"Dark Alleys" on the Internet

nokilli writes "Sounding the alarmist tone many of us became used to in the early days of the web, The New York Times has a story that talks about "national security" concerns over the myriad ways in which two people (i.e., terrorists) can communicate using the Internet today [NYT=Kneel before Zod]. They're talking about monitoring chat rooms, email servers, etc. I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD."

Server Access?

[piett134]

They may not need server access to monitor your chat session in your MUD. Simply monitoring your incomming / outgoing data should be sufficient.
Remember, even encryption can be broken :)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Apparently never looked into MUD code

[dead sun]

Most of the MUD codebases I have looked into have all had this nifty feature to log what players do, should the admins start suspecting foul play. It'll keep track of where the players go, what they say, emote, do, pretty much everything. Simply talking to an admin and letting them know that you're with some national TLA and would like cooperation in logging a characters conversation would probably be enough to get the job done.

Or, consider most MUDs are transmitted in plaintext, and a simple sniff on your connection would be more than sufficient.

No, the real tricks should be information hiding, all messages stongly encrypted, sensitive or otherwise, and simple knowledge of where not to communicate. Wonder if crypto hidden in the least significant bits of a scan of a point and shoot 35mm picture of some random "family" photo would ever go noticed. I hope you don't think your chatting in the open in an "obscure" MUD location really helps you any.

Noise and Signal

[Thangodin]

The more extraneous crap they monitor, the higher the noise to signal ratio. Kerry mentioned in the debates that there were hundreds of thousands of hours of unexamined surveillance tape. Of course there is! The best thing you can hope for with the growing mountain of surveillance output is that after the next attack, the cops will be able to look at the tapes and say, "Oh, yeah, there go the terrorists..."

The intelligence community needs men on the ground, deep cover agents in the places where the terrorists are recruiting. By the time they are sending encoded messages to each other in secret areas of the net, it's already too late. Getting rid of Ashcroft helps too. They just don't come any more incompetent than that.

Re:Server Access?

[leuk_he]

They can arrest and hold you (without charges) just for being a (terrorist) suspect, what you are right now. The only way to come out of prison is to reveal your password. I hope for you it is just porn.

Re:impossible

[Total_Wimp]

We used to say the same thing about electronic dossiers--that storage was so expensive there was no way to keep all that transactional data forever. Now they can.

So they can store it. Can they find it through all the noise?

If out of every 300 million people there are a couple dozen terrorists, how do you expect to find the terrorists talking about bombs through all the talk about bombs in video games, bombs in the movies, blonde bombshells and new cars that are "the bomb"?

Even if you solve storage and you solve relevance, you still have to solve monitoring every delivery avenue. With the incentive of P2P, video games and new hardware you have several new avenues opening up every day. What if they terrorist wanted to communicate via handwritten text on his new Nintendo DS? Is that monitored?

When communication was just phone and post, spies used flashes of light, pigeons and cleverly placed symbols in public locations. There is always a way to communicate without being spotted. Being able to store all you _can_ find will only help a little bit.

TW

Re:Server Access?

[Have Blue]

You forgot to include "based on current knowledge of algorithms, mathematics, and computation methods and technology".

And encryption in general is still vulnerable to the rubber-hose attack :P

Re:Uhm

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have a fucking clue about how SSL work. Having the certificate of the server only helps if you can trick someone to connect to you - it doesn't help eavesdropping, as you'd need the private keys of the certificates for that, and that is never disclosed to the certificate authorities, so there is no way for them to disclose it to the NSA.

Re:More ominous than that...

[Kurt Granroth]

I think that the message here is much more ominous than what the surface story tells. The young man simply stated his great dislike for the United States government that is in place. He also made a flip comment about himself being a pilot of one 9/11 planes that crashed into the towers. I only see a crime here if he actually did the task.

If that was the only reason he was arrested and indicted, then I agree that this is a scary precedent. But is it the reason? I don't think this story gives that kind of detail. This is all it says:

Mr. Walker, a 19-year-old student, is accused, among other things, of using his roommate's computer to communicate with - and offer aid to - a federally designated terrorist group in Somalia and with helping to run a jihadist Web site.

"I hate the U.S. government," is among the statements Mr. Walker is said to have posted online. "I wish I could have been flying one of the planes on Sept. 11."

It doesn't say that he is accused of making treasonous speech or inciting war or anything at all of the type. He is accused of offering aid and running a website for known terrorist groups. The quotes from Walker seem to be included only to make him look obviously guilty to the reader.

Still, this article doesn't say very much at all. It's entirely possible that those statements really are the crux of the case ("offering aid"). If that's the case, then I agree, this case if far more serious than anything to do with "wiretapping the Internet". This would be a dagger deep into the heart of our notion of free speech.

So with that in mind, I tend to think that this case is something else. Yes, I know we've lost a lot of our rights concerning free speech in the past few years, but I don't think we've gotten quite that far.

Re:You don't understand

[m50d]

I'm a terrorist and planning to overthrow the government. I just need a load of explosives and some weapons grade plutonium so I can make a dirty bomb to hold the government hostage until I can assasinate the president.