I think Perfect Forward Secrecy has a great deal to do with how things have turned out. In the days of Room 641A, copying and diverting fiber traffic to somewhere like Utah even before it could be read, would have conferred an advantage if it was encrypted (and important enough for other attacks like black bag jobs on servers). PFS has turned ephemeral encryption into the garbage it deserves to be.
How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
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Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
#42Beware, this is a book excerpt rather than a standalone blog post, so it ends on a cliffhanger. Still a fun read.
Cliffhanger! Did it end with millions of Americans being freed forever from government surveillance?!?
j/k It's a good excerpt, and makes me want to read the book.
Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
#43Entire generations of people who were never alive to remember a world where their every movement and utterance was not being tracked by the advertising/surveillance industrial complex. It's just considered normal now. The west is very sick.
You spelled world wrong. China has their social credit, EU has their cameras, America has Palantir, Starlink has internet everywhere, 5G can be used as radar, age verification is being deployed globally, ect... Babylon reborn.
Edit: UK not EU
Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
#44Entire generations of people who were never alive to remember a world where their every movement and utterance was not being tracked by the advertising/surveillance industrial complex. It's just considered normal now. The west is very sick.
Are we pretending this isn't a global phenomenon?
Of course all governments want to control every move and thought of their citizens. It makes governing easier. We expect that in autocracies.
I don't know about The West as a bloc, but at least the USA was supposed to have respect for the basic individualistic privacy and freedom of the average citizen. We've allowed that to largely evaporate. The differences between the US and something like the PRC are rapidly eroding.
Don't get me wrong, the US is still an order of magnitude more free but you can see a future where the trend lines are converging.
Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
#45The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything. There was a short period at the end of the Bush years when this was a big deal, but as soon as the gaslighting was coming from both political teams, it became a non-issue politically. > President Obama defended the U.S. government's surveillance programs, telling NBC's Jay Leno on Tuesday that: "There is no spying on Americans." "We don't have a domestic spy…
> The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything.
Everything is political. Electric cars, crude oil, rocket launches, rare earth metals, cargo transportation, public transportation, housing, taxation, data, compute... which of those aren't political?
The problem is Americans believing obvious lies like "Privacy is a human right" and "Don't be evil" and then blaming the government instead of themselves.
Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
#46Beware, this is a book excerpt rather than a standalone blog post, so it ends on a cliffhanger. Still a fun read.
There's more info about the outcome in [1]. Long story short, the US government passed a law (whilst this case was being litigated) that let AT&T off the hook. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T
While I was upset to hear how that ended, it's also unfair to expect a company to refuse when the government shows up with guns, takes over a part of your offices, and tells you to stay out of their way and never tell anyone what they are doing or else you'll be killed or sent to a secret torture prison for the rest of your life.
That's not a situation that's supposed to happen in a free country, but here we are. If you're handed a gag order by the federal government and can't even tell your lawyers about what happened what options does a company have? How many CEOs and low level employees should we expect to volunteer to have their lives destroyed by refusing to cooperate with the government's illegal surveillance schemes?
At&t may not have been coerced quite that aggressively, but these kinds of problems need to be addressed by people other than the private companies who are themselves victims of government oppression. Having said that, not every company is a totally unwilling participant either. There are companies who are happy to make a lot of money by selling our private data to the government. ISPs and phone companies even bill police departments for things like wiretaps and access to online portals where they can collect customer's data. State surveillance (legal or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed to become a revenue stream for private corporations. In fact it should be costly.
Considering the massively disproportionate amount of influence corporations have over our government (mostly as a result of their own bribes) it's tempting to want to make compliance so costly to companies that they're compelled to try to use some of that influence to stop or limit domestic surveillance by the state, but honestly I doubt that even they have enough power to stop it. Snowden showed us that even congress doesn't have the power to regulate these agencies. The head of the NSA, under oath, lied right to their faces by denying that their illegal wiretapping scheme even existed. You can't regulate something you aren't allowed to know exists. He also faced zero consequences for those lies which tells us that he's basically untouchable.
Obama was elected on campaign promises that he would end the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. Obama was an expert on constitutional law and taught courses on it at the University of Chicago. He spoke out passionately about how unconstitutional and dangerous such programs were. After he was elected his stance quickly changed. He not only started publicly praising the NSA, he actually expanded their surveillance powers. Maybe the NSA showed him a bunch of top secret evidence that scared him enough to make him willing to accept the dangers of their surveillance despite knowing the risks and unconstitutionality. Maybe the NSA strong-armed him. Either way, not even the US president had the power to stop the NSA. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that AT&T would.
Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
#47Instances like this is a powerful statement that truly free and democratic governance is not sustainable in the long run with technological advancements.
We are basically trading marginal comforts from new technology in the short run for political freedom in the long run and the latency is decreasing.
The difference is overt governance of this nature is vilified and amplified in the media and the covert governance is insulated and critics marginalized.
Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are we pretending this isn't a global phenomenon?
Overseas, cash is king. In Canada, and also in San Francisco, you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0]. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-an...
>you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0]
maybe during peak covid? but certainly not now. this comment is either being intentionally disingenuous or just parroting a random article from an extraordinary (and no longer applicable) time of our lives and presenting it as if its still the current status quo.
i am in canada for weeks at a time multiple times per year, and i have family that live in BC, AB, and ON.
cash is my primary form of payment and not once have i been turned down using cash on any of my visits. not once has family complained about being unable to use cash (several of the older of them, like me, primarily use cash).
Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overseas, cash is king. In Canada, and also in San Francisco, you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0]. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-an...
> you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0] maybe during peak covid? but certainly not now. this comment is either being intentionally disingenuous or just parroting a random article from an extraordinary (and no longer applicable) time of our lives and presenting it as if its still the current status quo. i am in canada for weeks at a time multiple times per year, and i have family that live i…
Congratulations, you are the 1 in 10. This is why we don't use anecdata.
> Even a report commissioned by the Bank of Canada suggests it's time to protect access to money.
> That report, titled "Social policy implications for a less-cash society," recommends legislative action, arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-sleepwalking-in...
Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0] maybe during peak covid? but certainly not now. this comment is either being intentionally disingenuous or just parroting a random article from an extraordinary (and no longer applicable) time of our lives and presenting it as if its still the current status quo. i am in canada for weeks at a time multiple times per year, and i have family that live i…
Congratulations, you are the 1 in 10. This is why we don't use anecdata. > Even a report commissioned by the Bank of Canada suggests it's time to protect access to money. > That report, titled "Social policy implications for a less-cash society," recommends legislative action, arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/…
doesn't matter what the proportion is.
the fact is i can still use cash, despite your very bold claim otherwise.
whats your goal with the misinformation, anyways?