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Why MAC Address Randomization is not Enough: An Analysis of Wi-Fi Network Discovery Mechanisms
by grarpamp 08 Jul '16

08 Jul '16

http://papers.mathyvanhoef.com/asiaccs2016.pdf

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The Whistleblower Architects: surveillance, infrastructure, and freedom of information according to Cryptome
by John Young 08 Jul '16

08 Jul '16

The Whistleblower Architects: surveillance, infrastructure, and freedom of information according to Cryptome (part 1) http://archinect.com/features/article/149955321/the-whistleblower-architect… The Whistleblower Architects: surveillance, infrastructure, and freedom of information according to Cryptome (part 2) http://archinect.com/features/article/149956364/the-whistleblower-architect…

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A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
by grarpamp 08 Jul '16

08 Jul '16

http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html Act 1: Once Upon a Time… Act 2: Crypto Basics Act 3: Details Act 4: Math! Epilogue

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tribalism - future world order?
by Zenaan Harkness 08 Jul '16

08 Jul '16

Tribalism. Seems to be the way of things. This article summarises the countries that have broken up since WWII - from Africa to Europe and Asia. Is North America immune? One day, chickens must come home to roost.. Karmicly, Americans continue to tacitly consent to their government's meddling in so many other countries. Across the globe, 'people want to rule themselves and be themselves': http://www.wnd.com/2016/06/after-brexit-a-trump-path-to-victory/#! (Alt: http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/after-brexit-trump-path-victory/ri152… )

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Litvinenko - Russian demonisation continues to crumble
by Zenaan Harkness 07 Jul '16

07 Jul '16

OK, a few facts first, to try to pre-empt some standard responses (to whoever ends up reading this): 1) I am pro-Russian, from points of view including the following: - That which I perceive as a "higher human intention" permeating the Russian psyche, Russian history and the "Russian ethos". - Putin is unimpeachable. He has never taken any bribe, is patriotic for his nation, loves his people, speaks truth, and encourages Russians, and the entire world, to stand for a better world - seriously, can we ask for a better leader? in ANY country? - Russians (in general) do not say "I, human, am the greatest and highest thing in existence" - such arrogance is not the Russian way. Russians allow for things or consciousnesses or beings of greater capacity, things yet unknown to the mind of man, for higher possibilties for "man" and "soul"; as true scientists, Russian souls are open to higher possibilties, potential and actual realities, holding as true that we are more than reproducing worms. No matter -how- great any "scientific achievement," humility in the face of the extraordinary-ness of this existence is maintained. - As at right now, the multi-polar world vision is the only hope we have for a reasonable power balance in this world. Anarchists or those desiring direct democracy, the "true" socialists and "true" communists, and even the communalist Rojavans - none have the mind share to cause a significant stand against America the hegemon! Perhaps in the future, we can attempt to move towards something even better than a multi polar nationalistic world, who knows - I certainly hope for greater possibilities, but right now, America is absolutely despotic in its actions, and its collective despotic hegemonic intention, MUST be stopped. The hegemon must be stopped. 2) The world is in the middle of a major war at the moment, and most sheeple don't see this war for the future 'world order' - they see "localised" military wars only - Libya, Iraq, Syria, etc. But the real war is a war of wills, the war of empire - the American hegemonic intention vs the "global south" (as Pepe Escobar calls it) and this "global south"'s multi-polar intention. I say this multi-polar possibility, in the framework of nations, MICs and governments (which predominate the world today), is the only current hope for a balance of powers in this world, for the possibility of one or a group of countries opposing a demonic / evil intention of another very powerful country (right now, it is America and its endless domination of the rest of the planet, in the future, it may be some other wanna-be hegemon). Saddam Hussein had the gall to think he could throw off his CIA overlords (who put him in power in the first place) and start selling oil for Euros, ditching the US dollar. Are you kidding me? Muammar Gaddhafi was slowly building a physical gold base reached over 120 tonnes (small by some national standards, very large by Canadian standards) and he consistently promoted an arabic world "gold dinar" currency. And what happened when he started to try to sell oil for currencies other than US dollars? That's right, America, France and the UK piled in to bust up his party. The hegemon must be stopped. 3) Putin is the only true statesman on the world stage today. Now I'm sure some will disagree with this, but if you wish to suggest the contrary to me, please bring with you AT LEAST ONE FACT. There are first hand reports where Americans studying him for many years from within Russia have stated "yeah, we haven't been able to find a single instance of Putin accepting a bribe" for just one of many examples. And if you can find an actual fact that shows an evil deed done by Putin, an example of corruption by his own hands, I will be very surprised, and will question and research your source - so be prepared to be absolutely certain about your purported fact. The only fact I have that goes anywhere near this is the current Russian legislation making its way towards law which shall require backdoors in all encryption software sold (perhaps used?) in Russia - I hope it's not signed into law, but if it is, it is hard to deny Russia parity with the "glorious" West, in the face of the endless attempts to overthrow nations both near to Russia, and in other continents, and Russia itself! American government's intention to split Russia up the guts is documented by America itself. Poor Soros, he is currently failing with this particular intention, and we ought be very very grateful this is so. As many of us have now read many times, by American mouths, "Ukraine's recent Maidan was the most blatant coup in history", and America, mostly via the CIA, has been attacking nation after nation, democratically elected leader after democratically elected leader in foreign nations around the world, since WWII. America is the epitome of a hegemonic empire nation running amok - and sadly, no one even attempts to dispute this very sad fact... 4) With the quantity, quality and intensity of mud slinging propaganda against USSR (since WWII), against Russia since the USSR's collapse, and against Putin in his time, it is so very easy for us Western schooled humans to accept that "some of the mud just MUST be true", e.g. "oh well, this particular Western lie has been exposed, but you know, Putin is still really bad, and Russia is just murderers and drunkards, like all the way down like". No there might not be any truth to the "bad Russians, bad Putin" meme! Perhaps they're fellow humans? Perhaps they're in fact really fine humans, and real humans? Perhaps their current leader is pretty damn great, by any and all international, national and local, Christian, and any other, standards? Perhaps the current collective Russian vision of a multi polar world is in fact the best thing for all of us on this planet, given the current despotic intentions of America and the deep hegemon (UK, France, etc - the Western oligarchic elite power brokers)? We can call this "Russians simply MUST be bad" meme, "the Western apologist". I.e. the Western apologist is he or she who cannot break the mold of the Western MSM propaganda, and so has convinced himself that "although I have not seen an actual fact to say so, it must be true that Putin is somehow bad, since, you know, he's in government and no one in government can be trusted anyway, and he's, he's, he's Russian! so he MUST be bad!" Read Putin's Crimea speech! Read Putin's recent anniversary address to the United Nations! In fact, READ ANY SPEECH OF THE current president of russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, aka VVP! Read his words! Watch him on youtube! Please, form your own assessment! Create an opinion for yourself, which is not my opinion, not the MSM opinion, but is your own, personal, opinion. Please. Utopian society cannot be formed instantaneously, and may never be had generally on this old earth - we have largely despotic democracies prevailing around the world (despotic because often selfish people stand for election (they demonstrate their selfishness by their actions)): THIS IS TODAY'S REALITY - we have to move forward from WHERE WE ARE NOW - what is the best way to move forward from where we are now?!! Any possibility for balancing the out of control American Military Industrial Complex hegemon, is a blessing which we ought seize with both hands! Bring on the multi-polar world. Let's do our bit towards at the very least, this proposed balance of powers in the world! The hegemon must be stopped... And now, for today's particular Western lie exposed (sadly, just another of so many): ----- Major Allegations Against Russian President Now Being Questioned (Part I) Putin, it turns out, was "probably" not responsible for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Dr. Julia Svetlichnaja 2016-06-28 http://eastwestaccord.com/major-allegations-russian-president-now-questione… (Alt: http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/major-allegations-against-russian-pre… ) ----- Thankfully, with the internet, more and more of the Western lies are being exposed.

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Fw: [ PFIR ] UK bill introduces 10 year prison sentence for online pirates
by Zenaan Harkness 07 Jul '16

07 Jul '16

"Every problem is an opportunity." "There's no problems, only solutions." Anyone in the UK? Now might be a good time to get a Pirate Party chapter going, only with a politically correct name, or use this as grist for your personal mill to further the state of the art of online file sharing. Good luck. ------- Subject: [ PFIR ] UK bill introduces 10 year prison sentence for online pirates https://torrentfreak.com/uk-bill-introduces-10-year-prison-sentence-for-onl… The UK Government's Digital Economy Bill, which is set to revamp current copyright legislation, has been introduced in Parliament. One of the most controversial changes is the increased maximum sentences for online copyright infringement. Despite public protest, the bill increased the maximum prison term five-fold, from two to ten years. - - - Oscar Pistorius just received a sentence of about half that for murdering his girlfriend. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein (lauren(a)vortex.com) http://www.vortex.com/lauren

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America’s Permanent Wars on the World
by Zenaan Harkness 07 Jul '16

07 Jul '16

America’s Permanent Wars on the World "Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s people." http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/the-great-leap-backward-americas-ill… (Alt: http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/great-leap-backward-americas-illegal-… ) Luciana Bohne Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21st century. If not stopped, it will be a short century. Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s people. In the 19thcentury, America exterminated another kind of “red menace,” writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (“Indian reservations”), in the name of civilizing the “savages.” By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab—internal imperialism– was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines. American external imperialism was born. Then, something utterly dreadful happened in 1917—a successful social revolution in Russia, the second major after the French in 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the world—US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes—put aside their differences and united to stem the awful threat of popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded Russia, fomented a civil war, funding and arming the counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in 1939. But Hitler’s war of extermination on the USSR ended in a spectacular victory for Moscow. For a while, after 1945, the US had to behave as a civilized country, formally. It claimed that the USSR had a barbarian, all-conquering ideology, rooted in terror, disappearances, murder, and torture. By contrast, the US was the shining city on the hill, the beacon of hope for a “the free world.” Its shrine was the United Nations; its holy writ was international law; its first principle was the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations. All this was rubbish, of course. It was an apartheid society. It nuked Japan not once but twice, deliberately selecting civilian targets. It shielded from justice top Nazi criminals to absorb them as partners in intelligence structures. It conducted virtual “show trials” against dissidents during the hysteria of the McCarthy congressional hearings, seeding the country with a harvest of fear. It waged a genocidal war on Vietnam to prevent independence and unification. It assassinated African independence leaders and bestowed fascist dictators on Latin America. It softly occupied Western Europe, tied it to itself through military “cooperation” in NATO, and it waged psy-op war on its opposition parties. Behind the civilized façade was a ruthless effort to take out the Soviet Union and crush self-determination in the colonial world. By hook and by crook, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and America went berserk with triumphalism. Now, at last, the conquest of the world, interrupted in 1917, could resume. The global frontier reopened and America’s identity would be regenerated through violence, which had delivered the American West to the European invaders in the 19th century. The benign mask dropped. Behind it came a rider on a pale horse. According to the ideologically exulted, history had ended, ideologies had died, and the messianic mission of the US to become the steward of God’s property on earth could be fulfilled. The “civilizing mission” was afoot.A cabal of neo-conservative policy wonks first sketched what I call the Great Leap Backward into lawlessness as a revival of the myth of the frontier in the 1990s. “The Plan for a New American Century” (PNAC) envisaged the 21st century as a unilateralist drive to entrench American values globally—what the PNAC ideologues call “freedom and democracy”—through preemptive wars and regime change. This frenzied delirium of US military domination turned into official foreign policy with the Bush Doctrine after 9/11, but it was the Clinton administration’s Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare before 9/11, that shut the door on the prohibition of aggressive wars by the UN Charter, remaking the map of the world into a borderless American hunting reserve by removing the principle of sovereignty and replacing it with “right to protect” (R2P)—or humanitarian pretext for use of force. Clinton’s doctrine was an act of supreme, even witty, exploitation of liberal principles and commitment to policies of human rights. It was how the liberal left was induced to embrace war and imperialism as the means of defending human rights. The Carnegie Endowment cooked up the doctrine in 1992. Its report, “Changing Our Ways: America’s Role in the New World,” urged “a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” The report recommended that the US use NATO as the enforcer. It must be noted, too, that the principle of “humanitarian war” has no authority in international law. The Charter of the United Nations sought to outlaw war by making it impossible for unilateral interventions in the business of sovereign states by self-appointed guardians of human rights. The reason behind the proscription was not heartlessness but the consciousness that WW II had been the result of serial violations of sovereignty by Germany, Italy, and Japan—by militarist imperialism, in other words. The bell tolled for the UN and the old order in the 1999 Kosovo War. The bi-partisan effort to dismantle the architecture of the post war’s legal order played out there. With the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration launched the first humanitarian war and set the precedent for waging war without Security Council clearance of many to follow by both Republican and Democrat administrations. The Clintonites who used NATO to bomb Serbia to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from non-existing Serbian genocide may or may not have appreciated the fact that Hitler had used the pretext of R2P—humanitarian intervention—to launch WW II by claiming to protect German minorities in Poland, but they certainly knew that the monopoly on use of force rested with the UN’s Security Council. This monopoly was secured after WW II precisely to prevent unilateral attacks on sovereign states through bogus claims of altruistic interventions, such as Hitler had championed and pursued. Ironically for critics of the Soviet leader, it was Stalin who insisted at the Yalta Conference that if the USSR were to join the United Nations a veto in the Security Council was a must to insure that any war would be a multilateral consensus and a multilateral action. As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go. In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally and deliberately destabilized the United Nations, substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill, Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not the only way to skin a country– especially one chosen by the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a cynic might add. So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent “genocide”; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rain—in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya. Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious, and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (“the Arab coalition”) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight its own creature? Are we stupid yet? $4 trillion dollars later, spent on the War-on-Terror/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic globalization through trade pacts—TTP, TTIP, etc.—that virtually abolish the constitution of states, including our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the periphery and the entire world is the so-called “Washington Consensus.” It hugs the market-fundamentalist idea that global neoliberalism and core finance capital’s economic control of the planet by means of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the option to poverty and social chaos. Neither military nor economic war on the sovereignty of nations has yielded anything close to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world. It had delivered death, destruction, debt, market crises, tidal waves of refugees and displaced persons, and concentrated masses of wealth in a few but powerful hands. What the poet W.H. Auden called “the international wrong,” which he named “imperialism” in his poem “September 1939,” is the crisis that stares out of the mirror of the past into our faces, and it bodes war, war, and more war, for that is where imperialism drives. In this scenario, no potential presidential candidate—even establishment-party dissenter—who does not call for both the end of the bi-partisan “Washington Consensus” and the end of bipartisan militarist aggression can reverse the totality of the “international wrong” or stem the domestic descent into social brutalization. If none calls this foreign policy debacle “imperialism,” elections will be a sleepwalker’s exercise. Nothing will change. Except, almost certainly, for the worse.

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Re: [tor-talk] These Maps Show What the Dark Web Looks Like
by Sean Lynch 07 Jul '16

07 Jul '16

On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 2:19 PM Yuri <yuri(a)rawbw.com> wrote: > On 07/06/2016 12:32, grarpamp wrote: > > > https://motherboard.vice.com/read/these-maps-show-what-the-dark-web-looks-l… > > > > What does the dark web actually look like? Well, new research maps out > > the relationships between a load of Tor hidden services, and shows > > that many dark web sites, rather than being isolated entities, are > > perhaps more intimately intertwined than commonly thought. > > > The article says "this lack of diversity in hosting infrastructure is > concerning—it places the future of a large proportion of Onion Services > in the hands of a limited number of groups". The future web might even > have no hosting, because the new technologies like ZeroNet don't require > hosting at all. I personally believe that distributed architecture is > superior to centralized architecture, and is a way to go. > > Agree with the need for decentralized architectures, though ZeroNet is only part of the way there. It's fine for small, static sites, blogs, and small chat rooms, but the mail and ID services are each controlled by one individual, and all their data are flooded to all users. We really need a platform on which to build decentralized apps, more like Freenet or Gnunet. As for centralization in Tor, it wasn't clear to me from the article that the related sites were actually legit as opposed to, say, clones. Since they found sites that only linked among themselves, they must have just been mass scanning onion addresses. But what we really care about are the sites a lot of people actually use. For such a purpose, finding and ranking the sites by spidering from a few well-known seed sites would be more useful than enumerating all the hidden sites. They talked about a bunch of sites being hosted by the same hosting provider, but given that they had identical SSH host keys I'd guess they were all actually the same machine, since it would be criminally negligent for a hosting provider to use the same key across all its machines.

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comprehending the heart's nationalism
by Zenaan Harkness 07 Jul '16

07 Jul '16

The following is a viewpoint worth comprehending, if not embracing. This could be described I guess as the higher intention of a "Russian". I consider it may be useful to contemplate ones own version of "principles" of honour, heart, heroism, worthy sacrifice and all those other concepts fit for legend and foundations. How else can we speak into existence a better future, no matter the label used? http://orientalreview.org/2016/06/19/the-russian-world-and-european-civiliz… (Alt: http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/how-russian-world-differs-ideals-west… ) How the Russian World Differs From the Ideals of Western Civilization The Russian ideal is more benevolent, contrasting noticeably with the historical Western hankering to dominate, subdue and exploit Anna Zhdanova (Oriental Review) Image: A noble warrior Originally appeared at Oriental Review In recent years, both the Western as well as the liberal Russian press have had a lot to say about Russian “barbarianism,” as if to contrast it with European “civilization.” But a closer inspection – through the prism of the heroic pages of Russian history – of the two groups’ moral ideals and actual lives presents us with quite a different picture. For example, in pagan times, ancient Russians never worshipped a god of war, although their contemporaries in Europe were transfixed by their own martial deity, constructing an entire epic narrative around the concepts of war and conquest. After defeating the “infidels” (the Golden Horde), Russians never sought to forcibly convert them to Christianity. In the epic poem “Ilya Muromets and the Pagan Idol,” the Russian hero liberates Constantinople from that mythological monstrosity, but refuses to become the voevoda (or ruler) of the city and returns home. Ancient Russian literature does not include tales of personal enrichment through conquest or plunder, although this is a common theme in the Western canon. The hero of the “Nibelungenlied” is obsessed with his search for a hidden treasure – the Rheingold. The main character of the ancient English poem “Beowulf” dies, having beheld “the gorgeous heirlooms, golden store … Now I’ve bartered here for booty of treasure the last of my life.” It would never occur to any hero from a Russian epic to sacrifice his life in exchange for riches. Ilya Muromets is not even able to accept the inducement offered by the brigands he meets – the “golden treasure, richly colored robe, and as many fine horses as he needed” (citation from the Russian fairytale ( http://tchaykovsky.ru/skazka/murom_solov.htm ) “Ilya Muromets and Nightingale the Robber”). He did not hesitate to reject the path by which he would “be rich,” instead voluntarily taking the road on which he would “be killed.” And it is not only in this epic, but also in the legends, tales, songs, proverbs, and folk wisdom of the Russian people where it is evident that one’s duty to uphold one’s personal or tribal honor is something quite distinct from any duty to exact personal or tribal revenge. The notion of retaliation, as such, is absent from Russian folklore, as if it were never part of the original “genetic code” of its people – the Russian champion has always gone to war as a liberator. And in this we can see the difference between Russians and Western Europeans. The Russian historian and philosopher Ivan Ilyin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ilyin ) wrote: “Europe cannot grasp us … because the Slavic and Russian way of contemplating the world, nature, and man is something alien to it. Humanity in Western Europe is motivated by will and intellect. The Russian people are above all guided by their hearts and imaginations, relegating the mind and will to a supporting role. Therefore, the average European is ashamed of sincerity, scruples, and kindness, viewing them as “foolishness.” A European, nursed on the ideals of Rome, is secretly contemptuous of other nations and desires to rule over them. Russians, however, on the whole expect kindness, scruples, and sincerity from others. The Russian people have always enjoyed the natural freedom of the vast space they inhabit … gazing “in wonder” at other nations, getting along with them amiably, with hatred only for oppressive invaders … “ Russians’ congenial relationships with their geographic neighbors are testament to their sense of justice and mercy. The Russian people never committed the same atrocities for which the enlightened Europeans were responsible in their own conquered lands. The psychology of the nation includes a certain principle of moral restraint. These naturally strong, resilient, dynamic people have been endowed with an amazing ability to survive. This spiritual strength is also the basis for Russians’ renowned forbearance and tolerance toward others. Continually invaded from all sides and forced to live in an incredibly harsh climate, the Russian people managed to colonize vast swathes of land, but without slaughtering, enslaving, robbing, or forcibly baptizing any nation. Western Europeans’ policies of colonialism annihilated the aboriginal populations on three continents and forced natives from across Africa into slavery, while its cities grew rich on the backs of those colonies. The Russian nation, which also waged wars that were not purely defensive, acquired, like all great nations, large tracts of land, but never treated their conquered subjects as the Europeans did. The European people reaped the benefits of Europe’s conquests and its cities were enriched by the colonial plunder. Russians robbed neither Siberia nor Central Asia nor the Caucasus nor the Baltics. Russia has preserved every nation within its borders, acting as their protector, granting them the right to own land and property and to practice their own faith, traditions, and culture. Russia has never been a nationalist state – it has belonged to all who inhabit her. The Russian people were granted only one “advantage” – to bear the burden of nation-building. The resulting state was like no other in the history of the world, and the Russian people defended it with their own blood, willingly sacrificing their very lives. Precisely because they have borne so much suffering and heavy sacrifice, my people deeply empathized with the pain and suffering of other peoples languishing under the Nazi yoke. And after liberating their own homeland, Russians channeled that same spirit of self-sacrifice and energy into liberating half of Europe. This was an example of epic heroism! These are the stouthearted people born of the Russian earth! And I believe that such a feat can be accomplished even by a great nation only once a century. The patriotism displayed by Russian soldiers in the fields of the Great Patriotic War met the highest ideal of patriotism – something unprecedented in the history of any nation anywhere in the world. And I will never agree with the media’s pronouncements about Russian “barbarianism” vs. European “virtue.” I stand proud that our ancestors – our heroic ancestors – were so lovely, steadfast, courageous, and resilient, and that we are their descendants!

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Senate Funding Bill For State Dept. Asks It To Figure Out Ways To Stop Bad People From Using Tor
by grarpamp 06 Jul '16

06 Jul '16

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jeremy Rand <biolizard89(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 12:17:24 -0500 Subject: [tor-talk] Senate Funding Bill For State Dept. Asks It To Figure Out Ways To Stop Bad People From Using Tor Well, this looks unfortunate. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160701/18073734878/senate-funding-bill-… I assume the Tor Project staff are aware of this language? ------------------------------------------------------ (Mis)Uses of Technology by Mike Masnick Wed, Jul 6th 2016 9:34am (Feedbacks linked above) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2938815/FY2017-State-Foreign-Ope… https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2938816/BILLS-114s3117pcs.pdf Senate Funding Bill For State Dept. Asks It To Figure Out Ways To Stop Bad People From Using Tor from the good-luck-with-that dept It would appear that Congress is not so happy that the State Department is a major funding source for the Tor project. Tor, of course, is the internet anonymyzing system that was originally developed with support from the US government as a way to promote free and safe access to the internet for people around the globe (mostly focusing on those under threat in authoritarian countries). Of course, other parts of our government aren't huge fans of Tor, because it doesn't just help activists and dissidents in other countries avoid detection, but also, well, just about anyone (except on days when the FBI decides to hack their way in). There has, of course, always been some tension there. There are always the conspiracy theorists who believe that because Tor receives US government funding it is by default compromised. Those tend to be tinfoil hat wearing types, though. The folks who work on Tor are not exactly recognized for being particularly friendly to intrusive government surveillance. They tend to be the exact opposite of that. And, of course, part of the Snowden revelations revealed that Tor was one tool that still stymied the NSA in most cases. But it appears that Congress may be quietly trying to undermine this. On Friday, Politico had a tiny blurb in passing about how the latest State Department appropriations bill making its way through Congress includes some references to stopping "circumvention technologies" from being used by bad people. The Politico report suggests this is designed to apply more broadly to encryption, but reading the specifics it appears to be targeted straight at Tor. Here's the Senate report on the appropriations, where it discusses funding related to "internet freedom." That, of course, was the reasoning behind Tor in the first place, but here Congress is now trying to put some limitations on what the State Dept. can do with its funds, including demanding that it seek out ways to stop bad guys from using technology like Tor. In the report, it's described this way: ...the Committee requires that spend plans submitted by the Department of State and BBG pursuant to section 7078(c) of the act include a description of safeguards to ensure that circumvention technologies are not used for illicit purposes, such as coordinating terrorist activities or online sexual exploitation of children. In the full bill, the key section notes that the funding shall only be available for internet freedom after efforts are made to stop bad people from using the tools. ... made available for the research and development of new tools or techniques authorized in paragraph (A) only after the BBG CEO, in consultation with the Secretary of State and other relevant United States Government departments and agencies, evaluates the risks and benefits of such new tools or techniques, and establishes safeguards to minimize the use of such new tools or techniques for illicit purposes. In case you're wondering, the "BBG CEO" is the CEO of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US government agency that manages media efforts around the globe, such as the Voice of America. Make no mistake, this appears to be an attempt to sneak in an attack on Tor via Congress into the State Dept. Tor has been developed to provide the best absolute anonymity/privacy tools for people using the internet -- with the acknowledgement that it can be misused, because the people developing it recognize that the best way to protect the vast majority of its users is to build a system that is truly secure -- not one that artificially tries to limit its uses. Hopefully, this provision is changed, or else it may be eventually leveraged as a way to attack Tor, to attack Tor's funding and try to get the State Department to stop supporting such useful projects. ----------------------------------

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