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European Police Plan to Remote-Search Hard Drives
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Dec 02, 2008 11:58 AM
from the oh-you-needn't-come-into-the-office dept.
from the oh-you-needn't-come-into-the-office dept.
Smivs points out a blandly-worded story from the BBC with scary implications, excerpting "Remote searches of suspect computers will form part of an EU plan to tackle hi-tech crime. The five-year action plan will take steps to combat the growth in cyber theft and the machines used to spread spam and other malicious programs. It will also encourage better sharing of data among European police forces to track down and prosecute criminals. Europol will co-ordinate the investigative work and also issue alerts about cyber crime sprees."
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lol (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, good thing I have a firewall, built right into my router.
Re:lol (Score:5, Insightful)
That's funny. I tend to keep my highly illegal terrorism-and-kiddie-porn related files on disconnected usb drives.
Parent
Summary is confused as usual (Score:5, Informative)
The summary takes the decision somewhat out of context.
They're not planning to remotely connect to any old joes computer they can and search it, they're planning to connect to zombie computers that have been hijacked by criminals to try and trace back where the criminals are coming from.
Apparently, there will be strict rules on what they can do on said machine too, that is, they're not allowed to start rummaging through people's personal data. Don't think I'm naive by saying that- I'm just repeating what I read on the issue, I don't believe for a minute those rules will be enforceable and I truly think as soon as they have access to these machines and their boss aint looking they're going to start rummaging like crazy.
I'm not sure how I feel about the general idea, if a machine has a backdoor and they can manage to connect to it also then in a way I feel they should just temporarily patch it for the user and inform the user at absolute worse although I'm not sure this is ideal- what if they patch some security researcher's honey pot for instance!
It certainly concerned me a bit when I read it but it's certainly not a plan to just use 0-day exploits to connect to everyone and anyone's PC or anything.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't believe for a minute those rules will be enforceable and I truly think as soon as they have access to these machines and their boss aint looking they're going to start rummaging like crazy.
Right. Because police tracking down criminal networks are more than willing to risk their careers to sneak a peak at some random person's emails to their grandmother, pictures of their friends, and last year's Christmas wish list.
I'm not saying that nobody will ever overstep their snooping mandate, but I think we can all loosen the tinfoil hats just a bit. If your computer is one of these zombies, I'd be more concerned about the snooping that may have been done by the people who zombified it in the first pl
Re:Summary is confused as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
You are wrong. First, because yes, people will risk their careers to snoop on the privacy of total strangers, just because they can. Since they work in secrecy, it's even debatable if they feel their careers at at risk for doing so: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5987804 [go.com]
Second, because as alarming as the linked story is, privacy is ultimately not about the police reading your shopping list. It's always about money - the money someone is willing to pay to access personal data on a political opponent (to discredit her or him), a dissident group (to penetrate and spy on them), or a competing business (obvious).
Therefore, it's also about human rights.
Once the technology is available, it *will* be abused, and we know this, because such abuses have always happened. I don't know of a government (or a business) that had a technology available and decided not to use it because doing so would be unethical or even illegal. How many times must the same stories repeat before we learn?
Parent
Re:Summary is confused as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
Once the technology is available, it *will* be abused, and we know this, because such abuses have always happened. I don't know of a government (or a business) that had a technology available and decided not to use it because doing so would be unethical or even illegal. How many times must the same stories repeat before we learn?
An old saying puts it best: "What the government wants to do, and has the means to do, it will do -- logic, ethics, and common sense notwithstanding."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly, this is not quite correct.
Here in Germany, they plan (and already have) to simply control you. Are you an eeeeeevil terrarist? Do you think of possibly considering, at some time in the far future, if you might want to do something which might bother some state bureaucrats? Do you Obey The RIAA?
It's not about spam, and zombie computers, and stuff like that. It's about control.
And, by the way, they are allowed to secretly enter your home, install some crap on your PC, and leave again. The might need a
Re:Summary is confused as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone in the arts or business is permitted to think 'The chances of that happening are remote, therefore it is unlikely, therefore I will ignore it. If it should arise, I'll see it and deal with it then.'
People in a technical disciple are obligated to think 'The possibility of that happening is there, therefore it is inevitable that it will happen, therefore the whole thing is wrong until I address it.'
Parent
Bogus statistical claims. (Score:5, Insightful)
In a statement outlining the strategy the EU claimed "half of all internet crime involves the production, distribution and sale of child pornography".
And the other half is copyright infringement?
Re:Bogus statistical claims. (Score:4, Funny)
I get MY statistics from /dev/random
Oh look, IE usage has dropped to less than 1% and the US is no longer in debt.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Leaving the 419 scams, eBay fraud, phishing for financial details, and violating the MySpace TOS all lost in the noise.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a dumb but not entirely theoretical question: how do you count copyright infringement of kiddie porn images??
After all, doesn't the porn industry claim it's the most infringed of all copyrighted material??
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That might actually be a viable solution... no shit, do you see these kids signing any waivers? No?? Then they're owed royalties.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA (Score:3, Funny)
Can you repeat after me?
When this is implemented, it will be....
duh du duhnnn
Wait for it.....
"The year of Linux on the desktop"!
propaganda and hysteria works both ways (Score:2, Insightful)
you frequently here discussions on slashdot about grey hat activities: going to computers hosting worms, and shutting down the worm remotely, for example. and you hear many people here supporting that
now in europe, this is exactly what they are going to do: shut down zombies, shut down spam relays, and everyone on slashdot babbles incoherently about teh ev1l gubmint invading our computers. when such european effort sprobably sprang directly from the kind of strategizing peopl ehere on slashdot frequnetly en
Re:propaganda and hysteria works both ways (Score:5, Funny)
now in europe, this is exactly what they are going to do: shut down zombies, shut down spam relays, and everyone on slashdot babbles incoherently about teh ev1l gubmint invading our computers.
You've got the eighth comment! And judging by the length of your comment you probably didn't even see half of the previous ones before you posted.
if you instead spastically flail out everytime someone words an article in a propagandistic manner
Oh hi.
Parent
Re:yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed...one need only look at the last eight years in the U.S. for the proof of this statement.
Oh, wait...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I find it interesting that you are complaining about the last eight years in the US, yet the article is about Europe...
IMO, it shows the anti-US sentiment, apparently because of the US's more or less high position in the world, as opposed to many European countries that are trying to rival it with the EU, etc., but failing.
And yet, The UK and Europe have far worse "wire-tapping" sorts of things than the US. But it's not in vogue to complain about it anywhere but in the US, it seems.
Re:yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
A grey hat in his basement can give me a trojan, perhaps fuck up my computer. The government can send hordes of armed men round to my house and lock me up for the rest of my life. Although I do probably trust the government more than some random, I know which one I am more scared of.
Parent
This can't be right (Score:5, Insightful)
how how how? (Score:2, Insightful)
how would this work? since to access my hard drive to search it, they would need.
1. me to be on the internet at the time they want to search my drive.
2. my to give them access to my machine via a remote desktop style connection, which would involve me giving them a username and password to my machine.
or
1. me to be on the internet at some point
2. mandating that EVERYONE in the EU runs an application that indexes the entire of all the hard drives connected to a machine, and transmits the index to a central lo
Re:how how how? (Score:4, Interesting)
Please see my earlier post [slashdot.org] regarding this...apparently, they plan to infect your system with a remote access Trojan.
But don't worry...it's for your own good.
Parent
or... (Score:3, Insightful)
or
1. search your computer through backdoor built into closed-source operating system.
Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, it's awfully hard to not be yet again reminded of Orwell here. Constant surveillance and no privacy from the government so they can monitor everything you do.
But, of course, if your machine is behind a firewall, they'll just outlaw having firewall because it impedes their ability to investigate you for crimes. At which point if you need to be insecure enough to ensure that law enforcement can get in and do this, your machine will be hosed within the hour as the actual bad people break through as well.
This will either fall apart as un-doable, or spark some absurd laws to enforce it.
Cheers
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
With mild encryption so it gives them some time to kill.
Could be fun, could also backfire, I mean if they are allowed to do this they'll eventually be allowed to arrest you for wasting their time by doing something like that.
Blah.
I'm moving to Russia.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't care for that analysis, here's another [securityfocus.com].
Parent
More Information? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, the article cited is maddeningly vague as to how this initiative will be implemented. A little digging turns up this Register article [theregister.co.uk] on the subject, which contains slightly more info.
From the Register article:
So, in short, here's just one more compelling argument for ditching Windows for Linux...
Re:More Information? (Score:4, Informative)
thank german minister for the interior for that shit. he introduced the law, the law was modded down by young social democrats, he was pretty pissed and so he tries to push the law through this way.
Parent
Linux is vulnerable too (sort of) (Score:3, Interesting)
So, in short, here's just one more compelling argument for ditching Windows for Linux...
With more and more Linux users running proprietary binary blobs for convenience reasons or just out of pure laziness (video drivers, flash players and what not), it would be rather easy for $GOVERNMENT to remotely substitute one of those blobs with a "policeware"-augmented one with a classic man-in-the-middle attack. How could you check the code of those binary blobs to be sure that $THEY aren't already listening in wh
Worried? (Score:4, Funny)
I would be worried that this would be badly worded and over-broad.
But, being a citizen of the UK, I know that even if legislation were made like this, then Her Majesty's Government would never abuse its powers and apply it to situations which were not originally intended.
Just like the anti-terrorism legislation.
Oh, hang on...
Go ahead (Score:5, Insightful)
as I sit here in a cafe, my laptop connected to some unsecured AP far awqay with a biquad wifi antenna, I say go right ahead, search my hard-drive, but don't forget to bring a good map and a gonio antenna to find me in case you realize I'm not the poor guy whose house you're about to raid.
This will never work, there are way too many anonymous internet connections around for this 1984 scheme to work, and people who have something to hide usually don't leave stuff hanging around unencrypted on their hard disks.
Disconcerting possibility: (Score:5, Insightful)
In the short term, that means some flavor of spyware. The disconcerting bit, though, is that said spyware would look and act like normal spyware; but be part of a police investigation. Generally, interfering with those is a crime. Will removing that spyware be considered obstruction of justice? Will blocking its operations or reporting be considered obstruction of justice? "Your honor, the defendant did maliciously configure his router to drop outbound justice on port 315..." In order to be effective, spyware has to be covert and subtle, so it will be damn difficult to distinguish fedware from ordinary spyware.
Worse, of course, is the medium to long term: if "remote search" is the law of the land, it will soon enough seem like a good idea to mandate a few features from hardware and software manufacturers to make it easier. Make an antivirus program? Well, you'd better be sure that it ignores the activities of any app signed by $AUTHORITY, if you want to stay out of jail. OSes could easily do similar things with process listings, priviledge escalations and the like. Even hardware could get in on the act. In principle, you could build obedience to cryptographically signed orders into all sorts of devices. This would be bad in all the ways that DRM usually is, only worse.
Unfortunately, this sort of turn doesn't seem entirely unlikely. Digital surveillance is all the rage these days, and unlikely to get any less popular, and there are few jurisdictions that have any terribly encouraging history of resisting it. Specifically, the EU has comparatively strong privacy legislation; but it is written from the basic philosophy that privacy is having the state control other's access to the data it collects, rather than privacy being having those data never collected. The US is stronger on that score(at least in theory, and as long as drugs, kiddie porn, and terrorism aren't involved); but the state of private sector privacy is absolutely miserable and there is nothing stopping the state from simply buying surveillance from said private sector(which it indeed does, on a fairly massive scale).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why.(among other reasons)
NO (Score:3, Funny)
Free Internet Access + EULA (Score:3, Insightful)
It's real easy for them to do.
Step 1 : Hand out free or discounted internet access. This may include higher than average datarates or fiber access making it really attractive to the end user. The caviout is that you must also run a software package on the machine or the connection is revoked. Said software includes the drive scanner and identification credentials.
Step 2 : Pass regulation that makes traditional anonymous internet access prohibitivly expensive for the individual user.
Ta da! The net is no longer anonymous and big brother is watching.
HALF of all net crime is child porn??? (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA: "In a statement outlining the strategy the EU claimed "half of all internet crime involves the production, distribution and sale of child pornography"
What? Half of all internet crime??
Hmmm. Bullshit detector's gone off the scale on this one. I think this is the work of industry lobbyists playing the child porn card to sell snakeoil to clueless, greedy politicians.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
...to roll-your-own OS. Or use one that's been built by and for the community with all the source code visible for all to see. Proprietary binaries? You don't know what's squirrelled away in there...
You don't know what's squirreled away in the Linux kernel, or any other open-source product you didn't entirely write yourself.
It's very easy to hide something nefarious in just a few lines of C (see the obfesicated C contesr for examples). If the NSA or a group of smart enough criminals wanted to hide something in a major open-source project, they almost definately could.
Re:All the more reason... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:All the more reason... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, the irony of this is hilarious. Linux is now more cumbersome to work with than the operating system which caused Linus to write the Linux kernel in the first place. I'm sure Tanenbaum will be proud that he's come full circle. :-P
Besides, all of the stuff one layer up from the microkernel would still need to be checked for security, so I don't really think it buys you anything. The operating system is more than just the kernel.
Cheers
Parent
You just moved the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Because the minix kernel doesn't do squat useful. So you need an application to do that. And the application will need to be bigger, more monolothic and easier to pwn like this because you haven't got the capability in the kernel.
Nice job.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is, there's still a nonzero number of people who are most likely not on the NSA's payroll, who are reviewing every line that comes in, and who may help reject a given patch if it can't be understood.
So yes, it's possible, but it's considerably harder -- you not only have to ensure that it's obfuscated, you have to ensure that it looks like it's not, that it appears to do something benign instead.
And you can't simply do that by adding complexity -- after all, the more complex it is, the more scru
Re:All the more reason... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even visible source code isn't entirely safe:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html [bell-labs.com]
Always a fun read.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That is an arms race which doesn't end, though -- how do you know you can trust icc, either? How did you obtain it in the first place -- did you download it and compile it with your own gcc?
Suppose you downloaded a trusted binary -- alright, how do you know you aren't rootkitted, with something which checks a predefined list of compilers, and thus modifies icc again?
Granted, it becomes unlikely. It is, however, impossible to ever truly know. Your method could prove that you are compromised, but it cannot pr
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, he's right. The intel-compiled gcc might be faster than the gcc-compiled gcc, but their (the 2nd generation compiler's) outputs should be identical.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They're not two unrelated compilers.
Reread the GP.
Compare the output of GCC compiled with GCC to the output of GCC compiled with ICC.
The compiler doing the final output is the same - GCC. The compiler doing the intermediate compile is different, but it's compiling the same GCC source code for the compiler for the last step. Which means, functionally - but not binary - icc_gcc_gcc and gcc_gcc_gcc should be identical. It would then follow that they'd produce identical output from the same source code.
Now,
Re:All the more reason... (Score:4, Funny)
(I have designed my own processor, and frankly, getting it to run 8 instructions was more than enough for me, lol)
Parent
Re:Go right ahead.... (Score:5, Funny)
If they search your /dev/random long enough they'll eventually find kiddie-porn so the joke's on you.
Enjoy prison
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, I am so spending tonight checking /dev/random to see if Half Life 7 has been releasd yet :)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not stealing imaginary property, smoking in a bar, drinking outside a bar, making juvenile jokes on an airplane...