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Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

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Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#111

Post by atmosx »

notastartup wrote: post #39

So let me get this logic: NSA contractor reveals mass surveillance on population Independent journalists reporting on the topic has their home broken into Independent article reports on NSA modifying laptops bound for "terrorists" Tor developer notices laptop shipping traversing through the opposite direction Tor developer is concerned and suspicious The same people who didn't care about having their freedom to priva…

And famous security analysts are ALWAYS on that side of crowd, isn't that weird?????

Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#112

Post by atmosx »

aragot wrote: post #91

Nonsense. Every single piece on those laptops already leaks more than a teabag, every protocol does more information broadcasting than the BBC, why would they have it shipped to the headquarters? NSA's job is to bug computers before they even enter Amazon.

The reason we're discussing this, is because of the laptop's/keyboard's owner: A TOR developer. If this was uncle Joe no one would even care, because probably his Facebook data is all that matters anyway.

Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#113

Post by linuxhansl »

Whether this actually happened or not is not the point.

The point is that there is now speculation (and in fact a, albeit remote, possibility) that this could have been the reason.

The loss of trust in the Government is what makes this a story.

Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#114

Post by mikeash »

polymathist wrote: post #100
TacticalCoder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some OS developers are sufficiently concerned that CPUs are NSA-modified to not trust, say, Intel's rdrand instruction anymore! It may very well be that every single Linux system running on a recent or semi-recent CPU has a rdrand instruction returning a number "nullyfying" (from the NSA's point of view) the previous entropy sources XOR'ing. You may call me "paranoid" but... Many people who were categorized as parano…

Can we get a source for that SNAFU claim? If true I would be very interested to read more about it.

Wikipedia actually has a pretty lengthy article about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsakey

Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#115

Post by [deleted] »

polymathist wrote: post #100
TacticalCoder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some OS developers are sufficiently concerned that CPUs are NSA-modified to not trust, say, Intel's rdrand instruction anymore! It may very well be that every single Linux system running on a recent or semi-recent CPU has a rdrand instruction returning a number "nullyfying" (from the NSA's point of view) the previous entropy sources XOR'ing. You may call me "paranoid" but... Many people who were categorized as parano…

Can we get a source for that SNAFU claim? If true I would be very interested to read more about it.

[deleted]

Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#116

Post by SamReidHughes »

rwg wrote: post #89
icambron wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I like this game. Let's play again: WHICH IS MORE LIKELY?! * The world's largest online retailer that does $54M in sales per day has a bug in its procurement system that randomly transposes tracking codes. ORRRRRRRR! * The intelligence agency whose massive scope and pervasive operational shortcomings were recently exposed by one low-level operative had a slip-up in applying a well-publicized tactic to an obviousl…

The intelligence agency whose massive scope and pervasive operational shortcomings were recently exposed by one low-level operative had a slip-up in applying a well-publicized tactic to an obviously high value target. A few comments: • This "low-level operative" was a system administrator who used social engineering to obtain other people's authentication credentials and gain access to material to which he wasn't aut…

> Internally, the keyboard and TrackPoint speak PS/2. While they could log keystrokes to an on-board chip and transmit keystrokes via radio, there aren't any especially interesting things the NSA can do to her laptop via a modified keyboard. They certainly won't be rooting it that way.

This is a joke, right? A keyboard and a keylogger would give you everything you need to root a computer.

Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#117

Post by krapp »

mikeash wrote: post #110
krapp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly, absence of evidence is evidence of conspiracy, and evidence to the contrary is propaganda. It's the only way to know for sure.

I give it about 50/50 odds that a followup article shows up along the lines of, "they received the laptop and the tracking info for this package shows it coming straight from the warehouse nearby and this is clearly evidence that the NSA is screwing with USPS tracking data ."

The site which posted this article wouldn't bother posting an article contradicting it.

Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#118

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

linuxhansl wrote: post #113

Whether this actually happened or not is not the point. The point is that there is now speculation (and in fact a, albeit remote, possibility) that this could have been the reason. The loss of trust in the Government is what makes this a story.

I find the loss of trust in the gov't encouraging. Healthy skepticism would be better, but distrust is better than nothing.

Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#119

Post by mverwijs »

tptacek wrote: post #27
mverwijs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad sad thing is, though, that in the '90s we made these jokes about surveillance cameras, internet taps, government-written-viruses, etc..etc... Seemed funny then, too.

No we did not. This is perhaps the most annoying meme to have come out of the Wikileaks and Snowden disclosures. Nobody working in technology laughed about dragnet surveillance or cryptanalysis capabilities or trojan horses. The 1990s was the era of Clipper and Echelon. People did not assume in the 1990s that the intelligence community was benign or disconnected. All you have to do is read _Applied Cryptography_ to s…

> No we did not.

The disdain with which you discard my memories of that time is... interesting.

Invent distrust? Of course not.

However, I and my colleagues (as I recall), at the time just did not take the threat of government surveillance seriously. Did I trust the government? Yes. Yes I did. I'm Dutch. We have a childlike faith in our government. Being spied on by the government was something that happened on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. And in the US. Surely not our very own flattened nook of the world.

And would this surveillance of other governments affect me? Ha! Why would it?

Sure I was naive. And I was hardly alone. Were there more enlightened souls, such as yourself? I'm willing to go out on a limb and trust that there were.

Does that discount my memory of being ridiculed as paranoid for using PGP? Or the times I ridiculed friends and colleagues myself for taking measures against being listened in on? I hope not.

Re: Did this Tor developer become a victim of NSA's laptop interception program?

#120

Post by tptacek »

mverwijs wrote: post #119
tptacek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we did not. This is perhaps the most annoying meme to have come out of the Wikileaks and Snowden disclosures. Nobody working in technology laughed about dragnet surveillance or cryptanalysis capabilities or trojan horses. The 1990s was the era of Clipper and Echelon. People did not assume in the 1990s that the intelligence community was benign or disconnected. All you have to do is read _Applied Cryptography_ to s…

> No we did not. The disdain with which you discard my memories of that time is... interesting. Invent distrust? Of course not. However, I and my colleagues (as I recall), at the time just did not take the threat of government surveillance seriously. Did I trust the government? Yes. Yes I did. I'm Dutch. We have a childlike faith in our government. Being spied on by the government was something that happened on the o…

You weren't just naive. You were anomalously naive. It's funny you should mention PGP: the 1990s were the time of the crypto-wars, which were in part sparked by PGP. Remember "this t-shirt is a munition"? You couldn't even sell products with crypto in them without jumping through hoops.
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