NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry
wired.com
wired.com
As for the US part of this, yes, my country the UK, is up to its neck in it, but, the part that is driving me away from the internet is the fact that Americans think their laws apply to non-Americans, and if necessary, Americans will force those laws on people who had no vote in it what so ever. Government will be leaned on and pressured to hand their people over to a US legal system I have zero faith in, and a penal system that borders a barbaric reinvention of slavery. If that fails, the US will "render" people, or as the rest of us call it, kidnap. To get my encryption keys, as a foreigner I genuinely fear American torture.
Now, I suspect the likes of China also do or aspire to spy on us all in the same way, but I don't feel the same risk of state kidnap, their laws, legals system, etc.
The spying is one thing, to a point I can live with that and alter behavior to compensate, but the idea I could break laws I don't agree with and have no influence over, while getting no support from my government, or be kidnapped, is frankly too much to accept. Even in typing this post I am self censoring.
As such, the internet has now become something I'm now very wary of. I almost feel like the using the internet is the same as traveling to the US, which is something I would never ever do. Its simply not worth the risk to my liberty and freedom.
Sad, very sad.
But in no way do I find acceptable that just because I'm using an American service, the US has access at will to all my data. I think it's common sense that there should be international treaties that state that "if you want my citizen's data, then you have to ask me first (the local government)".
Stuff like that is what (maybe) will restore some trust in US companies in the future, but it's only one small step of the many steps needed to be taken to ensure the protection of both Americans and foreigners' privacy.
The way I see it, foreigners with data on American corporations' servers should be more protected than American citizens, not less, because I'm not their damn citizen, so they have no business scooping up all my data when they want to! At least that's how they should approach this if they still care about the "economy" and their corporations' welfare.
EU and UN also need to speak up more and say that this whole NSA spying thing is infringing on everyone's human rights for privacy. I feel this argument is being used very little right now, because I do think having private communications goes well beyond just one country's Constitution.
Edit: perhaps research and training in security and seeing how I can contribute on that front is the first step back towards being proud of my work...?
Well. The open-source tools might be as easy as the professional tools to taint.
Someone training for the CCNA/P-Security or any other certifications is still using the same corrupted conduits :(
William Gibson said this about virtual lights (a novel which deals with bike messengers and data): "In the future, information'll be more secure when written on paper and transported by physical human hands than on the wired."
Which reminds me of this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11325452
And there is work to do : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
I think this anti-USA kick is misplaced anger about your own governments being happily in cahoots. Do you think US strong-armed UK into house arresting Assange or interrogating Miranda? The UK/USA liaisons are probably high-fiving each other over these things.
Germany apparently was using XKEYSCORE, but oh my where could that data have come from? The information fairy came and put it under their pillow!
Come on. Your governments are just as bad or worse and that's why these revelations are so troubling for you.
But I digress.
The president and the NSA are basically saying, don't worry, we're not running a dragnet data mining operation that covers everything and everyone and violates your most basic privacy rights, unless you happen not to be a US person.
We seem to be at a rather dangerous stage within that process of globalization if a profound sense of injustice and inequality spreads beyond a small group of radicalized fanatics right into the mainstream of many societies around the world.
There are many benefits to having some cultural commons, a language that everyone knows, some common ideas about what's right and wrong. I'd hate to see the world slide into the kind of void that followed the decline of the Roman Empire, or worse some kind of global apartheid state.
All the U.S. influence means is that you now have to check CNN.com as well as the Daily Mail. If CNN has weeks of coverage of new anti-tomato laws, move your pro-tomato website to a non-American server. For the most part, the CIA is just a bunch of fashion-conscious hipsters with really cool spy shit. Avoid whatever is unfashionable and you're safe.
If you really want to worry about government surveillance, worry about one of your friends drinking an epic amount of cider and deciding to use your bank card on a kiddie porn website as a lark. The NSA's influence is nothing compare to what your local thoughtcrime enforcers do.
I feel like a lot of businesses and VC funds have intentionally tried to push towards collecting as much user data and communications as possible, knowing how valuable it will be not only for advertising and genuine business, but also for national and international security, a world of secret dollars and prop-ups for important data stations.
Maybe that's me pushing too much complicity where none exists, but I honestly get the feeling that there must have been enough people with experience of communications interception history in S.V. (IT, telecoms, communications have existed for a long time before Internet startups, and will have been doing similar things during the cold war) to know that this was going to be a big trend. They would have been able to least slightly influence the recent trends towards 'openness' and 'social sharing', which neatly leverage narcissism, human psychology, and network effects to draw people in (and promote consumerism as a side benefit).
The inward-looking nature of the U.S. is definitely a concern as well - there's still certainly a huge amount of naivety about the rest of the world and the way things work elsewhere, even in cultured circles where people travel -- ultimately the news and media still set a lot of opinions. There is an awareness that many things operate differently in other countries, but very often only a miniscule understanding of different cultures (socialized healthcare being a long-running example).
So yes, it is very annoying that so much data travels over U.S. links, and that there is so much focus on how everything is OK, because the U.S. works hard to avoid spying on it's own citizens -- when that is just a tiny proportion of the world population, which is broadly innocent. At near enough a billion users, a huge proportion of Facebook users have no protection from this at all - and so any upcoming politicians in other countries are completely open to access, presumably.
I would disagree slightly on the point regarding other countries - I honestly think that on the whole, the U.S. does still respect free speech and has a bit of an edge on other countries in terms of liberties, but the trends are very worrying, and what will be important is how it reacts as a country to legitimate attempts to understand, curtail, and avoid all this surveillance.
All this said, I'm an eternal optimist - I think we have the tools to build very good secure communications, and I think we can do it with distributed systems. We can now transfer value without banks using bitcoin, route traffic very ambiguously and easily using Tor, encrypt and send messages anonymously using bitmessage/PGP/etc. It is possible to get off Gmail and Facebook, we just need to make it easier to do so, and provide the functionality that everyone expects in a more distributed setting.
There's a lot of work to make it all easy to use safely (even for hackers, but then for everyone), and then a lot more work to get it adopted widely, but I think there will be a huge appetite for it now, and I think it can be done. The more revelations that appear and the more that the realities of centralization and surveillance become part of the public understanding, the easier it'll be to persuade people to use secure services -- and crucially, the better people will be able to critique the vulnerabilities of them.
Money and marketing are a huge force multiplier for centralized services (especially if they have state-level support), but ultimately as long as the Internet is there and allows us to communicate, eventually we'll figure this stuff out and build the tools we need.
All politicians draw from the same pool of bureaucrats and advisors. They all went to the same schools, mostly in the Northeast United States. Every member of the President's board of economic advisors has been from a school in Cambridge, MA since the turn of the millennium.
Only 2,000 jobs are elected or politically appointed out of a federal bureaucracy numbering over 2.5 million people. We could give the Brits a vote in American elections and it simply wouldn't make any difference. Democracy has been successfully tamed by politicians.
The way to repent is by migrating to securable[0] technologies where possible, and deprecating insecure ones by treating them as prima facie compromised. Yes, this means giving up the unthinking conveniences you've probably become accustomed to. For instance, if you care about the security of "your data", you simply cannot have unfettered access on a contemporary mobile phone. For that capability to be created, we have to stop pretending that it already exists. Otherwise, the demand shifts towards MHz+eyecandy bumps instead of for phones that create security for their users.
[0] The primary thing for a secure technology is not to be assuredly secure, but for it to have a design goals that are compatible with security. For instance, OpenSSH may still have gaping holes in it. But when these are discovered, they are considered unambiguous bugs and they're patched to be closer to the platonic. A system that relies on storing plaintext or equivalents on someone else's server can never be patched to fix this.
Seriously, you're so terrified of traveling to the US? Give me a break man, the UK government has done plenty of scary things and have been complicit and willful participants in the sort of surveillance the NSA is conducting. Are you hiding under your bed at night then, because if you're scared just to travel in the US I would feel you should be just as terrified living in your own country.
I'm going to be in the UK in a few weeks, maybe I should be concerned I'll be detained for 9 hours without access to a lawyer and my laptop, phone, and other electronics confiscated for no reason other then some nebulous pretense that I could be associated with terrorists?
While I'm seriously concerned about the what the NSA is doing some of the language I've seen here borders a bit on the ridiculous. I don't think anyone should legitimately terrified to the point of not wanting to travel in any of these places quite yet, as opposed to lets say Eygpt, where there are more real dangers and a seriously corrupt government and police state. A bit more on the rational side figuring out which encryption technologies the NSA has compromised (http://bit.ly/17botWf) and not using them might be a more valuable use of your time.
I plan on spending the next few months moving most of my accounts back to self-hosted, or at least hosted nationally.
Mihail Bakunin
This is overblown out of proportions, anyone that ever had any contact with secret services knows, the only rules they follow is their own, regardless of the country.
Basically, I've always accepted that whatever I do online is public anyway. That doesn't mean I endorse that, and I'd rather give my money to local companies than endorse the US at this time.
But either way surveillance is either good or it's bad, I've never understood the reasoning of people who say that it's OK for their own state to do surveillance as they're "probably inept" anyways.
Would you be OK with NSA surveillance if the NSA were inept? No, you wouldn't, so apply the same standard to your own nation as you do to the USA.
The very principle is wrong, but if we assume everyone is surveilling us (which is what is being discussed as people make excuses for the US government doing it), then you'd want to be surveilled by the ones who are the least likely to actually hurt you.
It's obvious no one is thinking their own government will never try to break laws just because they're national, but the extent to which they'll do it is far, far less than the US government. For the very practical reasons of political capital, budget, technological and intellectual capabilities.
I am old enough to have gotten the last bits of it, as we learned to move to democracy, so I would call our secret services anything but inept.
People-focused forces (such as the police or an army) don't have the same issue.
Nor do technologies that are relatively cheap, such as the kind of computer hardware that would help a state surveil its own networks.
If anything, America is slipping compared to the rest of the world with regard to the quality of their computer programmers and other computer-focused developers. Even countries like Estonia could certainly find someone to help them develop competent surveillance if necessary.
The only limitation is that they'd probably not be able to attack the underpinnings of cryptology the way the NSA probably can, but we as computer professionals already know that usually the crypto is not the problem, it's the people or the implementation that is, and both of those are within reach of the Estonia state, if they really wish.
Remember we're not talking about the people foisting this on themselves, we're talking about the government taking on that power.
Although the reasoning you mention is a better way to express one of the points I was trying to make.
The US certainly holds less power over foreigners, but the CIA's job is to blur the distinction between citizens and foreigners, and the CIA operates with essentially no oversight or restrictions aside from its budget.
We're all dealing with 'unknown unknowns', that which we don't know we don't know because it's so secretive. If it were a 'known unknown' (such as "What is water made of?"), we could at least know where to go to find out such information (and actually find it out).
This is a case of known unknowns - you don't know if any given piece of digital information about you has been collected and investigated, but an easy way is to simply assume that it all has. Same with encryption backdoors - we know they're possible, we just don't know where they exist. What's more, we even have examples of these kind of things existing from things like the Great Firewall.
Unknown unknowns would be (for example) a sufficiently general P = NP proof rendering crypto as it exists today obsolete, efficient large qubit quantum computing clusters running Shor's algorithm, or mind-reading at a distance apparatus, or genuine telepathy, or anything that's completely off the charts.
Assume all the certificate authorities based in the US are compromised, all the cryptography implementations from the US are backdoored, and all the communications transiting in the US in any form are available to search by whomever you least want to see them.
For example, have they recorded all IP traffic ever? It's possible, but absolutely overwhelmingly unlikely. But all IP traffic originating from $small_anti-US_country_x in the last year? That's a whole lot more plausible, and thus probably worthwhile to defend against.
Also, does that mean non-US CAs are trustworthy? Are non-US comms also subject to tapping, modernday Ivy Bells[1] style?
Also, you have no real idea of exactly if/how they're analysing their captured data in order to extract "threat metrics" or whatever. Posting in a reddit thread about kittens would seem utterly innocuous to virtually everyone; but suppose their steganography detection throws a false positive on your image and by random coincidence they also have hits from some IP once used by a 'terror organisation' in the same thread.
Should threats of that nature be considered, purely because they're possible? How do you clear your name? Why won't you give up the password to the bomb plans claimed to be embedded in your image file? Is it because you're protecting other commie mutants[2]?
How much paranoia is reasonable?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_%28role-playing_game%...
Just think about the use of microsoft os/programs in the government and how much they could lose.
Still, I'd rather my money went to local interests, and my data stayed within a sphere I have some control of.
Yeah, that has an appeal all its own completely independent of what you feel about spying in general.
The USA certainly does the same in reverse, there's always a big push for buying things "Made in the USA" so it's fair to push for it the other way. :)
If you want to visualize this, think of the world's navies. Who else but the US navy can even operate globally? Who has naval aviation? You might come to think there is a qualitative difference in the ability to do spying.
Imagine the same kind of position in the physical world. A multinational storage company would be forced by the USG to open up a client's storage locker somewhere in Europe, copy all the documents in it and send them to the US.
If nothing else this is a very serious threat to the US as the global provider of tech services.
MI5/6 doesn't go 'oh poppycock, they've hopped on the chunnel and fled to France.' They talk to the French agencies or if it's too secret, they go and do it them self. Mossad doesn't give a damn where in the world you are.
'Everyone, everywhere, our laws only exist in our country' is, and has been for a long time, standard operating procedure for these agencies in every country for basically their entire existence.
I didn't change the topic at all. I can't quote the relevant laws in this case but as far as I know the law in Europe is that you need a warrant to get the information and that requirement doesn't disappear if the owner of the information is a foreigner.
That's what's truly amazing in the USG's position. I agree that everyone tries to spy on information on the wire, but the idea that you can demand any information at rest from any company as long as the owner of the information is a foreigner is an amazing position to hold.
There are two other reasons to move your data to your own jurisdiction from US services. 1) the US has the most well funded military so your local spooks probably have less capabilities 2) if one of your local spooks spies on you at least you're in the same jurisdiction and have a small amount of agency (the courts, the vote).
It's frustrating. I don't believe the US should spy on foreign citizens. But in order to present a bulletproof argument, I have to focus on "American Citizens".
The main reason for this is because spying on American citizens is actually illegal. If I let the concept of "foreigners" into the discussion, I lose the constitutional, legal, and rhetorical footing that is already pretty tenuous.
Can anyone recommend a Linode alternative not US based?
But ensure you choose their French data center and not the one they now have in Baltimore...
No affiliation other than being a Gandi customer for six years.
Speaking as an American, if they do this to US tech companies, imagine what they do non-US companies.
Use a 0-day remote exploit to get a login, exfiltrate data.
Use a known, unpatched exploit to do same.
Use 0-day/known local exploit with sophisticated spear-phish trojan to do same.
Use leverage over domestic software suppliers to ship a customised exploitable (or directly backdoored) update to target company. Ditto domestic hardware manufacturers.
Black-bag (or diplomatic quid pro quo) tap of external or internal comm links, to get either raw traffic or encrypted. If the latter, apply other complementary techniques to obtain keys.
Infiltrate company with agent who can deploy local exploit via physical access, or who can bug/exploit workstations of users to obtain privileged access to server.
Bully/dupe the German government into raiding & seizing the server as part of an international terror/crime investigation. Acquire disk image from seized machines via direct or complementary techniques.
Purchase/acquire German company via a domestic front company. Demand IT infrastructure be 'harmonised' with acquirer and moved to US.
...and many, many more. The only reason not to do most of these things is because the cost/benefit analysis doesn't make it worthwhile to do universally without any prior suspicion.
But just remember: everyone is spying.
We're all in this together, and running from one nationality to another will only change the name and face of who is watching you.
However, there is a thing called economic espionage. Depending on what you're doing, having your own government spy on you can be a very different thing from having a foreign government spy on you.
And no, I don't believe for a second the NSA isn't involved in economic espionage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/820758.stm
Gut feeling? Not all countries have can afford an expensive program like NSA.
This is also interesting, something someone posted on HN from Steve Gibson back in 2006:
https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-022.htm
At this point I would really start with the presumption that at least Windows and Intel's chips (possibly others, too) have backdoors in them, and that the chances of that happening at this point is higher than not happening.
I'd also assume most routers have at least dormant backdoors in them. Jacob Appelbaum has been saying for years that it's easier for manufacturers to just build-in the backdoors in all routers that they're making, because so many countries demand them, and they just keep them "disabled" in the countries that don't ask for them. It might be a good idea to start installing OpenWRT firmware on your routers.
Of course, it was still exploitable.
Services are forever tainted. And services are the most interesting part of the puzzle.
Open source software that runs on the client is nice, but frankly I'm not as concerned about the NSA having access to my desktop. Logging, parsing, and analyzing client data of this sort opportunistically probably doesn't scale. And it's easier for me to set up a system in my house where I can audit all incoming and outgoing traffic (not that I'm going to do it, but I'm confident that I could). The one exception to this is encryption software... more on this later.
But it's hosted services where a lot of my interesting data lives, is structured in a way that makes opportunistic scanning much easier, and there is no way for me to audit it.
There's no way for me to know that GMail's servers don't have a backdoor. Or likewise for Dropbox or Facebook or Citi or my Amazon, etc...
This means I have to encrypt everything stored on any service (which is why my encryption software does need to be backdoor free). But most services store data about me where I don't control if its encrypted or not (it's not easy to encrypt voice calls from the end user perspective).
The end result is I already have fatigue, and I haven't even done any work yet!
I think most people are going to rely on an old story:
"Two guys are walking through the woods when they run across a hungry bear. At this point one of the men quickly ties his shoes. The other man says, 'Why are you tying your shoes -- you can't outrun this bear!' To which the other man says, 'I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.'"
Internet services are too valuable to not use. But it will be too much work for 99.9% of the population to preserve their privacy. The lack of privacy from the NSA will become the new normal. I have trouble seeing it playing out in any other way.
I see it as a plus. But I've been against the very concept of such services in the first place. I think most centralization is unnecessary, that the reason it is so common today is because it is a straight-forward business plan for a company to insert itself as an intermediary between all of the users and thus extract money (and therefore efficiency) from their interactions.
Facebook's the ultimate example. Their popularity is a result of people needing a place to easily host and share their photos. But the cheaper storage and bandwidth get, the less utility Facebook provides compared to a distributed system. I think we are at a point today where high-end phones could host all the content that the majority of people want to share. Combine that with a little smart caching between "friends" so that their phones on wifi can pick up the slack when the original host is cell-only and throw in a distributed hash table for finding new "friends" and the value that facebook provides users by centralization drops precipitously.
If these NSA revelations help kickstart a new (but actually old) paradigm where each internet user is essentially self-hosting, then I believe that will be a great boon in the long run.
I see the current configuration of Internet services--what I call the "plain cloud"--to be a frustrating diversion, and one that passively or actives suppresses the "personal" aspect of applications. As Amadou points out, the plain cloud is facile because businesses can easily be intermediaries. Oh, it's so difficult to connect an always-on, secure, and self-controlled host to the Internet to share your photos with family and friends? Don't worry! We'll handle that for you. Oh and look, we also get all of your photos and data. But don't you worry, we're good people. Trust us.
For years, it has irked me that so many have voluntarily forfeited control of their data and applications out of convenience when alternative models that would provide convenience without sacrificing control are fairly easy to conceive. With equal R&D effort as the plain cloud has seen, these alternatives could be realized.
I was angry when Google made their terms of service for Google Fiber disallow home servers. I imagine Amadou was as well. (I don't have Google Fiber, but I want it or something similar with reasonable TOS.) Preventing home servers is just perpetuating the current narrow vision of centralized hosting, and that notion is overdue for disruption. Obviously that's favorable to Google, but I don't really care about what's good for Google.
Data centers in general should fear symmetric gigabit+ to the home. I know that without a doubt if I had fiber to my home, I would pull my servers out of my data center immediately and put a rack in my garage.
I want self-hosting demystified and mainstreamed. As the pendulum swings back to self-control, anyone who is working to make "self-hosting" synonymous with today's popular verb, "sharing" is posed to earn my business. The model should be embraced by open source advocates. I even suggest Microsoft should leverage the building momentum and be the first industry titan to champion disintermediating the plain cloud [2].
[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao [2] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft
The question is what's going to happen when the vendors are identified ? - I can't imagine it'll be good for their customer base or their share-price.
Imagine you're a bank using vendor X's backdoored SSL acceleration. Say you're involved in a lawsuit where a customer claims they didn't authorise a transaction, now the customer can point to the fact that you're knowingly using hardware which has backdoor which would have allowed a third party to silently steal the users credentials.
This is a huge deal.
I even see things like Facebook and Twitter taking hits with competitive services hosted in "more secure countries" popping up.
At this point I feel Chinese based services is safer, and that is saying a lot.
Now that the cat's out of the bag I'm sure they will refocus their efforts on shoring up the defence of every government communications network.
I'd say it's true for everything that's not open-source and doesn't allow for proper public key encryption. (Assuming that public key encryption is still holding up.)
For example, now I worry the security model of WebRTC has been compromised by NSA, because it has the potential to offer very secure P2P conversations to the masses (at least 1 billion users - and that's before IE even adopts it in IE12, hopefully).
Whatever channel you use might be compromised, if you cannot control both ends.
Phones don't record conversations in the pocket by default yet, but it's not inconceivable when computing efficiency improves that recording is always on, and keyword data is saved by default. Handy if it can creates calendar markings from verbal agreements...
And with Glass, video too.
So meeting in person is getting less secure as well.
Glass adds the perversion that you don't have your say regarding surveillance of society, anymore. Your "friends" will do it for you.
Only solution: Get vocal whenever you see somebody wearing Glass.
Even when they don't, it's probably easy enough to disconnect the battery on your own.
If I owned any server hardware, chances are it would be in a rack in a datacenter. What's to say somebody hasn't walked in, flipped a badge and taken my SSL private keys? In fact, that's quite probable.
Certificate Authorities are almost certainly compromised. Why bother with one at a time when you can just force the vendor to hand the keys to the castle over? Sign your own certs, MITM anyone you want.
I'd certainly agree that open source offers the potential for independent verification of its nature, how many of these applications and libraries have been examined in detail by those who have the deep expertise to spot a subtle flaw and how many are just taken at face value?
The whole thing is frankly a cluster frak.
There are folks that made their fortunes and earn their livelihoods on the net. These folks are going to defend what we built to their dying day. There are governments and corporations, which believe they absolutely must have whatever data they view as honorable (and this definition is surprisingly flexible) in order to continue to privide their services.
Then there's the general public, including most reporters, who suspects something is amiss but keeps hearing all kinds of contradictory opinions, including calling out the folks who warned about these as tinfoil hat types.
Yeah sure, there's lots of noise and confusion, but doubt? I don't think so.
Note: I'm not trying to weave a conspiracy theory here. My only point about existing players is that they're too emotionally wrapped up in things that took many years of hard work to see the situation objectively
This looming threat will only get worse as the government shifts its focus from capturing data to utilizing it at scale.
Although it wouldn't solve all of the NSA techniques (social engineering, acquiring pre-encrypted data) it would certainly be harder to track down (i.e. steal, crack, coerce, subpoena, etc) tens of millions of keys rather than tens of thousands.