On 10/08/13 16:41, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
As I say I am far more concerned about 'modern' incompetent ISP's.
Uncaring ISPs or ISP's that can only care about profit (and so
advertising) or they are out of business and tasking them (perhaps to
their delight) with layer 7 filtering which requires great care and
expertise and arguably only securable passively which I am sure they
will not be doing.
This should certainly be stopped as it may give people with mostly evil
intentions similar access as the NSA or just reduce reliability perhaps
at a time when the net is needed most. Sounds like it was quite a bit
of work though or was that mostly the resistance?
Global government surveilance is not going to be stopped or the
backbone avoided and atleast likely comes from mostly good intentions
even if it is bound to be abused or infiltrated at times.
History has demonstrated time and time over that it is the nature of
government to keep and expand power at all costs. Surveillance states
don't go away until a major upheaval takes place. Look at East
Germany's Stasi, or the former USSR's KGB. Oh wait, that came back
again with a new name, the GRU I believe.
As I said in a previous post, it's most likely that the NSA is vacuuming
up /all/ Internet data. Even if they aren't grabbing 100% of it,
they're definitely getting the "interesting bits". And that data is
going to be stored forever.
Even if your data is safely encrypted today, that data will be stored
somewhere for pretty much eternity. In 20 years when supercomputers, or
quantum computers, can make mincemeat of today's strong crypto, that
data will be analyzed to "predict" the future by learning from the past.
Even if you can pretend the US government of today, or any other
government for that matter, is truly innocuous with the best intentions
(ha!), that doesn't take into account the nature of future governments.
Back in the pre-WW2 days, Belgium (or was it the Netherlands? I
forget.) kept detailed census and medical data on their citizens,
including their religious affiliation. It was useful data for a
friendly government, never to be abused.
Then WW2 happened, and Hitler's Nazis invaded. They found that data,
especially the religion part, quite useful, and we all know how that
turned out.
The NSA has been playing this game not for years, but *decades*. The
breadth of PRISM and other programs with names always written in caps is
astounding. They, and other intelligence agencies, are /everywhere/.
Routers and switches with backdoors from the US (like Cisco), China
(Huawei), Russia and others. Splitters on backbone fiber, like "Room
641A". Superfast computers that intercept HTTPS/SSL data using acquired
private keys from "friendly" or coerced companies. Moxie Marlinspike
demonstrated these techniques at a black hat conference in 2009, google
for it.
Sounds far fetched? Look at the revelation that LavaBit did indeed shut
down because the FBI insisted on having their private keys, and
installing a "device" on their network to intercept and decrypt the
data. They originally were (allegedly) targeting just Snowden's
account, but when the head of LavaBit declined, the FBI wanted the data
for /all/ users. So he shut it down. Then Silent Circle shut down, and
the list continues to grow.
More food for thought? Go read Naomi Wolf's book "The End of America".
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf for a quick outline.) Don't
have time to read it? Watch her youtube video (~48mins) of a speech
given at the U of Washington in 2007.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8u-5gsZdgc, amongst others) Hopefully,
it will make you think about the direction the US is heading.
--
Scott McEachern
https://www.blackstaff.ca
"Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers,
kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing
the government to do anything with those four." -- Bruce Schneier
