Cybercrime Treaty Pushes Surveillance Worldwide 89
bs0d3 writes "As part of an emerging international trend to try to 'civilize the Internet', one of the world's worst Internet law treaties — the highly controversial Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Cybercrime — is back on the agenda. Canada and Australia are using the Treaty to introduce new invasive, online surveillance laws, many of which go far beyond the Convention's intended levels of intrusiveness. Negotiated over a decade ago, only 31 of its 47 signatories have ratified it. Many considered the Treaty to be dormant but in recent years a number of countries have been modeling national laws based on the flawed Treaty. Leaving out constitutional safeguards, gag orders in place of oversight, and forcing service providers to retain your data may all be coming soon."
Encrypt everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no better argument for encrypting everything that can be encrypted than this.
Yeah, sure, most governments aren't going to do anything with that data NOW, but once they have it, they have it forever. And political climates can and do change. It is not inconceivable that the US will elect Big Brother bread-and-circuses socialists who model their ideas on the surveillance state of Britain, or religious whack-jobs who will simply say "God's law is higher than Man's law" and start criminalizing homosexuality, abortion, titty-pictures and religions that aren't Christian, or frothing-at-the-mouth Greenies who formalize in law the already-existing mapping of "skeptic" to "heretic". And they will be sitting upon a treasure-trove of information to identify who needs to be put in their place.
That's what ideologically-driven governments do. All of them. In the name of "social equality", God, or "global warming", it's the same.
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Sure, you can encrypt the data, but you still have layer 3 information showing what servers you're communicating with. And with the extensions to allow vhosts on https (with different certificates for each vhost), you might be able to tell what site is being visited by logging the handshake.
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:5, Informative)
Um.... extensions other than Subject Alternative Name? Because, that has worked fine for a few years now (in browsers, and a few other places anyway).
With a SAN the certificate just simply lists ALL vhosts that it supports. So, while an eavesdropper can see what site you are going to, he can only see it as one of the several sites that you might possibly be going to.
Of course, Verisign makes sure to ass rape you solidly if you want SANs, but that is almost redundant since, they always try to provide that service.
-Steve
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No, I'm referring to Server Name Indication [wikipedia.org].
a lot of good that encryption will do you... (Score:1)
when the backdoor mandated by government is built right into every piece of equipment.
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's lucky they took the time to run lots of false flag operations in the name of LulzSec and Anon. - otherwise the public might be forgiven for thinking that the levels of cyber-crime didn't warrant a global government-organised snooping-operation.
Good show.
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:4, Interesting)
Or more likely, governments in the future will just sit back and build a profile from information shared internationally. Then use a heuristic tool to assign a point core on amount of posts, wording, and other such to assign a threat factor to someone. That threat factor gets beyond a threshold, the local police get notified, the person disappears, and either a prison camp gets another hand, or an organ bank gets another set of kidneys, heart and other items to sell to a high bidder.
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This is the point I emphasize whenever I talk about why topics such as the sprawling Surveillance State and the attempted criminalization of WikiLeaks and whistleblowing are so vital. The free flow of information and communications enabled by new technologies -- as protest movements in the Middle East and a wave of serious leaks over the last year have demonstrated -- is a uniquely potent weapon in challenging entrenched government power and other powerful factions. And that is precisely why those in power -- those devoted to preservation of the prevailing social order -- are so increasingly fixated on seizing control of it and snuffing out its potential for subverting that order: they are well aware of, and are petrified by, its power, and want to ensure that the ability to dictate how it is used, and toward what ends, remains exclusively in their hands.
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Or what you are saying is; "The nightmare result of a potential Liberally abusive government is only less awful than that of a "free market" abusive government" as Caerdwyn had put it earlier.
>> Government is going to be there whether we like it or not -- it's just a TOOL for setting the rules.
Data collection and lack of privacy isn't good for a Democracy or free speech -- no matter WHAT paradigm you are living in. And the "free market" being allowed to pool and profile everyone isn't any better than
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can disobey physical laws... OTP encryption with a pad derived by a physical process is unbreakable without the pad.
Re:OTP (Score:1)
It's xkcd's wrench again. (paraphrased). "Hi. Here is a wrench. I will beat you on the head with it in 4 4 time until you give me the passkeys."
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the trouble with hardware otp is that there is no passkey except the hardware itself (and the otp in it).
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but I guess that my skull will still be crushed so if I am not a terrorist (also known as freedom fighter) who value ideals more than is own life that is a bad thing...
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If even 10% of the population encrypted everything, the government wouldn't have enough wrenches or people to use the wrenches.
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There's a bash.org quote that I can't find right now (at work) where the guy was doing transfers in cents to a friend with a word or two attached, and apparently managed to carry out a conversation. I'm suddenly put in mind of that - if you can only encrypt a certain class of "communication", then why not encode & communicate over that?
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Considering they recently reported (here at slashdot no less) that a "breakthrough" was made in decrypting AES encryption, which is pretty standard stuff, making the cracking of it twice as easy. However that said, we would probably see the heat death of the universe before that happens using current technology. Or at least several million or billion years (I am being intentionally vague here as what does it matter at these values). That is to say nothing of eventually making quantum computers, or some othe
Whatever (Score:1)
This trend will only get more pronounced as population rises and Internet connectivity increases. The more people there are, the more impact every individual's actions have on everyone else, and therefore the greater the incentive everyone faces to put limits on what everyone else can do.
Many people love having freedom, but hate their neighbor's freedom (whether they realize it or not). This makes us all easy prey to the aristocracy.
Besides, anything that empowers the masses to the detriment of the aristo
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is wise. And I appreciate that you showed that all sides of the political spectrum act the same if they get too much power. More Americans need to realize this.
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It all boils down to the same old saying, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Governments are power. Ideological ones (i.e., all of them - at a minimum, a view on how they believe they should go
Socialists and/or Fascists (Score:1)
As a Canadian, I have no intention of going into countries where I might disappear and be tortured to see what I might know (or just because they enjoy torture) - you know, countries like Chad, Angola, and the US.
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LOL, you're confused.
It wasn't socialists, it was people masquerading as socialists. Including a few out and out fascists, such as the National Socialists of some country or another.
They also masquerade as Communists, Christians, Liberals, Libertarians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and so forth.
About the only thing they don't call themselves is anything accurate.
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LOL, you're confused.
It wasn't socialists, it was people masquerading as socialists. Including a few out and out fascists, such as the National Socialists of some country or another.
They also masquerade as Communists, Christians, Liberals, Libertarians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and so forth.
About the only thing they don't call themselves is anything accurate.
I have never personally heard of a socialist who wants a small government. I doubt it's even compatible with their particular dogma. The government most socialists seem to want is a large and powerful one. That's the main problem with socialism. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong in this scenario. Even if the people who originally set it up are noble, and good luck with that, positions of authority are irresistably attractive to sociopaths of all kinds.
When I say this, bear in mind I am
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Mazlow's pyramid. I'd rather deal with a larger government that can provide basic services should something happen than have to worry about if I have enough cash for the doctor, enough cash to feed family, a place to sleep, private security so some crackhead doesn't shoot me for a gang initiation rite.
There is a happy balance of a government that can provide basic security for its citizens, but not become an overbearing police state. Ideally the best government is one where everyone participates in. This
Re:Socialists and/or Fascists (Score:5, Insightful)
The US is scary, but at least it has a real Constituion. This constituion is being ignored in many cases, but at least some people care about this.
Canada is currently less scary than the US, particularly if you are a Canadian citizen. But I live in a city with a zillion cameras, which I hate. What I hate even more (and what scares me even more) is that the cameras went up and no one seems to care. I don't know how much debate there was about them, but Canada has very little except tradition to prevent it from turning into a police state.
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Ditto with Australia - it's essentially the Westminster 'tradition' of good governance and accountability that keeps places like Canada and Australia free. Now to be fair, this is more than a mere tradition - it is essentially common law, and has as much strength as any other law. But you're right to say it's not formally written down in a document that is as strong or explicit as something like the US Constitution.
We enjoy the rights we do because the courts have traditionally recognised those rights, and
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Canada had a Bill of Rights (from 1960) but (I had to Google this) it was considered to be ineffectual. In 1982, we got a"Charter of Rights and Freedoms". However, the latter has a "limitations" clause and a "notwhithstanding" clause which the government can involke if it thinks it is important enough.
What it boils down to is that we have a pretty good set of "rights" but, unlike the US bill of rights and constitution in general which (is supposed to) fundamentally limit the rights of government, our ri
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There is one small glimmer of hope from Birmingham in the UK. The police got as far as installing a large number of CCTV cameras in a mostly Asian area of the city but the residents objected. Eventually the cameras were removed without being turned on. They had to play the race card but this is the only such incident I know of.
Scary Places (Score:3)
Yeah, well..... As a Canadian citizen I am better protected in Canada than I would be anywhere else, although our constitution and rights have been granted by the government, and what the government can grant, it can take away.
Theoretically, the US is better, in that the constitution defines roles and limitations of the government (rather than the government granting rights to people). But the US is a very scary place in some ways. The Bill of Rights in the US has, in some cases, been interpreted to app
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"Addendum. If you encrypt anything that means you have something to hide and are therefore a terrorist. End of Line."
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Well, the first and last options are pretty close to inconceivable, at
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It is not inconceivable that the US will elect Big Brother bread-and-circuses socialists
I find it funny that most Americans who are so terrified of socialism apparently have no clue what it is
Re:Answer = Proxy Server (Score:5, Informative)
Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
Re:Answer = Proxy Server (Score:5, Insightful)
Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
Staying under the radar hoping they won't target you next ... that's not the same thing as fighting back.
The way to fix this is to make passing these kinds of laws even more detrimental to a career in politics, than, say, destroying Social Security.
Sometimes I think we should just hurry up and implement global fascism and get it over with. I'm tired of all the suspense. We can have neighbor snitching on neighbor for thoughtcrimes. We can have full-time martial law since that's cheaper than building enough prisons to house every man, woman, and child. Maybe we can make people fight their neighboring cities to save ourselves the transportation costs of fighting pointless wars overseas. That seems to be more like the society so many people really want to live in. That's why they keep swallowing the bullshit excuses for each baby-step towards its implementation.
Then when the whole thing collapses under its own weight we can all admit what we should have known from the very beginning: that the other way for politicians to feel secure is to be noble and to truly seve the people then they won't feel so threatened by unfettered exchange of information, that there was never a justification for fascism, for the nanny-state, or for ever telling consenting adults what they may do or how they may do it. Perhaps attempting to do so could be the only capital crime on the law books.
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Posting anonymously even though it is trivial to trace. A devil's advocate's point of view:
Have you considered that a groaning police state is the normal as opposed to the exception? Look at Europe. For 1000+ years, life was so cheap that if a peasant stole more than a penny, they would be killed immediately. China was the same way -- plenty of tortures kept the proles in line. Egypt, same.
Want to know why we had some free reign? The Black Plague. Once there were too few backs for the upper class to
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You assume that the U.S. military would be used by the government to put down any significant rebellion, but I do not think this is very certain; it may seem counter-intuituve, but the U.S. military culture has a strong streak of distrust of high authority. There is a lot of thought and language devoted to classifying orders as lawful and unlawful. Some few will no doubt go along with any order, but as a whole I think it's hard to say where they would come down in the long run.
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The police seem to be getting kitted up with all the military hardware:
Why do the police have tanks? [alternet.org]
Then there is Operation Fast and Furious [wikipedia.org]
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SWAT teams are well equipped, but still a very long way from Apaches and Hellfire missiles.
The order is there already (Score:2)
If an american citizen is brought before the International Court of Justice, the USA has threatened beforehand to use military force. Isn't that unlawful? Would the US army disobey?
Mind you, the army would off course not be asked to fight civilians. They would be asked to fight terrorists. That the individuals meant by the two words are the same does not matter.
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Shooting Hellfires at civilians would be fucking retarded and set the whole country and probably world against whomever did it. They have plenty of tech for dealing with riots and demonstrations that doesn't involve blatantly setting off a civil war.
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The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
I went to college with the guy who ran that VPN server.
The only reason he cooperated with the Feds so readily is because he didn't want them flagging him as a Person Of Interest.
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The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
I went to college with the guy who ran that VPN server.
The only reason he cooperated with the Feds so readily is because he didn't want them flagging him as a Person Of Interest.
Thanks for clearing that up. None of us could have imagined that our own federal government would find ways to make someone's life miserable when that person stands between them and someone they'd really love to apprehend. That's so unprecedented.
Sarcasm aside, I would never consider running a VPN sever or a proxy of any kind unless I had a log retention policy of 30 seconds, and/or all personally identifying information was scrubbed from all logfiles prior to their being written to disk.
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Sarcasm aside, I would never consider running a VPN sever or a proxy of any kind unless I had a log retention policy of 30 seconds, and/or all personally identifying information was scrubbed from all logfiles prior to their being written to disk.
Why log at all?
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Thanks for clearing that up.
Clarification: He has done things that would get him in more trouble than hacking Palin's e-mail.
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TOR. Enough said.
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He used a commercial VPN? Haha I didn't realize he was an idiot.
A commercial VPN is only slightly better than a direct connection from home. A random Proxy server would be a better option. Tor is a good option. A proxy chain with Tor in it is an excellent option and costs nothing.
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It depends on VPN providers. Some are explicit in their SLA that they keep logs for "x" amount of time, and what they keep logs on. This is done to prevent abuse, as well as look for intrusion attempts or malicious activities. After a period of time, say 6-24 hours, the logs get erased via a wipe command in the rotation script and life goes on.
There are multiple levels of security a VPN provider provides, and there are trade offs. Couple examples:
VPN provider 1 is fast and US based. However they have a
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Business for Proxy servers will be going up. The more governments intrude, the more the people will fight back.
Or maybe there will be an increase in TOR usage.
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Check the other story on the front page.
Oh the naivete! (Score:2)
Do we expect anything less? Who couldn't see this coming from a thousand miles away? So let's start hearing some good news about real ad hoc networks that can actually keep us out of reach.. And please, if you all are gonna squeal about using encryption over their wire, save your breath. It won't work
Alas! (Score:2)
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I keep remembering the monologue from 'V for Vendetta' [imdb.com]:
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Re:Alas! (Score:4, Insightful)
I use to think Alex Jones of infowars.com was a hoot to listen to. Now days, I find myself surprisingly shaking my head in agreement sometimes.
Most people who are ahead of their time and can see things coming from a long distance away are regarded with ridicule and contempt. Especially when they were right.
But don't worry. The fact that this has happened so many thousands of times never stops anyone from climbing up on their high horse and dismissing without examination anything and everything that doesn't fit their personal orthodoxy. The satisfaction of feeling for two whole seconds like they're better/wiser/smarter than someone else is much too precious to them.
Also they sure as hell won't question their personal orthodoxy or how it came to be. That's too painful for cowards who derive their security from conformity to a group. The really scary thing is what they might discover: that it's not really theirs at all. If you want a biological model, consider a virus that injects itself from without and takes over a cell from within.
Taking over a nation by force is the old, outdated, obsolete method and it's much too messy and risky for the modern tyrant. The sophisticated aristocracy of today simply brainwashes the masses by exploiting their ignorance and laziness and anti-intellectual culture. Then not only can you take control without firing a single shot, but they will actually elect you themselves. Eventually they'll have to because no one else will be on the ballot.
I've been called a tin-foil hatter etc. plenty of times. I am only too familiar with the shallow narrow-minded mentality that never has the guts to put forth its own viewpoint, or attempts to do so and can only come up with some regurgitated talking points that came from a sound bite. That mentality is the foremost reason why nearly every major Western nation is decaying from within.
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*again*? I think he's been rolling steadily faster since the mid-nineties.
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An aware population can defend the internet against tyranny
there is significant awareness on the Internets population about this sort of thing, why do you think groups like lulsec and anonymous are being so aggressive lately?
If we lose the internet, what's next? Seriously... (Score:1)
I know serious questions usually aren't asked in slashdot comments, but I do have one. If the internet keeps going this way, and all the things that made it great are slowly taken away, what is the next technology that the original early-adopters are going to move to?
Was privacy something that was always dead, only it took a few years to realize that fact on the internet? Or are there other ways of communicating beyond the internet that nerds/geeks are starting to look into?
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Distributed networking, but you need to be able to trust your neighbours.
Which is how it started, back in the day, albeit with a different definition of neighbour. I expect it'll be wireless and encrypted this time around though.
Treaty Now! (Score:2)
Well I heard it on the internet
And I saw it on slashdot
Back in 2011
All those posting privacy advocates
Words are easy, words are cheap
Much cheaper than our priceless profits
But your indivisible rights can disappear
Just like bloggers in the night
Treaty Yeah
Treaty Yeah Treaty Now
This net was never given up
This net was never yours
The planting of the flag with 12 stars
Never changed our view at all
Now multiple legal systems have run their course
Sepa
Why? (Score:2)
the internet is not like "the wild west" the internet is like more like international waters of infinite dimension.
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I honestly think it's apathy. Those in the government pushing this agenda want it. Noone else does, and frankly most would object if they knew or cared.
But they don't know, and they don't care. They use the internet, but don't really know how it works. What they do know is that they hear the scare stories in the media about crime ON THE INTERNETS (omg) and thus anything directed at stopping that must be a good thing, right?
Which brings up the second thing they don't care/know about. The vast majority of peo
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Ex spooks and their supporters get to flood the federal bureaucracy with security cleared offers of best new logging and tracking systems.
A tax payers funded dream for the insiders and their political supporters. Fresh cash and only a select few can bid for it
People who get the funding recall the parties and individuals who helped them, later in life, very nice jobs open up.
Astroturfing is used where needed or real small time one issue pr