Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
|
|
|
Nov 25, 2016 - 05:21pm PT
|
This is mistitled to seem about Trump, but Trump is a non-issue here.
This is about bigger ideas, and I find Snowden to be quite articulate in making important points:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
The beginning part from Phil Zimmermann is a bit self-serving, but to be fair, the inventor of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) deserves to get credit for making the tools that enable us to "fight back." All of the redneck gun nuts who tout the 2nd Ammendment should really be idolizing Phil Zimmerman, because it is his privacy tools that will be the weapons to fight against present and future abusive governments- not guns.
Edit: If you don't have the attention span for the whole thing, here is the pith:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
The central argument from my perspective: imagine a world with perfect enforcement of all existing laws, supported by a total surveillance environment. On the surface it seems like a good thing, "if I am not doing anything wrong I don't have anything to hide." But consider how every advancement of social justice from the abolition of slavery, to women's rights to vote, to LGBT folks not having to hide themselves from the public... imagine if all of the injustices that still exist in the world will never go away, and that the government can become like a boa constrictor to continually squeeze down on our rights, and we have no tools left to push back. If we accept 100% law enforcement, we accept a cessation of human progress and creating a more just society.
|
|
Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
|
|
|
Feb 10, 2017 - 06:28pm PT
|
Y'all do know that another traitor has been discovered? The media has
basically passed on it in favor of frothing over the travel ban.
"The indictment alleges that Harold Thomas Martin, 52, spent up to 20 years
stealing highly sensitive government material from the U.S. intelligence
community related to national defense, collecting a trove of secrets he
hoarded at his home in Glen Burnie, Maryland.
The government has not said what, if anything, Martin did with the stolen data.
Martin faces 20 criminal counts, each punishable by up to 10 years in
prison, the Justice Department said."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/nsa-contractor-indicted-over-mammoth-theft-of-classified-data/ar-AAmJWKj?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp
Hmmm, 200 years in Leavenworth sounds a little lite.
|
|
7SacredPools
Trad climber
Ontario, Canada
|
|
|
Feb 10, 2017 - 06:34pm PT
|
Excellent talk by Snowden.
Disappointing, but not surprising that Obama didn't pardon him.
Thanks for posting.
|
|
Happiegrrrl2
Trad climber
|
|
|
Feb 10, 2017 - 08:00pm PT
|
Y'all do know that another traitor has been discovered?
I recall when that guy was found out. The news story was that though he was in possession of "a lot" of sensitive stuff, it seemed he had done nothing other than collect it, and seemed like it was an emotional instability "hoarding" type thing going on.
Of course I have no idea what the truth of the matter is, but I would argue that a person does not become a "traitor" until they use whatever information or skill they have to undermine their country. It's kind of like this thing a fellow trail crew guy said: What is the difference between a rock, and a stone?
Answer: A rock becomes a stone when it receives its purpose.
|
|
NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
|
|
[Click to View YouTube Video]
I don't mean to freak you out with it, but I think it's true:
Even our memories are not absolutely private in America.
Any of us can be compelled, in appropriate circumstances, to say what we remember, what we saw. Even our communications with our spouses, with our clergy members, with our attorneys, are not absolutely private in America....
In appropriate circumstances, a judge can tell any one of us to testify in court about those very private communications. And there are really really important constraints on law enforcement as there should be. But the general principle is one we've always accepted in this country. There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America. There is no place in America outside of judicial reach. That's the bargain. We made that bargain over two centuries ago....
Widespread default encryption changes that bargain. In my view it shatters the bargain.
Comey is presenting a twisted and historically revisionist version of our privacy rights and expectations to lay the groundwork for banning encryption technologies. Note that the existing exceptions to privacy that Comey cites can still be enforced in the presence of encryption. Encryption is about protecting information in storage and in transit. What he wants is the ability to intercept private communications and act without needing to compel a witness to testify. Encryption technologies are not an assault on the following privileges or exceptions to them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spousal_privilege
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney%E2%80%93client_privilege
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest%E2%80%93penitent_privilege
If he spoke in terms of lawful intercept and wiretapping mechanisms, there might be room for a discussion. But thanks to Snowden, we know that our government has violated the contract with its citizens in terms of using lawful means to selectively surveil people. Not only is the government unrepentant about that, but is doubling down to tell us we never had the right in the first place. The real problem is that encryption technologies thwart the ILLEGAL activities of our government, and it pisses them off when they can't do what they have become accustomed to illegally doing.
To be fair, I do recognize a problem of real criminals using these technologies to stop lawful surveillance. But it is the government that started the problem by breaking the trust of the public, and the public has access to tools to protect us all from an overreaching government. Encryption technologies would not have been so popular if governments had not overextended their reach, but in any case the problem would have come to a head at some point. I don't have a good solution right now, but I think we are throwing out the baby with the bath water if we give up our expectation of privacy.
How soon will it be before we are allowed to own fully-auto assault rifles with enlarged magazines, but owning or writing encryption software will land you in Guantanamo?
|
|
NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
|
|
As a counterpoint to Comey's recent efforts to reset our expectations about privacy, listen to Phil Zimmermann's experiences (creator of the first widespread encryption tool) in relation to human rights, peaceful protests, and FBI violations that inspired the creation of these tools:
Start watching at 10 minutes, 10 seconds:
https://youtu.be/4ww8AAkWFhM?t=10m10s
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Check out his reflections on facing seemingly "hopeless" situations and how that tends to paralize people from trying to solve them. This resonates strongly with me, and inspires me:
https://youtu.be/HuHm1vzzm1g?t=36m0s
Jump to 36 minutes 0 seconds:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
Comey is an azzhole and you can't believe a word that prick spits out ......
|
|
c wilmot
climber
|
|
NWO- you forgot comment boards and sites like facebook. People essentially build a profile of themselves for the govt every time they post a comment online. I wouldn't doubt the use of facebook during the Egypt revolution was simply a dry run at both identifying potential domestic enemies and gauging how well facebook could be used to influence behavior.
Our govt has been spying on and suppressing the people since the violent protests of the Great Depression.
|
|
NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
|
|
And for people who are wondering what they can do about it... here is one tool:
https://darkmail.info/
I would like to dedicate this project to the National Security Agency. For better or worse, good or evil, what follows would not have been created without you. Because sometimes upholding constitutional ideas just isn’t enough; sometimes you have to uphold the actual Constitution. May god bless these United States of America. May she once again become the land of the free and home of the brave. --Ladar Levison
DIME strives to create a secure communications platform for asynchronous messaging across the Internet. The key design element which differentiates DIME from traditional Internet electronic mail (email) is the use of end-to-end encryption. The incorporation of encryption directly into the protocols ensures the secure and reliable delivery of email,
while providing for message confidentiality, tamper protection, and a dramatic reduction in the leakage of metadata to processing agents encountered along the delivery path. To the extent possible, we have made DIME resistant to manipulation, but a secure system is only as strong as its weakest link. The goal with DIME has been, wherever possible, to make the security of the system depend on the complexity of a user’s password, and the strength of their endpoint’s defenses.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
WikiLeaks on Tuesday published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency’s
"purportedly" they say as usual.
You can't believe one word coming out of wikileaks.
A total tool of disinfo .....
|
|
crankster
Trad climber
No. Tahoe
|
|
CIA docs are genuine.
But why can't this geek get Trump's tax returns?
This why?
Oct. 10, 2016
Trump: "I love WikiLeaks!"
Where: A campaign rally in Pennsylvania
|
|
NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
|
|
Werner, the motivations and intentions of the release of info is certainly subject to question, and the choice of what to release is subject to manipulation, but there is legit stuff in these releases.
My first glance into it, looks like a planning session among software developers for how to solve specific problems, achieve specific objectives. It's just that the objectives (for the first thing I am looking at) are how to breach endpoint security and send beacons back to the mothership as a precursor to remote control. I am not seeing source code, but the discussions are not technical bullsh#t. It's real. It's like a training manual for someone like me if I went to work for the CIA. It points to specific tools they have and details of how to use them, where to find resources, where to find reference standards for the protocols they are subverting, etc. For example the first thing I am looking at is details about EFI/UEFI which is the modern version of how computers boot up. Hacks to this can bypass all operating system security and have a hacker's software running at a layer below the operating system, capturing keystrokes or running other bad stuff in the background while the computer user has no idea what is happening. I have slightly more awareness of this in the last month because I had to hack a cheap Acer laptop that ships with Windows 10 but I wanted to run Linux for music software. They put in mechanisms to block people from doing this, worthy of Anti-Trust prosecution. The only way to get around it is to trick the computer to run something else (e.g. renaming your linux instance to the same name they have hard-coded for Windows in violation of the EFI/UEFI standards) by changing a few variables in low-level files.
So while the technical stuff looks real (but what I see is not a full-disclosure step by step playbook how to implement the hacks), the disinformation is more nuanced in terms of timing of release to mask other news stories, who is the target to be discredited at the moment, etc... all that can be nefarious. But technical truth is truth. Anything can be weaponized, including truth.
Edit: Pretty fishy thing... I was looking at a project called "Green Packet" which appears to be a way of setting up a secure tunnel to a Green Packet router, ostensibly to extract data from service providers around the world using those products? There is a Wikipedia page for Green Packet that looks like a company started in Cupertino (headquarters for Apple and not much else) and moved to Malaysia... So was it a USA company made international, and then embedded in companies around the world to not look American? All the links in the Wikipedia page are invalid, either because someone is scrubbing data or it is a fake thing with a shallow cover story. Lots of links to old awards or old stories that I can't quickly dig up. Weird. Done with my tinfoil hat for the day, need to get more work done instead.
https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_13763790.html
This looks to me a lot like what I would expect if I was working in a small team in a bureaucracy trying to solve the same technical problems they are trying to solve, a mix of the technical roadmap and silly politics of how to get your group noticed or how to engage with other teams. If it is fake, someone went to an almost inconceivable amount of effort to pull it off. I have to believe that effort is better spent in building real hacker tools than in trying to pose as an "enemy" as part of a psy-ops effort to make an embarrassing or misleading leak with all b.s. materials.
|
|
nah000
climber
no/w/here
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 8, 2017 - 07:31pm PT
|
"there is no place in American life outside of judicial reach. That's the bargain... Widespread default encryption changes that bargain."
what an absolute and complete load of horse shIt.
the bargain has always been thusly: the state can get a court order as per the fourth ammendment and authorities can threaten with jail time those who don't comply with said court order.
as far as i am aware, there has never been an agreeement between the state and the american people that said a person couldn't use better locks, or secret codes to communicate, or that they couldn't choose jail over compliance.
what comey is advocating for is not compliance but control. he wants to be able to force access to a person's technological property. regardless of how he skews words, he can not do this now regarding someone's memories. "compel" is a world apart from "force".
comey is not satisfied with only being able to "compel" and is using manipulative language to subtly argue that "compelling" and "controlling" are the same.
they are not.
i used to keep an open mind about comey. no longer. he is a snake tongued devil selling one of the cardinal foundations of totalitarianism as "security".
only way he could prove me wrong, regarding his being a charlatan, would be for him to open all of his communications to the public.
he never will.
so fUck his attempt to undermine the foundations of dissent.
the encrypted letter using founding fathers are rolling over in their graves as we speak.
|
|
kunlun_shan
Mountain climber
SF, CA
|
|
And for people who are wondering what they can do about it... here is one tool:
https://darkmail.info/
I like and use Protonmail myself:
https://protonmail.com/
End-to-End Encryption
Messages are encrypted at all times
Messages are stored on ProtonMail servers in encrypted format. They are also transmitted in encrypted format between our servers and user devices. Messages between ProtonMail users are also transmitted in encrypted form within our secure server network. Because data is encrypted at all steps, the risk of message interception is largely eliminated.
Zero Access to User Data
Your encrypted data is not accessible to us
ProtonMail's zero access architecture means that your data is encrypted in a way that makes it inaccessible to us. Data is encrypted on the client side using an encryption key that we do not have access to. This means we don't have the technical ability to decrypt your messages, and as a result, we are unable to hand your data over to third parties. With ProtonMail, privacy isn't just a promise, it is mathematically ensured. For this reason, we are also unable to do data recovery. If you forget your password, we cannot recover your data.
|
|
Curt
climber
Gold Canyon, AZ
|
|
CIA docs are genuine.
But why can't this geek get Trump's tax returns?
I would also like to know why Wikileaks is always supporting Donald Trump's agenda. When Trump was running against Hillary, only DNC/Podesta emails were hacked and released. Now that Trump is basically at war with US intelligence agencies, a massive amount of CIA secrets are hacked and released. Seems like more than coincidence.
Curt
|
|
Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
|
|
Curt, I'd go a step further: Wikileaks only seems to take actions that damages western democracies. We don't see anything from Russia, nothing from China or North Korea, all hotbeds of cyberattacks throughout the world.
Seems like an anarchist agenda to me.
Why don't they release Trumps income taxes: they don't see a benefit TO THEM to doing so.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Mar 10, 2017 - 11:33am PT
|
DMT: . . . US interests at heart . . . .
And what ARE those? Is the U.S. the standard bearer for all things democratic, fair, equal, compassionate? Shall it see it as its mission to spread, maintain, protect those values to other countries? Or is it the same as many other countries (Russia included): self-preservation: creating a position to defend against different ideas, values, and loyalties; putting its citizens’ own welfare ahead of other people in the world?
It’s a bit ambiguous, isn’t it? Our math friends might want to employ game theory to tell us how we should proceed, but game theory assumes clear, somewhat unequivocal, and non-conflicting objectives.
We are a fragmented nation in so many ways. This happens to be one of democracy’s problems no matter where it shows up. In time, there develops a lack of unity, and a diminishment of intellectual and moral capabilities to deal with issues facing a democracy.
Visit Alexis de Toqueville’s, “Democracy in America” (1835). Wiki summarizes Toqueville’s treatise casually in the following manner:
According to Tocqueville, democracy had some unfavorable consequences: the tyranny of the majority over thought, a preoccupation with material goods, and isolated individuals. Democracy in America predicted the violence of party spirit and the judgment of the wise subordinated to the prejudices of the ignorant.
Of course, just who is ignorant and who is prejudiced may turn the interpretation from one side to another. (Ignorant of what?)
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
someone stole the signing key for a root certificate authority (a company in Netherlands)
Let us know!