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Forced Exposure

groklaw.net

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Re: Forced Exposure

#21

Post by Questioneer »

madaxe wrote: post #9
Questioneer wrote: post #2

Lets not try to code our way out of this. We succumb to terror pushing away meaningless bits of code on Github as a crypto projects in response. Some projects flourish sure but the same forces that profit off the court-less killings of others are collating your data, your pet projects. Harvesting your stolen info out of botnets. Giving you a salary for technician work keeping infrastructure ticking. Enough enabling t…

> If you have a career with Dell, AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, and many others, start making demands or make resumes. Stop being complicit. Unfortunately, the majority of wage-slaves are so indentured to their overlords that simply leaving is not an option, as the alternative is penury and starvation - particularly when you work for a giant like BAH, who'll ensure nobody will ever employ you again. If you want to…

I 'Asked HN' earlier but received no reply from anyone. I would love to hear from anyone, mostly those listed on Bluecabinet on ProjectPM. The latter site started Barrett Brown, currently under prosecution by the US government[1]:

Ask HN: Do you work for any of the included companies? (Dell/HBGary/AT&T/etc)[2]

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-doj-is-suing-barrett-br...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240908

Re: Forced Exposure

#22

Post by einhverfr »

lazyjones wrote: post #16
gokhan wrote: post #6

Want to keep your rights and freedom? It's time to act, now. History is full of great things going all the way down. Don't wait for the Superman.

> It's time to act, now Suggested courses of action? Tried and didn't work: * voting * not voting * protesting online / offline * writing about these issues, raising awareness What options do we have left? Violence? Hopefully there's more.

It is in the little things.

But it is also in everything together. My rule is that if I protest, I write my congressmen. If I voted based on issues I wrote about I write them and explain my votes. I have at times gotten interesting responses that show I have sometimes managed to get folks to stop and think which is all one can hope to do.

But beyond that we need to do what is needed now. We need to get guaranteed secure email services going in nations which have strong privacy protections. We need to create networks of end-to-end encrypted voice traffic which use open source architectures designed for privacy. The NSA has handed the good guys one heck of a market. All that is needed is the time and effort.

Re: Forced Exposure

#23

Post by yuvadam »

lazyjones wrote: post #16
gokhan wrote: post #6

Want to keep your rights and freedom? It's time to act, now. History is full of great things going all the way down. Don't wait for the Superman.

> It's time to act, now Suggested courses of action? Tried and didn't work: * voting * not voting * protesting online / offline * writing about these issues, raising awareness What options do we have left? Violence? Hopefully there's more.

In this battle, there is no quick win, no proverbial low-hanging fruit.

Never forget that by changing your actions, and your awareness, you are influencing other to do the same.

Re: Forced Exposure

#24

Post by igravious »

oneandoneis2 wrote: post #4

OMG.. Groklaw shut down!? I'm in shock.

A part-solution.

All tech geeks set up mail servers with encryption and volunteer to migrate their non-tech friends and family to new email homes. We also show how to configure encryption in their mail clients and start getting them to use native email clients rather than webmail.

This will have two effects. It will send a message to Google/Microsoft/Yahoo!/insert big mail provider here/... that they have been lax in protecting the privacy and interests of their users. Of course, given the free-as-in-beer model of webmail it was long apparent to some that the user was actually the product and the advertiser was the actual customer. If a user is seen as a mere data-point then there is little incentive to assure these mere data-points privacy. maybe this will be the kick in the pants the big providers need. Maybe that model is irredeemably broken and always has been but we just didn't know it yet.

Email should be like snail mail. Everybody acts as their own mail server and mail client in snail mail land. Your inbox is the physical letterbox and you would never let some corporation provide that value in return for some dubious positive (convenience? a nice interface to your mail store? the ability to search your mail store? ...)

The second effect is that it sends a message to the spooks and claws back a vital channel of our privacy. We can work on safe and easy anonymous browsing and safe and anonymous and federated social networking and whatever else further down the road -- mail needs to come first.

Think about it. There are enough tech geeks. Every geek should need to know how to do this anyhow. This will scale. We need to build a movement around this. When something in the political arena forces the immeasurably invaluable Groklaw offline something tangible needs to be done. We have had a series of ever more alarming wake-up calls (though I hate how clichéd that sounds) since the first Snowden revelations. We need to start acting on these calls. Sure our response needs a political dimension (a global moratorium on digital mass surveillance) as well but I think that this technical part-solution has got legs.

What do you think?

Re: Forced Exposure

#25

Post by nwh »

rlpb wrote: post #8

How feasible is Freenet for email? We can use PGP today, but the metadata is available to all. But what journalists who need to communicate more anonymously that that used pseudonymous PGP keys - one per story, rather one per person, and posted encrypted messages on Freenet?

When you think about totalitarian internet monitoring, like the one the US seem to have, there's almost no point aiming for anonymity. Almost all sensible means are broken when you have deep levels of traffic interception in many countries.

The Tor Anonymity Router mentions the types of monitoring they attempt to subvert, and mention that full internet monitoring is not one of their design goals. This is simply because with any low-latency system, correlation between the entry and exit can be obtained. Similar attacks exist for networks such as Bitcoin for similar reasons.

> But what journalists who need to communicate more anonymously that that used pseudonymous PGP keys - one per story

In this case you run into troubles with authenticity. Without persistent keys being authenticated in some way (see "web of trust"), there's no way in telling if the person is communicating with a government proxy or the real target journalist.

That's the issue with the "encrypt everything" mantra, authenticity is stupid difficult to verify.

Re: Forced Exposure

#27

Post by ferno »

lazyjones wrote: post #16
gokhan wrote: post #6

Want to keep your rights and freedom? It's time to act, now. History is full of great things going all the way down. Don't wait for the Superman.

> It's time to act, now Suggested courses of action? Tried and didn't work: * voting * not voting * protesting online / offline * writing about these issues, raising awareness What options do we have left? Violence? Hopefully there's more.

What about waiting for something drastically bad to happen? That'll wake people up, won't it? I think the issue here is that the US populace on average is much too complacent. People don't "care", they don't see how it affects them, etc.

Re: Forced Exposure

#28

Post by madaxe »

sz4kerto wrote: post #12
madaxe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have a career with Dell, AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, and many others, start making demands or make resumes. Stop being complicit. Unfortunately, the majority of wage-slaves are so indentured to their overlords that simply leaving is not an option, as the alternative is penury and starvation - particularly when you work for a giant like BAH, who'll ensure nobody will ever employ you again. If you want to…

Nobody on HN should say that she cannot stand up and walk away. We're have one the most sought-after and best paid jobs in the world. If we cannot give up some comfort, nobody is going to.

Absolutely. I quit my well paid job for a bank in 2006, as the stink of corruption was too much for me - and quit by just walking out one day, and not coming back. 'lo and behold, banking scandal and collapse, not long later. Fuckers I'd been working for had been hiding $bns of bad debt by shunting it into a director's name every quarter. SEC nabbed 'em. I spent several years broke, getting my own outfit off the ground. Means I'll never work in that industry again. Good riddance.

Re: Forced Exposure

#29

Post by rolux »

mixmax wrote: post #20

While I understand her (1) personal reasons for shutting down Groklaw, this is an extraordinarily bad decision for privacy and democracy. In the last few weeks quite a few providers of private communications and/or freedom (for some definition of freedom) have shut down. Lavabot, Freedom Hosting, etc. If the US could shut down The Guardian they would. This leaves fewer and fewer secure channels for private communicat…

> While I understand his personal reasons

pj = Pamela Jones

But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian states that they can no longer report on certain topics from London.

It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols.

Re: Forced Exposure

#30

Post by kaoD »

rlpb wrote: post #8

How feasible is Freenet for email? We can use PGP today, but the metadata is available to all. But what journalists who need to communicate more anonymously that that used pseudonymous PGP keys - one per story, rather one per person, and posted encrypted messages on Freenet?

It's just non-feasible. Freenet is a distributed file/web database, not realtime internet.
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