COMSEC: Beyond Encryption [pdf]
grugq.github.io
grugq.github.io
Also like the mention of cover. Every action you do should have some explanation. Why were you here? Why were you doing that? Why were you taking to them? How will these questions be posed and answered to random LEOs, lawyers, judges, etc.?
People seem to focus on some flashy part, like using Tor, but forget overall basics.
Like that kid nailed for making bomb threats. He had no cover story for why he was on Tor. He didn't shut up, and cracked. All be had to do was get embarrassed and say he was looking for porn, or looking at drug prices, and he'd have been fine.
Edit: It might be good for the cover to be slightly illegal, or damaging. Investigator grills someone, finally gets them to confess, and it's cause they were buying weed, or having an affair with illegal prostitues or hiding something from their family. Then the all the covert actions and software and nervousness make sense. (And the investigator will move on cause a simple possession charge isn't worth their time.) Just make sure the story checks out.
At other places, like border crossings, you might not have the ability to refuse to say anything (especially as a non citizen). Being able to have a good cover may be the difference in being let go after a cursory look versus being detained for in depth examination.
And I really cannot imagine counter terrorism agents bothering to actually go forward charging that kid with attempting to buy pot or something. After all, if they suspect him off terrorism, that alone should be enough to get a search warrant and take his computers.
This law professor explains why you should never talk to police, even if innocent http://youtu.be/6wXkI4t7nuc
How is it OK that your ISP sees you connecting to Tor, but dangerous if your VPN provider does? Or is this about some other issue?
Up until now, I'd thought of distributions like TAILS as offering excellent defaults, while providing good compartmentalization. I remember reading that Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Bruce Schneier all made use of TAILS when reading leaked NSA documents.
> What a global, passive adversary (one who can observe all Internet traffic) can achieve:
> A GPA can learn who is using Pond and where their home servers are located.
It's probably a great piece of software, but how exactly does it fit into the theme of cover over concealment? At its current level of popularity, simply using Pond, without a proxy at least, paints a giant target on you in the eyes of such an adversary. GPG and Tor, for all their faults, do not have this property.
NB Just remember that lying to the FBI is in itself a criminal offence :-( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
See http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Kiwicon_2014_expulsion
IMO it was justified, but guess you had to be there.
Alsp, many speakers are working on their slides and talk minutes before going on. These talks get finished notoriously late
[0] I mean they didn't point to a trans person in the room and say, "You're sticking out!"
"Sticking out like a white guy in a Mayan village" would probably have been non notable so I don't follow how it's offensive by switching the subjects.
"It's not compassionate to remind transgender people that they're a minority that often has trouble "passing" and face extreme violence bc of that...if you were a trans woman in the audience who'd been beat up for not being able to pass as cis, how would it make you feel to have that treated like a joke"
Seems reasonable. I retract my previous comment.
See, fuck this. We are all fucked if style begins to trump substance in infosec, like it has in most everything else. Fucking marketing turds. The Grugq is dropping pearls before swine.