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Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

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Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#151

Post by sievebrain »

stevetrewick wrote: post #150

> But at the same time, we technologists as a class knew academically that these capabilities could be abused, but nobody actually believed they would be abused. Because why would you do that? It seemed so antisocial as a basic concept. What's with 'we?' The various classes of technologists that I've been a member of - from the teen hax0r BBS days thru the crypto lists and Usenet groups to actual working professional…

I think he's right. His statement is carefully phrased. Yes, of course, all sorts of intelligent people have argued that the tools of mass surveillance could be developed and could be abused.

But only a very small number of people picked up on AT&T Room 101 and Echelon and so on, and saw their significance. Unfortunately those things were more like news stories than events that redefined people's thinking. Mass surveillance simply wasn't a part of the conversation for the vast majority of technologists who mattered, i.e. the ones building the products we all use.

The NSA leaks changed all that. Now you have the guys running WhatsApp and Apple talking about this stuff. And even though for politeness reasons they sometimes talk in hypotheticals, "if we don't encrypt it could be abused by bad governments", it's as clear as day that what they really mean is "because we don't encrypt it is being abused by our governments".

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#152

Post by sievebrain »

shabble wrote: post #143
ashitlerferad wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most cash is easily surveilled as it has serial numbers on it. Only coins are a safe form of cash but have a huge disadvantage of being exceptionally bulky.

That would assume a comprehensive system of serial number scanning at point-of-sale in order to track the movements and actually connect it with people/purchases. The technology is probably available, and it's entirely possible that ATMs could be recording serial numbers of dispensed cash and tying them to the account used, but it's (presently) deeply unrealistic that every possible (or even most) places that accept…

You're falling victim to the same trap as what Snowden is talking about.

Serial numbers on bills are routinely scanned and tracked. There's a discussion here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ou4h4/e...

It's not done at the point of sale. It's done when the money is returned to the banks themselves, and when they're dispensed at ATMs. Cash doesn't circulate for long and anti-money laundering laws prevent payment for many expensive items in cash, so this can provide important clues about where the money goes.

For instance, withdraw money from an ATM, pay for food at your local grocery shop, and the bank/govt can see "withdrawal from account Herr Schmidt at 7:03pm Thursday, deposited by a grocery store down the road the next day" and conclude the money was used to buy food ... or at least had at most one hop in between.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#153

Post by sievebrain »

marssaxman wrote: post #135
chongli wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For as long as technologically minded folks insist on technological solutions to political problems, we will be stuck in this quagmire. The answer is a political solution to a political problem. Admittedly, that's a hard one for some folks. It requires talking to people and building relationships. It takes a long time and change can be frustratingly slow to present itself. But that's how it is. Trust no one With this…

"Frustratingly slow" as in "not happening at all, and in fact getting steadily worse"? I'll take the gamble of a technological solution which might actually work over the certainty of a political solution which will happily consume more time and energy than I can afford to waste on it without showing any results whatsoever.

You need both.

Technology alone cannot solve political problems. The technology can be banned.

Technology can, however, raise the difficulty for sub-components of a government that are wanting to push the limits and do things outside the boundaries of the politically agreed upon systems. Encryption can't stop the NSA if it has widespread political support because the encryption can be banned. But right now intelligence agencies are absolutely hurting, because what they're doing is highly controversial and blocking them with encryption is not at illegal. If the political debate is won, even if it's just a partial win, then they're forced back inside their box for a long time to come.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#154

Post by stevetrewick »

sievebrain wrote: post #151
stevetrewick wrote: post #150

> But at the same time, we technologists as a class knew academically that these capabilities could be abused, but nobody actually believed they would be abused. Because why would you do that? It seemed so antisocial as a basic concept. What's with 'we?' The various classes of technologists that I've been a member of - from the teen hax0r BBS days thru the crypto lists and Usenet groups to actual working professional…

I think he's right. His statement is carefully phrased. Yes, of course, all sorts of intelligent people have argued that the tools of mass surveillance could be developed and could be abused. But only a very small number of people picked up on AT&T Room 101 and Echelon and so on, and saw their significance. Unfortunately those things were more like news stories than events that redefined people's thinking. Mass surve…

Not could. Had been and were, for which there was growing evidence culminating with the Snowden files. I don't disagree that they had a considerably larger impact than what went before. You're absolutely right in the sense that once the stories of GCHQ's black boxes, the EUP's documented disclosure of Echelon [0], room 101 and so on and so forth got outside the circle of people who were familiar with them they became FOAF stories and conspiracy theories and weren't part of any mainstream discourse, but there was a bit more to [it] than abstract hypotheticals and general 'power corrupts' cynicism.

[0] An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdf/jadis/2013_12/8.PE4_AP_PV!...

[edit]

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#155

Post by nickpsecurity »

mercurial wrote: post #134
nickpsecurity wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, he's full of it. We in high-assurance community and even the cypherpunks have been telling people forever it was being abused. Because people were abusing it and its design practically asked for it. These were ignored as externalities by people motivated by convenience, feature bloat, price, and/or profit. Even getting it down to almost identical cost/speed didn't help if it lacked unnecessary feature X. This w…

> Yeah, he's full of it. We in high-assurance community and even the cypherpunks have been telling people forever it was being abused. Because people were abusing it and its design practically asked for it. These were ignored as externalities by people motivated by convenience, feature bloat, price, and/or profit. Even getting it down to almost identical cost/speed didn't help if it lacked unnecessary feature X. So,…

It was a theoretical risk pre-Snowden that PC and neteork security was horrible? No, it was in thd news every day with recommendations from industry and government on how to counter a lot of it. Further, academia was teaching the INFOSEC people about high assurance methods from the old days.

Such things were mostly ignored despite being in media, conferences, government certifications... yoh name it. Interestinv enough, Snowden had seeminglh no impact on number of high assurance dsvelopments out there. So, even as bad as it is, people aren't doing the things that stop even NSA during evaluations and which they themselves use for most critical stuff.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#156

Post by chillingeffect »

0xCMP wrote: post #71
deepnet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foresight has been essential in this. Without Stallman's foresight of the need for public domain open source software, there would only be proprietary software, all subject to PRISM. Without the foresight of potential Government's to come the US founding fathers would not have written in such protections as still exist today. Before Snowden there were many that suspected but now everyone knows. >Um. Who thought this?…

I kid you not. Stallman looked crazy in my eyes before Snowden. Even my "paranoid" perspective on all these things pre-snowden where never close to true Stallman "crazy" (or so I thought before..) Now I want to use Emacs. I want to use everything FSF if possible. I'm no where close. There is a lot for me to do to get there. But I'm hoping I will because soon that may be our only hope. > NSA's James Clapper lied to Ro…

Perfect timing: New LTS of Ubuntu this month! Jump in!

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#157

Post by intopieces »

randommodnar wrote: post #146
roywiggins wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages do exist with gender-neutral pronouns. Is Hungarian full of "sjw" crap? Adding a gender neutral pronoun to English isn't a crazy idea- "sibling" is a gender-neutral 20th Century invention and it fits in fine. I'm partial to "they" as the easiest option (it has a long history of being used in the singular) but constructed pronouns would work too.

It's not crazy. English speakers tend to use "they" when they need a gender-neutral option. This just sounds like some edgy teenager... ooh look at me, I'm using some invented new pronouns because of the injustices I've never actually faced myself.

Why does someone have to face injustice themself to do something about it? White people faught for abolition and in the civil rights movement, straight people are the reason we have gay marriage...

Or is it just that you fundamentally disagree with the "need" for gender neutral pronouns and this is your way of ridiculing it? I'm afraid I don't follow your logic at all.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#158

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #93
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like we know how to solve this. Put a CAPTCHA on account creation, then allow users to flag posts and auto-ban fresh accounts with high flag rates. I'm honestly kind of surprised that there isn't more spam from attackers who compromise something close enough to a backbone provider that they can spoof arbitrary IP addresses and still see the return traffic.

Those are possibilities. As is Disqus-style moderation. Nonetheless, it's a lot of extra work with nothing to show for it and possibly dangerous to site experience. That's the problem Tor poses.

The problem isn't unique to Tor. It's anything that allows a spammer to use the same IP address as innocent people, including things that aren't exactly legal, like compromised PCs and routers. Which means blocking Tor blocks the people who follow the law but not the people who break the law.

And the problem is going to get worse as a result of IPv4 address exhaustion because some ISPs are going to have to start using carrier grade NAT (and some already are). The answer to that is IPv6 as ever, but that has the opposite problem. IPv6 addresses are too cheap to meter and using a thing for proof of stake requires the thing to be scarce.

So the thing to show for it is that you can field test your solution prior to the day of Spam Armageddon when a spammer realizes they have a botnet with access to a million billion IPv6 addresses.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#159

Post by marssaxman »

sievebrain wrote: post #153
marssaxman wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Frustratingly slow" as in "not happening at all, and in fact getting steadily worse"? I'll take the gamble of a technological solution which might actually work over the certainty of a political solution which will happily consume more time and energy than I can afford to waste on it without showing any results whatsoever.

You need both. Technology alone cannot solve political problems. The technology can be banned. Technology can, however, raise the difficulty for sub-components of a government that are wanting to push the limits and do things outside the boundaries of the politically agreed upon systems. Encryption can't stop the NSA if it has widespread political support because the encryption can be banned. But right now intelligen…

Governments can ban anything they like but the ban doesn't mean much if they cannot feasibly enforce it. Such is the lesson of the War on Drugs: the government comes in and makes trouble for people from time to time, but otherwise they simply haven't got a clue, and for the most part people just live their lives as they please and ignore the laws they don't agree with.

I'm glad there are people fighting the political fights too, though I can't imagine where they get the patience. I certainly have nothing to offer in that arena.

I take your point about the NSA, but it doesn't appear that political action will stop them either, because they are happy to ignore political constraints (and lie to Congress about it, for example) and simply do whatever their technological capabilities allow them to.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken

#160

Post by mercurial »

tmptmp wrote: post #142
mercurial wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess, the Snowden incidence is being used to hurl undue venom towards USA. But these people are ignoring or deliberately misleading other people to ignore the real dangers posed by extremists (including Islamists, communists, the far right Christians and so on). Yeah, well, I don't think Cuban or North Korean spies are really at the forefront of anyone's concerns (apart from South Korea and Japan). > Thus terror…

>>You want a Donald Trump nominating one of his cronies at the head of the US intelligence services and starting to dig into untold amounts of already-recorded communications? Still a Donald Trump in USA is far better and very less dangerous as compared to the tyrants like Mao or Stalin or Castro, because USA has many good checks and balances in place. I do appreciate people's fears about state becoming tyrannical bu…

> Still a Donald Trump in USA is far better and very less dangerous as compared to the tyrants like Mao or Stalin or Castro, because USA has many good checks and balances in place.

How do you think Hoover stayed in place that long? You can pull a great many things without needing to disappear people at four in the morning.

> The important point to note here is that the intellectuals (Snowden and his supporters) who are targeting USA both at national and international level were silent about the extremely intrusive surveillance and other atrocities inflicted by the tyrants like Putin (at whose place Snowden may be currently enjoying his reward) and are still silent.

Snowden was not a public figure before. And you really think a life of exile in Russia is some kind of reward?

That said, I think Snowden is against global surveillance in general, but:

a) I can totally understand that you want to tread carefully in this kind of situation. You don't think he has already given up enough? What would you do in his situation?

b) While Putin is certainly more willing to suppress political opponents, I doubt the Russian surveillance network is even remotely in the same league as the NSA

c) Snowden is no doubt a lot more qualified to speak about Western surveillance than he is about Russian or Chinese efforts

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