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So you'd describe what the folks at Bletchley Park did 70 years ago as terrorism?
They were not spying on people as far as I know.
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"While they may have unlimited financial resources, I would pit unlimited technical resources and creativity against that any day of the week." They are the ones with unlimited technical resources. You don't have armed drones nor biological nor nuclear weapons. You are an hostage like everyone else. You might as well accept that fact for now and just enjoy life.
I have to respectfully disagree. They have unlimited financial resources, which translates into unlimited storage capacity etc. But NOT (IMO) unlimited technical resources in the sense of brainpower and creativity. When I say technical resources I'm referring to the ability to create new tools. For example, I know for a fact that a large number of intelligence tools are written on top of open source projects. That ba…
I'm all for OSS. I believe this is going to cause a lot more people to take it and security seriously.
"Here is David Miranda explaining to BBC what it's like to be forced to turn over your passwords to security agents who have detained you under a terrorism law, so they can troll through your emails and Facebook account and Skype program while you are detained. Just watch that short video and judge for yourself." As I read this I tried to imagine how to reset my digital life, now that all my passwords are exposed. Yo…
Forced, how? Threat of detention beyond the 9 hour window?
If so, it's easy to speculate I would call their bluff and refuse. But in the situation, probably not so easy.
What about using a hidden volume in TrueCrypt for plausible deniability? [1]
I suppose that would work effectively for documents. There's no plausible deniability for stuff like Facebook and Gmail. They can easily see if you gave them access to the real/full thing, or not.
However given the revelations David Miranda of all people would have to assume his Gmail, FB, et al have _already_ been compromised.[2] So the only interesting, still-private stuff would be any documents.
[1]: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/plausible-deniability
[2]: Not that this makes it right to demand the passwords at LHR.
Government is us, when stomach tries to fight with brain over trivial details like food you or giving, amount, quality and so on. One day brain will kill stomach with all the control mechanisms, it dies too. "For the benefit of all". We already live in virtual reality where most of the things we do is just to numb our perception. Nothing to do with advancements in energy, space travel, consciousness. Going where no m…
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I don't really see a solution, and I'm assuming that nobody else does really. Citizens and foreigners (like me) have equally little power over what their governments do, just a mild decision between two parties come election time. The general population seems to be apathetic about it all, I don't think I know a single person who has any opinion other than the tired "nothing to hide" line.
Sounds like we need a campaign against the "Nothing to hide" line. You could probably point out to them that there are so many laws now, they probably broke 10 of them before they left for work in the morning.
In addition to simply exposing these events, it also associates their own rhetoric with abuses.
Fighting terror with terror. How can it be that no one in the UK government agencies responsible for this can see the irony? How can it be that they don't understand their actions are degrading society just as much as those of the terrorists?
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Spying on people is terrorism and should stop ASAP.
So you'd describe what the folks at Bletchley Park did 70 years ago as terrorism?
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Seriously - my take is that it is on PowerPoint . I mean just having "Super secret spy details" on Powerpoint means its not being handled by "our top people". George Smiley is not carefully placing a glass board under his cipher paper before taking a micro-copy. This is spying on everyone, passed around like candy at the middle-managers meeting Its the sheer mundane, ordinariness that has driven it home for me - they…
> just having "Super secret spy details" on Powerpoint means its not being handled by "our top people" So if it was being handled by the top people, they would have outsourced the documentation to a graphic design company, to generate a super-professional looking PDF? (Seriously, how do you expect the high level management to communicate with each other?)
Which begs the question: what additional programs do the best of the best at the NSA know about?
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> would any of you have believed Yes, honestly. For more than 20 years, the basic message of the cipherpunks and related communities has been that the NSA spends tens of billions of dollars to spy on everything "foreign" that it can possibly get its hands on, and its foreign adversaries are doing the same, so you'd better use PGP (or more) if you want any chance of keeping your communications secret from the governme…
The M-x spook feature of emacs is not a new thing! I was just looking at the code for that, 5 minutes before I read your comment. It was written in May 1987. A comment near the top says "Help defeat the NSA trunk trawler!". It's interesting how our preceptions of this kind of counter-surveillance tool (primitive as it is) has changed from "OK, man, that's just crazy talk" to "Huh, I guess it really is happening!".