PC LOAD LETTER posted:

If they know who you are they know all your friends/familly/co-workers and maybe even the random guy you waved to on camera while buying stuff down at the 7/11 and can ransack their personal accounts/info/whatever just as easily. They have way more control over the IT infrastructure then you could ever hope to so you're not going to beat them at their own game. Especially when they seem to be able and willing to bend the law into a parody of itself almost with impunity.

As the articles that were posted over the last couple of pages noted its on the human or 'analog' level where all their high tech snooping falls down flat on its face. Approaching protesting/demonstrating from that angle is your best bet to protect yourself, your privacy, and the privacy of your friends/family/co-workers while standing up for your rights.

Seriously guys just mentally filter out the word 'cellphone' and replace it with the phrase 'portable device that automagically constantly sends the NSA/FBI/police agency my location, personal info, pics, etc' and this will all make a lot more sense. There are all sorts of good reasons why that sort of thinking is unpleasant to say the least but that is the reality of the situation today.

Anyways if you still disagree I'll just drop it since there isn't anymore I can think to add that is useful on this tangent.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

People were arguing for the phones as tools for exposing police abuses at protests, not secrecy. If your phone automatically uploads a video that is then shared online, no amount of NSA tomfoollery is going to suppress that. And really, even without a phone how are you going to hide the fact that you were at a protest short of a balaclava (that will promptly get you detained/pepper sprayed anyway)?

And if you want to maintain at least a layer of privacy, buy a burner with cash.

Kobayashi posted:

If you want privacy at a protest, wear a ski mask, pad your clothes, vary your gait, and pay someone to carry your cell phone through your "normal" routine so that it doesn't suddenly stop moving while you're away.

Kobayashi posted:

If you want privacy at a protest, wear a ski mask, pad your clothes, vary your gait, and pay someone to carry your cell phone through your "normal" routine so that it doesn't suddenly stop moving while you're away.

Kobayashi posted:

pay someone to carry your cell phone through your "normal" routine so that it doesn't suddenly stop moving while you're away.

mobby_6kl posted:

There's a much simpler solution - just take a loving camera to document everything. There's potentially something that could be done with the noise patterns to ID the camera but that's still much better than broadcasting stuff from a phone.

mobby_6kl posted:

There's a much simpler solution - just take a loving camera to document everything. There's potentially something that could be done with the noise patterns to ID the camera but that's still much better than broadcasting stuff from a phone.

ShadowHawk posted:

Cameras can't upload stuff to the internet before the police confiscate and destroy it.

j3rkstore posted:

I believe if you stream live via ustream they maintain a copy online.

SedanChair posted:

I knew my habits would pay off some day. *leaves phone in front of computer for 20 hours, goes to protest*

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

The security culture stuff about phones probably won't make a difference unless you're doing some sort of covert direct action, rather than a protest or symbolic arrest. In the meantime, in my experience, it promotes a weird paranoid militarism that's usually pretty toxic to any attempt to organize anything since everyone's paranoid about cops or whatever.

Classicist posted:

simpler solution? take it easy at home not anyone every changed the world by protesting something.

Sancho posted:

On the bright side I believe today is General Alexander's last day on the job. Good riddance and rot in hell.

crusader_complex posted:

The revelations that the NSA is finding it harder to track Russian plans makes me wonder: is it that foreign information security has improved, or was it basically nonexistent in a lot of places until recently? Maybe they're just complaining about the growing threat of widespread technological literacy, like "oh no foreign governments stopped using unpatched windows 2000, how will we hack them now?"

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Funny thing about that, turns out those Windows patches are probably NSA backdoors.

quote:

"In recent months fake PGP keys have been found for at least two developers on well known crypto projects: Erinn Clark, a Tor developer and Gavin Andresen, the maintainer of Bitcoin. In both cases, these PGP keys are used to sign the downloads for popular pieces of crypto software. PGP keys are supposed to be verified through the web of trust, but in practice it's very hard to find a trust path between two strangers on the internet: one reply to Erinn's mail stated that despite there being 30 signatures [attached to] her key, [the respondent] couldn't find any trust paths to her. It's also very unclear whether anyone would notice a key substitution attack like this. This leaves three questions: who is doing this, why, and what can be done about it? An obvious candidate would be intelligence agencies, who may be trying to serve certain people with backdoored binaries via their QUANTUMTHEORY man-in-the-middle system."

crusader_complex posted:

The revelations that the NSA is finding it harder to track Russian plans makes me wonder: is it that foreign information security has improved, or was it basically nonexistent in a lot of places until recently? Maybe they're just complaining about the growing threat of widespread technological literacy, like "oh no foreign governments stopped using unpatched windows 2000, how will we hack them now?"

US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a "back door" in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications.

The NSA's collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans' details within the databases.

Now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed for the first time the use of this legal authority to search for data related to “US persons”.

“There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter, which has been obtained by the Guardian.

“These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.”

The legal authority to perform the searches, revealed in top-secret NSA documents provided to the Guardian by Edward Snowden, was denounced by Wyden as a “backdoor search loophole.”

Many of the NSA's most controversial programs collect information under the law affected by the so-called loophole. These include Prism, which allows the agency to collect data from Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and other tech companies, and the agency's Upstream program – a huge network of internet cable taps.

Clapper did not disclose how many warrantless searches had been performed by the NSA.

Confirmation that the NSA has searched for Americans’ communications in its phone call and email databases complicates President Barack Obama’s initial defenses of the broad surveillance in June.

“When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about,” Obama said. “As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.”

internaut posted:

“There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter, which has been obtained by the Guardian.

Elotana posted:

That is some artful comma placement. (In case you're not catching it, the purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US yada yada yada. We already know that. But the queries? Well, those can be for whatever the gently caress we want.)

JeffersonClay posted:

Attempting to thwart the most repressive censorship in the western hemisphere seems like a good goal to me.

Pygmy Pyrosaur posted:

I think the bigger story is that "Social Media as a means of maintaining hegemony" is in the playbook of a group alleged with being a CIA front (edit:by the author of Killing Hope).

I'm still reading up on the confluence of subjects here, but with the reputation USAid seemingly has in most of South America, ending censorship would be a collateral good caused by furthering US foreign policy.

rockopete posted:

So the Senate Intelligence Committee has voted to declassify the executive summary and conclusions of the report they were doing on the CIA's torture programs. The same one that caused the huge fight between them and the CIA about a month ago. Word is that may take a month for the White House and CIA to go over it, who knows how much will be redacted, but a hopeful sign regardless. Obama has said that he wants to see this declassified, for what that's worth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/us/politics/senate-panel-approves-release-of-cia-interrogation-report.html?ref=us

Badger of Basra posted:

He keeps saying this, but doesn't he have the power to unilaterally declassify it? Or was that the report done by the CIA itself?

rockopete posted:

The CIA would deserve every bit of it IMO, but more importantly it would make an agency very reluctant to do anything like this again.

mystes posted:

I agree. The CIA will be very reluctant to leave an internal report concluding that its actions were illegal lying around to be leaked or accidentally turned over to a congressional investigation in future.