241–250 of 474 posts
Some FBI agents came to my house once and told me that my home Internet had been used to visit Islamic Extremist websites. They brought a local police office with them and a 'threat assessment' coordinator from my workplace. They asked me if my family was Muslim and wanted to know if we had been radicalized. We are not religious (at all). We do not attend church, synagogue or mosque. We are lower middle class white A…
It says Telegram has no message content. Isn't telegram not E2EE by default, instead required explicit steps to make a conversation encrypted? Either way looks like Signal wins by a lot. The size of it spot is so small, it seems almost squeezed in. But only because they have nothing to share.
Telegram is encrypted OVER THE WIRE and AT REST by default with strong encryption no matter what you do. It's E2EE if you select private chat with someone. Lots of FUD out there there about Telegram not being encrypted that's just not true. There's nothing either side can to do send a message in clear text / unencrypted.
What this means is that any conversations where you do select E2EE are the ones the "authorities" will take interest in, even if only to the extent of metadata.
That's the fundamental problem with E2EE-by-exception, rather than by default. It calls attention to specific data, even if its not cleartext, rather than obscuring everything.
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> if you have something to hide Most people don't realize that most people have something to hide. The USA has so many laws on its books. Many of which are outright bizarre[0] and some of which normal people might normally break[1]. And that's only counting current/past laws. It wasn't that long ago a US President was suggesting all Muslims should be forced to carry special IDs[2]. If you have a documented history be…
Did you even read the snopes article you referenced before making what seems like a definitive claim about how Trump was suggesting muslims carry special IDs? Because Snope's own rating is "Mixture" of truth and false and if you read the assessment, it is grasping at straws to even make that conclusion.
EDIT: Ultimately, the nuance in that history is not relevant to the point that criminal law changes to include new categories in unexpected ways.
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The people responsible for investigating and prosecuting such crimes have some not so great incentives to avoid doing so and keep the whole thing secret though, don't they? And then when they get caught, they do this: https://cdt.org/insights/the-truth-about-telecom-immunity/
Sounds like an easy way to have your case tossed out in court. It's funny how much this differs from my own personal experience with law enforcement. The friends I know are timid as hell and don't do anything without a warrant just to stay on the safe side- even if they probably don't need one.
This is terribly naive in my experience.
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The Stored Communications Act makes disclosing the contents of messages without a search warrant unlawful
EO12333 makes it lawful without a warrant.
An EO making it lawful for a federal agency to collect doesn't mean it is lawful for a private company to disclose, it doesn't change when a company is permitted to disclose the content of messages under the SCA
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"are the fact that current privacy movements like Tor, Signal, OTF, BBG are fundamentally military funded and survive on government contracts." Are those "facts" avaiable for investigating, without having to buy the book? (that Tor is partly US administration funded is known, but Signal? And what is OTF and BGG?)
https://www.opentech.fund/results/supported-projects/open-wh... Funded by Open Technology Fund (OTF) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund Which is funded by Radio Free Asia (RFA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia . It had a few reboots but was created as a CIA program in 1951 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia_(Committee_for... ) to blast shortwaves into China from Manilla to tr…
This seems like a good place to say that I strongly recommend Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley book ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-va... ) where he suggests that all of this is working as intended, going all the way back to the military counter-insurgency roots of the arpanet first in places like Vietnam, and then back home in anti-war and leftist movements. The contemporary themes that…
Yasha Levine is a conspiracy theorist hack. There’s really no other way to say it. His narrative is attractive to a left leaning audience with shallow knowledge in this area, but the reality is that without publicly funded software like Tor, Signal, OTF, and my own Lantern, our world would be more fully saturated with corporate control of the internet. We need more public funding for open source software (with public…
> Without them, we’d basically be left with Wikipedia as the only popular entity on the internet outside of corporate control.
Wikipedia is absolutely not "outside of corporate control". It is trivially astroturfed to advance special interests.
> All of these projects are more properly grouped with government funding in other spheres, such as the BBC or PBS in media
Both BBC and PBS routinely publish outright disinformation to advance the special interests of their corporate/government clients, including the intelligence community. For example, look at PBS Frontline's ridiculous puff piece for the violent extremist group HTS last year.
> Levine overlooks basic details, such as reproducible builds
Reproducible builds are also easily circumvented by selectively deploying backdoors and other malware, based on IP or other fingerprints.
If there are good reasons to dispute Levine's investigative journalism, they're not here.
This seems like a good place to say that I strongly recommend Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley book ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-va... ) where he suggests that all of this is working as intended, going all the way back to the military counter-insurgency roots of the arpanet first in places like Vietnam, and then back home in anti-war and leftist movements. The contemporary themes that…
Where is any evidence of Tor being a military surveillance project? I find it hard to believe an open source project like this has been infiltrated. Yes, there is suspicion some ECC curves are compromised, but only the ones provided by NIST. I'd really like to see evidence of Tor.
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Sounds like an easy way to have your case tossed out in court. It's funny how much this differs from my own personal experience with law enforcement. The friends I know are timid as hell and don't do anything without a warrant just to stay on the safe side- even if they probably don't need one.
Good luck with that. In my case there was a ton of violations of the SCA. Violations of the SCA are only actionable if they are "constitutional" in nature. (That essentially means that if the government indict you based on information they illegally gathered through violating the SCA but the information did not belong to you - say it belonged your wife or business partner - then you can't get the information suppress…
I was involved with a case that sounds similar - the judges don't care about your rights and blatantly missapply the law. Also, magistrates are also complete BS, and don't even know basic legal stuff. I had one think I called him prejudice when requesting a case be dismissed with prejudice... Complaints do nothing. There's no real oversight, leading to a completely incompetent system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
EO12333 makes it lawful without a warrant.
> EO12333 An EO making it lawful for a federal agency to collect doesn't mean it is lawful for a private company to disclose, it doesn't change when a company is permitted to disclose the content of messages under the SCA