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The EFF warned long ago something was going on when AT&T was putting beam splitters on Internet backbones to feed the NSA. Then Snowden revealed how everything

The EFF warned long ago something was going on when AT&T was putting beam splitters on Internet backbones to feed the NSA. Then Snowden revealed how everything is tapped. Then, be sure all mainstream encryption is "NOBUS". Nothing is truly random. Someone somewhere has the master key: elliptic curve cryptography using magic numbers from NIST? "Secure boot" by Intel? OpenSSL? Microsoft software? All backdoored. Trust no one.

abandonliberty 11y ago
Just possibly old versions of truecrypt. This author's conclusions seem quite sound to me. They collapsed it in a way to comply with a gag order while silently sounding an alarm. https://forum.truecrypt.ch/t/my-analysis-of-what-really-happened-to-truecrypt/387/3 https://forum.truecrypt.ch/t/my-analysis-of-what-really-happ... Anyone operating in this space is eventually going to get the same option as Lavabit's founder: compromise or collapse.
- depingus 11y ago
  If you're super paranoid you shouldn't trust any version of truecrypt. Read the fascinating story of Paul Le Roux... https://mastermind.atavist.com/ https://mastermind.atavist.com/ He created E4M (which truecrypt was based on) and is rumored to have been one of the creators of truecrypt. Apparently he's also been a US government asset for a while.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    If you're superparanoid, you should trust that because a superparanoid seemed to build it for himself and open-source it to stick it to the man in his mind. And then built a criminal empire that, if he was still financing it, depended on it for his survival. That's the kind of incentives that get results.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    TrueCrypt has been subjected to an independent security audit. As have successors like VeraCrypt. Any alternatives likely haven't.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    So what? Snowden even said that Truecrypt was one of the only tools that currently the NSA could not defeat. I'd rather trust him on that than your opinion on the matter.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Same shit I said to Moxie about GPG. There's only a few things consistently stopping them. Best endorsement ever if you ask me. I still push for even greater levels of security and assurance but what stops NSA at the moment is one hell of a starting place.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
djsumdog 11y ago
I heard about those taps in 2008/2009 I think. Snowden hasn't really given us anything truly new. It's also bizarre how quickly everything he presented was/is accepted as fact immediately without question. I think it's way more likely Snowden was intentional. He's still working for the Federal government and the leaks are intentional so that the Federal Government could announce to the world that they are spying on all their own citizens...and nothing happen. No real revolution, and no real end to the surveillance. I mean yea, we have better security practices, more people use encryption, more people are aware about security ... but overall the landscape hasn't changed except in one crucial aspect: people are talking less publicly. People are afraid that what they say is monitored. There has been a chilling effect. The Snowden narrative needs to be questioned. Since when does an NSA contractor working from home in Hawaii get VPN access to all the government secretes? Like...people actually believe that?
- partycoder 11y ago
  "Super secret information leak! Oh no, please don't read it" = "Sale! 50% off! We are losing so much money!"
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  > I heard about those taps in 2008/2009 Back then the excuse was that they were only being used to collect foreign traffic. Snowden revealed their loose interpretation of "foreign" and many more domestic activities happening outside of AT&T NOCs. Foreigners' rights aren't protected by the constitution. Citizens' are and now we have legal standing to force the government to respect the law which we didn't have before knowing that the panopticon was pointed at us.
  - walrus01 11y ago
    It was fairly widely known in the network engineering community in 2003/2004 that the "Echelon" system collected an extensive amount of domestic data for each of the five eyes, using legal dodges where a foreign agency (like GCHQ) would siphon american/canadian data and feed it to the NSA and CSE, and vice versa. Those who knew how much the system had changed from satellite-intelligence gathering (from the era prior to transatlantic/transpacific submarine fiber, where most phone calls and international data were satellite based), to tapping fiber at submarine cable landing stations and "partnering" with major telcos, were totally unsurprised.
chongli 11y ago
For as long as technologically minded folks insist on technological solutions to political problems, we will be stuck in this quagmire. The answer is a political solution to a political problem. Admittedly, that's a hard one for some folks. It requires talking to people and building relationships. It takes a long time and change can be frustratingly slow to present itself. But that's how it is. Trust no one With this sort of attitude you might as well give up on life. Society doesn't work without trust between people.
- themartorana 11y ago
  There has never, in my life, been a time that the government and the people they work for/represent/are have ever been more adversarial. When you realize government has stopped working for you and are actively treating you like a criminal, you ask who they are working for. It's hard not to land on banks, corporations, and Bernie's "Billionaire Class" - whether that's true or not isn't part of my point. So it's hard to "trust" in a single direction when the actions that cause distrust are so, so bald-faced. Every conspiracy-sounding theory surrounding surveillance has turned out to be true. And all that worry about being caught has had a net-zero effect. Maybe Let's Encrypt was at least partially a result, but that's about it. So why worry now? Turns out secret courts are just about guaranteed to green-light whatever the hell the NSA wants, so people finding out didn't really turn out as badly as they were worried about. So "trust us" is about impossible anymore. I don't know if the relationship can be healed, to be honest. Obama was the ideal of our best shot, but that ship sailed like, day 2.
  - maccard 11y ago
    Trust isn't a binary thing. I trust different people; different organisations, with different data, information and details about my life and other peoples lives.
  - chongli 11y ago
    I didn't say "trust government", I said "trust people". Do you trust your neighbours? Do you attend meetings or organizations with like-minded people? The surveillance state is most powerful when everybody sits at home afraid to go out. If you get out in public and organize with people and talk about these issues, you'll find strength and courage in your neighbours. The #1 goal of the Neoliberal elite class is to crush the will of people like you. If you've already given up then you might as well be dead to them; they don't even need to spy on you at that point! If, on the other hand, you're out in public and organizing in large numbers then what can they do? You can force them to engage with the issues on your terms.
oridecon 11y ago
I wish there was some kind of map showing where each area (hardware, software/firmware, network, yada yada) is compromised and by which initiatives and companies. With solid info (avoid speculation). Just curious if would make any impact if the regular user see how their data and everything else is treated by the companies they think they "know" and "trust".

abandonliberty 11y ago

Just possibly old versions of truecrypt. This author's conclusions seem quite sound to me. They collapsed it in a way to comply with a gag order while silently sounding an alarm. https://forum.truecrypt.ch/t/my-analysis-of-what-really-happened-to-truecrypt/387/3 https://forum.truecrypt.ch/t/my-analysis-of-what-really-happ... Anyone operating in this space is eventually going to get the same option as Lavabit's founder: compromise or collapse.

depingus 11y ago
If you're super paranoid you shouldn't trust any version of truecrypt. Read the fascinating story of Paul Le Roux... https://mastermind.atavist.com/ https://mastermind.atavist.com/ He created E4M (which truecrypt was based on) and is rumored to have been one of the creators of truecrypt. Apparently he's also been a US government asset for a while.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  If you're superparanoid, you should trust that because a superparanoid seemed to build it for himself and open-source it to stick it to the man in his mind. And then built a criminal empire that, if he was still financing it, depended on it for his survival. That's the kind of incentives that get results.
- dublinben 11y ago
  TrueCrypt has been subjected to an independent security audit. As have successors like VeraCrypt. Any alternatives likely haven't.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  So what? Snowden even said that Truecrypt was one of the only tools that currently the NSA could not defeat. I'd rather trust him on that than your opinion on the matter.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Same shit I said to Moxie about GPG. There's only a few things consistently stopping them. Best endorsement ever if you ask me. I still push for even greater levels of security and assurance but what stops NSA at the moment is one hell of a starting place.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

djsumdog 11y ago

I heard about those taps in 2008/2009 I think. Snowden hasn't really given us anything truly new. It's also bizarre how quickly everything he presented was/is accepted as fact immediately without question. I think it's way more likely Snowden was intentional. He's still working for the Federal government and the leaks are intentional so that the Federal Government could announce to the world that they are spying on all their own citizens...and nothing happen. No real revolution, and no real end to the surveillance. I mean yea, we have better security practices, more people use encryption, more people are aware about security ... but overall the landscape hasn't changed except in one crucial aspect: people are talking less publicly. People are afraid that what they say is monitored. There has been a chilling effect. The Snowden narrative needs to be questioned. Since when does an NSA contractor working from home in Hawaii get VPN access to all the government secretes? Like...people actually believe that?

partycoder 11y ago
"Super secret information leak! Oh no, please don't read it" = "Sale! 50% off! We are losing so much money!"
kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
> I heard about those taps in 2008/2009 Back then the excuse was that they were only being used to collect foreign traffic. Snowden revealed their loose interpretation of "foreign" and many more domestic activities happening outside of AT&T NOCs. Foreigners' rights aren't protected by the constitution. Citizens' are and now we have legal standing to force the government to respect the law which we didn't have before knowing that the panopticon was pointed at us.
- walrus01 11y ago
  It was fairly widely known in the network engineering community in 2003/2004 that the "Echelon" system collected an extensive amount of domestic data for each of the five eyes, using legal dodges where a foreign agency (like GCHQ) would siphon american/canadian data and feed it to the NSA and CSE, and vice versa. Those who knew how much the system had changed from satellite-intelligence gathering (from the era prior to transatlantic/transpacific submarine fiber, where most phone calls and international data were satellite based), to tapping fiber at submarine cable landing stations and "partnering" with major telcos, were totally unsurprised.

chongli 11y ago

For as long as technologically minded folks insist on technological solutions to political problems, we will be stuck in this quagmire. The answer is a political solution to a political problem. Admittedly, that's a hard one for some folks. It requires talking to people and building relationships. It takes a long time and change can be frustratingly slow to present itself. But that's how it is. Trust no one With this sort of attitude you might as well give up on life. Society doesn't work without trust between people.

themartorana 11y ago
There has never, in my life, been a time that the government and the people they work for/represent/are have ever been more adversarial. When you realize government has stopped working for you and are actively treating you like a criminal, you ask who they are working for. It's hard not to land on banks, corporations, and Bernie's "Billionaire Class" - whether that's true or not isn't part of my point. So it's hard to "trust" in a single direction when the actions that cause distrust are so, so bald-faced. Every conspiracy-sounding theory surrounding surveillance has turned out to be true. And all that worry about being caught has had a net-zero effect. Maybe Let's Encrypt was at least partially a result, but that's about it. So why worry now? Turns out secret courts are just about guaranteed to green-light whatever the hell the NSA wants, so people finding out didn't really turn out as badly as they were worried about. So "trust us" is about impossible anymore. I don't know if the relationship can be healed, to be honest. Obama was the ideal of our best shot, but that ship sailed like, day 2.
- maccard 11y ago
  Trust isn't a binary thing. I trust different people; different organisations, with different data, information and details about my life and other peoples lives.
- chongli 11y ago
  I didn't say "trust government", I said "trust people". Do you trust your neighbours? Do you attend meetings or organizations with like-minded people? The surveillance state is most powerful when everybody sits at home afraid to go out. If you get out in public and organize with people and talk about these issues, you'll find strength and courage in your neighbours. The #1 goal of the Neoliberal elite class is to crush the will of people like you. If you've already given up then you might as well be dead to them; they don't even need to spy on you at that point! If, on the other hand, you're out in public and organizing in large numbers then what can they do? You can force them to engage with the issues on your terms.

oridecon 11y ago

I wish there was some kind of map showing where each area (hardware, software/firmware, network, yada yada) is compromised and by which initiatives and companies. With solid info (avoid speculation). Just curious if would make any impact if the regular user see how their data and everything else is treated by the companies they think they "know" and "trust".