FBI director wants ISPs to track users

[ProguninTN]

Tracking

I guess "Innocent Until Proven Guilty" is out the window. I suppose now we are all criminals who havent' been apprehended, yet.

 

[MechAg94]

So when they find my searches are for "simpson", "hewitt", "milano", and "heigl", what will that mean in terms of law enforcement?

 

[taliv]

i'd be interested.

 

[Gunfire]

Here's Mueller's boss telling us how he is going to classify US citizens (home-grown) as terrace. Note he says they need say nothing.

"They can train themselves over the Internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination," Chertoff said.

Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the Internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Monday.

 

[dragongoddess]

Well I'm toast. My recent searches have been AK's,scopes,ammo,mags, and other firearm related subjects.

 

[hvengel]

In addition to web browsers having fairly secure encryption you can also make your email messages secure by using a good encryption system such as GNU Privacy Guard which is what the NSA uses and this is way more secure than anything that is used by browsers. GPG is Open Source and FREE. Many email packages (not Microsofts) now have good integration with GPG. Sending and reading encrypted emails is very straight forward when these are setup correctly. For those not running an NSA approved OS you can purchase commercial software named PGP and it will integrate with commercial email readers such as those from Microsoft. With GPG or PGP encryped email the most .gov would be able to find out is who you communicated with and not what was written unless they get a court order to disclose your private key (IE. they can not do this without you knowing about it). Also the encrypted/signed messages produced by GPG and PGP can be read by the other software since they are based on the same standards if you limit GPG to the smaller key sizes the PGP supports.

If anything this is actually more secure than using regular mail. After all if .gov wants to see what is in your regular mail all they have to do is open the envelope and read. With properly encrypted email the process is much more difficult since it takes a huge amount of computational resources to "open the envelope" (IE. decrypt the message). PGP will support keys up to 2048 bits and GPG will support keys up to 4096 bits. By the way for those of you new to this it is 3.2317 * 10^616 (2^2024) times as hard to break a 4096 bit encrypted message as the 2048 a encrypted message.

Also you should think of any unencrypted email as being the electronic equivalent of a post card. If you would send the same thing enclosed in an envelope in the regular mail you should encrypt it if it is email.

 

[Old Dog]

Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the Internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Monday.

I'm thinking that the "Department of Pre-Crime" in that recent Tom Cruise movie, "Minority Report" (based on the story by the great Philip K. Dick) is close to reality ... But we don't need the psychics, we've got the Internet.

 

[cosine]

As an aside, I'm -><- this close to starting an electronic privacy blog/forum. Any interest? It's really not THR material I'm afraid, though I think it's equally important.

I'm definitely interested.

 

[Manedwolf]

Definitely interested in a privacy forum. Seriously, if they do ham-handed datamining, what sort of flags could be slapped on someone who likes guns and reads gun sites, and perhaps also believes in "know thy enemy" and likes to look at translated versions of Middle Eastern news sites to see how they're slanting events? Or if someone's PC is hijacked by a virus and used as a proxy by actual bad guys? I'm afraid this is going to be the electronic equivalent of SWAT raids on the wrong house.

To that end, there's a really simple and free anonymous system I'd recommend. Check out http://tor.eff.org/. It's a package called TOR, and there's an easy on/off Firefox plugin for it.

Even easier, a version of Firefox with it built in, Torpark, is at http://www.torrify.com/ That one can be installed on a keychain flashdrive and taken anywhere with you.

 

[Sindawe]

Another interested vote for Derek's idea of a privacy focused blog/forum.

I queried my ISP on what logs they keep (if any) of their customer's net traffic and the like. Since they are a small shop, they don't keep any logs outside of what their mail servers keep. What THEIR providers keep is another matter, since they purchase their bandwidth from QWest.

 

[pcosmar]

surf safe

ManedWolf , good call on TOR. If you are woried about Virus Hijacking, Use a safer Operating System. It wont stop the tracking, but you can stop the hacking (cracking). Mac is better, Linux is best. You can tighten it up to NSA level security. SElinux was developed for the NSA.

 

[CNYCacher]

Christian-based organization at Bush's School Violence Summit

sorry, meant to be a new thread

mods, please delete

 

[Lucky]

What do Proxy's do, and could you still play video games on the internet through a router on a cable internet LAN if you have one?

 

[51Cards]

As an aside, I'm -><- this close to starting an electronic privacy blog/forum. Any in

I've had some experience with the "Patriot" Act, re acquiring my pistol license. I'm very interested in ANYthing having to do with e- or any- privacy issues. Having had at least four Ammendments violated, and having gotten nothing but drivel from my "representative" congressnonpeople ...

 

[gezzer]

oversteping his bounds IMHO. Congress makes the laws

 

[CornCod]

That's why governments just love terrorism. It gives them an excuse to get rid of any liberties they find inconvienient and it gives them carte blanche to invade any country they like. The lemmings all rally around the flag, even if the flag is carried by a grade "A" con man, with either Dem. or Rep. after his name, it really dosen't matter.

 

[Aguila Blanca]

Actually, this issue--or the record retention part of it, at least--isn't really materially affected by the 4th, since I would assume that LE would still need to obtain a warrant to look at those records.

When dealing with governments, especially ... never EVER assume anything (except that they'll always do their best to screw you over).

 

[Flyboy]

Derek, not only am I in, but I'm volunteering to provide both server space and (substantial) bandwidth to the project, at no cost. PM me if you're interested.

As for THR's logs, I like your answers. A lot. Of course, were I truly paranoid, I'd assume you're a Fed, and lying to me, but, well, sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.

 

[Zedicus]

That's why governments just love terrorism. It gives them an excuse to get rid of any liberties they find inconvienient and it gives them carte blanche to invade any country they like. The lemmings all rally around the flag, even if the flag is carried by a grade "A" con man, with either Dem. or Rep. after his name, it really dosen't matter.

Sad but all to True....

 

[Derek Zeanah]

Flyboy: I've got some servers and bandwidth already.

I've got a spare box sitting around though -- not too speedy (2x P3, 512M RAM, 2x 18G SCSI), but enough for OpenBSD and being a TOR outproxy. How much bandwidth do you have available?

One of the things I'm thinking about doing is taking donations to put up a few servers like this. I figure they'll be $100/month each, but ...

 

[callgood]

But, but.........

Everything's DIFFERENT now!

Back in the days when students were radical hippy commies, one suggestion I heard was that at a certain point everyone on campus should flush their toilet, the theory being that the change in pressure would destroy the sewer system or something. The theory was never tested, I guess someone asked, "Dude, what if I have to take a dump???????"

So if the Sturmführer AG and his minions get this going, what would be the result of millions of people, at a given moment, sending huge emails comprised of....
nukalar, makmoud, al queda, sadaam, pakistan, 5 kiloton, etc., etc.

Would SAC scramble?

Friggin border is wide open and these clowns are interested in my emails. Sheesh.

 

[buzz_knox]

Friggin border is wide open and these clowns are interested in my emails. Sheesh.

The existence of one major threat doesn't mean you don't look at other threats. We made that mistake during the Cold War and laid the seeds for a lot of the problems we have now.

We know that the terrs are sophisticated and using the internet. How to deal that in a constitutional manner should be the issue, not whether to do so.

 

[LkWinnipesaukee]

SO, LEMMEE GET THIS STRAIGHT

I'm into computers, but networking is my weakest area.

So what can be seen? My searches, posts to THR, what websites I visit? And that information is stored on the servers that host the site (I feel like an idiot for not knowing, since I host a website on this computer as well). So the government would like to take this information and use it against us?


So wouldnt a anon. proxy server solve all of this?


Anyone know of any good proxies?

 

[pcosmar]

Try this

LkWinnipesaukee,
"So what can be seen? My searches, posts to THR, what websites I visit? "
Try this, I just Googled your name
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=LkWinnipesaukee&btnG=Google+Search
And that is just Google, not an in depth search.

 

[alan]

pcosmar:

Having seen your post, LkWinnipesaukee,
"So what can be seen? My searches, posts to THR, what websites I visit? "
Try this, I just Googled your name
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search
And that is just Google, not an in depth search., I Googled myself.

There was a long listing of people with my name, some spelled differently. In only a single case, re several pages I looked at, was the guy mentioned, described or referenced ME.

Re this, I wonder as to how much value searching the internet would be, re actually finding someone. I admit to not knowing all that much about computers, being simply an end user, however seeing the results above mentioned, my question stands.

As to FBI snooping, that is another matter, though one wonders as to whether they could find themselves? It does seem that individual privacy is under serious threat, if any remains at all, though possibly not so much from the FBI. I submit that unchecked commercial data banks, poor data security, if there be any at all, along with a lot of bum data therein, might be more worrysome.

Of course, re privacy, what with the way many people bear their souls, in search of that fleeting "free Stuff", one wonders about many things.