"Dark Alleys" on the Internet 704
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."
Uhm (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uhm (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Uhm (Score:5, Insightful)
Throw some nice 2048-bit RSA encryption in there, and the whole thing is impossible.
You know, it's stuff like this that the terrorists want. They want us to lose our freedoms to overzealous anti-terrorism laws, they want us to live in fear. Suggestions like this article must make Bin Laden smile.
that's it, exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
>> they want us to live in fear. Suggestions like this article must make Bin Laden smile.
What scares me is when it becomes normal for people to include "national security" in their vocabulary, especially people in government. To think that this is happening so few years after the wall finally broke down (you know, that concrete thingy that used to be somewhere in Europe)
What we really need is so basic: Freedom of speech, human rights, and free movement of people and goods. Not the opposite - we know what happens when you restrict any of that; history has taught us that lesson over and over again.
Re:Uhm (Score:4, Interesting)
You can chalk up more victims to Sept 11th - thousands killed in the WTC, tens of thousands killed in Afganistan and Iraq, and millions accross the world living in fear and oppression.
This sort of thing should be a wakeup call to the masses.
Despite my best attempts, my girlfriend still worries when I get a on train every morning for London. She doesn't worry I'll be run over by a black cab, or raise my blood pressure in a stressful job. Instead, she worries that terrorist will blow up my train, my office, or even 'the whole of London'. The Culture of Fear has her trapped.
Re:Uhm (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, bin Laden could care less if you live in fear or spend all day high. All you infidels are going to hell anyway. What he wants is to affect American foreign policy. (Which is going to plan.)
Re:Who's going to read it? (Score:5, Funny)
In Other News (Score:3, Insightful)
George Tenet could just as easily have noted how we do not yet know everything that everyone is thinking and we have not figured out how to prevent crimes by monitoring individual's brain waves for possible "dangerous" ideas. If we had this equipment we could eliminate all crime and free thought. Think of how secure we would be then.
Certa
Re:Uhm (Score:3, Insightful)
Some clueless people, eh? Gov's been monitoring communications, even cabbie radios, since the '40's. You dudes need to watch some history channel. Probably do not even remember when people used to put words like "bomb" and "whitehouse" in their
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, house
Re:Uhm-You are right! (Score:3, Insightful)
Terrorists Want Absolute Power (Score:3, Insightful)
If Arab terrorists wanted freedom, they would have signed the Oslo deal and gotten a Palestinian state. Th
Re:Uhm (Score:5, Interesting)
Our legal department has informed me that I am required by the provisions of the USA PATRIOT act to provide a back-door that will allow law enforcement to enter and view any conversation taking place in any of the servers, including private conversations, without being observed. I must also provide a way for the chat, including private chat, to be logged, and we must keep those logs for at least 6 months.
Since chat through our servers cannot be encrypted, there is no 128 bit option.
Big brother is watching you, friends.
impossible (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:impossible (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:impossible (Score:2)
Re:impossible (Score:3, Insightful)
good thing computers can't search text or audio (or video with facial recognition), otherwise the minority would be able to watch the majority
who is going to watch the watchers?
The Watcher in the Woods [imdb.com]
Re:impossible (Score:4, Informative)
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:impossible (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that the number of terrorists are within the margin of error for any measurement system. Ask any experimental scientist or statistician about measurements and errors; they will agree. The only thing the government can do is reduce the number of terrorists to an acceptable level. The politicians will never admiit it, but this is exactly how they think (just as long as I can get through this term without any attacks..
Re:impossible (Score:4, Insightful)
Terrorists and such will continue to communicate efficiently and every other net user will have no privacy, and have to put up with and inherant network strain placed by this spying crap.
Re:impossible (Score:3, Insightful)
As if this would ever compare to the "strain" caused by spam and P2P apps.
Re:impossible (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:impossible (Score:4, Funny)
sucess: not a word
success: achievement of a goal or status
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:impossible (Score:3, Funny)
As in "I told him sucess about it"?
Re:impossible (Score:2)
And when they realise this, the nations with enough PATRIOT-esque laws will simply shut off internet access in the name of national security. (They care for their citizens' best intrests of course!)
I can't remember now, which communist (?) nation was it that shut down all the country's coffee shops because they realised that they couldn't put a spy at every table?
Re:impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
And the real usefullness would be after the fact, and only when someone has told all that they know (and the goverment has all of the data recorded too).
Thinking back to the cold war, the most successful communciations that the Russians spies would do where out in the open- usually simple things like colored thumbtacks on public bulletin boards, which unless you knew what to look for and then what it ment, it was very easy to miss.
Re:impossible (Score:3, Funny)
Announcing Google Surveillance Search Beta !
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Noise and Signal (Score:3, Informative)
The intelligence community needs men on the ground, deep cover agents in the places where the terrori
Server Access? (Score:2, Informative)
Remember, even encryption can be broken
simple solution (Score:2)
that is sufficiently bizarre that the code breakers will try to decrypt it just on the off chance that something else might be hidden in the supposed text. (During wwII composer alban berg's music was inspected for encoded messages, until they realised it really was just music)
never mind if it's salted with random characters or typos.
now if everything was encrypted......
Re:Server Access? (Score:2)
I suspect that Stenography is the real direction that this is going to take. They could 'monitor' the cleric/mage chat in the MUD, but if the chat looks like a standard character exchange, with the data of the underlying chat being the location of some punctuation, or some specific word choice, or some way o
Re:Server Access? (Score:3, Funny)
Um, No.
There are easily reachable key sizes that would literally take longer to crack than the universe has left to exist, assuming every atom in the universe was a computer, all working to crack one message.
Re:Server Access? (Score:3, Informative)
And encryption in general is still vulnerable to the rubber-hose attack
Re:Server Access? (Score:4, Informative)
sniff (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called sniffing.
Either on the wire, or if the MUD software encrypts traffic, on your end (via trojan) or the server end (via court-order).
Internet caffe ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Internet caffe ? (Score:3, Insightful)
But the government already knows that the 9/11 hijackers used cybercafes, libraries, and Kinkos sites to get net access for email and possibly other means of communication. Any guesses where the Dept of Internal Security is focusing its electronic eyes?
(And they busted a guy for installing keyloggers in NYC Kinkos and ripping off bank and credit card account numbers an
Re:Internet caffe ? (Score:4, Insightful)
E.g., consider two coffeeshops across the street from one another. One guy sits in one and has a cup of coffee, reads the paper, etc. The other sits in the other and does the same. If they see each other every day, no attack. If one is absent, *boom*. Given the way people work, it's a regular, repeatable event, and can be used to communicate data (albeit slowly) - perhaps the paper is folded slightly differently, or carried away vs. left on the table.
The real trick to hiding is to make it look like you have nothing to hide. And that is what makes it difficult.
Attack based upon presence or lack thereof (Score:5, Funny)
And I thought I had "Oh, shit!" moments when waking up from oversleeping...
Re:sniff (Score:3, Interesting)
That's far too complex.
Buy game. Create female character. Ask Mage, "Hi, I'm new, can I tag along with you for a while?"
This is the digital version of the 'Russian Hooker' gambit, except, sadly, with geeks no real sex needs to be exchanged for information.
My personal opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me old fashioned.
Re:My personal opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? It doesn't seem to apply to 'other' matters.
Re:My personal opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
And the author didn't go to any practitioners in the field, either. Like...
. an analyst at the United States Army's Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth
. a computer forensics specialist and a senior fellow at Mitretek Systems
. an author and a specialist on the National Security Agency.
. a former Arab linguist with the National Security Agency and the Defense Information Sy
Data is not the same as intelligence. (Score:5, Insightful)
It would make a lot more sense to focus on effectively handling the data available than simply adding to the flood of data already at hand.
Re:Data is not the same as intelligence. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is going to sound like a paranoid rant. I guess it is. But then, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
What gives you the idea that "they" really believe the bullshit that they shovel? "They" always want a little more authority, so they can protect you from terrorists, or save your kids from drug pushers, or fight "the war on poverty."
Is it possible, just possible, that all of these things are nothing more than thinly veiled power-grabs?
Pierce the veil.
-Peter
Not about Intelligence. It's about Fear. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is best done when fear is in place. --You don't have to be aware of accurate information on everybody. You just need instant access to accurate information on everybody. That way, you can make your quotas of public beatings and arrests without hassle. This, by itself, provides the impetus for the good sheep to stay good sheep.
Harvesting begins shortly. Please stand by.
-FL
I can still remember the times (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I can still remember the times (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can still remember the times (Score:4, Insightful)
Hint: no social or economic system is inherantly good or bad, some have advantages over others and vice versa. It is the leader who determines how a system is used that determines whether that instance of it is good or bad.
Already tapped.... (Score:5, Funny)
The clerics in obscure level 50 corners of all MUD games are FBI agents. Did you not know that??
Re:Already tapped.... (Score:5, Funny)
The Internet: Where men are men, women are men, and little girls are FBI agents.
Re:Already tapped.... (Score:3, Funny)
MMORPGS: Where orcs are men, female woodelves are men, and that level 60 cleric offering you a quest item for information is an FBI agent.
Re:Already tapped.... (Score:2)
Oh, wait...
Re:Already tapped.... (Score:3, Funny)
Suddenly, working for the FBI is sounding a lot more attractive.
"I AM working, boss. I am interrogating this dragon to see if it knows anything. It could be an enemy bot! Pow. Take that! Let's see how you like my fireball!"
SLAP * back to reality (Score:4, Funny)
They put a packet sniffer on the ethernet cable? Because your mage, my cleric, and the impossible to reach corner of the dungeon are not actually in a mythical world of make-believe, but just linked structs in heap memory? You retarded?
Futile (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a concern but not a very legitamate one.
You don't understand (Score:2)
Storage is cheap, and it is quite easy to automatically analyze a conversation for key phrases/words. A human analyst could then take the time to listen in on interesting recordings.
Re:You don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You don't understand (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Garbage phrase, garbage reasoning (Score:3, Interesting)
If the FEAR of being punished prevents people from speaking, then freedom of speech has essentially been revoked.
There are already people who are afraid not only of speaking, but of listening as well. The culture of fear that's being encouraged is as damaging to the overall political process.
You don't need to monitor everyone and throw them in jail if you can convince them that they will be.
Even if there's no real danger of arrest, and YOU know that and act accordingly, doesn't
Re:Futile (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea was first set forth as a method of perfectly controlling a factory. The premise was that a manager or observer would sit at some central station observing employees who he could see but who could not see him. As the employees could be under scrutiny at any given time, they had no choice but to assume that they were always under scrutiny.
The Carceral is a prison, not for the mind, but of the mind. Have you ever stopped at a red light when there was no one for miles? That's the classic example of the Carceral in action.
We see this all around us, every hour of every day. The RIAA uses it to deter file traders. The Federal Government uses it to deter tax cheats. Walmart uses it to prevent shoplifting.
The online world is a different place, however. Security and scrutiny are something the individual has as much power to prevent as the observer has to employ. Use of sophisticated encryption systems is within the grasp of many users. Moreover, the huge volume of traffic does make monitoring even a meaningful portion hugely difficult.
Remember, the challenge is not to monitor all the traffic on the Internet, but to monitor enough that people will assume that you can monitor it all. Just as the RIAA can't sue every file trader, the Feds can't monitor every bit and byte that flows over the wires. That said, the RIAA can monitor enough to make you think twice about loading up a P2P client, and the Feds might be able to monitor enough to make terrorist organizations choose a less convenient, less efficient, and less sophisticated method of communication. That in and of itself is a victory.
The consequences for the rest of us will be just another casualty in this war on terror. Chalk it up there with free speech, privacy, and equal protection under the law.
Re:Futile (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I personally find myself often breaking out in laughter at some of the things they suggest for me. Granted, some of their suggestions are good. But others are truly bizarre, and I find myself wondering why they would link me to that.
Now, with amazon.com, I can just chuckle and go on to what I'm looking for. But when it comes to government investigators, such things aren't funny. You can end up in jail indefinitely without trial because of your "associations". Or, more subtly, you can be put on lists and locked out of things like potential good jobs because of the suspicion that you are linked to someone or something that the current administration doesn't like. And those links will be generated by software that's probably even flakier than amazon's.
Example: Some years back, when my wife was in grad school, she made friends with a Russian woman who was there (Boston University) on a scholarship. The woman discovered she was pregnant soon after coming to the school, and when delivery time came, my wife was handy and gave her a ride to the hospital. Even more fun, after the birth, my wife helped out a bit by doing things like picking up the baby pictures - and paying with a credit card.
Ever since then, we've been getting junk-mail catalogs for baby/children things, and the catalogs have followed the child's age. We mostly think this is funny, as do most of the people we tell about it.
But we are aware that there's a potential problem here. The databases show that we have a close personal connection to this Russian woman. Today that doesn't mean much. 30 years ago, it would have put us on some seriously-bad government lists. 20 years from now, who knows? Especially when you consider that, when the kid reaches 18 years, he will have a choice of which citizenship he wants to claim. Depending on how things go in Russia, he could well make the rational decision to be an American. Naturally, we'd welcome him and help him, though the clique in the White House then might not.
An even funnier part of the story is that we learned a year or so after the birth that the people at the hospital apparently had a bit of confusion. Since the mother was accompanied by another woman rather than a man, they put my wife's name in the "father/husband" slot. Her name could be a man's name, though it's usually female. And Boston-area medical people are known for their helpfulness towards people in "non-traditional" family arrangements. We've told some of our gay friends about this, and they think it's hilarious that my wife is "father to a Russian baby".
But we do have grounds to be nervous about what might happen when, say, Pat Robertson becomes president, and sets up a program to purge the nation of gays. Will the database say that we're part of the problem? I'd guess that they say this right now, though our current leader merely wants to prevent gays from getting married or insured, and isn't talking about jailing or killing them. And even if they figure out that the birth certificate is wrong, investigations would show that we do have gay friends.
If you look at the history of US government subversive lists, there's good grounds for worry here. Right now, we may think it's all funny. And it gives us lots of cred in "liberal" (and gay;-) circles. But we're both computer geeks, and know well how screwy databases can be. We've both worked on them and experienced the frustration of keeping the data sane. We understand how hopeless it is to expect government or corporate databases to contain only valid information. And we're following stories like this one
Obviously the answer is simple... (Score:5, Interesting)
After that, we should destroy cell phones, especially the ones that have 'no contract' that can be picked up at a local drugstore, used for a week and then be tossed away.
Our Modern world has just made it to easy for those 'evil ones' to communicate about destroying us. We should foil all their plots by going back to pre-80's technology levels. That will show them!
Re:Obviously the answer is simple... (Score:5, Funny)
Aye, pre-1880 levels. Let them try hijacking horse-pulled buggies and drive them into buildings!
Re:Obviously the answer is simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
Aye, pre-1880 levels. Let them try hijacking horse-pulled buggies and drive them into buildings!
Back then, terrorists were different. They won, and then they wrote the history books.
See: History of the United States (1776-1789) [wikipedia.org]
I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of the Internet?
Don't forget the dark alleys... (Score:2)
We must eliminate all alleys, entryways, nooks, corridors, subways, booths, cul de sacs, and anywhere else two terrorists might converse without being observed! In fact, we should eliminate all private residences -- nay, all buildings! -- lest terrorists hide in or behind them and discuss their nefarious plans. And forests! Where better to have a conspiratori
So... (Score:2)
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/14
(It's a joke, laugh! No offence meant to Deathifier...)
Definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
My main concern is their definition of a 'terrorist'. I have no problems with law enforcement agencies going after real, or suspected terrorists, but I do disagree with the slow creep of the word to include people who have different opinions then the government.
Then again, I'm more paranoid than most. Probably nothing to worry about. Probably...
Realities. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
S'already working, since there are no terrorists other than those the government deliberately allowed to act. The 'terrorism' bugaboo is just a way to trick people into being heavily controlled. But you know that already.
You're not paranoid. I
Re:Realities. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Every country, especially a large a powerful country, needs a fascist government every once in a while, just to teach the moron part of the population to value their freedom. US is long overdue:-)/.
Perhaps.. (Score:2)
> my mage as it talks to your cleric
Not dark alleys (Score:2)
Terrorists use MUDs? (Score:2)
More seriously though, this problem is insoluble. Not that that will stop them from trying and sacrificing a lot of liberty meanwhile. If you're smart enough to rig a car bomb, you're smart enough to use encryption while planning it. Illicit communication can always be disguised as arbitrary binary data.
Apparently never looked into MUD code (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Apparently never looked into MUD code (Score:3, Interesting)
To many ways to comunicate. (Score:2)
Cave (Score:2)
That trivial to do: you could monitor the packets passing along your connection to the MUD by going to your ISP. Or they could go to the administrator of the MUD and get access.
I'd be more worried about two people conversing in a language that the intelligence community doesn't have enough experts in, who are personally known to eac
In related news... (Score:3, Funny)
Bah (Score:3, Funny)
Thats why whenever you get a monster to yourself suddenly *BOOM* kill stealer.
Reminds me of a quote I saw recently (Score:5, Funny)
Dark Alleys? Who needs em... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dark Alleys? Who needs em... (Score:2)
I call bullshit (Score:2)
I call bullshit. There aren't more terrorists than there were decades ago; the country is not more dangerous. The rights and freedoms in the west are the crowning achieveme
Stegano (Score:2)
Not that terrorists are usually that covert, honestly... But if they needed to be, they could. That is, of course, pretending a system like this wasn't an excuse to monitor a society which has grown less a
What about (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me count the ways... (Score:2)
Jabber, IRC, e-mail, telnet BBS, OGG streaming, MSN, blogs comments, FTP text files, watermarked photo, web cams, GoToMeeting.com, MUDs, chess tourneys, internet faxing, slashdot, VOIP, SSH, SMS, P2P....
Did I forget any? Oh yeah, someone could make a custom protocal.
sounds more like... (Score:2)
what's the point of monitoring more if you don't have the system in place to make sense of the information you gathered?
there are indications that we had monitored and gathered enough intelligence to (at least) be concerned about 9/11 before that day. we weren't able to piece it together.
as long as increasing monitoring is simply about gathering more information but not about making sense of them, it seems to be nothing buy a political move to increase accountab
it's impossible to stop (Score:2)
I'm no expert on steganography, but my understanding is that automatically detecting its present depends on statistical anomalies that presumably wouldn't exist in a well-encrypted message (which will appear to be random noise)
More ominous than that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More ominous than that... (Score:3, Informative)
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 o
Something I was taught... (Score:3, Interesting)
World of Warcraft (Score:2, Funny)
When will we learn... (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't fight terror with force because as much as you may disagree with the terrorists' goals, to them and their followers they are freedom fighters. If you were a freedom fighter rebelling against what you thought was an unjust foreign force, would them invading your half of the world make you give up? No, you'd fight harder than ever and this time you'd recruit your friends. Would knowing that your communications might be intercepted stop you? No, you'd just find new ways to communicate.
I wonder what percentage of our "defense" budget goes toward lobbying politicians to try to make policies that don't piss off half the world. That'd do more against terrorism, and for our defense, than any war.
Firehose Defense (Score:2)
The autorities also have a time problem since their monitoring storage is of finite size (exabyte?) and can hold only a small fraction of traffic.
Answer the problem itself (Score:4, Insightful)
The US government should switch its efforts to why all these 'terrorists' are targetting it. There's gotta be a reason, and the reason isn't because the US "is a shining beacon of freedom." (why aren't they targetting Holland? Sweden? Finland?).
Catching these terrorists isn't gonna solve the problem: more will popup immediately to take their place. But if the US started to address (and fix) why they're being targetted (their utter arrogance towards other nations), most of this will go away.
Hammer into Anvil (Score:5, Interesting)
In one episode, titled Hammer into Anvil, the protagonist, Number Six, who is constantly being spied upon by the sinister forces who control his mysterious prison (called only "The Village), decides to turn the tables on the chief warden (called "Number Two"). He begins to send secret, encoded messages to nonexistant entities, indicating that he is not really a prisoner, but a mole sent to determine the strength of Village security and staff.
Eventually, he drives the current "Number Two" to a nervous breakdown. It's one of the best episodes.
It seemed somehow relevant.
As someone who RTFA... (Score:3, Insightful)
The most troubling part of this to me is it comes from the angle that there is an expectation that all communications from "bad guys" can be monitored. If we operate under the expectation that all communications can intercepted we're just setting ourselves up for failure.
The simple act of sending a postcard, or a flag flown on a balcony at a specific time, or a stalled car at a specific point on the road with it's left turn signal on or...
Doesn't our own government use covert means of communication that they think can't be intercepted? If we have them, others do too. Focusing on high tech ways to monitor people who'll use low tech, or no tech, is another example of the arrogance of technology. We need to have many, many layers of security because none of them will work all the time. We can't check all the shipping containers, but we can control communications??
Helping how? (Score:3, Insightful)