Privacy and security

[mdlbear]

Good post on privacy vs. security, with reference links, posted by alobar. Via meglimir.

In a Jan. 21 "New Yorker" article, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell discusses a proposed plan to monitor all -- that's right, *all* -- Internet communications for security purposes, an idea so extreme that the word "Orwellian" feels too mild.

This is really just a matter of formalizing what's been widely suspected for years: that the NSA has been monitoring all the phone and Internet communications it can get to.

"The land of the free and the home of the brave..."

Yeah, right. Try this version.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Starfleet regs and all that.

Do you remember back in the old days, we used to put

NSA, crypto, bomb, etc....

in our .sigs? I still wonder how much irritation we caused....

I am tempted to run off about 100 copies of that song in laser print on something relatively waterproof and get me a staple gun and/or some gluestick and stick'em up in various places and see just how much hell I can raise.

Paranoid treacherous bastards. That's the second batch of'em in 24 hours that need a drop'n'stop.

ETA: this needed the right icon...

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

I always sort of assumed that the NSA effectively cracked all of the commonly used encryption schemes years ago, about at the time that all of the talk of key escrows, clipper chips and the like faded away.

Who knows, could be that the relatively limited amount of encrypted email all gets immediately flagged, cracked and give closer attention than almost anything else.

Is that sufficiently paranoid for you?

I suppose, if you want to bug the snoops, the thing to do would be to get good source of true random numbers (don't VIA processors have some sort of thermal noise random generator built in?), format them into something that looks conspicuously like encrypted emails, and send lots of them. Zero content. One could spend lots of time trying to crack them.

[mdlbear]

You should probably leave my name off if you decide to post the song around town...

Other than that, and the fact that the second verse is hopelessly dated, go ahead.

[mdlbear]

The encrypted mail would at least be subject to traffic analysis.

I like the idea. /dev/random is probably good enough for most purposes.