That makes me glad I work for the Anonymizer. I'm not claiming the Anonymizer technology can defeat NSA, but shoot, it's a start. Sheesh. I hope they stop tapping my line and reading my e-mail for keywords like "nuke child pornography washington hoover martin luther king jr. terrorism plutonium depleted uranium fudge noodle target vector". I read William Crowell's declarations to the House National Security Committee over the summer regarding restrictions on cryptography. He makes a little sense but there are some major problems in his testimonial. It's not like Freeh's, much better, of course; Freeh can't even use the shift key and typed everything in upper-case, like he was shouting at the House. Crowell's testimony, for example, says that it would take so many millions of years or whatever to crack a 128 bit code with "256 desktop PC's" like some geek at U.C. Berkeley -- but NSA has a chip foundry and the biggest supercomputer budget of any organization! Crowell makes many recommendations for a public key infrastructure so encryption can be "widely deployed to the public" for the protection of citizen data, but then brushes by the key recovery issue and provides no justification why the government should even be involved in the first place. Anonymizer could defeat the problem with Internet Explorer, provided IE doesn't insist on exchanging version information with Redmond. Even so, we'll have Anonymizer Dialup soon in several major U.S. cities. Then, if most of your desktop is locked with F-Secure Desktop from datafellows.com, it doesn't matter if they can get into your computer because they won't know who you are (unless they have sticky fingers in our dialup provider and trace your phone line) and won't be able to access encrypted files. Any terrorist trading suitcase nukes will use real encryption and some sort of secret Mason-like coding anyway. Government Access to Keys simply gives NSA a backdoor to Mom and Pop's internet terminal. Even the head of Interpol's Internet crime division say there's no reason for crypto restrictions and that old fashioned travel, interviewing, and investigation works the best and will work for a long time. GAK is bad. Protect yourselves! Mark Hedges On Tue, 23 Dec 1997 almat_private wrote: >All of the following information, except the last paragraph, is from news >stories run over the past two years. > >The NSA has a facility in England that has the capacity to listen to every >phone conversation placed in the US. Until recently, they could only >monitor conversations that went outside the borders of the country. With >satellite bounces, they take that as leaving the US. No, they don't listen >to every phone call. They do openly monitor all conversations overseas >using tape and "sniffing" devices. When key words come up a human is >assigned to check the call. > >They also openly place "sniff" programs at what they call "key points" of >interchange on the internet in the same way and can and do monitor email >that way. > >The NSA also runs "front" websites that deal with information that would >attract people they are interested in tracking. > >Long before Internet Explorer was introduced, an NSA officer told me they >were working with Microsoft to get a backdoor into internet usage. Since >explorer allows a web site to read a visitor's disc, and even place hostile >cookies that can destroy a drive, there is a good chance that was the >system he was talking about. Unlike the java function in Netscape, this >feature cannot be turned off in Explorer. > >
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 12:57:50 PDT