Is talking about our guns a good idea with big surveillance govt?

[Ed Ames]

While all this is true...

Our generation has also voted in the Clintons, the Obamas and supported the idiocies of the Algores. Our generation is seeing our embassies invaded and our fellow citizens killed yet still support those that provide the leadership for such atrocities to be possible. We weren't born at the signing of the 1934 act or the 1968 act or the Sullivan act so it's not our fault. Duly noted... what has our generation done to repeal them? And what is our excuse for the Patriot act?

I'm still outnumbered.

Ok, being serious, there are two problems.

1) The people who caused many of today's worst issues saw the public school system as a tool for social change, and have spent the last 100 years systematically coopting it for political indoctrination purposes. That is another thing the WW2s/Boomers failed to prevent, along with the drug war and many other crimes against liberty. If they hadn't been so credulous and asleep at the wheel the political views of those just attaining voting age would be less uniform and you wouldn't have one party trying to "rock the vote" (increase young voter turnout) while the other is afraid of young voters. You may not have had Clinton or Bush/Obama and you certainly couldn't say that younger voters put them in office.

2) The old people are still out there voting in huge numbers, relatively speaking. Even if issue 1 was not a factor, those old people would still be an overwhelming force against liberty. That won't change for another decade or two.

 

[Officers'Wife]

I see a number of my peers that have swallowed the public school animal by-product. I've taken them through a number of facts that show why they are misinformed. They still parrot the teachings even after being spoon fed the truth. Gawd has blessed us all with a natural curiosity, those that allow the curiosity to be stifled do so willingly and have no one to blame but themselves.

The "youth vote" (18-30) could swing any election if each member were to vote. All I hear from the ancients is voting for an independent is a "wasted" vote. Wrong, a vote for the independent that has a platform to my desires of government is a vote for an independent. The wasted votes are the votes for the 'lesser of two evils' or not voting at all.

 

[Certaindeaf]

I made a post regarding a .500 magnum and then got a pop-up about Viagra. you be the judge
Hard and troubling times indeed!

 

[jbrown50]

Is talking about our guns a good idea with big surveillance govt?

I've had this Top Secret SCI (and all of the caveats that come with it) security clearance since I was 20 years old. So I'm used to the prodding, picking, searching, questioning and tracking of my personnal activities, friends, relatives, neighbors, church family, etc.

Way back when my wife was my fiance I remember her and her mother, my future mother-in-law, telling me about how these guys with badges and creds came to visit them and question them about me. I then asked my mother-in-law if she felt better about me now. She then said no, but she now knows who to call to get me back in line in case I screw up

 

[Certaindeaf]

Anything can be contrived and or fabricated, once a soul is marked for the settling side of things. I heard back in Vietnam days an unknown was often offered a fish and rice to eat and if he went for the cheek meat he was executed. Here now it's a little more subtle. perhaps
But to keep this on track, guns are fun and handy.

 

[orsillac]

Is there a way to keep big brother from knowing?

As we have learned over the past few weeks, the US Government can and has been tracking our phone calls, e mails, on line searches and credit card purchases. So the question is how can we purchase on line and keep it private? Can we purchase a prepaid debit card with cash and use it to make on line purchases? I have heard that some on line retailers require that the card be registered and that to do so you must give your name and address to the card provider and use the same name and address as the billing address when making an on line purchase. Can one make up a name and address and use that same made up name and address as a billing name and address, but use your real name and address for shipping? And if you do, is it private? As far as private e mail and on line searching is concerned have a look at ixquick, firstpage, and hushmail. What do you use for surfing the web and e mail? Do you feel they are private?

 

[Certaindeaf]

I think if you finger your keyboard all pidgin/coded style you'll be OK. and talk like a Klingon on your telephone machine.
Granted, your ordered survival biscuits or tinfoil will be actual Pravda shoes but that's just a minor detail.. they are made of leather and probably have some nutritional value. you should be able to do whatever you want though. good luck. heh

 

[brickeyee]

You can't hide data... but you can bury the signal in noise.

steganography

One easy way is to hide the bits of a message in the lowest bits of the pixels of a photograph.

Looking at the picture as an image reveals nothing.

The penalty is you now have to move around a much larger file, and everyone that need access must understand WHERE the message bits are hidden.

Say the last bit of every 10th byte in the file.

If you then use even simple PRBS patterns to help randomize the bits it gets VERY hard to pull anything out.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

I made a post regarding a .500 magnum and then got a pop-up about Viagra. you be the judge.

Google "red corvette" and see what happens.

Jacques has trimmed his moustache.
The ladder is now in the shed.
AF has solved their water problem.

 

[Certaindeaf]

The flapjack is on the plate. whatever

 

[skoro]

I'm just thinking, with all the recent gun legislature that was passed around, the idea of universal background checks, registration, our surveillance society, the government taking our phone and Internet records etc.... Is it really a good idea, to be posting pictures of our sweet new tactical firearms on these forums? It seems like it just gives big brother more ammo to use against us if they actually start going in a confiscation direction.

I think they have bigger fish to fry than searching through THR.

 

[skoro]

Jacques has trimmed his moustache.
The ladder is now in the shed.
AF has solved their water problem.

Some good WWII references there...

 

[Ignition Override]

It's as if black helicopters were already preflighted, to be dispatched towards our neighborhoods? Now there Are lots of olive drab helicopters out there; we just taxied by an ANG or Army Reserve squadron of Blackhawks in Richmond VA (KRIC) a few days ago. Sometimes a helo crosses our area from nearby Millington, or on a cross-country from Ft. Campbell.

With the vital need to spot terrorist phone patterns, they have no interest in my SKS, Enfields or M-1 Garand etc, unless they get stolen by "persons of interest". Even an East German AK with mis-matched parts won't interest anybody (except you guys, who might offer half of the market price...).

"Capricorn One", "America Under Siege" "Conspiracy Theory" etc were only movies. Maybe we never landed on the moon.

 

[Officers'Wife]

You can't hide data... but you can bury the signal in noise.

If you are worried about it, go get an account at a few anti forums. Create a bunch of free email addresses. Have them send each other a ton of encrypted mail. Have some of them send mail to one group, others send mail to a totally unrelated group - create networks where none existed before. Let them wonder what shooters, expectant mothers, people discussing tourism in Yemen and fans of hairless cats have in common. BE that intersection point. We should work together to make a "dangerous profile of the week".

There was a guy a few years back who aimed to become the greatest grocery shopper the world had ever known. He posted the bar code from his shopping club card online for others to use. The marketers saw him buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of groceries nation wide. THAT is how you fight big brother.

Kind of the online equivalent of hiding from the thermal imaging drones by lighting a forest fire (but with fewer homeless baby squirrels).

BD, you are rude, crude and socially unacceptable with an evil and devious mind.


I like that in a person.

 

[wrs840]

All of your electronic data is being archived. The purpose is for algorithms to create an electronic portrait of you and flag if enough data creates hits, then it will possibly be reviewed by actual human beings. I like the white noise idea. Let's all dedicate an hour a week to post about our love for fertilizer-buying heavily-armed Jihadi Unicorns on LGBT web-boards.

 

[zxcvbob]

If you are worried about it, go get an account at a few anti forums. Create a bunch of free email addresses. Have them send each other a ton of encrypted mail. Have some of them send mail to one group, others send mail to a totally unrelated group - create networks where none existed before. Let them wonder what shooters, expectant mothers, people discussing tourism in Yemen and fans of hairless cats have in common. BE that intersection point. We should work together to make a "dangerous profile of the week".

There was a guy a few years back who aimed to become the greatest grocery shopper the world had ever known. He posted the bar code from his shopping club card online for others to use. The marketers saw him buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of groceries nation wide. THAT is how you fight big brother.

Kind of the online equivalent of hiding from the thermal imaging drones by lighting a forest fire...

That was beautiful! :')

 

[ApacheCoTodd]

I think they have bigger fish to fry than searching through THR.

I think being found out randomly to be a "gun nut" is less an issue than having the other side in either a criminal or civil court happen upon certain postings or photos in data mining after you are already being scrutinized in a case as either defendant, plaintiff or witness.

Look at the photos on Trevon Martin's phone that came up this week. Could just as well have been on a forum.

 

[bigalexe]

If you didn't think the government had been observing anything relevant to it's security for the past few decades you're a fool. For the length of my lifetime (25) everything always has been observed in some way or another if there's somebody that can benefit from it. Maybe it's not one person, organization or outfit doing all the observing but one way or another it's all there.

Another relevant point is that information can be fabricated. Lets say I paint my house the wrong color. Today there's enough technology and fabrication methods out there that the town sheriff who doesn't like me can make up a situation where I'm a drug dealer and have me sent away for 20 years or more. All because I painted my house the wrong color and he had too much spare time. Your true self is not a defense.

Lastly lets talk about realistic targets. In order for the government to be concerned with you then you need to be a pretty big target. Nobody on a level to challenge the US Gov't can be on that level without drawing attention of some sort. Start to draw the attention and get marked then you become a target. Additional measures can be put into place to do better monitoring on an individual level. Quite simply if you are potentially a problem you are going to get marked.

So overall let's review.
1.) Surveillance has always been there and it's nothing new.
2.) Real evidence is unimportant and pales relative to what can be fabricated
3.) Nobody can rise to a level to be a problem and stay under the radar

 

[VVelox]

As others have stated, if one stops they have won. To further expand upon this if one stops it means one less to the herd that makes the data that hard sort through.

Even with all or most of the internet backbone tapped, they can only make sense of a small amount and still then it is very problematic to do. Using meta data is fairly useless for the most part as a lot of the traffic goes similar locations. This means deep packet inspection must be done, which in becomes even more resource intensive. Not only that, but it requires putting that information together with other grabbed TCP sessions to have even the vaguest idea what is going on. To then go and build a model out of it becomes a task that is just so obscenely large as to be impossible. So unless they have a known target to watch, they really can't do much effectively or at all.

The phone stuff is where the real threat is as while it is large, it is something that can easily be processed and models built from. Now using any number of commercially available databases they can legally pull info from with out a warrant, they can put names and addresses to those numbers. Interception is also a lot easier here thanks to CALEA and the fact that phone calls a lot less complex than putting together multiple TCP sessions and UDP.

 

[Trent]

I disagree, it's actually pretty easy to filter out traffic to store.

They have that really BIG datacenter in Utah for a reason. And they've been busted putting line splitters on backbones to shunt traffic to their private network.

It's a pretty simple exercise to grab all e-mail, just grab all TCP port 25 (SMTP) and you get ALL e-mail travelling over the backbone, in clear text. Not encrypted; just store, index by to & from, and done. (We've written systems that do exactly this, for clients wishing to archive all company mail). After that it's simply a matter of querying the DB for keyword, or to/from, or source IP, or whatever.

Web traffic is similarly easy; watch port 80, grab HTTP post headers, and you get all forms submissions made.

HTTPS is trickier, but with the RDP exploit US-CERT sat on for 11 months before releasing, along with some of the other "held as offensive weapon" zero day exploits the Government was privvy to after Homeland Security took over CERT, plus some of what we saw with the US produced offensive cyber weapons (Flame, etc), we can be sure that any system on the planet that the US Government wanted to compromise WAS indeed compromised. Which means the PKI infrastructure has been compromised. Get the master private keys for Verisign, MS, etc, and you can form a man in the middle attack, or even reverse the SSL.

On the other end of this spectrum, across the big pond, is all the firmware burned to chips in China, that's part of consumer and business networking gear. We busted the Chinese putting kill codes in chips for our electric grid already; I have no doubt they've got backdoors in a LOT of networking gear hardware.

There is no such thing as privacy, anymore. And unless you A] run your own IPS system to monitor egress traffic, and B] keep your own private networks set up using only preshared keys, you are very, very vulnerable. And even if you do watch for unusual traffic you ASSUME that anything going over the wire is getting beam split.

I have private gigabit lines run between datacenters and I even encrypt THAT traffic. Why, if we're the only tenant? Because fiber can be split and you'll never know it.


Steer clear of 'dual use' (internal/external) keys, if you need to move data securely and don't trust the PKI infrastructure. (I don't).

 

[VVelox]

Right, to filter out traffic to store. This requires already having selected a target IP pair.

As far as HTTPS goes, it is secure as it requires active involvement, not just a tap. Basically you shove in a invisible proxy using a root wildcard cert signed by a recognized authority. This is also a PITA to do unless you have a target selected.

For doing any thing other than a small amount, the required processing power and disk IO speed just is not there yet for doing something like this on any more than a small amount of the traffic.

Yes, the NSA may be large, but 350 E. Cermak is either as larger or slightly smaller than it(depending on if you believe the 1M square feet or 1.5M square feet). The building goes through a ass load of traffic just it's self. That is just one building the NSA would have to watch. Based entirely on the square feet involved alone, the idea that they watch more than a small chunk at a time becomes a bit laughable.

 

[Ed Ames]

Right, to filter out traffic to store. This requires already having selected a target IP pair.

Filtering by known IPs is one way to slice it, but not the best way.

Another approach is to abstract the useful information. E.g. capturing which IPs are communicating, the nature of the traffic, and associated identity information if it can be recognized. It's still filtering in that you disregard the payload (unless it matches certain triggers), but it provides a lot of information for analysis. The sort of information we already know they are after.

That information can populate a graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory) to show relationships between individuals. If you use your cell phone (verizon records, to easily correlate personal identity for this discussion) web browser to connect to a web site frequented by Constitutionalists, and you also come here to THR, that envelope information will show THR posters/viewers in general as being proximal to known Constitutionalists. If you use your same THR login at home, that ties your identity to your home internet connection. If other THR members are going to the same web sites, that relationship will be perceived as stronger and we will all be suspected of harboring Constitutionalist tendencies. If some people here also visit American College of Pediatricians or JDL websites, that links Constitutionalists with known hate groups. Remember that these are also people who will count organizing and supplying a faux "attack" that involves 9 federal agents and one idiot who was too stupid to walk away OR be a real threat to anyone, and arresting the idiot, as stopping a terrorist attack. Being linked to a hate group is plenty of cause to justify deeper scrutiny.

This whole thing boils down to trust. It's hard to win, and easy to lose, and absolutely essential to a functioning social system. Families, businesses, cities, and great nations are all built first on trust. If the people don't trust each other to do right, trust the government not to be evil, trust their car not to explode...everything breaks down. The NSA, by actively lying to congress and everyone else, has thrown away a lot of trust. Elected politicians who side with the NSA on this are also throwing away trust. The more trust they destroy, the less there is holding society together. By creating bureaucracies of distrust they actively encourage distrustfulness in society. I think that the NSA practices, and the oversight and "leadership" that lead to those practices, are the single most destructive threat the USA faces today because they are corrosive to trust. I'm honestly not sure how much trust the USA can afford to lose but trust isn't infinite.

 

[Jacob L Freeman]

When you buy a gun from a dealer, it's already registered to you. When you buy private party, as those who value their right to privacy and freedom have a tendency to prefer, it's not. Know that the United States government has decided that it is above the law, which it can also change at any time in any way with or without your consent and has every ability to see anything posted on the internet.

If you don't mind the government knowing what you own or think, post away.
If you'd rather excercise your right to be unknown, keep it offline. The internet is the new town square.

 

[Trent]

Right, to filter out traffic to store. This requires already having selected a target IP pair.

No, it doesn't. Grab all port 25 traffic, period. Scan for keywords or phrases, and store what matches. Each of my 16 core Xeon boxes can do this on several hundred thousand messages every second. I've got 20 of those in a rack (w/ 2TB of RAM). Each node has 20GBPS storage array access, with multiple 24 drive RAID 6 arrays that can sustain write traffic of 20GBPS per array. Each rack I have is EASILY capable of monitoring 10x10GBPS internet lines for traffic, maybe more, since only a subset of the traffic needs to be monitored (port 25, but we also grab 53 TCP/UDP for DNS queries, port 21 FTP control sessions, and acks on 3389 and 1433 to detect egress logins on RDP and PPTP.)

As far as HTTPS goes, it is secure as it requires active involvement, not just a tap. Basically you shove in a invisible proxy using a root wildcard cert signed by a recognized authority. This is also a PITA to do unless you have a target selected.

And you don't think they have this capability for common targets like facebook, g-mail, etc? They KNOW what targets they want to tap in to. The only thing they need is the private key for the site, and the entire initial hashing conversation. We know they are adept at breaking in to servers; since taking over US-CERT they hold ALL of the zero-day fixes. Do you really think they can't get the private keys?

Hell, they held on to and abused the public RDP exploit offensively for *11 months* before passing it on to Microsoft, after the Chinese caught on and started hitting US servers with the exploit. Then, boom, we get an out of band update that was rushed to the market. The original report went to CERT almost a YEAR before CERT passed it to Microsoft that there was a vulnerability, and could prepare a hotfix. Why? Because the government wants to wage warfare offensively on the net. And they ARE, at the expense of security. CERT *USED* to be a good thing. Now it's just a tool for the government to collect zero-day exploits.

For doing any thing other than a small amount, the required processing power and disk IO speed just is not there yet for doing something like this on any more than a small amount of the traffic.

Not true. The processing capability I have in a single rack (640 XEON cores, 2TB of RAM, plus supporting storage servers) is more than adequate to monitor 10 entire OC192's of traffic.

And I don't have anywhere CLOSE to their budget or resources.

 

[Certaindeaf]

.Not true. The processing capability I have in a single rack (640 XEON cores, 2TB of RAM, plus supporting storage servers) is more than adequate to monitor 10 entire OC192's of traffic.

And I don't have anywhere CLOSE to their budget or resources.

Is that comparable to a cray (maybe those are obsolete now) supercomputer as big as a city block cubed?