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Sounds like a call to start crossing the border more frequently- with a suitcase full of "suspicious" drives. How many petabytes of mirroring before the whole
by ip26 6y ago
Sounds like a call to start crossing the border more frequently- with a suitcase full of "suspicious" drives.
How many petabytes of mirroring before the whole operation becomes too expensive to justify?
- smnrchrds 6y agoI imagine they would seize the drives and give you a receipt. And then, a year or two later, they give you a call to tell you they are releasing the drives and you can pick them up. Isn't that what happens to computers that are seized as a part of a police investigation?
- dagmx 6y agoIf they have an auto extraction script, could also put a zip bomb in there
- ceejayoz 6y agoI don’t have enough faith in the legal system to try that one.
- Shared404 6y agoI mean, some hypothetical nasty terrorist could do a drop somewhere along the border, where they presumably don't have camera's. I'm sure that the diligent border patrol protecting us would find it eventually.
- rocqua 6y agoHonestly if you do try that, I think the legal system would be right to prosecute you for it. "The law is immoral" is not a legal defense against "You knowingly disrupted a law-enforcement IT system."
- sk5t 6y agoA “zip bomb” can be merely a very efficiently compressed file. That sound like a crime to you?
- StartupTree 6y agoThe law works by judging intent, not by "actualllly technically i am correct here".
- gruez 6y agoAnd how would you prove intent? It might be easy to prove if it's an usb drive with only a zip bomb. But what if it's on a 8TB external hard drive, with a bunch of random stuff (research papers, movies, podcasts, etc), placed inside a folder called "DoS examples" with a bunch of other malformed files as well?
- coldtea 6y ago>And how would you prove intent? They don't have to prove it, in the sense that you prove a mathematical proof. They just need to agree you had that intent.
- jeffe 6y agoIsn't the American legal system the one where that kind of argument actually has weight? Why so many cases are thrown out on technicalities and litigation costs are so high.
- rocqua 6y agoA kitchen knife is just a tool for cutting meat, does that sound like a crime to you? Depends very much on what is being cut, in what context, and why. Cutting chicken fillets in a kitchen to cook dinner? No. Cutting a human on the street whilst screaming 'die you bitch' probably yes. Its not about the tool, its about how you use it.
- jpitz 6y agoOr a hard drive shell with a Raspberry PI inside doing the equivalent of piping out /dev/random to the interface.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- andrewnicolalde 6y agoThis made my day hahahaha. How long do you reckon it would take for someone to catch on?
- AsyncAwait 6y agoIf you encrypt it, presumably they'll try to store it just in case they can decrypt it later. At lest that's what the NSA does.
- gumby 6y agoIf you have a good rng it will be indistinguishable from encrypted data. In fact the more uniform the seemingly more cunning. Be sure to put he proper headers on the data so it self identifies as an encrypted file.
- sushshshsh 6y agoThat reminds me of some story I read back in the 90s about some famous hackers (I think the ones who testified to Congress from MIT). One of them knew their apartment was going to be raided by the FBI so they left a suitcase full of encrypted cassette tapes in there for the FBI to salivate over. After finally decrypting the first one, I believe it was just static noise :)
- dwild 6y ago> After finally decrypting the first one, I believe it was just static noise :) That sound fishy, was there any metadata to confirm it has been decrypted? That's the thing with encryption, it's just math, it won't "fail" anything if you got the wrong key, you'll just get random data back.
- Kapura 6y agoThe Snowden leaks showed that the NSA has built the capacity to spy on essentially the entire internet. You really think they'll balk at a few petabytes?
- Shared404 6y agoI mean, that's the NSA. Does the border patrol share resources? That being said, you are of course correct.
- gonzo41 6y agoI've heard that 5 eyes can only process 20 precent of what they collect a day. I'm not sure what they do with the 80% at the end of the day considering that pipe is constantly getting more feeds.
- tolbish 6y agoI doubt they look at everything by default. I would think they have a starting point of something like Persons of Interest, Devices of Interest, and Locations of Interest.
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoYes but this isn’t the NSA, this is the border patrol, operating with a fraction the budget and expertise of the NSA. The people doing the copying are basically security guards that couldn’t pass the police physical nor find work as teachers. I really like the idea of a hacked hard drive or phone which generates a never-ending series of files containing terabytes of random data. I bet any given boarder crossing will only have the ability to scan two devices at a time, so bring a couple and you can probably shut down everything as they scramble to figure out what to do when their local storage fills up.
- manigandham 6y agoAre you crossing illegally? If not then they wouldn't care. If you are then you got bigger problems than them.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adwi 6y agoRespectfully, your bio says your work is “privacy-focused”, how is that compatible with an “if you have nothing to hide...” style argument? As the article states the “border” area encompasses a population of 220M people and every traveler coming in and out of the US. Take CBP acting as Trump’s personal force in quashing protests as another data point. They’ve all but dropped the pretense this work is focused on preventing illegal immigration and we ignore that at our peril.
- manigandham 6y agoWhere did I make that argument? Most people here have no idea how law enforcement or CBP operates. Some full drives are not a big obstacle and they're not going to waste time without knowing who you are first. As far as the data collection, searches without reasonable suspicion are already ruled unconstitutional. The rest has been policy for years. The only change is centralizing the data but this isn't big news and there are already movements against existing practices. I don't support unlawful collection or searching law-abiding citizens but that has nothing to do with my work, or what would realistically happen in the above scenario. I'm not sure what you're talking about with the rest of your political claims.
- DaftDank 6y agoWould you support them seizing data from someone who owns a legal marijuana cultivation business in San Diego (because he's so close to the "border area") and then sharing that information with the DEA to federally prosecute him? The definition of "law-abiding" there would get a little murky. What if it's someone who grows weed for his personal, medical use in an illegal state?
- rorykoehler 6y agoPetabytes of deepfake porn featuring US Border Patrol chiefs
- dade_ 6y agoBest to be deepfake granny & grandpa porn. Is there anyone working on that yet? The US legal system being what it is, I expect it will be necessary to prove the deepfakes are legal adults that consented to the filming.
- analognoise 6y agoThis is the difference between reality and theory. In theory, you'd be fighting the system. In practicality, you'd probably end up in some black site, disappeared. I recommend against doing stuff like this.
- nichos 6y agoGovernment never cuts projects because they're too expensive. They live well outside of their means. Cost is never a consideration.
- KineticLensman 6y ago> Government never cuts projects because they're too expensive 'never'? Rising costs is a common factor in numerous cancelled projects, at least in the UK defence market that I'm familiar with.