Is there really any way to hide from a motivated state actor?
Asking about it on HN is definitely not one.
Relevant xkcd: 538 [1]
Asking about it on HN is definitely not one.
Relevant xkcd: 538 [1]
>MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled gold-farming crew really nonsense? When a game goes to great lengths to simulate a world, the possibilities for covert communication are nearly limitless!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/11/14/why-the-p...
>
The hunt for those responsible (eight terrorists were killed Saturday night, but accomplices may still be at large) led to a number of raids in nearby Brussels. Belgian federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon has said outright that the PS4 is used by ISIS agents to communicate, and was selected due to the fact that it’s notoriously hard to monitor. “PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp,” he said.
This is a plot device in <http://enwp.org/Little_Brother_%28Doctorow_novel%29>.
It’s a comedy, I don’t think it aims to depress.
Which is why Agora marketplace, digital lawyers, and a slew of others have simply said:
"we no longer operate under any assumption of privacy regardless of measures taken, and have simple refused to operate on the internet any longer."
Which is what the 3 letters want, a chilling-effect to reduce their Herculean-effort to just an Athenian one.
You can avoid being the "easy picking".
When tor falls, the next question is "what do they see?" You have control over that.
Even with the NSA's budget and infrastructure, I don't think it's technologically feasible for them to decrypt and then semantically process or store that much content. Video is also the vast majority of traffic on the Internet so it would be trivial to hide in plain sight with some creativity (Using stenography to hide content in the video) With 4k you can pack a ridiculous amount of information into even a single frame, and that's one frame among hundreds of thousands, among billions of videos.
I have little doubt that they can store terabits of video content. They let us know about their utah data center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center) which was estimated to have as much as 12 exabytes in 2013 and who knows what data centers they have they aren't mentioning. Back in 2003 they had no problems capturing every bit of data that moved over AT&Ts network. Storage is dirt cheap and they can just hang onto everything until they see a reason to dig into it. No need to process everything right away.
You'd think your video would be blending in with all the other video on the internet, but it really wouldn't. Streaming video put out by netflix is going to look very different than streaming video served via youtube vs streaming video over P2P etc.
Ideally they wouldn't have to search everything when needed and could keep a running file on everyone (because lazily parsing data could be expensive and probably a waste on their existing current resources). That's not to say they can't do it, given that they probably have a huge budget, but it's also not a sure thing they can do it effectively for those who are trying to stay hidden.
Steganography is the word in this case. Stenography is different, it means short-hand writing.
You can make things more and more difficult for your adversary (and usually for yourself too) but if they are dedicated enough they can basically outspend you.
Therefore you need to minimize the apparent cost of your actions and their duration. You can afford to be a passing pain in their butt but you can't afford to be the focus of their eye.
I believe one of the theories about the proliferation of the current organization of political entities is that the only organization that can reliably compete with one nation-state is another nation-state.
Meanwhile, detectives scoured video footage from cameras in the area and picked out a white Hyundai Elantra driving past the house three times before stopping on the fourth pass shortly after 4am. The car left 16 minutes later “at a high rate of speed”, according to Payne
Meanwhile, FBI investigators trawled through Kohberger’s cellphone records and discovered that he turned it off shortly before the attack, perhaps thinking it would help him to avoid detection. The phone springs to life again at 4.48am on a road out of Moscow.
The records also showed that Kohberger was in the area near the house at least a dozen times in the months before the attack, usually in the early morning or late evenings. Investigators said they were examining whether he “conducted surveillance on the King Road residents and was in contact with any of the victim’s associates before or after the alleged offense”.
https://www.wired.com/2012/12/calgary-travel-time-informatio...
Yeah, but if there is an exception to that, it'd be the scenario we're talking about.
- tor + cubesOS set up by somebody you deeply trust (person A)
- on a USB bought by a different person (person B)
- with a network card bought by a different person (person C)
- many miles away, wearing generic clothes in a cafe where people go to work
- different hairstyle and facial hair
- mask
- without having a phone (obv)
- navigating there by changing multiple cars with minimal electronics
- ordering the most boring coffee
- persons A, B, C don't know each other. You don't know personally B, C, but a person(s) D, (and E) can vouch for them.
My gut tells me that the more people you involve, the easier it is to trace you because you will be at the intersection of those people's radii.
There's a chance that you'll get caught on camera at Starbucks. But the cameras there, if any, aren't set up to provide full coverage and are rotated every few days.
Don't involve any other people , don't wear a disguise. If you're going to alter your appearance in any way, do it when you meet the seller to pick up the laptop.
added: You might want a burner phone to call the cab. But normally a motel desk will do that if you ask nicely.
If you leave your cell phone at home that would help, but you still risk being tracked by your car or being caught on any number of cameras and identified via facial recognition.
This assumes they are already looking for YOU.
At a certain point, the world is full of so much metadata that you really can't control your own. Want to turn off location services? Make sure you turn off WiFi too, because a list of nearby access points and SSIDs is enough to pinpoint you down to a few meters. Want to spoof your location when using an app with network services permission? You'll need to spoof nearby access points and their transmission power to match them to somewhere in the real world. And you better make sure to do it inside a Faraday cage. Because no matter how careful you are, if someone else is walking by your clever hacking nest, and they do have location services enabled, then their phone will be able to pair their geolocation with your unique access point topology. Oh, and even with the Faraday cage, the fact your phone is seeing access points that no other phone has seen is a unique data point in itself.
Point is, you can be compromised without any action on your own part. Traffic analysis is hard to defeat, but you can mitigate against it by not committing crimes that motivate the government to spend resources on tracking you across disparate systems like mobile networks and traffic cameras. Or if you must commit those crimes, then you'll need to make sure everything you do is in the fattest part of the bell curve for every possible statistical test the government can use to analyze common behaviors.
Before the internet and mobile phone age I can only imagine how much harder crimes like this were to solve.
Not just wifi, bluetooth is used for location tracking as well.
The fatal flaw in the plan:
Barista talking to news after person is arrested by FBI: "As soon as they ordered the brewed coffee with no customizations after standing in line for 10 minutes, I knew something was suspicious. Who comes to Starbucks, stands in line for 10 minutes, and then orders boring coffee?"
the police-justice system is usually broke for commoners. So yeah, if you're not doing a serious offense, they will never catch you. Where I live, you can buy weed. Even if the government says they're motivated to stop it, they don't have the resources to plant police everywhere. If your home was 'visited' by burglars, they would just take fingerprints. They wear gloves, and that's enough to avoid the state actor.
if you're doing a real serious crime, you can kind-ish avoid attention, if you know retention laws and stuff. if the (mostly digital) traces you generated are too old, they would have disappeared or would not be usable in court. if you appeared on mall CCTV months before you did the crime, have been browsing sites over a year before, ... these data should technically have been deleted.- Just don't create new data in the meantime.
In a similar fashion, some white collar criminals host data in their lawyers office. it is so hard to have a warrant for a lawyers office that you can be safe. A law teacher at our engineering college said it was convenient to hang out with a lawyer - just drop your phone in their purse if cops show up.
then, you can avoid some digital communications. Putin and friends are well known for being mostly offline, unlike some ministers at western governments, for example. Send letters, and you will have that perfect forward secrecy.
there has also been some stories about plausible deniability ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability ), especially among rogue corporations and corrupt politicians. ie when you create data, you can do it in a way where it says what it says, but it's not meaningful in court.
don't drag attention on you. cops shows teach you how so many criminals are found out after a traffic stop, when they were speeding or ran a red light. The government can't check everyone, so they check those who stand out.
Lastly, I remember watching a youtuber who got out of prison, and who said that three people could only keep a secret if 2 are dead. it's a bit pessimistic and dark, but maybe don't just involve everyone in your crimes.
I would like to know if series like Breaking Bad are (or were) realistic. I know some criminals learned a lot from movies.
Edit : or just befriend politicians, you would be above any law in most places. Someone in France once stole 2.5 billions $ in one shot from the government. It what became known as the uramin scandal, and nobody was caught. So everything is possible.
Exactly. Which is why, not to start a JFK war, I think the Mafia killed JFK. If it were the CIA, or LBJ, someone would have talked. Anyone who knew what happened got whacked.
And note that Jimmy Hoffa got disappeared, albeit 13 years later.