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Prism Break

prism-break.org

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Re: Prism Break

#141

Post by Joeboy »

vidarh wrote: post #136
Joeboy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass adoption is a bulwark against legislation, not a promoter of it. Eg. alcohol is legal because it's popular, not because it's safer than drugs which are illegal.

But even so, a large percentage of developed countries did prohibit alcohol for a few years, both despite and because of its popularity, and it took years of people being turned into criminals before those laws were rolled back. Popularity provides some protection, but it also creates a more desirable target for legislation amongst those who oppose it.

It seems to me that, for example, PGP is much more vulnerable to legislation than SSL, simply because of the latter's popularity. Not that I think either are currently particularly likely to be legislated.

Re: Prism Break

#142

Post by tptacek »

lifeguard wrote: post #73
tptacek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you can do as robust a job at securing your mail as Google does with Gmail, by all means. But I'd feel awfully dumb if I migrated from Gmail to some other web mail provider only to lose my mail to a 17 year old with a Perl script.

I know I can select a webmail provider that is not beholden to the United States of America's government. If you think Google is the only company that can secure webmail, I bet you are an employee.

If you really bet that, it says more about you than me.

But anyways: what does it matter if your webmail provider isn't beholden to the government, if a suitably motivated teenager can read your mail because of software vulnerabilities?

Google Mail isn't likely to be more secure just because Google is inherently better at building software than anyone else. Rather, it's because they allocate more resources to the problem of keeping Google Mail secure than any other mail provider does (or even can) allocate to their security.

Re: Prism Break

#143

Post by gurkendoktor »

h2s wrote: post #76

While I understand and sympathise with the compulsion to resist surveillance in this practical, technological way, I think it might be the wrong reaction to the information. It's typical of techie people to seek technical solutions to social problems, and this is one such case. It may well be possible to mitigate their ability to watch you by wearing enough tin-foil hats. Even if you succeed, all you've achieved is t…

For Europeans, writing letters to foreign politicians is obviously pointless. And given the ongoing TSA facepalmery, I don't think my tourism boycott has made a difference in the US either. What else can we do?

Re: Prism Break

#145

Post by grey-area »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #143
h2s wrote: post #76

While I understand and sympathise with the compulsion to resist surveillance in this practical, technological way, I think it might be the wrong reaction to the information. It's typical of techie people to seek technical solutions to social problems, and this is one such case. It may well be possible to mitigate their ability to watch you by wearing enough tin-foil hats. Even if you succeed, all you've achieved is t…

For Europeans, writing letters to foreign politicians is obviously pointless. And given the ongoing TSA facepalmery, I don't think my tourism boycott has made a difference in the US either. What else can we do?

Talk to your own government and local representatives and let them know you're not happy with their collaboration with the NSA. It's very unlikely they don't collect and share your information already, and very likely they're breaking local laws to do so. Agitate for laws to be passed banning this sort of surveillance and for the repeal of those authorising it.

There's lots we can do, it's just that some of it is hard, time-consuming and probably frustrating. I do know that this will be the first question on my lips when a politician next asks me for a vote.

Re: Prism Break

#146

Post by alan_cx »

Just a bit of site feed back:

Maybe its me, not completely unlikely, but when I open the left hand nav menu, with the button at the top left, the whole site shifts to the right to show the menu, but that cuts off the text in the last column. As well as that, no bottom scroll bar appears. Maximizing or resizing the browser window makes no difference. This is in Chrome, Iron(which you don't list and I reckon should), and firefox. Tried in IE, but the menu button at the top left doesn't work at all.

On the up side, the site name gave me a welcome chuckle!!!

Re: Prism Break

#147

Post by sanukcm »

h2s wrote: post #76

While I understand and sympathise with the compulsion to resist surveillance in this practical, technological way, I think it might be the wrong reaction to the information. It's typical of techie people to seek technical solutions to social problems, and this is one such case. It may well be possible to mitigate their ability to watch you by wearing enough tin-foil hats. Even if you succeed, all you've achieved is t…

> Is the idea that our democracies could eventually fix this situation really beyond all hope?

Of course not. We should vote these creeps out of office and elect someone that really stands for privacy and civil liberties - like this promising young man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6fnfVJzZT4

Re: Prism Break

#148

Post by shiven »

lifeguard wrote: post #73
tptacek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you can do as robust a job at securing your mail as Google does with Gmail, by all means. But I'd feel awfully dumb if I migrated from Gmail to some other web mail provider only to lose my mail to a 17 year old with a Perl script.

I know I can select a webmail provider that is not beholden to the United States of America's government. If you think Google is the only company that can secure webmail, I bet you are an employee.

I know I can select a webmail provider that is not beholden to the United States of America's government.

Please do tell which one? And why you are sure they are not beholden to a government?

Re: Prism Break

#150

Post by qznc »

jayfuerstenberg wrote: post #99
chrischen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but how much is a claim worth? Anything centralized is at risk to be tracked by the government. It's not as if Google put in the TOS that the NSA is monitoring their data.

I wonder if there is a decentralized P2P crawler system that shares IP addresses of at least major domains/hosts. With that you could run a node and search locally against your machine without anybody knowing.

Yacy is mentioned in the article.

http://yacy.net/de/index.html

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