Lawful for cops to hack into your computer/phone

Strider590

Mr_Toad wrote: »

Except funding wasn't removed.

The US Govt. still funds it, up until 2012 it fundeded 80% of the project, I have no idea if this is still true but they are still involved as far as I know.

And while one government agency is funding the project and hailing it as a great freedom for the poeople another government funded ageny, the NSA, see it as a huge problem to it's goals and would love to shut it down but that's democracy in action, checks and balances.

It's a great freedom for people in countries where censorship has gone mad, but it still comes down to controlling freedom of information, knowledge is power and if you can't control what people think, you can't control the people.

The security aspect is something else entirely, there are many other ways that terrorists (for example) could pass around information, but Tor is the one that's most acessible to the general public, because it's free.

The media is more than happy to assist in attacking it, they've got a lot to gain from being the nations ONLY source of information.
Remember how they used to attack the internet itself? On a regular basis, trying to instil fear and paranoia into the public.
Some young lady gets murdered on a night out, it's just about news worthy, another young lady gets murdered after arranging a date over the internet and suddenly it's front page news.

tronator

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

I'll bet you will change your attitude quite rapidly when it is YOU or your family or your children caught up in some terrorist incident.

FUD

http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

Lumstorm

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

I'll bet you will change your attitude quite rapidly when it is YOU or your family or your children caught up in some terrorist incident.

I bet you might change your mind when your details get stolen by a bad guy using the back door put in for Cameron.

The problem with government back doors put into secure networks is that they are no longer secure and the back doors will by used by others.

There is also the issue of Cameron's "!!!!!! Filter" seems a good idea in principle to protect the children but its less about that and more about censorship.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/03/david-cameron-internet-!!!!!!-filter-censorship-creep

Thankfully I'm on Virginmedia which doesn't seem to have implemented the !!!!!! filter and doesn't have much Censorship yet apart from the various torrent sites.

Nasqueron

Lumstorm wrote: »

Thankfully I'm on Virginmedia which doesn't seem to have implemented the !!!!!! filter and doesn't have much Censorship yet apart from the various torrent sites.

They have sort of done it, I got the page up a while back, said basically no I don't want my internet censoring, it took me to the account details page (gf pays that bill and I don't have the details) so I just closed the page and never seen anything since lol

ChiefGrasscutter

Lumstorm wrote: »

I bet you might change your mind when your details get stolen by a bad guy using the back door put in for Cameron.

Well I hardly think the risk of having my details stolen in such a way compares to a friend of mine being blown up and killed by the IRA all those years ago, when such ability (had modern computers then existed) by the Security Services to intercept all communications might have prevented it.
Occassionally I see his pictures in papers/web etc - and while the rest of us have got on with our lives and got older his picture always remains the same........
I shall not be making any further contributions

paddyrg

I wonder how many TOR entry or exit nodes are still in the control of the US Navy? You cannot have perfect privacy online (Ross Ulbricht is probably regretting his mistakes, but even in a perfect world). You can have encryption that is very difficult to break, but not perfect. If someone with resources wants to spy on you, they will find a way. Computer networks are so, so complicated there are so many points of weakness.

If you want prefect encryption, you need a one time pad system, which requires an upfront key exchange via a secret, trusted route. If you haven't done this, all you have is difficult to break, not impossible to break encryption. You haven't done this with each website you communicate with, so your privacy is not absolute anyway.

Email is staggeringly leaky, it's plaintext hopping from one server to the next, any of which may keep a copy.

VPN? By all means, but all you do is push the problem further down the line, the traffic still emerges or the VPN company themselves may be effective aggregators for suspect traffic and provide a free tier of service precisely because Big Brother is bankrolling them...

Encryption is really hard to get right. Really hard. Only a fool rolls their own (2ROT-13 must be twice as secure as ROT-13, right?) and many schemes, libraries and implementations have been demonstrably flawed. The smart route is to assume all your internet activity is being snooped, and behaving accordingly. Know most spooks won't care about your one-handed reading material, but if they did, they'd already have access one way or another to some extent.

Mr_Toad

I'm not sure the US Navy control any of it.

The premise behind TOR, as far as I remember, was to enable the US agencies to move away from secure, and therefore targeted, networks and subnets and give them the ability to anonymize and hide their traffic in the background noise and chatter of all the other TOR users which was the main reason for releasing it into the wild.

It doesn't work if you're the only user but the downside and irony is that you and your adversaries end up sharing the same network along with the genuinely persecuted political and religious groups. An added bonus is that the paranoid, the private and baco foil bonnet brigade add to the noise which helps everyone.

RumRat

Those at the extreme right and left have always run information gathering systems. Usually started as not affecting the ordinary law abiding citizen, enabling the Governments to sleep walk the citizens into acceptance. It didn't take long for all citizens to be spied on.
Imagine what the Stasi or the SS could have achieved with this law. Those who think that this Government is benign at the moment (and I have my doubts), may not worry, or, think it's for their benefit, however, they should remember that the Nazis were elected. The Jews were given Stars and herded into ghettos for their own protection.
Being against this law should be a no brainer for anyone with so called 'British Values', but, of course, those are also a myth...

tronator

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

Well I hardly think the risk of having my details stolen in such a way compares to a friend of mine being blown up and killed by the IRA all those years ago, when such ability (had modern computers then existed) by the Security Services to intercept all communications might have prevented it.

As tragic as this event was, a magnitude more people get killed by other causes like car accidents etc. So let's ban all cars? There is no 100% security in life.

Also, you think that adding more hay when the "Secret Services" are trying to find the needle in the haystack will help? In most cases the terrorists are already known to the secret services[1], yet they fail to prevent the attacks.

Also, I have nothing against filtering tools provided by the ISP, but it should be an OPT-IN. I also fail to see how this helps against child abuse like many organisations claim. It's like me seeing someone beaten up on the street and my solution is to look away. These filters open the door to censorship if they are enabled by default and who knows what websites are already on them...

__________________________
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lee_Rigby#Attackers_and_other_suspects

esuhl

Did someone say "censorship"...?

A plan by the home secretary to introduce counter-extremism powers to vet British broadcasters’ programmes before they are transmitted has been attacked in the bluntest terms as a threat to freedom of speech by one of her own Conservative cabinet colleagues...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/21/mays-plan-to-censor-tv-programmes-condemned-by-tory-cabinet-colleague