Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: astor on March 17, 2013, 02:26 am
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Thought you all might interested in this.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet-surveillance/index.html
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The Internet is a Surveillance State
Editor's note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of "Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Survive."
(CNN) -- I'm going to start with three data points.
One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.
Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.
And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels -- and hers was the common name.
The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.
Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell's identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.
Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there's more. There's location data from your cell phone, there's a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.
This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.
Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that allow us to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters.
There are simply too many ways to be tracked. The Internet, e-mail, cell phones, web browsers, social networking sites, search engines: these have become necessities, and it's fanciful to expect people to simply refuse to use them just because they don't like the spying, especially since the full extent of such spying is deliberately hidden from us and there are few alternatives being marketed by companies that don't spy.
This isn't something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services are interested in tracking us. Visit a website and it will almost certainly know who you are; there are lots of ways to be tracked without cookies. Cellphone companies routinely undo the web's privacy protection. One experiment at Carnegie Mellon took real-time videos of students on campus and was able to identify one-third of them by comparing their photos with publicly available tagged Facebook photos.
Maintaining privacy on the Internet is nearly impossible. If you forget even once to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the wrong thing, and you've permanently attached your name to whatever anonymous service you're using. Monsegur slipped up once, and the FBI got him. If the director of the CIA can't maintain his privacy on the Internet, we've got no hope.
In today's world, governments and corporations are working together to keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect -- occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer -- to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they're not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want.
Fixing this requires strong government will, but they're just as punch-drunk on data as the corporations. Slap-on-the-wrist fines notwithstanding, no one is agitating for better privacy laws.
So, we're done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites.
And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.
Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight.
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*slams head against desk*
I knew there was going to be a day where I had to read this. Thanks for sharing this though!! +1
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Great post!
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Funny as it may seem my paranoia has already for a long time led me to think this was already happening, now it's just confirmed. It's not like this wasn't going to eventually happen anyways. These are the same people that try to tell us what choices we have as far as what we put in our bodies, it was only a matter of time before they figured out a way to poke their little evil heads even further into our lives. Fuckers.
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Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight.
To continue from the very last line, we've ended up here with hardly a fight because the vast majority of the victims of internet spying even if they knew about the loss of privacy, wouldn't care. They feel that privacy is the price you HAVE to pay in order to use all the great things that modern technology offers. The benefits of easily searchable websites, instantaneous videos, constant connection via social media is worth the price you pay in forfeited privacy. In a democracy, the ultimate party to blame is always the citizen. You cannot blame the government or corporations for taking your privacy, when it is the citizen that willingly gives up that privacy in exchange for a facebook graph search or a twitter connection to your favorite celebrity. It is sad that we live in a society where there is no privacy. It's sadder still that no one even cares that there is no more privacy.
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Good article!
There are ways around this, although it's getting harder.
Use Walmarts 'BlueBird'. Get a bum downtown (with ID + secondary ID) get him to get you a PO box. Buy a throw away phone, and don't turn it on while at home, or at places that you want big brother to know about. Get a clean computer, load a live operating system (doesn't save to hard drive) Get a antenna (make one out of a old Primestar antenna or drain pipe-google how) and log on via your neighbor's wi-fi. The WEP protection can be cracked easily with open source tools.
It takes work, and I haven't done all this, but it can be done. Articles like this educate people, although a lot of people don't like what they hear. When you abuse substances, you better try to lower your 'footprint' if you value your freedom. Sites like SR and the forums can disseminate information like the above article and precautions. All is not lost!
All this does is thin out the herd. The ones that are left are stronger!
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Thanks, OP.
As if my day is not already bad enough.
I knew, but you just had to confirm it didn't ya?
Thanks! >:(
No, really, I +1'd you. ;D
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We are living within the universe of 1984...
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So true, it's been this way for years i thought more people would know about it.
However i also think that people feel "safe" in their house accessing the internet from behind their locked doors, Nearly every single business now has a facebook, Why? so that they can gether information that they use for consumer marketing, But what happens once they'v got all the information they need? You think it gets discarded. hell no the government get passed the details and build up profiles on those they deem, "risky".
every single thing you have searched for on the clearnet, All the porn you've watched, The people you've contacted. Everything is all recorded.
that is like people that say the Cia and government isn't still doing tests on soldiers, You have to be shitting me? I know of soldiers "KIA" in Afghanistan who never died, Put it that way.
Project Mk ultra was only the beginning. believe it. very few peple who know details are still alive i wonder why . it's all gas leaks and hit and runs, Climbing accidents. you get the picture.
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Fixing this requires strong government will, but they're just as punch-drunk on data as the corporations.
Horse shit. Fixing this requires eliminating government first, then the corporations will die without protection from the state. Nice article, but the author is still thinking inside the box. Imagine no government whatsoever and then possibilities are endless.
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Well, yes.
But you should be a little happier with the situation. You see people like us are people who realize this. Most of the people who read this forum are the kind of people who've taken or are taking steps to protect themselves. It's everybody else who is fucked.
During world war 2 the allies bombed buildings that contained useful data in census records about ethnicity. Saved the lives of countless Jews and other dissidents against the fascist state.
Today, nothing so ironically humanitarian as a huge bomb could be used to achieve the same end. Future wars will be absolutely vicious, genocide can be achieved with an efficiency that the German machine could not hope to accomplish. As much as the average civilian imagines SR and the Darknet to be disreputable, the fact of the matter is that things like Tor could be the only thing standing between freedom and oblivion for western liberalism. That may sound dramatic but I don't believe it really is. I actually believe that Tor is used, net balance, for the wrong reasons (clearly I don't mean SR, it is that by a long shot, the most visited links in the Darknet are those for child pornography, I don't believe they're a majority, but that they are the most frequent users is very likely), but that in the longer term it will serve a much greater humanitarian function, in the same sense as the purpose as NATO's Operation Gladio, only that it will actually work far better. Defense subtracts from the economy every year, but when you need it, you really really need it. People don't like Operation Condor or Gladio, but frankly the collateral damage was a drop in the bucket vs the potential harm posed by Communism and repeatedly demonstrated again and again. It's a fact that many people in some districts turned to cannibalism in Cambodia, Soviet Russian and Maoist China, yet the McCarthyism and ills that attended such paranoia seem to get more airtime.
There is an awful lot of pressure on Roger Dingledine and the other Tor developers to get it right, and outside of a small series of communities they get little succor for it. Tor is far more important that any social networking site like Facebook or Twitter. When they write the history books, I think it more likely Tor will get a chapter and Facebook will get nary a mention. It's the software equivalent of an invisibility cloak and with an age of ubiquitous surveillance I don't think markets and democracy could go underground in the same way as they did in the 20th century in many states. Future wars will be all about information and You Do Not Want the other side's hackers to get to your people. Knowing encryption isn't just about a handy way to obtain drugs, it could be the key to your survival.
tldr; Run or fund more Tor nodes.
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WB pine <3
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Pine +1. when i first started using Sr you helped me with my PGP etc, i was wondering where you had gotten too, hadn't seen any of your posts for a while which are usually well worth a read :) I wouldn't even consider using the deepnet without protecting myself , I took a week or two to suss everything out before i started ordering.
Without sounding like some conspiricy theorist idiot, You would have to be living in the shade to not realize that the government is clearly not a democracy. People are figureheads to fuck knows who. there are "illegal" military operations going on all over the world. who is to say which are right or wrong, not me, but they happen. Experimentation?it happens, not so much with hallucionagens like LSD but with newer drugs that we dont even know about yet. Future wars will be fought with weapons so evil you couldn't believe. You are right there, it will be on a scale neither the nazis could ever imagine.
with the speed that technology is rapidly evolving, becoming easier and easier to invent things, The weapons that we will create and the things that we will do with them will limit us a society in the sense of we will be slowed down in space exploration finding new materials everything. It's going to be a big bad ride in the next 50 years if im still here.
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Future wars will be absolutely vicious, genocide can be achieved with an efficiency that the German machine could not hope to accomplish.
Wars have always been this way. Only the technology and faces change. The only thing technology has done has enabled more efficient killing at a faster rate. On the whole I agree with what you said about TOR though. 8)
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tldr; Run or fund more Tor nodes.
And use Tor as much as possible to legitimize it.
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WB pine <3
Pine +1. when i first started using Sr you helped me with my PGP etc, i was wondering where you had gotten too, hadn't seen any of your posts for a while which are usually well worth a read :) I wouldn't even consider using the deepnet without protecting myself , I took a week or two to suss everything out before i started ordering.
Thanks guys! :)
Without sounding like some conspiricy theorist idiot, You would have to be living in the shade to not realize that the government is clearly not a democracy. People are figureheads to fuck knows who. there are "illegal" military operations going on all over the world. who is to say which are right or wrong, not me, but they happen. Experimentation?it happens, not so much with hallucionagens like LSD but with newer drugs that we dont even know about yet. Future wars will be fought with weapons so evil you couldn't believe. You are right there, it will be on a scale neither the nazis could ever imagine.
with the speed that technology is rapidly evolving, becoming easier and easier to invent things, The weapons that we will create and the things that we will do with them will limit us a society in the sense of we will be slowed down in space exploration finding new materials everything. It's going to be a big bad ride in the next 50 years if im still here.
Wars have always been this way. Only the technology and faces change. The only thing technology has done has enabled more efficient killing at a faster rate. On the whole I agree with what you said about TOR though. 8)
Yes to all of that. I believe that we are in teetering on the brink of something awful, I mentioned as much a few months ago when I made a thread about the potential for a new form of civil conflict in the western world.
http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=70911.msg586306#msg586306
Our political intelligentsia seem to be asleep at the wheel.
tldr; Run or fund more Tor nodes.
And use Tor as much as possible to legitimize it.
Amen!
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I agree. There are two options in my book: End of the world or a new dark age.
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Related article by Schneier.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/16/internet-of-things-privacy-google
Will giving the internet eyes and ears mean the end of privacy?
Corporations and governments are turning the internet into a colossal, always-on surveillance tool. Once passive objects are able to report what's happening, where is the power balance?
The internet has turned into a massive surveillance tool. We're constantly monitored on the internet by hundreds of companies -- both familiar and unfamiliar. Everything we do there is recorded, collected, and collated – sometimes by corporations wanting to sell us stuff and sometimes by governments wanting to keep an eye on us.
Ephemeral conversation is over. Wholesale surveillance is the norm. Maintaining privacy from these powerful entities is basically impossible, and any illusion of privacy we maintain is based either on ignorance or on our unwillingness to accept what's really going on.
It's about to get worse, though. Companies such as Google may know more about your personal interests than your spouse, but so far it's been limited by the fact that these companies only see computer data. And even though your computer habits are increasingly being linked to your offline behaviour, it's still only behaviour that involves computers.
The Internet of Things refers to a world where much more than our computers and cell phones is internet-enabled. Soon there will be internet-connected modules on our cars and home appliances. Internet-enabled medical devices will collect real-time health data about us. There'll be internet-connected tags on our clothing. In its extreme, everything can be connected to the internet. It's really just a matter of time, as these self-powered wireless-enabled computers become smaller and cheaper.
Lots has been written about the "Internet of Things" and how it will change society for the better. It's true that it will make a lot of wonderful things possible, but the "Internet of Things" will also allow for an even greater amount of surveillance than there is today. The Internet of Things gives the governments and corporations that follow our every move something they don't yet have: eyes and ears.
Soon everything we do, both online and offline, will be recorded and stored forever. The only question remaining is who will have access to all of this information, and under what rules.
We're seeing an initial glimmer of this from how location sensors on your mobile phone are being used to track you. Of course your cell provider needs to know where you are; it can't route your phone calls to your phone otherwise. But most of us broadcast our location information to many other companies whose apps we've installed on our phone. Google Maps certainly, but also a surprising number of app vendors who collect that information. It can be used to determine where you live, where you work, and who you spend time with.
Another early adopter was Nike, whose Nike+ shoes communicate with your iPod or iPhone and track your exercising. More generally, medical devices are starting to be internet-enabled, collecting and reporting a variety of health data. Wiring appliances to the internet is one of the pillars of the smart electric grid. Yes, there are huge potential savings associated with the smart grid, but it will also allow power companies – and anyone they decide to sell the data to – to monitor how people move about their house and how they spend their time.
Drones are the another "thing" moving onto the internet. As their price continues to drop and their capabilities increase, they will become a very powerful surveillance tool. Their cameras are powerful enough to see faces clearly, and there are enough tagged photographs on the internet to identify many of us. We're not yet up to a real-time Google Earth equivalent, but it's not more than a few years away. And drones are just a specific application of CCTV cameras, which have been monitoring us for years, and will increasingly be networked.
Google's internet-enabled glasses – Google Glass – are another major step down this path of surveillance. Their ability to record both audio and video will bring ubiquitous surveillance to the next level. Once they're common, you might never know when you're being recorded in both audio and video. You might as well assume that everything you do and say will be recorded and saved forever.
In the near term, at least, the sheer volume of data will limit the sorts of conclusions that can be drawn. The invasiveness of these technologies depends on asking the right questions. For example, if a private investigator is watching you in the physical world, she or he might observe odd behaviour and investigate further based on that. Such serendipitous observations are harder to achieve when you're filtering databases based on pre-programmed queries. In other words, it's easier to ask questions about what you purchased and where you were than to ask what you did with your purchases and why you went where you did. These analytical limitations also mean that companies like Google and Facebook will benefit more from the Internet of Things than individuals – not only because they have access to more data, but also because they have more sophisticated query technology. And as technology continues to improve, the ability to automatically analyse this massive data stream will improve.
In the longer term, the Internet of Things means ubiquitous surveillance. If an object "knows" you have purchased it, and communicates via either Wi-Fi or the mobile network, then whoever or whatever it is communicating with will know where you are. Your car will know who is in it, who is driving, and what traffic laws that driver is following or ignoring. No need to show ID; your identity will already be known. Store clerks could know your name, address, and income level as soon as you walk through the door. Billboards will tailor ads to you, and record how you respond to them. Fast food restaurants will know what you usually order, and exactly how to entice you to order more. Lots of companies will know whom you spend your days – and nights – with. Facebook will know about any new relationship status before you bother to change it on your profile. And all of this information will all be saved, correlated, and studied. Even now, it feels a lot like science fiction.
Will you know any of this? Will your friends? It depends. Lots of these devices have, and will have, privacy settings. But these settings are remarkable not in how much privacy they afford, but in how much they deny. Access will likely be similar to your browsing habits, your files stored on Dropbox, your searches on Google, and your text messages from your phone. All of your data is saved by those companies – and many others – correlated, and then bought and sold without your knowledge or consent. You'd think that your privacy settings would keep random strangers from learning everything about you, but it only keeps random strangers who don't pay for the privilege – or don't work for the government and have the ability to demand the data. Power is what matters here: you'll be able to keep the powerless from invading your privacy, but you'll have no ability to prevent the powerful from doing it again and again.