Tag: 1984 was a Warning not a Blueprint

Everybody was a Communist

We’re used the government labeling everybody terrorists. But the game isn’t new. Before the label of terrorist was applied to everybody the term communist was used. As a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) files on Isaac Asimov we now know that the agency accused Mr. Asimov of being a communist because of his science fiction:

By September 14, 1960, Isaac Asimov had been a professor of biochemistry Boston University for 11 years, and his acclaimed “I, Robot” collection of short stories was on its seventh reprint. This was also the day someone not-so-subtly accused him of communist sympathies in a letter to J. Edgar Hoover.

The FBI’s file on the author, who died in 1992, indicates that the FBI had its own suspicions about Asimov, based primarily on his extensive science fiction corpus and academic ties.

Hoover’s tipster questioned Asimov’s position “with respect to whether the Soviets had the first nuclear power plant.” He enclosed for the Director a letter he had written Asimov on the subject, and two postcards Asimov had sent in reply.

Today we play the same game by a slightly different name. I’m sure the FBI readily accuses anybody who questions America’s glory of being a terrorist. In all likelihood the agency has a file on me and many of my friends. Trying to label an individual as a dissident is the state’s way of isolating potential threats to the status quo from the remainder of society. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for the state, these labels being to lose their meaning when they being to be applied to anybody and everybody with a dissenting opinion. Willingness to apply the label communist or terrorist to a wide number of people makes the general population realize that the labels are nonthreatening. Once that happens the isolation tactic fails and people often begin listening to the so-called communists and terrorists.

More Cavity Searches in New Mexico

Via Twitter zerg539 let me know that our friend Agent Flemming is still operating in New Mexico:

A man in New Mexico was pulled over by police for a minor traffic violation. When officers said a K-9 unit sniffed drugs on the driver’s seat, the officers forced the man to undergo invasive medical procedures, including an anal exam.

It may sound nearly identical to David Eckert’s nightmarish story as reported by TheBlaze Tuesday, but this is an entirely different incident.

What’s interesting is that these two incidents involve the same drug dog, which apparently isn’t certified:

Leo’s certification to be a drug dog reportedly expired in April 2011. K-9s need yearly re-certification sources, and Leo is more than two years behind. But as Reason.com notes, that may not matter:

According to the Supreme Court, none of this necessarily disqualifies Leo as an informant reliable enough to obtain a warrant authorizing the sort of humiliating searches that Eckert and Young underwent. Last February the justices unanimously ruled that “a court can presume” an alert by a drug-sniffing dog provides probable cause for a search “if a bona fide organization has certified a dog after testing his reliability in a controlled setting” or “if the dog has recently and successfully completed a training program that evaluated his proficiency in locating drugs.

I’ve always thought of drug dogs as a scam. While I don’t doubt the ability of the dogs I doubt the way they’re handled. A drug dog signalling is used as evidence to perform a search. The problem is that an alert action is subjectively decided by the human handler. A drug dog’s handler could take his dog’s pacing back and forth as and alert and use it as evidence to perform a search. This really relegates drug dogs to the status of exploitable tool to get around pesky warrant requirements. But seeing that the drug dog hasn’t even been reevaluated in over two years really adds icing to this already rich cake.

Posting Forecast isn’t Looking Good

I spent my entire Halloween evening helping a friend move from a shitty living situation to a far better one. That being the case I didn’t have time or energy to write anything. Maybe I’ll post some material later or maybe I won’t. In the mean time I do have a little good news. It appears that the National Security Agency (NSA) is going to Hell:

ROME — The National Security Agency spied on cardinals as they prepared to select the new pope — perhaps including even Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who emerged from last spring’s conclave as Pope Francis, a leading Italian news magazine reported in Wednesday’s (Oct. 30) editions.

Getting Them Used to the Surveillance State

Colleges are great places where students can be subjected to years of rabid neo-liberalism in their pursuit of getting a piece of paper. On top of being beat over the head with statist propaganda, college students also have something else to look forward to: widespread surveillance:

It monitors email and social media accounts, uses thousands of surveillance cameras to track behavior and movement, is funded by billions of dollars from the federal government, and has been called “the most authoritarian institution in America“.

The National Security Agency? Nope. It’s your average college or university.

This makes sense. In fact, I would be shocked if colleges weren’t surveilling students. Colleges have been little more than an arm of the Ministry of Truth for decades now. Students are fed bullshit ranging form social contract theory to Keynesian economics. Anything that may justify the actions of the state are shoved down the throats of students who just want to get a piece of paper that says they’re qualified to do a job so they can join the ranks of the unemployed with everybody else.

But colleges are supposed to prepare students for the real world. Spying on them will ready them for being spied on for the rest of their lives.

Being Offline Won’t Stop the State from Tracking You

After Edward Snowden leaked the National Security Agency (NSA) documents that unveiled how vast its surveillance has become there were a lot of reactions. Some people decided they didn’t have anything to hide so the state’s spying wasn’t an issue, otherwise decided to pursue technologies that would allow them to keep private communications private, and others decided to go offline. Of the three reactions the last one was, by far, the most irrational. You don’t have to be online for the state to track you. As this article points out, there are other ways for the state to surveil you:

The people who have actually attempted to live without being tracked–most often due to a safety threat–will tell you that security cameras are just about everywhere, RFID tags seem to be in everything, and almost any movement results in becoming part of a database. “It’s basically impossible for you and I to decide, as of tomorrow, I’m going to remain off the radar and to survive for a month or 12 months,” says Gunter Ollmann, the CTO of security firm IOActive, who in his former work with law enforcement had several coworkers who dedicated themselves to remaining anonymous for the safety of their families. “The amount of prep work you have to do in order to stay off the radar involves years of investment leading up to that.”

People who believe themselves to be very clever will often brag about the fact that they use a burner phone (a pre-paid cellular phone you can buy in most convenience stores) that they bought with cash. In their mind this means that the phone isn’t tied to them in any way and that they are untrackable while using it. Most convenience stores have security cameras looking at every square inch of the store. Those cameras can have some fantastic optics that give crystal clear images (the days of grainy black and white video footage from security cameras is ending). Facial recognition software is frighteningly accurate (just post a picture of a friend’s face on Facebook sometime). The state can requisition surveillance video whenever it wants (assuming it doesn’t just collect all surveillance footage like it does with phone calls and e-mails). In addition to that, the NSA collects phone records. It doesn’t take much to look at the numbers you called and develop a social map that has a good chance of identifying you. Using a burner phone won’t keep you safe from Big Brother’s gaze.

Another major source of leaks when it comes to your personal information are your friends:

Friends can be an impediment to a life off the radar. For one, they probably think they’re doing you a favor when they invite you to a party using Evite, add you to LinkedIn or Facebook, or keep your information in a contact book that they sync with their computer.

But from your perspective, as someone trying to remain as untraceable as possible, they are selling you out. “Basically what they’ve done is uploaded all of my contact information and connected it to them,” Sell says.

This is the biggest one in my opinion. My family has given out my phone number and personal e-mail address to people even though I’ve told them numerous times that I didn’t want them to do that. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean your friends and family are. Unless you’re willing to sever all ties with other people you’re trackable. You may not have a Facebook account but that won’t stop your friends from posting pictures of you and writing your name in the description.

Going offline won’t save you. It won’t even make tracking your more difficult. The only thing going offline does is prevent you from utilizing very powerful technology to your advantage.

Keith Alexander is Planning His Move to a Cushy Private Sector Job

The bastard who spearheaded the massive National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance apparatus has unveiled plans to retire:

Army General Keith Alexander’s eight-year tenure was rocked this year by revelations contained in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s widespread scooping up of telephone, e-mail and social media data.

Alexander has formalized plans to leave by next March or April, while his civilian deputy, John “Chris” Inglis, is due to retire by year’s end, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

I’m sure a lot of credit for this retirement goes to Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. If it wasn’t for all the bad publicity provided by those two Mr. Alexander would likely continue is reign of spying. But this news is bittersweet. Being a higher up in the military, Mr. Alexander has probably received numerous job offers from politically connected defense contractors. Those offers likely include an absurdly high salary with very few job responsibility. Lockheed Martin, for example, would almost certainly love to hire Mr. Alexander to wine and dine his former military buddies to convince them to go with Lockheed’s solutions instead of Raytheon’s.

In other words, Mr. Alexander spend years illegally spying on us and his reward will almost certainly be a high paying career as a salesman for a defense contractor. That doesn’t seem like a very just outcome but it is a typical outcome when corruption within the state is unveiled.

Pure Sensationalism

One of my friends posted this story from Natural News, a site known for sensationalist stories. This story fell within my area of expertise so I found it more annoying than most sensational articles posted on that site. According to the article:

(NaturalNews) We have already established that Healthcare.gov is not a functioning database application that allows people to shop for competing health plans. It is actually a government-run Trojan Horse that suckers people into creating accounts where they hand over:

• Name and address
• Email address and password
• Social security number
• Private bank account details
• Employer details and other information

During the enrollment process, your computer also hands over your IP address which is then tied to your social security number.

This time the emphasis isn’t mine. With the exception of your Social Security number and employment history all of these things are handed over to any site you buy products from. With that information your Social Security number can be found for $0.25 through services like Tracers Information (I was Kevin Mitnik bring up a volunteer’s Social Security number using this site in the Social Engineering Village at Defcon 21). And, more to the point, this is all information that the federal government already has. In fact the federal government is the organization that gave you the damn Social Security number in the first place.

The article then goes on to claim that all of that information is transmitted to the National Security Agency (NSA). Why would the NSA have to get Healthcare.gov to send it that information? Thanks to Edward Snowden we know that the NSA is spying on people directly through direct access to Internet Service Providers (ISP) and companies that offer online services (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.). As a federal agency the NSA also has access to your driver license records (name and address), Social Security information, and bank information (financial institution regulations are glorious, aren’t they). A simple peek at your bank account will almost certainly reveal who you’re working for (and who you have worked for). The NSA doesn’t need a healthcare website to get all of this information, it has setup a pervasive surveillance apparatus to get all of this information already.

The reason these types of articles piss me off is because they drum up unnecessary fear of technology. In order to overcome tyranny fear must first be alleviated. Or, to put it another way, the only way to fight gods is to first prove that they’re not gods. So stop with the fear mongering and sensationalism. It’s annoying because I then have to explain all of this shit to my less technically minded friends.

Information is Power

I’ve been avoiding dwelling on the Affordable Car Act (ACA) too much. The last has passed and the state has never been too keen on repealing something it put into place. I would prefer to spend my time thinking of ways to bypass the ACA such as building “underground” mutual aid organizations. But the ACA is the hot topic right now and it pays to point out my issues with that legislation as justification for finding a way to bypass it. It seems Maryland’s health insurance exchange (the ACA mandates that each individual state implement a health insurance “marketplace”) contains some interesting language in its privacy policy:

The policy contains many standard statements about information automatically collected regarding Internet browsers and IP addresses, temporary “cookies” used by the site, and website accessibility. However, at least two conditions may give some users pause before proceeding.

The first is regarding personal information submitted with an application for those users who follow through on the sign up process all the way to the end. The policy states that all information to help in applying for coverage and even for making a payment will be kept strictly confidential and only be used to carry out the function of the marketplace. There is, however, an exception: “[W]e may share information provided in your application with the appropriate authorities for law enforcement and audit activities.”

This exception could turn out to be a lot of fun for law enforcement. What’s to stop law enforcement agents from digging through your medical history in order to find some dirt on you? Did you do drugs in the past that lead to medical issues? Have you overcome your addiction? Too bad, because your attendance at a detox center may be enough proof to land you in jail (or at least nail you with a nasty fine). While the scenario I just laid out is entirely hypothetical I believe it is a likely one based on how the war on drugs not patented by major pharmaceutical companies has been conducted so far.

Information is power. One of the most worrisome consequences of the ACA is the amount of healthcare data that will be made readily available to the federal government. With how pervasive it has been with surveillance as of late we can’t assume that it has any egalitarian reason to gather healthcare information as well as copies of our communications.

Tor Stands Pretty Secure Against NSA Attack

We all know that the National Security Agency (NSA) hates Tor. Tor stands for everything the NSA is against, such as anonymity and information security. It comes as no surprise to find out that the spy agency has been attacking the Tor network:

The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.

It’s pretty funny when one government agency is focused on destroying something originally created by another government agency (Tor was originally funded by the United States Naval Research Laboratory). Fortunately the NSA has met with very little success:

But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled ‘Tor Stinks’, states: “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.” It continues: “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” and says the agency has had “no success de-anonymizing a user in response” to a specific request.

Another top-secret presentation calls Tor “the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity”.

There has been a lot of speculation about Tor’s security. Even now people are arguing over whether or not the Tor Stinks presentation is still accurate. It is possible that the NSA has developed a way to successfully remove a Tor user’s anonymity since the presentation was leaked. So far we’ve seen no evidence of this though. The two primary stores involving Tor, the take down of Freedom Hosting and the apparent arrest of Dread Pirate Roberts, were both accomplished using old fashioned investigative work. This leads me to believe the the Tor Stinks presentation is still accurate and that the NSA hasn’t found a reliable way to attack a Tor user’s anonymity.

Once again, we can speculate about the powers of the NSA. The problem is we can’t work off of speculations. I agree with Bruce Schneier who said we should “trust the math.” Unless we have evidence to the contrary we can only assume that Tor works. With that said, it’s never good to rely entirely on a single tool. Tor is great but you should also take other precautions to protect your anonymity online (for example, Tor doesn’t do you a lot of good if somebody has already managed to install a trojan onto your computer).

More Dogs Shot by Police

We can’t even get through an entire week without a report of another dog shot by another police officer. This time around police officers stormed a home looking for a man who hasn’t lived there in six years. Upon seeing dogs at this address they had no business being at they opened fire:

Warrant officers stormed a home overnight waking up a family and nearly hitting their dog with a gunshot.

Bienvenido Gutierrez said he and his fiancé, Nina Castro, heard noises coming from the back of their row home on Ashmead Street in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia around 12:30 a.m.

Gutierrez told NBC10’s Jesse Gary that they then heard a knock on the front door and he let in about a half dozen First Judicial Warrant Unit officers who said they were looking for Gutierrez’s brother Joshua Gutierrez.

Gutierrez said he tried to explain to the officers that his brother moved out six years ago. He also said he warned the officers that there were two dogs in the home, including one pit bull sleeping in the same room as Gutierrez’s children — ages 7, 2, and 10 months.

So the National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on every phone call and e-mail message and the state still can’t figure out where people live? Also, why couldn’t the cops have walked up to the front door, knocked, and asked if the person they were looking for was there? It’s a pretty simple procedure and far less dangerous than trying to break into a home, especially when you’re not sure if the person you’re looking for is even there.