Tag: Shut Up Slave

You Have To Pay To Play

Every year people from around the world gather in the Nevada desert to show off art, demonstrate their self-sufficiency, and just generally have a good time. This even is called Burning Man and it has been going on since 1986. Because all property is owned by the federal government the organizers of Burning Man have to beg for permission from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in order to host the event in the middle of nowhere. Anytime you have to beg the government for permission there’s a payoff involved. Usually this payoff is wrapped in bureaucratic paperwork and terminology such as permit and license. Seldom is the government blatant about what it wants and why it wants it. But this year the BLM decided toss off the thin veil of officialdom and just demand the luxury air conditioned trailer and unlimited ice cream for some of its agents:

Lavish requests by federal authorities for flush toilets and 24-hour access to soft-serve ice cream at Burning Man are putting Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Nevada Republicans on the same side as hippies.

The Bureau of Land Management is denying a permit to hold the music and cultural festival on public land unless organizers pay more than $1 million to house “VIP” agents in an air-conditioned compound with couches and hot water, reported the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Why do federal agents need 24-hour access to soft-serve ice cream, flush toilets, and air conditioned trailers to keep an eye on a bunch of hippies who have managed to host a yearly event since 1986 without nuking a portion of the Nevada desert? Because it’s not about ensuring safety, enforcing environmental protections, or preventing the violation of federal decrees. The BLM’s involvement, like all government involvement, is about transferring wealth from the people to the state and stroking the egos of state agents. State agents often receive inferior pay to people who hold similar jobs in the private sector. In exchange for lesser pay they demand certain benefits such as pensions and obedience from serfs. All of these demands by the BLM are about forcing serfs to kowtow to the king and his knights. But it does give us a rare glimpse of the state outright demonstrating its true intentions instead of trying to make them more palatable by wrapping them in bureaucratic nonsense.

David Cameron Is On A Holy Crusade To End Encryption

When Edward Snowden showed the world that the United States and British governments were spying on the entire world, including their own citizens, a lot of people were pissed. Citizens of those countries were pissed because their governments had promised them for decades that they weren’t going to spy on them. Other countries, especially those who were allied with the United States and Britain, were pissed for the same reason. Both the United States and British governments were pissed because lots of people suddenly started encrypting the lines of communication that were being spied upon.

In addition to becoming pissed off the people being spied on decided to start making more thorough use of encryption. Seeing this and noting how it could hurt their spying efforts the two government responsible for this entire mess have been working diligently on making those who have begun using strong encryption criminals. David Cameron, a British politician, has been beating on the criminalizing encryption drum especially hard:

David Cameron has signalled that he intends to ban strong encryption — putting the British government on a collision course with some of the biggest tech companies in the world.

As reported by Politics.co.uk, the British Prime Minister reaffirmed his commitment to tackling strong encryption products in Parliament on Monday in response to a question.

Crypto Wars II is moving into full swing. What I really enjoy about Mr. Cameron’s crusade is how blatantly it demonstrates the true goals of the British state. Like all states the British state claims to protect the person, property, and rights of the people within its borders. However banning strong encryption would violate every British citizens’ person, property, and rights.

By not having access to strong encryption users of the Internet are directly at risk of many threats. The first threat is that their personal information is up for grabs by anybody who has the knowledge to bypass weak crypto systems. That means, for example, abused spouses could have their efforts to contact help discovered and thwarted.

Property is also at great risk if strong crypto isn’t available. If you think the leaking of credit card data is bad now just imagine what it would be like if anybody snooping communications between a client and server could break the crypto and nab the card data. Business deals would also be at risk because anybody snooping communications between two businesses could see what deals were being worked on and maneuver to hamper those deals.

Weak crypto systems also put peoples’ rights at risk. Due process could go entirely out the window if law enforcement officers are able to extend their “anything you say can and will be used against you” to snooping on every citizen at all hours of the day. On a personal level you also put the right of privacy at risk Embarrassing communications, such as those between a doctor and their patient could suddenly find themselves posted on public forums.

There is an upside to all of this. What Mr. Cameron proposes is a pipe dream. Prohibiting strong crypto is impossible because it is nothing more than math and math, being in the realm of ideas, cannot be stopped from spreading. With the widespread use of the Internet we’ve seen how impossible censorship has become and that isn’t going to change.

Please Remember To Be Afraid This July 4th

The federal government has a very important message for you. This July 4th, instead of enjoying yourselves and having a good time, you should be paralyzed with pants shitting fear! You see, the Islamic State (ISIS) is going to strike the homeland and you’re all going to die!

WASHINGTON – As our nation’s capital gets ready for its massive Fourth of July celebration, there are new warnings about a possible terror attack centered on Independence Day. The warning comes as thousands of people are expected to be on the National Mall this weekend.

The FBI, Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center are all warning local law enforcement about a heightened concern involving possible terror attacks targeting the July 4th holiday. U.S. Park Police officials say they received the bulletin.

“We always take great care, we are constantly monitoring the updated security situation and we have a very robust security plan,” said Lt. Alan Griffith of the U.S. Park Police.

National security analysts say the warning is different and serious this year because of ISIS. They point to U.S.-based extremists who just this year launched attacks in Boston and Dallas and an arrest of a Virginia teenager for helping a friend join ISIS.

If you have any question what this is actually about this video clip explains it perfectly:

Did ISIS actually issue a threat or is this just another one of those “speculations based on unconfirmed reports from credible unspecified sources?” Who knows. It would be to ISIS’s benefit to issue such threats from time to time because they force the United States government to invest a lot of resources into investigating and preparing without actually costing ISIS anything. When you’re the smaller force in a conflict you need to expend as few resources as possible to get your opponent to invest as many resources as possible. If you succeed you wear them down and can ultimately achieve victory. On the other hand the government loves its “credible threats issued by unspecified sources.”

Either way the likelihood of an actual terrorist attack this weekend is basically zero. Don’t let yourself get caught up in the state’s fear mongering. Go out and enjoy yourselves, have a good time, and blow some shit up.

NSA Officially Allowed to Continue Spying Operation

Many people were too euphoric about the expiration of Section 215 of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (the whole name of the act doesn’t get printed out enough, which is a shame because somebody spent a tremendous amount of time trying to think of a backronym for USA PATRIOT) Act to take a moment to consider what it really meant. I noted that the expiration didn’t actually change anything but governments love their redundancy so the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the National Security Agency (NSA) could resume (implying it didn’t simply continue its surveillance program after the expiration) wholesale spying on American citizens:

WASHINGTON — The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency may temporarily resume its once-secret program that systematically collects records of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk.

[…]

In a 26-page opinion made public on Tuesday, Judge Michael W. Mosman of the surveillance court rejected the challenge by FreedomWorks, which was represented by a former Virginia attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican. And Judge Mosman said the Second Circuit was wrong, too.

“Second Circuit rulings are not binding” on the surveillance court, he wrote, “and this court respectfully disagrees with that court’s analysis, especially in view of the intervening enactment of the USA Freedom Act.”

When the Second Circuit issued its ruling that the program was illegal, it did not issue any injunction ordering the program halted, saying it would be prudent to see what Congress did as Section 215 neared its June 1 expiration. Jameel Jaffer, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, said on Tuesday that the group would now ask for one.

Once again I find it necessary to reiterate that politics isn’t going to solve this problem. The government enjoys the ability to spy on the populace too much to give it up. No amount of begging, voting, or completely pointless filibustering by presidential hopefuls who don’t have a chance in Hell of winning the nomination is going make the NSA’s surveillance apparatus go away.

If you actually oppose this kind of spying then it is up to you to do something about it. Standing by and hoping you can vote somebody into office to deal with the problem for you isn’t going to cut it. You need to learn, encrypt, and decentralized.

The NSA’s program relies on the pervasive use of plaintext communications and centralization. Collecting plaintext, which is a term for any unencrypted data including e-mails and phone calls, costs very little outside of the taps on the lines and storage. Encrypted text is an entirely different beast. When the NSA scoops up encrypted communications it doesn’t know what it has obtained unless it is able to break the encryption. The documents leaked by Snowden showed us that the NSA had problems with numerous encryption tools including Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and Off-the-Record (OTR) messaging. Even when the NSA is able to break the encryption it’s not a costless endeavor when compared to plaintext.

Another key thing the NSA relies on is centralization. It’s much easier to surveil people when they’re all using a handful of services. With the popularity of Gmail, the fact that there are only four major cell phone carriers in the country, and how many people use Facebook a lot of data is being stored in a handful of locations, which means the NSA only needs to focus its efforts on a few key spots to spy on a vast majority of American. If more people ran their own e-mail, XMPP, etc. servers it would increase the NSA’s costs as it would have to spread out its efforts. Utilizing decentralized networks, such as Wi-Fi mesh networks, instead of centralized Internet Service Providers (ISP) would even further complicate the NSA’s efforts.

Fighting the NSA’s surveillance apparatus requires increasing the agency’s costs. That can only be done by the ubiquitous use of encryption and decentralizing infrastructure. Don’t be a lazy libertarian, start learning how to utilize cryptographic tools today. As always I’m here to help.

When is Discussing Cryptography a Jailable Offense

A 17 year-old is facing 15 years in a cage because he discussed cryptography. Specifically he discussed how members of the Islamic State could utilize cryptography to further their goals:

A 17-year-old Virginia teen faces up to 15 years in prison for blog and Twitter posts about encryption and Bitcoin that were geared at assisting ISIL, which the US has designated as a terror organization.

The teen, Ali Shukri Amin, who contributed to the Coin Brief news site, pleaded guilty (PDF) Thursday to a federal charge of providing material support to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

Dana Boente, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said the youth’s guilty plea “demonstrates that those who use social media as a tool to provide support and resources to ISIL will be identified and prosecuted with no less vigilance than those who travel to take up arms with ISIL.”

According to the defendant’s signed “Admission of Facts” filed Thursday, Amin started the @amreekiwitness Twitter handle last June and acquired some 4,000 followers and tweeted about 7,000 times. (The Twitter handle has been suspended.) Last July, the teen tweeted a link on how jihadists could use Bitcoin “to fund their efforts.”

According to Amin’s court admission (PDF):

The article explained what Bitcoins were, how the Bitcoin system worked and suggested using Dark Wallet, a new Bitcoin wallet, which keeps the user of Bitcoins anonymous. The article included statements on how to set up an anonymous donations system to send money, using Bitcoin, to the mujahedeen.

Some may point out that this is obviously bad because it supports the “enemies of America.” But it brings up a very important question. Where is the line drawn between aiding an enemy and simply discussing cryptography? I write a lot of posts about how encryption can be used to defend against the state. That information could very well be read by members of the Islamic State and used to secure their communications against American surveillance. Have I aided the enemy? Has every cryptographer who has written about defending against government surveillance aided the enemy?

Lines get blurry when governments perform widespread surveillance like that being done by the National Security Agency (NSA). Regular people who simply want to protect their privacy, which is supposedly protected by the Constitution in this country, and military enemies of the government suddenly find themselves using the same tools and following the same privacy guides. What works, at least in regards to secure communications and anonymization, for people wanting privacy and military enemies is the same. Therefore a guide aimed at telling people how to encrypt their e-mail so it can’t be read by the NSA also tells an agent of the Islamic State how to do the same.

Where is the line drawn? Is it the language used? If you specifically mention members of the Islamic State as the intended audience are you then guilty? If that’s the case wouldn’t the obvious solution be writing generic guides that explain the same things? Wouldn’t that mean the information written by Ali Shukri Amin would have been perfectly fine if he simply didn’t tailor it for members of the Islamic State?

As the state’s use of widespread surveillance is utilized to enforce more laws the desire of regular people to secure their communications will increase (because, after all, we’re all breaking the law even if we don’t intent to or know we are doing it). They will use the same tools and guides as members of the Islamic State could use. Will every cryptographer face the same fate as Ali Shukri Amin?

Thou Shalt Not Discuss Manufacturing Firearms

The United States government has been trying fruitlessly to stifle the spread of any information it deems inappropriate for centuries (at least since the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts). Back in the 1990s the government was trying to restrict the sharing of information about of strong cryptography, claiming such algorithms were munitions (I’m not making this up). Now the government is doubling down on its stupidity and trying to prevent the sharing of information related to manufacturing 3D printed firearms:

As readers of Reason know well, Cody Wilson is living proof the government has already been acting on the belief they have this power to prevent certain technical details about gun making from spreading to the Internet without their approval—in Wilson’s case, CAD files to for a 3D printed plastic handgun. And they’ve already been sued for it by Wilson.

Wilson this morning tells me that in making this regulatory move public, it’s almost like the people he’s suing are begging for an injunction to stop them. The proposed regulation is even signed by one of the same people Wilson is suing, C. Edward Peartree, director of the Office of Defense Trade Controls Policy. (One might argue that this is a person being sued in some sense backtracking to cover his own legal ass by stating that the seemingly objectionable actions he’s being sued over are settled lawful regulations, though I don’t know if a court would agree with that argument one way or the other.)

The State Department, Wilson says, could have gone to the next hearing on his case on July 6 “and say we are changing the rule, we will address [Wilson’s complaints about the 1st, 2nd, and 5th amendment issues with their censorious practice], moot the case.” Instead they are “completely explicit” with these new announced regs, “doubling down” on their supposed power to require government license for certain kinds of speech related to weapons usable for self-defense.

Wilson says his suit had to try to demonstrate that the government had such a policy for prior approval of speech. Now the government is “saying our policy is literally that there is such a requirement and always has been.” Wilson seems to think it might make it easier to get an injunction against the government’s threats to him to take down from his servers information related to the home-making of plastic guns via 3D printers. We’ll see.

Attempts to restrict the proliferation of information don’t worry me. The state can write as many laws as it wants but in the end people will always ignore restrictions on sharing information. Thanks to strong cryptographic tools, which the state tried but failed to control in the 1990s, it’s trivial for people to post and read information anonymously. And the task will only become more futile as the state tightens its grip. Arrests, charges, prosecutions, and imprisonments will encourage more and more people to utilize tools such as Tor to protect their anonymity. As more people use these tools the task of the state to identify and attack sharers of information will become more infeasible.

This battle has been waging since at least the invention of the printing press and will continue to wage until humanity rids itself of the yoke of statism. But it is a battle that the state can never win because it is only a handful of individuals going against the collected creativity of the masses.

It Wasn’t Enough to Just Silence Ross Ulbricht

The railroading of Ross Ulbricht, whose only crime was to host a website that made buying and selling illicit drugs safer, was sentenced to life in prison so he would serve as an example to anybody else thinking of doing the same. But silencing Ulbricht wasn’t enough. Now the state is moving to silence people who believed the charges and sentence were absurd:

The United States Department of Justice is using federal grand jury subpoenas to identify anonymous commenters engaged in typical internet bluster and hyperbole in connection with the Silk Road prosecution. DOJ is targeting Reason.com, a leading libertarian website whose clever writing is eclipsed only by the blowhard stupidity of its commenting peanut gallery.

Why is the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet?

Because these twerps mouthed off about a judge.

Freedom of speech only exists so long as you don’t say something that the state disagrees with. Mind you, some of the commenters said some shitty things. Some may even consider them threats if not for the fact they were posted online, which is the capital of impotent rage. In fact we know the state doesn’t usually care about threatening language as can be seen by it’s completely lack of action against the Gamer Gate community. But when such speech is directed at a holy robed one the rules change and names must be obtained!

This is why, more than ever, tools for preserving anonymity are necessary. If you’re going to comment about one of the state’s misdeeds it would be wise to do so through Tor. Failing to do so could result in you facing charges for posting offensive comments.

Clearing Your Browser History? That’s a Felony!

“Obey the letter of the law,” is a phrase shouted by the touch on crime crowd. They believe all laws, not matter how asinine, should be obeyed exactly as written and if you fail to do so you deserve everything that comes to you. It’s an attitude that requires a complete lack of critical thinking ability, especially today when so many laws are so ridiculous that it’s impossible to actually comply with them. Furthermore the volumes of legalese that rule our lives are so large that it’s impossible to know every law. For example, did you know that it’s a felony to clear your browser history under certain circumstances? I bet you didn’t. But it is:

Khairullozhon Matanov is a 24-year-old former cab driver from Quincy, Massachusetts. The night of the Boston Marathon bombings, he ate dinner with Tamerlan and Dhzokhar Tsarnaev at a kebob restaurant in Somerville. Four days later Matanov saw photographs of his friends listed as suspects in the bombings on the CNN and FBI websites. Later that day he went to the local police. He told them that he knew the Tsarnaev brothers and that they’d had dinner together that week, but he lied about whose idea it was to have dinner, lied about when exactly he had looked at the Tsarnaevs’ photos on the Internet, lied about whether Tamerlan lived with his wife and daughter, and lied about when he and Tamerlan had last prayed together. Matanov likely lied to distance himself from the brothers or to cover up his own jihadist sympathies—or maybe he was just confused.

Then Matanov went home and cleared his Internet browser history.

Matanov continued to live in Quincy for over a year after the bombings. During this time the FBI tracked him with a drone-like surveillance plane that made loops around Quincy, disturbing residents. The feds finally arrested and indicted him in May 2014. They never alleged that Matanov was involved in the bombings or that he knew about them beforehand, but they charged him with four counts of obstruction of justice. There were three counts for making false statements based on the aforementioned lies and—remarkably—one count for destroying “any record, document or tangible object” with intent to obstruct a federal investigation. This last charge was for deleting videos on his computer that may have demonstrated his own terrorist sympathies and for clearing his browser history.

Matanov faced the possibility of decades in prison—twenty years for the records-destruction charge alone.

Federal prosecutors charged Matanov for destroying records under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law enacted by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal. The law was, in part, intended to prohibit corporations under federal investigation from shredding incriminating documents. But since Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in 2002 federal prosecutors have applied the law to a wider range of activities. A police officer in Colorado who falsified a report to cover up a brutality case was convicted under the act, as was a woman in Illinois who destroyed her boyfriend’s child pornography.

Prosecutors are able to apply the law broadly because they do not have to show that the person deleting evidence knew there was an investigation underway. In other words, a person could theoretically be charged under Sarbanes-Oxley for deleting her dealer’s number from her phone even if she were unaware that the feds were getting a search warrant to find her marijuana. The application of the law to digital data has been particularly far-reaching because this type of information is so easy to delete. Deleting digital data can inadvertently occur in normal computer use, and often does.

Matanov is the victim of a practice that is far too common in the United States. Wanting to nail him to the wall the state applied every law it could to increase the number of charges. It’s the legal version of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. With the massive library of laws available to a prosecutor it’s impossible for any individual to avoid being charged with something. In this case one of the charges was applied simply because he cleared his browser history.

What’s most worrisome about this case is that no sane person would consider clearing their browser history a felony unless, perhaps, they knew they were being investigated. But even that final case is irrelevant here because Sarbanes-Oxley doesn’t leave any exception for an individual being entirely unaware that they’re being investigated.

When laws are so numerous that nobody can know them all and so ridiculous that no sane person can comprehend them then the trial system ceases to be fair as it advantages the prosecution to an insurmountable degree.

Dumbest Thing You’ll Read All Day

Salon has a long running track record of trying to disagree with libertarians on everything. Sometimes this causes it problem. For example, due to the publication’s idiotic claims that Rand Paul is a libertarian (he’s not by any definition I use) it has to disagree with everything he does. Rand has been claiming he opposes the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance program and that means Salon has had to find a reason to back peddle on its previous opposition of the same so it doesn’t find itself on the same side as Rand. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the dumbest thing you’ll read all day:

Perhaps to those like Sen. Rand Paul who’ve never had to fight assumptions based on one’s ethnicity or the color of one’s skin, the thought of cell phone data being pooled and analyzed is disconcerting. However, as someone who regularly puts up with extra scrutiny, whether it’s at an airport or a shopping mall, I welcome the leveling of the playing field that bulk data collection brings. I urge our government not to follow the Russian method of profiling, but, instead, to use bulk data collection to arrive at objective analyses.

That’s right, opposing surveillance is now white privilege. I’m not sure how that is since persecuted minorities have the most to lose from the NSA’s surveillance. The data it collects isn’t used to clear anybody, it’s only used when it can lead to somebody’s prosecution. With everything being illegal in this country anything you say at any point is likely incriminating to the right prosecutor. If you’re part of a targeted minority, such as Muslims, the last thing you want to do is have the NSA collect your phone calls because something you said could very well be used to fabricate charges to justify putting you in a cage.

United States Government Looking to Repeat Security Blunder

As we’re recovering from two vulnerabilities caused by old export restrictions on strong cryptography tools the United States government is looking to repeat that failure:

The U.S. Commerce Department has proposed tighter export rules for computer security tools, a potentially controversial revision to an international agreement aimed at controlling weapons technology.

On Wednesday, the department published a proposal in the Federal Register and opened a two-month comment period.

The changes are proposed to the Wassenaar Arrangement, an international agreement reached in 1995, aimed at limiting the spread of “dual use” technologies that could be used for harm.

Forty-one countries participate in the Wassenaar Arrangement, and lists of controlled items are revised annually.

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) is proposing requiring a license in order to export certain cybersecurity tools used for penetrating systems and analyzing network communications.

Another great example of the state making the same mistake, only harder. Restricting the export of strong cryptographic tools put everybody at risk of attack and an export restriction against penetration testing tools would put everybody at risk of missing basic vulnerabilities in their networks.

Penetration testing tools, like any technology, can be used for good and bad. If you properly utilize the tools on your network you can discover vulnerabilities that are exploited by those tools and patch them. Not utilizing these tools allows an malicious actor to exploit your network using those tools. Any restriction on exporting these tools will leave networks vulnerable to them.

Why would the United States government propose implementing restrictions that put the entire world at risk? Most likely it’s because government agencies utilize penetration testing tools to exploit networks and would therefore gain considerably by making defending against them more difficult. This proposal shows just how self-centered the state really is because it’s willing to put billions of people at risk just to make its task of exploiting networks a little easier. Its narcissism is so bad that it doesn’t even care that this restriction would also make every network more vulnerable to exploitation by its enemies (if the United States can hack your network then foreign countries such as North Korea can as well).

Fortunately we learned what happens when restrictions are placed on ideas during the crypto wars. Even though the United States restricted the export of strong cryptographic algorithms the knowledge spread quickly. It’s pretty hard to restrict something that can literally be printed on a t-shirt, especially when you have a worldwide network that specializes in information sharing. If this restriction is put into place it will be entirely ineffective at everything but giving the state justification to put several very intelligent people in a cage for the crime of making our networks safer.