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Forced Exposure

groklaw.net

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Re: Forced Exposure

#81

Post by demallien »

quail wrote: post #68
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…

Obama continues to push hard to steal what little privacy rights US citizens have remaining. He is openly hostile about it, and lies about it constantly. Am I exaggerating here? The scary thing is I'm not. He's not done. It's going to get worse.

I don't think that it's useful to be talking about Obama specifically. Before Obama there was Bush Jr, who was the sitting president when most of these programs were put in place. It should be clear now that it's not one specific President, or one specific party, but the whole political class that has been corrupted. Thinking things will get better at the next election will absolutely not help things, unless the issue du jour of the next election is privacy, and the new president chosen based on their commitment to privacy. Even then it's not sure whether such a President could successfully make meaningful change.

Re: Forced Exposure

#82

Post by zby »

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.

There is this annual event "Freedom not Fear" which is about protesting against government surveillance - this year in Germany there is a huge coalition organizing demonstrations on September 7 http://blog.freiheitstattangst.de/

Hashtag: #fnf13

The pirate parties together with other organizations all over the world plan to join in. Spread the message and contact me if you plan to organize something.

Re: Forced Exposure

#83

Post by nwh »

jrabone wrote: post #80
vidarh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Encryption is fairly useless without authentication, and we can safely assume that the NSA has control of Certificate Authorities. You don't need CA's for e-mail encryption. You need keyrings and networks of trust (I exchange keys with my closest associates via offline means; I sign a certificate stating that I vouch for the authenticity of their certificates; my associates can then choose whether or not to trust t…

You need a CA for TLS-secured comms between MTAs. Many MTAs are set up to do opportunistic encryption out of the box, but they won't be validating the certs they get, so there's no guarantees about who's got the private key. Of course there's no need to rely on a central CA - it's not hard to run your own, and you can make it reasonably secure - say, a small ARM Linux board with passphrase-protected private keys on a…

> You don't necessarily need a $5000 HSM solution to issue your own SSL certificates at this level.

Well sure, I can issue them myself in a few minutes, the issue is that arbitrary mail servers won't be able to authenticate me. Which means we're means we're back to MITM attacks—better than plain text if the observer can't manipulate the data stream—but I wouldn't bet on it. Work with the assumption that the NSA is Mallory, not Eve.

Re: Forced Exposure

#84

Post by einhverfr »

arkitaip wrote: post #14
derefr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice to say. Get angry, be outraged. But what do we do , day-to-day, while things are still a mess? How do you organize a revolution under the noses of the people you're revolting against? The code still has a purpose, even if it's not the "right" solution, long-term.

It really comes down to lobbying lots and lots of politicians who can stop the NSA by significantly slashing its funding or by enforcing existing laws. The Occupy movement showed that revolutions don't work in a state where government and police will conspire against its citizens by infiltrating and undermining its civil rights movements.

The problem with Occupy was that there was no demanded reforms, only complaints and protests against things. Protests aren't ever enough though.

It is telling how little credibility Occupy had with Washington when Obama, giving his jobs speech during the protests, called for the deregulation of Wall St.

Re: Forced Exposure

#85

Post by yuvadam »

jacquesm wrote: post #37

Holy crap. Groklaw? I'd never for one second thought that the fall out from the NSA debacle would reach so far as to cause Groklaw to be shut down. PJ feels extremely genuine here, she is definitely not using this as an excuse. Wow. There is something very unhealthy in the air or in the water these days. Lots of people seem to be totally immune to the consequences of rampant surveillance and frankly bizarre powers ex…

That 'something unhealthy' is called privilege, and most people assume that it will protect them from government atrocities.

Little do they know that privilege is given at the behest of the oppressor, and can be revoked instantaneously.

I suspect that US tech companies who are complicit in dragnet surveillance - and PRISM specifically - are already understanding this.

Re: Forced Exposure

#86

Post by igravious »

Questioneer wrote: post #61
igravious wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lets not try to code our way out of this. I disagree. Let's use all our skills and avenues, not just some of them. > We succumb to terror pushing away meaningless bits of code on Github as a crypto projects in response. That is a subjective opinion. Email itself is meaningless bits of code. You want us to stop using email altogether? What about the web? Why are you even posting on this forum so? > Some projects flo…

> Dell? A computer hardware device assembler? What on earth are you on about. You appear to think that the entire info-tech infrastructure, companies and "wage-slaves" alike are complicit in all this. "Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government's electronic spying programs while he was working for Dell Inc in April 2012, almost a year earlier than previous…

That's a completely new one on me. I seem to stand corrected on the Dell issue (could someone expand on this?) -- but I still think you are casting your net a bit wide. I apologize for the heaping pile of denigration as you call it but maybe tone it down a bit and take the time to show (and link) in more detail why you are saying what you are saying, ok?

Re: Forced Exposure

#88

Post by pron »

route66 wrote: post #62
pron wrote: post #39

I have said this on HN several times, and I will say this again. Dragnet surveillance of private digital correspondence by the US and other governments is wrong, and a gross, unjustified, overreaction to the real threat of terrorism. And yet, when taken as part of the whole picture that is the internet, government surveillance is little more than a drop in the ocean. While governments may collect a possibly significa…

> ... Google, Facebook and their ilk ... usually don't destroy hard drives of journalists or don't detain people as a matter of harrassment just to name two recent actions undertaken by governments who use their introspective powers to take conclusions ("we have to have this Miranda guy") and act upon them ("we know he's in Berlin. Check the flight records") The point is that the control of the governments does not s…

> ... usually don't destroy hard drives of journalists or don't detain people as a matter of harrassment

I actually remember a similar action taken by Apple (though through the use of a government agency). But bear in mind that corporations' rights to employ violence have been taken from them, but only after they'd been put to good use. They had a long history of terrorizing and killing people (in the US it was during the days of the Pinkertons), and Google is already more powerful today than the robber barons ever were. If government is weakened enough, corporations will gladly fill the void.

Re: Forced Exposure

#89

Post by herrschindler »

Comment of the CEO of the service PJ chose for her communications: http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=625

"While we’re happy to provide a privacy asylum in a safe legislation, society should not need them. Privacy should be the default, not the exception."

So it's come down to privacy asylums and digital refugee camps now. WTF?

Re: Forced Exposure

#90

Post by fauigerzigerk »

pron wrote: post #39

I have said this on HN several times, and I will say this again. Dragnet surveillance of private digital correspondence by the US and other governments is wrong, and a gross, unjustified, overreaction to the real threat of terrorism. And yet, when taken as part of the whole picture that is the internet, government surveillance is little more than a drop in the ocean. While governments may collect a possibly significa…

A purely quantitative comparison between governments and corporations is completely pointless.

Governments have a monopoly on the use of force, on law making and on many other things that we all depend on. Governments have much greater powers than any particular corporation, and hence the abuse of that power is a lot more dangerous.

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