October 2013 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: [Cryptography] Bruce Schneier has gotten seriously spooked
by Eugen Leitl 07 Sep '16

07 Sep '16

----- Forwarded message from Brian Gladman <brg(a)gladman.plus.com> ----- Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 09:33:28 +0100 From: Brian Gladman <brg(a)gladman.plus.com> To: Cryptography Mailing List <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> Subject: Re: [Cryptography] Bruce Schneier has gotten seriously spooked User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 On 07/09/2013 01:48, Chris Palmer wrote: >> Q: "Could the NSA be intercepting downloads of open-source encryption software and silently replacing these with their own versions?" > > Why would they perform the attack only for encryption software? They > could compromise people's laptops by spiking any popular app. Because NSA and GCHQ are much more interested in attacking communictions in transit rather than attacking endpoints. Endpoint attacks cost more to undertake, only give access to a limited amount of data and involve much greater risks that their attack will either be discovered or their means of attack will leave evidence of what they have done and how they have done it. The internal bueaucratic costs of gaining approval for (adverarial) endpoint attacks also makes it a more costly process than the use of network based interception. There is significant use of open source encryption software in end to end encryption solutions, in file archivers, in wifi and network routers, and in protecing the communications used to manage and control such components when at remote locations. The open source software is provided in source code form and is compiled from source in a huge number of applications and this means that the ability to covertly substitute broken source code could provide access to a huge amount of traffic without the risks involved in endpoint attacks. I stress that I am NOT suggesting that this has happened (or is happening), simply that it has attractions from an NSA/GCHQ viewpoint. Fortunately, I think it is a difficult attack to mount covertly (that is, without the acqiecience of the author(s) of the software in question). On the more general debate here, in my view, 'security for the masses' through the deployment of encryption is a 'pipe dream' that isn't going to happen. Functionality (and the complexity that comes with it) is the enemy of security and it is very clear that the public places a much higher value on functionality than it does on security (or privacy). Every time a new device comes onto the market, it starts with limited functionality and some hope of decent security but rapidly evolves to be a high functionality product in which the prospect of decent security declines rapidly to zero. Raspberry Pis look interesting _now_ but I would be willing to bet that they won't buck the trend of increasing funtionality and declining security simply because this is what the majority in even this limited user community will want. To buck this trend we need an effort like the Raspberry Pi effort but one driven by our community with a strong commitment to simplicty and deliberately limited functionality in both hardware and software. Brian Gladman _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Re: [liberationtech] Interesting things in keyservers
by Eugen Leitl 17 Aug '16

17 Aug '16

----- Forwarded message from micah <micah(a)riseup.net> ----- Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 10:05:42 -0400 From: micah <micah(a)riseup.net> To: Micah Lee <micahflee(a)riseup.net>, 'liberationtech' <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Interesting things in keyservers User-Agent: Notmuch/0.15.2 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/24.3.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Hi Micah! Micah Lee <micahflee(a)riseup.net> writes: > I'm working on a talk for OHM2013 about PGP. Can anyone send me examples > of interesting keys in key servers that you know of? Since you are preparing a talk about the subject, I'm going to be pedantic and correct your usage of "PGP", because it is important to get your terminology straight when giving a talk. I presume you aren't giving a talk about the commercial software, but instead you are actually giving a talk about OpenPGP which is the standard specified by RFC4880 that different programs like GnuPG, Seahorse, MacGPG, and PGP etc. all implement. If that is true, then you should refer to it as OpenPGP, and not PGP. I dont know what your talk will consist of, besides the funny enigmail XSS and goatse.cx stuff (thanks for that! always good to have some goatse early in the morning), but I would like to point out a few things that might be useful to mention. One is a wiki page that I created with some people: https://we.riseup.net/riseuplabs+paow/openpgp-best-practices - it contains some useful hints about using OpenPGP, maintaining a good key and some general good practices that people often dont know about (such as the importance of keeping your keys updated to get critical revocation and expiration extension certifications!) One thing mentioned on that page that I wanted to highlight, because you used pgp.mit.edu links in your original email, is that the keyserver pgp.mit.edu is not a good one to use/promote. Everyone uses it as their 'goto' keyserver, but it is a really bad idea! As a keyserver, it has been broken for years. For a long time it was just dropping revocations, subkey updates and expirations on the floor. That is *really* bad. Eventually, they upgraded their keyserver software, but it is *still* running an older version of SKS, a version that fails to handle 16-digit subkeyid lookups (among other failings). So, please don't rely on pgp.mit.edu for your security, and please don't include them in your slides! If you are looking for one to use, I highly recommend using the SKS pool address (hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net or http://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net/ - or if you want a more close geographical pool, have a look at http://sks-keyservers.net/overview-of-pools.php) Finally, there seems to be some amazing misconceptions about keyservers, keys and the web of trust. In particular this http://cryptome.org/2013/07/mining-pgp-keyservers.htm circulated recently and it pained me to see because it suggested various wreckless conclusions that were dangerously off the mark[0] (and used pgp.mit.edu, hah). While it is true that we've jokingly called the OpenPGP web of trust "the original social network" because of the exposed social relational graphing that can be done by querying keyservers, and it is for this reason that many activists I know do not want to have signatures uploaded to keyservers (and instead use the bulky local-only signature work-around)... ... but for some reason people seem to think that if it is on a keyserver, is true, or it means something that it doesn't. People don't realize critical things, such as the fact that I can create a key with the UID Nadim Kobeissi and upload it to the keyservers[1]. That doesn't mean that is the real Nadim's key (this is what exchanging key fingerprints and doing certifications is for, so you can know, with a certain degree of certainty, that this person is the person who controls that secret key material). Or people think that because I signed your key and that signature is on the keyserver that indicates: I trust you; we met in person at that date; we know each other; we are involved in a criminal conspiracy with each other; or many other wrong assumptions about what that certification means. I can sign Edward Snowden's key and send that to the keyservers[1]. Hell, I can sign Snowden's key with my fake Nadim Kobeissi key[1] and then send it to the keyservers. Does that mean that Nadim and Snowden have met in person?! No, it does not at all. Anyways, I can keep going... but I dont know what the focus of your OHM talk is about, so going on like this isn't particularly useful to you and your talk... however, I'd be happy to provide more feedback about your talk if you would like![2] After all, we Micahs need to stick together, micah 0. "the cryptome article just sounds like impenetrable bullshit from someone with no interest in actually understandning what's happening" - I'm not saying who said this... 1. no, I didn't do that, nor did I upload the edward snowden or bradly manning keys. -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans
by Eugen Leitl 23 Jun '14

23 Jun '14

http://people.umass.edu/gbecker/BeckerChes13.pdf Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans ? Georg T. Becker1 , Francesco Regazzoni2 , Christof Paar1,3 , and Wayne P. Burleson1 1University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA 2TU Delft, The Netherlands and ALaRI - University of Lugano, Switzerland 3Horst ortz Institut for IT-Security, Ruhr-Universiat Bochum, Germany Abstract. In recent years, hardware Trojans have drawn the attention of governments and industry as well as the scientific community. One of the main concerns is that integrated circuits, e.g., for military or critical infrastructure applications, could be maliciously manipulated during the manufacturing process, which often takes place abroad. However, since there have been no reported hardware Trojans in practice yet, little is known about how such a Trojan would look like, and how dicult it would be in practice to implement one. In this paper we propose an extremely stealthy approach for implementing hardware Trojans below the gate level, and we evaluate their impact on the security of the target device. Instead of adding additional circuitry to the target design, we insert our hardware Trojans by changing the dopant polarity of existing transistors. Since the modified circuit appears legitimate on all wiring layers (including all metal and polysilicon), our family of Trojans is resistant to most detection techniques, including fine-grain optical inspection and checking against "golden chips". We demonstrate the ectiveness of our approach by inserting Trojans into two designs | a digital post-processing derived from Intel's cryptographically secure RNG design used in the Ivy Bridge processors and a side-channel resistant SBox implementation and by exploring their detectability and their ects on security. Keywords: Hardware Trojans, malicious hardware, layout modifications, Trojan side-channel

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Omidyar influence in new Greenwald venture [was: SRF: cryptic]
by coderman 07 Jan '14

07 Jan '14

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 6:11 PM, coderman <coderman(a)gmail.com> wrote: > ... this should be tempered with appropriate caution: > "Six Degrees of Omidyar" > http://tomslee.net/2013/09/six-degrees-of-omidyar.html > who will surely show up in any Open Data effort making progress... also involved in: """ Glenn Greenwald, who has published many of the most important scoops from the Edward Snowden leaks, is leaving The Guardian and setting up a new media venture with long-time journalist Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill from The Nation. The venture is being funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who has suggested that he's prepared to invest more than $250 million in the new venture. """

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Re: [Full-disclosure] Secure whistleblowing feedback / reporting systems in the content of compartmented information, endpoint security [was: [NSA bitching] [formerly Re: PRISM][]]
by coderman 06 Dec '13

06 Dec '13

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 4:40 AM, <dan(a)geer.org> wrote: >... > http://geer.tinho.net/geer.uncc.9x13.txt an interesting discussion :) "This is perhaps our last fundamental tradeoff before the Singularity occurs: Do we, as a society, want the comfort and convenience of increasingly technologic, invisible digital integration enough to pay for those benefits with the liberties that must be given up to be protected from the downsides of that integration?" -- dan i would argue that there is an alternative in design and architecture, mainly those which decentralize and protect end-to-end. however, there is a cost attached to these efforts as well, which so far most opt-out of paying... best regards,

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private fiber security, large IPsec deployments [was: PRISM too much trouble? Get MUSCULAR]
by coderman 04 Nov '13

04 Nov '13

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Gregory Foster <gfoster(a)entersection.org> wrote: > ... According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, > NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records > every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks ... > The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a > project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the > agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ. From undisclosed > interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying > entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry > information between the data centers... encryption between sites would eliminate the risk above on private fiber. you can easily accomplish this today via various means. (some businesses already VPN over private dedicated fiber) if you wanted to protect every host in every data center end-to-end would you go with IPsec or OpenVPN or other? what is the largest IPsec deployment on record? (transport, not tunnel mode) how would you handle key management / key exchange for such a system?

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Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps
by Eugen Leitl 03 Nov '13

03 Nov '13

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and… Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps Like a super strain of bacteria, the rootkit plaguing Dragos Ruiu is omnipotent. by Dan Goodin - Oct 31 2013, 3:07pm CET BLACK HAT HACKING Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock Three years ago, security consultant Dragos Ruiu was in his lab when he noticed something highly unusual: his MacBook Air, on which he had just installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD ROM, it refused. He also found that the machine could delete data and undo configuration changes with no prompting. He didn't know it then, but that odd firmware update would become a high-stakes malware mystery that would consume most of his waking hours. In the following months, Ruiu observed more odd phenomena that seemed straight out of a science-fiction thriller. A computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting. His network transmitted data specific to the Internet's next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled. Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed. Further investigation soon showed that the list of affected operating systems also included multiple variants of Windows and Linux. "We were like, 'Okay, we're totally owned,'" Ruiu told Ars. "'We have to erase all our systems and start from scratch,' which we did. It was a very painful exercise. I've been suspicious of stuff around here ever since." In the intervening three years, Ruiu said, the infections have persisted, almost like a strain of bacteria that's able to survive extreme antibiotic therapies. Within hours or weeks of wiping an infected computer clean, the odd behavior would return. The most visible sign of contamination is a machine's inability to boot off a CD, but other, more subtle behaviors can be observed when using tools such as Process Monitor, which is designed for troubleshooting and forensic investigations. Another intriguing characteristic: in addition to jumping "airgaps" designed to isolate infected or sensitive machines from all other networked computers, the malware seems to have self-healing capabilities. "We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows system CD," Ruiu said. "At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we're using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of the sudden the search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it to search for their keys." Over the past two weeks, Ruiu has taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus to document his investigative odyssey and share a theory that has captured the attention of some of the world's foremost security experts. The malware, Ruiu believes, is transmitted though USB drives to infect the lowest levels of computer hardware. With the ability to target a computer's Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and possibly other firmware standards, the malware can attack a wide variety of platforms, escape common forms of detection, and survive most attempts to eradicate it. But the story gets stranger still. In posts here, here, and here, Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: "badBIOS," as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps. Bigfoot in the age of the advanced persistent threat At times as I've reported this story, its outline has struck me as the stuff of urban legend, the advanced persistent threat equivalent of a Bigfoot sighting. Indeed, Ruiu has conceded that while several fellow security experts have assisted his investigation, none has peer reviewed his process or the tentative findings that he's beginning to draw. (A compilation of Ruiu's observations is here.) Also unexplained is why Ruiu would be on the receiving end of such an advanced and exotic attack. As a security professional, the organizer of the internationally renowned CanSecWest and PacSec conferences, and the founder of the Pwn2Own hacking competition, he is no doubt an attractive target to state-sponsored spies and financially motivated hackers. But he's no more attractive a target than hundreds or thousands of his peers, who have so far not reported the kind of odd phenomena that has afflicted Ruiu's computers and networks. In contrast to the skepticism that's common in the security and hacking cultures, Ruiu's peers have mostly responded with deep-seated concern and even fascination to his dispatches about badBIOS. "Everybody in security needs to follow @dragosr and watch his analysis of #badBIOS," Alex Stamos, one of the more trusted and sober security researchers, wrote in a tweet last week. Jeff Moss—the founder of the Defcon and Blackhat security conferences who in 2009 began advising Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on matters of computer security—retweeted the statement and added: "No joke it's really serious." Plenty of others agree. "Dragos is definitely one of the good reliable guys, and I have never ever even remotely thought him dishonest," security researcher Arrigo Triulzi told Ars. "Nothing of what he describes is science fiction taken individually, but we have not seen it in the wild ever." Been there, done that Triulzi said he's seen plenty of firmware-targeting malware in the laboratory. A client of his once infected the UEFI-based BIOS of his Mac laptop as part of an experiment. Five years ago, Triulzi himself developed proof-of-concept malware that stealthily infected the network interface controllers that sit on a computer motherboard and provide the Ethernet jack that connects the machine to a network. His research built off of work by John Heasman that demonstrated how to plant hard-to-detect malware known as a rootkit in a computer's peripheral component interconnect, the Intel-developed connection that attaches hardware devices to a CPU. It's also possible to use high-frequency sounds broadcast over speakers to send network packets. Early networking standards used the technique, said security expert Rob Graham. Ultrasonic-based networking is also the subject of a great deal of research, including this project by scientists at MIT. Of course, it's one thing for researchers in the lab to demonstrate viable firmware-infecting rootkits and ultra high-frequency networking techniques. But as Triulzi suggested, it's another thing entirely to seamlessly fuse the two together and use the weapon in the real world against a seasoned security consultant. What's more, use of a USB stick to infect an array of computer platforms at the BIOS level rivals the payload delivery system found in the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm unleashed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. And the reported ability of badBIOS to bridge airgaps also has parallels to Flame, another state-sponsored piece of malware that used Bluetooth radio signals to communicate with devices not connected to the Internet. "Really, everything Dragos reports is something that's easily within the capabilities of a lot of people," said Graham, who is CEO of penetration testing firm Errata Security. "I could, if I spent a year, write a BIOS that does everything Dragos said badBIOS is doing. To communicate over ultrahigh frequency sound waves between computers is really, really easy." Coincidentally, Italian newspapers this week reported that Russian spies attempted to monitor attendees of last month's G20 economic summit by giving them memory sticks and recharging cables programmed to intercept their communications. Eureka For most of the three years that Ruiu has been wrestling with badBIOS, its infection mechanism remained a mystery. A month or two ago, after buying a new computer, he noticed that it was almost immediately infected as soon as he plugged one of his USB drives into it. He soon theorized that infected computers have the ability to contaminate USB devices and vice versa. "The suspicion right now is there's some kind of buffer overflow in the way the BIOS is reading the drive itself, and they're reprogramming the flash controller to overflow the BIOS and then adding a section to the BIOS table," he explained. He still doesn't know if a USB stick was the initial infection trigger for his MacBook Air three years ago, or if the USB devices were infected only after they came into contact with his compromised machines, which he said now number between one and two dozen. He said he has been able to identify a variety of USB sticks that infect any computer they are plugged into. At next month's PacSec conference, Ruiu said he plans to get access to expensive USB analysis hardware that he hopes will provide new clues behind the infection mechanism. He said he suspects badBIOS is only the initial module of a multi-staged payload that has the ability to infect the Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Linux operating systems. Dragos Ruiu Julia Wolf "It's going out over the network to get something or it's going out to the USB key that it was infected from," he theorized. "That's also the conjecture of why it's not booting CDs. It's trying to keep its claws, as it were, on the machine. It doesn't want you to boot another OS it might not have code for." To put it another way, he said, badBIOS "is the tip of the warhead, as it were." “Things kept getting fixed” Ruiu said he arrived at the theory about badBIOS's high-frequency networking capability after observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an infected laptop that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted even when the laptop had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed. Ruiu also disconnected the machine's power cord so it ran only on battery to rule out the possibility it was receiving signals over the electrical connection. Even then, forensic tools showed the packets continued to flow over the airgapped machine. Then, when Ruiu removed the internal speaker and microphone connected to the airgapped machine, the packets suddenly stopped. With the speakers and mic intact, Ruiu said, the isolated computer seemed to be using the high-frequency connection to maintain the integrity of the badBIOS infection as he worked to dismantle software components the malware relied on. "The airgapped machine is acting like it's connected to the Internet," he said. "Most of the problems we were having is we were slightly disabling bits of the components of the system. It would not let us disable some things. Things kept getting fixed automatically as soon as we tried to break them. It was weird." It's too early to say with confidence that what Ruiu has been observing is a USB-transmitted rootkit that can burrow into a computer's lowest levels and use it as a jumping off point to infect a variety of operating systems with malware that can't be detected. It's even harder to know for sure that infected systems are using high-frequency sounds to communicate with isolated machines. But after almost two weeks of online discussion, no one has been able to rule out these troubling scenarios, either. "It looks like the state of the art in intrusion stuff is a lot more advanced than we assumed it was," Ruiu concluded in an interview. "The take-away from this is a lot of our forensic procedures are weak when faced with challenges like this. A lot of companies have to take a lot more care when they use forensic data if they're faced with sophisticated attackers."

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Re: Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps
by brian carroll 03 Nov '13

03 Nov '13

naive perhaps, though would it be possible to transmit such 'radio code' via a small transmitter, say at short range in another building, that could send a stream of infecting code into a building (and thus the infection could begin outside the USB framework), such as via a small programmed microcontroller with radio antenna, either networked or running autonomously (or would this be a pirate radio issue, closed-in on quickly by HAMs monitoring misuse of spectrum). further, if this radio broadcast of code were possible, one-way or bidirectional, what would prevent this from scaling city or region wide if a transmitter were overtaken and sending out signals to computers en masse, to reprogram firmware, targeting via equipment statistics or OS/hardware demographics. just wondering if software-defined radio may be a context for hacking computers beyond the peripherals directly attached to the computers, such that a different security situation, boundary, or perimeter may exist yet not be accounted for or protected against.

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Re: [Cryptography] [RNG] on RNGs, VM state, rollback, etc.
by Theodore Ts'o 02 Nov '13

02 Nov '13

On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 08:12:00AM -0400, John Kelsey wrote: > This gets back to the threat model discussion. If your attacker is > watching you from the outside as you generate your key, then > interacting with stuff over the local net won't help you much. (You > may get a bit or two of entropy from the attacker not being able to > know exactly which clock-tick you were on when the interrupt was > serviced, but not much.). If he's not watching you then, you can > rule out a whole category of attackers. Yes, absolutely. For example, if you assume that the attacker has network taps at Fort Meade and in a phone closets of companies like AT&T, they are very likely not going to be able to watch your LAN traffic. OTOH, if they have physical access to your LAN such that they can drop an agent close to your computer that can monitor all of the packets hitting your computer, we have to ask how are they doing this? If they can someone break into your local ethernet switch remotely, then you might be in a world of hurt (although usually switches generally don't have enough of general purpose CPU that this is likely). If you posit a "black bag" job where they physically break into your house, and replace your ethernet switch, then they could presumably place a keyboard bug on your keyboard, or otherwise physically tamper with your computer, install audio/video surveillance equipment in an HVAC duct, etc. --- and then you're either doing something really black hatish, or I have a tin foil hat to sell to you, or possibly both. :-) My challenge as someone who is designing things like a general purpose /dev/random is that it's challenging to determine which assumptions about the threat environment might make sense in a large set of hypothetical scenarios, and which do not. I can imagine scenarios where the adversary is on a public network --- say, at a University dorm network --- who might be able to watch interpacket network arrival times, but who probably can't make a lot of assumptions about HDD completion drive times --- and the user might want to generate a securely long-term public key for their ssh host key or for GPG. I'm less willing to accept as a valid threat model one where the adversary has near-total control over _all_ entropy sources, *and* can divine the state of the prng, but has no other access to the system so they can't break root in other ways, *and* where if you can't prove that you can make the prng secure again, it's somehow horrible and your rng is not robust (and that the authors of said paper should deserve lots of citations so they can get a suitably high impact score on their way to achieving tenure :-). But maybe there are scenarios where such a threat environment is actually realistic. I'm certainly willing to hear someone try to give me an example of such a threat environment; it would probably be quite educational. - Ted _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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<nettime> public indifference
by allan siegel 01 Nov '13

01 Nov '13

Excuse me but is public indifference considered to be a new phenomenon is that really what it is? Remember Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers? Levels of domestic and international surveillance have intensified logarithmically in the post-war period; just imagine what J. Edgar would have done if he could Hoover up data the way the NSA does. The highest echelons of this behemoth of a security apparatus have taken on a life of its own independent of the governmental controls that are supposed to monitor its activities. Quite presciently Norman Mailer wrote about this ages ago in reference to the CIA; he described how the various entities and fronts that it created began to take on their own economic realities far removed from any governmental controls and now, far beyond what Mailer might have imagined, the government officially and openly sub-contracts security and policing to companies effectively working outside the law. All this just increases daily despite shut-downs and economic crises (after all its sucking up tax dollars just like all the data its accumulating). Indifference is an inaccurate description of what the public is feeling right now. What might be more accurate is a profound sense of cynicism, confusion and fear because the world most of us live in is littered with enormous uncertainties and where survival is high on the daily agenda; and because politicians and government leaders are baffling in terms of their levels of incoherence; and because the omnipresent cloud of some kind of terrorist act lingers in the not far distance (and never mind the kind of atrocities that occur daily enabled by the same systems that govern the surveillance apparatus). So, indifference is not quite appropriate when you start thinking about the future and how it appears or manifests itself stitched into people’s daily routines. This is not to belittle or diminish the importance of what Snowden has done; the impact of his act is hard to quantify as its ramifications will be still felt years from now; the Pentagon Papers had a shock value when they came out also and the NY Times eagerly published them (and the Times then still had journalistic stature). But, indeed now the times they are a’changing. The real indifference lies not with the public but rather with the shamble of what we politely call the Fifth Estate and the obscene level of public discourse… bye for now allan # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org

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