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Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

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Re: Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

#11

Post by jlgreco »

oceanstone wrote: post #8

Assuming this level of unconstitutional surveillance continues, what can we do? Here are some of my ideas: Send encrypted emails, to communicate long distances. Use the internet way less. Use cell phones only to arrange real life meetups. Hang out & talk to people in real life. Never have a meaningful discussion "over the air".

PGP/GPG adoption needs to go way up, but I am concerned by the rise of "non-owned" devices. I would put way less trust in running PGP/GPG from a client-side mail client on a smartphone with OTA updates, apparent carrier spyware, etc than I would in PGP/GPG running on OSX, for instance.

Maybe one way to partially mitigate these concerns is to push for only storing/using private keys on these devices on a TPM.

Re: Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

#12

Post by alan_cx »

oceanstone wrote: post #8

Assuming this level of unconstitutional surveillance continues, what can we do? Here are some of my ideas: Send encrypted emails, to communicate long distances. Use the internet way less. Use cell phones only to arrange real life meetups. Hang out & talk to people in real life. Never have a meaningful discussion "over the air".

In general, I am using the internet and electronic communications less and lees. Often I am now asking myself if what I am going to do is necessary or does it have to be electronic.

As well as altering my choice to use, I am adding more and more security options. Mainly silly small things like the add-on that chooses HTTPS, ad blockers, or using Iron in stead of chrome, and so on. So, where I have an easy or ultimately seamless choice, Im choosing to encrypt and block. Nothing major, I know I am not secure, but more of my traffic is encrypted. Lastly, while I have used Linux servers for years, Im now trying to make Linux work for me as a Windows replacement. Partly because of the awful Windows 8 which I will down grade to from Vista (!!!), but more so because of these security issues.

So, nothing big, but a general move. But one key thing is that is people are anything like me, what we will see is more and more internet traffic become encrypted. Not sure what that with do to spy paranoia. Probably makes us default guilty.

The other plan is to use NO defenses what so ever. Open one's self up, but never ever do anything other then the tedious benign on the internet. Show the world how open and nonthreatening you are. Keep all the evil stuff like joint smoking, porn watching, political opinion, medical questions, employment details, etc off the electronic spy.

Re: Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

#14

Post by lawnchair_larry »

oceanstone wrote: post #8

Assuming this level of unconstitutional surveillance continues, what can we do? Here are some of my ideas: Send encrypted emails, to communicate long distances. Use the internet way less. Use cell phones only to arrange real life meetups. Hang out & talk to people in real life. Never have a meaningful discussion "over the air".

In general, plaintext protocols of any form should be met with the same derision as something like telnet would today. Encrypt all the things. We need the very idea of sending something like plain ASCII beyond your computer to be offensive at its core.

Considering passwords are often stored in plaintext and companies think this is no big deal, I'm not sure how well that will work.

Without proper trust models in place, this won't solve all the problems, but I feel like that's what the culture of communication on the Internet has to look like. It has to be done by the engineers at the protocol level, and application developers have to adopt it. Servers and other peer-to-peer clients should refuse to speak plaintext.

Focusing on things like getting people to use PGP, OTR, etc, is hopeless and will only work with other privacy geeks.

Re: Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

#15

Post by [deleted] »

griffordson wrote: post #3

A choice quote: Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said. “It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the…

[deleted]

Re: Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

#16

Post by mark-r »

oceanstone wrote: post #8

Assuming this level of unconstitutional surveillance continues, what can we do? Here are some of my ideas: Send encrypted emails, to communicate long distances. Use the internet way less. Use cell phones only to arrange real life meetups. Hang out & talk to people in real life. Never have a meaningful discussion "over the air".

Since much of the information is used to find out who you hang out with, your strategy doesn't help as much as you think. Guilt by association, you know.

Re: Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

#17

Post by walshemj »

hiddenfeatures wrote: post #6

In my experience over the last few weeks, younger Germans (my age, 30 years & younger) are blissfully ignorant ("I don't have anything to hide" - sounds familiar ?) to the impact of the government spying on its citizen. 24 years are a long time & that part of history is not as well-ingrained in the collective memory as the Holocaust. :-(

Its always struck me as odd that Germans seem to be so hot on privacy but seem fine with having mandatory ID cards and with the police being able to demand you show it.

Re: Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

#18

Post by ihsw »

It's interesting that the only defense the USG can muster in this debacle is their insistence that there are policies in place to prevent abuse.

Policies change when governments change, so every time there are US senate elections[1] or US presidential elections[2] then it'll be a chance that we irrevocably move further down the dark road of totalitarianism.

If there's anything to do to remedy this situation, it's talk to your congressional representative. Gerrymandering may have made that a pointless task, but it's just the first step towards freedom.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...

Re: Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

#19

Post by alan_cx »

ferdo wrote: post #9
ewrwerwerw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father, a man of 75 years old in the last couple of months had been mentioning that all our calls were being recorded. I dismissed him as just paranoid. After all, I'm the software developer, I'm the techie in our house. I know best, I would tell myself. Now I feel quite stupid. How could I have been so naive in believing that our government would never do this. This is the land of the free after all right? I've l…

> I dismissed him as just paranoid. ALWAYS listen to the crazy old guy, especially if he's been correct about past events. You don't have to believe him, but at least listen to him. regards, A Crazy Old Guy

Most of all, because one day, if we are lucky, we will be that crazy old guy.

Re: Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

#20

Post by feral »

The EU, which Germany is a major part of, passed the Data Retention Directive [0] in 2006.

That directive required every state in the EU to pass laws that all their citizens telecommunications metadata would be stored for at least 6 months, and often more, up to 2 years.

As I understand it, this means all 'metadata' is required to be stored, including the source and destination for every phonecall and text message, including cell location for cellphones, and information mapping IPs to users for web+email (and perhaps also the source and destination of every e-mail; but I'm not certain about that?). I believe that the data is stored by service providers, and only passed to law enforcement in the context of a particular investigation in theory (in the Irish implementation, a court order is not required to access an individual's records; a request from a high ranking law enforcement officer or tax official is enough). But its all collected and stored.

Maybe that's a sufficiently big difference that warrants the EU retention laws not being mentioned in this article? But it seems to me that they should still be part of this narrative.

There have been challenges to the EU directive, and countries dragging their heels about implementing it. But, by and large, it is an established part of EU law.

I don't know a lot about this area, but I feel that an understanding of existing European data retention laws seems to be missing from the coverage of the European reaction to the US data collection issues.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

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