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AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

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Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#221

Post by sharednothing »

davidandgoliath wrote: post #110
rdtsc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew about it too and I am always baffled at the general population's indifference to it. I guess when you are in debt, about to lose your house, your job, your health insurance, you don't really give a crap if Uncle Sam looks through your emails ... ?

Understand that a lack of privacy isn't a problem until it's a problem, e.g. someone has something against you and needs something to wield against you. The government & large corps. will happily use propaganda against you, and it's easier for them to find dirt on you with little to no privacy. Think of it this way, the average person has something in their past they're probably not happy about that could be misused…

Bill Clinton. Complete and faithful servant of the international bankers. Why?

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#222

Post by sitmack »

binspace wrote: post #216
cyrus_ wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flip side of course being that libertarians generally oppose the kind of government regulation that could stop this heinous merger from further destroying an already non-classical market.

Government regulation will not stop this, it's top secret. Just give the NSA less money.

Sooo the government can't stop itself? And we are the government. So we cannot stop ourselves from spying on ourselves. It makes sense and it is a positive feedback cycle that will destroy this country. I blame not stopping WWII.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#223

Post by sitmack »

davidandgoliath wrote: post #108
pyre wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that the NSA isn't listening to those? It would seem more appropriate to make public-key encryption easier to use. There are already well-defined ways to use it with email, and there's OTR for IM that could be applied to multiple protocols. Granted, only the contents of the communications are hidden in these cases, but that's a big step forwards.

Everyone is listening to TOR, always ensure that encryption is in use. Always ensure encryption is in use anyways with anything important.

Every spy organization on the planet is running tor exit nodes.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#224

Post by reedlaw »

nroman wrote: post #202
reedlaw wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe his son, Rand (Senator-KY), will someday run. He may stand a better chance.

Not really. Any political consultant worth his salt could easily paint Rand Paul as a racist, given his comments on the Civil Rights Act. ( http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-now/2010/05/rand_paul... ) Just to be clear, I'm not saying I think Rand Paul is a racist. I'm just saying I don't think he has a chance in a national election.

It is clear from the context what Paul is saying and I don't think anyone who hears him speak for more than 2 minutes will believe he's a racist:

PAUL: Well, I think what you've done is you bring up something that really is not an issue, nothing I've ever spoken about or have any indication that I`m interested in any legislation concerning. So, what you bring up is sort of a red herring or something that you want to pit. It's a political ploy. I mean, it's brought up as an attack weapon from the other side, and that's the way it will be used.

But, you know, I think a lot of times these attacks fall back on themselves, and I don't think it will have any effect because the thing is, is that every fiber of my being doesn't believe in discrimination, doesn't believe that we should have that in our society. And to imply otherwise is just dishonest.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#225

Post by reedlaw »

kingkawn wrote: post #207
nroman wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Any political consultant worth his salt could easily paint Rand Paul as a racist, given his comments on the Civil Rights Act. ( http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-now/2010/05/rand_paul... ) Just to be clear, I'm not saying I think Rand Paul is a racist. I'm just saying I don't think he has a chance in a national election.

I suppose not caring at all about black people is not expressly racist, indifference and dislike are rather different, no?

Paul is neither indifferent nor racist. He is explicitly pro-civil rights and anti-racist.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#226

Post by sabat »

Semiapies wrote: post #167
sabat wrote: post #64

... but corporations are A-OK. It's the government that's the problem. Right?

Usual pattern: 1) Massive government abuse 2) "Look, over there, corporations! " It doesn't even matter that a company is involved. AT&T could go out of business tomorrow, and the government would lean on someone else to give them what they want.

It's actually the opposite: 1) massive corporate abuse, 2) "Look, over there, the GOVERNMENT!" (which received its direction from behemoth corporations).

AT&T will not go out of business tomorrow. "The government", as you know it, will go. At least it's made of elected officials. Peons don't elect or have any control over large corporations.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#227

Post by viraptor »

asciilifeform wrote: post #189
viraptor wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do you ever wonder why there is no consumer hardware PGP telephone? Not on the analogue phone. But you can easily get a TLS-enabled or ZRTP-enabled hardware or software VoIP phone. Many vpbx providers will also provide you with a vpn tunnel endpoint if you ask about it often enough. Also, since the analogue phone PSTN interface is pretty trivial to handle, there are multitude of analogue encryption boxes which work…

> Not on the analogue phone. And not on a consumer cell phone, either. > But you can easily get a TLS-enabled or ZRTP-enabled hardware or software VoIP phone. In theory, arbitrarily strong/usable encryption products can be marketed within the USA. In practice, from this list: A) Usable by non-experts (requires no software fiddling, hardware mix-and-match, or other wastes of time) B) Based on uncrackable/de-facto uncr…

Example of a system doing A+B+C -> Skype. You can claim that they have some way to clone the traffic for NSA use - maybe they do, but from the technical point of view - they satisfy the requirements. It also relies on Skype doing proper authentication / identity presentation.

Hardware-only plug & play box will never work here. You actually have to know something about the connection - information provided out of band. And I don't think most people would accept pressing ~150 digits on the pad as an easy solution.

Analog encryption does not end on scramblers and they don't have to be a joke. As mentioned before, put 2 modems together, apply gsm encoding and any digital encryption you want.

There's a lot of FUD here. If you come up with a proper system, black vans will take you away; NSA has gentelman's agreement; your product will disappear from the market; etc. etc. I don't think you can prove any of it and I can't disprove it either, so I'd rather stay with things we can be sure about.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#228

Post by asciilifeform »

viraptor wrote: post #227
asciilifeform wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not on the analogue phone. And not on a consumer cell phone, either. > But you can easily get a TLS-enabled or ZRTP-enabled hardware or software VoIP phone. In theory, arbitrarily strong/usable encryption products can be marketed within the USA. In practice, from this list: A) Usable by non-experts (requires no software fiddling, hardware mix-and-match, or other wastes of time) B) Based on uncrackable/de-facto uncr…

Example of a system doing A+B+C -> Skype. You can claim that they have some way to clone the traffic for NSA use - maybe they do, but from the technical point of view - they satisfy the requirements. It also relies on Skype doing proper authentication / identity presentation. Hardware-only plug & play box will never work here. You actually have to know something about the connection - information provided out of band…

> Skype

If it doesn't have backdoors now, it will soon. The remote-intercept capability mandate for land line phones is in the process of being extended to all commercial VOIP.

> Hardware-only plug & play box will never work here.

This looks like an example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Terminal_Equipment

Or, for that matter, this:

http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32640fd9-0213-4...

> I don't think you can prove any of it

Naturally.

But the absence of any easy-to-use/uncrackable/provably non-backdoored secure voice phone on the market is proof enough for me.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#229

Post by intended »

pyre wrote: post #206
intended wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is great and fine in a theoretical world. You guys just had your economy blow up. IT doesn't matter if its big or small. It matters if it works. Ignore size.

Ok, so you determine that it isn't working. Then you try to figure out how and why so that you can fix the problem and you find out that it's death by a thousand cuts. I'm not so delusional to think that there will be some magical shrinking of the government, but you seem to be telling me that it isn't a worthy goal, which I disagree with. You can have the goal of making the government work now while at the same time…

I have no issue with a smaller government. I just don't see how smaller or bigger government are worthy goals IN and OF themselves. It just needs to be working government.

The debate about big vs small govt. is one of many, pointless hand-wavy, ideas used to harm your debate.

Is it wrong to point out that something is being used to obfuscate discussion, polarize opinion, and detract from getting a solution?

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#230

Post by DennisP »

mikepurvis wrote: post #218
leot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If any of the major webmail providers, with millions of active users, offered "brain dead" PGP (i.e., PGP signatures by default, and automatic PGP encryption and decryption whenever possible), many of the others would follow suit and a lot could be done to counter this kind of program ... ... and, furthermore, it would take a huge bite out of spammers and phishers while allowing you to, e.g., talk to your doctor and…

For a while, I've liked the idea of a client-side PGP plugin for Gmail. Essentially, you have a greasemonkey (or bookmarklet, whatever) script which performs the encode on send and save draft, and the decode on receive. Of course, it kills Gmail's big feature, which is search. But for that, I figure you could take the wordlist from the email, hash each one individually, and then paste that at the bottom of the messag…

Encrypt each word with a secret key, rather than just hashing it.
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