FW: When technology is utilized against us.

[Michael Weisman-2]

Forwarding from another list.  This one gave me chills.  I've deleted email
addresses for privacy.

Mike Weisman
--
Please respond to:
Mike Weisman
popeye@...

>
> To all,
>
> An interesting comment on everything Freedom to Connect stands for as we
> learn that Nokia and Seimens have provided aid to the Iranian government
> in their quest to censor communication and spread misinformation.
>
> "...the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often
> called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only
> block communication but to monitor it to gather information about
> individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according
> to these experts."
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html
>
> An acquaintance of mine made the following analysis, referring to the
> Iranian government, "All of their mistakes, though, track back to that
> first one: failure to understand information in the 21st century."
>
> To which the following response was offered, "And that sentence will be
> the concluding statement in the history books that discuss this time."
>
>
> In another rather strange wrinkle that only our connected time could
> produce, Anonymous, the group who attempted to disrupt the Church of
> Scientology, is now working to identify members of the Basij, the
> Iranian government's militant plain clothes police who are being blamed
> for terrorizing the protesters, with some apparent success.
> http://i40.tinypic.com/2dturfo.jpg
>
> In a statement released yesterday, Anonymous said, "Hello leaders of
> Iran, we are Anonymous. As the eyes of the entire world hold you under
> close scrutiny, the eyes of the Internet have taken similar notice of
> your recent actions. While the governments of the world condemn you for
> your violation of human rights Anonymous has taken a particular interest
> in your recent attempts to censor the Internet not only for your own
> people, but for the citizens of the entire world.
> Such suppression of dissent cannot go unpunished. By cutting off
> information of the Iranian citizens to rest of the world you have made
> clear to us that the most revered of human rights, the right to free
> speech is no longer important to you. By seeking to silence the voice of
> the people in an election and silence the criticism of such a gross
> cover up you have prepared to enter the anger and rage of your people.
> Anonymous has therefore made it our mission to see to it that the voice
> of the Iranian people can be heard around the world. Just like [another
> authoritarian religious group], Anonymous will tear down the walls of
> silence using only the truth. The truth you are trying so hard to
> suppress by using violence, intimidation and fascist laws.
> As your people continue to riot and speak out against you, as you
> continue to beat and shoot your own citizens in the street, as you
> continue to lie in the face of the entire world, know that the Internet
> is watching and that we do not like what we see.
> Knowledge is free. We are Anonymous, we are Legion, we do not forgive,
> we do not forget.
> Expect us."
>
> Interesting times we live in...
>
> Ken DiPietro
> LaVale MD
>

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[Morlock Elloi]

At some point, in late 90s, there was a collective shift from privacy
to convenience.

Convenience of not having to understand how technology works,
convenience of being connected although slightly retarded, convenience
of free shiny user interfaces provided by private corporations in
exchange for eyeballs.

That was so much easier than using cumbersome ad-hoc encryption
(which, even without certificates, would completely cripple
interference by lesser governments.)

Revolutions, however, do not favor retards. I really do not understand
the purpose of this consternation along the "we are sending cleartext
and ISPs, governments and service providers are meddling with it"
lines. Do you really think that pathetic righteous whining will stop
deep packet inspection? It will not. Whatever you conveniently and
effortlessly send in cleartext will always be intercepted and used
against you, sooner or later, in every single jurisdiction in the
world. Think of it as applied Darwinism.

As long as you prefer convenience to prudence, you will get deep
rectal inspections.






> "...the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice
> often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities
> to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather
> information about individuals, as well as alter it for
> disinformation purposes, according to these experts."



     


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[Heiko Recktenwald-3]

Who is "we"???

Anyway:

Michael Weisman schrieb:

> An acquaintance of mine made the following analysis, referring to the
> Iranian government, "All of their mistakes, though, track back to that
> first one: failure to understand information in the 21st century."

And wrote something on Anomymous to make the little Pasdaran visible. People on twitter proposed to collect names of members to be able to mark their houses with a cross. Do you think that is a good idea? IMHO it is pure nonsense!

During the last student demonstrations in 2006 or so, I asked some Iranian economy students in Bonn about it and they replied something like "The biggest problem in Iran is that everybody shouts "Death to" whoever. We have the same here: "Death to Khamenei" etc. The state of Iran does not use such language!

One of the most interesting officials is Laridjani, the former diplomat, who poposed some open TV discussions. To make the "millions" in the streets heart.

I personaly understood Khamenei completely different from how this speech was interpreted in the media. There was no open thread with violence and his remark about violence that would happen did raise the question in me how much he is still in power. Maybe the Pasdaran do mostly what they want like people in a "Smart Mob". But lets face reality, whether to be peacefull or not has been discussed on twitter, it is a question, see also Anonymous. The Pasdaran are NOT scientology, they are a part of the state and that is perfectly ok. The Pasdaran are not per se bad, they can do brilliant things like they did with than UK ship in the Sea. See also Hezbollah which is the best that did ever happen in Lebanon in the last 20 years or Hamas. They are able to say "Yes, Yes, No, No" and this is most important IMHO and one of the biggest values in the Bible.

Anyway, Ladidjani did say, that the Pasdaran activities in universities must stop! And what was really happening in the shooting scenes is a matter of investigation.

All from presstv.ir. They may be slow, their english may be broken and their language may be difficult to understand sometimes anyway, but they are official. More than rumor and emotions.

IMHO the state of Iran has been VERY tolerant, this could not have happened in Riad or Kabul. The last time in did happen in Israels occupied territories it was called Intifada. But IMHO the members of Intifada did know better what they were fighting for.

IMHO "we" dont have very good arguments.

WSJ has an excellent graphic of the structure of the state of Iran.

Laridjani is the current president of the parliament.

Best,

H.


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[Evan Buswell-2]

I used to work for a company that was trying to turn encryption into
a everyday user product. The problem was (and still is, for this
company) that protecting internet communication has very little
intuitive relation to protecting regular communication.

On "Get Smart", if any of you remember from late night re-runs,
there used to be this device that Maxwell Smart and the chief used
to protect their communications. It was two bubbles connected by a
little shaft, descending slowly over their heads to block all sound
from leaving. If I remember rightly, it hilariously also blocked sound
between them. But overall, a (working) device like this is what we
picture when we picture privacy. Walls have ears, so we need to make a
silencer to keep anything from getting out.

On the internet, the main problem is not actually encryption,
silencing, it is trust. We can't see each other; we have little
tangible physical relationship. Nobody can be sure whether their
messages are consistently going to the same place or not. If that
problem is not solved, then encryption is just ensuring that no other
government agents are intercepting the communication between you and
the government agent that, unbeknown to you, you are speaking to,
and is in turn speaking to somebody else on your behalf. This is the
certificate hell that all internet security has entered into. For the
company I worked for, that issue boiled down to everyone trusting the
service providing company to sort out the identity of everybody else.
And of course, the more completely the problem is solved, the more
complete control over everything that one company has, with the limit
being just about the same hypothetical vulnerability that everyone
else has sending it all in the clear and trusting the ISPs forwarding
the packets not to legally or illegally be monitoring packet flow.

Which brings me to the second point: anonymity is a very different
problem than encryption. The messages being posted from Iran are
public, by design. Because all IP records both source and destination
address, in the absence of random message delays, all that the Iranian
government has to do is monitor packet flow and correlate that with
the times when suspicious messages publicly appear. It doesn't
actually have to read anything that those packets contain. I have no
idea what "deep packet analysis" is supposed to mean, but I would
imagine that the analysis I'm talking about here is all Iran is doing.
It seems like probably all they need to do.

The real problem is that the two goals of trust and anonymity are
mutually exclusive. This is not just an internet problem. But our
perceptions of the internet obscure this especially, because in
most situations where one would want anonymity (piracy, random
one-off posts on bulletin boards, periodic lurking in chat rooms with
strangers, twittering from an ad hoc account), one more or less has
anonymity. And then in situations where one would want non-anonymity
(facebook, sometimes twitter, email, etc), one more or less knows who
one is talking to, though this latter is notoriously often broken. We
continue to be shocked by reality not matching our expectations, and
expect technology to be improved so that it will match them. But it
is not a technological problem, nor a problem which can be solved by
ditching convenience, but a fundamental problem about our togetherness
in communication.

All the twitter/facebook stuff which brings the events in Iran out
so clearly is an interesting case study about our communication.
The parts where the communication here is failing to work in the
desired way are small compared with the parts where it's functioning
as desired. Why? I certainly don't have a full answer, but I imagine
that the internet is really only one piece in the puzzle, whether or
not it's a *sine qua non*.

Evan Buswell





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[Nick-159]

Hi list. I'm new here; recently found this place from a reference to
a Jeffrey Juris interview, and I'm very interested in the
discussionn here.

I am also in agreement with Morlock's analysis, as harsh and
condescending as the tone may have been.

I have some disagreements with Evan's points though:

Quoth Evan Buswell:

> On the internet, the main problem is not actually encryption,
> silencing, it is trust. We can't see each other; we have little
> tangible physical relationship. Nobody can be sure whether their
> messages are consistently going to the same place or not. If that
> problem is not solved, then encryption is just ensuring that no other
> government agents are intercepting the communication between you and
> the government agent that, unbeknown to you, you are speaking to,
> and is in turn speaking to somebody else on your behalf. This is the
> certificate hell that all internet security has entered into. For the
> company I worked for, that issue boiled down to everyone trusting the
> service providing company to sort out the identity of everybody else.
> And of course, the more completely the problem is solved, the more
> complete control over everything that one company has, with the limit
> being just about the same hypothetical vulnerability that everyone
> else has sending it all in the clear and trusting the ISPs forwarding
> the packets not to legally or illegally be monitoring packet flow.

There are a host of schemes to prevent Man In The Middle attacks;
see OpenPGP signing or ZRTP for example.

And the trust issue is been addressed by 'web of trust' models, as
practised with OpenPGP, or Freenet. No centralisation needed. At
all.  (though voluntarily some centralised services can be used, for
convenience, e.g. OpenPGP keyservers).

> Which brings me to the second point: anonymity is a very different
> problem than encryption. The messages being posted from Iran are
> public, by design. Because all IP records both source and destination
> address, in the absence of random message delays, all that the Iranian
> government has to do is monitor packet flow and correlate that with
> the times when suspicious messages publicly appear. It doesn't
> actually have to read anything that those packets contain. I have no
> idea what "deep packet analysis" is supposed to mean, but I would
> imagine that the analysis I'm talking about here is all Iran is doing.
> It seems like probably all they need to do.

Again, isn't this solved by using web of trust, associated to an
identity which is different to one which could readily incriminate
'the real' you?

And deep packet inspection/analysis is looking inside an IP packet
at the content, e.g. if a series of HTTP packets contained a video,
it could be fingerprinted and compared against a database of
'forbidden' content, and the stream could be closed by a hostile
ISP.
 
I'll be interested to hear what others on the list have to say.

Nick White

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[Evan Buswell-2]

Nick points out stuff I was skimming over in my analysis.  That's
good, since I left one side out.  See below for responses, however.

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Nick <nick@...> wrote:

> Hi list. I'm new here; recently found this place from a reference to
> a Jeffrey Juris interview, and I'm very interested in the
> discussionn here.
>
> I am also in agreement with Morlock's analysis, as harsh and
> condescending as the tone may have been.
>
> I have some disagreements with Evan's points though:
>
> Quoth Evan Buswell:
> > On the internet, the main problem is not actually encryption,
> > silencing, it is trust. We can't see each other; we have little
> > tangible physical relationship. Nobody can be sure whether their
> > messages are consistently going to the same place or not. If that
> > problem is not solved, then encryption is just ensuring that no other
> > government agents are intercepting the communication between you and
> > the government agent that, unbeknown to you, you are speaking to,
> > and is in turn speaking to somebody else on your behalf. This is the
> > certificate hell that all internet security has entered into. For the
> > company I worked for, that issue boiled down to everyone trusting the
> > service providing company to sort out the identity of everybody else.
> > And of course, the more completely the problem is solved, the more
> > complete control over everything that one company has, with the limit
> > being just about the same hypothetical vulnerability that everyone
> > else has sending it all in the clear and trusting the ISPs forwarding
> > the packets not to legally or illegally be monitoring packet flow.
>
> There are a host of schemes to prevent Man In The Middle attacks;
> see OpenPGP signing or ZRTP for example.
>
> And the trust issue is been addressed by 'web of trust' models, as
> practised with OpenPGP, or Freenet. No centralisation needed. At
> all.  (though voluntarily some centralised services can be used, for
> convenience, e.g. OpenPGP keyservers).

MITM attacks are only prevented by proper trust based on certificates.
That was my point, though I see now how that may not have been
underlined in my (probably too negative) text.

OpenPGP/various "web of trust" models are all great stuff to bring up,
as the centralized model is certainly not the only one.  But one only
has to look at such things as "key signing parties" to realize that
this is a social solution, not a purely technological one.
Definitely, though, my larger point is not that there's nothing we can
do, but that our lack of a widespread solution is for reasons other
than laziness.  Establishing trust is a social phenomenon.  We have no
agreed-upon encoded representation of that phenomenon because the
interface between our internet and non-internet practice of trust and
identity is complicated.

Freenet gives semi-anonymity with semi-trust.  You know that a key
continues to belong to who it first belonged to, but not much else.
If you crack one message source, you know all the messages which that
author published and the person effectively loses their "anonymous"
identity.  Freenet's (and other's) idea of anonymous-but-establishable
identity is really interesting, but I hope it is apparent the way that
idea radically differs from our everyday ideas about what it means to
be anonymous or identifiable.

Again, I don't want to imply by any of this either that there are not
already solutions one could use or that better solutions cannot be
found, just that there are much more complicated things involved.  I
think some Freenet-like model is fantastic, but right now it's only a
special solution (for both social and technical reasons), and as such
not available in public places like internet cafes, from which a lot
of activists end up posting their messages.  Note also that the
practice of posting in a cafe in most cases solves the problem of
anonymity better than technology and without any sort of technical
solution backing it.

> > Which brings me to the second point: anonymity is a very different
> > problem than encryption. The messages being posted from Iran are
> > public, by design. Because all IP records both source and destination
> > address, in the absence of random message delays, all that the Iranian
> > government has to do is monitor packet flow and correlate that with
> > the times when suspicious messages publicly appear. It doesn't
> > actually have to read anything that those packets contain. I have no
> > idea what "deep packet analysis" is supposed to mean, but I would
> > imagine that the analysis I'm talking about here is all Iran is doing.
> > It seems like probably all they need to do.
>
> Again, isn't this solved by using web of trust, associated to an
> identity which is different to one which could readily incriminate
> 'the real' you?

Not really.  That part only establishes a fictional identity, it
doesn't de-link it from your real one.  Encryption isn't really
required since these are not secret messages.  Freenet (for example),
I think does this by things like packet delay and random peer-to-peer
forwarding and all sorts of other stuff that works really hard to
protect the user's identity, but also vastly degrades the performance
of the network.  You can forget about real-time updates and
broadcasts---though the delay doesn't have to be huge.  Plus, any
packet-forwarding anonymizer's strength (and usually performance) is
always going to be proportional to the number of people using it who
can't be eliminated as suspects, which is again, a social problem that
isn't so much about the laziness of a subversive person as it is about
the apathy of those not engaged in any subversive messaging
themselves.

> And deep packet inspection/analysis is looking inside an IP packet
> at the content, e.g. if a series of HTTP packets contained a video,
> it could be fingerprinted and compared against a database of
> 'forbidden' content, and the stream could be closed by a hostile
> ISP.

Gotcha.  Then this is more about blocking information than identifying
its source?  Yeah, any cipher should bypass most of that (including
https), even with government-known keys, just due to the extra
computational load.

I guess overall, I do appreciate a solutions-oriented rather than an
absolutely-shocked response to all this; that point is well-taken.
But we can only really get on the path to creating solutions when we
acknowledge the complexity of how all of this works.  We're talking
about trust and identity, stuff like the scarlet pimpernel or batman
with masks and dual identities and sabotaged expectations and creating
secret spaces for whispering and riding around in random directions on
bicycles with morse code transmitters wired to pre-taped codes, not
just uncomfortably twiddling with bits.

> I'll be interested to hear what others on the list have to say.
>
> Nick White
>
> --
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