"Government will spy on every call and e-mail"

[two sheds]

So I send one email via an unsecured wi-fi business network, effectively burying the mail in with the legitimate traffic from that router. In that mail (encrypted in a JPG file or not) I give my associate a fresh email address - perhaps disguised as something else - to reply to. He does the same when he replies, while posting from one of the many unsecured/easily hacked wi-fi networks around the city. Neither of us use the same email address/network more than once.

How might the system detect a trend here?

How immune would you be if a key logger program had been installed on your computer? Presumably that would be first line of attack on anyone with suspicious activity.

 

[darkfibre]

How immune would you be if a key logger program had been installed on your computer? Presumably that would be first line of attack on anyone with suspicious activity.

Heh. Let's not go there...

This conversation put me in mind of some of the 'Security Maxims' proposed by Roger Johnston.

 

[two sheds]

Heh. Let's not go there...

This conversation put me in mind of some of the 'Security Maxims' proposed by Roger Johnston.

Bookmarked, ta.

I was thinking earlier this evening that I'd never be able to get involved in anything dodgy along these lines cos there are a lot of people out there who are a lot cleverer than i am

 

[darkfibre]

I was thinking earlier this evening that I'd never be able to get involved in anything dodgy along these lines cos there are a lot of people out there who are a lot cleverer than i am

I dunno - you could perhaps cunningly conceal your identity be lying about how many sheds you have, for instance.

 

[two sheds]

I dunno - you could perhaps cunningly conceal your identity be lying about how many sheds you have, for instance.

And what i keep in my sheds? I like it.

 

[darkfibre]

And what i keep in my sheds? I like it.

No no no! It's not the contents of your shed(s) they're interested in - merely the fact that you have or had sheds, when you had them and where they were.

Well, it was... until you suggested that the contents of your shed(s) is worthy of concealment and hit 'submit reply'.

 

[two sheds]

You want i should draw you a map??


__________ ....__________
!.............. !.... !.............. !
! shed 1 ....! .... ! shed 2 ....!
! (bicycles) !.... ! (birdseed) !
! ..............! .... !...............!
!_________! .... !__________!


__________
! shed 3 ....!
! (Enigma ..!
! coding.... !
! machine). !
!__________!

 

[darkfibre]

shed 3

You've blown it now, Mr. 'suspicious shed concealing activity'.

You should have encrypted the last one... Oh, hang on.

Lord knows what will now end up in my file having discussed it with you. I've shot the lady in the co-ops cat as a precaution.

 

[two sheds]

You've blown it now, Mr. 'suspicious shed concealing activity'.

Yeh but i got a secret one that i don't tell anyone about

I read an excellent book recently by the way, Against the Grain, you know it?

 

[editor]

Like I was saying....

"A heavyweight US investigation of counter-terror databases has concluded that the type of intelligence mining proposed by UK spy chiefs under the auspices of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) probably won't catch jihadis."

£12billion Database Unlikely To Catch Terrorists, More Privacy Concerns Revealed

The recently reported £12billion that's being used to compile a communications database of phone calls, texts and emails in Great Britain seems to have garnered a rather angry response from most quarters and in our view, rightly so.

At the risk of poking a sleeping bear with a stick we'd like to update you with some more bad news following a US investigation of counter-terror databases that has specifically been looking at the intelligence mining proposals in the UK.

A 352-page report by the National Academies, an advisory board for politicians on such matters, had some rather damning things to say about the proposal.

The first would seem rather obvious and states that trawling such a database for suspicious activity would generate an enormous number of false leads.

It goes on to say that predicting terror attacks with this information would be extremely difficult if not impossible, or to quote a passage from the report: "Such highly automated tools and techniques cannot be easily applied to the much more difficult problem of detecting and pre-empting a terrorist attack, and success in doing so may not be possible at all."

Apparently very little is known about what patterns of information are reliable gauges of terrorist activity and there's concern that data mining of this nature could lead to people being wrongly accused or even detained on questionable grounds.


So that leaves us with £12billion being spent to try and prevent internet paedophile rings and uh... computer fraud. With the latter costing (just) hundreds of millions of pounds each year it does seem a bit like trying to swat a fly with a shotgun.


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/08/us_gov_data_mining_report/

 

[cybertect]

Geoff Hoon says if that if you don't agree with the government keeping tabs on all your communications "you're giving a licence to terrorists to kill people"*

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/hoon_comms_data_bill/



* Will terrorists need to present their passport when they apply for their licence to kill?

 

[SpookyFrank]

Geoff Hoon says if that if you don't agree with the government keeping tabs on all your communications "you're giving a licence to terrorists to kill people"*

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/hoon_comms_data_bill/

These people have really gone beyond satire haven't they?

The fact is people are squishy and pathetic and if somebody wants to kill lots of them, it's not that fucking hard. Monitoring communications will not change this fact, it might simply mean that terrorists are somewhat inconvenienced by the need to communicate face-to-face or using codes of some description. From the case of those failed drinks bottle bombers, the terrorists seem to have alredy figured out that using the phone to talk about bombs isn't very wise. Hell, maybe the terrorists will abandon bombs altogether and go for entirely more sneaky methods of mass murder. They could, for example, rise to a high positison in the department of health and then force various NHS trusts to accept crippling PFI deals for new facillities, then refuse to provide them with the funds needed to honour their lease agreement and treat sick people. With refusal to pay the piper not an option wards will be closed, illnesses will go untreated and shitloads of people will die. And nobody will send you to prison for that, in fact you'll probably get a fucking OBE.

 

[elbows]

The outgoing prosecutor said some very good stuff:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7680704.stm

"We have been absolutely right to resist, whenever they have been suggested, special courts, vetted judges and all the other paraphernalia of paranoia.
"Of course, you can have the Guantanamo model. You can have the model which says that we cannot afford to give people their rights, that rights are too expensive because of the nature of the threats we are facing.
"Or you can say, as I prefer to, that our rights are priceless. That the best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions, rather than to degrade them.
"We would do well not to insult ourselves and all of our institutions and our processes of law in the face of these medieval delusions."

 

[elbows]

Oh his full speech is on this page, the section on terror that the above are from is near the end if anybody is interested:

http://www.cps.gov.uk/news/nationalnews/coming_out_of_the_shadows.html

 

[nino_savatte]

That's how I read it, but then those powers are already partly in place under the RIP Act.

Yep, the panopticon already exists: it's formed by Menwith Hill and GCHQ.

 

[weltweit]

All this panicky communications spying is really : "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted"

Once such a system is in place do you expect the terrorists to use it any more, or if they do, do you expect them to do it in an obvious way ..

 

[weltweit]

All this panicky communications spying is really : "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted"

Once such a system is in place do you expect the terrorists to use it any more, or if they do, do you expect them to do it in an obvious way ..

Especially as the suicide bombers are not bothered about "getting away with it" and don't have any issues about being identified after the act.