And this is why we all need to start encrypting everything. Every HTTP request, every email. There's strength in numbers and privacy in a crowd. They may have massive resources but they're not limitless, we have the technology available to render tools like PRISM unfeasible for the foreseeable future, the choice is ours.
It's really chilling when you realize this is your government you're talking about. It sounds like some dystopian future where normal citizens have to hide from their government's eye, but it's here and now.
Encrypt your email. Help support jobs for mathnerdspooks. Seriously, the more people they have to hire to sort our garbage personal communications, the more likely future leaks will be about this invasive, wasteful, unnecessary threat to (life, the universe, everything).
Indeed that is the problem, we are now at the point where you are marked a target for trying to keep some privacy between you and your friends, when you try to keep a third-party, the government, at bay your citizenship rights are temporarily suspended.
"Deine papiere bitte" on the streets is not that far away. Actually what we have today is worse, self-censorship and suspension of rights.
>"Deine papiere bitte" on the streets is not that far away.
Yup. It is practically here, license plate scanners, NSA metadata with location, constant surveillance. The only thing missing is automatic enforcement of the many petty crimes we commit each day (but you will be threatened with them if the gov't needs you to inform against someone, or simply wants you to plead guilty to some crime).
As long as there is no default way of doing that for the majority of activity of the lowly user it will not succeed. If, e.g., Mozilla and Ubuntu built it in to all their assets by default with the ability to disable it, then you might have a working plan to overload and drain away the resources put towards decrypting data.
Does it dawn on anyone else that our government has and will continue to have turned on its own people. Let that sink in for a couple seconds. The the majority of the legislature instituted it and the executive has been executing it with impunity.
It is already bad enough just based on principle as to what is being done to the rest of the world, but our own government has turned on its own people. Just like Europe didn't quite understand what it was getting into, let's say late ~1910 and again in ~1930, because what was to come was so beyond their experience and comprehension; we are making the same mistake and not quite comprehending the ramifications and consequences that will wash over us.
No one wants to acknowledge it, but the enemy is within. Tyranny is spreading the way it does and will not be apparent until it is too late.
The irony is that reforming the U.S. so that it turned insular and tore itself apart was the very goal of the terrorists who this system is supposed to defend against. The remedy is becoming the disease itself.
As a non-US citizen, they can keep all my communications forever anyway. It seems to me that my only redress is to encrypt as much as I can now so as to chaff that one time at some point in the future when I do have something to hide.
Yep, and I think they can even keep all the communications of everyone in the US you communicate with.
Not encrypting to stay secure is just plain fucking stupid. If you don't encrypt they can read your shit anyways. Plus "reasonably believed to contain secret meaning" in all likelihood means "whatever the fuck we want".
As someone else already noted: There's strength in numbers. Let's just encrypt everything and have those fuckers deal with humongous amounts of data, most of which will be completely useless. Shit, if you're inclined to do so let some piece of software run all day that just produces encrypted gibberish and sends it off to random recipients.
> As someone else already noted: There's strength in numbers. Let's just encrypt everything and have those fuckers deal with humongous amounts of data
Just so you know; the reasoning behind huge NSA camp they are building in Utah is not because huge camps are cool, but because someone at decisions level was presented with average number of data an average citizen of us soil digest per day, and that number was overwhelming.
So, if we all encrypt everything, 2 things gonna happen:
Either they will ask to quadruple their funding and build 10 more Utah-type camps "because we need more storage and CPU resources to catch those pesky terrorist", or
The problem will be so huge for the government that it will ban usage of PGP/encrypting. The light version of banning would be, for example: extra tax if you encrypt your data. I can see it easily reasoned: terrorist use PGP encryption so the government uses lots of resources (that equals to money) to crack those down so in order to keep their operation running they need extra money. Of course if you do not use PGP you don't have to pay that tax. If you do use PGP, you are required to pay it. Simple checkbox on your tax form. Now, if they every catch you with some encrypted files that they can reasonably say belongs to you (just like the can/cannot tell the child porn files belong to you [they can always upload them themselves]), you will be charge with a severe fine or imprisonment up to 25 years for aiding terrorist [by not supporting NSA Encryption Unit financially -- remember Bush motto? you not with us, you with terrorist].
So, long story short. Just pissing them off and encrypting everything will not fix the issue. It will just give them more reasons to ask for more funding. And they will get them.
Nobody should believe that any encryption used today will be secure against attack from anyone after nnn days due to technological advance. Even if no weakness is ever found with which to attack the encryption, Moore's Law will eventually take care of it.
edit: yeah, I was talking out my ass, get over it. I still think it's imprudent to assume that encrypted files may never be compromised in the future.
I often TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) as containers to transport private documents on USB or in emails, and able to use multiple encryption algorithms for the containers (e.g. AES-Twofish-Serpent). Something like this will presumably slow them [NSA] down umpteen amounts of times?
> Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.
You probably don't need to use 3 cyphers. Just make sure you're storing your private key somewhere safe.
Not sure, I'm not a crypto wizard. My guess would be that "it depends". What you describe was more-or-less the basis for 3DES IIRC, but (knowing crypto) you could probably just as easily accidentally break the cryptosystem to the effectiveness of just the best scheme.
They are collection a ton of data. As time goes on, if a large portion of it is encrypted, then it may not be feasible to break it all, even with Moore's Law. They may just have to be selective with it. You can imagine that even in if the US becomes a new-age Nazi Germany / Stalin's Russia, it may still be prohibitively expensive to go spelunking through years old communications looking for people with possible subversive thoughts.
Edit: It would probably just be easier at that point to ban encryption going forward.
I should have known better than to paraphrase or quote "Moore's Law" out of context around here. I usually feel its safe to do so because I don't really consider Moore's Law to be Law, as much as "Moore's Quite Good Prediction"
s/Moore's Law/technological advance and\/or advances in cryptanalysis/
I wonder if you could tie up the NSA with honeypot spam? Just send tons of encrypted data from a bunch of different sources, 24/7. You could even hide your legitimate messages within it.
Does a system like that exist? A constant stream of random bytes, some of it real information, most of it not. Only those intended to be the recipient know where to look.
It's often possible to distinguish random data from encrypted data using something like a chi square test. However, if you just encrypted random bytes, then it would look just as encrypted as your real data (because it is). Alternatively, you could just encrypt spam emails (it'd be cute if a system like this encrypted and sent every spam email that you received).
...system like this encrypted and sent every spam email that you received
I wanted to like this proposal, but then I realized these encrypted spams have to be sent somewhere. Any ethical target would be too easy for "the bad guys" to filter. Oh well.
I can't edit that now but actions speak louder than words - get your GPG key set up today: http://gpgtools.github.io/GPGTools_Homepage/keychain/ It takes 5 minutes, tops. If you've spent 5 minutes talking or worrying about this issue you owe it to yourself to do it. Set it up with your favorite email client and encourage your friends to do the same.
I've had my public key available on my website for years. Nobody uses it. The problem is social: people are not in the habit of using encryption and only the technically adept have any idea how. Even my correspondents who know how to use gpg don't bother.
That, and the fact that public/private key encryption is difficult to understand on a conceptual level, uses poor, inconsistent, or misleading terminology, and has a user-hostile interface with GPG or a buggy and error-prone interface with Enigmail. The problem is social in part because we've done such a poor job packaging and marketing the solution.
This, a thousand times this. I could write an entire post on the key metaphor alone. I don't think anyone has ever had their conceptual understanding improved by calling the codes you use to encrypt and decrypt things 'keys'. If we insist on calling them that, can we at least make sure to explain why it's called a key, instead of giving people the impression that it somehow works like an actual key?
I wonder whether users need to know the difference.
Seriously, the are few situations where someone's actually going to want to post their private key to the internet - at least if they understand what it is - so what are we imaging that they're doing with it that they need to know about it in the first place?
You're probably going to want them to have a backup, but you can have them make a backup without having them understand the difference - you just have your program back up a folder structure that the private key is hidden somewhere in and only make the public one obvious. Make them aware that if they don't backup they won't be able to access their emails - should the worst happen - but don't tell them why. Someone with a push-button understanding of computer... they just don't really need to know why.
... -sigh-
I almost wonder whether it wouldn't be easier to market public-private key crypto as a packaged solution. Buy an encrypted email address kind of thing. Send people a physical token they mentally associate with that email address and tell them not to lose it.
Except in other contexts, the use of the public and private keys is reversed. I use my private key to generate signatures: does it aid understanding to tell someone to use my "lock" to verify such signatures?
GPG has a sucky API and crazy CLI. It's a stack of eggs that everyone is scared to improve.
People don't even try to understand the bare basics of PKI or even security because they are fundamental lazy and not required too. No one expects them to understand the math, just the few processes required for basic usage. If you can understand the arcane rules of baseball, or how to drive a stick, or solder, or field strip a pistol or basic cooking, you can learn how to "use" encryption.
> That, and the fact that public/private key encryption is difficult to understand on a conceptual level, uses poor, inconsistent, or misleading terminology
Consider https. That is very easy to use, because the user doesn't have to do anything to use it. The user doesn't need to know anything about encryption.
> Consider https. That is very easy to use, because the user doesn't have to do anything to use it. The user doesn't need to know anything about encryption.
Doesn't this mean that many users will just click through any errors, thus making https less secure than it could be?
Consider the evolution of warnings. Padlocks were shown in different states and colours, then pop-up dialogue boxes appeared, and now Chrome has an entire red screen with a suitably stern warning.
You're right that https is the easiest form of PKI for users to understand. And they still get it wrong. And that's for encryption that could make a difference to their lives - people could steal their money or their products or whatnot.
I remember reading about Hushmail a few years back, encryption was built in the web based email system with PGP, the use would never need to worry about encrypting the mail since it was baked in out of the box, esp between hushmail accounts.
The only problem was that the system was compromised in order to comply with US requests.
In all seriousness, I agree that it's a social problem. I think we (in the tech industry) can do a better job of making the tools easier to use. If we really want to make something like PGP take off, we'll have to provide easy tools that integrate with people's email clients and provide dead simple tutorials of how to get started.
The best way to make people use it is to make it seamless.
I am talking about something like a Chrome/Firefox extension, which creates a GPG key pair for you, uploads the public to some central server and encrypts stuff like the text in your hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail, etc, after you press "send" and before the text is sent to google.
Then, at the other side, the a user with the same extension opens the new message and as soon as it appears, the extension detects that it is an encrypted message, reads the id of the sender and decrypts the message.
There are lots of details which makes this difficult to implement... but that would be the only way to make the vast majority of people use public key encryption.
I think there is a certain level of distrust of the technology on top. I had a discussion about encryption with a group of non-technical peers a while back and every single one of them strongly believed that it could be circumvented with ease. If you come with that attitude, you'll find no reason to use encryption, as it is only as good as plain text at that point anyway.
Yes, and that's why the software needs to be easier to use. In fact it should be effortless: once installed, it should automatically encrypt on the way out and decrypt on the way in.
I combine this with the HTTPS Finder https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/https-finder/ which detects when a HTTPS version of a site exists and redirects you. It also writes a rule for HTTPS Everywhere so you don't visit the HTTP version again.
The problem is that we are not enough - you have to get the other 95 % not really caring on the bandwagon...and this without causing the slightest bit of additional inconvenience.
You must assume that the NSA already has master keys for all domestic CA root certificates, and given how many were hacked recently, foreign ones too. In which case SSL traffic is effectively the same as plaintext to them.
Is this correct? Wouldn't they still need all of the leaf private keys to decrypt things?
My understanding was that having a CA's private key just enables someone to issue new child keys for that CA. That vulnerability could be addressed with certificate pinning.
Not quite sure what you mean, but for the record, as a general rule CAs do not generate keys. They just sign the public keys coming in as Certificate Signing Requests. Without ever seeing the accompanied private key.
On the other hand, we do have the influence to get something like http://tcpcrypt.org standardized and deployed in commodity operating systems if we really care enough. Then the 95% won't need to care.
95% would be nice, but a few percent should be good enough, if there's enough traffic overall. (And even 100% would not be enough if there's almost no traffic, like in the beginning of the internet.) Absolute numbers matter more than shares, here.
The Direct Project as part of the ARRA stage 2 meaningful use is worth looking at since encrypted emails will be widely adopted by medical professionals. Maybe this project will be useful for the rest of America.
The challenge is if you encrypt every email, you're basically using your own email server and service. The gov't isn't decrypting your HTTPS gmail traffic - it is going to Google, saying "hey, give me msy's emails from 2007 to 2010. k?thnx buhbye!"
So you essentially have to go off the usual grid to run your own email service... then you have to get all your contacts onboard with using it.
I have a client that uses zixmail - webmail that is https and just sends notifications to your plain-old-text email, then you login and read and reply to your email over https. Ironically, it is a gov't agency that makes us use it.. I wonder if they snoop on their own encrypted, vendor-provided secure email?
Lavabit encrypts all of their stored email to the point that if you lose your password there is no way to recover your email. It might be worth checking out their service [1]. I've switched to lavabit from gmail and outside of a minor outage, I have had no complaints.
I loooove lavabit. Stumbled across it a year ago, and it's my primary account for all my freelance work.
The only problem is that a lavabit email is generally viewed as an anonymous (burner) email, so half the services I want to register to just kick the email back as not being "legitimate" enough.
If you want to use something other than "@lavabit.com" for your e-mail address, you can. If you have a domain name, you can point your MX records for your domain at the lavabit servers to have your mail forwarded to your lavabit inbox. For example, you could get "John@Smith.com" and direct it to your lavabit inbox. After setting the MX records, you would just need to send an e-mail to lavabit support to have them set it up on their side.
The vast majority of people are not able to run a mail server. Of the ones that do some should not be doing it because they're not clueful enough to keep it secure and out of blocklists.
> Can't you just use pgp encryption and it doesn't matter where your email is stored.
Most people get freaked out by context menus and right-clicking. You're smart; you're surrounded by smart people; you're surrounded by people who know computers. I think you might be unaware of just how bad most people are with computers.
If they can't get the data in transit, they'll go for the sources and destinations. Legally mandated keyloggers, anyone? An 'adversary' as markedly omnipresent as the NSA has had no problems [1][2][3] with intruding upon infrastructure, and I doubt your pesky little Win8 tablet or your pretty little Linux box would be able to withstand even a fraction of what the NSA could set up as a push-button intrusion system.
> And this is why we all need to start encrypting everything. Every HTTP request, every email. There's strength in numbers and privacy in a crowd.
And strength in numbers is not the only reason to do this. The more people expect that their Internet communications are private by default, the more outrageous it will seem to the general public that encrypted data is an exception to whatever rules there are against storing and targeting data from U.S. citizens. "Encrypt everything by default" is a good policy for changing social attitudes, not just a technological measure to defeat an unconstitutional practice.
Furthermore, it's a counter to the absurd argument that our emails are not private because we share them with third party servers. By encrypting them, we are clearly asserting our intent for them to remain private.
This is almost exactly what I logged in to say. If we all use strong encryption to secure our private communications then we'll quickly exhaust all available decryption resources possessed by any government or entity looking to do massive-scale dragnet surveillance.
We do have a choice here, and our collective decisions will be what shape our future and our future government. Without a concerted effort we're doomed to slip ever closer to a dystopian future of zero privacy and ever present suspicion of everyone.
What is quite telling (at least within US media coverage) is that it is apparently only controversial that the NSA is spying on those in the US. The complete disregard for everyone else in the world seems almost casual, as if it isn't an issue at all.
But indeed, let's keep using encryption. It is, after all, the US government that has a long history(1) of trying to keep encryption out of our non-American hands.
Why would you expect the US government, or ANY government to respect the right of privacy of citizens of other countries? The first duty of government is surely to protect the interests of the country to which it belongs - note that I'm in favour of governments belonging to countries, not the other way around. And that first duty surely indicates that any government should do its upmost to pry into the business of anybody where doing so will offer advantage to its citizens.
Furthermore, it would be weird if this didn't happen. And if your country, whichever one it is, isn't doing this, and some horrible thing happens which might have been avoided by this kind of spying, then your co-citizens will be rightly outraged and demand to know what the hell your government thinks it is doing.
But, equally, your government might [ought?] to consider what it can do to protect its citizens from foreign spying.
Most wicked in all of this is not that the spying takes place, but that it does so within the most diaphanous of legal frameworks. I understand that my government might want to spy on me if it thinks I'm involved in something illegal, but I damn well want a clear, unambiguous, legal framework that says who gets to authorise that spying, for how long, and on what grounds. Oh, and the person who does that authorisation had better be a judge, or an elected official that I can un-elect.
All this we're-so-clever-because-we-found-a-way-to-subvert-the-law-by-cleve-interpretation nonsense needs to be stopped in a career ending way for those doing it. Oh, and the politicians who gave it a wink and a nod need to be named so we can decide what to do with them at the next election.
In summary, countries spy on foreigners. Always have. Always will. But that doesn't excuse them spying on their own. That kind of behaviour has a bad reputation, for a bunch of historically valid reasons.
The current state is a sadly very country-centric perspective.
I'd like to live in a world where we all were able to assert our rights, as stated most elegantly under the Declaration of Human Rights (1).
Article 7:
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 12:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 14:
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
Article 19:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
The USA's own Elanor Roosevelt was the Chair of the CHR, which drafted the Declaration, and the US is a signatory. (2)
Well, maybe, but I think I somewhat prefer the old fashioned way where at least a democracy or republic looked after the interests of its citizens, and hopefully the citizenry had some concept of ethics and fairness towards others in the world.
Now we seem to have this attitude of "Justice for all (multinational) corporations!". Voting the wrong way is terrorism, as far as some of these interests are concerned :-(
Why would you expect the US government, or ANY government to respect the right of privacy of citizens of other countries?
Because being openly hostile to foreigners is not very productive in a world where international commerce is important. What happens to all of those "cloud" companies when nobody trusts their bytes to leave their country's borders?
This is already the case, most of our customers will not host on the cloud (even though it makes business sense to do so) because of this exact reason.
The situation gets nice and juicy when you realize that the NSA has a data sharing agreement with the UK and some other countries.
So if the NSA want to spy on a US citizen they simply enable the UK to spy on that USA citizen and share data afterwards. All very legal and NSA is clear to spy on any US citizen.
Because by not respecting foreign citizens America instead of leader becomes the schoolyard bully. So the US are losing respect, soft power and goodwill with nothing to show for that.
So international isolation in the upcoming turmoil times of re-balancing of the global politics may not be the best time to be.
US seems like post-Birsmarck's Germany right now - too powerful, arrogant and incompetent for its own good.
And that first duty surely indicates that any government should do its upmost to pry into the business of anybody where doing so will offer advantage to its citizens.
Here you are going wrong because this implies every other country should do the same and therefore harm you. This is nothing but war just without shooting people. Every right you claim for you, you have to grant to everybody. You want to perform industry espionage, then don't call it an act of war if they are spying at you. This is one of the deepest roots of all the mess in this world - not being willing to treat everybody equally.
I actually have a nice Gedankenexperiment. Just imagine for one moment Iran would contact the US government and tell them they fear that the USA may be hostile to them and they are concerned about their atomic weapons. Therefore they would like the USA to denuclearise and grant them access to all their nuclear facilities to oversee what they are doing. Can you imagine the laughs?
So what you are basically saying is that the cloud and the free international market of services are dead.
I would prefer if we managed to stop this nation vs nation view on things. But, since this is probably impossible, the way forward is to encrypt everything and stop using foreing cloud services.
In summary, countries spy on foreigners. Always have. Always will.
That's exactly why we have an intelligence arms race developing.
Country A spies on citizens of Country B. Learns all sorts of useful information that could be used for doing some nasty things like black mailing political leaders, manipulating the economy, supporting anti-government groups, etc.
Country B says hey wait a minute. Country A knows more about our our domestic situation than we do because they spy on our citizens and we don't. That could give them a huge strategic advantage. We gotta start spying on our own citizens to stay one step ahead of Country A!
It's the evolution of warfare into the 21st century.
Why would you expect the US government, or ANY government to respect the right of privacy of citizens of other countries?
I want to see what the reaction is when we find out that some foreign country is spying on all communications of American citizens and retaining all their data. For sure it is happening. Someone else mentioned GCHQ UK possibly has the same kind of program running with agreements with NSA. Let's just wait for that one to be exposed. Or maybe China. Or Russia. Or N Korea.
Why would you expect the US government, or ANY government to respect the right of privacy of citizens of other countries?
Oh I don't know... morals? A simple sense of common decency? I know, it brings a chuckle to talk about such qualities when talking about a government, but let's just pretend for the sake of conversation that the government is for the people and by the people and not a self-propagating hostile life-form.
The first duty of government is surely to protect the interests of the country to which it belongs
Do you not see that the foreigner-spying aspect of this this leak does immeasurable damage to US interests, especially US-based companies? Such simple-minded views are used to defend our drone program. To put it crudely, we can't go around the world fucking everyone else in every which way and continue to pretend to be the good guys. The concept of this country being a good citizen of the world hasn't even occurred to most Americans.
your co-citizens will be rightly outraged
You beg the question. They may be outraged, but I don't think they'll be rightly outraged. People tend to have very myopic perspectives in the face of disaster. I don't think that's the bar by which we should set our policy.
Yeah that's what has bothered me. Everyone is rattling on about spying on US citizens (which of course is justified) but hardly anybody seems to point out the blatant disregard for everyone else.
As a non-US citizen (UK) the NSA supposedly has all my communications stored. I have no say in that and it seems that people are treating that as a non-issue. 'Ahh foreigners won't mind.' But we do
I feel like I'm a fairly open-minded guy, but I've just always taken it for granted that Intelligence agencies exist entirely for the purpose of keeping tabs on what other countries and their citizens are doing, in order to know about threats before they become problematic.
I'm curious, do you think it would be unethical for British Intelligence to spy on someone in, say, Pakistan?
But how do you know a foreigner is a potential threat if you're not spying? If a government has a mandate to protect its citizens from foreign harm, it easily follows that the government would attempt to datamine the communications of the entire world. Why did you expect it to be any different?
This sudden outrage is odd, honestly what did people think the NSA did with their tens of billions of dollars per year budget?
That's not justification for spying on everyone all the time. Giving one organisation the power to look at everybody's communications is extremely stupid.
Definitely not a justification, we completely agree there. My point is that this level of surveillance is absolutely inevitable given the mandate that the government has. The only way we could have prevented this is by actively pushing back.
My comment is more about how so many people seem to be blindsided that this is what the NSA does. It should have been assumed, even expected.
But, for example, if they would run a query "select everyone who uses email encryption", and then analyze this subset of people further, then you might have placed yourself under radar, and they can have a closer look at your other non-encrypted traffic. Basically, you revealed that you "have something to hide".
Anyway, I have found that if some article claims that you should or should not do something to protect yourself against NSA, it is almost always written by an amateur. The real experts know that we currently don't know which capabilities NSA has and what exactly they do, so it is almost impossible to assess if something will help or not help or hurt.
My "amateur gut feeling" tells me that if you really want to send something secretly, you should at minimum setup a separate hardware+software with no connection point to your real identity. But this is not advice against NSA, just an opinion.
From what the CIA officer who was operating out of the US embassy in moscow had on him when he was caught by russian authorities recently, that makes sense.
If you'd like to fight back, feel free to send me a heavily encrypted email (it's in my profile) with paragraphs from 1984 (or other related, Big Brother type books)!
Maybe we need the "Herd immunity" of a large number of people using encryption software. If a sufficient number of people are using encryption, then targeting those users becomes less worthwhile.
Or better yet everyone capable start a p2p service with email as the protocol and millions of random encrypted and nonencrypted junk files to an entire web of ever increasing spam emails.
In a world were most people would use encryption, NSA and other agencies would just backdoor consumer hardware or libraries such as OpenSSL and pretend to cry over their sudden loss of power.
Technology is not the solution to this problem, it is society and it can be solved by rule of law, accountability, revolution and such old forgotten concepts.
I tend to assume that Microsoft Windows has backdoors, given their track record and their corporate culture of bending to the will of the government. This means that anything you run off of Windows is already compromised. Open-source operating systems are one way to remove this unknown. The largest ones have the eyeballs of thousands of people scrutinizing them at all times.
I can't speak to hardware backdooring because I know nothing about it. Would this be able to affect end-to-end encryption like GPG? I'm assuming it would have to have extremely complicated analysis to understand the "bigger picture" of the instructions being run on the CPU...and logging every instruction is beyond the capabilities of built-in hardware for most computers, I would think. Are there any good articles on this?
On the other end, the American public needs to wake the fuck up and realize that just because one of us isn't a terrorist doesn't mean this doesn't affect each of us, individually. The government works for us, and we wrote the constitution, not the government. It is ultimately our job to enforce the constitution.
I'm starting to wonder if Americans even deserve free speech if all it's used for is to take pictures of your lunch and post it on instagram, or free press if it only covers a useless string of mundane sludge while dancing around the issues that are defining us as a people.
Really, a million eyes on it? Okay, lets go with that,
to compile OpenSSl you need a compiler and an entire toolchain, an operatingsystem, microcode and hardware. In any layer it is possible for an organization such as NSA to do its dirty deeds.
They dont fabricate their own chips/hardware for fun. Well, maybe for fun too, but not only for fun.
Sure we can't go around trusting trust. OTOH most of the compilers in general use see a number of eyeballs. Ditto for the operating systems. I could even see this becoming the case for hardware eventually. An evil system must model the system that relies on it in order to attack that relying system, while remaining functional in general. The longer you make the chain that inserts your nasty code into higher-layer objects, the more complicated, fragile, and discoverable the attack becomes.
This doesn't follow. The article makes two points:
1. The NSA is allowed to store and analyze encrypted data longer than unencrypted
2. US citizens' encrypted data will be treated the same as non-citizens'
It still seems you have a much better expectation of privacy by encrypting your data and trusting to mathematical proofs that it would take thousands of years to break it; rather than leaving it in the clear, and trusting to five year storage limits and the supposed privileges of American citizenship.
Keep in mind that as a rule of thumb, its useful to assume that the NSA is about 20 years ahead of the public in crypto research. Even if systems like HTTPS and Tor appear secure today, the NSA may already have knowledge of weaknesses that we don't.
I think I first heard this when I took a crypto course in college and read Applied Cryptography, by Bruce Schneier.
There was a section in there about the development of DES. At some point the researchers at IBM showed their work in progress on DES to the NSA, and the NSA made a few suggestions on improvements, one of them was a different set of S-Boxes (basically a bunch of constants used as part of the cipher.) IBM analyzed the new S-Boxes and could find no weaknesses so they used the ones the NSA recommended.
Over a decade later, differential cryptanalysis was discovered and it turned out that the tweaks the NSA had suggested made DES particularly resistant to differential cryptanalysis.
After doing some googling, it seems like the gap has closed since that book was written. They are still ahead, but not as much as they were in the 80's and 90's. Or maybe that's just what they want us to think ;)
But, in general, NSA / GCHQ have many mathematicians working on crypto. Some of them are breaking existing products. Some of them are breaking newer algorithms. Some of them are working on creating newer algorithms.
One example of an important cryptosystem that was invented independently in secret before it was invented is public is public-key crypto. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks)
Employment opportunities for mathematicians are slim, and GCHQ is known for tolerance of the sometimes odd behaviour of people with Asperger's.
Tor is already vulnerable to anyone that can watch a large enough portion of global network traffic. Thanks to the NSA taps on US internet use & the (recently revealed) taps that GCHQ puts on EU internet traffic travelling through the UK it seems likely that the NSA can track Tor users in the US and most of Europe in real time if they choose to.
(It's fairly likely that the US has covertly tapped undersea cables elsewhere in the world as well.)
I think they're both serious about what they're doing (being able to keep encrypted data indefinitely), and they're using these public disclosures to discourage mass adoption of encryption. As everybody here understands, the NSA very likely could not deal with large scale encryption adoption. Scare tactics it is then.
For me it´s not a theory, thats what I said in my comment and I´m pretty sure they ARE actually using these articles to discourage people from using encryption.
Your idea of seeding some /dev/random or attaching some /dev/random to emails sounds like a great idea, and also funny, to me. We should definitely do that!
Actually, if enough of these spring up on various trackers, chances are some real terrorist organization may actually end up making one of these files (but with actual information).
Alternatively, we could set up a mesh of dropbox/cloud accounts. People would connect in pairs and generate their own huge files of garbage. Then they would copy it into each of their dropbox directories and it would propagate n times. If everyone does this every day (write a script to generate random data), there will be a continuous stream of randomly encrypted files across the network. When your cloud drive fills up, delete older files.
While I wouldn't put something like that past them, I don't think that's the case here unless it's part of a much larger conspiracy where Snowden is deliberately leaking misinformation on behalf of the NSA. Because the evidence behind this revelation is a DoJ document signed by the Attorney General authorizing exceptions to the ban on collecting U.S. data, and it was given to The Guardian by Snowden.
I'd rather prefer they store my encrypted data forever over storing my unencrypted data for five years. Yes, they might be able to break the used cipher during my lifetime but there is at least a (good) chance that they will never see my data in plain. Therefore I have to completely disagree with the headline.
It's not really useful in defending this point because the threat doesn't scale.
The NSA can't hire enough heavies to break fingers of every person sending and receiving encrypted data (assuming they could even find the people sending and receiving it without first decrypting).
The difference is, if the assumptions/reassurances about the math/crypto/physics hold, I can be _reasonably_ sure that if they haven't broken my fingers or hit me with a wrench, they've probably not read my email/files. That knowledge of whether they have or haven't "broken my crypto" is of value.
So you're saying: don't force the NSA to get a court order and force you to reveal the unencrypted data, just hand it over to them now so they can look at it any time they want?
At this point, no one has to worry about that if they aren't being individually targeted. I think most people just want to avoid being sucked up in a dragnet along with everyone else and having their communications permanently on record.
True, but that only applies to data in flight. For everything you want to store and look at again you better have a key - otherwise you could just delete everything and arrive at essentially the same result.
All perfectly true, but you've at least made it a bit harder for someone to break your encryption without your knowledge and monitor your communications on an ongoing basis.
I agree with this, especially if you keep in mind that there will probably be a large gap between being able to decrypt today's data in individual cases and being able to crunch it on a large scale.
Great, so the choice is between using everything in the open, unencrypted, and then maybe they won't look at it, or encrypt it and then there's a very high chance they'll look at it.
It seems to chill speech either way. This is why the wholesale spying must stop.
I´m pretty sure the unencrypted communications will be automatically parsed and processed to look for certain patterns or keyword, and if not found, ignored, but after processing nonetheless.
They can attack an encrypted communication and probably decrypt it, but they just want you to be afraid of encrypting with fear of being targeted so that they have it easier to process your information.
But that´s a fallacy and a puny tactic to make the general public afraid of being under scrutiny because of the very reason of using encryption.
They might be able to decypher encrypted communications if they are the minority, but even with their big supercomputers and billions of dollars, I doubt they would be able to process people´s communication if encryption was the majority of communications.
And these articles work towards the NSA´s goals and agenda misleading the public in thinking that it´s better not to use any encryption at all. If the public was educated on this subject and everyone used encryption, I guess they would have a really hard time processing all this information...
>> They can attack an encrypted communication and probably decrypt it
No. If you do it right, nobody on earth can decrypt it. From Bruce Schneier:
>> In fact, we cannot even imagine a world where 256-bit brute force searches are possible. It requires some fundamental breakthroughs in physics and our understanding of the universe. For public-key cryptography, 2048-bit keys have same sort of property; longer is meaningless.
and
>> These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
>> But what about very well funded entities such as the US National Security Agency (NSA)? Could they build a machine to crack a 256 bit key? Assume they could build a theoretical nanocomputer that executes 10^13 instructions per second (approximate rate of atomic vibrations) in a space of a cube with a side that is 5.43nm across (This is the approximate size of a silicon lattice10 atoms wide, or a crystal containing 1000 silicon atoms). Assume that it could calculate an attempt in 10 cycles. Such a computer the size of the earth would take more than 10^13 years (roughly 58 times the estimated age of the earth) to attack a 256 bit algorithm via brute force.
Snowden himself said it in a recent interview: the NSA can not decrypt your messages if you use a reasonable encryption method. They rely on endpoint security.
"They can attack an encrypted communication and probably decrypt it"
Why this assumption? The NSA has NO super-human abilities.
And one of their jobs is to protect gov secrets. Which is why they participated in the AES standard. If you really believe they can decrypt AES, then you believe they chose an algo that is insecure, than would allow China, Russia and others with similar abilities to read any of our nation's secrets.
Not to mention, that there are currently no known attacks that would allow them to decrypt AES in any reasonable amount of time, even if they had every single computer in the world.
If you really believe the NSA can decrypt anything, then you're out in conspiracy-theory land, with magical yet-to-be-invented computers, and humans with super-math abilities.
A larger research budget than the entire open cryptographic community? Maybe. But it's not just about budget. A lot of the smartest cryptographers don't work for the NSA anymore, because they like to publish their research, and/or because industry pays better.
If you haven't broken the algorithm, a "larger hardware budget" really isn't helpful at all. Key sizes are big enough that the laws of physics prevent you from brute-forcing them. From Bruce Schneier: "If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2^192. Of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter." http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_c...
If they've made a huge breakthrough on quantum computers, they could break the popular public-key algorithms, but could only halve the effective key size of symmetric algorithms.
> Key sizes are big enough that the laws of physics prevent you from brute-forcing them
A lot of it still boils down to password guessing. The limitation is in the user's choice of password, not the laws of physics.
Given the techniques listed here http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-mi... (e.g. generating password guesses with Markov chains) suprisingly long and un-obvious passwords are found without brute-forcing the whole space. In other words, you have to pay attention to a whole lot of lateral things to actually be secure. The mathematical properties of the key-space don't matter if your OS has been backdoored and a keystroke logger installed.
That's only true if you have a copy of the user's encrypted private key. You've got that if you've confiscated his hard drive, but it doesn't go over the wire. The key itself is random.
A keylogger bypasses the whole thing but so far nobody's accusing the NSA of hacking lots of domestic computers, and that would definitely do away with the excuse that "we didn't know he was in the U.S."
> That's only true if you have a copy of the user's encrypted private key. it doesn't go over the wire.
I know several people who have put all of their (strong) website passwords in a 1password/keepass/truecrypt file covered by a password that they can remember and type; and then put that on dropbox. Over the wire. I am assuming that this is compromised now.
> nobody's accusing the NSA of hacking lots of domestic computers
I am sitting in front of a domestic computer that is not in the US. The line about "but only for non-americans" is no reassurance whatsoever to the world.
I was familiar with both those stories, and neither is about the NSA hacking into domestic computers (by which I mean, computers in the USA, which is "domestic" for the NSA). Voluntary cooperation by firms is not the same as the NSA surreptitiously installing keyloggers.
And yet you were arguing a few comments up that the keyspace that 1password etc use was too large to ever crack. But you have to remember some master password. Your crypto is only as strong as the weakest part.
> domestic computers (by which I mean, computers in the USA)
I'm sorry, I thought that you meant "computers in people's houses". In the USA or not, I could not care less.
> Voluntary cooperation by firms is not the same as the NSA surreptitiously installing keyloggers
The keyloggers is a logical endpoint of what they would do with the 0-day exploits mentioned in the two articles. Not directly related to the "cooperation by firms"
The annoying thing about this defeatist attitude is that people don't realise it's the same thing as being afraid of their massive resources being employed to purchase enormous kettle elements to boil the ocean.
As a foreigner with an enormous distaste for the US government and a comfortable relationship with cryptography I say; good luck with that fascists, bring it on.
I don't think that I personally have a "defeatist attitude". To guard yourself against someone with superior resources but no superpowers is possible, but you do have to be very careful.
"cryptography" is not enough - but good cryptography with good passwords, and due care at the points where the decryption happens may be.
All the computers in the world wouldn't be able to brute force the strongest crypto algorithms in far more than billions of years. Are you implying that the NSA has access to other planets?
No, but I am implying that your choice of crypto, your choice of passwords, and your security at the points where the decryption happens had all better be good. They have superior resources but no superpowers. You only have to make one mistake in order to be exposed.
This 'tactic' was classified until leaked, so I don't think its purpose is to scare the public. My guess is that they just want tons of ciphertext samples to use in future cryptanalysis work.
Since he's apparently now deep in debriefment with the Ruskies, this would have been a brilliant counter-intel maneuver, leveraging the prejudices of all of us chattering morons to fake out everybody in the world.
That it would have been brilliant, is how I know that General Surveillance and his minions didn't do it.
There's absolutely no evidence that's true. People are just speculating that the Russians might want to do that. As far as anyone knows, Snowden is still sitting in the transit area of the Moscow airport and has never left that location so far.
They can't look at "it" when it's encrypted. They can look at data that is indistinguishable from random noise, and in case it can be decrypted in the future they will finally be able to do what they're doing with unencrypted data right now, probably still with considerable effort.
> the choice is between using everything in the open, unencrypted, and then maybe they won't look at it, or encrypt it and then there's a very high chance they'll look at it
... but then it's encrypted. I'm not willing to take chances with the argument that if I send everything in the clear and take steps to act non-suspiciously then they won't intrude on my privacy. What I send in the clear I assume will be looked at; as for what is encrypted, they are welcome to store it and look at it as much as they like. (Yes, maybe they can break OpenPGP-grade encryption, but if this is the case then we're screwed anyway.)
Steganography is hard. You need a large amount of cover text to hide the plain text.
Many steganography systems use images or video or sound, but are 'proof of concept' - toys for learning - rather than serious tools. This, unfortunately, includes many of the steganography systems described as serious tools.
One of the problems of hiding text in text is persuading people not to re-use the cover text.
US Persons are protected from surveillance without a warrant. This is a right guaranteed to them by the Constitution. The burden of establishing if someone is a US Person should fall on the government agency performing surveillance.
If they cannot establish if a US Person is party to the conversation, they should assume one is and remove the potential of violating this constitutionally guaranteed right. This could be due to a failure of the service provider (Google, Verizon) to collect this information (they don't), or the fact that the communications are anonymous or encrypted, etc. Proving a negative can be tough, but that burden is the government's to bear.
Of course there is also a moral component… I'm pretty shocked that as patriotic as we are about the sacred rights of the constitution, we somehow feel that it is morally ok to not afford these protections when dealing with foreigners. The Declaration of Independence says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
With the rights to be enshrined more specifically later in the Constitution. How can anyone passionately agree with these words and not believe that the just treatment afforded to US citizens should somehow not be afforded to non-citizens, or citizens who choose to use a particular software program?
The Constitution doesn't guarantee warrants for all searches, let alone all "surveillance". It says two things:
* All searches & seizures will be reasonable and
* All warrants will be particular and based on probable cause.
Read an introduction to criminal law to verify that these are independent protections. The latter was intended as an antidote to the British "General Warrant", a transferable warrant that gave officials the right to toss any house in the empire.
Warrantless searches of various kinds have been been a constant throughout the history of the US. Electronic surveillance of US citizens began in the mid-1800s, when the US tapped telegraph lines prior to (and during) the civil war.
The Supreme Court said that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy while using the phone, and that therefore the 4th Amendment applied. Part of the reason people had that expectation was that Congress had introduced much stronger regulation of telephone circuits in 1934 so it wasn't like just anybody was allowed to tap into utility lines.
However the only protection is the expectation of privacy, which Congress can take away by saying "you should not expect communications to be private in these situations". And that's exactly what they did in 1968 in response to those Supreme Court decisions.
One important provision of that law were that the President was allowed to take "such measures as he deems necessary:"
to protect the nation against actual or potential attack or other hostile acts of a foreign power, to obtain foreign intelligence information deemed essential to the security of the United States or to protect national security information against foreign intelligence activities.
EMails have less expectation of privacy, though Congress did try with ECPA (which was passed when POP was the way to obtain email, not IMAP). But even ECPA gives broad exceptions for FISA surveillance.
Part of the reason people had that expectation was that Congress had introduced much stronger regulation of telephone circuits in 1934 so it wasn't like just anybody was allowed to tap into utility lines.
I wonder how well we would take it if we discovered that in addition to the NSA, Gmail was also sending all communications directly to Joe Blow in Podunk, Indiana, for his personal edification and entertainment? After all, it's not like we had any expectation of privacy for our email. What laws would this violate?
Well, is Joe Blow a Google employee? It might not break any laws at all in that case.
If he's not a Google employee it would probably violate ECPA, but ECPA explicitly allows foreign intelligence surveillance to occur (even over the Internet), so that wouldn't help against government surveillance being done in accordance with FISA.
No, Joe Blow is just some random dude. He did Sergey a solid once, and in return he gets access to all of Gmail. ECPA is a dead letter, and was specifically about government not private actions anyway.
My point, which admittedly I'm still not making clearly, is that it's weird to consider phone calls to be some sort of judicial fluke that was far outside accepted 4th Amendment jurisprudence. Americans didn't want the government listening in on their phone calls. Since we clearly couldn't elect a government that would abstain from that noxious practice, it was a good thing the third branch stepped in for a time to stop it. Maybe sometime in the future we'll be that fortunate again.
If one is uncomfortable with the Joe Blow example, consider how much worse it is for the government to be reading all of Gmail than it would be for Joe Blow to be doing that.
Actually, if I go to the trouble of encrypting my data, I have nothing against someone storing it indefinitely. That's the whole point of encryption — it no longer matters who has the data, it only matters who has the key.
You have nothing against someone storing it indefinitely, but I bet you have a problem with them now thinking you might be a bad guy. Will they listen to your phone calls to find out if you are in fact a bad guy?
True. In a perfect scenario I would rather the NSA not store my communications at all, and have them no reason to even look at me to assume I am either good or bad.
But, unfortunately, looking at the absolute pushback from congress and the white house over this whole thing, it's pretty clear the citizens have absolutely 0 say in the matter. After all, we're just ignorant sheep. They're the ones will all the knowledge and we should just trust them. We're not going to be able to change the NSA's policies or magically make everyone follow the constitution and the law to the T overnight. This is a compromise on our end.
The NSA may have a large amount of resources for storing and running attacks on my emails, but they don't have limitless resources. For every hour they spend bruteforcing my keys to recover a sappy "Just thinking of you <3" to my wife, the less time they're spending bruteforcing someone else's emails.
Not all public key cyphers are based on the difficulty of factorizing huge primes. Quantum computing only solves a small subset of problems we have, but it doesn't solve NP.
AES-256 takes 2^256 guesses to break by brute force and by using Grover's quantum algorithm that's only improved to 2^128. It is something, but I can bet that AES-256 will at some point become insufficient due to Moore's law, not due to quantum computing - a theory that has originated in the 1980-1981 and that has yet to yield actual machines that we can use. And of course, Moore's law also works in our favour, since with more power and specialized chips, we'll be able to use bigger keys that aren't likely to be breakable by Moore's law or Quantum computing in the next century or even millennium.
As long as we cannot reduce NP problems to P, then virtually unbreakable cryptography is possible. Also, cryptography as a (mathematical) field is pretty new.
> not due to quantum computing - a theory that has originated in the 1980-1981 and that has yet to yield actual machines that we can use.
Uhm – classical computer science originated sometime in the early 19th century (possibly earlier) in the form of analytical engines and the first actually usable machines[0] were created just a bit before World War II. General relativity originated before WWI and was first used well after WW II. Quantum mechanics was invented at the beginning of the last century and the first usable LASERs were built in the 1960s.
Really, 30 years is not that long in the context of ‘hard’ science. Even in the ‘fast-moving’[1] field of software engineering, people still use SMTP (1982), TCP/IP (1975) and FTP (1971).
[0] ‘Usable’ in the same sense that QC are not usable yet because people can perfectly factor 15 without Shor’s algorithm.
[1] Because it’s young and hence easy to discover new stuff.
Given the accelerated R&D that happened since the 70-ties in computer science, the huge resources that this industry can throw at problems and the fact that quantum computing can theoretically solve many important problems for us, 30 years is a long time.
I'm not saying that it won't happen eventually. I'm only saying that Moore's law is a more imminent threat to current encryption methods and that quantum computing still doesn't solve NP and as long as NP is not P, unbreakable encryption is a reality that quantum computing won't change.
The problem here is that QC is not lagging behind in the field of computer science (all the theories are there) nor the field of hardware engineering (the engineers can build every we tell them to), but in (condensed matter) physics. And physics is something you can only speed up so much, especially given that there are many other equally exciting, high-profile projects (think LHC).
The problem with that is that what might be considered safe today might not be it tomorrow, whether it is some undetected flaw in the encryption implementation or even in the algorithm you are using, or if someone builds an effective quantum computer.
edit: That was odd downvotes. Anyone care to explain?
Personally I thought encrypting stuff was just a temporary middle finger, and denazification the long term solution? After all, you don't get safety by complying with commands from your predators, that just gives them ideas.
So how about simply ignoring all that. Think of vampires; they can't get in without your permission, and sunlight kills them real fucking quick, so quick you will doubt they ever existed. Sure they can be dangerous, but their main tools are lies, and foolishness of their victims.
As Assange pointed out, censorship betrays fear. These people have nothing but a huge house of cards. Even if they ruled forever, they have nothing inside; they are a clenched fist around nothing, around a bluff, around fear. So they already lost anything humans can loose, they already went the way of the dinosaur, at "best" they can take us all with them.
They have my pity, and those who are still able to get out I wish the best, but the rest should simply learn to know their place already.
Regards,
a deluded narcissist, writing from the fortress of his mind, unimpressed by noob stuff such as death.
Since I am not a citizen of that country I am quite happy to "not be treated as a United States person". And from the other point of view, Americans and American companies are surely aware of organisations other than local ones that they might want to keep secrets from, so I'm not sure that this information should change anyones behaviour.
Even if you don't encrypt your communications, can you be sure that NSA will not store your data indefinitely? Sure, they can pass the raw unencrypted data through their system, parse out the important bits, save them in a database with a unique key for you and then throw away the raw data. Are you OK with that? They have lied in the past and might even keep that raw data as well. How will you know?
IMO, best bet is to keep it all encrypted. It sounds like an attempt to scare people into leaving their stuff open.
Exactly. We're operating on the assumption that they are telling the truth. I think that's a pretty stupid assumption.
This is just a scare tactic to get people to not use encryption, but it's also dimwitted because they could get a lot more mileage by saying "we can break all forms of encryption" and the American public would probably believe it (even with Snowden/a vocal minority calling out the NSA on the lie). The media would most likely propagate the lie because they don't seem to care about the rights/freedom of the people in the US more than creating a scare frenzy.
In summation, the NSA are liars and will keep your data regardless, so encrypt everything, don't put anything sensitive on Google, Skype, Dropbox (you'd have to be really stupid to do this anyway), and call your senator.
It's possible they're pushing the story now as a scare tactic, but the source of this information is a document from the DoJ authorizing the NSA to collect and store U.S. data in certain cases, leaked by Snowden.
But, but, but we know for certain that
there's nothing to worry about, nothing
wrong, no violation of the Fourth
Amendment. How do we know? Because
the FISA court, all bow down, assume
an appropriately servile, submissive, obsequious,
respectful posture, told us so!
And we all know that the FISA court is
infallible, the great Wizard ("pay
no attention to the man behind the
curtain"), deserving of all our trust, right?
Thank you; thank you; thank you, oh
wonderful, all knowing, all seeing,
all wise, all powerful, wonderful
FISA court watching over us and
taking such good care of us!!
FISA court, I don't know who you
are, where you are, what you do,
or how to contact you or review
your work, but I know that you
are now watching over all of us.
What a new day! For 200+ years we've
had the restrictive Constitution
from those skeptical founding fathers
and suffered under such paranoia
as
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance"
when all we needed was the wonderful
Father FISA court! Why didn't the
founding fathers think of this????
I can believe that Hitler, Stalin,
Mao, and even Pol Pot thought of this --
why not our founding fathers?
At a secure, undisclosed location in the
private chambers of the FISA court:
"Darn, why can't we keep those
ink pads for our rubber stamps in stock?
Oh, well, the rest of the day is shot.
Back to watching those SnapChat
intercepts from Sweden!".
If you are using Tor correctly, they can't target 'you' because they don't know who 'you' are. Also, have fun storing indefinitely all of my banal communications until forever.
Mixnets like Tor generally aren't considered secure against an adversary who's monitoring the whole network. Maybe the NSA isn't there quite yet, but they're sure trying. If they succeed, a DC-Net can still provide perfect anonymous communications, but it's hard to make those scale. There's been some work to improve matters, eg: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi12/strong-scalable-ano...
I may be ignorant, but doesn't it take a lot of statistical analysis to do attacks like this? The point being not that the NSA cannot do it, but that they have to be specifically targeting you to pull it off. Unless they know what's going through the wire, how will they know to target you?
Controlling the exit node does not inherently compromise anonymity, only allows access to the plaintext message. If using end-to-end encryption on top of Tor, you should be able to maintain both anonymity and protection from tampering and snooping.
They still don't know the source of the communication. Running an exit node means they can see where traffic is headed as it emerges from Tor, not that they can magically determine from whence it came.
The problem here is that the destination can identify you. You, after all, are the one paying for that VM instance at that IP address within AWS. Who else would be connecting via SSH?
As far as I know, Tor is theoretically vulnerable to a correlation attack by an entity capable of monitoring the entry and exit nodes. Personally, I thought having this capability, plus actually implementing the attack was a bit far-fetched for most cases.
However, reading about what the NSA might or might not be be doing, plus the fact that GCHQ is tapping the transatlantic cables and knowing that the US and western European intelligence agencies tend to cooperate, I'm not so sure anymore. I think at this point we can assume that other countries have similar capabilities as well. Knowing that the infrastructure for this kind of attacks is in place, I think the cost is a lot lower than I would have expected a few months ago.
I'd be interested to know if the number of people running tor servers, or if donations of servers, or donations of money to fund servers, has increased much recently.
How many machines would Tor need to make traffic analysis tricky?
Isn't every https page load and form submit an "encrypted communication"? This article seems to imply that any secure online surfing or shopping would trigger this "capture the encrypted communication" stuff. Thisvdoesbnot make sense.
This is a distraction. If you don't trust the NSA's oversight, then you should assume they keep everything for ever and taking issue with them being able to eavesdrop so easily.
If you do trust the oversite, it makes sense that they keep encrypted data around since they have no easy way of knowing if its from a US person or not. Once they decrypt it and find out it is a US person, thats where you should focus. It should be as if they collected US Person data originally and should count it as collected when they actually got it, not decrypted it.
As to the argument that the NSA could count anything as encrypted. Yep, they could. See point one.
I always wondered why there are no mainstream mail clients which use encryption by default. With "by default" I do not mean that it's an option that may be turned on or not. Rather, as soon as an e-mail address is entered when composing a mail the client should search the key servers for available public keys, import them and encrypt the message. Likewise, it shouldn't even be possible to launch a mail client without having generated a key pair for your address.
I see of course that there is this movement towards webmail, and this makes things more complicated. Wouldn't it be possible to write an online version of an encryption-friendly mail client? I mean, a web service which polls your mails via POP/IMAP from any server, and where the encryption is done client side in javascript. If that doesn't exist, maybe we should write one.
Isn't this giving in and doing exactly what they want, always using unencrypted communications?
The question is, how much do you want an unchecked organization with no oversight to know about you? Do you trust the NSA to know everything about you and never do anything wrong with it, 10, 15 or 20 years from now?
Random question: Is there some way to troll NSA by 42 zip exploits, i.e. a zip file that includes always bigger and bigger emptied zip files, only this time with relatively easy to crack passwords. Would be fun giving these some suspicious sounding names and sending them around in circles.
Sounds like US citizens should have an unencrypted email signature saying:
My name is XXX, I am a US citizen.
My address is YYY.
By the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution and supported by federal courts, the contents of this email are encrypted, private, and require a valid warrant to be intercepted, stored, or accessed by the US government.
What if we all start attaching files with random content to our e-mails? An extension could do this automatically. Can the output of "dd if=/dev/urandom of=unicorns.pgp bs=1 count=1024" be easily distinguished from a real pgp file? No one could ever decrypt these files.
Attaching random content to emails reminds me of Emacs's 'M-x spook' command (and I'm not even an Emacs user).
As for distinguishing random data from PGP that is very easy: PGP messages (even binary ones) have some headers that determine who the recipient is, what encryption is used, etc.
See here for the format of PGP messages:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880
What you could do is to generate a public/private PGP keypair, then destroy the private key, and encrypt your /dev/urandom data using that public key.
In that case one could create an extension that creates a PGP keypair _for the recipient_, attaches encrypted crap to the e-mail, and deletes the private key. Is that what you mean?
The idea is to add by default an encrypted message to all e-mails that contain nothing useful, to make it indistinguishable from e-mails that do contain useful encrypted stuff. Is that possible? Does it make any sense?
Is using a service like privnote a plausible way to communicate privately? According to the privacy policy, at no time is any note held in any readable format state on their servers. Also each message 'self destructs' after being opened one time.
Always assume "No" unless you have a bunch of established crypto researchers who've looked at the system and who are prepared to use it themselves.
People might say that "there are no posted attacks for privnote", but that just means the bad guys haven't told you they can crack your encryption. Since bad guys will never tell you that they can crack your encryption you must not assume lack of evidence of cracks is the same as lack of cracks.
Doesn't matter, you should still encrypt anything. If they manage to break it, cool. If they use it against you it will become public knowledge what ciphers have been broken by the 404-Agency. Then just switch to a different cipher or up the bits.
I starting to get the feeling that the best way to "encrypt" my data and stay safe from the watchful eyes of all the various agencies around the world is to just to go back to good old fashioned mail that physically gets posted in a box!
If you are considered a foreigner they have to break the encryption. If you are US citizen, constitutional restrictions have to be overcome. Nothing lost when encryption is used.
the statement "communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning" tells me that it doesn't even have to use Tor or be encrypted in any way. Double entendres, for example, contain 'secret meaning' and thus would also be included just as easily as encrypted communication!
I'm routinely hostile to people who use the "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" apology. Few positions encapsulate a more dangerous concept of proper relations between the state and its citizens. And yet, when I think about how I actually live my life, my basic assumption is "I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm okay." The difference between how I think and how I behave is pretty glaring.
Yeah, yeah, three felonies a day. I know. But there are a third of a billion people in the US. Given a billion felonies a day (more or less), it's easy to find comfort in statistics and probability. Honestly, I've got bigger and more likely problems to worry about than getting sucked into some Kafkaesque nightmare (though, like an attack by shark or bear, it's not impossible).
No, what really concerns me is the emergence of a belief that the government is an impervious citadel, fortified against any democratic control or correction. When stuff like the spying scandal, or the crime spree on Wall Street, goes unchecked (let alone unpunished) it saps political will in general, and that leads to a social environment that really is intolerable. A tiny portion of the population resorting to encryption doesn't do anything to change that. The truly appropriate response is a political one, and one that goes well beyond the mass surveillance issue in particular. Specifically, we (the people) need to recover control of our own Congress.
The mushrooming scandal with spying fits a broader pattern of regulatory capture, adding to the constellation of toxic effects that result. But at the heart of all this corruption, there's a relatively vulnerable target. That's because the mechanics of capturing legislators rest of four key pieces: private campaign finance, closed primaries, gerrymandered districts, and the revolving door between public and private offices.
Before the apathy goes to deep, we need people to coalesce around a set of conditions for winning office. Specifically, no legislator gets past the voters if they haven't committed themselves to changes that make them exclusively beholden to the voters (i.e. open primaries, non-partisan redistricting, public election finance, and a lifetime hell-ban on going to work for the industries you once "regulated"). If someone promises to do all this, but balks once elected, throw them out systematically. Keep doing this until there is a critical mass of legislators who can push through reform that makes legislators dependent on the people alone. Not their financial backers, not their future employers, not their political parties, and not the voters they hand-pick.
Lots of folks aren't worried about the NSA at all. There's a fairly disturbing number who actually think mass surveillance a good and necessary thing. But regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, there's a good chance that something about crony capitalism bothers the daylights out of you. Different people will have different reasons for insisting on the basic "you-work-for-us-alone" condition for winning office. That's fine. As long as people will hold legislators to it, the restoration of government of, by, and for the people can happen.
But aside from this - from the sustained and forcible assertion of exclusive control over legislators - I don't see how the spying problem, or really any major problem, will resolve itself satisfactorily.
here's the rationale: if we don't have total awareness and snooping power over this guy private stuff, he must be doing secret stuff and we can't know if it's bad, therefore we have reason to believe he must be a TERRORIST(are you still using this one or have you admitted to yourself that the objective is just `total information awareness`?)
also, cannot stop LOVING that non-americans basically have no fucking rights whatsoever.
As an American, it's pretty sad. As if the rest of the world wasn't getting sick of us already. Let's stick our noses into everyone else's business all the time, start a bunch of wars for the obvious benefit of our corporations, crash the world economy (btw we're doing more derivatives trading again so expect another crash lolol), and now spying on every person in the world, US citizen or not.
On top of it, instead of our media telling us "WAKE THE FUCK UP AND LOOK AT WHAT YOUR GOVERNMENT IS DOING!!" they are saying "Gee, where will Snowden go next lol?!?! Ohh he's in Moscow now, neat!!!!"
I think the endorphin rush people get from receiving a Facebook message on their portable distraction device outweighs the negative feelings of the government spying on every aspect of our lives. People don't know what's happening two feet away from them, much less in their government or the world (besides what big media tells them).
We're sliding fast down a slippery slope while chuckling and playing Farmville on the way down.
