Do you like online privacy? You may be a terrorist
publicintelligence.net
publicintelligence.net
I...
1) Shield my screen in public places ( I don't want snoopers reading my emails....) 2) I pay cash most of the time (Helps me save money as the change goes into a change jar never to be spent again) 3) I have multiple cell phones. (One for business, one for personal)
4) I use a proxy to shield my IP address 5) I encrypt my computer and files, I send password protected compressed files. 6) I communicate with people I have never met in video games
7) I sometimes keep track of hackers and learn of vulnerable websites and infrastructures
Seriously though I am not keen on the flier. I think terrorism and extremists work best in fragmented societies. If you live in a small village where everyone knows everyone then the oddball or outcast will naturally be viewed with curiosity and suspicion. However, in towns and cities where you sometimes don't know your neighbor.. this is where a suspicious person can thrive.
Fliers like this encourage you not to trust to your neighbor. It screams. "The guy next to you might be a terrorist!" and encourages you to be distrustful. Its not healthy. It helps propagate the climate of fear. You expect messages like this in a police state not in a supposedly free country.
Feeling terroristy this morning.
You're on a website called "Hacker News", for starters. Am I the only one who's had to deal with related idiocy when on a public computer? (Also, using PuTTY with the default black screen can get you kicked out of places for "hacking".)
Has this happened to you or anyone you know?
Back in public school, I had a friend who got banned from using the computers for several months for VNC'ing into his home computer. Because it was "hacking" - no other rationale, no complicating factors.
To use the car analogy: it's like getting arrested for using a remote to unlock your car instead of a physical key. (Or, more accurately, like getting your license taken away for several months. Which may make even less sense.)
A bunch of terminals tailing logs in color looks like hacker scenes in movies to the uninitiated. People have asked me, most impolitely, what the hell I was doing.
1) Like Microsoft Word.
> If you live in a small village where everyone knows everyone then the oddball or outcast will naturally be viewed with curiosity and suspicion.
On the other hand, they're a known oddball which seems to put people at ease most of the time.
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
It probably won't be you. By the time they'd come looking for you, these laws will have been laughed out of the Supreme Court and a few political careers will be dead forever.
It makes me mighty uncomfortable how often we have to fall back on "because the supreme court" (or more generally, "because courts" - there are a lot of lower-level justices doing their jobs admirably, and they don't get nearly enough credit) to convince ourselves that we're not heading for a closed society. Eventually, someone will grab enough political capital to pull an Andrew Jackson and decide to just ignore and possibly arrest them - at which point we're absolutely screwed.
We're at the point now where viable presidential candidates can openly admit that they don't believe the courts are worth obeying. It's time to start worrying.
Also, paying cash in an Internet café doesn't seem like unusual behavior at all. Many people who use them will be students and people traveling who may not want to hand over a credit card in a foreign country.
And yes for Internet cafés. Absurdity.
It's almost entirely small businesses that try to flout their agreements - you'll rarely see any major business try because of the consequences.
And for the American credit card carrying traveler, the next most important phrase would be, "Puce ou piste?"
Cafés in particular really don't like your card "piste" (magnetic stripe) and often gesture bewilderedly with the wireless card terminal as if to indicate there's no conceivable mécanisme for mating with your filthy swipey card. (There is, as they may eventually concede.)
I can be found in a cafe almost more often than not. I...
1) regularly use encryption for all traffic while in a cafe. Would you yell out your credit card in a cafe over the phone? It's easier to encrypt everything than handpick.
2) regularly have multiple phones out on the table. I'm usually doing Android dev.
3) travel up to six kilometers to get my good coffee. Apparently unwillingness to drink McD coffee is a sign of a terrorist?
4) love coffee and drink way too much of it. So if I'm a little twitchy from that third Americano I may be a terrorist?
5) prefer to pay cash to limit my spending so I don't get that fourth Americano.
6) Like to get out. Just because I have Internet at home and I'm using it somewhere else doesn't make me suspicious.
That being said, I have been suspicious of people using Internet at coffee shops before. But usually it's that guy who has parked right in front of the coffee house for the third consecutive day and has his laptop out. (I noticed his car when going to the cafe one day and realized he was just getting porn. The cafe owner and I had a good laugh about it.)
I have also called police about a young man who had made a giant map of downtown and making sniper signs and lines of sight across it. He also really wanted to talk about a recent mass murder. The creepiness and attention seeking was enough to set off internal alarms. The police followed up with me after and were very professional.
The only people I ever terrorised in a coffee house are the Mactards who think it is fine to bittorrent and bring even simple email checking for everyone else to a screaming halt. So far, it is the only useful thing I've ever made in Python.
Whoever wrote this should go back to both English class (grammar!) and circular logic class (I should consider someone 'suspicious' because they have 'suspicious behaviour'?)
Anyway, that's just as bad: it teaches you to be paranoid.
What taught me to be paranoid weren't retarded fliers like these. That honor goes to the people who caused me to pick up the practices described on this flier in the first place - organizations like the FBI, government increasingly evolving towards police states a and, last but not least, corporations like Google or Facebook, whose practices can at best be described as amoral.
Is there any official download to this file on the FBI's website?
It is important to remember that just
because someone’s speech, actions,
beliefs, appearance, or way of life is
different, it does not mean that he or
she is suspicious. Instead, focus on
behavior and activities that are unusual
or out of place for the situation and that
appear to be suspicious.
The activities outlined on this handout
are by no means all-inclusive but have
been compiled from a review of terrorist
events over several years. Some of the
activities, taken individually, could be
innocent and must be examined by law
enforcement professionals in a larger
context to determine whether there is a
basis to investigate.
It looks like they acknowledge the same individual complaints as noted in the comments here but I think they miss the overall point that people are innocent until proven guilty. It sounds like they are saying only law enforcement professionals are qualified to determine whether someone displaying some of these behaviors is really innocent.
I'm not saying someone needs to have charges pressed against before being investigated. Instead, I'm saying this is a dramatic shift to our social obligations and interactions: the person next to you is now no longer innocent by default, he is a potential terrorist and it is your responsibility to monitor his activities and if they show any unusual behavior to bring in the police/feds.
Note "some of the activities could be innocent" ... really? ... "and must be examined by law enforcement" ... ok then ... "to determine whether there is a basis to investigate".
Sure smells like an end run on "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause..."
Here the "could be innocent" implies default of not being innocent, and the law enforcement gets involved before determination of basis to investigate.
It's "If you've got nothing to hide, why are you hiding it?" in flyer form.
I mean, really - what kind of insanity is being entertained in the US at the moment?
Seriously, if more people where actively protecting their privacy, it would no longer be suspicious to encrypt one's email. But some people need to do it first.
I suspect that if you deliberately acted suspicious enough to make them lose time, you'd lose a not insignificant amount of time as well.
And this is the sort of thinking that the "suspicion detection" powers-that-be quite possibly want to encourage - where personal convenience trumps a [imho, perfectly natural] desire for privacy.
This is an excellent point! At least open source OS systems should make encryption the standard option. But even Ubuntu seems unable to pull this off and more or less in stagnation on this - despite EFF's efforts ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/help-bring-disk-encryp... ).
Suggestions: - saves files on a local storage system and not on a cloud service. - is not caring a smart phone - owns a variety of "wires" to connect different devices
Do cross words constitute a "coded work sheet"? That old lady really looks intent on figuring it out.
And those fourth graders keep sending suspicious messages on that PC game! Like "PWND" and "teafrag"...
Well, I'm fucked, but it could be worse:
http://www.periscopepost.com/2012/01/britons-denied-entry-to...
This security and copyright madness reminds me of middle ages witch hunts, and fighting heretic. Most people didn't cared about witches, nor heretics, as long as nobody said them they should.
Governments and religions created that paranoia, and then it just lived on.
I like this http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/261344/Henrician-A... solution to the problem of government instilled paranoia.
It was possible in 1573 to demand of king, that he would keep the promises, he made before people elected him. People just made him sign a treaty, that if he started religious persecution, he will not be a king anymore accordingto law.
Why now, in the age of democracy, we can't hold our representatives responsible, and can't demand that they will keep their promises? I would gladly vote for someone, that signed such documents before elections, that says he won't be fighting terrorists by restricting freedom. But in our system such contracts are void, if I understand correctly.
Or maybe you're only supposed to care about encryption and privacy when you work for the government?
Using Chrome on my laptop, I get a warning that there are too many redirects.
The same reason I have to take my shoes off at the airport: because one asshole tried to hide plastic explosives in his over a decade ago.
This is just ridiculous.
The one interesting thing to come out of this sheet is that apparently terrorists are heavy stego users.
Most of these terrorist indicators seems like common sense to me. Paranoia over reason once again?
Now, I agree that I would still want my privacy in an Internet cafe, as well as paying cash, and using multiple phones. But some of the other stuff doesn't make much sense in an Internet cafe.
You might be a terrorist if...
While I agree that the main post is ridiculous, I'm not sure that grammatical issues are the real reason why. We've long since accepted calling someone a guerilla who engages in guerilla warfare; why should calling some a terrorist who engages in terrorism be any less valid? (Or perhaps the term 'guerilla' isn't valid either?)
Or perhaps the point you're making is a more subtle one, that being a terrorist is not a label that is permanently affixed: i.e., that it's reasonable to say to someone "you are a terrorist" precisely to mean "you are engaging in terrorism at this moment", just as you might say "you are a flanker" (or whatever) precisely to mean "you are on the right flank at this moment"?
What makes the planes into the world trade center more evil than the hundreds of thousands of bombs used to blow up suspected enemy hideouts in iraq, Iran and Afghanistan?
(Of course, these differences mean nothing to those who were wrongly killed.)
Isn't the US the only country to have ever used nuclear warfare? Therefore willingly and knowingly killing countless innocent civilians?
This is why I find the phrase 'terrorist government' to be absurd.
What makes targeting civilians more evil than targeting militants?
We've charged as terrorists people who have attacked soldiers stationed in a foreign invader's military base (http://www.salon.com/2011/12/10/the_real_definition_of_terro... and http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000860.html for examples). Those are purely military targets attacked in wartime...
At the same time, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/27/breivik-not-terr...
In November 2004, a United Nations Secretary General report described terrorism as any act "intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act"
Clearly, a terrorist is one who commits, or seeks to commit, an act of terrorism.
Seriously though did they lower the requirements to become a government employee even further? Who comes up with the stuff? I would laugh but it's actually kind of disturbing that these are the people who we rely on to prevent actual "Terrorists" from doing "Evil".
Why are both democracies and non-democracies so damn afraid of having choosy and thinking citizens? What are the World governments hiding?!