Original graphic published at www.reachinglight.com.
Hmm, esoteric content? web forums? This is a huge attack on free thinking and any type of organisation or collaborative endeavour. It will probably include geeky tech and alternative politics.
What will the web be like without conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists?
This post subject to change
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/tim-berners-lee-encryption-spy-agencies
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who created the world wide web, has called for a “full and frank public debate” over internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, warning that the system of checks and balances to oversee the agencies has failed.
The damning assessment was given as the heads of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 prepared to face questioning by MPs in the Commons on Thursday. In an unprecedented hearing in Westminster, questions over the conduct of Britain’s spy agencies will be raised when the heads of the three secret services – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – go before parliament’s intelligence and security committee.
The 90-minute session will give the nine-strong committee, led by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a chance to question the agencies about the reach of the mass surveillance programmes that have provoked a global debate about privacy in the internet age. While critics have often despaired of the ISC’s lack of clout, Rifkind has promised to use new powers to provide robust scrutiny of the agencies and restore public confidence in what they have been doing.
As the inventor of the global system of inter-connectivity known as the web, with its now ubiquitous www and http, Berners-Lee is uniquely qualified to comment on the internet spying revealed by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
In an interview with the Guardian, he expressed particular outrage that GCHQ and the NSA had weakened online security by cracking much of the online encryption on which hundreds of millions of users rely to guard data privacy.
He said the agencies’ decision to break the encryption software was appalling and foolish, as it directly contradicted efforts of the US and UK governments to fight cybercrime and cyberwarfare, which they have identified as a national security priority. Berners-Lee also said it was a betrayal of the technology industry.
In contrast to several senior British politicians – including the prime minister, David Cameron – who have called for the Guardian to be investigated over reporting of the Snowden leaks, Berners-Lee sees the news organisation and Snowden as having acted in the public interest.
“Whistleblowers, and responsible media outlets that work with them, play an important role in society. We need powerful agencies to combat criminal activity online – but any powerful agency needs checks and balances and, based on recent revelations, it seems the current system of checks and balances has failed,” he said.
As the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that seeks to forward global standards for the web, Berners-Lee is a leading authority on the power and the vulnerabilities of the internet.
He said the Guardian’s coverage of the Snowden leaks had to be seen within the context of the failure of oversight of GCHQ’s and the NSA’s surveillance activities. “Here is where whistleblowing and responsible reporting can step in to protect society’s interests.
“It seems clear that the Guardian’s reporting around the scale and scope of state surveillance has been in the public interest and has uncovered many important issues which now need a full and frank public debate.”
Talking in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berners-Lee said that though he had anticipated many of the surveillance activities exposed by Snowden, including taps on the internet through the Prism program, he had not been prepared for the scale of the NSA/GCHQ operations. “I didn’t realise it would be so big,” he said.
At worst, such spying could damage the public’s confidence in the intimate privacy of the internet as a free and safe place to interact. “When you take away the safe space, you take away a lot of the power of human problem solving,” he warned.
Berners-Lee will mark the 25th anniversary of his invention of the web next year by campaigning for greater public awareness of threats to the internet and by pushing for a charter that would codify the rights of all its users. As head of the World Wide Web Foundation, on 22 November he will release the 2013 Web Index, which measures the web’s growth, utility and impact across about 80 countries – including indicators on censorship and surveillance.
…
Former US vice-president Al Gore has described the activities of the National Security Agency as “outrageous” and “completely unacceptable” and said whistleblower Edward Snowden has “revealed evidence” of crimes against the US constitution.
Gore, speaking Tuesday night at McGill University in Montreal, said he was in favour of using surveillance to ensure national security, but Snowden’s revelations showed that those measures had gone too far.
“I say that as someone who was a member of the National Security Council working in the White House and getting daily briefings from the CIA,” Gore said, in comments reported by the Canadian Press.
Gore had previously said he believed the practice of the NSA collecting US citizens phone records was unlawful and “not really the American way”, but his comments on Tuesday represent his strongest criticism yet.
Asked about Snowden, the NSA whistleblower whose revelations have been reported extensively by the Guardian, Gore said the leaks had revealed uncovered unconstitutional practices.
“He has revealed evidence of what appears to be crimes against the Constitution of the United States,” Gore said.
…
Blind old cnut Blunkett all of a sudden says “Human nature is you get carried away, so we have to protect ourselves from ourselves,” he said. “In government you are pressed by the security agencies. They come to you with very good information and they say ‘you need to do something’. So you do need the breath of scepticism, not cynicism, breathing on them. You need to be able to take a step back. If you don’t have this, you can find yourself being propelled in a particular direction.”
I suspect that this is about spying on mobile phone users: In fact I suspect that it’s about governments demanding the ability to spy on mobile phone users is designed into the systems. This was on big C cnut Blunkett’s watch after all …
COUNCIL RESOLUTION of 17 January 1995 on the lawful interception of telecommunications
(96/C 329/01)
Official Journal C 329 , 04/11/1996 p. 0001 – 0006
[These demands from ‘law enforcement agencies’ are for every signal including location. Mobile phones signal their location continuously. Isn’t that a bug? … Blunkett, what do you have to say? You were home secretary after all … ]
[Later edit: Blunkett became Home Secretary in 2001. It should be recognised that mobile phones announce their location and much more.
[Later: It appears that there was no opposition by Blunkett to these demands from ‘law enforcement agencies’. Wasn’t there a scandal about this time about New Labour databases? – Escalibur was associated with Mandy and Labour coming into power but it was more than that – have to research this.]
Don’t look at this Mobile phones are designed to be mobile bugs
OpenBSD is widely regarded as the most secure operating system. Today is the release date of the latest release OpenBSD 5.4. You’ll need to give it a few hours because it’s not yet 1/11 in Canada.
OpenBSD is secure because it is continually security audited. It is absolutely ideal for firewall/routers because of it’s advanced pf packet filter. It’s best suited for servers but also performs well on desktops and multimedia machines.
Learning C programming properly. C is all about pointers and indirection. It seems to be taught totally the wrong way. Pointers are key and all else follows …
I recapped a motherboard. You don’t need a new machine nowadays and I was pleased to revive a machine for a friend’s parents. It’s good to save a computer from the skip. I solder badly because I don’t do it often enough but I obviously solder well enough.
I replaced a Sempron LE-1150 with a really fast Athlon X2. Now it rocks.
[
11/11/13 I’ve been trying to learn Drupal 7. Drupal is a Content Managment System (CMS) which also claims to be a CMS framework. A CMS is used to build websites and Drupal is used to build many of the most complex and advanced websites. As the diagram shows, Drupal is difficult to grok. My experience is that it’s counterintuitive and opposed to many of the principles of programming e.g. the use of global variables. But then it’s not programming of course – it’s an application for developing websites.
I did try Joomla and WordPress but it looks like Drupal is what I need to build the websites I want. I think it may be that you just have to learn the Drupal way. Just lately I’ve been doing some maintenance to this blog and realised that WordPress produces an awful lot of dead links which are no good to anyone. I’m thinking of converting this blog to Drupal soon and get some practice in.
There’s some weirdness about this post – not allowing me to edit it as I normally would. I’ve had to use a different browser because it simply appeared totally blank in the browser I normally use but yet it appears published fine. Weird.]
[9/12/13 I’ve been repairing analogue radios just recently. It’s surprising what some contact cleaner, compressed air and a vacuum cleaner can achieve. I still need to repair my favourite radio which was second-hand and well used when I got it about 1999. It will need some soldering but some radios are special.]
Use strong passwords. I particularly like long passwords because I know about brute-forcing.
Backup.
Get a real operating system. Linux livecds can help.
[More geeky tips. This could go on and on.
Firewall. Firewall on all interfaces especially on laptops and mobile devices. Lock it down.
Wireless should be considered insecure.
[6/11/13 The Guardian has published a Guide to Tor. The latest Tor browser bundle should be used and care should be taken. People have been caught-out accessing web-based email by not appreciating how it works. It should not be used for anything that divulges personal info and there’s not really much point in watching Youtube through Tor. If you’re in a repressive country it’s worth using. Basically, it hides what you’re looking at. [edit: It’s likely to get past broad political internet censorship. ]
If you have geek competence and spare resources please consider running a Tor relay as I do. There are certain dangers involved in running an exit node (relay) which do not apply to intermediate nodes.]
[4/11 What was I not thinking about? Mobile phones are designed to be mobile bugs.
… and here are the regulations from the ILETS / ENFOPOL affair of the 90s. These regulations are demands made by law enforcement authorities of the capabilities needed to infiltrate communications. Essentially, these law enforcement demands are design requirements for communication systems. You will notice that these requirements date from the mid 1990s. It’s probably safe to assume that they have been implemented by now. [Later edit: These regulations were intended particularly at mobile devices: phones at that time e.g. the reference to location. These regulations are bound to have been updated in the same culture of secrecy for technological developments since.]
COUNCIL RESOLUTION of 17 January 1995 on the lawful interception of telecommunications
(96/C 329/01)
Official Journal C 329 , 04/11/1996 p. 0001 – 0006
…
Annex: Requirements
This section presents the Requirements of law enforcement agencies relating to the lawful interception of telecommunications. These requirements are subject to national law and should be interpreted in accordance with applicable national policies. Terms are defined in the attached glossary.
1.Law enforcement agencies require access to the entire telecommunications transmitted, or caused to be transmitted, to and from the number or other identifier of the target service used by the interception subject. Law enforcement agencies also require access to the call-associated data that are generated to process the call.
1.1.Law enforcement agencies require access to all interception subjects operating temporarily or permanently within a telecommunications system.
1.2.Law enforcement agencies require access in cases where the interception subject may be using features to divert calls to other telecommunications services or terminal equipment, including calls that traverse more than one network or are processed by more than one network operator/service provider before completing.
1.3.Law enforcement agencies require that the telecommunications to and from a target service be provided to the exclusion of any telecommunications that do not fall within the scope of the interception authorization.
1.4.Law enforcement agencies require access to call associated data such as:
1.4.1.signalling of access ready status;
1.4.2.called party number for outgoing connections even if there is no successful connection established;
1.4.3.calling party number for incoming connections even if there is no successful connection established;
1.4.4.all signals emitted by the target, including post-connection dialled signals emitted to activate features such as conference calling and call transfer;
1.4.5.beginning, end and duration of the connection;
1.4.6.actual destination and intermediate directory numbers if call has been diverted.
1.5.Law enforcement agencies require information on the most accurate geographical location known to the network for mobile subscribers.
1.6.Law enforcement agencies require data on the specific services used by the interception subject and the technical parameters for those types of communication.
2.Law enforcement agencies require a real-time, fulltime monitoring capability for the interception of telecommunications. Call associated data should also be provided in real-time. If call associated data cannot be made available in real time, law enforcement agencies require the data to be available as soon as possible upon call termination.
3.Law enforcement agencies require network operators/service providers to provide one or several interfaces from which the intercepted communications can be transmitted to the law enforcement monitoring facility. These interfaces have to be commonly agreed on by the interception authorities and the network operators/service providers. Other issues associated with these interfaces will be handled according to accepted practices in individual countries.
3.1.Law enforcement agencies require network operators/service providers to provide call associated data and call content from the target service in a way that allows for the accurate correlation of call associated data with call content.
3.2.Law enforcement agencies require that the format for transmitting the intercepted communications to the monitoring facility be a generally available format. This format will be agreed upon on an individual country basis.
3.3.If network operators/service providers initiate encoding, compression or encryption of telecommunications traffic, law enforcement agencies require the network operators/service providers to provide intercepted communications en clair.
3.4.Law enforcement agencies require network operators/service providers to be able to transmit the intercepted communications to the law enforcement monitoring facility via fixed or switched connections.
3.5.Law enforcement agencies require that the transmission of the intercepted communications to the monitoring facility meet applicable security requirements.
4.Law enforcement agencies require interceptions to be implemented so that neither the interception target nor any other unauthorized person is aware of any changes made to fulfil the interception order. In particular, the operation of the target service must appear unchanged to the interception subject.
5.Law enforcement agencies require the interception to be designed and implemented to preclude unauthorized or improper use and to safeguard the information related to the interception.
5.1.Law enforcement agencies require network operators/service providers to protect information on which and how many interceptions are being or have been performed, and not disclose information on how interceptions are carried out.
5.2.Law enforcement agencies require network operators/service providers to ensure that intercepted communications are only transmitted to the monitoring agency specified in the interception authorization.
5.3.According to national regulations, network operators/service providers could be obliged to maintain an adequately protected record of activations of interceptions.
6.Based on a lawful inquiry and before implementation of the interception, law enforcement agencies require: (1) the interception subject’s identity, service number or other distinctive identifier; (2) information on the services and features of the telecommunications system used by the interception subject and delivered by network operators/service providers; and (3) information on the technical parameters of the transmission to the law enforcement monitoring facility.
7.During the interception, law enforcement agencies may require information and/or assistance from the network operators/service providers to ensure that the communications acquired at the interception interface are those communications associated with the target service. The type of information and/or assistance required will vary according to the accepted practices in individual countries.
8.Law enforcement agencies require network operators/service providers to make provisions for implementing a number of simultaneous intercepts. Multiple interceptions may be required for a single target service to allow monitoring by more than one law enforcement agency. In this case, network operators/service providers should take precautions to safeguard the identities of the monitoring agencies and ensure the confidentiality of the investigations. The maximum number of simultaneous interceptions for a given subscriber population will be in accordance with national requirements.
9.Law enforcement agencies require network operators/service providers to implement interceptions as quickly as possible (in urgent cases within a few hours or minutes). The response requirements of law enforcement agencies will vary by country and by the type of target service to be intercepted.
10.For the duration of the interception, law enforcement agencies require that the reliability of the services supporting the interception at least equals the reliability of the target services provided to the interception subject. Law enforcement agencies require the quality of service of the intercepted transmissions forwarded to the monitoring facility to comply with the performance standards of the network operators/service providers.
22/7/14 My stats show that this is the most popular post – probably because of the ILETS / ENFOPOL quote above.
Got a spares or repair box off eBay cheap and swaped the processor. It rocks – quad core, 2T hard drive and I only ever use a small part of the memory.
Learning django at the moment and hoping to build a site using it soon. Python is good.
Everything wireless strikes me as fantastically insecure. Normal computer users are going to be vulnerable to evil twins at public hotspots. What about wireless keyboards? That’s a keyboard transmitting what keys are pressed. I don’t know but would doubt that encryption is used.