Yet Another NSA Abuse...'Bullrun'...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?_r=0

So much for encryption to preserve privacy...

 

It's sad that we have to consider any electronic interaction to be monitored by our government. Land of the free indeed.

 

Worse...we have no idea how they will use the info. If they are interested in non illegal communications (or political speech) they can/will forward the name and data to 3rd party government agencies and a trumped up charge appears and the poor victim is done, and has no idea why he was singled out...nor will the court.

 

It was only a matter of time before we learned that the NSA has managed to thwart much of the encryption that protects telephone and online communication, but new revelations show the extent to which the agency, and Britain’s GCHQ, have gone to systematically undermine encryption.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-backdoored-and-stole-keys/

 

Honestly the worst part about these NSA threads is the lack of comments. I don't know if it's from fear or just not caring, but either is horrible. This is a major issue. I don't understand why it is hardly being addressed on this forum. I mean I know most posters take their cue from their political party, but (*)(*)(*)(*) how hard is it to have an open mind before your thoughts are given to you by your party?

 

Not hard at all, as a Nationalist I'm an independent who wants the safety and security of my country first and foremost. And frankly this is discouraging.

 

Many of the headlines I have been seeing about this have been misleading. It isn't that the NSA has been "cracking" the encryption, it is that they have been having back doors put in. All of these companies have been rolling over for them. Do NOT trust third party encryption and assume any closed source or proprietary encryption software has backdoors for the government. If you have communications you don't want Uncle Sam reading use open source encryption, such as PGP. They can't put back doors in there because the code is there for all to see.

 

about the lack of comments on NSA: the majority of the accounts/posts I've seen on this site are fixated on race baiting, trivial complaints (feet on desk) class warfare and conspiracy theories about anything government, personalizing everything that happens into some unending soap opera goof ball super-drama about the president and various political and religious groups.

whether reacting to a collectively deliberate debate unfriendly tactic or not, looks like probable would-be activists against NSA (or Syria etc) passing through are instead spending worthless time being manipulated into calling out sensationalist bizarro comments about the president or any social issue trying to defend human decency (!)

when ignored, a new group of names cycle through and the comments becomes more outrageous (just like tv) to keep your attention. Sometimes you'll even get the good cop for awhile taking you back in to the debate but then it flips back again. You'd get bored if tactics didn't change and then you might address things that mattered in reality like NSA, Citizens United, Interventionism.. etc

I do think overall the lack of interest and action in American politics has to do with people getting discouraged by taking interaction online too closely to heart. ( I also believe there are well financed interests that know that)
People become focused on Americans they can't stand rather than something like NSA etc and the ability to make some positive changes important to everyone.
We're mostly under the spell of crowd control. I think.
just a thought.

Anyway, there are probably a a few good productive organizations out there fighting all of this that probably get their websites trolled on a regular basis that could use some support.
Worth checking out

 

Wow, surprise surprise. Our government is getting our private information on the internet. I really hope they happen to open it open one say so we know exactly what they're doing.

 

It would seem that the gov't just can't become East Germany fast enough.

[sarcasm]
I'm sure if we keep voting for clowns from the same two parties things will get better.
[/sarcasm]

 

The problem is simple...No one in Congress knows about ALL these programs and schemes and what they do know is sanitized and fluffied so as to make the abuse appear necessary and benevolent.

What we need is a real, powerful, 3rd party to examine all the schemes openly and transparently. All abuse should be stopped and prosecuted. All ineffective schemes closed, and all judicial over-site examined to determine if we have seen abuse there as well, such as mass and blanket warrants. A new transparent over-site program need be established, one where folk can see if they have been targeted and one with recourse to the courts when one has been denied a right without actual cause. An example of abuse is the secret no fly list where one can get added without review, knowledge or recourse.

 

Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/

the gist: endless obscure laws you probably don't know as well as out of date laws, plus the ability to track you everywhere and read everything you write.
equals 100% effective law enforcement. Police already abuse their power punishment could be selective like there are no laws at all.
What happens to our ability to challenge out of date laws or experience alternative ideas?

 

Other countries' military use modern encryption.

Do you not want our intelligence agencies to have the capability to crack it?

 

Coercing companies into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door does nothing to help intelligence agencies crack the encryption of a foreign military.

 

Other countries buy a lot of their encryption tech off the open market.

 

Really? Which ones?

 

Cracking foreign intel is not the issue. Snooping on every American 24/7 is the problem...Domestic abuse is the problem.

 

Notably China. Their encryption systems are either reverse engineered US systems or pirated commercially available ones.

- - - Updated - - -

This is one of those "dual use" technologies.

 

How do you know this? Actually, it seems like you don't know since you threw out two different possibilities.

It would seem much more likely that the Chinese military would have created their own encryption systems. They aren't exactly dumb over there and the state certainly has the resources required.

What is the source of your assertion? You're not just guessing, are you?

Also, if they reverse engineered US systems then wouldn't it be likely that the US government backdoor would NOT be included? Why would they code in a backdoor for a foreign government?

 

Maybe it's because there's so little information to even comment on. Basically, there are people who will say "that's terrible and Orwellian, etc." and those who will say "but the government needs to do this to keep us safe". And that's about it. It comes down to people who trust the government vs those who don't, and the name calling between those groups.

 

There is certainly enough information out there to make a decision, and the fact that government has been caught lying about what is going on several times in this same chain of leaks should alert anyone who is paying attention that we don't know how far down the rabbit hole this goes. How anyone can be in support of this knowing full well that they have no idea of what is happening is beyond me; this is the antithesis of a free society. I understand that people want safety and all but I'm amazed at how many people seem to think that 9/11 was the start of a major offensive that is being staved off by patting down 6 year olds at the airport and filtering through all electronic communications for clues. Going through my deals on the internet solves nothing because I am not a terrorist. The same can be said of you and every other poster on this forum. I would be shocked if anyone on this form was even considering violent action against the government, and I'd be more shocked if the only way that was found was by going through all of our electronic communications. There are other, targeted ways to do this. Hell warrants, even ones that are not secret, can be involved! It's worked before and it will continue to work. You don't have to monitor my mothers e-mail to see who has been going to extremist websites looking for hints on how to do bad things.

 

To the encryption bit, one of those slides showed that Microsoft was one of the first on board with the back door policy. This likely explains why when you are looking up encryption for .net (their product) it tells you to use their encryption vs another because theirs is more secure. I also wouldn't doubt that they have machines running algorithms to break whatever encryption they don't currently know as well as teams of analysts looking to break it. That's also a problem I have with open source; if you know how it is being done then you are half way there. I'm sure people more gifted than I who have been at this sort of thing for decades can come up with some clever ideas to get around things. It happens all the time. Remember how 128 bit was supposed to take hundreds of lifetimes to crack? Well....

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/researchers_crack_923-bit_encryption_set_new_world_record

Remember when it was announced that SandForce 2000 series-based SSDs were only obscurifying data at 128-bit AES encryption, rather than the 256-bit protection promised? Turns out it doesn't matter, because a team of researchers recently managed to crack open a 278 digit, 923-bit long pairing-based cryptography system. That's a new world record and up until the time it happened, breaking cryptography that complex was thought to be impossible.

Edit:

I realize cracking encryption is the job of the NSA, so I'm not opposed to them doing so. What I am opposed to is the dragnet monitoring they do. They need to be targeted, and those targets designated for an actual reason. This domestic monitoring and storage is unacceptable. We are citizens, not suspects.

 

Which requires extreme oversite to prevent abuse.....

 

And to add to the abuse joy...they have their snouts in cellphones also...

http://www.spiegel.de/international...nsa-can-spy-on-smart-phone-data-a-920971.html

There is no privacy...Griswald has been reversed by simple government abuse.

 

And of course we get abused warrant practices

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...6ef658-0fe5-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html