Government snooping, backdoors and #necessaryhashtags

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

o Patriot Act Author Calls For Clapper's Prosecution And Rein In NSA Abuses

The faux headline "Farmer calls for extra-strong padlock for barn door after horses bolt!" comes to mind - not sure why...

Sensenbrenner seems to have trouble envisioning how his proposals to extend government power could ever go wrong ... (although he can easily explain, from his position on the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, how anthropogenic global warming was cooked up as a liberal plot to enslave us all, or give his opinion on our First Lady's posterior).

His newsletters to his constituents are sometimes a hoot.

[xilman]

Cryptoseal has shut down its consumer VPN service because of the danger that it may be forced to hand over cryptokeys. In its announcement the company specifically recommends that its ex-subscribers use services not based in the US run by non-US nationals. It also appears to be treating its ex-subscribers very decently --- refunding subscriptions, offering to pay a year's subscription to one of its competitors and to give a free year's subscription if the US legal system subsequently allows it to do business.

[Nick]

The German government says they have indications that the US have been tapping a mobile (cell) phone of the German chancellor Angela Merkel. You have to remember that until 1990 she lived in East Germany with its infamous secret police. This makes such issues particularly sensitive in Germany.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24647268

[chappy]

http://nsahaiku.net/

it is almost fluffy with bunnies...

[Nick]

Next year's Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) symposium will be held in Amsterdam. The call for papers & program committee have just been announced here:
http://petsymposium.org/2014/

It's usually quite a fun event.

[Nick]

The Dutch press are running a story that the Dutch general intelligence agency (AIVD) has been hacking forum servers and downloading their entire databases. This may be a breach of Dutch law, and members of our Parliament are taking these reports seriously.

An English version of the article:
http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/30/...internet-fora/

Greetings to all AIVD staff reading this message!

[chappy]

Now, I'm no where near as worried about all this NSA stuff as most people seem to be, but for the problem has always been just how stupid and useless an effort this task actually is.

I add this to the record, your honors, exhibit 3,216.A: http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged...175511620.html

[Xyzzy]

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[ewmayer]

USA Today has a piece about the widespread use of cellphone tower data dumps by local police which features the kind of non sequitur I am used to seeing whenever advocates of such mass surveillance note that "it helps fight-terrorism/solve-crime/find-lost-puppies" and are subsequently pressed to back that claim up:

Cellphone data spying: It's not just the NSA

The tower dump data helped police choose about 500 people who were asked to submit DNA samples. The broad cell-data sweep and DNA samples didn't solve the crime, though the information aided in the prosecution. A 17-year-old man's mother tipped off the cops, and the man confessed to kidnapping and dismembering the girl, hiding some of her remains in a crawl space in his mother's house. He pleaded guilty and last month was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison.

According to the above narrative, neither the celltower data suck nor the violation of 500 folks' civil rights [suuuuuuuure the DNA swabs were 'voluntary' - if one didn't want to risk appearing on the evening news as a 'possible suspect', that is] had anything to do with the key break in the case, and there is merely vague claim about "aided in the prosecution" - given that the guy confessed and police presumably found the girl's remains where he said, I don't see how the cell data played any significant role at all. Now maybe the article was just piss-poorly written, but it fits a pattern of "sweeping claims of good backed by little factual evidence" that appears to be near-ubiquitous with this sort of mass surveillance.

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

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Nicely revealing image pairing. We have met the enemy, and all that.

[only_human]

NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking
Washington Post (blog)

Given the widespread use of Google services and widgets, most Web users are likely to have a Google PREF cookie even if they've never visited a Google property directly.
That PREF cookie is specifically mentioned in an internal NSA slide, which reference the NSA using GooglePREFID, their shorthand for the unique numeric identifier contained within Google's PREF cookie. Special Source Operations (SSO) is an NSA division that works with private companies to scoop up data as it flows over the Internet's backbone and from technology companies' own systems. The slide indicates that SSO was sharing information containing "logins, cookies, and GooglePREFID" with another NSA division called Tailored Access Operations, which engages in offensive hacking operations. SSO also shares the information with the British intelligence agency GCHQ.

Felten disagrees, noting that the latest documents show that "the unique identifiers that are being placed on users' computers are not only being used by analytic and advertising companies, but also being used by the NSA for targeting." He also says that there are things those companies could do to protect their users from the type of attacks described in the slides, like "not sending tracking IDs, or at least not sending them in the clear" without a layer of encryption.

[ewmayer]

Re. Google tracking, I attempt to combat that 2 main ways - other/better suggestions welcome:

1. Remove/avoid Google "URL enhancement" tracking spam - Still use the GOOG for basic search, but now instead of clicking the "enhanced links" in the search results, I either copy the underlying link directly from the results page or (if displayed link is redacted for length) copy the tracking-spam-ified link into the URL bar and remove the leading/trailing tracking spam to reveal the underlying link before going there. For example, was looking for the Wikipage on the 2013 skiing world cup earlier today ... Google search for "wikipedia fis skiing fis world cup 2013" produces the desired page as the #1 result, but the "Google enhanced link" reads like so:

https://www.google.com/url?q=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Alpine_Skiing_World_Cup&sa=U&ei=BvenUrmGDcPxoATfs4H4Aw&ved=0CB0QFjAA&usg=AFQjCNGMDKTJLV_2wL_DJZcKvKvtr-FBKg

I've bf-highlighted the part of that you want, which is just this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Al...iing_World_Cup

...Which is also short enough to appear as plaintext immediately beneath the live-search-result link in this case - too-long links alas get gutted via a ... middle-part contraction, so must be extracted from the spamified link as above.


2. Browser setup: