omnibus PRISM/NSA/free Edward Snowden/encryption tutorial thread

Looks like the UK Govt or the Independent are pulling some shenanigans.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

Didn't somebody have dinner with somebody else and Stephen Fry earlier in the week, ostensibly to talk about Russian homophobia?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2013/08/21/fbi-suspected-william-vollmann-was-the-unabomber/

The celebrated writer William Vollmann has revealed that the FBI once thought he might be the Unabomber, the anthrax mailer and a terrorist training with the Afghan mujahideen.

In the September issue of Harper’s magazine, Vollmann describes the alarming and ludicrous contents of his 785-page secret government file, 294 pages of which he obtained after suing the FBI and CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. Spiked with sarcasm directed at what he sees as the agencies’ arrogance, presumptuousness and ineptitude, his Harper’s essay, “Life As a Terrorist,” is inflamed with moral outrage at the systemic violation of his privacy. “I begin to see how government haters are made,” he writes.

Ya, lots of news lately. Been reading the articles but had not had time to post on here.

Here is another one fresh off the press: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs-tech-companies-paid

Not sure if it's been posted yet. If so, my apologies.

Seems like my WWW use has become increasingly narrow. Has anyone else's? Thinking it might change/go back to the way it was over time, though.

anybody following the whole independent vs. snowden/greenwald thing

confusing

independent thing smells like a set-up. release 'damming' information that has shades of benghazi, make false claims about the guardian's journalism, report 'controversy' over leaks being dangerous to the public, and on top of that, retail this weird story about how the information miranda was carrying could be injurious to public safety.

so its all a one-sided story _plus_ it has "new" information.

it sources that to "the leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden". But the fact that this information was _in_ the leaked documents probably came to the independent via a government source, which mainly wanted to provide background on how 'dangerous' the leak was overall.

well and snowden has denied ever giving anything to them which uh

oh sorry didn't read you very carefully there duh

There is currently a room full of very smart individuals working 24/7 figuring out ways to erode or topple Snowden/Greenwald's effect on the public consciousness. The Independent thing is just the tip of the iceberg.

Seems like my WWW use has become increasingly narrow. Has anyone else's? Thinking it might change/go back to the way it was over time, though.

Still hoping for some opinions on this thread: VPN providers S/D

(obv. VPN isn't NSA-proof, but am interested in slowing things down at least)

Anonymity on the Web is really hard. I have my own thoughts on it, but nothing you can't find out with a simple Google search. Sorry for the non-answer. It's Friday and I'm feeling a bit burnt out.

In the meantime, have you seen this? https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 3,308,511 tested so far.

Interesting. And this is with JS, Java, Flash all off and w/ad blocking on.

The fonts you have installed also are a big unique-factor.

There are so many things, which I guess can be like meta info, which is used to ID you.

their FAQ says 85% of visitors are unique (altho the rate is falling as more data is collected). i'd read abt that font list trick for identifying a user before; i guess graphic designers must be more trackable than the average person

+ apparently it's not just the fonts u have installed but the order in which the list is returned, which reflects node order

ugh

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/cass-sunstein-nsa-appointment-082213

Eeks

Charles Pierce allows Jeffrey Toobin space on his blog to respond (and, yes, buy Toobin's book on the 2000 election).

toobin's nuremberg outrage really was the most revealingly bonkers shit. basically: suggesting that the international law adopted after ww2 was intended to apply to america = calling americans nazis. that stuff's for people who need it! meanwhile, this opening graf where i actually do directly compare edward snowden to JAMES EARL FUCKING RAY is just a thought-provoking historical analogy; we are all adults here.

I say that China and Russia probably copied Snowden's data and probably will make nefarious use of it. You write, "If Toobin wants to accuse Snowden of espionage, he should man-up and do it. Otherwise, this is just incoherent." It's true that I don't have proof that the Chinese and Russian took advantage of the intelligence windfall that fell into their laps. I don't say that I do have proof. Nor do I have proof that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.

i c wut u did

i

what

Nixon: "I am not suggesting Johnson is anything other than a patriot..."

The U.S. National Security Agency has bugged the United Nations' New York headquarters, Germany's Der Spiegel weekly said on Sunday in a report on U.S. spying that could further strain relations between Washington and its allies. 'The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!)', Der Spiegel quoted one document as saying, adding that within three weeks the number of decoded communications rose to 458 from 12.

naive question: who "orders" this kind of thing at NSA? "Hack into the UN and spy on other countries!" - who tells someone to do that? is it some evil guy in shades in the upper echelons at the NSA who is somehow never forced to disclose this kind of thing except in confidential briefings to members of the senate committee on the path to dystopia or something?

not the NSA per se, but this was a 2010 WikiLeaks revelation : http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/28/clinton-ordered-diplomats-spy-un/

The politics of bugging the UN (and potential fallout from discovery of this) would make this a very high level decision. My guess would be that the idea could have originated at almost any level, but the decision to go ahead was approved by the national security council and particularly with the approval of whoever was president at the time.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/obama-surveillance-and-the-legacy-of-the-march-on-washington.html

haven't been the biggest fan of cobb at the NYer but this was good

Was waiting for someone to address that.

That figures whose dissent consisted of a demand that the United States abide by its own Constitution could be vacuumed into a system meant to trace foreign threats raises the question of what other democratic demand, what present moral inconvenience, is being similarly thwarted.

it's a poignant irony but that's a weak article imo, it starts by ironically framing obama's own words to distance him from the civil rights movement, then lands on the above sudden and unsupported quote for its conclusion. there are many, MANY people with closer ties to the civil rights movement (if that's our standard) who are opposing these invasions than a solitary dude atop the pyramid.

mural altered

http://i.imgur.com/DVGxjhy.jpg

Barack Obama is, as he pointed out in Selma, an heir to the civil-rights movement. What he decides to do with that legacy is another matter

oh, he's decided.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-spied-on-al-jazeera-communications-snowden-document-a-919681.html

I watched Sneakers last night (don't ask) and it was kind of a hoot. Love the parts discussing how the NSA doesn't have the authority to spy domestically. Oh the 90s

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html

So Snowden gave Gellman of the W. Post the Spy agencies budgets

sneakers is great. Lawrence Lasker is like one of the only h-wood guys capable of not being excruciatingly dumb about computers onscreen. that 'can you guarantee my safety' bit is still loads of fun, along with a few other moments.

I always have a hard time remembering which one is Sneakers and which one is Hackers.

When spies are denied authority to eavesdrop, then only unauthorized eavesdroppers will spy on us.

the DEA: underrated!

AT&T, in return for payment by the government, has employees sit with government drug units and sift through company (not government) stored data reaching as far back as 1987....

Unlike controversial NSA programs like PRISM, Hemisphere does not see the DEA itself hoarding communications data; AT&T stores the data. Nonetheless, with only an administrative subpoena (not a warrant) drug agents can hone in on an individual’s communications data within an hour. As such Hempisphere is yet another example of how government agencies and corporations work in tandem to create and uphold the surveillance dragnets from which almost no communications within or going out of the U.S. escape....

“I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts,” said the ACLU’s Jamil Jaffer.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/03/dea_can_access_all_att_records/

Small lol at 'hempisphere'

Some good news today

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/09/hundreds-pages-nsa-spying-documents-be-released-result-eff-lawsuit

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

As long as they haven't cracked rot13 I'm still nfsr.

fnsr! Duh. :-(

Dubious headline, there. The article makes clear that the NSA hasn't broken RSA or anything.

Independent security experts have long suspected that the NSA has been introducing weaknesses into security standards, a fact confirmed for the first time by another secret document. It shows the agency worked covertly to get its own version of a draft security standard issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved for worldwide use in 2006.

SSH 2.0?

The NSA has worked closely with its British counterpart, the GCHQ, in the effort to break or get around the codes that protect the data that billions of people send across the Internet each day — including e-mails, bank transactions, Web searches, phone calls and chats, the newspapers reported on their Web sites Thursday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-has-made-strides-in-thwarting-encryption-used-to-protect-internet-communication/2013/09/05/0ec08efc-1669-11e3-a2ec-b47e45e6f8ef_story.html

Phil Zimmermann is founder of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and battled the U.S. government in the 1990s over his effort to establish strong Internet encryption for consumers. He said he is confident that the NSA has not cracked PGP encryption, which is now owned by Symantec. “The fact that they use PGP for government users indicates that they haven’t broken it,” he said. “Otherwise they’d have stopped using it.”

Still hoping for some opinions on this thread: VPN providers S/D

(obv. VPN isn't NSA-proof, but am interested in slowing things down at least)

― Elvis Telecom, Friday, August 23, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess it's still in the works and they'll be publishing the source code soon.

http://www.popehat.com/2013/09/06/nsa-codebreaking-i-am-the-other/

The is the one thing i recall related to potential NSA backdoors in encryption standards: http://www.schneier.com/essay-198.html

I'm sure there's other stuff too that we don't even know about.

this article is vaguely relevant to the thread too: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/barrett-brown-faces-105-years-in-jail-20130905?print=true