Big Brother is watching YOU!

[Dr Alan]

This scares me a lot. And with technology evolving exponentially, it can only get worse. Paranoia? Maybe. But I see it as erosion of the very principles that allow me to make subversive, anti-government posts like this one. No worries though. I suspect I'm probably already on the "lists".

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm

[markface]

its scary but not unexpected . we are very quickly losing all of our civil liberties . as long as we have a government that is of the rich and powerful and for the rich and powerful i guess we're stuck . they dont trust anyone and so everyone becomes suspect . i also believe it will continue to get worse as time goes on .

[Cool Evil Liz]

Things like this has been ongoing for years before 9-11 but they use that for any excuse now to do as they wish. And i agree will just continue to get worse.

[Damnitbonnie]

They can put me on the list and I will bore them all to death for you.
I know it's not really something to joke about. Reminds me of the things that went on during the 60's and 70's with "college radicals". Some of the students were truly radical but alot were just using their right to protest peacefully.

[bassett524]

I can't say it really suprises me. Gotta love our privacy.

[Otter_23]

Guess I'm glad I don't have any of the phone companies. :icon_butt:

[Dr Alan]

Guess I'm glad I don't have any of the phone companies. Unfortunately, using cell phones won't save your butt here. One of my techno-geek friends told me recently that using cell phones for sensitive communications was about the same as broadcasting your conversations on the radio. Big Brother is still listening (or threatening to listen). You can still beat the system by throwing the phone into the river every hour or two and using a new one....

[sputnik]

Cell phones are actually easier to trace or track, eves drop on.... you name it!

[Otter_23]

Whew I use smoke signals. Lets seem them crack that :eusa_think: or maybe I should find a modern version of the wind talkers.

[jstu_3]

won't be long before they know every move we make, gotta love the gov't

[sputnik]

Big brother has alwys been able to know what you do with your cell phones, that's nothing new. Along with your email!

But, for all the monitoring that goes on.... there has to be someone to look through it. And people make mistakes!

[jstu_3]

mistakes, the gov't, naaah!!!!

[Windwalker]

Ahh.. Methods of Covert Communication. Terrorists don't need Phones. They use SPAM! Seriously, they encode information inside spam messages and send it out to lots of people. Anyone who has one of these "Encoded Terrorist Messages" has plausible deniability. The NSA first tracked this kind of “Covert Communication” from a bunch of Pilipino kids chatting back in forth using the Mail message headers of spam messages. Since then, they have been tracking several encrypted messages. The cool thing is, a terrorist can split the message into several different spam mailings, so several messages have to be put together before they can be decrypted. Since the original spam list might not have any or all of the email addresses the government uses for snooping spam, its possible that they don’t get the complete message, and therefore have a MUCH more difficult time decrypting.

Another interesting way of communicating is something called Port Knocking, it has been used to provide a “Combination” to a firewall that tells the firewall to open up what port for what services. It does not take much to do the same thing to send a quick message back and forth using ICMP Pings to specific ports, each port representing a letter or number (there are 65360 ports in TCP/IP) With how many ICMP message that flys around the internet it would be neigh on impossible for the NSA to determine it’s a message unless they are watching the Sender or Receiver.

There are many more ways to chat, but I won’t bore all ya with the details 

[Dr Alan]

You lost me somewhere in the second paragraph WindWalker, but it doesn't sound good. My computer skills fade kinda fast beyond hitting CONTROL/ALT/DELETE when the thing locks up.......

[Windwalker]

Love your Tag line Dr Alan. Soo True.

I think the Irony now is, We are more safe because of 9/11 not because of the Government but because of the Terrorists. Now it will be MUCH harder for the Terrorists to take over a plane because people will not sit still and be complacent. There have been several incidents that have happened where the Passengers attacked would be attacker. (Shoe Bomber comes to mind). However, by making everyone Scared, they fear for their safety and are willing to give up certian rights they feel they don't have anyway.

If things like the Patriot act continue to stand, I think that Thomas Jefferson said it best....

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience [has] shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security." --Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:429

[Damnitbonnie]

You lost me somewhere in the second paragraph WindWalker, but it doesn't sound good. My computer skills fade kinda fast beyond hitting CONTROL/ALT/DELETE when the thing locks up.......

I'm in the same class as you are Doc. My secret weapon is a call to my daughter. HELP!

[Otter_23]

That is interesting stuff WindWalker. Bore me with more please (I am serious).

[Windwalker]

Well.. Okay!

Lemme see, Passive covert communication methods such as steganography, hiding information inside of other informations such as pictures or documents. If you have the original it is easy to tell information has been hidden, by comparison (histogram). This could be paticularly useful on web pages or multimedia email messages where the originating document is not public domain, such as a family picture or some random document.

Steganography has been done a lot, but still has several tricks. Such as putting a itsy bitsy spaces in a PDF document that can't be read by human eyes but can be done by a program, The spaces could just be numbers like 4,2,8,6,3,21,3,543 but to the right person they would know to go to such and such a blog and the numbers represent words.

As of late, Cryptography is not too subtle and the government has backdoors inside several of the popular methods so cracking them by those in the "know" is not difficult. Encryption is based on lots of large prime numbers, if one of the Prime Numbers is comprimised so is the whole encrypted message (aka, one number that is suppose to be prime isn't)
Oddly enough, there are several instructions built into our current CPU's that was put there for assisting in decoding cyphers. Cyphers become useful again when it can be broken up and hidden as stupid random data such as HTML form redirection data, or as information in Email headers.

I am missing some other neat methods, but I don't want this message to get to outlandishly large. If interested I will post more methods of communication later.