Keeping Your Data Private From the NSA (And Everyone Else) 622
Nerval's Lobster writes "If those newspaper reports are accurate, the NSA's surveillance programs are enormous and sophisticated, and rely on the latest in analytics software. In the face of that, is there any way to keep your communications truly private? Or should you resign yourself to saying or typing, 'Hi, NSA!' every time you make a phone call or send an email? Fortunately there are ways to gain a measure of security: HTTPS, Tor, SCP, SFTP, and the vendors who build software on top of those protocols. But those host-proof solutions offer security in exchange for some measure of inconvenience. If you lose your access credentials, you're likely toast: few highly secure services include a 'Forgot Your Password?' link, which can be easily engineered to reset a password and username without the account owner's knowledge. And while 'big' providers like Google provide some degree of encryption, they may give up user data in response to a court order. Also, all the privacy software in the world also can't prevent the NSA (or other entities) from capturing metadata and other information. What do you think is the best way to keep your data locked down? Or do you think it's all a lost cause?"
I hide my data in big wheels of cheese (Score:4, Funny)
It stinks, but I can see if anyone's been intruding. So far it is totally secure.
Re:I hide my data in big wheels of cheese (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I hide my data in big wheels of cheese (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I hide my data in big wheels of cheese (Score:5, Funny)
Most companies would use something that's just gouda enough
Re:I hide my data in big wheels of cheese (Score:5, Insightful)
"And while 'big' providers like Google provide some degree of encryption, they WILL give up user data in response to a court order"
I believe the correct statement would be:
"And while 'big' providers like Google provide some degree of encryption, they HAVE GIVEN up user data in response to a court order"
Re:I hide my data in big wheels of cheese (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. If Google cared, they could take measures to immunize themselves against court orders.
Courts can only order that these businesses divulge data they have. Google could encrypt your email, docs, &c., that are stored on their servers using your login password, and so long as they don't store your login password, they cannot now decrypt the data. All they could respond to a court order with would be an encrypted blob and, "if you want the data, subpoena the owner and get the password from him." No more spying without the owner's knowledge.
Google's encryption is just HTTPS, which is end-to-end between the user and Google's servers. It's great for protecting against MITM attacks, but useless to protect against Google themselves.
Re:I hide my data in big wheels of cheese (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, we're on to you. I work for the NSA in the cheese department. We have secret methods of turning milk into "18-month cave-aged gouda" within 23 minutes.
Re:I hide my data in big wheels of cheese (Score:5, Funny)
Your Swiss cheese security is full of holes!
Re: (Score:3)
At least with Swiss cheese you are on "firm ground," so to speak.
On the other hand, cream or cottage cheese make for lossy obscuration. Maybe better paper will help?
Re: (Score:3)
How do you know it's not government cheese?
Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, which is why i've been using PGP for emails to/from my more nerdy family and friends for a while.
Used to be a free plugin for those of us cursed with using Outlook, now paid.
I should take a closer look at this, I suppose:
http://code.google.com/p/outlook-privacy-plugin/ [google.com]
Of course, other options exist. Enigmail for Thunderbird works OK too, apparantly...
Is it just me, but how hard would it have been for Microsoft, Apple & Lotus/IBM to have rolled this type of functionality into the base product?
(And don't tell me a corp like Exxon or whatever would find it too hard to swap certificates with its major supplier & customers, also presumably mostly big corporations with a vested interest in keeping their emails secure)
Why did they not, eh? Conspiracy theorists, off you go!
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
But the NSA says it's just collecting the metadata on communications, not the actual communications. So while encrypting the message in your email may prevent them from (easily) reading your email, they still see that you sent or received an email and who it was coming or going to.
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
And encrypting it screams "hey look at me look at me I'm saying something I don't want you to know about!"
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
And encrypting it screams "hey look at me look at me I'm saying something I don't want you to know about!"
Huh? My mail server has been opportunistically encrypting all MTA traffic for the past decade and all of my remote access is via OpenVPN or ssh. My work involves conversations with clients that include, but are not limited to trade secrets, personally-identifiable medical records, and financial information. Damn right I don't want other people to know about that stuff, and the NSA is near the bottom of that list.
The only change I'm going to make over this NSA tussle is to stop accepting plain HTTP on my own infrastructure. Sorry, IE on XP users - you're out of luck. The other 95% of the web will be better off if everybody makes the same change.
I'll have to look through my logs to see if the same change can be made for mail yet.
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now it screams "I've heard of PRISM".
Now is the best time to start routinely encrypting your communications, because you have a plausible reason to do so.
Re: (Score:3)
There used to be anonymous remailers that accepted encrypted messages. You encrypted once with the recipient's private key and once with the remailers. Then only the remailer could decrypt the real recipient's email address and forward it on, without reading the actual message.
Of course the remailer was vulnerable to surveillance but you could always chain a few of the better ones together. It won't be impossible to trace but it will break PRISM.
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
But the NSA says it's just collecting the metadata on communications, not the actual communications. So while encrypting the message in your email may prevent them from (easily) reading your email, they still see that you sent or received an email and who it was coming or going to.
You're forgetting: They are lying. They lied before each leak, and after were proven liers. Now they claim to have told congress "The least untruthful" thing they could. You think they are finally telling the truth now? lol
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:4, Informative)
But the NSA says it's just collecting the metadata on communications, not the actual communications. So while encrypting the message in your email may prevent them from (easily) reading your email, they still see that you sent or received an email and who it was coming or going to.
enter torbirdy.
torbirdy is a addon for Thunderbird email client routing all you email through tor. You can also use a tor hidden email service let them try and unravel who is communicating with who then. you can also use tor with pidgen chat client, and pgp encryption all they will get is random noise lost in the tor network. the problem is trying to get the muggles to bother to use/learn these.
as it stands today we have all of the technology needed to make prism virtually useless for anything, the problem is the general populous overwhelming apathy and lack of interest as long as they can play stupid facebook games. As long as most the average joe doesn't care enough to act we all are vulnerable we have to communicate at the lowest common denominator. i would love to move all of my communication to double public key encrypted obfuscated triple proxied tor hidden service hosted secure goodness, but grandma can barely handle facebook. so we are all stuck with cc'ing everything to nsa/cia/fbi/homeland.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:4, Interesting)
This is how Lotus has worked for 20 years. Your log-in key is a file which is your public/private key and public keys of important servers (home server, various "main servers", adjacent domain servers). Then it's PGP all the way down. It's a simple menu option (often force-enabled by your admin) to have your client encrypt the message decryption key for each destination user.
That's why their webmail requires that you upload the log-in key. And it expires according to your company password policy. The cert trust chain corresponds to the organization's servers, and cannot be spoofed without having the organization's keyfile (on admin server) or using the admin server itself (which is highly logged). This makes the encryption very tamper-proof (in 20 years I've never heard of it broken, and I'd know).
But this is for organizations running Lotus internal and the organizations it peers with. AFAIK There's no direct + easy standard that does the same thing.
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:4, Informative)
This. Servers you control, communicating using strong encryption set up by yourself alone.
And even this assumes that the NSA doesn't secretly have any cracks for any strong encryption algorithms. Rumor is they've found a way to efficiently brute-force low-level AES.
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
Rumor is they've found a way to efficiently brute-force low-level AES.
A rumor that hasnt been substantiated even after over a decade of analysis by top crypto experts around the world. Color me skeptical.
Im sure the NSA is good, but AES security has been pretty thoroughly tested, hammered, and inspected for chinks.
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:5, Informative)
No, that would be NIST, the same folks who standardized SHA, SHA2, etc.
AES (aka Rijndael) was developed by Daeman and Rijman. NSA offered some tweaks to it, which were later determined to have significantly strengthened the cipher.
The "folks who evaluated it" include Bruce Schneier, who aside from being a well respected cryptoanalyst (having developed several NIST standard candidates), is nothing if not paranoid.
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:4, Informative)
And never used for any purpose but converting electricity to heat... because once you hook them up to the wider world (even just to a monitor), you're compromised. (Traffic analysis, emissions analysis, etc... which most 'geeks' seem blithely unaware of, being at least as useful as actually reading the data.*) Seriously, it's a trade off - protecting data that nobody but you gives a fuck about anyhow, or actually using that data to accomplish something useful.
* Cryptography is fashionable among geeks, it's a cheap way to tighten the tinfoil, but it's only one small corner of information security. Go ahead and feel protected because your head is under the bed - but you should be aware that your ass is hanging out.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Run your own servers and use encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
"Even there, however, the government can still potentially gain information on who you may be sharing the data with. "
Not with OneSwarm [oneswarm.org]. It was specifically designed such that content is distributed throughout your OneSwarm network, and it is physically impossible to determine which node or nodes are supplying the data you are receiving via that network.
It might be theoretically possible for them to find out who is in your network, with a lot of effort. But even if they managed to insert a node into your network, they could not tell with whom you are communicating. By design.
Security through obscurity (Score:5, Informative)
1. Use an email provider nobody's heard about.
2. Keep social network data private, more importantly don't post anything sensitive.
3. Don't engage in terrorism, they really hate that.
4. Somewhere between "get off Windows" and use a live disk, I don't think any OS is truly secure.
5. Don't save anything locally, keep your accounts hidden, no email notifications.
Wave at the black SUV outside your window as not having any traceable data may warrant suspicion in itself.
Move to SA (either one).
Re:Security through obscurity (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Keep social network data private, more importantly don't post anything sensitive.
Are you serious? How about "don't participate in an online social network"?
Just knowing your set of friends or contacts is enough to extrapolate a huge amount of information about you. So, even if the ONLY data you provide a social network is your friends, that's already a LOT of information.
The classic study on this was probably about five years ago now, where someone showed how it was possible to predict (to a reasonably high degree of certainty) whether you were gay or not using just your list of friends.
More recently, it's been shown how easy it is to guess Social Security numbers -- for people of certain ages -- with just things like a birthplace (often same as home town) and approximate birth date, which can often be extrapolated just from a friend list. ("He's friends with a bunch of people all from the same town, and they're all about the same age -- probably high school friends, therefore....")
Of course, the NSA probably can figure out your SS#, birthdate, birthplace, and similar information without going to any trouble. But the point is that you can often be significantly profiled on a social network even if you never post anything and only accept friend requests from people you know.
Re:Security through obscurity (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, the NSA probably can figure out your SS#, birthdate, birthplace, and similar information without going to any trouble. But the point is that you can often be significantly profiled on a social network even if you never post anything and only accept friend requests from people you know.
The NSA can have anything it wants. First of all, they are not in the habit of asking permission, and they simply don't tell anyone what they are doing. Second, there have been perfectly legal ways for the government to buy your data for as long as marketing data has been kept and sold. It's perfectly legal for a private corp to buy your purchase history (via a credit card), the data that Google has mined out of your "free" email service, your transactions with any vendor who has a low integrity threshold (who doesn't?) So what keeps the government from buying it also? Nothing at all. If I were doing it, I'd set up a front corporation (like "Air America" of CIA fame) to buy the data so I don't get screaming headlines.
The reason for all the hyperventilation is that three things have happened: agencies who lack the subtlety of NSA have gotten into the market, and they've done it directly—that is, they've outright seized the data instead of using the kinder gentler approach of greasing corporate palms. Third, the amount of data they have sucked has gotten so huge that it is impossible to manage without an army of low-level clerks. This is why an Army private and a contracted data massager can give the whole show away. With this many people involved, you are going to have leaks. I am surprised that there have been only two.
I wonder. In order to fully capitalize on the amount of data they are collecting on us, will it be necessary for all of us to be employed by the US government as DB admins? Welcome to the new Greece.
Re:Security through obscurity (Score:5, Insightful)
3. Don't engage in terrorism, they really hate that.
Problem is that if they dislike you for some reason they tend to define whatever you do as terrorism. Even if you just happen to get blown up by a random drone strike while attending your friend's wedding you become a terrorist.
Game the system ... (Score:5, Funny)
Just game the system. I've started typing random shit in gmail before I do anything ... let 'em see lots of false positives.
You know, I'm glad nobody KILLED OBAMA. Durka durka, mohammed jihad. Monsanto sucks. Bush was a simpleton. Death to American cheese.
Gotta go, someone's at the door ...
Re:Game the system ... (Score:5, Funny)
Client side encryption, and cascade ciphers (Score:3)
That has some UI implications (i.e. gmail can't search the bodies of your encrypted emails). But still seems like a better idea to have your email on your client anyway; so why not have the search index there as well.
Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
As with all things, assume that your communications are going to be monitored, whether electronic or not. I know, I know, it's not the answer you want; but the truth is...we put innocent people to death. If we are willing to do that, and not tear down our societies in an act of grief over the loss of a single innocent life, looking deeply within and without as to how or why we allowed this to happen, and how we can prevent it from ever happening again, then caring about protecting your privacy from the monsters waiting outside your door is the wrong approach. You're fighting Evil himself, and he aims to win by any means; if putting a gun to the head of one your children's heads to get you to decrypt your hard drive is what it takes, then he will do it, no hesitation.
Easy (Score:5, Funny)
Live in a cabin in the mountains that is over 100 miles from the nearest cell phone tower. Also ensure that you have top cover so satellite surveillance cannot see your house. Add enough insulating material (dirt would be easiest) above your cabin so that there is little/no thermal footprint. And never leave your new found cabin, since cars and feet all leave tracks.
Re:Easy (Score:5, Funny)
Live in a cabin in the mountains that is over 100 miles from the nearest cell phone tower. Also ensure that you have top cover so satellite surveillance cannot see your house. Add enough insulating material (dirt would be easiest) above your cabin so that there is little/no thermal footprint. And never leave your new found cabin, since cars and feet all leave tracks.
I cover my footprints with aluminum foil, so the satellites and drones can't spot them.
One name (Score:3)
PGP. It's good enough for WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden and good enough for me
Solutions = encryption + decentralization (Score:4, Informative)
The solution is encrypt everything (OpenPGP for emails, etc.), plus decentralization. If everyone either hosted their own email, or used a minor hosting company, then it would be much more difficult for the NSA to round up all those emails. Then, if even half the population used OpenPGP for emails, we could hide in the mass, and the NSA etc. will have no hope of reading all those emails.
As soon as you have just a few spots (e.g. FarceBook, Google-, Murdoch'sSpace) that host the significant majority of a certain type of communication, then you have a huge weak spot. Solution is decentralization and federation.
Use tools like Diaspora, StatusNet, Jabber, SIP, and email. Don't use tools like Skype, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Facebook, etc.
See also: http://autonomo.us/ [autonomo.us] and particularly Reducing vulnerability to massive spying with free network services? [autonomo.us]
Why the hell are people accepting this? (Score:5, Insightful)
People, the government is supposed to work for you, not the other way around.
Re:Why the hell are people accepting this? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the kind of crap that was held up as examples of why communist countries were so much worse than the US.
People, the government is supposed to work for you, not the other way around.
How many times in the last 12 years have you heard "the President's job is to keep us safe"?
How many times in the last 12 years have you heard "the President's job is to keep us free"?
Most people vote for low taxes, baseball stadiums, security theater, and enforcing their values on everyone else. Freedom and privacy get trumped by too many of those things.
Re:Why the hell are people accepting this? (Score:5, Informative)
According to wikipedia, in 2001 in the US 42,196 people died in traffic accidents.
According to Wikipedia in 2001 (A crappy graph) approximately 8000 people were killed with handguns in the US.
Someone tell me why the threat of terrorism gets so much attention.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why the hell are people accepting this? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are. Why else are they recording everything you do?
Remember, Snowden has committed "treason." Treason means he gave aid and comfort to an enemy of The United States. The jihadists already knew they were being watched. Only the American people didn't. What enemy, exactly, did he give aid and comfort to?
Fighting the impossible fight. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with heavily encrypted solutions is that they rely on human perfection. There was a story a few months back about Sabu. He eluded the FBI for months until, in a hotel room, he made the mistake of logging into IRC without using Tor first.
That was all it took. One non-Tor login, and the FBI had him.
Human beings are not designed for constant watchfulness. We make mistakes. We screw up. Even if *you* stay perfect, the person or persons you're communicating with may not, and if the FBI or NSA wants the details of what you're talking about, they can "break" the encryption at either end of the conversation. Maybe they can't find you -- but if they find the people you're talking to, they can still grab the info.
I'm not saying that all security is useless, or that there's no benefit to raising the bar. My point is that the solution to this is to *stop spying.* Because, in the long run, almost everyone screws up.
Re:Fighting the impossible fight. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. We weren't secure in our homes because we had unbreakdownable doors, and we weren't secure in our papers because papercuts were too ouchy. We were secure(ish) because the constitution forbade the government from spying on us, and those who did so would be...I don't know, embarrassed?
Now that's not the case. It's not secret spying anymore. It's routine, obvious, and "perfectly legal!"
And worse, the storing. The perpetual storage. Never forgetting, always searchable. What you say today innocently will hang you tomorrow (and justly and legally at that!).
CNN is making jokes by writing about the "Obama reads your email" meme. I wish Obama just read my email. It's boring. But it's not Obama reading my email that kept me awake last night. It was the endless rows of computers, parsing, sifting, correlating, profiling, and storing, forever. And with every record they can "buy" from every corporation.
But at least they can't read my physical, printed papers without a warrant, eh? I feel so secure. Thanks, National Security Administration. You've done your job well, and a grateful nation salu^H^H^H^Hbows to you.
HTTPS is not safe either (Score:3, Insightful)
So, in an effort to hide from NSA you go all out HTTPS. However, to avoid getting those pesky "this site is dangerous!!!" messages browsers show you on self-signed certificates, you buy your keys from any of the larger certificate authorities. Safe? Sorry, no. Almost all those CAs work under American jurisdiction, or on delegation from American CAs. Assuming NSA doesn't get the keys in other ways, all they have to do to get them is to ask the CA and the company would have to hand them over.
With those private keys available they can listen in on the HTTPS conversations in real time, and there is no way for the participants of the conversation to know this.
Amusingly enough, the safest bid (well, to hide from NSA at least) would be to use self-signed keys despite all the browser warnings.
If you still want to get valid keys, here is an interesting discussion [riseup.net] on which CA to choose.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You don't understand how PKI / X.509 works.
The CA signs the public key. The private key is not shared with the CA, the CA is not able to decrypt messages. The NSA, potentially having access to the CA's private keys, cannot simply decrypt your messages.
The NSA could very likely have their own "approved" signing key or copies of legitimate signing keys for which they could launch a man-in-the-middle attack and present their own privately generated version of a certificate and proxy requests to the original si
Twitter (Score:4, Funny)
...puts a crimp in the number of followers though.
Stop paying the NSA (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight. You've got a military that spends trillions of dollars. You've got eight national defence organizations screwing with your own citizens. And a) you think that you can dodge an organization that has spent that many dollars purely to find you, and b) you think that you don't have a cultural problem?
Where do you think all of those funds come from? For every tax dollar that you spend, how much goes to military, para-military, and anti-crime organizations? How much of it winds up in actual crime? Are you spending more on anti-crime than you would on crime in the first place?
Maybe you should solve the actual problem. Maybe you should start electing officials who spend your money on things that you like, instead of things that you dislike. I can't vote for you.
And correct me if I'm wrong -- you see, my country earned its independence by asking nicely -- doesn't your country believe in violently fighting your own government to break free of restrictions to your freedoms? Have you forgotten how to do that? Your right to fight would seem to be the only freedom for which you do fight, and then you don't use that right to protect your other freedoms.
One of these days, you'll wake up to realize that you've kept the right, but eliminated the opportunity. What good is the right to bear arms when you can't get away with using it?
Re:Stop paying the NSA (Score:5, Insightful)
My fear is now that it's out and the majority of people either don't care or outright support it, we have reset their expectation of what people will go along with and, thus, what they can get away with in secret.
This is Stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
None of those things will help you. To the NSA, the content of your email may be less important than with whom you are communicating. Yes, the care about the content of some emails, but their dragnet appears to be for network analysis -- sender, recipients, date, time, etc. The NSA almost certainly catalogs every DNS lookup you do. This is the stuff that is erroneously being referred to as metadata.
One possibly surprising way to keep your communications private is to read/post your communications to a very public forum. That way the intended recipient is difficult to determine. Keep the communication slightly covert -- a little steganography goes a long way if you can fly under the radar. Just don't trust others with your privacy.
Our rights are inalienable -- but only if we use them.
Turn off http. (Score:3)
We need a campaign to turn off http. Only https should be allowed, websites should be discouraged from allowing http access. Browser makers should help too, but having popups whenever someone goes to an http site.
Certificate-based encryption is not secure! (Score:3, Insightful)
Certificate-based encryption (like HTTPS) is only as secure as the certificates that sign sub-certs. If you accept certificates signed by a trusted CA, and that CA is compromised (i.e. controlled or accessible by the NSA, which all of them are), then you have no privacy, and all of your communications can be monitored without your knowledge or consent.
Here's a good writeup on how it works:
http://theorylunch.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/ca-mitm/ [wordpress.com]
Would take effort (Score:4, Informative)
You could...
Host your own mail server. Of course, you'd probably have to upgrade your internet service to a tier where incoming mail ports aren't blocked. You'd also need to have SSL/TLS support, ensure everyone whom you email hosts their mail on your server and that you can personally trust them. Not exactly practical.
Instead of Skype, use a decentralized chat system like RetroShare. Takes some doing to trade PGP keys with friends, but works.
Use an encrypted proxy for all of your surfing. Practical and quite easy.
Use encrypted SIP for VoIP communications. No idea how easy or difficult this is, haven't researched it.
Throw away your landline and cell phone. Goodbye 911 service.
The point is that the middlemen have proven themselves unworthy of our trust and we should seek to avoid them. The larger and more daunting point is that this breakdown of trust could ultimately lead to a society's collapse.
Lessee, all USA internet goes through root servers (Score:3)
These root servers root packets to their correct locations....
So duplicates of these packets can be routed to any other location...
And analyzed for interesting material and then either saved or dicarded...
So, no, there's not squat you can do. All internet traffic in the USA, regardless of form or format is theoretically possible to search, analyze and store. There may not be enough capacity to save all of it, but the interesting stuff, I'm sure, is compressed, catalogued and stored.
Can "interest" be evaded? Probably. Encrypting within .pngs and .jpgs might work. Simple agreed upon coding systems in plain text might evade detection. Zipped and encrypted files, I expect, would all be saved for later processing.
Would allusion packed Klingon poetry get through? Navajo? Elvish? Hard to say. You'd probably take up someone's time though. Keyword flooding might work to overload the filters, but it's hard to say how much capacity is involved. Flooding might not work.
Partial separated messages would also probably work if there were no obvious semantic or other identifiable similarity. Tricky as well.
This is just off the top of my head. There are undoubtedly more effective ways to use internet communication in an invisible way, which unfortunately leads me to the conclusion that this effort is going to be fairly effective at catching stupid people and lax people, but not people who are either sufficiently bright, or sufficiently paranoid.
It obviously also doesn't have a lot of predictive power, otherwise two pseudo-Islamic nutjobs in Boston would have been stopped before they bought their first pressure cooker.
Privacy protection methods. (Score:4, Informative)
I've been meaning for a while to write a guide for friends/family about this. I thing that first you really have to have an understanding of why this is happening, what the goals (hidden and obvious) are for those engaging in the spying, and determine where you stand on the subject before you can't make any sort of plan for implementing the level of privacy you desire. From there the entire discussion is about capabilities and methods. I will forgo the first points in the hope that the hacker mentality still thrives at least somewhat on /.
First, there was metadata,
Metadata combined with modern algorithms and big data can give it's owner just about everything on you. Here is what I consider metadata
(this assumes every point compromised except local, imagine NSL's etc)
IP - Your ISP will always know this. Circumvention includes tor, i2p, other anonymizing technologies. VPN does not secure your metadata. Wardriving. Rooted boxes.
MAC - Much less of an issue, can be spoofed easily. Usually not know outside of edge network devices or ISP.
Time - Heavily used but not well understood. Correlation of login times to compromised activity elsewhere holds up pretty good in court. The longer they've been watching you, the more dangerous to security this is.
Other machine identifiers (agent strings, cookies, DNS, etc) - mostly a software (and knowledge) issue. Have to be able to prevent DNS leakage, spoof agent strings, keep machine clean of cookies (including harder to find/remove cookie types like flash) If you are on windows... this is your most likely failure point.
Then, there was low hanging fruit.
Low hanging fruit: cloud services (webmail providers, social networking, cloud apps, cloud storage/computing, voip/txt chat protocols, etc) If you use these services you must expect them to be compromised and not private. You can choose to not use these services, or compartmentalize use of them (which is my preferred method). Data poisoning becomes more relevant here. Now, you can attempt to be anonymous while using them (say tails(tor) for facebook), but the data is still compromised. But if they can't tie my identity to X, why does it matter. Two reasons: one, because if you are using a service like that, all it takes is one slip up to tie everything to you, and two, because there are other ways beyond even time-data correlation to do so (writing analysis for example)
So, assuming you have figured out how to be relatively anonymous and encrypt your data (ssh, tcplay, dm-crypt, gpg) You self host as many services as possible, and directly connect to people/sites you "trust". You have in intelligence terms "gone dark" or "dropped off". I'm going to ignore the issue of DPI for the moment.
This is where the majority of people who care about privacy want to be. They want to be just enough of a hard target that it's not easy to grab up their info. This is what the 90's cryptowars were about. The ability to go dark.
The problem with this state is twofold: First, your data can still be retroactively inspected. So that AES-256 you think is nice and secure is finally cracked by the NSA (if it isn't already). Then they run it on gobbled up data from the past, and suddenly your encryption is worth jack. (save discussion of storage feasibility for another time, some of the math has already been done over on Schneiers blog)
Second, once you become a target for other reasons, they will resort to other methods. First with off-site but close compromise. Usually ISP. Then escalated to remote compromise (trojans, keyloggers, etc through 0-days or backdoors) If for some reason you are still safe at this point, commence black bag operation. While you are at work, they break into your house and plant a physical keylogger, audio bug, copy HDD, install trojan (MBR not encrypted? evil maid!) or any other number of growing possibilities. This boils down to your physical security. Think your ADT alarm system works? Think again (well, this depends on who you pissed off, normal
Re: Can't have it all. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want "it all". I just want our government to respect our rights and our Constitution. Is that too much to ask?
Re: Can't have it all. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Can't have it all. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that your right maybe someone else's breach of freedom. That's always the issue.
E.g. You eat peanuts, the guy beside you is allergic. He has to leave the event because he can't be within 20 metres of peanuts...
Collection of information can protect citizens from crooks but also impede on said individuals privacy. Which one is more important? Is there a balance?
Re: (Score:3)
I don't want "it all". I just want our government to respect our rights and our Constitution. Is that too much to ask?
That depends on which Constitution you are referring to. If it is the one written as a founding document of the United States, as written, with a long period of interpretation and decisions in the courts, then that isn't too much to ask for. If it is the same constitution, ignoring the long history and results of jurisprudence, but with a strong added dose of common misunderstanding and possibly fortified with fringe theories, then that probably is too much to ask for. The only thing you are likely to ge
Re: (Score:3)
let me give you a small tidbit as to how many US parties respect our rights and our constitution. It's a number slightly less than 1, and it's an integer. There are very, very few individuals in any party that do respect them, and the majority does not.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who worry are usually those who have something to hide or something criminal in the works.
You won't mind me wiretapping your phones, installing caneras in your home and adding keyloggers to your computers? You're not a criminal with anything to hide, right?
Re: (Score:3)
Okay. Tell me your name and where you live so I can get started.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:5, Interesting)
This kind of argument re: "the person watching will be bored/frustrated" may have worked circa 1948, but nowadays computers can do the work. When there's something useful then the computer signals it. No muss, no fuss. I'm always stunned by how many people refuse to get into the 21st century with their thinking on this issue.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's silly. Privacy is a constitutional right -- so important that it's part of the original Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments). To state that the desire to MAINTAIN your right to privacy means you have ill intent to "do wrong" (whatever the hell THAT means) is saying that nobody has any rights whatsoever -- since whatever is "granted" is as easily revocable and ostensibly temporary.
Furthermore, what constitutes "wrong"? Who's the judge? It's a moral characterization to actions of an inalienable right afforded by our founding fathers. Your statements simply don't make sense.
Re: Can't have it all. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, privacy isn't mentioned in the Bill of Rights at all. It has been inferred though not explicitly mentioned.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The parent should be modded up. It's factual, relevant, and worth remembering.
Re: Can't have it all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell me if this isn't a more exact definition of privacy than simply stating: "People have a right to privacy."
4th amendment - general warrants (Score:5, Informative)
The 4th's ban ban on general warrants (that's what it means when it mentions "warrants" in its historical context) strongly implies a privacy right. General warrants were authorization from the crown for its agents to search any person or premises they desired to, blanket authorization. The 4th amendment bans that. The government has to have specific cause, evidence already at hand related to a specific person or premise, to search at all.
That the government in general has no right to search means by very strong implication that you have the right to the privacy which results. What else is it but your privacy that the 4th amendment says the government can't intrude on? It's nonsense not to find a right to privacy as a necessary implication of our constitutional protection from general warrants.
Re: (Score:3)
We get it. I believe the reason that there is no right to privacy, the right to be left the hell alone, guaranteed in the Constitution including the original Bill of Rights is that no one of that time could have been reasonably expected to foresee that it would ever become an issue. The technical means for mass gross intrusion, and the present extreme degree of police state, could not possibly have been imagined at that time. One can criticise the oversight as a failure of imagination, but nobody is perfect
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:4, Insightful)
How would you interpret this:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What part of that do you feel authorizes the government to collect detailed information about our private lives? Or do you think email is not "papers" because it's stored electronically and that if our founding fathers meant for email to be included, they would have had the foresight to include electronic document storage?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:5, Insightful)
This presupposes that privacy is a right, rather than a privilege.
This is part of the reasons we have so many problems with government. At the time the US government was formed the premise was:
The people have all the rights; the government has no rights at all, except those granted by the people through the constitution.
For most people today the belief similar, except they swap people and government.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." Cardinal Richelieu.
See, when your government spies on everything you do, sooner or later someone will come along and decide that since they already have this information, they can use it for other things.
If you don't grasp this, I suggest you read more about Joseph McCarthy -- America is entirely capable of political persecution as any other government.
Bottom line, with your attitude, you deserve to be dragged off in the night, because you're part of the problem with the complacency and people not seeing what's really wrong here. That's kinda how I see it.
Since you're not part of the solution, you are the problem.
Twenty years ago, the US would make jokes about "papers please" and the Soviets. Now, that's just normal routine.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:4, Insightful)
And don't say it can't happen here. It just did.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why DHS was monitoring the anti-war protestors in Boston instead of looking for terrorists with bombs, right?
Because TERRORISM!
Face it, the jokers in power aren't Republican or Democrat. They're authoritarians.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or you're a tea party supporter trying to start a nonprofit.
Re: (Score:3)
Or a political advocacy group illegally trying to file as a non-profit.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:5, Insightful)
The old 'if you are innocent you have nothing to fear' argument. I thought that one went out of fashion when the German Jews realized that being innocent is no defense again tyrants.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:4, Informative)
Or anyone targeted by McCarthy's hearings.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:5, Informative)
Is not their problem if you feel that you don't have anything to hide. You could be committing 3 felonies a day [wsj.com] without being aware of it. Anything that you did in your past could be used against you, even if not a matter of national security, or against some friend to frame you if they think you did something wrong. And could be in your side to prove that you are innocent, something that could be costly if even possible.
And not forget that the **AA are in bed with them, the wrong you did could be having a background music in the video you took in a birthday party or that silly theme that you were singing with your friends when drunk.
Don't think just in the present, and your precarious today's safety, Things will change. And for worse.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:4, Insightful)
Security concerns are not about common people, or even criminals being tracked. It's aboud political opposition being tracked.
Snowden said he could listen in on conversations of anyone he wanted, including powerful people, and proceeded to do so as a test. No one came to get him for doing so without a warrant.
Among hundreds, maybe thousands of agents, it's trivial to insert an operative to listen to opposition.
He says he has data ready to release in case he's arrested. I hope it includes embarrasing conversations of said powerful people. Maybe then these jackasses will wake up.
All people want is a system design that tracks and records everything the government does, as it tracks and records everyhing we do, from Twitterers to opposition discussing political planning.
That currently does not exist.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are a couple of issues with this argument.
1. Retroactive violation of new laws:
Let's imagine that you're a smoker and that you smoke in your house. The government could pass a law saying "Smoking is not allowed inside any building. Anyone caught must pay a $500 fine." They can now either go back and look at their surveillance data and retroactively charge you for smoking in your house in the past or they can put you on a list of people to watch and then catch you smoking in your house.
2. If this is your stance that you have nothing to hide.... I presume that you don't have shades. Why don't you post your credit card statement on your front door for your neighbors to inspect "Hey, you've got nothing to hide". In fact let's make your browsing history completely public. How about your health records?
You may nothing to hide but I suspect you're also not eager to share your personal details with the world.
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can fully see how this can be used to stop terrorist attacks, but so far we have finger pointing from every corner that says our intelligence community has had prior knowledge of several potential attacks and neglected to follow through. It is far more likely this will be used against law abiding citizens. What if I am a law abiding citizen but I begin speaking out against the injustices the administration is committing in the name of fighting terror and they use my data to pin point and come after me. I've committed no crime other than I could be labeled a terrorist for speaking up for my rights.
The way I see it it's just another way the government can abuse or circumvent checks and balances that were put in place to protect our rights.
Do you honestly want your government to know every minute detail of your life?
Re:Can't have it all. (Score:4, Funny)
Everybody does something criminal. On the average of three felonies a day.
http://kottke.org/13/06/you-commit-three-felonies-a-day [kottke.org]
Want some bread with your water?
Re: Can't have it all. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a common fallacy spouted by those who foist surveillance on us. See here, [theartofprivacy.com] here, [ssrn.com] or any other of the many hits when you search for privacy "nothing to hide" [lmgtfy.com]
It goes right along with the "privacy and security are mutually exclusive" [securitymanagement.com] fallacy.
People like you that are trading your long-term liberty and privacy for a current sense of security are going to rue this day eventually. These essential freedoms need constant vigilance. Many of our forefathers died defending them. They're rolling in their graves now seeing how so many are nonchalantly pissing them away.
Here's your homework. Go read the Constitution of the United States of America. No, really. Read it line by line and understand why some say it's the most important and influential document created in the last 1000 years.
Dragging the usual dead horse out for a beating... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. You don't see it at all. Because illegal is not a synonym for wrong .
Over 2000 years ago, Sun Tzu pointed out that when the laws imposed by the rulers are aligned with the customs and ethics of the people, societies are prosperous and resistant to crime, war and rebellion. When the rulers lose the way, as the corporate overlords of the USA have, the people become unhappy and the society becomes progressively more fragile over time. Eventually a neighbor invades or a province revolts and the rulers are replaced, because nobody's willing to die to protect them anymore.
Re: Can't have it all. (Score:5, Funny)
Your an idiot.
/facepalm
Re: (Score:3)
And the next time the US chastises another government for this kind of thing, they'll get told to blow it out their rear.
As you say, Google, Microsoft, et al have established the precedent they'll be willing to do this ... so every other government is going to tell them they want the exact same level of monitoring, and will expect to get it.
Re:SneakerNet (Score:4, Insightful)
The USPS, however, still takes a picture of both sides of every envelope (and obviously time, date, location) and stores it.
Re: (Score:3)
In the 1970's banks had developed technology to read the magnetic MICR text on checks through an envelope to presort incoming mail. (MICR is that wierd font used for account and routing number at the bottom of a check)
Re: (Score:3)
I think that the regular postal mail is still protected from the NSA.
Yeah, for the moment, that we know of... Of course Lindsay Graham (R) is quite ok with doing just that linky [hotair.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Wait, you don't have a social media account, Comrade? Why are you being anti-social? Don't you like our society?
Re:SSL / TLS ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:seriously (Score:5, Informative)
Most people aren't concerned about the NSA looking at them right now. They're concerned about how this data may be used in the future should they suddenly find themselves with an administration which has a problem with their views on issue X and now has the means to identify all the people who have those particular views on issue X.