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Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 23:00:05 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: "R.A. Hettinga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Clips] Great Computer Skills Are a Must For Anyone Emulating Deep Throat Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ...meanwhile on that "Internet" thing, progress in modern snitchery apparently proceeds apace... Cheers, RAH Who damns Bill Gates to Hell for capitalizing the "I" in the Word spell checker way back when... ------- <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB111800810686151189,00.html> The Wall Street Journal June 6, 2005 PORTALS By LEE GOMES Great Computer Skills Are a Must For Anyone Emulating Deep Throat June 6, 2005 A generation ago, the original Deep Throat had to rely on 2 a.m. meetings at the bottom level of an underground garage to offer guidance to reporters investigating Watergate. Today, he would probably use the Internet. But whether he would be able to remain anonymous for three more decades would depend on his computer skills. That's because the Web today remains a confusing mixture of absolute privacy and shocking exposure, and most laypeople -- including those with no aspirations to emulate Deep Throat -- don't know which is happening when. Pieces of the Internet experience are secure from eavesdropping to an extreme degree of certainty -- such as when you are communicating with your bank. Those interactions are encrypted, or scrambled, and centuries of mathematicians have worked to guarantee, as much as is humanly possible, that some interloper won't be able to read them. When you fill in your credit-card number on a Web commerce page and press "send," the contents of that page are turned into a jumble of random characters that can be turned back into your card number only at their destination. And the guarantee is nearly absolute: No one, be they hackers or police investigators, will be able to read what you are doing. This veil of secrecy protects everyone, be they Web shoppers, whistle-blowers or al Qaeda members. In fact, one of the great conundrums of the Internet is that the same technology that makes it safe for Amazon also makes it safe for child pornographers. Then again, the same thing is true for other technologies, like electricity, which can be used by all. But how do you know it is really "your bank" you are talking with, and not a server in a former Soviet republic that has been set up as part of the latest phishing scam to snatch credit-card numbers and passwords? Or how do you know that the tape file with your credit-card number won't be left lying on some shelf somewhere, for anyone to filch? A decade ago, in the early days of the Internet, the patrons and boosters of the Web pointed to the mature science of encryption as the answer to all questions about the safety and security of doing business online. They assumed that the main threat on the Internet would be the same threat over which cryptographers for centuries had fretted -- someone trying to break your code and read your messages. But the real Web security problems have turned out to be far more prosaic: overseas teenage criminal hackers or knuckleheaded practices by data-storage companies. The industry is only now beginning to grapple with them, and while bad things happen far less frequently than headlines might suggest, vigilance is still required from all concerned. With a little bit of effort, you shouldn't have to think twice about an eavesdropper ever reading your emails. But you do need to be on guard against some phony email claiming to be from Meg Whitman that is attempting to persuade you to type in your eBay password. While today's Deep Throat could sleep secure in the knowledge that no one else could read his emails, he would still have to worry that someone would know he was sending them. Whenever you are doing anything at all on the Web, you are telling some other computer to send data to yours. You can't go online without revealing the "IP number" of your machine any more than you can buy something by mail order and not list an address or P.O. box. If the machine you are communicating with keeps a log of what it is doing -- and many of them do -- then it becomes a pretty simple matter to trace the connection back to you. That's one way the record industry has been able to go after music downloaders. They know the IP address to which a bootleg MP3 was downloaded; they can then get a court order forcing your Internet service provider to reveal your real-world name and address. Potential Deep Throats should thus realize that determined investigators equipped with subpoena powers can be as much of a formidable adversary online as they are in the real world. Still, if you are willing to inconvenience yourself a bit, you can greatly increase the odds of preserving both your privacy and your anonymity online. You might, for instance, find a wireless Internet connection somewhere, and then log on to it with your laptop. The only Web address that gets stored in this case is that of the connection's supplier, your local Starbucks, for instance. By the time anyone gets around to checking things, you will long since have gulped down your latte and split. This is precisely what a new breed of Web criminals is doing in their search for an untraceable way of launching their latest schemes. Their undoing, though, may end up being some time-stamped video security camera that records their comings and goings and can later be correlated to the time a cyberattack took place. What all this means is that aspiring Deep Throats should realize that being a confidential source has never been easier, or more complicated. Steady yourself, and prepare to walk onto the stage of history, not to mention book deals and movie rights. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]