

Use Tor, Get Targeted By the NSA - daw___
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/21/1443204/use-tor-get-targeted-by-the-nsa

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alan_cx
Given that now we are all suspects in waiting, use of anything to protect
privacy is going to be evidence of, well... something. Governments, for some
weirdo reason, think that no one should have need for privacy, if they are
decent lawful people. Despite individuals in government insisting on personal
privacy for them selves.

What bothers me is that the more we use systems to protect our selves, the
more governments will become paranoid because they may not be able to monitor
us to reassure them selves that we are not up to no good. This could well make
them react by telling the mass population that "terrorists" and "criminals",
might as well bung "pedophiles" in there too, are communicating "securely". We
will prove their paranoia, give them the evidence they can twist and use. It
will become more and more twisted, with the whole thing artificially
ratcheting up. This seems to be how governments do things these days.

However, perhaps the severe danger government face is that privacy may catch
on. Imagine if people begin to default to the most secure methods they can
get. Simple add-ons that enforce using HTTPS where available, browsers that
block tracking, more secure email, and so on. Might not be robust and perfect,
but the internet would see more and more traffic definable as "secure". As
this goes on, these secure services will become faster, easier, and more
secure, enabling more and more people to be easily secure. Worse still, the
software would become independent and open sourced for verification. In the
end, even the NSA should have difficulty keeping up and cracking the security.
The more data that is encrypted, the more data they will feel they have to
keep.

Dunno quite where I am going with this, but I reckon that by aggressively
spying on mass population government is making their own job much harder in
the long run. It could force the internet and communications in general to
become secure beyond their capabilities to crack. Then all that is left is
blackmailing people to give up keys with threats of prison, or worse.

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DanBC
Cipher punks used to urge everyone to run encryption software as often as
possible. This was to make sure that privacy and anonymity because the
default, and that people wanting to breach that privacy had to justify it.
Those people couldn't just say "only the bad guys try to hide what they're
doing".

It feels a bit like TV crime shows. In reality you never talk without a lawyer
present. On TV it's only the bad guys who lawyer up.

~~~
cinquemb
> _It feels a bit like TV crime shows. In reality you never talk without a
> lawyer present. On TV it 's only the bad guys who lawyer up._

Maybe that's what they want the masses to think…

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goblin89
So it seems that NSA analysts are guided to assume you're not a US citizen—and
act like corresponding privacy laws don't apply—when you mask your location in
an attempt to preserve anonymity online.

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vy8vWJlco
This is where saturation flooding of meaningless garbage can play a role in
anonymization. In addition to making timing attacks more difficult, bulk
garbage data provides a cheap smokescreen for the anonymized traffic and
participants, increasing the burden for storage and analysis.

I'm pretty sure even the NSA would have a hard time storing and sorting
through the collective output of everyone's /dev/random or /dev/urandom.

It's also a very low-risk thing to do - less so than even routing. If routing,
one can just top up a channel with garbage to whatever rate both sides agree
upon. It needn't affect speeds for others.

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levosmetalo
Is this some kind of campaign to scare off people using privacy protection
techniques? What's next, to force people to use credit cards instead of cash
so that their spending habits could be easier to track?

~~~
wavefunction
"Don't be a square fumbling for your cash or writing a check, simply wave your
magic card over the pad and be on your way like a cool dude cause other people
are behind you waiting to consume. Chicks don't dig squares."

That's the actual subtext of more than one commercial in the US.

Here's one for example:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuMgRN2Atvk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuMgRN2Atvk)

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jedbrown
"In light of the recent leaks about the NSA's illegal spying, I've decided to
go back to using M-x spook output in my email signatures."

[http://lwn.net/Articles/554941/](http://lwn.net/Articles/554941/)

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atirip
That is what we all should do. Imagine when lot of internet users globally
used Tor and encrypted all their messages. Just because. NSA would go nuts
trying to target them all.

~~~
guizzy
I am Spartacus!

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tete
Come, use Tor and join the fun then. If we all do we will all be labeled
terrorists, which is so trendy these days.

And lets get all cool EFF stickers for our laptops!

[https://supporters.eff.org/shop](https://supporters.eff.org/shop)

