October 2013 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

[tor-talk] x.509 for hidden services
by Gregory Maxwell 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

==Background== (you can skip to the Tor section if you don't care) The Bitcoin universe is in the process of creating a specification for digital invoices called "the bitcoin payment protocol". (More info: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=300809.msg3225143#msg3225143) The payment protocol allows someone to request someone else pay Bitcoin for specific things, instructing them to pay specific amounts in specific ways, and allows the receiver to provide things like instructions for sending a refund if the transaction is for some reason aborted... all sorts of extra metadata which doesn't belong in the public Bitcoin network for scalability and privacy reasons. One of the things these invoices have is an optional signing mechanism for authentication and non-repudiation. Normally these requests would be sent over an authenticated and encrypted channel which provides confidentiality and authentication, but not non-repudiation. The non-repudiation will provide cryptographic evidence to the participants which can be used to resolve disputes: e.g. "He didn't send me my alpaca socks!" "Thats not the address I told you to pay!" "He told me he'd send my 99 red-balloons, not just one!" "No way, that was the price for 1 red-balloon!" The payment protocol is extensible and may someday commonly support many kinds of signatures, but the initial implementations only support signing with internal x.509 certificates and verifying those certificates with standard CAs. As _horrible_ as this is, it's better than nothing, and the primary users asking for this functionality have SSL websites today. We don't believe that any other PKI mechenism is actually functional enough to be usable (e.g. as evidenced by the fact that downloads of our GPG signatures, is on the order of 1% of the downloads of the Bitcoin software; and probably only a small portion of those users have actually done anything to verify the signing keys) today, so other options haven't been a priority. However, the need to use the known insecure CA infrastructure for this (optional!) feature has seriously spazzed out some people. A lot of this is pure confusion, e.g. people thinking that all payment requests would have to go via the CA (no kidding!), but its surprisingly hard to convince people who are responding emotionally of the subtle tradeoffs involved especially when they have the luxury of saying "it's your problem to go figure out, figure it out and go write a bunch extra of software for me". So having some alternative on day one would be useful in helping the more conspiracy minded understand that this isn't some effort to cram the use of CAs down their throat. ==Where Tor comes in== One of the downsides if using x.509 certs to non-repudiate here is that sites hosted as tor hidden services can't participate. It occurred to me that this could be fixed with very little code: Take the HS pubkey, pack it into a self-signed x.509 cert with the cn=pubkeybase32.onion. And specify that .onion certs have a special hostname validation rule that hashes and encodes the key. Then the whole process would work for .onion, we'd have a non-CA option available and working, etc. I'm aware that HS pubkeys have been used for application level authentication in Tor elsewhere (e.g. I believe torchat does this) so it's not entirely unprecedented. I'm not aware of anyone packing them in x.509 certificates. If anyone has, I'd like to use the same encoding style for greater compatibility. The biggest reason I can see not to do this is that it will not be compatible with future editions of hidden services which aren't based on RSA keys. (e.g. the EC point addition stuff to protect against enumeration attacks wouldn't fit into this model). I don't think this is a serious concern: if HS x.509s do become widely used we could add a new authentication type for the new onion addresses when those are introduced. Does anyone else see any other reasons not to do this? Are there other applications which would benefit from having x.509 certs for onion names? -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

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[liberationtech] A Public Statement Regarding Ubiquitous Encryption on the XMPP Network
by Moritz Bartl 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [jdev] TLS Everywhere Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 21:23:08 -0600 From: Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter(a)stpeter.im> Reply-To: Jabber/XMPP software development list <jdev(a)jabber.org> To: jdev(a)jabber.org Almost 15 years have passed since my friend Jeremie Miller released the initial version of the jabberd IM server, launching the Jabber open-source community and the technology we know today as XMPP. Yet, all that time, hop-by-hop encryption using SSL/TLS has been optional on the XMPP network. A number of server operators and software developers in the XMPP community have decided that needs to change for the better. Based on discussions at the XMPP Summit last week in Portland, Oregon, I have drafted a plan for upgrading the XMPP network to always-on, mandatory, ubiquitous encryption. You can find it here: https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto In short: we owe it to those who use XMPP technologies to improve the security of the network (and thanks to Thijs Alkemade, we now have better ways to test such security, using the newly-launched "IM Observatory" at xmpp.net) Although we know that channel encryption is not the complete answer, it's the right thing to do because it will help to protect people's communications from prying eyes. If you or your organization develop XMPP-compatible software or run a service that's connected to the XMPP network, I encourage you to sign the statement by following the instructions in the README at the URL shown above. Thanks! Peter _______________________________________________ JDev mailing list Info: http://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/jdev Unsubscribe: JDev-unsubscribe(a)jabber.org _______________________________________________ -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu.

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Re: [Cryptography] BitMessage?
by Keyfur 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

That would get extremely bulky in mass-adoption, in both local storage and network usage. Currently they have some structure to create tiered "streams", but that still doesn't eliminate the excessive network burden, it just saves some disk space. The streams work in a hierarchy, with the uppermost assuming the highest network burden. Because it's necessary to send an acknowledgement message, a complete circuit must established (though not all at once) between nodes. Also "broadcast messages" seem too risky to me. They're liable to be abused and cause a DoS if this protocol is adopted on a large-scale. Proof-of-work doesn't protect broadcast message abuse, because an attacker could just use a small botnet to generate a bunch of untransmitted messages with similar timestamps for a future date. Once that date arrives, then the attacker could just submit a very large batch of valid broadcast bitmessages. I can't think of a solution to either of these problems right now, but I otherwise think Bitmessage is a great idea. It's current, humbly sized userbase makes for comfortable testing. https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf James On 25 October 2013 01:41, Russ Nelson <nelson(a)crynwr.com> wrote: > I haven't seen any discussion of BitMessage (http://bitmessage.org) > here yet. The idea is to be a mixer with a pool of recipients, which > currently seems to be 12,000ish. Before anybody will receive your > message, they need to see a proof of work. Once they do, they forward > the message to everyone else, using a flood-fill algorithm. Messages > are encrypted so only the recipient can decode them. Mailing lists are > simulated via a shared private key. > > It looks plausible. Not obviously snake oil. > > -- > --my blog is at http://blog.russnelson.com > Crynwr supports open source software > 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315-600-8815 > Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | Sheepdog > _______________________________________________ > The cryptography mailing list > cryptography(a)metzdowd.com > http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography > _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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Re: [Freedombox-discuss] Dumb idea: Alternative to Tor that promotes good behavior
by Daniel Kahn Gillmor 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

On 10/27/2013 01:26 PM, Bill Cox wrote: > Here's the problem: Tor has little public support, because most Tor > traffic is wasted on supporting bad behavior. I don't think that's the main reason Tor has little public support. I think Tor has little public support because using Tor is slower and less convenient than not using Tor, and people (at least in the USA) seem to value convenience above most other things. > Here's my solution: Build a Tor-like network for routing anonymous data, > but track behavior of all users' secret identities, and make their > Internet history public. Allow node operators to choose categories of > public identities they which to support. This would not be anonymous data. You're asking people to publish their full internet histories for the privilege of being able to use the network. Are you aware of the work being done toward de-anonymization of rich data sets? I think many people's web browsing habits alone would be sufficient to discover their physical identity with relatively high certainty. Even if we were to assume that the data was not possible to tie back to someone's physical location to put them in harm's way, if their network use patterns are how they do their activism, then publishing their network use patterns provides an adversary with a lot of information that is very helpful to disrupt this same activity (e.g. "Which web sites do they usually use to distribute their [tools|analysis|incitements]? Which chat channels do they frequent? Where/how do they get their e-mail? Can we destroy or subvert those services?) > For example, I would choose to promote all forms of non-violent free > speech. I should be able to contribute my bandwidth to this purpose. > If a dissident in China goes by the public ID of ChinaCat, and has a > high reputation for promoting freedom, they are welcome to use my > bandwidth. If someone just wants access to redtube.com, they can get > that access from someone else. If you prefer this, then you should personally make arrangements with ChinaCat directly. I'm not convinced that you could ever make such an arrangement scale cleanly without gross oversimplifications that wouldn't meet many people's assumptions about what the terms mean. Is a sit-in at a restaurant "non-violent free speech"? What about a work stoppage at a factory? how about when the workers barricade the factory against its owners? What about people who sabotage or destroy machinery in their factory? What about destruction of machinery that is prepared to destroy desparately needed housing stock? What about people who smash the windows of low-wage corporate franchises? What about smashing the windows and doors of fire-prone sweatshops? Are all of these things non-violent free speech? can you imagine that someone else might have a different answer for any of them than you do? > There are various technical aspects to this idea. For example, would > prefer that the social graph between secret identities be public so I > can use a simple network flow algorithm over trust edges between > identities to determine how much I trust someone. I think it would be worthwhile to spec out such an algorithm, and then think through the spec under a handful of real-world use cases. what does it mean to do "network flow over trust edges"? What specifically does "trust" mean in this context? Can you give an example of how that would let you automatically determine how much you trust someone? What does that kind of automated trust discovery mean from a human perspective? What are the ways it could be exploited by an adversary intent on causing trouble? sorry to be a pessimist, but i'm not convinced this is an effective or even desirable framework. --dkg _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss(a)lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss

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Re: [tor-relays] Filtering TOR Non-exit Relay - Just Curious
by Zack Weinberg 27 Oct '13

27 Oct '13

Lukas Erlacher <l.erlacher(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> Middle nodes don't know the type of traffic. If they have any way >> to find out, that is a bug that needs to be fixed. End-of. Packet timing analysis may be able to tell you *something* -- this is part of my current research project, ask again in six months :-) Mr. Nelson Laurenti wrote: > I didn't say I knew the type of traffic on my relay, that would be an > entirely new set of problems; I said I can see the IP addresses > coming in and going out, and the ports used. That's to be expected. Tor is still using IP, so there is no way around the fact that a relay operator can observe the IP addresses of hosts in direct communication with their relay(s). If your relay is acting strictly as a middle hop, however, the IP addresses you observe should all be the addresses of other Tor relays, and none of the traffic you observe should *originate* from the IP addresses you observe. If you are an entry hop, some of the traffic you observe will be traffic coming directly from clients, and you can learn their IP addresses and probably quite a bit about them. This is part of why we have guards. (I am skeptical about guards actually being a good idea, but that's *also* part of my group's research, so, again, ask again in six months.) Only if you are an exit node should you be able to observe any traffic that is in cleartext and/or coming directly from server hosts. It is possible for one Tor process to serve all three roles simultaneously, but never (by design) for a single circuit. The design intent is that it will be prohibitively difficult for any single operator to control more than one node in a circuit more than some tiny fraction of the time; how feasible this actually is in real life has been the subject of quite a bit of research already (and, yep, my group is looking at that as well, albeit not as centrally). zw _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

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Re: [Cryptography] [RNG] /dev/random initialisation
by John Denker 27 Oct '13

27 Oct '13

On 10/24/2013 02:42 PM, Sandy Harris wrote: > What I want to model here is the harder case where none of the above [sources for a good high-entropy seed] > is in place or urandom starts producing output without waiting for > them. In an ideal world, this case would never arise but in the real > world it has and likely will again. This is excellent. This is exactly the sort of discussion we ought to be having. > The problem involves avoiding > duplicate outputs, so the birthday paradox works against us. If we > need a low risk of collision for 2^n cases, then we need about 2n bits > of input entropy. I agree with the sentiment, but having lots of entropy isn't the only way of solving the problem; we can make do with a lot less entropy if it is /computationally infeasible/ for the attacker to untangle what we have done. > There are two separate cases to consider: avoiding duplicate outputs > when a single device is rebooted many times and avoiding it when many > identical devices are deployed. OK, good. > Multiple reboots of the same device are the easy case. One threat > involves a computer that is rebooted often (perhaps several times a > day) and whose outputs are monitored continuously over a fairly long > period (perhaps a year). Another involves an enemy that can force many > reboots of a network device without the administrators noticing and > blocking the attack. Neither threat looks at all likely to involve > more than a few thousand reboots, so a dozen or so bits of timing > information per reboot should be enough to block them. It may help to add a little bit more detail to that analysis. There are two subcases: a) The PRNG starts out in a good state, with a seed that is large enough, random enough, and unknown to the attacker. If we now use the real-time clock (RTC) to /stir/ the seed, that should be sufficient to guarantee no collisions. That should be enough to stop replay attacks. b) If the PRNG starts out in a bad state, because the seed has been compromised, then the PRNG cannot quickly recover, and in particular it cannot recover while it is under attack. The RTC is nowhere near sufficient to /substitute/ for a proper seed. To say the same thing in slightly different words: There are two separate objectives that we need to consider: A) Resistance to attack, and B) Recovery from compromise. In some rock-candy world it would be nice to do both at the same time, but in this world, there are situations where a practical PRNG cannot do both at the same time, and that's OK. The moral of the story is that it is super-important to make sure the PRNG is properly seeded. The seed needs to be big enough, random enough, and unknown to the attacker. Note that the RTC does not add real entropy to the PRNG. All it does is stir the PRNG. Assuming the PRNG's hash function is working properly, (seed + RTC1) should be effectively very different from (seed + RTC2). The attacker could try to mount a related-plaintext attack against the hash, but for any decent cryptologic hash this should be computationally infeasible. There is a fundamental conceptual distinction between (a) reseeding the PRNG with honest-to-goodness entropy and (b) merely stirring the existing seed. However, there are some situations in which stirring suffices. > Timing data appears to be the only thing we can use against this > threat; more-or-less everything else is constant across reboots. Linux > random already mixes in some timing information, but I am not certain > how much. It shouldn't take much stirring, assuming the hash function is working properly. We absolutely require that the RTC produce non-repeating values, but that's about all we really require. Again, this is all predicated on starting with a high-quality seed. > Many identical devices are a harder case. I hate to sound like a broken record, but the solution is the same in all cases: You need a proper seed: big enough, random enough, and unknown to the attacker. > A manufacturer might produce > tens or hundreds of thousands of the same device The manufacturer reeeeally needs to provision each instance of the device with a proper seed. The cost of doing this is ridiculously small. The manufacturer already needs to provision things like the MAC address, hostname, IMEI, et cetera ... and the addition burden of provisioning the seed for the PRNG is negligible. > a Linux distro > might send out some huge number of installation images; Again (!) the solution is the same: If there is a proper seed, you're fine. If there is not a proper seed, you're screwed. Specific suggestion: a) Download the .iso image onto disk. b) Provision a proper seed onto the image. c) Burn the modified image to CD if desired. A few years ago I cooked up some tools to do exactly this. I tried to get support for it installed into the distributions, but the proposal was shot down by some "expert" who decided that the RTC was sufficient security, even if every attacker on earth knew what was in the distributed seed-file ... and even if every attacker on earth knew what time it was. More general suggestion: We ought to produce some sort of "Best Practices" document that explains to manufacturers, software distributors, VM providers, et cetera how important it is to provision a proper seed, and explains how to do it. We should also provide tools and infrastructure that makes it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. For example, in the general case, unpacking and repacking an .iso image is a pain in the neck, but if the image is engineered to facilitate rewriting the seed-file the procedure is much, much simpler. ================================== Following up on a proposal by Jerry Leichter, on 10/25/2013 05:15 AM, John Kelsey wrote: > I like this idea. If my PRNG is in a secure state, I can give out > random numbers to anyone who asks. I like this idea so much that I implemented it many years ago. The command line looks roughly like: lynx -auth=harpo:swordfish -source 'https://example.com/pvt/random?bytes=512' | randomize kernel from - > At first startup, it won't be > possible to establish a secure connection yet (no entropy), I disagree; see below. > but by > asking some hosts for a random number, we ensure that if those > messages aren't recorded, the attacker can't possibly guess our PRNG > starting state. Again (!) the key is to have a proper seed stored on the machine in question. It's like the proverbial seed-corn: If you have none, you're screwed. If you have some, you can grow more. On 10/24/2013 07:59 AM, John Kelsey wrote: > a. Get 256 bits of entropy from the OS. > b. Get 256 bits of entropy from the hardware entropy source. > c. Ping several hosts on the internet and measure the response time, and fold that into your seed. > d. Fold your ethernet address, IP address, and serial number into the seed. > e. Fold the installed-at-birth secret 128 bit value from your device into the seed. > > Initialize a PRNG with all that, and the attacker is in an extremely > hard place, as he has to be able to guess all five elements. (d) > isn't all that hard to guess, but the rest will in general be very > hard to guess. Some comments: a) If you have 256 bits of honest-to-goodness entropy from /any/ source, OS or otherwise, then that's more than enough to seed the PRNG, and nothing on the list matters. b) Ditto. c) Not so good. Ping times are not guaranteed to be always different, and not guaranteed to be unknown to the attacker. In the crypto business it is conventional to worry about MITM attacks. A scenario where the MITM doesn't need to mess with the packet contents, just the packet timing, is extra-easy for the attacker. d) Not so good. All that stuff is constant, and relatively easy for the attacker to know or guess. The RTC wasn't mentioned, but it is better than the items that were mentioned, in that it is at least non-constant and non- repeating. The RTC cannot /substitute/ for a proper stored seed, but it can /stir/ the seed. e) That's basically the right idea, except that we should call it the "stored" seed rather than the "at-birth" seed. The stored seed should be changed at frequent intervals. This helps with the recovery from compromise. Perhaps more importantly, it reduces the window of vulnerability and reduces the value the attacker gets from peeking at the stored seed. _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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[tor-talk] PrivateCore Demonstrates Industry’s First PRISM-Proof Tor Server in Public Cloud
by Pokokohua 27 Oct '13

27 Oct '13

Saw this ad/news item on another list ------------------------------------------------------ PrivateCore Demonstrates Industry’s First PRISM-Proof Tor Server in Public Cloud PrivateCore, the private computing company, today demonstrated the first cloud Tor server protected from NSA PRISM-like programs by fully encrypted memory. The company deployed a Tor server protected by PrivateCore vCage software to a dedicated server hosted by infrastructure-as-a-service provider SoftLayer. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide volunteer network consisting of more than three thousand relays to maintain the anonymity of a user’s location or usage. This PrivateCore Tor deployment provides undeniable evidence that organizations can achieve private computation in the public cloud. Without vCage full memory encryption, Tor servers operating in hosted provider environments expose secret key material in memory, where it can be accessed through NSA PRISM-type programs. Using PrivateCore vCage, no trace of Tor server code or data is maintained in memory or on disk, eliminating the possible exposure of secret key material through memory forensics. As demonstrated by the NSA PRISM program, information owned by an organization can be handed to authorities without their knowledge by cloud service providers who control the cloud servers. While organizations need to respond to lawful requests for information such as the NSA PRISM program, PrivateCore vCage enables them to remain in control of servers in the cloud and prevent access without their prior authorization. Click to Tweet: .@PrivateCore vCage memory #encryption software enables #PRISM proof Tor server http://bit.ly/1gCCkMP “PrivateCore vCage is a very important step forward for cloud security that uses a brilliant design created by experts who really know what they are doing,” said Felix “FX” Lindner, Head of Recurity Labs a leading security consultancy based in Germany. Service providers and enterprises face growing risks of physical access to sensitive data through the proliferation of outsourced IT infrastructures in untrusted environments including the cloud, co-location facilities and remote sites. Sensitive data-in-use is subject to compromise due to lawful requests, such as the recently disclosed NSA PRISM program, as well as illegal compromise. For example, state actors can target server memory which typically contains sensitive information such as digital certificates, encryption keys, intellectual property and personally identifiable information. While sensitive data may be protected by encryption while at rest or in transit, it is unprotected and “in the clear” while in use. PrivateCore’s unique vCage software encrypts data-in-use without requiring application or hardware modifications. “The NSA PRISM program has raised concerns around the world among organizations considering deploying sensitive data in the public cloud. This proof of concept shows that data in the public cloud can remain under the control of the owner under any circumstance,” said Oded Horovitz, CEO of PrivateCore. “Protecting data-in-use has been a challenge in security sensitive industries for years, but hardware advances such as larger processor caches have enabled PrivateCore to develop an innovative platform that shrinks the hypervisor into the CPU to secure data even in memory.” -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

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[cryptome] Re: Obama vs Merkel
by coderman 27 Oct '13

27 Oct '13

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 4:16 AM, John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > Hard to believe the DE spies did not know of spying on Merkel > perhaps assisted it as part of their own spying on her,... this entire fiasco manufactured - ongoing dilution and castration of the leakage. impact and relevance continually declining from piece to piece. one of many legitimate cries for wide distribution of the entire archive! this phone spy posturing a particularly irrelevant sacrificial detritus to distract for some many days from quality leaks. ... the downside of 50,000 objects to select from, the diffusing chaff is plentiful...

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Re: [ExI] chilling effects
by Anders Sandberg 27 Oct '13

27 Oct '13

On 2013-10-27 18:15, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 07:44:07AM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> So, will you stop visiting other countries as a result of this? > Will I be stopped, you mean? Maybe. I certainly know people > who are every time "randomly" selected for special treatment > when flying, and I know people who've been denied entry. > It is really quite ridiculous. > > I also know people who are afraid for their life so they're > effectively in exile. We also know a person who's trapped > in an embassy in London. Nevermind people like Snowden > and Manning. It is not 'chilling effects' if you actually are harassed or have warrants on your head. What I am getting at is that the vast majority of people are not directly affected by many of the threats we have discussed, yet if they think they are or could be and as a result change their behaviour in a more compliant direction then we have a problem. Especially if the thinking is (accidentally) seeded by the people who actually are against the compliance. There is a fine line here, similar to denouncing a tyrannical government. You want to make people aware of the abuses, yet not so afraid of the abuses that their response is to conform. There are also links to Hirschman's "Exit, voice, loyalty" analysis: if key people respond by exit (moving to friendlier states, disappearing into the blacknets) the remaining people will be less able to efficiently voice concern and ensure some negotiated resolution - and many might cleave to loyalty because that seems to be the only solution. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat(a)lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat

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Re: [ExI] chilling effects
by Eugen Leitl 27 Oct '13

27 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Anders Sandberg <anders(a)aleph.se> ----- Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 22:25:47 +0200 From: Anders Sandberg <anders(a)aleph.se> To: extropy-chat(a)lists.extropy.org Subject: Re: [ExI] chilling effects Message-ID: <526AD3CB.9000807(a)aleph.se> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.0.1 Reply-To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat(a)lists.extropy.org> On 2013-10-25 20:32, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Anders, do you remember Assange? He used to post to this list. > Have you received email from him? Encrypted email? Are you one > one or two hops away from people that are known targets? Have you > received packages from any such? Have you had any significant > exposure to Bitcoin circles? Did you travel to Bitcoin conferences > as a speaker? Are you a computer security researcher? Are you > a member of political group even remotely considered daring, > or are you connected to people like that? Do you travel a lot, > into diverse countries? &c&c > > If any of these apply, consider yourself a likely target for > telco surveillance. Sure. I also get invited to speak to the US and UK government. If they *didn't* check me out, they would be rather remiss. You wouldn't want one of the Bad Guys to visit the MoD or NSC shindig, right? In fact, one intriguing issue is government self-surveillance. When the Army invites me to a meeting, no doubt the NSA has to check out the people attending - they are dealing with somebody in the network of "interesting" people! Ah, yes, obvious Swedish military and crazy libertarian connections, hey - double second-order links to Assange! ...wait, a third order link to *Saddam*?! And vice versa, by going to that meeting I am now by definition an "interesting" person and my government contacts are worth checking out a bit more... The problem is of course to rein in the spread of who to keep tabs on - and big data is providing its own apparent solution: "all of them". Plus that large scale trawling will tend to pick up lots of things just by default. Which actually means that various agencies are gathering data other agencies would rather not have gathered. Just ask David Petraeus. At least humans know better than to spy on the boss, but the software can't tell the president apart from another suspiciously well-connected person who is meeting with shady people. Add to this the normal craziness of intelligence ( http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/spook-century.html ) and there is plenty of potential for tragicomedy. But the upshot of this is not that I should keep silent: *it doesn't matter*. I am in this mess whatever I do, even if I follow the best opsec and sigint practice. The risk of me being targeted is less affected by my actual activities and more affected by arbitrary group memberships. >> Most dire warnings I hear about how the Powers are doing sinister >> things seem to be more about getting attention and playing human >> social games than actual intel. And they do damage by their chilling >> effects - I have met people who are afraid of being associated with >> cryptography or working for better intelligence oversight because > They have reason to suspicition that this adds a flag that can > make a difference in future, but perhaps being flagged a coward > stings a bit more. The most worrisome effect is that a certain kind of people take those putative flags very seriously, and deliberately live amazingly bland lives. You can see the young politicians who have nearly no net shadow except party activities, and plan on being electable because they have no scandals. You can see it among the admin people who aim at conforming maximally, thinking this is a clever career move. The problem is that this can lead to a feedback loop: if the officers vetting you have a perspective of what a proper life is based on their own conformist lives, they will gather people like themselves in the institutions of power. Most bureaucracies love bureaucrats, because they make sense to bureaucrats. But this is specific problem that is more narrow than the general problem of *badly founded* fear of omnipresent and omnicompetent Powers making people conform. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat(a)lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ----- 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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