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Washington DC's Public Library Will Teach People How To Avoid the NSA
Jason Koebler writes Later this month, the Washington DC Public Library will teach residents how to use Tor as part of a 10 day series designed to shed light on government surveillance, transparency, and personal privacy. The series is called "Orwellian America," and it's quite subversive, considering that it's being held by a publicly funded entity mere minutes from a Congress and administration that allowed the NSA's surveillance programs to spin wildly out of control.
That learning how to protect your privacy from quasi-legal Govt. data harvesting could now be considered "subversive"
Hey, Bob, attend this class, make a list of attendees. Oh man, this is too easy!
Librarians understand.
Cold Fjord should parachute in there and put a stop to this!
Avoid going to meetings about avoiding the NSA while in public.
Welcome to the TOR class. To register, we need your name, DOB, address, Social Security number, and a short essay on why you fear the government...
"Come on in, come on in, don't mind the webcam at the front door, it's there to detect any NSA agents who would try to infiltrate our premises."
So NSA do love practical jokes, what's new here?
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
Wikipedia thinks that "Subversion refers to an attempt to transform the established social order and its structures of power, authority, and hierarchy. "
One might consider this superversive, an attempt to restore a social order's power of their security servicer.
davecb@spamcop.net
A Congressional rider attached to an unrelated bill outlawing such activities within the District. Kind of how like Maryland's Andy Harris inserted language to block DC's marijuana legalization.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
In addition to the obvious benefit of public education, it's nice to see a local government function giving El Federales the finger.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
You don't talk about TOR club.
Area51 - We are watching...
So you encrypt your data. Can you encrypt your brainwaves and prevent them from watching you move around inside a building with building penetrating tomography? Can you prevent signals intelligence from being intercepted before data is encrypted, or can you prevent passwords and digital certificates from being lifted off a users brain and machine from space? If not, this course is just another error based on public misperception and cluelessness on the full capability.
obamasweapon.com
A lot of people don't realize librarians have always been on the forefront of protecting out rights.
From fighting for censorship, to advocating for free speech, to stuff like this ... librarians tend to be people with a real understanding of our liberties, and why it's important to have them.
So, if you enjoy the right to read a book which someone found offensive, of the ability to access stuff without having to pay the publisher, or free and anonymous access to the interwebs ... hug your local librarian.
They or someone like them has probably done as much to maintain your freedoms as anybody else in the last few decades.
Showing the public how to undermine the surveillance crap ... well, that deserves applause in my book.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Librarians have been fighting the good fight in America at least as far back as the 1940s when they stood up to red scare shenanigans. They were also at the forefront of fighting the PATRIOT act, both in lobbying and in action when they redesigned their lending software to delete all information once a book was returned. They are also at the center of the hackerspace movement.
It's not the government that loyalty is owed, it is the government that owes loyalty to its people, and it is lacking and found wanting.
Even the place is right. Let congress and senate learn what horrid beast they have created.
Of course, it could still be subversive, if they or some other service would abuse this series of meetings to flag and catalogue people to keep an eye on. All the more reason to make sure as many senators and congress(wo)men attend.
Their last seminar on How Not to be Seen wasn't very popular with some of the attendees.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
NSA must have cracked Tor...
H&Ks Garf
The NSA's own files as leaked by Edward Snowden indicate that the NSA has had poor luck breaking Tor. This isn't to say that progress couldn't have been made since then, but to simply point out that the use of Tor as an anonymity tool in light of the information provided is not unreasonable.
No evidence that such technology exists. You're just another paranoid schizophrenic who craves attention and demands that the world believe your batshit insane theories.
If you stay in ONION yes. But the feds own or control a vast many exit nodes to consider it a 'safe' route anywhere outside of onion space.
Libraries are by design one of the safeguards against tyranny.
And we're only safe once the tools to subvert domestic NSA spying are so ubiquitous that a workshop like this one are no longer newsworthy. But I'm sure some future John McCain/Lyndsey Graham congressional asshat will decry "public funds being used to support terrorism" and the program will be cancelled.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You know, i hear you can take a ton of benadryl to help with schizophrenia
I clicked on that first link and was greeted with the following:
This domain is blocked.
Sorry, motherboard.vice.com has been blocked by your network administrator. All blocked pages are logged and reported to the IT Department.
This site was categorized in: Lingerie/Bikini, Nudity
Contact your network administrator
#^$& OpenDNS :(
Ironic captcha: permit
What do we do once NSA starts burning books?
Oh, wait -- I think I just... Godwin'd this one. Sorry, folks.
He (and the guy he took it from) a special hat to keep their thoughts from being detected.
A word of advice: Don't use tinfoil. It might work, but if people see you wearing a tinfoil hat, they will think you are a crackpot. Except of course if it doesn't work, then anyone who can read your mind will know if you really are a crackpot or not.
Disclaimer: The above is meant to be funny. Publicly-known technology is so far away from reading brainwaves at any significant distance that any claim that there is "secret technology" to do so is incredulous. It will be at least a decade, probably several decades, before you'll need to wear brainwave-blocking hats while walking down the street.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That's what fire departments are for.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I've been wondering what happens if my SSL key signer received a FISA gag order and request for my private keys, how would I know?
Do you know?
I'm suggesting they also teach how to selfsign their certificates and understand how this whole process works.
If I were trying to monitor the internet's HTTPS/SSL traffic i'd go after those private keys soon as possible, especially since there is this belief that your safe if you have a signed pem key for your host/https/tls/etc..
Tor is a government project. Research the beginning of Tor. I am sad for anyone who trusts Tor.
As good as the security is, one of the top rules for avoiding the NSA is to avoid all cloud services. No encryption is perfect, and anything traveling over the internet is being looked at, even if only by algorithms.
DC Public's catalog and patron data are hosted in the cloud.
Source: I work there.
If you stay in ONION yes. But the feds own or control a vast many exit nodes to consider it a 'safe' route anywhere outside of onion space.
That works for me. I always stay in TheOnion
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
had poor luck breaking Tor
in 2006.
This isn't to say that progress couldn't have been made since then
That progress is called PRISM. Unlimited metadata collection is the veil-piercing tool that the TOR developers warned everyone about. They don't need to read the encrypted data in your packet if they can track the packet from beginning of the onion to the end. Even if the end is a hidden service.
what about Postmans? they are FBI agents with absolute memory/ I filed address change form, and One Of Them came to my door "why you did nt fill forms for other family members"?
A page about Orwellian surveillance, that shows no content without javascript enabled. Ironic.
I wonder how many spooks'll be there taking names?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The idea of teaching proper internet practices is a great idea. Teach people how to recognize phishing e-mails/sites and the like. Teach people how to use account names and password properly. Teach people the scams. but... teaching TOR at this point seems silly. It's been compromised. It's a bad lesson.
X
That's last centuries technology. Today, they can erase someone's memories and personality and program them with new memories and personalities. They can turn them into whatever or whomever they need. Today they are a call girl, tomorrow a ninja assassin. They are creating the perfect operatives -- people who doesn't even know they are operatives.
THE DOLLHOUSE IS REAL!
...is not something I feel comfortable with these days.
Too many high profile fuckups lately, and while most of them are easily explained away by poor operational security, I'm having a harder time by the day swallowing the mantra coming out of the tor camp about how they're secure and solid and there's nothing to worry about.
The tor code seems to be in worse need of a full blown security audit than openssl was last April.
The city government of D.C. likes tweaking the nose of the Federal government. Ever seen one of these? It's a D.C. license plate, and it reads "Taxation Without Representation".
Giving an ineffectual finger to the Feds is a pastime for them.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Sure, Go to a TOR meeting in DC - nothing suspicious about that.
Oh, by the way - everyone attending will pass quite a few federal security cameras and should not be surprised if their names and faces get added to some "List" somewhere.
Clever. If you want to avoid the NSA and talk to someone over the internet, buy a VPS, disable console login, ssh and ytalk. Stop using the VPS upon it being rebooted and goto a new hosting company in another country. Easy.
A VPS could be given an offer by security services in its host country. Become a honey pot for all foreign networking traffic that expects privacy and anonymity.
With tame international standards and all ip's been logged a person is left with the security and privacy of an application. As both ends of the encrypted chat are uncovered the only task is to get the plain text, voice before encryption by an app. Most open and consumer grade OS seem to be very useful to offer access to plain text as entered or a voice stream before encryption is used.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"