Booman Tribune ~ A Progressive Community

Open Thread

by BooMan
Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 01:11:07 AM EST

The government can read your email and tap your phone now. So, make sure to say hello whenever you use electronic communications devices.

Here's a picture of Kid Oakland and BooMan sharing a moment.

Open Thread | 37 comments (37 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

I already am (none / 0)

My default email account has a header (not visible without a bit of inspection) that reads: "Hello to my friends and fans in domestic surveillance." Have done for some time.

I'm wondering if I shouldn't start encrypting my mails with GPG (an open-source trapdoor encryption scheme) just to annoy anyone who might be trying to read them.

I for one welcome our new Twitter overlords. @Omir55

by Omir the Storyteller (omir.the.storyteller -CAT- gmail -DOG- com) on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 01:27:08 AM EST

Re: I already am (none / 0)

Don't waste your time. When the NSA stopped pressuring Congress to suppress public-key cryptography, it can only be because they found a way to crack it easily.

Ironically, the best way to thwart government surveillance these days is probably communicating in manuscript on paper. The intelligence agencies are apparently more than capable of automatically sifting through electronic communications, but the humble letter still requires some schmuck to open envelopes and then key the contents if they prove interesting. Not cost effective at all.

---Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?

by eodell (eodell at naqada dot org) on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 01:38:34 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I already am (none / 0)

Don't be so sure. I'm afraid I don't share your pessimism about the security of trapdoor encryption, especially since the complexity of cracking the message gets higher as the number of bits used to encode it increases.

True, you can brute force a public-key encrypted message, especially at a fairly low key length. It takes a lot of time and computer power, and keep in mind that the NSA aren't supermen and there are limits to what even the equipment available to the NSA can accomplish. Plus, if the NSA is busy cracking a message I sent to you, that's resources that they can't devote to cracking a message somewhere else.

Rather than being able to quickly crack public-key encryption, I suspect they figured out that using pattern analysis of who's sending what, from where, and to whom (among other techniques, I'm sure) is more effective than trying to crack messages one at a time until things really get urgent.

I for one welcome our new Twitter overlords. @Omir55

by Omir the Storyteller (omir.the.storyteller -CAT- gmail -DOG- com) on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 02:53:28 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I already am (none / 0)

What concerns me isn't that they have the computing power to perform a brute-force attack, it's that they may well have found a weakness in the RSA algorithm that eliminates the need for brute force. The NSA employs a substantial proportion of the country's mathematicians, and it would not surprise me if they have found a way to perform large number factorization in polynomial time.

---Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?

by eodell (eodell at naqada dot org) on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 11:18:32 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I already am (none / 0)

I'll admit that it's possible, but I don't think it's likely. They employ a lot of good minds, but not all, and with the encryption to PGP and GPG being publicly available and well known, it wouldn't surprise me if some of the better minds in the crypto community aren't actively attacking the problem as well.

Still, one's tinfoil hat can't be on too tight these days. Theories I would have dismissed a few years ago as wild speculative fantasy are suddenly sounding more and more reasonable with every passing day.

I for one welcome our new Twitter overlords. @Omir55

by Omir the Storyteller (omir.the.storyteller -CAT- gmail -DOG- com) on Thu Aug 9th, 2007 at 12:42:43 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I already am (none / 0)

Has Georgie's gang also given itself the right to open first-class mail? I still haven't heard anything about this. In fact we're living in czarist Russia.

by Quentin on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 07:27:54 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I already am (none / 0)

The problem is that we don't know what Georgie has given himself the power to do. The details remain classified.

---Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?

by eodell (eodell at naqada dot org) on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 11:11:57 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I already am (none / 0)

Not a lot of detail required when the starting point is "I am on a mission from The One True God and He tells me what to do."

We are all captives of the pictures in our heads -- our belief that the world which we have experienced is the world that really exists. -- Walter Lippman

by stormkite on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 12:57:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I already am (none / 0)

No kidding, I'd say they have given themselves permission to do any damn thing they want to..and then some. They have operated from day one believing the rules don't apply to them...rules, we don't need no stinkin rules.

'Poverty is the worst form of violence'--Gandhi

by chocolate ink on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 05:44:47 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Open Thread (none / 1)

This has been my email sig for over a year now. I think it was courtesy of the Bush Impeachment Coalition peeps.

NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President.

Latino Político | "We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit." - Octavio Paz

by Man Eegee (man.eegee at gmail dot com) on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 01:50:48 AM EST

Re: Open Thread (4.00 / 2)

I easily deciphered the notice you have. I just took the 20th letter from the end, & put it with the 15th letter from the end, to spell FU.
Now my emails will all have the same message as yours. Let them figure it out.
Hey, what`s up Manny. That`s a nice notice.

The difference between theists and atheists is that the atheists don't set the theists on fire for refusing to agree with them.

by KNUCKLEHEAD on Wed Aug 8th, 2007 at 04:28:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]