Google gonna rape your privacy if you don't take action

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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/...story-googles-new-privacy-policy-takes-effect
 
The sad truth is they're going to rape you anyway, as does facebook and anyone else who can get your data. While I don't doubt that their procedure will help, it's well known that the government is involved and doing their own thing with all the data, the onion joke clip on facebook as an adjunct to the CIA notwithstanding.

For quite some time now, it's not been legal for the government to look at say, your financial records without a warrant. But you know what? It's perfectly legal for them to BUY them from a credit agency who can see them without one, and they've been doing that right along - just one example.

While Asimov is kind of for beginners at sci-fi, I find myself quoting him more and more - we'll need the Heinlein as more things hit the fan, I suppose - he's tops when things get really nasty.

At any rate, Asimov had a character in the foundation trilogy (a young girl) discuss how one keeps a secret, and it's sage advice. She said something along the lines of (sorry about any misquote, this is from very long term memory)

"When I have a secret, I don't put tape over my mouth and withdraw, oh no, that makes it obvious I'm hiding something. Instead, I talk as much as normal, but about boring things no one will want to listen to - it's much more effective."

I think that's the strategy that's going to work going forward here. I can't see anything else will work. Using encryption raises flags, going dark raises flags - you have to know they already have a ton of your history spread around in databases to compare against. If you were doing something marginally dodgy, and just stop, that's as bad as doing it more - taper it off slowly as though it's now boring you (and any watcher)....you get the idea.

 
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Thank you very much for the post. I just copied that and bcc'd it to about 20 google account holders I know.... Wake up folks!

I can't wait for one of them to try the "I don't have anything to hide" excuse with me. ohhhh boy!!! I CAN'T WAIT! :flail:

3 days until my Facebook account is 100% deleted as well... It's been dormant for over a year anyway. Ugh, why did I ever bother.
 
What alternatives to google are you guys using?

I've used scroogle recently, but they're down since two weeks.
Now I'm using startpage.com
 
I still use Google's search engine. I don't use gmail, google+ or hold a youtube account though.
 
Information gathering is so pervasive I think any alternative is sort of pointless. All this stuff is sold back and forth at some point - or ordered to be turned over to a government (along with orders not to reveal it's happened), it's too valuable to toss in the trash.

Going with something purported to be super private just gives them an easy point for data collection on all those who seem to think they have something to hide, it's counter productive in the end. All you're doing is self-selecting for them.

I think it's amusing in some cases. Having been at this web thing since the beginning, I've used a number of deliberate misspellings of my name, and tracked who I handed them out to. The watch as they sell the info, despite privacy policies that say they never will. Of course, that's not the only leak point at all - a disgruntled employee with a carload of backup tapes is pretty common, as is the ubiquitous government order to turn over the goods in secret or else be prosecuted for something else. The revealed paperwork in the warrant-less wiretapping cases is fairly revealing about that one, as are the bank regs in the Patriot act (which are classified but slowly leaking out - people talk).

What I hate about it is targeted advertising, personally. As an inventor, finding out about things I didn't know were available/practical is part of what I do all the time.
Losing that is a loss to me. Random ads were better and more likely to be useful to me for a variety of reasons.

And why in heck does Amazon think the only things I'm interested in are things I just bought? I just bought them, heck, now I have enough! I want something else now, if I want anything. They'll get better at it, of course, but gheesh. Buy a nice video camera and get ads for the next month - all video cameras? Now I bought 10 led lamps to make my solar power system better - and now that's all the ads I get.

Google cache means it doesn't matter what you think you delete online - they've got a copy of the entire web taken fairly frequently. It's helped us over at Groklaw a lot when companies try to re-write history in court cases - it's not entirely negative.

What's the most scary to me, is not the new ubiquity of cheap, almost permanent storage, but the advent of the ability to automate going through it with various algos - which only get better with time, and all that data doesn't go completely stale, ever. So data that's not useful now becomes useful later to various interests whose agenda is kind of difficult to predict in any great detail.

Even my cheap video camera now has facial recognition that works well, and within that a feature to snatch a still out of a video when some target happens to smile. In real time, battery powered...some entities don't have such limits on computing horsepower.
 
Now, this IS news, at least to me. And it's not just google, they only feed stuff in.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/“we-a...an-state-big-brother-goes-live-september-2013

"We're this far from a turnkey totalitarian state"

I used to work with these guys. Not sure this particular article is fully correct, but yeah, it's how they think and what they do - it "smells" right. The TIA program has taken on different names and scopes over its life, despite funding being voted down a number of times - which means it just comes out of the all-black budget instead, for those who know how those things work. Just because no one wanted to publicly sign on to the final death of the constitution, doesn't mean they didn't sign on.

The thing is, once you have this ability to get the dirt on everyone - you have power over everyone, including those who vote your budget, who are perhaps more dirty than your average guy to begin with, but also more sensitive to it being revealed.

Anybody who's had a background check/ high level clearance, look at what they wanted to find out about you most - and you'll realize that blackmail was their prime concern. They really didn't care what you did that much (I admitted smoking pot and it only caused minor troubles) - they care if you care who finds out much more.

This isn't the first wave of this, that happened awhile back. Note how there's never any political discussion on the budget for DHS, even though it's huge and most people agree there's really not much threat, while pointing out just how much of the money for it goes to companies owned by previous government officials, like Michael Chertoff? Building crap x ray machines has never been so profitable - and one wonders why the pros at it didn't get the contracts, but I don't wonder very much.

Of course, with that much data and processing power, you can also have some fun on the markets...and not even need the black budget. I believe Tom Clancy (who correctly predicted 9/11, except the real thing missed Congress) - also wrote "Teeth of the Tiger". Good read for how some of that might actually work.

Actually, his writing on spy work is "in your dreams" for the most part - at least based on my own experience in the field. It's what they'd like to believe they could/should/would actually do. Or is it.

No good spy is like James Bond at all. It doesn't work like that. If they even know you were there, it's a failure. A good spy gets hired as a janitor, and finds out what he can, then gets fired for accosting a chick or being drunk on the job....no one ever knows. Over the years, since people who can play it that well are always scarce, they've gone more and more to "technical means" - with this sort of thing as the result. They hit on me for speech recog software many years ago...just to look for keywords in phone conversations. Obviously without warrants, and for initial use in other countries, but once the cat's out of the bag...

Remember what I mentioned above - it's any sudden change in habit that triggers the traffic analysis checks. Keep talking...just about something else. Sadly, computers are really hard to bore.
 
I had pretty much assumed the NSA was just sub-contracting the datacenter storage and search functions from Google. Not sure that much is really changing here.
 
OK, I´ll start a slow change right now.

Gcv3hLnN4 u85Tkje Y4e3xc7phd85 6TYja tOO620 7MvE056Ñe27KijTS34hK r79Ijbcc4 3T4unusVV86!

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
 
My calculator gives me an easy way to get random numbers:

328663484 140636696 436753471 253406189 795253354

That other post just above I made up...
 
Ah, crypto and random numbers. Actually, if you report a few, NSA can tell you the algorithm used to generate your not-very-random numbers, and certainly has a list of who uses which algo to generate them. Most attempts to fiddle an algo to make it different make them much less random to most analysis technique, ask any real crypto guy (or check "Numerical recipies in C and Fortran" for commentary). Or of course, Knuth, or Bruce Schneieir's Applied Cryptography.

Non plaintext is something that's very easy to detect and it raises flags. After all, if you're not doing anything wrong, why are you trying to hide? Not that I agree with that one, but it's a common statement made by those invading your privacy.

"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." -- JohnVonNeumann

You can get pretty close, though. Intel tried using diode noise and an a/d converter for awhile - quantum noise. However, since nothing is perfect, you can actually use a sequence from it to ID a particular CPU.

About the most random thing there is would be the decay of thorium (very long half life). Timing between geiger counter pulses from a small sample is *really* random. But not perfectly, as a counter has a time resolution and will never report two very close pulses as separate. When you have a "zillion" atoms - and each has an attempted decay event say 200 trillion times a second, but only succeeds about once in 10e9 years...pretty random when they "go".

Sure, NSA contracts out a lotta things - some of my old paychecks were due to that. But that says nothing about what they're actually doing...They will often put out a spec, "make us this thing" and never say what it would be used for, though a smart guy can often guess, and we do know about Naurus and a few other things they have certainly done that can't be used for much else.

I once helped them on a project to intercept the entire radio spectrum and write it down - DC to daylight, and from loud down to the background noise level. That's one heck of a firehose all by itself. Now they have fat pipes into the entire telecom business and the internet backbones as well. It's probably more than they can truly handle at this point. But as even Tom Clancy knows - traffic pattern analysis can cut down the flow to the point where you can handle it, and even by itself tells you things.

Let's do a hypothetical. A guy is busted selling drugs in the usual way that happens. Now we look at all his phone traffic - just the times and who called who will do. We trace this back to a pattern - one original call "the stuff is here" results in a chain of calls down the line of dealers and from them to their customers. Bingo - we wrap up the entire operation.

Watching the Russian fleet used to be something I helped do. In normal times, there's a certain amount of radio traffic, and most of the ship powerplants are at idle (which you can tell by satellite IR imagery). Suddenly there's a burst of traffic and all the stacks light up - and then traffic goes to near zero. You might not know exactly what's going on - but you know something is - and it's important (since they went silent after the orders), and not very many seconds after they do.

Now, imagine it's gold they are tracking instead of drugs...or any attempt to organize some opposition to the PTB. These are the actions of people determined to remain in power despite the wishes of the governed, there's no other legit explanation, Occam would agree. You don't need this to catch the odd guy with a shoe bomb, or even a group that want to crash planes (and it wouldn't and it didn't). So, why again do we need it?
 
I still fail to see how you could filter the incredible amount of data flowing around the web. The amount of info permanently stored on the web is nearly uncountable, yet they arrogantly believe they can filter out the muck to find a small gem? That is like trying to find a specific drop of water in the fucking ocean. Of course, I'm not a mathematician, and I suppose there are ways to pick out specific words, but what would stop me from switching the word......say.......gold, in to something totally sterile such as marmalade?
 
Google cache already has more or less the entire web, and quite a lot of "backup points". This of course is a lot more than goes around daily - took awhile to accumulate that much.

You just have to get a feel for relationships of huge numbers. For crying out loud, I have a computer that gets well into the terflops myself (trillion operations per second), and it's not even my "main squeeze" - it's a toy for my numerical pursuits - main squeeze is only up to about 100 billion (tesla card + 8 cores intel). Terabyte disk drives are under $70 here - retail and in ones. NSA doesn't need to save every streamed movie every time it streams, just the title.

Remember, most of what flies around the net is spam - you only need to have one copy, or webpages - again, the same stuff over and over. What's more interesting is the much more compact "to and from" information.

If all you're trying to do is build a communications "call tree" to find out what's worth looking at, you get an initial huge data reduction going from a phone call at say 64kbits/second - to a few bytes for time and both ends ID. You then watch that (or emails or whatever) for changes in the "normal" patterns, which all that helpful mostly un-analyzed (so far) history helps with. Anything that changes "too much" - you can set various thresholds, and no, they are much fancier than single words and can easily detect things like using "dog food" to mean dope, and then deep dive and see if you find anything of interest to you. Every time you do that - succeed or fail, you are also training the neural net that decides what's worth looking at, so it only gets better. (remember, you have a large team of programmers helping all the time - and they don't contract that out for the sensitive stuff).

Then, once you find something, you've got all history to go back through to see what that person or group is up to in general, and now you know what to spend your limited amount of effort on.

And that's a big part of what's new about this, the ability to reach into the deep past, once they decide they don't like you. With our laws, everyone is some sort of criminal, but it didn't used to matter much. Now the opportunity for selective enforcement has been handed to someone other than the friendly cop on the beat, someone with a very different agenda it would appear.

Example - my (hopefully soon to be ex) wife got politically active and angered some people medium high up. Soon after, a detailed check of her was carried out, and a very old felony was discovered. Bang, no voting rights. That was under the old system, and probably left some tracks that she could have used to show it was politically motivated etc had she had the skills and desire to do that.

Now? Not so much. Some guy whose name you're not even allowed to know (national security, the reason the government didn't allow the warrant-less wiretapping case to proceed - fiat of the other sort) - just digs up some junk, sends it to local law enforcement, and knowing all they know, no problem to find a way to bust you for what they can legally observe, now that they have probable cause.
This is one of the slippery slope issues that we've lost already - now classified info can constitute "probable cause" and that's all it takes.

"If you see something, say something".
 
To add a little more. There used to be a distinction between two types of security - tactical and strategic.

You didn't need as good a crypto for tactical. If the enemy can only decode your stuff after the attack - doesn't matter. If you only find out about a drug deal going down at a time or place a week later - doesn't matter, it's no longer there to intercept. Or I should say it didn't used to matter. Now, knowing that they can pull full history from all the security cameras that might be involved and get data there'd have been no way to get before...

Strategic stuff - now that requires a whole lot better protection, say, whether or not we can really see a Chinese stealth fighter - or have broken their codes - at some range or in some timeframe.

What's going on here completely blurs those lines, it's a brave new world. And now we have the FAA being ordered by congress to find a way to allow drones in domestic airspace.
 
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i hit the like button DCF. Not because i like what you havewritten but because you have once again enlightened me a little more

thank you.

now how can we best 'fit in' and stay below the radar, yet continue to live and think as we currently do ?

allyrthorts rblong2us
 
Great dialogue above guys. I will be looking once again into how to better encrypt anything sensitive and yet do it slowly and learn to remain under the radar (but it´s too late for that I am sure in my case).

That´s REALLY BAD that they can play those games with the local cops re snooping into your past to find a felony they can exploit... I am sure that I have done SOMETHING in the last seven years (Statute of Limitations for most crimes?) that they could come and BUST me on...

Three fun facts re encryption, DCFusor probably already knows at least some of this but here goes:

1) The ¨PGP¨program is no longer free. Bummer! Symantec owns it now, and when I went to pgp.com, it was a Symantec page. A LONG TIME ago I briefly had the public key / private key, but none of my friends wanted to play with encryption.

2) There is a set of equations in math called ¨Elliptical Curves¨ which have an interesting property: namely that you can write a program (well maybe YOU can, but not me!) that uses one of the properties of elliptical curves to make an encryption system even harder to crack that PGP (was/is) -- the old multiplying two large prime numbers technique. Some company in Canada some 12 or so years ago was trying to market a system like this.

3) I once took a course in Linear Algebra, they had a sidebar-page which showed how to do a ¨Transformation Cipher¨, namely moving letters around. I believe that technique was said to be efiicient in the sense that the number of permutations (for a reasonably longish note) would be very hard to crack.

Too bad I could never get the hang of programming a computer! Like accounting..., too hard!
 
DoChen, there are a few types of crypto that solve different problems, and so are different. The two prime number thing (RSA-like) tries to solve the problems of authentication with its public and private keys, but is hard to do (when you have the keys) versus easy to crack (factor). It's a good way to send keys used for other things, in other words. A one-time pad is pretty darn good if you only use it once, and everyone knows where to start in it - but how to get the key to someone safely?

Turns out the Diffie-Hellman thing had a lousy way of choosing the primes in the first place and has a backdoor due to that - but it's still enough to keep amateurs out.

Believe me, though - anyone with a good list of all the primes of the two popular sizes used there could make a fortune by agreeing to NOT sell it. I've thought of doing that, but it kinda paints a target on your back, or forces one back into government service. It would be a lotta disks, but computers that could fill them are now in territory where one could actually afford them.

It's a big world in that zone, anyone who want more should probably go buy Applied Cryptography and some other works of Bruce Schneieir. There's plenty of good crypto free, but it's just the crypto routine - you have to do the rest. As Bruce and many others point out, most leaks aren't from someone breaking the crypto itself - there are side channel attacks, poor implementations that leave the plaintext around somewhere, and the ultimate side-channel attack - the rubber hose till you give up the key.

I know that in staying under the radar here, even with the like minded we don't talk about how much we dislike what the PTB are doing - we know anyway. We don't talk about how big the food or PM stash is becoming, we already know or see it when we visit. We talk on the porch away from cars and celphones when we do.

We go out and have a beer and shoot our guns (either before or after grilling the steaks), but don't act like knuckle dragging camo-wearing white supremacist skinheads, which is easy, because we aren't. We aren't revolutionaries. Just ready if someone else does. If TSHTF, we won't be the guys throwing it - we'll be the guys wiping it off people after.

Just some normal guys, maybe a little better off than average - but not too rich-appearing even if we are, we love collecting all our neato tools, having a little extra everything...being able to be sufficient in whatever we can accomplish that in, and so forth. It's amazing how few words that can take, and none at all in public about why, to get there and be pretty completely under all radars - even the other neighbors.

It's like a club no one knows exists till they get invited in, and that happens because they obviously already qualify. Then all it takes is a glance and a nod - pretty hard to intercept.

All simple ciphers are trivial to crack because in most cases, it's now possible to automate plaintext detection when it works - most people don't use enough layers or forget certain nasty gotchas. You can just toss it to a bank of machines and wait, but that's rarely needed - there are other ways in, and something being crypto is the main flag you need to get interested in it in the first place, which is why steganography is also popular.

In that technique, you can just replace the least significant bits of say, audio or picture data with your stuff - since most stuff is way over-precise, you don't notice there's a message in it at all, which of course, is the point. You could encrypt it too if you wanted to, of course, making it harder for someone to be sure there was anything there that wasn't just noise. But you're still leaving traffic out there to be analyzed, and I'm sure if you send the same few pix back and forth enough, someone will figure out something is going on - so it's work to get right. All this stuff is.

So, if you need to hide a few messages to a few people, you really have to be sending a lot to a lot of people...all the time, so there's nothing special about those few that's easily picked up on. Goes all too deep for the tastes of most.

Bruce doesn't talk much about crypto these days, but his blog goes way back, and his books are industry references. Here's a little free stuff. The code is out there online for it.
 
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