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HEY, KIDS! Do YOU know what time it is?! [wild audience applause] THAT'S RIGHT, it's time for WHICH IS MORE LIKELY?! [intro music] Today on Which is More L

by rwg 13y ago

HEY, KIDS! Do YOU know what time it is?! [wild audience applause] THAT'S RIGHT, it's time for WHICH IS MORE LIKELY?! [intro music] Today on Which is More Likely?, we're looking at a replacement Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard that was shipped to Alexandria, Virginia, instead of Seattle, Washington. What a blunder! [slide whistle sound effect] Now put your thinking caps on and ponder, WHICH IS MORE LIKELY?! • The largest intelligence agency on the planet, recently outed by Snowden's leaked documents for operating a multi-decade worldwide dragnet that secretly gathered communications on hundreds of millions of people, was too incompetent to have the US Postal Service display tracking information that hides the fact they're modifying a laptop keyboard in order to somehow spy on a Tor developer. ORRRRRRRRRR! • The third-party seller who uses Amazon to accept orders screwed up and gave Amazon the wrong tracking number. That's all we have time for on today's episode of Which is More Likely? Don't change the channel! Up next is a BRAND NEW episode of Godwin's Law and Order! Good night from Hollywood! [outro music]

mverwijs 13y ago
The sad sad thing is, though, that in the '90s we made these jokes about surveillance cameras, internet taps, government-written-viruses, etc..etc... Seemed funny then, too.
- tptacek 13y ago
  No we did not. This is perhaps the most annoying meme to have come out of the Wikileaks and Snowden disclosures. Nobody working in technology laughed about dragnet surveillance or cryptanalysis capabilities or trojan horses. The 1990s was the era of Clipper and Echelon. People did not assume in the 1990s that the intelligence community was benign or disconnected. All you have to do is read _Applied Cryptography_ to see a sober, expansive concern about NSA surveillance. And Schneier's writing was far more carefully considered than, say, Usenet. For fuck's sake, the most popular show on television centered on government conspiracies. The millenials did not invent distrust of the government.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - busterarm 13y ago
      > Some deleted comment about tv wags joking about conspiracy people wearing tinfoil hats. If people were relying on television entertainers for informed political opinions in the '90s, they were already hopelessly lost. It's hardly even 'back in the day' as you said. Network was released in theaters in 1976.
  - dijit 13y ago
    Seem to remember it being popular in Hollywood. Enemy of the State, The Simpsons.. even AAA movies like Swordfish.. "The Carnivore program, reading every ISP subscribers email- I did what every federal judge wouldn't do"
    - tptacek 13y ago
      And of course, Enemy of the State is a sort of sequel to The Conversation, a (great) movie from the '70s.
      - stox 13y ago
        Let us not forget another great 70's flick, 3 Days of the Condor.
  - mverwijs 13y ago
    > No we did not. The disdain with which you discard my memories of that time is... interesting. Invent distrust? Of course not. However, I and my colleagues (as I recall), at the time just did not take the threat of government surveillance seriously. Did I trust the government? Yes. Yes I did. I'm Dutch. We have a childlike faith in our government. Being spied on by the government was something that happened on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. And in the US. Surely not our very own flattened nook of the world. And would this surveillance of other governments affect me? Ha! Why would it? Sure I was naive. And I was hardly alone. Were there more enlightened souls, such as yourself? I'm willing to go out on a limb and trust that there were. Does that discount my memory of being ridiculed as paranoid for using PGP? Or the times I ridiculed friends and colleagues myself for taking measures against being listened in on? I hope not.
- busterarm 13y ago
  Maybe it makes me a looney but I was educated about things like COINTELPRO and TEMPEST before I was a teenager and the idea that a government wouldn't be doing these things is more surprising to me than the leaks that they are.
milsorgen 13y ago
Your tone and the overall lack of tact in your post is very off putting. Which is a shame as you have a marginally good point to make.
- rwg 13y ago
  Well, I made a long, detailed, and reasoned reply to one of the replies to my "lack of tact" post, and it got downvoted to -1. So there you go. Yay HN.
busterarm 13y ago
Maybe this is Amazon/USPS's shipping version of the warrant canary? If Apple does it... Imagine that we're not in the US for a second and that this were a journalist? Would your opinion of what happened change? It would have to be a mis-delivery at least instead of a "wrong tracking number". How likely is it that Amazon would ship something from a CA warehouse and it take more than 2 days to get to Seattle? Also keep in mind that USPS does Saturday delivery. Also, nice defense of the NSA, but keep in mind this is the same intelligence agency that gave pretty much unfettered document access to independent contractor Systems Administrators.
- Varcht 13y ago
  This is the first alternate scenario that ran through my head while playing "Which is more likely".
- kriro 13y ago
  Yep my first thought as well.
mindslight 13y ago
> The third-party seller who uses Amazon to accept orders screwed up and gave Amazon the wrong tracking number. This should be easy to find out. Check if the tracking number on the website differs from what's printed on the package itself, and if so what the tracking for it looks like.
- rwg 13y ago
  Yep. But the package hasn't arrived, so all we can do is make wild-assed hand-wavy conjecture. Or something. Of note, when searching Amazon for "NEW and ORIGINAL IBM Lenovo Thinkpad Keyboard 42T3209 42T3177", I find one seller ("u fix it", who "Ships from TN") selling that item. Assuming that's the seller Andrea bought the keyboard from, that clearly doesn't jive with the tracking information, which shows the item shipping from California.
icambron 13y ago
Oh, I like this game. Let's play again: WHICH IS MORE LIKELY?! * The world's largest online retailer that does $54M in sales per day has a bug in its procurement system that randomly transposes tracking codes. ORRRRRRRR! * The intelligence agency whose massive scope and pervasive operational shortcomings were recently exposed by one low-level operative had a slip-up in applying a well-publicized tactic to an obviously high value target. On the other hand, what's great about your way of putting it is that it juxtaposes your belief in the all encompassing nature of the NSA's programs with your incredulity that such a program might have been applied specifically here. I also like the part where the NSA is guarded by the Catch-22 "it wasn't them, because if it was, you'd never know", such that that there's no scenario in which you could be convinced that the NSA did anything. And yet again, maybe it's time to stop thinking of the NSA as some far-off abstraction and start thinking about it is an actual thing that affects our daily lives.
- tptacek 13y ago
  I don't understand. Richard's point doesn't depend on an Amazon bug that transposes tracking codes. But your point does depend on the NSA redirecting packages to Alexandria in such a way that anyone who checked their order status would notice.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    And why Alexandria? Part of this discussion seems based on a lack of understanding of the geography of the DC area. Alexandria is near these agencies, omg! But the fact is that there isn't much government in Alexandria. USPTO is there, and otherwise it's charming old houses, quirky shops, crappy strip malls, cookie-cutter suburbia, smallish high-rise apartments, railroad facilities, light industry, and other such similar things. It's roughly like seeing your Mac get misdelivered to Richmond, CA and deciding that holy crap it's been intercepted by Apple on its way to me.
    - busterarm 13y ago
      The NSA does rely heavily on outside contractors though. Maybe this page is of interest? https://www.ida.org/aboutus/organization/hpcc.php https://www.ida.org/aboutus/organization/hpcc.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Defense_Analyses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Defense_Analyses Spy the address down at the bottom. And if you wanna get really crazy or are just interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_protests_of_1968 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_protests_of...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
Uninformed speculation on which option is more likely cannot rule something out entirely.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
im3w1l 13y ago
You are asking which is more likely. I.e. is the probability of compromise higher than 50% ? I'd say the the probability is less than that. But I think even risks with lower than half probability are worth worrying about.
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  You're asking "what is the probability that this laptop was compromised by the NSA?". Sure, that is low. But there's a different direction to look at it from: What is the probability that someone's laptop was compromised by the NSA? This is approaching 100%: we know that they do this.
scythe 13y ago
>HEY, KIDS! Do YOU know what time it is?! It's science time. Ideas are tested by experiment. Have other NSA-intercepted laptops displayed this sort of diversion in USPS tracking? Is this the only case of its kind?
atmosx 13y ago
You are either stupid or subversive. By now we all know Keith Alexander’s view of hackers (socially disabled, semi-autistic kids sitting behind a laptop at 4 a.m. wearing a batman suit and gloves) and his view on technical matters is equal with Comodo’s [2] leader. As for NSA having skilled personnel??? Sure - some of them are skilled - but they don’t take decisions[1]. The stupid guys do (again, K. Alexander is an excellent reference for incompetence add to that that he is a lier[3] and you’ ve got an explosive mix). NOTE: In “War and Peace” - Tolstoy’s masterpiece - there’s a Russian officer (Prince Andrey IIRC) who realizes the insane tragedy of human history: While the Prussian and Russian army coalition (hundreds of thousands of men, with families and lives left behind…) is about to face the fiercest opponent of their era (Napoleon, is a legend among Russian military officials) the two Generals (Prussian and Russian) are fighting and sabotaging each other about who is going to lead the battle… Until it’s too late. They both get easily crashed, without putting up a fight. So you can play naive, stupid, stunned or cunning all you like but human history is FULL of stupid people in position of power. [1] Quora: “Does the NSA have better engineers than Facebook or Google?”: http://www.quora.com/Engineering-in-Silicon-Valley/Does-the-NSA-have-better-engineers-than-Facebook-or-Google http://www.quora.com/Engineering-in-Silicon-Valley/Does-the-... [2] “BlackHat USA 2011: SSL And The Future Of Authenticity”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA&feature=youtu.be [3] “K. Alexander lies to congress” - http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-chief-lies-to-congress/5339142 http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-chief-lies-to-congress/5339...
- tptacek 13y ago
  "Subversive"? What does that even mean?
  - futurist 13y ago
    Here you go: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=subversive http://lmgtfy.com/?q=subversive

by rwg 13y ago

mverwijs 13y ago

The sad sad thing is, though, that in the '90s we made these jokes about surveillance cameras, internet taps, government-written-viruses, etc..etc... Seemed funny then, too.

tptacek 13y ago
No we did not. This is perhaps the most annoying meme to have come out of the Wikileaks and Snowden disclosures. Nobody working in technology laughed about dragnet surveillance or cryptanalysis capabilities or trojan horses. The 1990s was the era of Clipper and Echelon. People did not assume in the 1990s that the intelligence community was benign or disconnected. All you have to do is read _Applied Cryptography_ to see a sober, expansive concern about NSA surveillance. And Schneier's writing was far more carefully considered than, say, Usenet. For fuck's sake, the most popular show on television centered on government conspiracies. The millenials did not invent distrust of the government.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - busterarm 13y ago
    > Some deleted comment about tv wags joking about conspiracy people wearing tinfoil hats. If people were relying on television entertainers for informed political opinions in the '90s, they were already hopelessly lost. It's hardly even 'back in the day' as you said. Network was released in theaters in 1976.
- dijit 13y ago
  Seem to remember it being popular in Hollywood. Enemy of the State, The Simpsons.. even AAA movies like Swordfish.. "The Carnivore program, reading every ISP subscribers email- I did what every federal judge wouldn't do"
  - tptacek 13y ago
    And of course, Enemy of the State is a sort of sequel to The Conversation, a (great) movie from the '70s.
    - stox 13y ago
      Let us not forget another great 70's flick, 3 Days of the Condor.
- mverwijs 13y ago
  > No we did not. The disdain with which you discard my memories of that time is... interesting. Invent distrust? Of course not. However, I and my colleagues (as I recall), at the time just did not take the threat of government surveillance seriously. Did I trust the government? Yes. Yes I did. I'm Dutch. We have a childlike faith in our government. Being spied on by the government was something that happened on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. And in the US. Surely not our very own flattened nook of the world. And would this surveillance of other governments affect me? Ha! Why would it? Sure I was naive. And I was hardly alone. Were there more enlightened souls, such as yourself? I'm willing to go out on a limb and trust that there were. Does that discount my memory of being ridiculed as paranoid for using PGP? Or the times I ridiculed friends and colleagues myself for taking measures against being listened in on? I hope not.
busterarm 13y ago
Maybe it makes me a looney but I was educated about things like COINTELPRO and TEMPEST before I was a teenager and the idea that a government wouldn't be doing these things is more surprising to me than the leaks that they are.

milsorgen 13y ago

Your tone and the overall lack of tact in your post is very off putting. Which is a shame as you have a marginally good point to make.

rwg 13y ago
Well, I made a long, detailed, and reasoned reply to one of the replies to my "lack of tact" post, and it got downvoted to -1. So there you go. Yay HN.

busterarm 13y ago

Maybe this is Amazon/USPS's shipping version of the warrant canary? If Apple does it... Imagine that we're not in the US for a second and that this were a journalist? Would your opinion of what happened change? It would have to be a mis-delivery at least instead of a "wrong tracking number". How likely is it that Amazon would ship something from a CA warehouse and it take more than 2 days to get to Seattle? Also keep in mind that USPS does Saturday delivery. Also, nice defense of the NSA, but keep in mind this is the same intelligence agency that gave pretty much unfettered document access to independent contractor Systems Administrators.

Varcht 13y ago
This is the first alternate scenario that ran through my head while playing "Which is more likely".
kriro 13y ago
Yep my first thought as well.

mindslight 13y ago

> The third-party seller who uses Amazon to accept orders screwed up and gave Amazon the wrong tracking number. This should be easy to find out. Check if the tracking number on the website differs from what's printed on the package itself, and if so what the tracking for it looks like.

rwg 13y ago
Yep. But the package hasn't arrived, so all we can do is make wild-assed hand-wavy conjecture. Or something. Of note, when searching Amazon for "NEW and ORIGINAL IBM Lenovo Thinkpad Keyboard 42T3209 42T3177", I find one seller ("u fix it", who "Ships from TN") selling that item. Assuming that's the seller Andrea bought the keyboard from, that clearly doesn't jive with the tracking information, which shows the item shipping from California.

icambron 13y ago

Oh, I like this game. Let's play again: WHICH IS MORE LIKELY?! * The world's largest online retailer that does $54M in sales per day has a bug in its procurement system that randomly transposes tracking codes. ORRRRRRRR! * The intelligence agency whose massive scope and pervasive operational shortcomings were recently exposed by one low-level operative had a slip-up in applying a well-publicized tactic to an obviously high value target. On the other hand, what's great about your way of putting it is that it juxtaposes your belief in the all encompassing nature of the NSA's programs with your incredulity that such a program might have been applied specifically here. I also like the part where the NSA is guarded by the Catch-22 "it wasn't them, because if it was, you'd never know", such that that there's no scenario in which you could be convinced that the NSA did anything. And yet again, maybe it's time to stop thinking of the NSA as some far-off abstraction and start thinking about it is an actual thing that affects our daily lives.

tptacek 13y ago
I don't understand. Richard's point doesn't depend on an Amazon bug that transposes tracking codes. But your point does depend on the NSA redirecting packages to Alexandria in such a way that anyone who checked their order status would notice.
- mikeash 13y ago
  And why Alexandria? Part of this discussion seems based on a lack of understanding of the geography of the DC area. Alexandria is near these agencies, omg! But the fact is that there isn't much government in Alexandria. USPTO is there, and otherwise it's charming old houses, quirky shops, crappy strip malls, cookie-cutter suburbia, smallish high-rise apartments, railroad facilities, light industry, and other such similar things. It's roughly like seeing your Mac get misdelivered to Richmond, CA and deciding that holy crap it's been intercepted by Apple on its way to me.
  - busterarm 13y ago
    The NSA does rely heavily on outside contractors though. Maybe this page is of interest? https://www.ida.org/aboutus/organization/hpcc.php https://www.ida.org/aboutus/organization/hpcc.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Defense_Analyses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Defense_Analyses Spy the address down at the bottom. And if you wanna get really crazy or are just interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_protests_of_1968 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_protests_of...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago

Uninformed speculation on which option is more likely cannot rule something out entirely.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

im3w1l 13y ago

You are asking which is more likely. I.e. is the probability of compromise higher than 50% ? I'd say the the probability is less than that. But I think even risks with lower than half probability are worth worrying about.

SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
You're asking "what is the probability that this laptop was compromised by the NSA?". Sure, that is low. But there's a different direction to look at it from: What is the probability that someone's laptop was compromised by the NSA? This is approaching 100%: we know that they do this.

scythe 13y ago

>HEY, KIDS! Do YOU know what time it is?! It's science time. Ideas are tested by experiment. Have other NSA-intercepted laptops displayed this sort of diversion in USPS tracking? Is this the only case of its kind?

atmosx 13y ago

You are either stupid or subversive. By now we all know Keith Alexander’s view of hackers (socially disabled, semi-autistic kids sitting behind a laptop at 4 a.m. wearing a batman suit and gloves) and his view on technical matters is equal with Comodo’s [2] leader. As for NSA having skilled personnel??? Sure - some of them are skilled - but they don’t take decisions[1]. The stupid guys do (again, K. Alexander is an excellent reference for incompetence add to that that he is a lier[3] and you’ ve got an explosive mix). NOTE: In “War and Peace” - Tolstoy’s masterpiece - there’s a Russian officer (Prince Andrey IIRC) who realizes the insane tragedy of human history: While the Prussian and Russian army coalition (hundreds of thousands of men, with families and lives left behind…) is about to face the fiercest opponent of their era (Napoleon, is a legend among Russian military officials) the two Generals (Prussian and Russian) are fighting and sabotaging each other about who is going to lead the battle… Until it’s too late. They both get easily crashed, without putting up a fight. So you can play naive, stupid, stunned or cunning all you like but human history is FULL of stupid people in position of power. [1] Quora: “Does the NSA have better engineers than Facebook or Google?”: http://www.quora.com/Engineering-in-Silicon-Valley/Does-the-NSA-have-better-engineers-than-Facebook-or-Google http://www.quora.com/Engineering-in-Silicon-Valley/Does-the-... [2] “BlackHat USA 2011: SSL And The Future Of Authenticity”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA&feature=youtu.be [3] “K. Alexander lies to congress” - http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-chief-lies-to-congress/5339142 http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-chief-lies-to-congress/5339...

tptacek 13y ago
"Subversive"? What does that even mean?
- futurist 13y ago
  Here you go: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=subversive http://lmgtfy.com/?q=subversive