The Big Brother Thread

[davidbfpo]

Currently the UK government has proposed a bill to extensively update the law on law enforcement and security agencies access to communications data. This is a controversial piece of legislation, partly for political reasons as when in opposition the current government opposed similar proposals.

Hat tip to a privacy advocacy group:http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/ho...companies.html

Parliament has a committee taking evidence on the bill, which has led to some very strange exchanges between them and the industry (Google, yahoo, Skype, Tor and others). Try this passage:

It is in the background brief. The Home Office states, “The Government is introducing legislation to ensure that communications data will continue to be available in the future as it has been in the past”. Another part says, “CEOP is already experiencing significant problems because of the difficulty of obtaining the same level of subscriber information for internet communications as is currently available for traditional telephony”. There is the problem. The key point is that our services cannot be made to look like telephony

Link:http://www.parliament.uk/documents/j...nel%201%29.pdf

Or the use by the Home Office (equiv. Dept. Interior & parts of DoJ) of

...this elusive 25%. If representatives from the Home Office were here today—and we asked them—they might say that telephony was not all on landlines or even on mobile phones but is now over the internet, and they might point at Skype or Tor as developments that have reduced their capability to capture and retain information

It is rare to see a comparison like this, from an industry speaker:

criminals already have the capability to prevent law enforcement making useful use of communications data. Criminals have shown the capability, but human rights workers do not have the same capabilities that criminals have, so they will be put at risk by deep packet inspection and similar things that this Bill could introduce.

From:http://www.parliament.uk/documents/j...nel%202%29.pdf

This blogsite also comments on such matters:http://www.spyblog.org.uk/

[AdamG]

One photo = 1k word Soliloquy

[davidbfpo]

As the UK chattering politicians post-Woolwich push for the "snooper's charter" bill to be reintroduced Denmark reports data collection is not that useful:

...five years of extensive Internet surveillance have proven to be of almost no use to the police. Session logging has caused serious practical problems....The implementation of session logging proved to be unusable to the police; this became clear the first time they tried to use [the data] as part of a criminal investigation

Link:http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/...igital-privacy

Back to the UK debate. An IT expert's thoughts:http://www.eradar.eu/2013/05/communi...t-opportunism/

'Naked Citizens' is a short twenty-five minute film on surveillance; it is not obsessed with:

..With one camera for every 14 people in London...

It starts with a good explanation of 'smart' CCTV identifying aberrant behaviour, but then becomes more strident. Anyway some interesting concepts are explained, notably suspicion, anonymity and privacy.

Link:http://www.journey.webbler.co.uk/?lid=65226&bid=2

[davidbfpo]

An example of vulnerability and in Syria, so no surprises that many sources have disappeared into the regime's care:http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_spy_w...c.php?page=all

[Firn]

An interesting and quite sad link with lots of further leads and reads.

After reading quite a bit about the latest events and trying to piece most of it into a big picture I had to note once again the deep irony of the whole story. The sheer size of the dragnet, and its depth needed a greatly increased the number of people working on secret stuff. The fear to fail to connect the dots has seemingly increased the amount of sharing and more people know more about the national efforts. The gigantic scope and reach of certain programs, especially those involving your average citizien have increased the danger of employing people who might feel it morally justified to whistleblow.

If that happens the public echo might be big indeed and it can indeed seriously harm directly and indirectly the most important, the true key interests of a nation. At least some sources are saying that terrorist groups have changed their comm. patters and that certain methods will be much harder to pull off. While there are certainly political games involved there should be a certain amount of truth in those informations. So if the fight against terrorism has indeed been the main goal of those various efforts then the NSA&Co might have scored an own goal in that area as well.

[davidbfpo]

I know many Americans have a strange regard, if not dislike for their postal service and it's inefficiencies - so they may think this odd:

..the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us...pagewanted=all

That must be some computer database, even if only retaining the photos for thirty days.

[Firn]

I know many Americans have a strange regard, if not dislike for their postal service and it's inefficiencies - so they may think this odd:

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us...pagewanted=all

That must be some computer database, even if only retaining the photos for thirty days.

So when the US spooks want 'everything' they really want every metadata at least from US citiziens. More, if possible from the rest of the world.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.

In this case it seems as if the methods of the digital age have been brought into the old analog world. Legally the path has been the reverse. Whatever floats the boats and is possible seems to get done with the legal bounderies getting streched and streched or even completely removed...

Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases.

In such days it certainly feels like that the terrorists did indeed score some important victories against key and noble ideas of the Western World. And once again it seems that the scale of the tracking efforts opens the door for highly questionable abuses which pushes the whole thing into the spotlight and alerts also the valid targets. Imperial intelligence overstrech.

[jmm99]

Petabytes (Wiki)

1000 kB kilobyte
1000^2 MB megabyte
1000^3 GB gigabyte
1000^4 TB terabyte
1000^5 PB petabyte
1000^6 EB exabyte
1000^7 ZB zettabyte
1000^8 YB yottabyte

A billion 1MB scans = 1 petabyte; so, 160 billion scans per year at 1MB per scan = 160 petabytes. Hitachi was marketing 32 petabytes of rack storage in 2004 (BBC).

The Bluffdale UT database (easily expanded at ~$2billion per site) could take us into the zetta and yotta storage ranges (UK Guardian).

William Binney, a mathematician who worked at the NSA for almost 40 years and helped automate its worldwide eavesdropping, said Utah's computers could store data at the rate of 20 terabytes – the equivalent of the Library of Congress – per minute. "Technically it's not that complicated. You just need to work out an indexing scheme to order it."

The USPS scans (@1MB per scan; a pure WAG) works out to ~ 1/2 petabyte (500 terabytes) per day - or 25 minutes of Bluffdale's daily capacity - IF Binney is in the correct order of magnitude; and if my math done in head is correct.

I believe all of this is due to the political response to the perceived demand by the American public for absolute security. Others will easily migrate to varied conspiracy theories. I believe it depends on whom we elect; and on whom they appoint. Others will disagree.

One can spend an interesting hour plus, watching William Binney on Youtube, NSA whistleblower William Binney Keynote at HOPE Number Nine (2012). Note the picture of the British sheep about two minutes into the video.

Regards

Mike