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A Russian Warning
by Александр 04 Jun '16

04 Jun '16

Source: *http://cluborlov.blogspot.co.il/2016/05/a-russian-warning.html <http://cluborlov.blogspot.co.il/2016/05/a-russian-warning.html>http://thesaker.is/a-russian-warning/ <http://thesaker.is/a-russian-warning/>*A Russian Warning We, the undersigned, are Russians living and working in the USA. We have been watching with increasing anxiety as the current US and NATO policies have set us on an extremely dangerous collision course with the Russian Federation, as well as with China. Many respected, patriotic Americans, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Stephen Cohen, Philip Giraldi, Ray McGovern and many others have been issuing warnings of a looming a Third World War. But their voices have been all but lost among the din of a mass media that is full of deceptive and inaccurate stories that characterize the Russian economy as being in shambles and the Russian military as weak—all based on no evidence. But we—knowing both Russian history and the current state of Russian society and the Russian military, cannot swallow these lies. We now feel that it is our duty, as Russians living in the US, to warn the American people that they are being lied to, and to tell them the truth. And the truth is simply this: *If there is going to be a war with Russia, then the United Stateswill most certainly be destroyed, and most of us will end up dead.* Let us take a step back and put what is happening in a historical context. Russia has suffered a great deal at the hands of foreign invaders, losing 22 million people in World War II. Most of the dead were civilians, because the country was invaded, and the Russians have vowed to never let such a disaster happen again. Each time Russia had been invaded, she emerged victorious. In 1812 Nepoleon invaded Russia; in 1814 Russian cavalry rode into Paris. On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombed Kiev; On May 8, 1945, Soviet troops rolled into Berlin. But times have changed since then. If Hitler were to attack Russia today, he would be dead 20 to 30 minutes later, his bunker reduced to glowing rubble by a strike from a Kalibr supersonic cruise missile launched from a small Russian navy ship somewhere in the Baltic Sea. The operational abilities of the new Russian military have been most persuasively demonstrated during the recent action against ISIS, Al Nusra and other foreign-funded terrorist groups operating in Syria. A long time ago Russia had to respond to provocations by fighting land battles on her own territory, then launching a counter-invasion; but this is no longer necessary. Russia’s new weapons make retaliation instant, undetectable, unstoppable and perfectly lethal. Thus, if tomorrow a war were to break out between the US and Russia, it is guaranteed that the US would be obliterated. At a minimum, there would no longer be an electric grid, no internet, no oil and gas pipelines, no interstate highway system, no air transportation or GPS-based navigation. Financial centers would lie in ruins. Government at every level would cease to function. US armed forces, stationed all around the globe, would no longer be resupplied. At a maximum, the entire landmass of the US would be covered by a layer of radioactive ash. We tell you this not to be alarmist, but because, based on everything we know, we are ourselves alarmed. If attacked, Russia will not back down; she will retaliate, and she will utterly annihilate the United States. The US leadership has done everything it could to push the situation to the brink of disaster. First, its anti-Russian policies have convinced the Russian leadership that making concessions or negotiating with the West is futile. It has become apparent that the West will always support any individual, movement or government that is anti-Russian, be it tax-cheating Russian oligarchs, convicted Ukrainian war criminals, Saudi-supported Wahhabi terrorists in Chechnya or cathedral-desecrating punks in Moscow. Now that NATO, in violation of its previous promises, has expanded right up to the Russian border, with US forces deployed in the Baltic states, within artillery range of St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, the Russians have nowhere left to retreat. They will not attack; nor will they back down or surrender. The Russian leadership enjoys over 80% of popular support; the remaining 20% seems to feel that it is being too soft in opposing Western encroachment. But Russia will retaliate, and a provocation or a simple mistake could trigger a sequence of events that will end with millions of Americans dead and the US in ruins. Unlike many Americans, who see war as an exciting, victorious foreign adventure, the Russians hate and fear war. But they are also ready for it, and they have been preparing for war for several years now. Their preparations have been most effective. Unlike the US, which squanders untold billions on dubious overpriced arms programs such as the F-35 joint task fighter, the Russians are extremely stingy with their defense rubles, getting as much as 10 times the bang for the buck compared to the bloated US defense industry. While it is true that the Russian economy has suffered from low energy prices, it is far from being in shambles, and a return to growth is expected as early as next year. Senator John McCain once called Russia “A gas station masquerading as a country.” Well, he lied. Yes, Russia is the world’s largest oil producer and second-largest oil exporter, but it is also world’s largest exporter of grain and nuclear power technology. It is as advanced and sophisticated a society as the United States. Russia’s armed forces, both conventional and nuclear, are now ready to fight, and they are more than a match for the US and NATO, especially if a war erupts anywhere near the Russian border. But such a fight would be suicidal for all sides. We strongly believe that a conventional war in Europe runs a strong chance of turning nuclear very rapidly, and that any US/NATO nuclear strike on Russian forces or territory will automatically trigger a retaliatory Russian nuclear strike on the continental US. Contrary to irresponsible statements made by some American propagandists, American antiballistic missile systems are incapable of shielding the American people from a Russian nuclear strike. Russia has the means to strike at targets in the USA with long-range nuclear as well as conventional weapons. The sole reason why the USA and Russia have found themselves on a collision course, instead of defusing tensions and cooperating on a wide range of international problems, is the stubborn refusal by the US leadership to accept Russia as an equal partner: Washington is dead set on being the “world leader” and the “indispensable nation,” even as its influence steadily dwindles in the wake of a string of foreign policy and military disasters such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the Ukraine. Continued American global leadership is something that neither Russia, nor China, nor most of the other countries are willing to accept. This gradual but apparent loss of power and influence has caused the US leadership to become hysterical; and it is but a small step from hysterical to suicidal. America’s political leaders need to be placed under suicide watch. First and foremost, we are appealing to the commanders of the US Armed Forces to follow the example of Admiral William Fallon, who, when asked about a war with Iran, reportedly replied “not on my watch.” We know that you are not suicidal, and that you do not wish to die for the sake of out-of-touch imperial hubris. If possible, please tell your staff, colleagues and, especially, your civilian superiors that a war with Russia will not happen on your watch. At the very least, take that pledge yourselves, and, should the day ever come when the suicidal order is issued, refuse to execute it on the grounds that it is criminal. Remember that according to the Nuremberg Tribunal “To initiate a war of aggression… is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Since Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” is no longer a valid defense; please don’t be war criminals. We also appeal to the American people to take peaceful but forceful action to oppose any politician or party that engages in irresponsible, provocative Russia-baiting, and that condones and supports a policy of needless confrontation with a nuclear superpower that is capable of destroying America in about an hour. Speak up, break through the barrier of mass media propaganda, and make your fellow Americans aware of the immense danger of a confrontation between Russia and the US. There is no objective reason why US and Russia should consider each other adversaries. The current confrontation is entirely the result of the extremist views of the neoconservative cult, whose members were allowed to infiltrate the US Federal government under President Bill Clinton, and who consider any country that refuses to obey their dictates as an enemy to be crushed. Thanks to their tireless efforts, over a million innocent people have already died in the former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, the Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia and in many other countries—all because of their maniacal insistence that the USA must be a world empire, not a just a regular, normal country, and that every national leader must either bow down before them, or be overthrown. In Russia, this irresistible force has finally encountered an immovable object. They must be forced to back down before they destroy us all. We are absolutely and categorically certain that Russia will never attack the US, nor any EU member state, that Russia is not at all interested in recreating the USSR, and that there is no “Russian threat” or “Russian aggression.” Much of Russia’s recent economic success has a lot to do with the shedding of former Soviet dependencies, allowing her to pursue a “Russia first” policy. But we are just as certain that if Russia is attacked, or even threatened with attack, she will not back down, and that the Russian leadership will not “blink.” With great sadness and a heavy heart they will do their sworn duty and unleash a nuclear barrage from which the United States will never recover. Even if the entire Russian leadership is killed in a first strike, the so-called “Dead Hand” (the “Perimetr” system) will automatically launch enough nukes to wipe the USA off the political map. *We feel that it is our duty to do all we can to prevent such a catastrophe.* Evgenia Gurevich, Ph.D. http://thesaker.ru Victor Katsap, PhD, Sr. Scientist NuFlare Technology America, Inc. Andrei Kozhev Serge Lubomudrov Dmitry Orlov http://cluborlov.blogspot.com The Saker (A. Raevsky) http://thesaker.is __________________________ Source: *http://cluborlov.blogspot.co.il/2016/05/a-russian-warning.html <http://cluborlov.blogspot.co.il/2016/05/a-russian-warning.html>http://thesaker.is/a-russian-warning/ <http://thesaker.is/a-russian-warning/>*

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[Fwd: Breaking: victory in Muckrock FOIA case]
by Shawn K. Quinn 03 Jun '16

03 Jun '16

Score one for the good guys. -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: James S. Tyre <jstyre(a)JSTYRE.COM> Reply-to: "James S. Tyre" <jstyre(a)JSTYRE.COM> To: FOI-L(a)LISTSERV.SYR.EDU Subject: Breaking: victory in Muckrock FOIA case Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2016 13:05:26 -0700 (EFF will have more to say later) https://twitter.com/EFF/status/738819423155281921 -- James S. Tyre Law Offices of James S. Tyre 10736 Jefferson Blvd., #512 Culver City, CA 90230-4969 310-839-4114/310-839-4602(fax) jstyre(a)jstyre.com Special Counsel, Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org -- Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn(a)rushpost.com>

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Tor (and other nets) probably screwed by Traffic Analysis by now
by grarpamp 03 Jun '16

03 Jun '16

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-uk-is-using-bulk-interception-to-catc… https://conspicuouschatter.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/a-technical-reading-of-… https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2702948-Problem-Book-Redacted.html Researchers have speculated that GCHQ may have the capability to deanonymise Tor users by examining the timing of connections going in and out of the Tor network. ... there is clear evidence that timing information is both recognized as being key to correlating events and streams; and it is being recorded and stored at an increasing granularity. There is no smoking gun as of 2011 to say they casually de-anonymize Tor circuits, but the writing is on the wall for the onion routing system. GCHQ at 2011 had all ingredients needed to trace Tor circuits. It would take extra-ordinary incompetence to not have refined their traffic analysis techniques in the past 5 years. The Tor project should do well to not underestimate GCHQ’s capabilities to this point. ... one should wonder why we have been waiting for 3 years until such clear documents are finally being published from the Snowden revelations. If those had been the first published, instead of the obscure, misleading and very non-informative slides, it would have saved a lot of time — and may even have engaged the public a bit more than bad powerpoint. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-uk-will-police-the-dark-web-with-a-new… https://blog.torproject.org/blog/traffic-correlation-using-netflows Prediction market (place your bids): "First networks utilizing fill traffic as TA countermeasure to emerge and reach early deployment by year end 2017..."

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Re: [tor-talk] Tor (and other nets) probably screwed by Traffic Analysis by now
by grarpamp 03 Jun '16

03 Jun '16

On 6/2/16, Allen <allenpmd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Another alternative would be to re-architect the services of interest to > use a message or packet store-and-forward protocol with a random delay to > thwart traffic analysis. Perhaps different terms for same derivative thing? >From other searchable and recent threads... Fill traffic needs store and forward with random delay, for low latency requirements it could be called reclocking with jitter, rearchitecting for higher latency adds additional bounds on time to the interval and jitter clocks. Packet / message oriented / UDP seems useful to remove constraints of TCP-in-TCP allowing for management of fill traffic, multipath traffic spreading, pluggables, and so on. Ineffective is say rearchitecting web "services" to deliver a tarball of a website for offline reading, if said delivery is over a traditional non fill network, it will be TA'd. Fill / chaff seem needed, otherwise in an all wheat network, input traffic on one side seems to match output traffic on the other side at some point, regardless of storage / delay. Fixed packet sizes seem to help. Fill ratios up to 100% utilization can mask the wheat. Minimum fill is amount needed for plausible deniability that single input can't be mapped to a single output. ie: 10MiB in, must have at least two outputs that received 10MiB. Is there any group / list that is actively researching or developing such networks? Or that wants to?

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Re: [tor-talk] Tor (and other nets) probably screwed by Traffic Analysis by now
by grarpamp 03 Jun '16

03 Jun '16

On 6/2/16, Aymeric Vitte <vitteaymeric(a)gmail.com> top posted without trimming: > Yes: https://github.com/Ayms/node-Tor#convergence > > Let's imagine that one Tor circuit reaches a P2P network (here browsers) > and is splitted between different peers (UDP) circuits before > reasynching to a relay or end point, then the reconciliation from the > source to the end point is quite unlikely >> Is there any group / list that is actively researching >> or developing such networks? Or that wants to? If I remember right you're doing file caching / serving in the browsers-as-torrent-nodes layer. Yes that asynchronous would seem to break end to end timing. But the 654321012 byte file "into one tor circuit" from user at one end would still count same bytes out to a "reasynching end point" user at the other end. (Or users plural if requested by more than one user). Between otherwise relatively quiet endpoints / users. If they are all shuffling around encrypted bits fulltime, without being driven to do so by end user demand, such that the start and stop of the bytes of the poster and requestor[s] can't be delineated, that looks more generally like the fill traffic.

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Re: [tor-talk] Tor (and other nets) probably screwed by Traffic Analysis by now
by grarpamp 03 Jun '16

03 Jun '16

On 6/2/16, Allen <allenpmd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > another alternative would be random packet sizes, ie, the packet size > transmitted to the next hop would not be the same as the size received What does this help / enable? Nodes are known to GPA's, there is no way to hide them. If GPA counting physical packets, over time period, bytes into a relay must equal bytes out, otherwise they're being dropped somewhere, which is inefficient... as opposed to temporarily reducing fill to cover wheat demand. There is up to %50 capacity loss with random sizes, requiring up to 2x higher packet / interrupt rates to compensate within the same pipe / cpu. And the code to do all the carving, queuing and reassembly of every single packet, more complex and costly than padding the last carrier packet of some layer. There is also to consider... - physical / logical paths and pathing - circuit, packet, label, or flow switching - what layers the fill is in (above, at, or below wheat), the layers managed at, and by who. Big challenge is figuring how the network self manages the fill system to dynamically make room for wheat demand wherever it is needed in the network. (That dynamic is also what makes the user apparent application performance roughly the same as non fill networks. Of course their NIC (or their configured anonymous network rate limit within that), is always saturated, but that's transparent to the application layer.) If that's all solved fill traffic might be a good defense to Global *Passive* Adversary, and even a fair one to a Global *Traffic Flow Perturbing Active* Adversary. (What evidence is there that Global Adversaries that are not partnered with Global Telecoms are able to, as opposed to simply listening, arbitrarily drop / inject / delay packets on the global backbones?) Designing something new, including fill, crypto, and anonymity... probably far harder than putting tor's basic design together was. On the other hand, there's now 15 more years of research, experience and components on hand to throw at it.

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How to download the full ruling of USA Supreme Court cases?
by Zenaan Harkness 02 Jun '16

02 Jun '16

Can this be done? For example, this quote and "case" reference, should have some context: "Jurisdiction, once challenged, cannot be assumed and must be decided." [Maine v. Thiboutot, 100 S. Ct. 250] How do I find the document containing that quote? That quote and reference can be found by google on many sites in many documents, but only as the quote - the full source document/ ruling would provide the context, which would be more useful. Some examples of URLs with the above quote (besides many others): http://freedom-school.com/lewis-mohr/bowden-petition-and-challenge-to-juris… http://www.nationallibertyalliance.org/how-beat-any-court-case http://thegetjusticecoalition.blogspot.com/2007/05/cp-6.html

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Re: [tor-talk] Tor (and other nets) probably screwed by Traffic Analysis by now
by grarpamp 02 Jun '16

02 Jun '16

On 6/2/16, juanjo <juanjo(a)avanix.es> wrote: > Something like this is what I feared when days ago I sent a message to > this list... If you allow Tor Browser to have all hops from the same > country, or the Tor network relies only on a few countries to host their > nodes (Germany, US, France) then Tor will be useless soon... > > https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2016-May/040991.html True regarding physical or network compromise of nodes, however that is single purpose and not very efficient attack. Instead, this is traffic analysis by GPA's and cooperating GPA's. They have their illegal, unethical, multipurpose mass surveillance network taps all over the planet. Even if your path was from Canada in (to Venezuela to China to Russia out) to Mexico, they don't have to have taps in any of those countries, only on transit that has visability of the IP's / points of interest, typically just the endpoints. There's nothing you can do about it but - start researching and using networks that use fill traffic - shut down those GPA's and their activities against you It is those out of control self aware self preserving entities with their secret games interpretations etc, that will lessen, chill, and tax at your overall life, not random criminals running about. Background on public tech... http://betanews.com/2016/05/26/microsoft-facebook-underwater-transatlantic-… http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-the-internet-work…

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A promising method to thwart global surveillence
by Ryan Carboni 01 Jun '16

01 Jun '16

The Russian Illegals spy ring in New York used steganography. The Caliphate cell in Brussels used truecrypt files uploaded to cyberlockers in Turkey. But the grugq notes that truecrypt files would probably have a fixed size (and even with a random length, it would still round to kilobyte sizes), so it wouldn't be so simple. Obviously if state-level actors use these methods against the NSA, steganography does have a good role to play. Problem is that machine learning has advanced substantially. In a worst case scenario, it will be obvious that you have steganographic files, that is if photodna hashes are similar for many files, but fuzzy hashes aren't as similar. The best that could be done would be to make automated scans more probabilistic and less reliable (I have tens of thousands of files on my computer), by embedding encrypted data steganographically in images in the PDF file. The text and images of the PDF file could be procedurally generated. But I'm not an expert. I'm just pointing out what makes sense to me.

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All your disk image are (forever) belong to us, says appeals court
by Александр 01 Jun '16

01 Jun '16

*All your disk image are belong to us, says appeals courtCourt says your files are ripe for seizure—Fourth Amendment doesn't apply.* *by David Kravets - May 31, 2016* http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/feds-can-keep-your-hard-drives-i… The government can prosecute and imprison people for crimes based on evidence obtained from their computers—even evidence retained for years that was outside the scope of an original probable-cause search warrant, a US federal appeals court has said in a 100-page opinion paired with a blistering dissent. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled <http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/d1aa55fc-fb04-4abd-a9c6-f19…> that there was no constitutional violation because the authorities acted in good faith when they initially obtained a search warrant, held on to the files for years, and built a case unrelated to the original search. The case posed a vexing question—how long may the authorities keep somebody's computer files that were obtained during a search but were not germane to that search? The convicted accountant said that only the computer files pertaining to his client—who was being investigated as part of an Army overbilling scandal—should have been retained by the government during a 2003 search. All of his personal files, which eventually led to his own tax-evasion conviction, should have been purged, he argued. But the appeals court said the authorities' behavior was acceptable and didn't reach the constitutional question of whether the Fourth Amendment rights were breached for accountant Stavros Ganias, who was sentenced to two years in prison. That's because three years after the original search of the accountant's files in connection to the Army scandal, Connecticut authorities got another search warrant for Ganias' own tax files that were already in the government's possession, the appeals court ruled in a 12-1 decision Friday written by Judges Debra Ann Livingston and Gerard Lynch. Ganias had subsequently deleted those files from his hard drives after the government had imaged them, according to court records: Defendant-Appellant Stavros Ganias appeals from a judgment of the United > States District Court for the District of Connecticut (Thompson, J.) > convicting him, after a jury trial, of two counts of tax evasion in > violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7201. He challenges his conviction on the ground > that the Government violated his Fourth Amendment rights when, after > lawfully copying three of his hard drives for off-site review pursuant to a > 2003 search warrant, it retained these full forensic copies (or “mirrors”), > which included data both responsive and non-responsive to the 2003 warrant, > while its investigation continued, and ultimately searched the > non-responsive data pursuant to a second warrant in 2006. Ganias contends > that the Government had successfully sorted the data on the mirrors > responsive to the 2003 warrant from the non-responsive data by January > 2005, and that the retention of the mirrors thereafter (and, by extension, > the 2006 search, which would not have been possible but for that retention) > violated the Fourth Amendment. He argues that evidence obtained in > executing the 2006 search warrant should therefore have been suppressed. > > We conclude that the Government relied in good faith on the 2006 warrant, > and that this reliance was objectively reasonable. Accordingly, we need not > decide whether retention of the forensic mirrors violated the Fourth > Amendment, and we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court. > *The case is clearly nuanced, but it has huge ramifications for the public because many people keep all of their papers and effects co-mingled on their hard drives.* In his 40-page dissent, Judge Denny Chin blasted the majority opinion and said the authorities wrongly seized files from Ganias that were unrelated to the Army overbilling investigation. "The government did precisely what the Fourth Amendment forbids: it entered Ganias' premises with a warrant to seize certain papers and indiscriminately seized—and retained—all papers instead," Chin wrote. This is not the first time the appeals court entertained the case. Last year, the court sided <http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-12-00240/pdf/USCOURTS-ca2-12-0024…> (PDF) with Ganias in a 2-1 ruling. But the government asked for the full appeals court to rehear the case en banc, and the court agreed to do so with all 13 judges. The court's original ruling for Ganias said investigators had a right to image Ganias' three hard drives at the center of the Army overbilling dispute. But the majority concluded that the law did not allow "officials executing a warrant for the seizure of particular data on a computer to seize and indefinitely retain every file on a computer for use in future criminal proceedings." Ganias' lawyer, Stanley Twardy, urged the government to set aside his client's conviction. *"The seizure and two-and-a-half year retention of every file on Ganias' computers violated the Fourth Amendment,"* Twardy wrote <http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/twardy.pdf>. (PDF) He told the New York-based appeals court that "at a minimum the Fourth Amendment requires prompt completion of an off-site review and return of files outside the warrant's scope." The government countered, "Consistent with the Fourth Amendment, the government may obtain a search warrant for nearly any person, place, or thing if the government establishes probable cause for the search and did not engage in an illegal seizure of the item to be searched," Assistant US Attorney Sandra Glover wrote in the government's filing <http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/fedsganiasbrief.pdf>

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