that's supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave? You think it's okay for our government to blatantly violate the constitution and then claim that they didn't actually do so because some secretive court rubberstamped general warrants?
You might be just a little paranoid though.
There has never once been a government that has failed to abuse its powers throughout history. Why do you believe me to be paranoid when I suggest that allowing the government to collect nearly everyone's communications is an awful idea? Do you believe the people in the government to be perfect angels? I do not understand why you would say such a thing otherwise.
I hope you were joking; otherwise, you are profoundly ignorant and naive.
Ignorance is a choice
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!
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!