Federal agents seek to loosen rules on hacking computers during investigations

This is what happens today. Not in some far off distant distopioan future meant to invoke fear in the ignorant/lazy.

Why not talk with me without the snark? This topic seems like it interests you a lot, so it seems like we have some shared ground.

one can clone the sc[1] and go through the source code for what could possibly define one as a Tails user, replace that with something else, build their own image and voila, you just avoided being in the dragnet.

This won't work because it's extremely difficult to analyze your network card and discover its behavior, and without this knowledge you'd be changing things blindly. There are far too many ways to detect an OS to change them all. Tweak-and-recompile would work if they use a naive and brittle heuristic like "look for the first 64 bytes of whatever is loaded into memory when Tails is booting up," but they wouldn't employ such a brittle heuristic in the first place because every time a new version of Tails is released, they'd need to update their entire infrastructure to look for a new pattern. Something like monitoring the network traffic for a unique "Tails signature" is more likely in this scenario; for example, how many computers start Tor immediately after a network card is connected? Detecting that condition would be a decent starting point for detecting Tails, and they'd want to combine it with some other hard-to-evade condition to cut down on false positives without introducing false negatives.

One interesting way to detect that someone is using Tails would be to notice that their system clock is set to UTC time. Most of the computers connected to the internet aren't using UTC, so UTC time plus Tor usage on startup is pretty commonly associated with anonymity OS's. That said, it seems like it might be difficult for the network card to detect whether the system clock is UTC time, but it's just an example of how difficult it is to fully conceal your usage of an anonymity tool. It's not just a matter of tweaking the source code.

This seems to prove the seriousness of this threat, though. Once you agree that it might be possible for your network card to be your adversary, there are endless ways that it can be used to defeat you. Hardware manufacturers have evidently been thinking along these lines, so why shouldn't we try to think of ways to prevent this from happening? As the BIOS exploits have shown, that dystopianic future may be closer than anyone's comfortable admitting.

EDIT: Someone went through and downvote bombed our whole converastion on both sides... I tried to correct it, but it looks like upvotes from Tor users under a certain karma threshold aren't registering, so I wasn't able to help fix it.

There were 25 arrests in the first operation and those suspects are currently fighting the search warrant because the FBI failed to give notice to the those who had the virtual search warrant executed on them within the required 30 days.

Nothing has really come of the second operation (after over 10 months now) except for an arrest of someone the FBI was able to identify without the help of their exploit (they used the same user name on Tor as they did on the clearnet).

[0]: http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/Fed-Tactics-on-Trial-in-P...

[1]: http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/is-the-u.s.-government-...

>One interesting way to detect that someone is using Tails would be to notice that their system clock is set to UTC time. Most of the computers connected to the internet aren't using UTC, so something like that is pretty commonly associated with Tails. That said, it seems like it might be difficult for the network card to detect whether the system clock is UTC time, but it's just an example of how difficult it is to fully conceal your usage of an anonymity tool. It's not just a matter of tweaking the source code.

It's not out of snark (I apologize for if it sounds like it, not intentionally seeking to offend anyone), but mainly out frustration about the conversation on how everything seems to be so difficult. Difficulty to whom? Someone who cannot modify sc to a significant extent? Someone who just downloads the program and expects it to just work? Not just some random tweak, I mean going through looking at what the functions actually do, which remote connections do they rely on to connect to at various stages, how data is generated and allocated in memory, what system calls are made, etc and change it according to ones threat model so that the program one complies has the same functionality but is not recognized as the same program. Maybe that involves changing the the system time. Again, trying to target someone doing such is trying to target someone actively adapting, probably faster than it takes for the dragnet to adapt since like I said, dragnets mainly hinge on effectively going after the common denominator that of which is usually of the mind set of someone who downloads/uses a program system and expects it to just work and address all of their concerns without doing anything themselves. In the end, anyone can try all they want to cut down on the false negatives and positives, but they will still exist and that's where the "real" danger comes from for groups/orgs/gov's that go to such extents.

>Once you agree that it might be possible for your network card to be your adversary, there are endless ways that it can be used to defeat you.

If this is really in one's threat model, one is probably throwing away or using shared computers before this point… maybe from within a virtual machine on a large banks network from an exploit one used (remote, or local).

>so why shouldn't we try to think of ways to prevent this from happening?

Few people do this today for themselves, most others do not. People today seem to have come to expect that someone else needs to protect them which must have fmr cyhperpuks laughing. As far as I'm concerned, we are already living in the dystopian future, and the few who take the steps to mitigate based on their threat model do. These issues have been around for a while, and those who cared all along took steps they felt were necessary to protect themselves and still do. Maybe that involves not taking advantage of the latest skinner box of the day, again tradeoffs and threat models to consider. And those now made aware have to learn a lot to put themselves in the same shoes, if they even care enough to learn what they need to start protecting themselves and to continue to adapt to do so. Again, its not like BIOS exploits suddenly became possible because snowden profiteers told us and because all of this I don't think it really is a serious threat (any more than it already was) because your adversaries are opening themselves up at the same time. This has always been an evolving landscape. Such is the world we live in and have always had.

Edit: No worries, as I've learned over time, down-voting isn't really effective for silencing ideas/discussion since it just attracts more interest to those who want to seek such information.