Month: June 2017

Judging a Case on Some of the Facts

The trail of Jeronimo Yanez took a strange turn yesterday when it was revealed that the jury wouldn’t be allowed to review the evidence:

Jurors requested to view the video of the shooting captured on Yanez’s squad car camera as well as the video that Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed on Facebook in the incident’s immediate aftermath on the evening of July 6 in Falcon Heights.

Both videos were played during the trial.

Leary let jurors watch the two videos in court Tuesday.

The judge declined jurors’ requests to see transcripts of the squad car video as well as the initial statement Yanez gave about the shooting to in

Why did the man in the muumuu refuse the jury’s request to review the evidence that had already been presented? Since the judge didn’t give a reason and a spokesperson for Minnesota’s Judicial Branch only said that a man in a muumuu has the right to regulate jury deliberations we’re left to speculate. I’m not going to go so far as to say that the man in the muumuu is trying to extend a little professional courtesy to his fellow government stooge but I also won’t deny that it looks that way. What I do know is that this will likely be latched onto by protesters if the trial ends in a hung jury or a decision of not guilty (and I guarantee that there will be protesters in either of those two cases).

The Inevitable Happened

With how polarized politics has become here in the United States it was inevitable that somebody was going to show their piety to their beliefs by performing an act of violence:

A gunman opened fire during an early morning baseball practice for Republican members of Congress on Wednesday, reportedly firing dozens of shots at a field in Alexandria, Va. Those wounded include Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama told CNN.

I want to clarify that when I wrote “their beliefs” I didn’t mean that the gunman was certainly a supporter of the Democrat Party. The individual could be a disenfranchised Republican who is upset about Donald Trump receiving the party’s presidential nomination, revolutionary anarcho-communist, or any other flavor of individual who has an axe to grind with the Republican Party. Then again it could be a random act of violence or even a supporter of one of the many country’s the United States is currently at war with. We’ll just have to wait an see on that.

Unfortunately, this act of violence will likely result in a rapid expansion of the police state. Rulers generally don’t take threats to their lives very well and usually respond by bringing down the might of their forces on everybody. Hopefully the expansion isn’t as bad as it was immediately after 9/11 but I wouldn’t hold by breath.

The Dangers of Insecure Internal Networks

It’s fairly well known that internally telephone networks operate on an insecure protocol called Signaling System 7 (SS7). How insecure is SS7? It has no mechanism for authentication so anybody able to access a network using SS7 can manipulate it. As you can imagine, gaining access to a global network that has no real authentication mechanism isn’t terribly difficult.

Security researchers have been warning about the dangers of SS7 for ages now but the telecom industry has shown little motivation to transition away from the insecure protocol. Now there is a Tor hidden service that claims to sell the ability to track individual phones using the SS7 protocol:

For years, experts have warned of vulnerabilities in the network that routes phone calls and cellular service — but those attacks may be more widespread than anyone realized. For more than a year, a Tor Hidden Service has been offering ongoing access to telecom’s private SS7 network for as little as $500 a month. Combined with known vulnerabilities, that access could be used to intercept texts, track the location of an individual phone, or cut off cellular service entirely.

Accessible on Tor at zkkc7e5rwvs4bpxm.onion, the “Interconnector” service offers a variety of services charged as monthly fees, including $250 to intercept calls or texts, $500 for full access, or $150 for cellphone reports (including location data and IMSI numbers). Well-heeled users can even pay $5,500 for direct access to the SS7 port, billed as “everything you need to start your own service.”

I checked the hidden service address and it appears that the site either went darker or never had much in the way of public information. Now it only lists an XMPP address to contact. However, while the service may or may not actually provide what it claims, the fact that it technically could offer such services should give people cause for concern.

SS7 is another example of the insecure legacy protocol that operates critical infrastructure. Considering the number of these legacy protocols being used to operate critical infrastructure, it’s a wonder that there aren’t more stores like this one.

Government Holds Everything Back

What if I told you that we could have had cellular technology as far back as 1947 if the government hadn’t interfered? You’d probably label me a cooky conspiracy theorist and file me with the people who say that we could have had electric cars decades ago if it weren’t for oil companies. But a conspiracy theory ceases to be a theory when it turns out to be true:

When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not “in the nature of convenience or luxury.” This view—that this would be a niche service for a tiny user base—persisted well into the 1980s. “Land mobile,” the generic category that covered cellular, was far down on the FCC’s list of priorities. In 1949, it was assigned just 4.7 percent of the spectrum in the relevant range. Broadcast TV was allotted 59.2 percent, and government uses got one-quarter.

Television broadcasting had become the FCC’s mission, and land mobile was a lark. Yet Americans could have enjoyed all the broadcasts they would watch in, say, 1960 and had cellular phone service too. Instead, TV was allocated far more bandwidth than it ever used, with enormous deserts of vacant television assignments—a vast wasteland, if you will—blocking mobile wireless for more than a generation.

The Fascist Communications Club Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was granted a monopoly on electromagnetic spectrum by the United States government (or, in other words. the government granted a monopoly to itself). Through this monopoly the FCC enjoyed and still enjoys life or death powers over a great deal of technology. Back in 1947 when AT&T wanted to develop cellular technology the FCC decided the technology should die. As television became more popular the FCC decided that the technology should live. It didn’t matter that there was enough spectrum for both technologies to coexist, the FCC wanted one to live and the other to die so it was made so.

The FCC’s power isn’t unique, it’s the inevitable result of any monopolized authority. Cannabis, a plant that shows a great deal of promise in the medical field, is prohibited because the United States government has a monopoly on what you can and cannot legally put into your own body. A lot of drugs and other medical technologies either don’t make it into the United States or are delayed for years because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been given a monopoly on deciding which medical technologies are legal and illegal.

It’s a Cyberpocalypse

Have you ever had a sneaking suspicion that an author of an article was given a keyword and paid based on the number of times they managed to insert that keyword into their article? I’m fairly certain that’s what precipitated this article. Doing a page search for “cyber” resulted in 29 hits.

If you can overcome the tedium of reading the word “cyber” every other sentence, you’ll find an article discussing the difficult the United States is having with fighting the Islamic State. It turns out that treating a decentralized organization like a centralized organization results in bad tactics. Who could have guessed that?

What’s even funnier though is the little tidbit the author snuck in that is supposed to justify the United State’s prohibition on carry-on electronics on flights originating from certain airports:

Even one of the rare successes against the Islamic State belongs at least in part to Israel, which was America’s partner in the attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Top Israeli cyberoperators penetrated a small cell of extremist bombmakers in Syria months ago, the officials said. That was how the United States learned that the terrorist group was working to make explosives that fooled airport X-ray machines and other screening by looking exactly like batteries for laptop computers.

Those must be some fantastically shitty x-ray scanners if they can’t actually tell the difference between legitimate laptop parts and bombs.

That tidbit might justify the carry-on electronics ban if it was in any way uniform. But the ban targeted specific airports, which means any terrorist with one of these highly advanced laptop bombs could get around the prohibition by flying to another airport, perhaps one in Europe, first and then flying to the United States from there. In other words, the “solution” to this threat wouldn’t have protected anybody and was therefore implemented for other reasons or was nothing more than security theater.

Police Body Camera Footage Being Placed Under Lock and Key

Equipping police with body cameras was supposed to help the public hold law enforcers accountable but like any solution the State agrees to, body cameras turned out to be yet another weapon in the State’s arsenal to expropriate wealth from its subjects. State governments are placing body camera footage under lock and key so it can’t be used by the public:

North Carolina, for example, passed legislation last year excluding body camera video from the public record, so footage is not available through North Carolina’s Public Records Act. That means civilians have no right to view police recordings in the Tar Heel state unless their voice or image was captured in the video.

Louisiana also exempts body camera video from public records laws.

South Carolina will only release body camera footage to criminal defendants and the subjects of recordings.

Kansas classifies body camera video as “criminal investigation documents” available only when investigations are closed. The Topeka Police Department may have wanted positive public relations with the release of its pond rescue video, but if a news outlet had requested that video through Kansas’ Open Records Act, that request would’ve likely been denied.

I stated pretty early on in the body camera debate that the footage would be useless, at least as far as holding the police accountable goes, unless the video was streamed directly to a third-party server that wasn’t under the control of any government entity. However, most body cameras upload their data to services, such as Axon’s evidence.com, that are controlled by parties with a vested interest in pleasing police departments. Combine that setup with the state laws that put the footage outside of the public’s reach and you have another tool that was sold as being good for the people that was actually very bad for them.

Monday Metal: Get Up And Fight by Masters of Persia

This week’s Monday Metal is taking us to Iran where metal isn’t as appreciated, at least in the more religious rural areas, as it is here in the United States:

For nine months after the beating, Meraj laid low, but one day a representative of the city’s religious authorities called his father and demanded he report to the police station. He didn’t, and a few weeks later a well connected student said that both Meraj and Anahid had been discussed during a high level meeting of the city authorities. “They said we have music in this city and there is a group named Master of Persia. The girl has a shaved head and is a Satanist,” he said.

A prominent local religious leader, Ayatollah Alam Alhoda told the meeting that the band were clearly kaffirs, or unbelievers, and demanded that the authorities deal with them. This, said Meraj, was serious. “When a big mullah says ‘kaffir’ this is no joke.

They don’t need the documents and the law – they will kill you,” he said. Ayatollah Alhoda also had priors: in 2012 he called for an Iranian rapper, Shahin Najafi, who lived in Cologne, to be assassinated. Najafi was later given a death sentence for apostasy by another hardline cleric based in Qom and an Iranian news website announced a $100,000 reward for anyone who would kill the rapper. Within four days, Meraj had sold his car for $4,000 and he and Anahid had fled Iran, first travelling to Tehran and then across the border by bus. They have not been back since.

When metal first arrived on the scene here in the United States it was also met with significant resistance from religious individuals and concerned parents. Granted, by that point in the country’s history religious leaders had already lost their extralegal privileges but they tried their damnedest to get the government to restrict metal and other “obscene” forms of music. Their push for government control was serious enough that Dee Snider had to defend himself against Tipper Gore in front of Congress in 1985.

While the fight for metal here has basically been won, the fight continues in other parts of the world.

The Future is Bright

A writer at The Guardian, which seems to be primarily known for propagating left-wing statist propaganda, has shown a slight glimmer of understanding. While neoconservatives and neoliberals fight for power over other people, crypto-anarchists have been busy working in the shadows to develop technology that allows individuals to defend themselves from the State:

The rise of crypto-anarchism might be good news for individual users – and there are plenty working on ways of using this technology for decent social purposes – but it’s also bad news for governments. It’s not a direct path, but digital technology tends to empower the individual at the expense of the state. Police forces complain they can’t keep up with new forms of online crime, partly because of the spread of freely available encryption tools. Information of all types – secrets, copyright, creative content, illegal images – is becoming increasingly difficult to contain and control. The rash of ransomware is certainly going to get worse, exposing the fragility of our always connected systems. (It’s easily available to buy on the dark net, a network of hidden websites that are difficult to censor and accessed with an anonymous web browser.) Who knows where this might end. A representative from something called “Bitnation” explained to Parallel Polis how an entire nation could one day be provided online via an uncontrollable, uncensorable digital network, where groups of citizens could club together to privately commission public services. Bitnation’s founder, Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, hopes Bitnation could one day replace the nation state and rid us of bureaucrats, creating “a world of a million competing digital nations”, as she later told me.

The biggest threat to statism is individual empowerment. While technology is a two-edged sword, serving both the State and individuals without concern for either’s morality, it is difficult to argue that it hasn’t greatly helped empower individuals.

A combination of Tor hidden services and cryptocurrencies have done a great deal to weaken the State’s drug war by establishing black markets where both buyers and sellers remain anonymous. Weakening the drug war is a significant blow to the State because it deprives it of slave labor (prisoners) and wealth (since the State can’t use civil forfeiture on property it can’t identify).

Tor, Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), Signal, and many other practical implementations of encryption have marvelously disrupted the State’s surveillance apparatus. This also cuts into the State’s revenue since it cannot issue fines, taxes, or other charges on activities it is unaware of.

3D printers, although still in their infancy, are poised to weaken the State’s ability to restrict objects. For example, the State can’t prohibit the possession of firearms if people are able print them without the State’s knowledge.

But if the State disables the Internet all of these technologies fall apart, right? That would be the case if the Internet was a centralized thing that the State could disable. But the Internet is simply the largest network of interconnected networks. Even if the State shutdown every Internet Service Provide (ISP) in the world and cut all of undersea cables, the separated networks will merely have to be reconnected. That is where a technology like mesh networking could come into play. Guifi.net, for example, is a massive mesh network that spans Catalonia. According to the website, there are currently 33,191 operating nodes in the Guifi.net mesh. Shutting down that many nodes isn’t feasible, especially when they can be quickly replaced since individual nodes are usually cheap off-the-shelf Wi-Fi access points. Without the centralized Internet a span of interconnected mesh networks could reestablish global communications and there isn’t much the State could do about it.

Statism has waxed and waned throughout human history. I believe we’re at a tipping point where statism is beginning to wane and I believe advances in individual empowering technologies are what’s diminishing it. Voting won’t hinder the State. The Libertarian Party won’t hinder the State. Crypto-anarchists, on the other hand, have a proven track record of hindering the State and all signs point to them continuing to do so.

It’s Not Your Data When It’s in The Cloud

I’ve annoyed a great many electrons writing about the dangers of using other people’s computer (i.e. “the cloud”) to store personal information. Most of the time I’ve focused on the threat of government surveillance. If your data is stored on somebody else’s computer, a subpoena is all that is needed for law enforcers to obtain your data. However, law enforcers aren’t the only threat when it comes to “the cloud.” Whoever is storing your data, unless you’ve encrypted it in a way that make it inaccessible to others before you uploaded it, has access to it, which means that their employees could steal it:

Chinese authorities say they have uncovered a massive underground operation involving the sale of Apple users’ personal data.

Twenty-two people have been detained on suspicion of infringing individuals’ privacy and illegally obtaining their digital personal information, according to a statement Wednesday from police in southern Zhejiang province.

Of the 22 suspects, 20 were employees of an Apple “domestic direct sales company and outsourcing company”.

This story is a valuable lesson and warning. Apple has spent a great deal of time developing a reputation for guarding the privacy of its users. But data uploaded to its iCloud service are normally stored unencrypted so while a third-party may not be able to intercept en route, at least some of Apple’s employees have access to it.

The only way you can guard your data from becoming public is to either keep it exclusively on your machines or encrypt it in such a way that third parties cannot access it before uploading it to “the cloud.”