Publicly Usable Secure Rooms

John Young jya at pipeline.com
Thu Jun 23 14:33:31 PDT 2016


Portable SCIFs have been around for decades, tent-size and desk-top:

http://cryptome.org/bema-se.htm

More compact and emanation-resistant now. Carry your own.

Entrepreneurs would offer curb-side service, like food carts, or larger
like waste shredders and blood test labs. Yarping and texting on cellphones
in the open, believing privacy policies, faith in crypto, wi-fi, ISPs, VPNs,
HTTPS, Tor, clouds, IoT, is day-dreaming, making sellers rich.

Anything that encourages and supports self-security instead of products,
standards, official protectors, is the right direction.

Quietly clumsy beats drum-beating authorities ever compromising their
users for cohorts.

SCIFs leak, sure, rig fixes, test, retest, minimize use of EMR devices,
don't bet your life on any security, homebrew or top 10.

Have a nice day.


At 05:00 PM 6/23/2016, you wrote:
>On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 3:14 AM, Karl Semich 
><<mailto:gmkarl at gmail.com>gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:
>I would like to index such places, and create motion towards such
>security being accessible for all people.
>
>
>Attempting to compile such a list would be 
>laborious and self-defeating.  It would invite 
>compromise of the enumerated "secure" locations. Â
>
>It would be more useful to compile 
>characteristics of "secure public spaces", and 
>heuristics for locating them in one's local 
>environs.  How can we tell - without special 
>equipment etc - if a given space is 
>monitored?  If we land in an unfamiliar city, 
>how can we correctly "guess" where to find a secure public space?
>
>On a recent trip I discovered a little 3' x 4' 
>nook in the outside wall of LA's Bonaventure 
>Hotel.  Tho adjacent to areas of high 
>pedestrian traffic, the nook was unspied by any 
>cameras.  No microphones or other sensors were 
>visible nearby.  A blissful respite from the 
>otherwise panoptic surveillance of urban California. Â
>
>In this case we might speculatively take the 
>hotel's Brutalist architecture as the heuristic 
>for finding similar spaces.  Although sometimes 
>described as an aesthetically "fascist" style, 
>Brutalist architects loved to create little 
>difficult-to-surveil nooks & crannies in their 
>buildings.  Alas many of these spaces have been 
>fenced up by the buildings' current Centrist 
>owners.  For example the 
><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Service_Center_(Boston)#/media/File:Government_Service_Center_Boston_P1000474.JPG>contemptible 
>disfigurement of Boston's magnificent Government Service Center building.
>
>What are other heuristics for finding secure less-surveilled spaces?






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