Don't Use These Lame Acronyms If You Don't Want to Get Nabbed by the Feds
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This is just one of tons of reasons why email is overused. Live, interactive, two-way conversations are better for most things. Making better use of interactive conversations does require some planning and discipline, to keep a list of what you need to discuss sorted by person. But the benefits of that practice are numerous, and increased privacy and plausible deniability is a comparatively minor benefit.
A few reasons to prefer interactive discussion to email:
- plausible deniability and increased security
- reduced chance of misunderstanding
- less time spent and potentially wasted carefully crafting the perfect message, because you can monitor your recipients reactions in real time and dynamically alter your delivery depending on which parts are immediately understood and agreed upon
- collaborate on the ideas interactively and rapidly, rather than a simple one way transfer
Email is good for some things, but it's seriously overused.
Covering your ass is often more important than covering your tracks.
I worked on an early-childhood / social work combo grant program as a "Data Consultant"[1]. We were in a building that had celebrated its 100th year, and it had one bathroom. The nurse had accused the males of "poor aiming". In a memo about fairly normal stuff, I included a paragraph in my status rebuking this claim and pointing out we have young children using the bathroom who might not be quite up to our level. I also pointed out this would be something that the early childhood people might need to work on with the children. I am pretty sure every word of it was viewable by a nun since we had one on staff. I was a very sarcastic person and not a bad writer of tales at the time.
About two weeks later, I got a call from the assistant project officer inquiring about this bit of information. He also informed me all of our correspondence internal to the program was reviewed by the project office in DC and a section of my memo was "well reviewed" in said office. Given the data requirements, I am pretty sure there is a box in a warehouse with this memo in it.
Since then, I write e-mails and memos like they will be reviewed.
1) It was a research grant and they needed help with data reporting and I sure as heck didn't come up with that title.
Each of these steps towards a surveillance state would be easier to stomach if the path weren't so clearly identified in 20th century fiction.
And unless you want to bug every single person's office which sounds a lot more like a surveillance state to me, I don't particularly think looking at the activities of people who are taking things offline is particularly egregious.
The funny thing is, if the people just discussed it by e-mail, they might get away if no one ctrl-f's for their terms! Ha!
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/world/asia/zhou-yongkan...
* Assuming the Judiciary is doing its job properly and not just rubber stamping everything and that investigators would never lie to a judge.
I can't tell if this is big business trying to make investigating white collar crimes harder or the federal government trying to drum up support for mass surveillance. I'm leaning towards the former based on where the article is.
This is a very specific case where Traders (that either were under suspicion directly or indirectly through suspicious dealing on an investment firm) were intentionally communicating with each other using office provided communications and constantly asking to go offline or to talk through other means.
This is nothing more than any other pattern one would find out through exploring any other media, for example one of the ways LEO's find illegal activity usually drug related is when by identifying numbers that only receive or make very short calls, this activity is then usually correlated with creating social networks of the phone numbers and what in many cases you get is a binary relationship with phones being used only to receive or make calls.
While this might sound suspicious to you, or just interesting after investigating how those criminal networks work through actual investigations criminologists identified this pattern as direct correlation to illegal activity which can be used as supporting evidence to get a wiretap or a search warrant.
There are a metric ton of various behavior patterns that might be suspicious and are usually related to some sort of a "illicit" activity if you are looking at some one who's leaking information and you have a GPS location on your suspects then some one who's driving every 3rd week out to the middle of no where might be your prime suspect, now he can be stargazing, he can be cheating on his wife, or he can be meeting with a contact or making a dead drop.
And I quote: "Simply highlighting suggestive phrases isn’t enough, of course."
If someone starts talking about Jihad, you can't charge them with a crime, but they're probably the person you want to look into when it comes to investigating terrorism. It's the same vein.
Why would you expect prosecutors to look blindly?
These types of things help establish precedents. Once their utility is demonstrated, and tools developed to make the technique more effective, they will begin to be deployed elsewhere.
Never write if you can speak;
never speak if you can nod;
never nod if you can wink.
Some things are better said in person...
Because both parties have to have it set up for it to work?
Because setting it up wrong will grant you no protection?
Because it just encrypts the communications in transit but when you're already under suspicion they can grab your computer, which has the unencrypted files on it?
Because in a setting like this (trader's work computers) you're often not even allowed to install any software?