While the idea of Wikileaks is still quite popular; with more revelations about Wikileaks, Assange is no longer the media darling with everyone taking a more critical view of the man behind Wikileaks.
America's oldest whistleblowing website Cryptome which Wikileaks described as a 'venerabe anti secrecy organization' has collated the most details about what happens within Wikileaks. Cryptome has published all of Wikileaks founder Assange's chats over a few years as well as Wikileaks insider details about how they need $55,000 to run servers but as much as $200,000 is used by the men who run Wikileaks for business class travel, hotels etc.
Read Cryptome to see that despite its idealistic mission, at some level Wikileaks behaves like another secret Government department with a couple of people deciding what is public interest.
In other words $200,000 is used for the secure travel and hotels for individuals like Julian. Your point? It's not like these guys aren't risking their lives. They are risking their lives to bring you a story, I'd say they should be able to stay in any hotel they choose.
Really, are you so intellectually dishonest that you're comparing a guy who makes sensitive information available to genocidal dictators and multi-million dollar frauds? The reason that those you use as examples were so easy to get through the justice system is that they had already been convicted in the court of public opinion. Assange is becoming something of a folk hero, and that makes him poisonous politically to actually put through a wringer. Now I'm not going to say that Assange is the Dalai llama, but if not in magnitude it's ethically the same sort of thing, who would arrest him and extradite him to China?
Maybe thats not how you see it but thats probably how the government sees it.
The main thing here is Julian has to worry about being tortured, not merely being killed. The government will find some punishment worse than death specially designed for Julian. And we know this government tortures people.
Those guys you list may or may not have been tortured. But when the government wants information out of you that is exactly the ticking time bomb type situation where you'd expect torture to be employed.
Torture is usually worse than death for the victims family because it involves loss of honor even if the individual is left alive. Framing the individual for a bunch of crimes, or framing the individuals family members for all sorts of crimes is an example.
Besides they wont want to kill Julian anyway. They want to know what he knows and find out who his sources are not kill him. They need him alive and chances are they'd put him in a super max prison or a secret prison which has 23 hour lockdown and basically put him in a dark room for 23 hours a day until he goes crazy and talks. If you put someone into a room with no light, no sound, no sensory information at all, it's only a matter of time before they start talking to themselves and literally go crazy.
The soviets used to torture political dissidents by putting them into insane asylums. In these special political hospitals doctors and psychiatrists would scientifically torture them until they literally went insane or broke and spilled their secrets. This type of torture is worse than waterboarding, worse than physical pain, because it's psychological and on some level everyone is psychologically weak.
The best thing he can do is get as much press as possible, make as many speeches as possible, engage in as much public activity as possible, and stay in a group at all times (no late night strolls alone). If the general public and press don't know who he is, the U.S. government can just grab him and quietly throw him in a secret jail cell somewhere (or even render him to a country willing to get their hands dirty torturing him with more than a little waterboarding).
It would be nice to live in a world where whistleblowers were rewarded and praised for their efforts. But the truth is that whistleblowers almost always suffer for their sacrifice. At best, they lose their jobs and/or are harassed. At worst, they end up in a filthy jail cell with electrodes on their balls.
Everything you say is correct. He should seek as much attention in the media as he can. Youtube and twitter are the easiest way to do it. About torture, the US government has the capability with psychologists and the covert agents to torture an individual without taking them to a jail or black site. Julian will have to worry about psychological as well as physical torture.To be harassed by random individuals is a form of torture.
It's not assassination that Julian has to worry about. It's the possibility of being kidnapped, taken into a secret location(black site), and questioned(tortured) by the government.It does not take a team of lawyers or a rocket scientist to figure out that Julian should not step foot in the USA. In fact he probably shouldn't leave Iceland if he's even safe Iceland.
how are they supposed to meet their handler without the US spy satelite picking that up?
Spy satellites are not magic. You meet someone in a building, or at night, or on a cloudy day. Satellites can't recognize people's faces anyway (and they don't see them either.)
How would they meet their handler without being seen by anybody anywhere?
It's not a requirement. A huge crowd offers very good privacy, see Karachi.
How would they go to a place like Pakistan and not set off red flags?
Through a 3rd country, perhaps? Those guys may have several passports, all legal, if they are citizens of several countries (or simply they might want to use fake or stolen passports.) Besides, a handler can easily travel from his base in Pakistan to a neutral country - like China or India - if necessary.
It would seem to be next to impossible for individuals to go to terrorist training camps and then come back and not trigger any sort of red flag.
Once you leave the US territory the USA has very little knowledge of where you are and what you are doing - unless you are so important that they assigned some spies to follow you.
LiveCDs on the other hand actually are secure but only if theres no backdoor anywhere in the Linux Kernel or in any software used. Do you trust the Linux Kernel programmers with your life? I doubt terrorists do
Hard to say. I trust Toyota with my life, for example. And note that terrorists are routinely risking their lives; their very occupation is a huge risk. It's probably far more dangerous for a terrorist to take a stroll in a park than to obtain a random copy of Linux and use it for random browsing. If someone is onto them to the extent that they do MITM on them and feed them a backdoored Linux CD (can't imagine how would they know!) then the terrorist's goose is already thoroughly cooked.
I don't think at this time the terrorists have that level of technical sophistication but that is something to look out for in the future.
Majority of "foot soldiers" are, and will be technically incompetent. However they will follow instructions that are written by a well educated terrorist. Why do we think AQ doesn't have its own IT? There are probably lots of AQ sympathizers who aren't fit to carry the rifle but are perfectly willing to give advices. It would be very unwise to assume that AQ is a bunch of idiots.
So if they send PGP encrypted data out the NSA would probably pick up on it instantly
Unlikely. "This here JPEG is completely corrupted, sorry about that." or "This here MPEG2 movie of my vacation is playing fine, however the last two bits of each pixel of each frame carry some other information..." With the sheer volume of messages sent over the Internet, it's not possible to analyze the content in real time in hope of finding something in it. Even an Excel spreadsheet, with one byte of a.pgp file in each cell,formatted as currency, will confuse the hell out of any traffic analyzer - even a human, if you make a token effort to colorize your "sales report for region of $foo". I'm sure it will sail through even if the terrorist doesn't bother PGPing his message and just formats the ASCII plaintext this way.
I dont think everything you said in this post is true. Satelites can see through buildings. Satelites can see faces. Satelites might not be as good on a cloudy day, I'll give you that but the spy drones can still see. And they definitely have night vision, the cover of night is a complete myth.
Also the USA has the ability to know where you go and what you do even when you are overseas. It's not that they aren't collecting the information but it's more that they might not take it seriously or fully analyze the information. They knew about the 911 hijackers. They know who went where and who did what.
And thats exactly what I said. They collect all the data so they'd definitely see it but they wouldn't have the time to analyze
because cryptographic systems are worth nada without a web of trust. And right now, there is none [...]
There may be none for geeks; crypto enthusiasts like using the technology, but they don't really have any secrets worth securing, and so the WoT is kind of not very important. On the other hand, terrorists have secrets, and they *already* have their WoT - it is based not on digital certificates but on personal contacts. Terrorists, like every illegal and underground organization, need WoT not just to send messages; they need it to even meet and talk to each other. But when a terrorist needs to communicate over the Internet, he will personally travel to Pakistan (or wherever) to receive his keyring from his handler.
There is of course a possibility that a terrorist can be simply given a https:/// URL of some webmail in Asia, and given that browsers usually don't save encrypted pages (and the pr0n mode saves nothing at all) it's easy and convenient for a terrorist to have a medium security communication channel that leaves no plaintext on the user's computer. A live boot CD would offer security that is comparable to PKI, as long as no ciphertext needs to be retained. Considering the issue of the trusted computer, the boot CD and SSL might even do better than a locally ran crypto.
While using a keyring personally handed to them from their handler sounds easy, how are they supposed to meet their handler without the US spy satelite picking that up? How would they meet their handler without being seen by anybody anywhere? How would they go to a place like Pakistan and not set off red flags?
The only way this would work is if they were born in Pakistan to begin with and have family who comes from Pakistan to the USA. It would seem to be next to impossible for individuals to go to terrorist training camps and then come back and not trigger any sort of red flag.
LiveCDs on the other hand actually are secure but only if theres no backdoor anywhere in the Linux Kernel or in any software used. Do you trust the Linux Kernel programmers with your life? I doubt terrorists do and I doubt you do or anyone else here. Since you don't trust them with your life, one would conclude that real terrorists would have to take the Linux Kernel and customize it so that it's trusted and make some sort of terrorist specific live-CD.
I don't think at this time the terrorists have that level of technical sophistication but that is something to look out for in the future.PKI is also very secure but it's not secure if you don't know how to use it. Most people using it don't know how to use it and one could conclude the terrorists wont know either. If the terrorists know how to use it then it would be very hard to deal with.
But this is assuming we have terrorists who are also at the highest most elite level of computer savvy. It's possible that some computer scientist turned terrorist, someone like the UNABOMBER could pull something off. It's still not going to be easy because once they connect to the internet every communication they send out will be monitored by the NSA or some letter agency. So if they send PGP encrypted data out the NSA would probably pick up on it instantly and start cracking it.
Lets face it, even if you aren't a terrorist you probably have no one you can trust. The terrorists probably have more people they can trust than the average American/domestic citizen has. The USA is a nation of informants, you never know if your neighbor is informing on you or not. You never know if your best friend, your wife, or your son or daughter is informing on you.
So even if you use encryption it's pretty much worthless against the might of the federal government. They'll use networks of informants, they'll offer large amounts of money for anyone who helps them. They'll also use all kinds of threats including blackmail, death threats, and the threat of a lifetime in some secret prison to get people to become informants against you.
So honestly there is no way to keep any secrets from the feds. The best you can do is live a clean life and keep all the radicals in your outer circle rather than in your inner circle.
The best encryption will slow the NSA down but it wont stop them. PGP's key length is not large enough that it cannot be cracked. It's large enough that it would take weeks to do it. So in general the use of encryption while secure enough to keep them from simply sniffing the data up, it wont stop them from putting a gun to your head and torturing the data out of you.
So if you use encryption and they suspect you are a terrorist, you'll be kidnapped and tortured, and this could last anywhere from minutes to years, or even for the rest of your life if they put you in a Supermax prison. The point is if you do use encryption it doesn't stop the rubber hose cryptoanalyst.
The proper context is never going to be "liberty vs security" for workers. The proper context of this situation is "liberty vs profits". In specific it's "liberty vs CORPORATE profit". To be even more specific it's "liberty vs BIG CORPORATE profit". This is about the security of big corporate profits.
The reason we lose liberty is because big corporations feel entitled to profit at the expense of the Constitution itself. If the Constitution gets in the way of profits the Constitution will be trashed/ignored/modified. Empowering the DHS allows for the big bad evil Corporations like some of the oil companies which destroy the environment, or some of the banking companies that put everyone in debt, or some of the food companies which make everybody sick, to have the power and legal ability to keep doing what they are doing and perhaps do much worse in the future.
So this debate must not be framed in a way which is deceptive. It's not your security they are talking about. It's corporate persons they are talking about and really it's only the corporate aristocracy, not ordinary corporate persons. The older the corporation is the more likely it is on the short list of corporate aristocracy.
If you don't like the situation or the debate then stop accepting the frame. Start by rejecting the false meme of liberty vs security and reframe it as liberty vs corporate profits. That is what is really at stake. The children who actually have parents who are old money wealthy need to take a careful look at whether or not THEY want to sacrifice liberty so their parents can make a little bit extra money today. It's their futures at stake.
A lot of them think that their money will be able to shield them and shelter them completely but this isn't entirely the case. If the beaches are destroyed by oil spills, if species of fish and animals go extinct, then the entire world is less beautiful and less diverse. If the internet is less free then the information on it wont be as compelling and they too will have to live with a diminished internet. It's the unintended consequences that affect ALL young people which is why young people (in specific the young wealthy) need to really consider what matters to their quality of life and whether or not they want to give that up to guarantee profits. There are some things in this world that money cannot buy.
You can have all the data you want from all of the internet. Even if the entire internet were able to be scanned and searched through like a semantic engine it still would not reduce the amount of time spent analyzing the data.
Data collection isn't the problem. Analyzing the data collected is the problem.
There are a lot of nuts like Hassan. He's insignificant. There were nuts worse than Hassan, like Sirhan Sirhan and there have been actual political assassinations in this country from MLK, to Malcom X, to Kennedy, and we are supposed to change everything because of Hassan? Hassan attacked a military installation not civilians.
We should think very carefully of the powers and responsibilities we give to the DHS.
And honestly if they want to reduce our liberty to help themselves do their job perhaps they should get another job. I'm all for them doing what they are paid to do, but to do it in a reckless way is to defeat the purpose of the job they are doing. If they do the job to defend and protect liberty you cannot protect liberty by removing it.
Also domestic terrorism is a job for the local police and the FBI. Thats if we even want to call them terrorists because while the right wing fascist Nazi's, and the militias may be called terrorists, it's not a fact that they are. The country has not decided yet whether these groups are freedom fighting patriots or terrorists. The same goes for Greenpeace and the ELF. These groups might be called terrorists but it's not remotely the same as foreign groups.
I hope these types of changes wont be used to declare another war on American citizens in the way the war on drugs was used. We may find that someday we are on the domestic terrorist list and these new powers used against us if we aren't very careful to draw a hard line in the sand which says liberty cannot be sacrificed for any, ANY reason.
If we have to live with the threat of Neo Nazi's, of Anarchists, of anti abortion murders, I'd rather live with that and be free than be a slave and have the illusion of safety. That's the options you get because you wont be any safety when the big corporate interests that the DHS are protecting decide to screw you over by putting pesticides in your food. The DHS also cannot protect the wetlands, and the DHS won't protect workers, won't protect innocent fetuses, won't protect anything but large corporations.
So if you give up liberty to increase profits (thats what security is measured in), then you will end up in an even more dangerous country where profits are high.
I just don't see how they could recruit over the internet without compromising their identity in the process. It wouldn't be difficult for the feds to set up some websites and monitor them. Frankly the terrorists just don't seem to be smart enough to outsmart the NSA or the FBI. When/if they become that smart then they'd still have to meet in person to do training. Any data transmissions also go over the wire and all data can be analyzed by the NSA, CIA, or whomever.
So I don't understand how they plan to improve the situation. Do they plan to hire more analysts? Theres already more data than can be deciphered and analyzed. There simply is not enough CPU resources, analysts, or time to analyze every single bit of data flowing through the wire.
Maybe I'm wrong and they analyze every bit in some classified way. If this were the case then why not let the NSA do it? Why the DHS? Can anyone explain?
hay stack, you don't need more hay. There were so many warnings about the Ft Hood shooter, the idea that more monitoring of the Internet would have prevented the tragedy is simply laughable.
In all my years I've never seen anybody recruit anybody into any gang, tribe, mafia, or trusted group entirely over the internet. At some point the terrorist has to meet with the potential recruit in the offline world, why not monitor these meetings? I'm sure it would be somewhat easy.
On the other hand to monitor the entire internet more than it already is, is this even possible? They already have an NSA doing just that right?
Whether a lowering of the crime rate corresponds to an increase in safety depends on which crimes are being reduced, of course, but typically a reduction in crime rate corresponds to a reduction in violent and property crimes.
Now, padding arrest rates with drug possession/prostitution arrests may be political posturing, but arrest rate is not the same as crime rate.
So tell me what exactly is the "crime rate"?
If it's not measured or correlated with the arrest rate, is it the conviction rate? How do we measure the crime rate?
What crime is dropping? Lets stop discussing it in terms of "dropping of the crime rate" as if thats saying anything. That's like saying "keep it real" or "yes we can", it's a meaningless political slogan.
This type of surveillance technology wont catch a sophisticated white collar criminal. This technology wont catch organized criminal mafias. It wont catch anyone but the dumbest criminals. This is designed to win political points by making the neighborhood look like it's safe when it really is more dangerous than ever. The police get to look like they are doing their job when they arrest hundreds of prostitutes and thousands of drug dealers. This technology is not going to stop any of the gangs, mafias, or white collar criminals. This technology will only be used to harass the dumb poor. If you are poor and dumb, you better be scared.
Of course law enforcement is going to be war. The organized criminals are warriors and so too must the cops be. The problem is most of the laws aren't designed to keep ordinary people safe. The laws as they are today can be used to arrest anyone for just about any reason. You don't have to cause harm to anyone else, and there need not be any victims. You can break the law just because a cop pulled you over and you had something in your possession you shouldnt have had. This could be anything from drugs, to being a lobster of the wrong size.
The problem isn't the technology. It's the goal. The goal is to lower the crime rate, not to reduce violence or keep citizens safe. Since most everyone is a criminal or knows a criminal, this brings increased risk to everybody in the neighborhood.
We have an economy where nobody can find work, lowering the crime rate only resutls in making the people who are already desperate even more desperate.
If the goal were to lower the "mugging rate" most of us would support that. If the goal were to lower the "murder rate" most of us would support that too. What we don't support is lowering the "crime rate" because this goal is indiscriminate. Lowering the crime rate in a recession can have many unintended consequences or perhaps they are intended?
Some questions to ask are does lowering the crime rate result in an increase in the incarceration rate? If it does then lowering the crime rate does not make us safer. Does lowering the crime rate increase the arrest rate for victimless crimes? If it does then it does not make us safer.
The goal should be to lower the rate of VIOLENT CRIME. The goal should not be to lower the rate of ALL CRIME. The goal should be to lower the arrest rate for VICTIMLESS CRIME. The goal should be to lower the INCARCERATION RATE.
Slashdot Mirror
While the idea of Wikileaks is still quite popular; with more revelations about Wikileaks, Assange is no longer the media darling with everyone taking a more critical view of the man behind Wikileaks.
America's oldest whistleblowing website Cryptome which Wikileaks described as a 'venerabe anti secrecy organization' has collated the most details about what happens within Wikileaks. Cryptome has published all of Wikileaks founder Assange's chats over a few years as well as Wikileaks insider details about how they need $55,000 to run servers but as much as $200,000 is used by the men who run Wikileaks for business class travel, hotels etc.
Read Cryptome to see that despite its idealistic mission, at some level Wikileaks behaves like another secret Government department with a couple of people deciding what is public interest.
In other words $200,000 is used for the secure travel and hotels for individuals like Julian. Your point? It's not like these guys aren't risking their lives. They are risking their lives to bring you a story, I'd say they should be able to stay in any hotel they choose.
Really, are you so intellectually dishonest that you're comparing a guy who makes sensitive information available to genocidal dictators and multi-million dollar frauds? The reason that those you use as examples were so easy to get through the justice system is that they had already been convicted in the court of public opinion. Assange is becoming something of a folk hero, and that makes him poisonous politically to actually put through a wringer. Now I'm not going to say that Assange is the Dalai llama, but if not in magnitude it's ethically the same sort of thing, who would arrest him and extradite him to China?
Maybe thats not how you see it but thats probably how the government sees it.
The main thing here is Julian has to worry about being tortured, not merely being killed. The government will find some punishment worse than death specially designed for Julian. And we know this government tortures people.
Those guys you list may or may not have been tortured. But when the government wants information out of you that is exactly the ticking time bomb type situation where you'd expect torture to be employed.
Torture is usually worse than death for the victims family because it involves loss of honor even if the individual is left alive. Framing the individual for a bunch of crimes, or framing the individuals family members for all sorts of crimes is an example.
Besides they wont want to kill Julian anyway. They want to know what he knows and find out who his sources are not kill him. They need him alive and chances are they'd put him in a super max prison or a secret prison which has 23 hour lockdown and basically put him in a dark room for 23 hours a day until he goes crazy and talks. If you put someone into a room with no light, no sound, no sensory information at all, it's only a matter of time before they start talking to themselves and literally go crazy.
The soviets used to torture political dissidents by putting them into insane asylums. In these special political hospitals doctors and psychiatrists would scientifically torture them until they literally went insane or broke and spilled their secrets. This type of torture is worse than waterboarding, worse than physical pain, because it's psychological and on some level everyone is psychologically weak.
The best thing he can do is get as much press as possible, make as many speeches as possible, engage in as much public activity as possible, and stay in a group at all times (no late night strolls alone). If the general public and press don't know who he is, the U.S. government can just grab him and quietly throw him in a secret jail cell somewhere (or even render him to a country willing to get their hands dirty torturing him with more than a little waterboarding).
It would be nice to live in a world where whistleblowers were rewarded and praised for their efforts. But the truth is that whistleblowers almost always suffer for their sacrifice. At best, they lose their jobs and/or are harassed. At worst, they end up in a filthy jail cell with electrodes on their balls.
Everything you say is correct. He should seek as much attention in the media as he can. Youtube and twitter are the easiest way to do it. About torture, the US government has the capability with psychologists and the covert agents to torture an individual without taking them to a jail or black site. Julian will have to worry about psychological as well as physical torture.To be harassed by random individuals is a form of torture.
It's not assassination that Julian has to worry about. It's the possibility of being kidnapped, taken into a secret location(black site), and questioned(tortured) by the government.It does not take a team of lawyers or a rocket scientist to figure out that Julian should not step foot in the USA. In fact he probably shouldn't leave Iceland if he's even safe Iceland.
how are they supposed to meet their handler without the US spy satelite picking that up?
Spy satellites are not magic. You meet someone in a building, or at night, or on a cloudy day. Satellites can't recognize people's faces anyway (and they don't see them either.)
How would they meet their handler without being seen by anybody anywhere?
It's not a requirement. A huge crowd offers very good privacy, see Karachi.
How would they go to a place like Pakistan and not set off red flags?
Through a 3rd country, perhaps? Those guys may have several passports, all legal, if they are citizens of several countries (or simply they might want to use fake or stolen passports.) Besides, a handler can easily travel from his base in Pakistan to a neutral country - like China or India - if necessary.
It would seem to be next to impossible for individuals to go to terrorist training camps and then come back and not trigger any sort of red flag.
Once you leave the US territory the USA has very little knowledge of where you are and what you are doing - unless you are so important that they assigned some spies to follow you.
LiveCDs on the other hand actually are secure but only if theres no backdoor anywhere in the Linux Kernel or in any software used. Do you trust the Linux Kernel programmers with your life? I doubt terrorists do
Hard to say. I trust Toyota with my life, for example. And note that terrorists are routinely risking their lives; their very occupation is a huge risk. It's probably far more dangerous for a terrorist to take a stroll in a park than to obtain a random copy of Linux and use it for random browsing. If someone is onto them to the extent that they do MITM on them and feed them a backdoored Linux CD (can't imagine how would they know!) then the terrorist's goose is already thoroughly cooked.
I don't think at this time the terrorists have that level of technical sophistication but that is something to look out for in the future.
Majority of "foot soldiers" are, and will be technically incompetent. However they will follow instructions that are written by a well educated terrorist. Why do we think AQ doesn't have its own IT? There are probably lots of AQ sympathizers who aren't fit to carry the rifle but are perfectly willing to give advices. It would be very unwise to assume that AQ is a bunch of idiots.
So if they send PGP encrypted data out the NSA would probably pick up on it instantly
Unlikely. "This here JPEG is completely corrupted, sorry about that." or "This here MPEG2 movie of my vacation is playing fine, however the last two bits of each pixel of each frame carry some other information..." With the sheer volume of messages sent over the Internet, it's not possible to analyze the content in real time in hope of finding something in it. Even an Excel spreadsheet, with one byte of a .pgp file in each cell,formatted as currency, will confuse the hell out of any traffic analyzer - even a human, if you make a token effort to colorize your "sales report for region of $foo". I'm sure it will sail through even if the terrorist doesn't bother PGPing his message and just formats the ASCII plaintext this way.
I dont think everything you said in this post is true. Satelites can see through buildings. Satelites can see faces. Satelites might not be as good on a cloudy day, I'll give you that but the spy drones can still see. And they definitely have night vision, the cover of night is a complete myth.
Also the USA has the ability to know where you go and what you do even when you are overseas. It's not that they aren't collecting the information but it's more that they might not take it seriously or fully analyze the information. They knew about the 911 hijackers. They know who went where and who did what.
And thats exactly what I said. They collect all the data so they'd definitely see it but they wouldn't have the time to analyze
because cryptographic systems are worth nada without a web of trust. And right now, there is none [...]
There may be none for geeks; crypto enthusiasts like using the technology, but they don't really have any secrets worth securing, and so the WoT is kind of not very important. On the other hand, terrorists have secrets, and they *already* have their WoT - it is based not on digital certificates but on personal contacts. Terrorists, like every illegal and underground organization, need WoT not just to send messages; they need it to even meet and talk to each other. But when a terrorist needs to communicate over the Internet, he will personally travel to Pakistan (or wherever) to receive his keyring from his handler.
There is of course a possibility that a terrorist can be simply given a https:/// URL of some webmail in Asia, and given that browsers usually don't save encrypted pages (and the pr0n mode saves nothing at all) it's easy and convenient for a terrorist to have a medium security communication channel that leaves no plaintext on the user's computer. A live boot CD would offer security that is comparable to PKI, as long as no ciphertext needs to be retained. Considering the issue of the trusted computer, the boot CD and SSL might even do better than a locally ran crypto.
While using a keyring personally handed to them from their handler sounds easy, how are they supposed to meet their handler without the US spy satelite picking that up? How would they meet their handler without being seen by anybody anywhere? How would they go to a place like Pakistan and not set off red flags?
The only way this would work is if they were born in Pakistan to begin with and have family who comes from Pakistan to the USA. It would seem to be next to impossible for individuals to go to terrorist training camps and then come back and not trigger any sort of red flag.
LiveCDs on the other hand actually are secure but only if theres no backdoor anywhere in the Linux Kernel or in any software used. Do you trust the Linux Kernel programmers with your life? I doubt terrorists do and I doubt you do or anyone else here. Since you don't trust them with your life, one would conclude that real terrorists would have to take the Linux Kernel and customize it so that it's trusted and make some sort of terrorist specific live-CD.
I don't think at this time the terrorists have that level of technical sophistication but that is something to look out for in the future.PKI is also very secure but it's not secure if you don't know how to use it. Most people using it don't know how to use it and one could conclude the terrorists wont know either. If the terrorists know how to use it then it would be very hard to deal with.
But this is assuming we have terrorists who are also at the highest most elite level of computer savvy. It's possible that some computer scientist turned terrorist, someone like the UNABOMBER could pull something off. It's still not going to be easy because once they connect to the internet every communication they send out will be monitored by the NSA or some letter agency. So if they send PGP encrypted data out the NSA would probably pick up on it instantly and start cracking it.
Lets face it, even if you aren't a terrorist you probably have no one you can trust. The terrorists probably have more people they can trust than the average American/domestic citizen has. The USA is a nation of informants, you never know if your neighbor is informing on you or not. You never know if your best friend, your wife, or your son or daughter is informing on you.
So even if you use encryption it's pretty much worthless against the might of the federal government. They'll use networks of informants, they'll offer large amounts of money for anyone who helps them. They'll also use all kinds of threats including blackmail, death threats, and the threat of a lifetime in some secret prison to get people to become informants against you.
So honestly there is no way to keep any secrets from the feds. The best you can do is live a clean life and keep all the radicals in your outer circle rather than in your inner circle.
The best encryption will slow the NSA down but it wont stop them. PGP's key length is not large enough that it cannot be cracked. It's large enough that it would take weeks to do it. So in general the use of encryption while secure enough to keep them from simply sniffing the data up, it wont stop them from putting a gun to your head and torturing the data out of you.
So if you use encryption and they suspect you are a terrorist, you'll be kidnapped and tortured, and this could last anywhere from minutes to years, or even for the rest of your life if they put you in a Supermax prison. The point is if you do use encryption it doesn't stop the rubber hose cryptoanalyst.
The proper context is never going to be "liberty vs security" for workers. The proper context of this situation is "liberty vs profits". In specific it's "liberty vs CORPORATE profit". To be even more specific it's "liberty vs BIG CORPORATE profit". This is about the security of big corporate profits.
The reason we lose liberty is because big corporations feel entitled to profit at the expense of the Constitution itself. If the Constitution gets in the way of profits the Constitution will be trashed/ignored/modified. Empowering the DHS allows for the big bad evil Corporations like some of the oil companies which destroy the environment, or some of the banking companies that put everyone in debt, or some of the food companies which make everybody sick, to have the power and legal ability to keep doing what they are doing and perhaps do much worse in the future.
So this debate must not be framed in a way which is deceptive. It's not your security they are talking about. It's corporate persons they are talking about and really it's only the corporate aristocracy, not ordinary corporate persons. The older the corporation is the more likely it is on the short list of corporate aristocracy.
If you don't like the situation or the debate then stop accepting the frame. Start by rejecting the false meme of liberty vs security and reframe it as liberty vs corporate profits. That is what is really at stake. The children who actually have parents who are old money wealthy need to take a careful look at whether or not THEY want to sacrifice liberty so their parents can make a little bit extra money today. It's their futures at stake.
A lot of them think that their money will be able to shield them and shelter them completely but this isn't entirely the case. If the beaches are destroyed by oil spills, if species of fish and animals go extinct, then the entire world is less beautiful and less diverse. If the internet is less free then the information on it wont be as compelling and they too will have to live with a diminished internet. It's the unintended consequences that affect ALL young people which is why young people (in specific the young wealthy) need to really consider what matters to their quality of life and whether or not they want to give that up to guarantee profits. There are some things in this world that money cannot buy.
You can have all the data you want from all of the internet. Even if the entire internet were able to be scanned and searched through like a semantic engine it still would not reduce the amount of time spent analyzing the data.
Data collection isn't the problem. Analyzing the data collected is the problem.
There are a lot of nuts like Hassan. He's insignificant. There were nuts worse than Hassan, like Sirhan Sirhan and there have been actual political assassinations in this country from MLK, to Malcom X, to Kennedy, and we are supposed to change everything because of Hassan? Hassan attacked a military installation not civilians.
We should think very carefully of the powers and responsibilities we give to the DHS.
And honestly if they want to reduce our liberty to help themselves do their job perhaps they should get another job. I'm all for them doing what they are paid to do, but to do it in a reckless way is to defeat the purpose of the job they are doing. If they do the job to defend and protect liberty you cannot protect liberty by removing it.
Also domestic terrorism is a job for the local police and the FBI. Thats if we even want to call them terrorists because while the right wing fascist Nazi's, and the militias may be called terrorists, it's not a fact that they are. The country has not decided yet whether these groups are freedom fighting patriots or terrorists. The same goes for Greenpeace and the ELF. These groups might be called terrorists but it's not remotely the same as foreign groups.
I hope these types of changes wont be used to declare another war on American citizens in the way the war on drugs was used. We may find that someday we are on the domestic terrorist list and these new powers used against us if we aren't very careful to draw a hard line in the sand which says liberty cannot be sacrificed for any, ANY reason.
If we have to live with the threat of Neo Nazi's, of Anarchists, of anti abortion murders, I'd rather live with that and be free than be a slave and have the illusion of safety. That's the options you get because you wont be any safety when the big corporate interests that the DHS are protecting decide to screw you over by putting pesticides in your food. The DHS also cannot protect the wetlands, and the DHS won't protect workers, won't protect innocent fetuses, won't protect anything but large corporations.
So if you give up liberty to increase profits (thats what security is measured in), then you will end up in an even more dangerous country where profits are high.
I just don't see how they could recruit over the internet without compromising their identity in the process. It wouldn't be difficult for the feds to set up some websites and monitor them. Frankly the terrorists just don't seem to be smart enough to outsmart the NSA or the FBI. When/if they become that smart then they'd still have to meet in person to do training. Any data transmissions also go over the wire and all data can be analyzed by the NSA, CIA, or whomever.
So I don't understand how they plan to improve the situation. Do they plan to hire more analysts? Theres already more data than can be deciphered and analyzed. There simply is not enough CPU resources, analysts, or time to analyze every single bit of data flowing through the wire.
Maybe I'm wrong and they analyze every bit in some classified way. If this were the case then why not let the NSA do it? Why the DHS? Can anyone explain?
hay stack, you don't need more hay. There were so many warnings about the Ft Hood shooter, the idea that more monitoring of the Internet would have prevented the tragedy is simply laughable.
In all my years I've never seen anybody recruit anybody into any gang, tribe, mafia, or trusted group entirely over the internet. At some point the terrorist has to meet with the potential recruit in the offline world, why not monitor these meetings? I'm sure it would be somewhat easy.
On the other hand to monitor the entire internet more than it already is, is this even possible? They already have an NSA doing just that right?
This is pretty much already the case, thanks to the War on Drugs, Patriot Act, DMCA, etc...
Why make it worse? The situation already is a situation where it's bad with a capital B.
So if we detect more crimes wouldnt it raise the crime rate?
Whether a lowering of the crime rate corresponds to an increase in safety depends on which crimes are being reduced, of course, but typically a reduction in crime rate corresponds to a reduction in violent and property crimes.
Now, padding arrest rates with drug possession/prostitution arrests may be political posturing, but arrest rate is not the same as crime rate.
So tell me what exactly is the "crime rate"?
If it's not measured or correlated with the arrest rate, is it the conviction rate? How do we measure the crime rate?
I suppose we should start with the pedophiles right? They have some of the most disgusting thoughts of all.
What crime is dropping? Lets stop discussing it in terms of "dropping of the crime rate" as if thats saying anything. That's like saying "keep it real" or "yes we can", it's a meaningless political slogan.
This type of surveillance technology wont catch a sophisticated white collar criminal. This technology wont catch organized criminal mafias. It wont catch anyone but the dumbest criminals. This is designed to win political points by making the neighborhood look like it's safe when it really is more dangerous than ever. The police get to look like they are doing their job when they arrest hundreds of prostitutes and thousands of drug dealers. This technology is not going to stop any of the gangs, mafias, or white collar criminals. This technology will only be used to harass the dumb poor. If you are poor and dumb, you better be scared.
Of course law enforcement is going to be war. The organized criminals are warriors and so too must the cops be. The problem is most of the laws aren't designed to keep ordinary people safe. The laws as they are today can be used to arrest anyone for just about any reason. You don't have to cause harm to anyone else, and there need not be any victims. You can break the law just because a cop pulled you over and you had something in your possession you shouldnt have had. This could be anything from drugs, to being a lobster of the wrong size.
The problem isn't the technology. It's the goal. The goal is to lower the crime rate, not to reduce violence or keep citizens safe. Since most everyone is a criminal or knows a criminal, this brings increased risk to everybody in the neighborhood.
We have an economy where nobody can find work, lowering the crime rate only resutls in making the people who are already desperate even more desperate.
If the goal were to lower the "mugging rate" most of us would support that. If the goal were to lower the "murder rate" most of us would support that too. What we don't support is lowering the "crime rate" because this goal is indiscriminate. Lowering the crime rate in a recession can have many unintended consequences or perhaps they are intended?
Some questions to ask are does lowering the crime rate result in an increase in the incarceration rate? If it does then lowering the crime rate does not make us safer. Does lowering the crime rate increase the arrest rate for victimless crimes? If it does then it does not make us safer.
The goal should be to lower the rate of VIOLENT CRIME. The goal should not be to lower the rate of ALL CRIME. The goal should be to lower the arrest rate for VICTIMLESS CRIME. The goal should be to lower the INCARCERATION RATE.