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[SalmonGod]

It's not just the internet, though... in order to avoid meaningful data collection, you'd basically have to avoid most interaction with modern society (in the U.S.)

Also, encryption doesn't even matter whatsoever when the NSA literally intercepts shipments of electronics to install bugs in them by hand.

[nenjin]

Also, encryption doesn't even matter whatsoever when the NSA literally intercepts shipments of electronics to install bugs in them by hand.

Of course you'll source that.

[SalmonGod]

Also, encryption doesn't even matter whatsoever when the NSA literally intercepts shipments of electronics to install bugs in them by hand.

Of course you'll source that.

Have all the sources you want

That one was widely reported on.

[lijacote]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

lijacote, I still don't think you understand the meaning of Big Data, as Bauglir is sort of pointing out.  I'll say it more directly.  Big Data doesn't just mean collecting the same sorts of data we always have and doing the same stuff with it, but on a larger scale.  It means collecting astronomically huge amounts of data, including stuff that we never would have bothered with in the past because it seemed useless, and running intelligent automated processes on that data that is able to find correlations and come up with predictions that humans would never have been able to.  Even with an infinite number of people, the logistics of communicating the content of analysis between all the people necessary to match what Big Data represents is absurdity.

On everything else, I would accept the argument that it's the same stuff that's always been going on but made easier.  Tracking people's locations, infiltration and subversion, gathering dirt and inventing crimes... all of that, absolutely yes.  But Big Data is a new kind of beast.

Even if it weren't, though, you have to consider that major revolutionary figures are the ones that slipped through the cracks of those same apparatus as they existed decades past.  For every public figure that goes down in history as standing up to the establishment and making a difference, there are many more who were successfully shut down.  Even if there is nothing qualitatively new about applications of newer technologies, don't you wonder about just how neatly those cracks that created the opportunity for building political movements in the past have been sealed?

Think what you will. I will return your attention to whence all this came from.

That's not going to happen until the domestic surveillance infrastructure is abolished.  There will not be another MLK so long as big data is able to pinpoint potential candidates for such a role and make it easy for authorities to find ways and reasons to marginalize them.

You explain the lack of leadership by the reality of surveillance. I don't think that's a valid explanation. The passivity and failure of the Left and the failure to organize in effective ways is not explained by increased surveillance. You can think that I don't understand the amount of data being gathered and processed by the CIA, by the NSA, etc., but that doesn't have persuasive power. While counter-intelligence must have a role and a part to play in dismantling the Left and resistance to rule, it is not the explanation. Not by itself. I can gladly accept it as a part of an explanation, as a part of the ruling class' influence on the world, but I will not accept it as the sole explanation.

[SalmonGod]

You explain the lack of leadership by the reality of surveillance. I don't think that's a valid explanation. The passivity and failure of the Left and the failure to organize in effective ways is not explained by increased surveillance. You can think that I don't understand the amount of data being gathered and processed by the CIA, by the NSA, etc., but that doesn't have persuasive power. While counter-intelligence must have a role and a part to play in dismantling the Left and resistance to rule, it is not the explanation.

You and Helgo were very quick to point out repressive government attitudes towards dissenting political movements in the past.  If you accept that those same attitudes have persisted into the modern day, but with expanded capabilities, then why can't that serve, even if not as a complete explanation, then as a major part of the overall picture?  This is something I point out to people often not to invoke defeatism, but because it simply is an obstacle that exists.  An obstacle that is not acknowledged cannot be overcome.

[lijacote]

You explain the lack of leadership by the reality of surveillance. I don't think that's a valid explanation. The passivity and failure of the Left and the failure to organize in effective ways is not explained by increased surveillance. You can think that I don't understand the amount of data being gathered and processed by the CIA, by the NSA, etc., but that doesn't have persuasive power. While counter-intelligence must have a role and a part to play in dismantling the Left and resistance to rule, it is not the explanation.

You and Helgo were very quick to point out repressive government attitudes towards dissenting political movements in the past.  If you accept that those same attitudes have persisted into the modern day, but with expanded capabilities, then why can't that serve, even if not as a complete explanation, then as a major part of the overall picture?  This is something I point out to people often not to invoke defeatism, but because it simply is an obstacle that exists.  An obstacle that is not acknowledged cannot be overcome.

Does surveillance explain the existence of forms of organization that lead to failure, does surveillance explain apathy? What of individualism, and idealism? Surveillance and counter-intelligence are not the institutions of education that help preserve the hegemony of bourgeois rule, and neither are they the institutions of neoliberalisation that take away our healthcare and security, and leave us in disabling misery, depression.

Sure. We can say that surveillance and counter-intelligence plays a major role, but I insist that it not be used as the single explanation, or simply privileged over other problems that revolutionaries must face. I am reminded of some people who seem to think that all that's wrong in the world is that there are banks and debt, and if only we had no banks... not that you are one of them, nor that you are saying that surveillance is the root of oppression etc., in your mind, but there is a need, as you say, to acknowledge problems. Problems that aren't surveillance. That was my motive here, and I think we have both achieved our goals here.

To crystallise: in a period of low struggle, there are less heroes to promote (not to mention that promotion would require a promoter). This is a period of low struggle, and that is due to a number of reasons, not one or two.

[SalmonGod]

Moving this due to ninja, which was previously an edit to my last post in response to your edit of your last post.


Ok, I see your edit that you do accept it as a partial explanation

And that's all I intended.  There are other problems, sure, of many kinds.  It's just a fact that this problem does exist.  It's a deliberate preventive measure taken against our objectives.  So in order to achieve our objectives, we have to face it.

If I can't pass through a doorway because there's a guy standing in my way who refuses to let me pass, you could argue that person isn't the whole explanation as to why I can't pass through the doorway.  You can point out all the ways that I'm not trying hard enough or not using the right techniques to clear my path.  But that doesn't change the fact that I will not be able to pass through that doorway until that person is no longer blocking it.  Lamenting the lack of organization and leadership in the response to these issues, but then marginalizing the issue of authorities taking deliberate measures to prevent those things from happening, is like pretending there's no one blocking the doorway.

Edit:

And I'm going to add that I don't see apathy as a primary issue.  I have seen shitloads of peaceful protest over the last decade.  Countered 100% of the time by being first brutalized and then villainized.  You could argue that there simply aren't enough people participating, but that's not apathy as much as inability.  There are many, many people out there who are willing to sacrifice for change, but that doesn't mean they're willing to throw their whole lives away.  And when a majority of the population is living their lives paycheck to paycheck, that's a lot of people who are simply unable to participate.  You can argue that the problem is activism not properly engaging with the political process, but that's a similar issue + those who have the resources to powerfully engage in politics being very likely to be the same people who are most interested in maintaining the status quo.

[Frumple]

... one of these days, we're going to find a societal problem that actually has only one cause. I will take that problem, plate it in gold, encrust it with rhinestones, cover it in bioluminescent fungus, and enshrine it as a monument to invisible pink unicorns. It will be called, "The Only Thing Sillier Than Thinking A Problem Only Has One Cause," or Totsttapohoc. Given the name, it will probably have to be sited somewhere in south america.

[wierd]

There ARE potentially ways to circumvent massive data collection, as far as what goes in and out of your internet pipe, but it requires you to be more geeky than normal.

TOR is a useful tool but not a silver bullet, nor is encryption. Good encryption has the keys exchanged securely (Sneakernet, or nothing at all!), and changed often. (Once a month at the latest.) It uses good keys, generated without compromised algorithms, made with good entropy sources, and as deep a key depth as possible. 

I use encrypted email with my friend, simply to waste the NSA's time.  If they want to invest the time to keep breaking my encryption just so they can see me and my friend discuss comic books and space news, that's on them. (In fact, the more people do that, the less profitable mass collection and automated processing will be! So, Join the Enigmail fan club! Just dont use a public key server, that's a point of potential compromise. Manage your keys yourself. OFFLINE.)

Dont use social networking! DONT DO IT! JUST DONT!

In terms of using TOR, it is usually possible these days to run something like OpenWRT on your router. This is just plain good medicine, as many routers these days have NSA and corporate backdoors baked into the shitty firmware they are running. OpenWRT is fully FOSS, and you can audit the code if you want, and build from source if you want.  (Building from source is actually recommended! It lets you turn on special features specific to your hardware, and potential use case!)

One of the packages for OpenWRT is-- Dun dun DUNNN... A Tor exit node network virtual interface driver!  You can load that sucker on your router, configure your routing table security to route certain kinds of data through that interface, and BAM-- You can have all HTTP traffic on your network go in and out through TOR, if that is your perogative. Just use TOR correctly. (No, that really isn't using it correctly, but you CAN set up some pretty kick ass configurations this way. You can also set up your own encrypted VPN tunnel interface, and quite a few other fancy things. Consumer router hardware crap (that is compatible) is all you need. See the hardware support list! I have TWO such routers that I have kicking around that I use for funtime hobby projects. One has a permanent serial header attached to the diagnostic serial port baked onto the motherboard, which I can use to do all kinds of fun things. Routers are pretty powerful little general purpose whizzbangs these days.)

If you are super paranoid, use an encrypted filesystem on a live disk USB key install of Linux. For bonus cred, use one that self destructs. 

Basically, in order to be secure these days, you HAVE to take matters into your own hands, and you HAVE to be a stickler about it. You CANT trust consumer gear firmware-- You cannot trust it AT ALL.  You HAVE to replace it with something that you have full, complete, inexorable control over, and then you have to properly partition and secure your network infrastructure.

You CAN do this. It really isn't that hard.  The deal is that you have to go off the sauce that is social networking. Screw Facebook and pals-- Talk to Grandma using postal mail. It has more federal protections than anything digital does.

[SirQuiamus]

[CENSORED BY NSA]

I've tried TOR just for giggles, but I found it nearly unusable due to sluggishness and widespread DNS poisoning.

The latter is a particularly serious security threat: The network seems to be lousy with bad-apple exit nodes that keep redirecting you to attack sites at the worst possible moment. (Are there any leet-skill workarounds for that?)

OpenWRT is also a good idea, but getting it into your box is a frikkin' chore. And it doesn't work on outdated-junk hardware.

 

[SalmonGod]

Advice on how to handle internet security is nice... but it doesn't relate much to the conversation.  Our culture is nowhere near a point where this kind of thing will see large scale adoption, and social networking is not going away.  And it doesn't help with all the surveillance methods that are outside the internet.

[SirQuiamus]

But is there currently any foolproof way to protect your online identity from the all-seeing eye? If TOR doesn't quite cut it, what does?

EDIT: I think this is relevant to the conversation because internet surveillance does have a chilling effect on political activism. When you're inside Panopticon, it doesn't matter whether someone's sitting in the central booth or not. The structure itself entails the possibility of surveillance, and it affects your behaviour regardless of how effectively it's being operated.     

[Frumple]

Sure. Don't have one.

There's no such thing as a foolproof security measure that involves actually doing anything. The point to using TOR and encryption and such isn't actually protection, per se, it's frustration -- making domestic spying agencies spend more money and man hours to collect the information in question. Because a sufficiently bankrolled and motivated organization will be able to get through whatever method you choose to use, period. That's basically the golden truth of network security, intra- or inter- net. What folks actually try to do is make it as irritating, expensive, and time consuming as possible to crack the system, in order to make doing so sufficiently inefficient the entity in question decides to spend their resources elsewhere (and allow a larger window for manual intervention, of course).

The ideal behind the TOR et al movement is that if the practice disseminates enough, domestic spying on any large scale will become fiscally inviable and, well, bugger off to greener pastures. It's not actually to make an ironclad online presence, because you, y'know, can't do that. It's more or less entirely impossible. All you can do is make it as difficult as you can and hope whoever's on the other side isn't motivated enough to bust through.

[SirQuiamus]

It's pretty self-evident that perfect software security is impossible – as impossible as perfect anything. Point being that there's currently no such thing as a second-amendment privacy-cannon, as was already pointed out above.

[SalmonGod]

This is over a week old... posted by Infoshop on Facebook.  Finally got around to reading it, and found it still worth sharing.  It provides much needed context to the clips and numbers that the media reports in these situations.

I'm going to try to keep this as brief as I can, but I've been asked by several people about Central Booking today, so I'll give you guys the shocking highlights. As much as I'd like to, I can't describe the particulars of some of the more egregious arrests, due to attorney/client privilege issues, but I would like to describe the Civil Liberties violations, and the deplorable conditions which people have had to endure.

As many of you know, more than 250 people have been arrested since Monday here in Baltimore. Normally when you are arrested, you are given a copy of your charging documents and then you must see a commissioner within 24 hours for a bail determination ("prompt presentment") and given a trial date. If you are not released after the commissioner hearing, you will be brought before a judge for a review of the bail set by the commissioner. None of this was happening, so we sent some lawyers to Central Booking yesterday to try to help. I heard, however, that only 2 commissioners showed up, and the correctional officers only brought about 9 people to be interviewed because the jail was on a mysterious "lock-down".

Today we were divided into two groups. Some of the lawyers were assigned the task of actually doing judicial bail reviews for as many folks as they could get interviewed and docketed. I was assigned to the other group. We were the "habeas team", and we were to interview folks that we felt were being illegally detained, so we could file writs of habeas corpus. Governor Hogan had issued an executive order, extending the time for prompt presentment to 47 hours. We believed that this order was invalid because the governor has no authority to alter the Maryland Rules. As a result, all people who were being detained for more than 24 hours without seeing a commissioner were being held illegally.

Knowing all of this, I was still not prepared for what I saw when I arrived. The small concrete booking cells were filled with hundreds of people, most with more than ten people per cell. Three of us were sent to the women's side where there were up to 15 women per holding cell. Most of them had been there since Monday afternoon/evening. With the exception of 3 or 4 women, the women who weren't there for Monday's round-ups were there for freaking curfew violations. Many had not seen a doctor or received required medication. Many had not been able to reach a family member by phone. But here is the WORST thing. Not only had these women been held for two days and two nights without any sort of formal booking, BUT ALMOST NONE OF THEM HAD ACTUALLY BEEN CHARGED WITH ANYTHING. They were brought to CBIF via paddy wagons (most without seat belts, btw--a real shocker after all that's happened), and taken to holding cells without ever being charged with an actual crime. No offense reports. No statements of probable cause. A few women had a vague idea what they might be charged with, some because of what they had actually been involved in, and some because of what the officer said, but quite a few had no idea why they were even there. Incidentally, I interviewed no one whose potential charges would have been more serious than petty theft, and most seemed to be disorderly conduct or failure to obey, charges which would usually result in an immediate recog/release.

The holding cells are approximately 10x10 (some slightly larger), with one open sink and toilet. The women were instructed that the water was "bad" and that they shouldn't drink it. There are no beds--just a concrete cube. No blankets or pillows. The cells were designed to hold people for a few hours, not a few days. In the one cell which housed 15 women, there wasn't even enough room for them all to lay down at the same time. Three times a day, the guards brought each woman 4 slices of bread, a slice of american cheese and a small bag of cookies. They sometimes got juice, but water was scarce, as the CO's had to wheel a water cooler through every so often (the regular water being "broken".)

My fellow attorneys and I all separately heard the same sickening story over and over. None of the women really wanted to eat 4 slices of bread 3 times a day, so they were saving slices of bread TO USE AS PILLOWS. Let me say that again. THEY WERE ALL USING BREAD AS PILLOWS SO THAT THEY WOULDN'T HAVE TO LAY THEIR HEADS ON THE FILTHY CONCRETE FLOOR.

Interviewing these women was emotionally exhausting. Quite a few of them began crying--so happy to finally see someone who might know why they were there, or perhaps how they might get out of this Kafka-esque nightmare. These women came from all walks of life. We interviewed high school students, college students, people with graduate degrees, people with GED's, single women, married women, mothers, the well-employed, the unemployed, black women and white women. Almost all of them had no record. Those that did, had things like dui's and very minor misdemeanors. Our group didn't interview any of the men on the other side, but my colleagues reported very similar situations. On the men's side there were journalists and activists, as well as highschool kids with no records, barely 18 years old.

As we were getting ready to leave, we heard that many of these folks might be released without charges, after being held for 2 days. When we returned to the office, our amazing "habeas fellow", Zina Makar, single-handedly filed 82 habeas petitions. That is when we heard that 101 people were released without charges. I'd like to think that the amazing legal response to this injustice played a large part in their release, and I feel privileged to have been a part of it. They may be charged later, but I'm guessing most of them won't based on how minor their alleged infractions are. There are still over a hundred folks in there that need to see a commissioner and/or a judge, but hopefully we have thinned the ranks a little, and we will keep fighting until everyone has received due process. (We are concerned about these folks potential bails, as we are hearing about bails in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for misdemeanor charges).

I'll wrap this up by reminding everyone that all lives matter. We are all human beings. And we are Americans, and as such we are afforded protections under the law, the guilty and innocent alike. If one person is denied due process, we all suffer. If one persons rights and freedoms are trampled on, it's not only a reflection on all of us, but it puts our own liberty at risk. The moment we view some individuals as more important than others, we cheapen ourselves. At the very essence of our democracy is the right to question and stand up to authority. During these trying times, we should all keep that in mind.

I'll leave you with a beautiful picture that was taken today of one of the women who was released without charges. Her husband had been waiting outside CBIF trying to find something...ANYTHING out about when she might be charged or released. This was taken moments after she walked out the door.....

Marci Tarrant Johnson — with Joseph M. Giordano, Brian M F Jefferson, Stacy McCormack, Jo Brown and Matthew Harbin