Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Welcome Back Anti-War Left

In case you sleeping when it happened, last night the United States decided to dump tens of millions of dollars of Tomahawk missiles into a Syrian airbase:

The US has carried out a missile strike against a Syrian air base in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town.

Fifty-nine Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from two US Navy ships in the Mediterranean. At least six people are reported to have been killed.

According to Wikipedia, the cost of a Tomahawk missile is $1.59 millions. The United States launched 59 of them, which comes to a total costs of $93.8 million. So far at least six people were killed, which brings the cost to kill ratio to $15.635 million per kill. At this rate Syria just needs to wait for the United States to bankrupt itself.

More importantly though, I’d like to welcome back the anti-war left! After eight years of mysterious absence I saw them popping back in last night. They were too busy decrying the actions of Mr. Trump to answer my question about where they were for the last eight years but I’m guessing they were on vacation or something and they’ll get around to posting pictures of their trip soon.

Man Arrested for Hacking Without Hacking Anybody

One of the more bizarre concepts in the United States legal system is that one can go to jail for providing a means for other people to commit crimes. Take Taylor Huddleston, for example. He was arrested because he wrote some tools used by malicious hackers:

The visitors were from the FBI, and after a 90-minute search of his house, they left with his computers, only to return two months later with handcuffs. Now free on bond, Huddleston, 26, is scheduled to appear in a federal courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia on Friday for arraignment on federal charges of conspiracy and aiding and abetting computer intrusions.

Huddleston, though, isn’t a hacker. He’s the author of a remote administration tool, or RAT, called NanoCore that happens to be popular with hackers. NanoCore has been linked to intrusions in at least 10 countries, including an attack on Middle Eastern energy firms in 2015, and a massive phishing campaign last August in which the perpetrators posed as major oil and gas company. As Huddleston sees it, he’s a victim himself—hackers have been pirating his program for years and using it to commit crimes. But to the Justice Department, Huddleston is an accomplice to a spree of felonies.

Brian Krebs offered a bit more legal analysis than the Daily Beast article. If you’re wondering why the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) went after Huddleston for writing a remote administration tool and not, say, TeamViewer, it’s because he advertised his product on a hacker forum:

Huddleston makes the case in Poulsen’s story that there’s a corporate-friendly double standard at work in the government’s charges, noting that malicious hackers have used commercial remote administration tools like TeamViewer and VNC for years, but the FBI doesn’t show up at their corporate headquarters with guns drawn.

But Nixon notes that RATs sold on Hackforums are extremely dangerous for the average person to use on his personal computer because there are past cases when RAT authors divert infected machines to their own botnet.

Now that you have the history of the case and the legal analysis, I’m going to provide the libertarian analysis.

Let’s assume the FBI’s accusation that Huddleston build a remote administration tool specifically for the malicious hacker market is true. Under libertarianism a crime doesn’t exist unless a victim exists so who were Huddleston’s victims? The people whose computers were hacked? While they were victims, they were victims of the malicious hackers, not Huddleston.

“But, Chris,” I hear some statist exclaim, “he built a tool used by hackers?!” That doesn’t matter. The existence of the tool itself is not a crime. A gun manufacturer isn’t charged with conspiracy and aiding and abetting a murderer when one of its guns is used by a murderer. An automobile manufacturer isn’t charged with conspiracy and aiding and abetting a bank robbery when one of its automobiles is used as a getaway car for a gang of bank robbers. So why are software tools treated differently?

I can hear our statist interrupting us again, “But, Chris, guns and automobiles have legitimate purposes! Hacker tools don’t!” First of all, that’s not true. Hacker tools have legitimate purposes. They’re often used by penetration testers. Second of all, that doesn’t matter. Every tool can be used for legitimate and illegitimate purposes. A gun can be used to defend an innocent life or to take one. An automobile can be used to drive to work or as a getaway vehicle for a crime. A remote administration tool can be used by a support technician to fix a user’s problem remotely or to configure a computer for botnet activities. Tools have no morality, only users do.

Under the arbitrary legal system us denizens of the United States suffer, manufacturers of certain tools can be charged for aiding and abetting criminals who used those tools while manufacturers of other tools can’t be. The only thing that determines whether a manufacturer can or can’t be charged is the opinion of a body of politicians. If they believe that the tools you manufacture have legitimate purposes, you might enjoy legal protections. If not, you might find yourself being arrested by the FBI because somebody used one of the tools you made to commit a crime. Under libertarian principles, a person can only be charged with a crime when a victim can be directly tied to their actions. What I can’t figure out is why most people seem to find an entirely arbitrary legal system more favorable than a consistent one.

A Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia

The problem with statists is that they never ask whether or not people should be ruled. All of their time is spent arguing over who should be ruling. Donald Trump’s election has infuriated a lot of statists because they don’t believe it’s the right person to rule us. Now a handful of these statists believe that the only solution is for them to rule us:

There’s a growing trend of scientists and engineers seeking public office, many of whom say they’re reacting to the cabinet picks and policy decisions from the new Trump Administration, which in many cases have been at odds with science.

[…]

Now more people in STEM fields are showing an interest in running for office—and many don’t have any formal experience running a campaign. 314 Action, a nonprofit organization named after the first three digits of the number pi, hopes to help solve that problem. It encourages those in the STEM community to run and offers resources to potential candidates, such as training sessions. Founder Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist who previously sought a seat in Congress, says that having more science-minded people in Washington “would lead to a more collaborative and fact-based approach to governing.”

“We have a lot of people that never considered running for office before that now feel compelled to step up and try to make a difference in their communities because of this assault on our future,” she told Ars.

More than 3,000 people have reached out to the organization since January. Most of those people are left-leaning and about half of them are women. 314 Action has not officially endorsed any candidates yet, but it’s currently only supporting Democrats because the organization considers the Republican party anti-science, especially on issues like climate change. The training sessions, however, are open to people from all political parties.

A dictatorship of the intelligentsia will solve everything! It’s science!

This is why statism will continue to doom us all. These people are upset about the Trump administration’s track record in regards to science. Instead of learning the obvious lesson, that the State shouldn’t be involved in scientific research in any capacity, they’re repeating the cycle that has lead us here. In fact, their inability to theorized based on observations really makes me question their scientific credentials. Even a cursory examination of the history of the State and its attitude towards scientific research would lead anybody of at least lukewarm intelligence to the conclusion that its attitude changes every time a new group of politicians come into power. If nothing else, allowing the State to involve itself in scientific research inserts unnecessary and undesirable instability.

Instead of running for office or supporting a political action committee that claims to want to put the “right people” in charge, scientists should be working to divorce their fields from the State. That is the only longterm solution.

Real American Heroes

A lot of municipalities require residents to sign up for garbage removal service. As far as I can tell, the justification for such requirements is that residents are too lazy to haul their own trash to the dump so every one of them must pay somebody else to do it. But rules are for thee, not for me. When the State decides to leave trash on land it claims as its property what consequences befall it? Usually nothing. However, once in a while there are a handful of people who step in and take action:

Since December, clothes, syringes and other waste — remnants of a homeless camp — sat at the corner on the edge of downtown. St. Paul staff members said they repeatedly called the Minnesota Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the property, and asked them to clean it up. But the trash remained.

When Mische heard about the months of inaction, he rallied neighbors and family members and spent more than five hours on Saturday and Sunday cleaning it up.

On Saturday, he took about 50 bags of trash to an official dump site. The site was closed Sunday. Frustrated, he thought of an alternative for the additional two dozen bags.

“If City Hall is not going to come get it, we’ll bring it to City Hall,” he said.

He left a heap of trash bags at the doorstep of City Hall.

Personally, I’d have bypassed the dump entirely and went straight to City Hall but that’s just me nitpicking. I applaud Mr. Mische’s efforts. To add icing to the cake, the city has also decided again charging Mr. Mische with illegal dumping. I guess the city decided it would look bad if it fined somebody who did its work for it.

Little acts of civil disobedience such as this may not topple the State but they can act as a thorn in its side.

Department of Justice Drops More Child Pornography Charges

With all of the work the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) went through, including hosting and upgrading a child pornography site, you would think that the Department of Justice (DoJ) would be eager to start the nailing suspects to the wall. But the agency has decided to drop yet more charges because it doesn’t want to explain how the FBI caught the suspect:

In Tippens, the government decided to make such a move rather than allow attorneys for the defendant to present still-classified material discovered on WikiLeaks as trial exhibits. In March, during trial, the defense attorneys told the court they wished to present exhibits showing the government’s ability to, as the judge summarized earlier this month, “hack into a computer without leaving any trace that it had been hacked or that an exploit had been placed on it.”

The result is that Tippens “would not be able to determine whether child pornography had been planted or whether security settings had been modified.”

During trial, prosecutors acknowledged that the material the defense wished to present was classified and that the materials therefore should be excluded. Because of that declaration, and the inability to present classified material that may possibly be helpful to the defense, the defense asked the judge to dismiss Counts 1 (receipt of child pornography) and 3 (transportation of child pornography).

This tendency for the DoJ to drop charges because it doesn’t want to reveal any evidence about how the FBI caught the suspects really makes me wonder what the FBI’s exploit actually did. I’m starting to wonder if it was doing something shady (as in shadier than normal for the FBI) that would prevent the evidence from holding up in court because the agency seems to be pulling out all of the stops to keep it secret.

It is Against the Law to Publish the Law

Ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse so everybody must be free to acquire copies of the law to ensure they’re in compliance with it, right? Not in Georgia. In Georgia there are two sets of published laws. The first set is the freely accessible one. The other set is an annotated version copyrighted by the State of Georgia. Carl Malamud dropped over $1,000 to acquire the annotated version so he could publish it for the world to see. This made the State of Georgia very unhappy so it took the matter to court. Not surprisingly, the State’s court sided with the State:

Open-records activist Carl Malamud bought a hard copy, and it cost him $1,207.02 after shipping and taxes. A copy on CD was $1,259.41. The “good” news for Georgia residents is that they’ll only have to pay $385.94 to buy a printed set from LexisNexis.

Malamud thinks reading the law shouldn’t cost anything. So a few years back, he scanned a copy of the state of Georgia’s official laws, known as the Official Georgia Code Annotated, or OCGA. Malamud made USB drives with two copies on them, one scanned copy and another encoded in XML format. On May 30, 2013, Malamud sent the USB drives to the Georgia speaker of the House, David Ralson, and the state’s legislative counsel, as well as other prominent Georgia lawyers and policymakers.

[…]

In Georgia’s view, there were two separate works at issue: the actual text of the laws, which were available to the public, and the annotations, which were copyrighted and owned by the state. The annotated code includes things like judicial decisions related to particular sections.

[…]

Now, the case has concluded with US District Judge Richard Story having published an opinion (PDF) that sides with the state of Georgia. The judge disagreed with Malamud’s argument that the OCGA can’t be copyrighted and also said Malamud’s copying of the laws is not fair use. “The Copyright Act itself specifically lists ‘annotations’ in the works entitled to copyright protection,” writes Story. “Defendant admits that annotations in an unofficial code would be copyrightable.”

Ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse but knowing the law is only possible if you’re willing to pay a sizable fee for a copy. If that isn’t a catch-22 targeting poor individuals I don’t know what is.

What makes this decision even more egregious is that the copyrighted material was funded by tax victims. The laws themselves are created by politicians who are paid with tax dollars and the annotations include things like judicial decisions, which are created in courts funded with tax dollars. Georgians are paying the State of Georgia to create these documents and then have to pay again if they want to actually read them. It’s a good example of double-dipping.

Mr. Malamud is appealing and it’ll be interesting to see where his case goes.

When the Gloves Come Off

Most governments make some attempt to appear to have the people’s best interests in mind. These attempts usually take the form of giving the people the illusion of having power over the government by granting them permission to petition, vote, and publicly criticize the government. But when a government feels that its power is being challenged it reveals its true nature. Venezuela is in the midsts of economic collapse. Even basic necessities like food and toilet paper are hard to come by. This has made the people unhappy with the government and that has caused the government to feel threatened. In response it has taken its gloves off:

On Thursday the Venezuelan Supreme Court seized power from the opposition-led legislature, a move that could essentially allow it to write laws itself.

The court justified the move by saying the National Assembly’s lawmakers were “in a situation of contempt” after allegations of electoral irregularities by three opposition lawmakers during the 2015 elections.

[…]

The move is the latest example of the socialist President Maduro tightening his grip on power, which critics say he has been doing for months, amid a deepening economic crisis in the country.

The socialist government has finally had enough of its troublesome opposition. With a court ruling the illusion of power, the National Assembly, has been rendered irrelevant. As you can imagine, this isn’t setting well with the people but if they don’t quiet down the next step the government will likely take is unleashing its police and military forces on anybody who dares question it.

This is the true nature of every government.

Private Solutions to Government Created Problems

Earlier this week the United States Congress decided to repeal privacy protection laws that it had previous put into place on Internet Service Providers (ISP). While a lot of people have been wasting their time begging their representatives masters with phone calls, e-mails, and petitions, private companies have begun announcing methods to actually protect their users’ privacy. In the latest example of this, Pornhub announced that it will turn on HTTPS across its entire site:

On April 4, both Pornhub and its sister site, YouPorn, will turn on HTTPS by default across the entirety of both sites. By doing so, they’ll make not just adult online entertainment more secure, but a sizable chunk of the internet itself.

The Pornhub announcement comes at an auspicious time. Congress this week affirmed the power of cable providers to sell user data, while as of a few weeks ago more than half the web had officially embraced HTTPS. Encryption doesn’t solve your ISP woes altogether—they’ll still know that you were on Pornhub—but it does make it much harder to know what exactly you’re looking at on there.

As the article points out, your ISP will still be able to tell that you accessed Pornhub, since Domain Name Server (DNS) lookups are generally not secured, but it won’t be able to see what content you’re accessing. As for DNS lookups, solutions are already being worked on to improve their security. Projects like DNSCrypt, which provides encrypted DNS lookups, are already available.

If you want to protect your privacy you can’t rely on the State’s regulations. First, the State is the worst offender when it comes to surveillance and the consequences of its surveillance are far worse. Sure, your ISP might sell some of your data but the State will send men with guns to your home to kidnap you and probably shoot your dog. Second, as this situation perfectly illustrates, government regulations are temporary. The government implemented the privacy regulations and then took them away. It may restore them again in the future but there’s no guarantee it won’t repeal them again. Any government solution is temporary at best.

Cryptography offers a permanent solution that can protect Internet users from both their snoopy ISP and government. HTTPS and DNSCrypt will continue to work regardless of the state of privacy regulations.

The Difference Between Criminal Gangs and the State

What’s the difference between a criminal gang and the State? Scope:

The Drug Enforcement Administration seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of drug activity over the last decade, but $3.2 billion of those seizures were never connected to any criminal charges.

A report by the Justice Department Inspector General released Wednesday found that the DEA’s gargantuan amount of cash seizures often didn’t relate to any ongoing criminal investigations, and 82 percent of seizures it reviewed ended up being settled administratively—that is, without any judicial review—raising civil liberties concerns.

In total, the Inspector General reports the DEA seized $4.15 billion in cash since 2007, accounting for 80 percent of all Justice Department cash seizures. Those figures do not include other property, such as cars and electronics, which are favorite targets for seizure by law enforcement.

All of this is possible through civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to seize property if they suspect it’s connected to criminal activity, without having to file criminal charges against the owner. While law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug traffickers and organized crime, the Inspector General’s findings echo the concerns of many civil liberties groups, which say asset forfeiture creates perverse incentives for law enforcement to seize property.

Civil forfeiture is a euphemism for armed robbery. With the exception of a few states, assets stolen via civil forfeiture don’t have to be tied to a crime in order to remain in the State’s possession. This is because civil forfeiture is based on the concept of being guilty until proven innocent. Unless you can prove that the stolen property wasn’t tied to a drug crime, an impossible feat, the State will keep it.

In eight years the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) stole $4.15 billion in cash and that figure doesn’t even include all of the other property stolen by the agency. All without having to find anybody guilty of a crime.

Incompetency Will Solve Everything

Computer security has become a hot topic, which I appreciate since it was almost completely ignored for such a long time. Unfortunately, as with any hot topic, politicians are forcing themselves into the conversation. Two members of Congress have come up with the wonderful idea of putting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in charge of regulating computer security:

Two Democrats in Congress are imploring FCC head Ajit Pai to address cybersecurity issues in the United States, arguing vulnerabilities in cellular networks infringe on citizens’ liberties and pose a “serious threat” to national security. Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Ted Lieu penned a letter to Pai laying out known issues in modern communications systems and asking the FCC to step in. However, that’s unlikely to happen.

Putting an agency of one of the single most incompetent organizations, one with networks that are supposedly too old to secure, on Earth in charge of computer security? What could go wrong!

This is the problem with letting people who are clueless about a subject talk seriously about regulating it. I’ll at least give Mr. Lieu some credit for having a degree that involves computers. But a computer science degree alone doesn’t make one an expert in computer security and, as far as I know, Mr. Lieu didn’t work in the industry so his knowledge on the subject, if he has any, is likely entirely theoretical.

But we live in a democracy, which means that whatever the plurality of voters, in this case members of Congress, say is literally law. It doesn’t matter how unqualified the voters are. It doesn’t matter how idiotic the idea being voted on is. The only thing that matters is whether the majority of voters say yay or nay.