No, not using the network makes you even more suspicious. In fact, it makes you a prime suspect nowadays! Use the network in a "harmless" way, i.e. in a way that doesn't give away information about you. Be as invisible as possible, by blending in with the sheep. Just don't draw attention to you, even if you're not a person of interest.
When using the network, always assume that you're being under observation... and act accordingly. Give less private information to the world. In fact, apply the principle of "need to know" in reverse: if the world doesn't need to know that you've taken your dog out 2 hours ago, then don't post it. Don't even mail it to your friend using PGP. It's as simple as this. Really. Be less talkative, be less open, and be more suspicious.
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.
Since Bruce Schneier himself said that you can't trust US-based cryptography companies, because such companies can be compelled by law to cooperate with the CIA... doesn't it also mean that NO US Person who is under the jurisdiction of the NSA can be trusted w.r.t. crypto advice? Is there a law of some kind in the US that muzzles US crypto researchers and forces them not to disclose certain facts that could harm the NSA's ability to operate? I'm just curious.
use LXC (Linux containers) or KVM or OpenVZ instead.
I'm running FreeBSD, you insensitive clod. How am I supposed to run other OSes from within that OS, when LXC, KVM and OpenVZ are all Linux-based? VirtualBox is perfect here, thank you very much.
Things that don't affect peoples' lives directly and very visibly are as if they don't exist. How many people have actually been harmed by NSA spying in the US? There's a queasy feeling about being spied on, but as long as the associated blackmail or harassment don't happen, it's a very abstract threat. People don't take abstract threats seriously, only clear and present dangers catch their attention.
Now, that foreign governments get bullied in line so they don't deviate from the US administration's wishes (e.g. w.r.t. Syria, NWO, whatever else), partly also due to NSA knowing a lot of personal secrets of the politicians there, that's another thing. However, that doesn't affect Joe Sixpack's daily live, so he won't care either (he may even appreciate the NSA's foreign spying).
GMail is already PGP and S/MIME compatible. Just avoid their webmail interface and use their IMAP server with your own MUA like, e.g. Thunderbird + Enigmail or some PGP-enabled app if you're mobile. Other providers are also PGP and S/MIME compatible, like, e.g. Yandex Mail via IMAP, if you prefer the KGB (or whatever they call themselves today) to the NSA snooping your mails. Same with other free mail providers: most of them offer IMAP/SMTP, and once you've got that, you're green to go with PGP and S/MIME.
They are actually taking this very seriously in Germany. Today, they announced more concrete steps to keep e-mail traffic inside Germany (provided you don't use US-based email providers). Businesses in particular are very concerned about the NSA and GCHQ large-scale spying on their trade secrets. Of course, they should encrypt end-to-end (e.g. PGP), but preventing the big data flows from traversing known NSA/GCHQ taps is already one tiny step in the right direction.
Let's see: OPCW are doing a great job. Nobody denies this. But they wouldn't be in Syria right now if Putin hadn't convinced Assad to get rid of CWs. OPCW are just executors here, while the real political drive to dismantle the Syrian CWs came from Putin. Sure, in this good cop - bad cop game, Obama played the aggressive bad cop and Putin the pacific good cop, so both would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize because of the result. However, since Obama already got it, Putin would have been the logical choice this time, IMHO.
RMS was always insightful. We were just trying to cut corners by being "pragmatists". We fully deserved what we got out of this consumerist, passive stance. Oh, not all of us (Theo, are you reading this?), but most of us deserve to be hit by a clue bat every now and then.
Well, I was (partly) joking, but what makes you think those binary blobs are backdoor-free? That's just a belief, isn't it? Point is: there's no way for nVidia to restore confidence other than to provide the full source. As a matter of fact, I do work in IT security and I'm seeing more and more companies here in Europe avoiding those binary blobs like the plague. Even more so since all this Snowden publicity. Now, does nVidia's driver contain a backdoor? If your corporate secrets are important to you, it is prudent to assume "yes" and go truly all-opensource.
Let's see: you use an overblown proprietary binary blob that contains who-knows-what in times of overall NSA spying, and you dare complain that this binary blob has lost one tiny bit of functionality w.r.t. Windows' binary blob? Don't worry, the main functionality of this nVidia blob (NSA backdoor?) is still fully functional.
Regarding alternative OS, it won't matter. Who says Intel, AMD, ARM, nVidia, RealTek and all other hardware manufacturers haven't already included backdoors into their firmwares and hardware design to please the NSA? There was an article recently in the German magazine C't about possible backdoors in Intel's Active Management's Technology (AMT). Even if turns out to be a hoax, for now, who knows what lays dormant in such firmware, waiting to be tapped by the NSA?
Now it seems there was an ugly monster hidden under this veil.
I'd rather say that the NSA is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They need strong codes for crucial US companies (and government agencies) to be widely adopted... and that's their good role. But they need to tap into the codes of the adversary, and that's their bad role. Due to the dual nature of their mission (to protect own codes, to crack foreign codes), and due to the fact that we've become a global village using the same codes, the NSA has developed some kind of dual-personality disorder, where it fights itself.
I happen to be an expert on the use of cryptography.
The point you forgot to mention is that encrypted files are easily spotted by analyzing the entropy of the decrypted disk blocks. That's why hidden containers WILL often stand out like a sore thumb. And this is precisely the reason why Truecrypt is just a poor tool at steganography.
However, unlike Truecrypt, some encrypting file systems do an excellent job at hiding data in a much more effective way. Of course, using such an OS/Filesystem combo is in itself a dead giveaway that you've got something to hide. So your point has merit still.
Rights aren't offered, they're innate (or God-given, if you prefer) and can only be infringed.
Wrong. Rights exist only as long as people fight for them. As soon as they take them for granted and stop acting vigilantly to keep them, they slip away like sand. Look how civil liberties (one special form or rights) have eroded all around the world since 9/11. If rights were innate, this wouldn't have happened.
DO NOT cooperate. DO NOT make it easy on them. DO NOT give in or give up.
More easily said than done... at least unless you're a Citizen. As foreigner, you'll be simply arrested and deported. Try then to travel again to that country. Good luck with that.
What you can do, is to hide in plain sight, i.e. use something like Truecrypt's hidden operating systems or something equivalent in other operating systems. Let 'em have the initial password, it won't do them any good.
And even better, users should have the option to customize the CSS of those sites to their needs... and I don't mean with additional browser add-ons. Site should be offering this to their users by default.
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No, not using the network makes you even more suspicious. In fact, it makes you a prime suspect nowadays! Use the network in a "harmless" way, i.e. in a way that doesn't give away information about you. Be as invisible as possible, by blending in with the sheep. Just don't draw attention to you, even if you're not a person of interest.
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.
The TFTP is being phased out in favor of FTP. Everyone is tracked financially, not just (presumed) terrorists.
Since when are leaders intellectuals, to have "intellectual property" in the first place?
Since Bruce Schneier himself said that you can't trust US-based cryptography companies, because such companies can be compelled by law to cooperate with the CIA... doesn't it also mean that NO US Person who is under the jurisdiction of the NSA can be trusted w.r.t. crypto advice? Is there a law of some kind in the US that muzzles US crypto researchers and forces them not to disclose certain facts that could harm the NSA's ability to operate? I'm just curious.
I'm running FreeBSD, you insensitive clod. How am I supposed to run other OSes from within that OS, when LXC, KVM and OpenVZ are all Linux-based? VirtualBox is perfect here, thank you very much.
Now, that foreign governments get bullied in line so they don't deviate from the US administration's wishes (e.g. w.r.t. Syria, NWO, whatever else), partly also due to NSA knowing a lot of personal secrets of the politicians there, that's another thing. However, that doesn't affect Joe Sixpack's daily live, so he won't care either (he may even appreciate the NSA's foreign spying).
GMail is already PGP and S/MIME compatible. Just avoid their webmail interface and use their IMAP server with your own MUA like, e.g. Thunderbird + Enigmail or some PGP-enabled app if you're mobile. Other providers are also PGP and S/MIME compatible, like, e.g. Yandex Mail via IMAP, if you prefer the KGB (or whatever they call themselves today) to the NSA snooping your mails. Same with other free mail providers: most of them offer IMAP/SMTP, and once you've got that, you're green to go with PGP and S/MIME.
They are actually taking this very seriously in Germany. Today, they announced more concrete steps to keep e-mail traffic inside Germany (provided you don't use US-based email providers). Businesses in particular are very concerned about the NSA and GCHQ large-scale spying on their trade secrets. Of course, they should encrypt end-to-end (e.g. PGP), but preventing the big data flows from traversing known NSA/GCHQ taps is already one tiny step in the right direction.
Let's see: OPCW are doing a great job. Nobody denies this. But they wouldn't be in Syria right now if Putin hadn't convinced Assad to get rid of CWs. OPCW are just executors here, while the real political drive to dismantle the Syrian CWs came from Putin. Sure, in this good cop - bad cop game, Obama played the aggressive bad cop and Putin the pacific good cop, so both would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize because of the result. However, since Obama already got it, Putin would have been the logical choice this time, IMHO.
RMS was always insightful. We were just trying to cut corners by being "pragmatists". We fully deserved what we got out of this consumerist, passive stance. Oh, not all of us (Theo, are you reading this?), but most of us deserve to be hit by a clue bat every now and then.
Well, I was (partly) joking, but what makes you think those binary blobs are backdoor-free? That's just a belief, isn't it? Point is: there's no way for nVidia to restore confidence other than to provide the full source. As a matter of fact, I do work in IT security and I'm seeing more and more companies here in Europe avoiding those binary blobs like the plague. Even more so since all this Snowden publicity. Now, does nVidia's driver contain a backdoor? If your corporate secrets are important to you, it is prudent to assume "yes" and go truly all-opensource.
It's much more difficult to hide an NSA backdoor in nouveau than in the closed-source nVidia blobs. Just so you know more.
Let's see: you use an overblown proprietary binary blob that contains who-knows-what in times of overall NSA spying, and you dare complain that this binary blob has lost one tiny bit of functionality w.r.t. Windows' binary blob? Don't worry, the main functionality of this nVidia blob (NSA backdoor?) is still fully functional.
Copyright is causing death. There, fixed that for you.
Regarding alternative OS, it won't matter. Who says Intel, AMD, ARM, nVidia, RealTek and all other hardware manufacturers haven't already included backdoors into their firmwares and hardware design to please the NSA? There was an article recently in the German magazine C't about possible backdoors in Intel's Active Management's Technology (AMT). Even if turns out to be a hoax, for now, who knows what lays dormant in such firmware, waiting to be tapped by the NSA?
Won't somebody please think of the poor polygraphs?
I'd rather say that the NSA is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They need strong codes for crucial US companies (and government agencies) to be widely adopted... and that's their good role. But they need to tap into the codes of the adversary, and that's their bad role. Due to the dual nature of their mission (to protect own codes, to crack foreign codes), and due to the fact that we've become a global village using the same codes, the NSA has developed some kind of dual-personality disorder, where it fights itself.
Use a patched version of Truecrypt, and create multiple hidden OSes. Give them the key to one of those hidden OSes, and chances are you'll be fine.
The point you forgot to mention is that encrypted files are easily spotted by analyzing the entropy of the decrypted disk blocks. That's why hidden containers WILL often stand out like a sore thumb. And this is precisely the reason why Truecrypt is just a poor tool at steganography.
However, unlike Truecrypt, some encrypting file systems do an excellent job at hiding data in a much more effective way. Of course, using such an OS/Filesystem combo is in itself a dead giveaway that you've got something to hide. So your point has merit still.
Wrong. Rights exist only as long as people fight for them. As soon as they take them for granted and stop acting vigilantly to keep them, they slip away like sand. Look how civil liberties (one special form or rights) have eroded all around the world since 9/11. If rights were innate, this wouldn't have happened.
Because the former morphed into the latter recently?
More easily said than done... at least unless you're a Citizen. As foreigner, you'll be simply arrested and deported. Try then to travel again to that country. Good luck with that.
What you can do, is to hide in plain sight, i.e. use something like Truecrypt's hidden operating systems or something equivalent in other operating systems. Let 'em have the initial password, it won't do them any good.
And even better, users should have the option to customize the CSS of those sites to their needs... and I don't mean with additional browser add-ons. Site should be offering this to their users by default.