That's always what I have though about using tor and other encryption, if you try to hide clumsily it might have the adverse effect. If you know how to use all the tools and don't make the error of login to social network, then it can be useful, but in general I doubt it can protect us. Sending letter might become the most secure way of communication after all, or book with hidden glued pages!
Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
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Re: Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
#92"The document, titled Minimization Procedures Used by the National Security Agency in Connection with Acquisitions of Foreign Intelligence, is the latest bombshell leak to be dropped by UK-based newspaper The Guardian." All good news! 1: The Guardian is still time-releasing, I thought they caved under a IGIC -sorry, what ever its called over there - gag order. 2: Now we know what to do to backup into the NSA cloud! A…
The D-notice system is a "request" to not publish — they are completely non-binding. They still are unable to publish anything covered by the Official Secrets Acts, but any leak from a foreign intelligence agency is not covered by that.
Re: Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
#93This shouldn't be a surprise at all. Using Tor hides your location, so they assume you are foreign unless proven otherwise. If I were to agree with the law that allows all of the snooping that the NSA does, I'd say this is pretty reasonable. As a European, what I find more disturbing about all the news about PRISM and related programs, is how US centric the reports about it are and how little other western government…
It's less of a big deal because states spy on other states, even their allies. It has been that way since the beginning and everyone usually turns a blind eye unless it either gets leaked and causes embarrassment or it results in a real security risk as in the case of Pollard. Every one of the countries currently lodging complaints over the story of the UK's GCHQ hacking G20 delegates possesses a communications intel…
Sure, I agree that governments spying on other governments is something that is a necessary evil up to a certain point.
In my opinion this is vastly different from a government reading and storing pretty much all foreign communication they can get their hands on from an allied state citizens though, something I understand the USA/NSA seems to be doing.
Re: Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
#94That might be the case, but even the NSA will not be able to decrypt a well encrypted message - or so we think at least.
That all said - and I realize that this might be controversial - I fully agree with wiretaps as long as there is a warrant (and I mean a real warrant from a real court on a case-by-case basis).
With its sweeping data collection the NSA is doing itself a disservice as it will eventually lead to wider use of strong encryption, which will make wiretaps with warrants much more expensive (or even impossible) to serve.
I think new laws for stricter limitations on exporting cryptography software or even restricting cryptography itself are likely in the near future. This will lead to interesting trials where folks might be forced to reveal their encryption keys; and the inability to prove whether there actually is encrypted data (good encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data, and some folks wipe old harddrives with random data before they are discarded, how would one prove that this is really random data?)
Re: Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Know of any non-obvious stego of 10MB, 100MB, and larger file size?
I suppose you need a large carrier for a large message to be hidden. Very high resolution home movies maybe? I assume you can't use content that is already public, as then the original can be compared with the modified version to prove that hidden data exists.
porn. It gets transcoded enough that the stego could fly through as just another lossy transcoding. Better yet, lossy transcode it to something and back, then stego, as long as your target has a copy of the same transcoder and knows what you're using as reference. You should also be careful to strip metadata as to which transcoder you're using. They're PETABYTES of the stuff floating around.
And if you're willing to pay a few bucks for private cams, there's no way anyone else can have a copy of your screencap, so no amount of clever transcoding will get them a reference copy.
Re: Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
#96This is fairly obvious. From the NSA's perspective, people that act like people who have something to hide are more likely to be hiding something. I'd be surprised if they didn't take it into account.
Wouldn't that give them even more reason for surveillence and aquireing of additional ressources?
Re: Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
#97I think this is the more interesting aspect:
>"reasonably believed to contain evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed."
Is this sort of intelligence gathering of domestic signals handed over to other relevant authorities? I'm sure the DEA would love to have the NSA's assistance in tracking down drug dealers. I'm just not convinced it has much of anything to do with national security.
Also, does use of HTTPS constitute "communications that are enciphered?"
Re: Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you cite your source regarding the NSA operated Tor exit? I do not mean this to be snarky -- if you have a legitimate source other than hearsay, I'd love to see it.
No I cannot, because this individual stated that "a 3 letter federal agency" operates the node. Thus never really saying it was the NSA. Given the recent news though, one can only guess it was the NSA. Is it really that hard to believe? Considering that the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) gets mostly DoD contracts and research grants and a lot of those contracts are for classified projects.
When I was in college, we always heard rumors of CIA doing this and NSA doing that... with the exception of the few NSA mathematicians who took sabbaticals in our math department, I generally assumed it was BS. (They were really nice guys, by the way. I learned elliptical factorization from one of them. Sure wish I remembered it!) This was the late 90s, not the heydey of LSD research and all that crazy stuff. I only wish...
Now, as for DoD funding institutional research, absolutely (they funded me last year for something completely benign and outside the scope for "info wars"). They fund research at a lot more places than GT. So, yes, plausible. But, unlikely IMO that NSA has an active presence on your campus doing intelligence work.
BTW, I challenge your claim that GT gets "mostly DoD". I'm sure your school is primarily funded by NSF (the preferred government tit to suck on). DoD is actually a pain in the ass to deal with because they don't go away after the money changes hands. Same is true for SBIR/STTR.
Finally, DoD classifies everything. Don't let that label fool you into thinking the work is sensitive (or even interesting). Within academia, this is less so because the objective of funding institutional research to produce publications. Contract R&D is not something that is popular with faculty (or the school, since depending on the IP ownership, it can put their tax exempt status at risk.)
That said, keep snooping and let us know what you find in that room labeled "no personnel permitted without super-duper top secret clearance".
Re: Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
#99Since I (and the majority of global internet users) are not "US persons", they're claiming they're entitled to intercept and store all my communications anyway - so my personal reaction to this is going to be to increase the use of tor and crypto for random everyday stuff. I'll start GPG encrypting email to anybody I know will be able ro deal with it. I might even start randomly mailing GPG encrypted mail for no reas…
To thwart email traffic analysis, what we really need is tor-over-email relays: you n-fold encrypt your email, one for each relay node, and the innermost message is encrypted for the intended recipient.
Re: Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is why we should (and we should encourage everybody we can to) regularly do the most mundane of browsing using TOR. And that's why I encourage everybody I can to run a tor node https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en
Also, if you don't want to run a node on your home network/machine http://cloud.torproject.org/ makes it ridiculously easy to set up one on EC2 (for as little as ~$3/month)
I'm running one of these on my free EC2 account and can attest to the ridiculously easy part. It took me < 5 min to setup. If you want to avoid paying any fees, just have to make 1 change to the torrc file bandwidth settings. Also, make a great ubuntu sandbox to play with. For example, I'm running a joomla test server with it.