Fucking governemt. Meh, if they wanna see my emails to other furs they can help themselves, nothing but extreme gay porn in them anyways. *Evil grin*

Well isn't that just peachy.... :(

yay, our country is going to shit

One thing I just don't understand is why should we worry? That the government is going to read some murry purry notes somebody traded over FA, hav a look at how much you earned from commissions on Paypal or know that you had to get treated for asthma a while back?
Why, why in hell would that matter? If you've nothing illicit to hide, you've not reason to be pissed. It's not like they deliberately allocate time to stalk innocent people.
[you isn't directed anywhere specifically]

Its much more than that, lets say you get your computer from a tech company, and it has a backdoor in it. That way the government can take whatever files they want, delete whatever files they want, and screw you up. Btw, the NSA tried to stop this bit of informationg etting out, pleading with the guardian and new york times to NOT post this story...

WHY would the government EVER do that? It serves them no purpose. They're not some evil overlord organization that exists solely to fuck our internet existence.

Basically i just explained it in a way thats more relatable to you. Basically theyve been infiltrating companies in this latest bit of news, and destroyed products intentionally, which is in turn corporate espionage. Another thing that comes our from this is this bit here.

Among other things, the program is designed to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems". These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as "adversaries".

"These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through Sigint collection … with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact."

I am pretty sure the NSA doesn't consider every single civilian to be an "adversary". You're twisting words.

Eh maybe you are right but at this point I don't even know what to think. My apologies for seeming rude though Rooth... Its just at this point there are a lot of options you can't rule out.

It's fine. It's a worthy topic to get upset about, we just have to be careful not to sound extremist such as by that kinda word-play, or else the valid core of the message will be lost on people who might otherwise pay it some heed.

Well when the last leak happened, people were saying that the governments already got access to everything and people blew them off from what I know. And now theyre right. It makes you think how many other conspiracies are right. And I promise you, I have no intention to sound extremist. The best thing I think I can do to inform others on the topic, especially around where I'm at now is to Explain it like I'm Five. XD I know that sounds crazy but I honestly think its the best way for people to get their thoughts around a topic.

I LOLed at that last bit. ;)

Here's another question, then: IF the government really does have unfettered access to all this information, and has been collecting it for years and years, and we're only just now becoming aware of it ... how would we judge the government's handling of that information, in hindsight? Have they oppressed us? Have they turned into thought police? Some would say they have .. but most wouldn't.

The problem with giving any entity that much power, no matter how responsible they may really be, is that it will eventually corrupt that entity and turn them from the best intentions.

I honestly dont know what will happen. There are too many variables for me to look into anyway to form a proper consensus... Damn i sound like a machine... ._. What do you honestly think though Rooth that if we could do anything to take back our future, so to speak, what would happen? Again I feel like im sounding crazy, but I feel like we have fallen into a sort of police state but people around the world are starting to fight back so to speak. Im just unsure of what to do.

The company infiltration is bad but doesn't sound like anything the FUCKING GOVERNMENT would do towards the HARM of general population.
It's all to find those who DO have something to hide...

The thing is, there could have been products that benefited the consumer kagi... if those products were destroyed by the government then thats harming the general population. Also have you noticed how the government is reacting towards everything??? We didnt do this, *leak*, well we did this but we did it a little, *leak* okay we did it a lot but we didnt do it this way. *leak* well we did it this way but...

The government is constantly lying about what its doing. The people want answers at this point...

They wouldn't do that to products that benefited the consumer. Unless it's a shitty government, a really shitty one.
They're lying for a reason.
The government isn't the enemy.

It isn't a matter of "I've done nothing wrong, I've got nothing to hide, so go ahead and look at all my data all you like". It's an invasion of privacy, where privacy was advertised and expected to be absolute. In our Constitution, we have a right to privacy from the government, who must go through special approvals in order to invade that privacy even if they're doing it covertly. When that protection breaks down, we begin to drift into a Police State, where the government goes beyond their role of protecting civilians and begins controlling civilians.

The expectation of privacy is also very important for business and financial transactions, medical records and prescription drug use, not to mention for the protection of government communications themselves. If the technology by which they do this encryption gets into the wrong hands, or if the data they have collected is leaked to the wrong people, all hell will break loose. Hell, we flip out every time some jerk hacks into a bank and steals credit card numbers, and/or they steal our money. That's just a drop in the bucket of privacy violation compared to what the government says it is doing.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

Okay yeah, but past the legal stuff, just going on simple person-to-person basis, how would it affect you negatively if the government took a look at your stuff?

The simple answer is: I would feel as violated by the government ransacking my house without invitation as I would if it were a friend, stranger, criminal, neighbor, or a family member. This is my life. Nothing that could be found in my house would ruin me if found, but I expect my house to be personal space, and people should ask me before ransacking it. If came home to a ransacked house, I wouldn't be worried about what they found really, but I would be worried about what they took. I couldn't easily tell what was lost (or copied!). The same holds for anything I assume to be secure and private, such as the encrypted communications I'm having with friends, businesses, or websites like this one.

They're not ransacking your house. They're just taking a look. Coming inside, looking at your expensive antiques, then leaving.

Without a trace, and without permission. You're ok with that? Is it ok if I do that, or only the government?

It's not ok if you do that, but it's ok if the government does that because I KNOW they have no ill intentions. The government doesn't exist to pick on random people.

Then why do they need to monitor random people?

They don't. You're thinking "we can monitor random people" means "we ARE monitoring random people".

When the line between "can" and "are" is no longer separated by an oversight board or other 3rd party approval, the difference between "can" and "are" is moot. (And for the record, this is the month the data center in Utah that records all your personal information that you're so not worried about will go online (ref)). They no longer need a valid reason to flip the bit from 'can' to 'are' and choose to monitor any particular person or group of people - it could just be the color of their skin, or the religion they follow, or the hobbies they enjoy.

And that's just wrong.

We shouldn't be monitored 24x7 by people we don't even know. It doesn't even need to be more complex than that. But even if that's not enough reason, let's explore the various kinds of fundamental privacy we enjoy but don't often think about or take for granted:

*) Would you be okay with the government putting a camera in your house?

*) Would you be okay with the government listening to every phone conversation you have?

*) Would you be okay with the government knowing whether or not you (or a female you're close to) are taking birth control pills and when your next period's gonna be?

*) Would you be okay with the government knowing what you look like naked?

Now replace the word 'government' with 'criminal', 'stranger', 'neighbor', 'employer', and 'parents'. Because all it takes is one disgruntled employee like Eric Snowden to take that information the government has and make it accessible to the people you don't want having it (like me ^_^). I'm not comfortable with any of those possible outcomes, so I really don't want them having that information in the first place.

You might say: "but they're not putting cameras in our houses, that's just silly; they're just decrypting our web communications, and recording who we're making phone calls to and when, but not the actual phone conversations themselves." True, but 10 years ago they weren't decrypting our encrypted communications. 10 years before that they didn't know who we were calling and when and why, or what medications we were taking. These things weren't very well centralized. Now they are. So 10 years from now, maybe they will be peeking into our houses without us knowing. Maybe they will be recording every phone conversation. What will they do with that information? Well, hopefully nothing, 'cause we're all law-abiding citizens, and they're all good people in the government, right? But even if we trust them with all that (that's a big if!), what about the people it could accidentally leak out to? What about some disgruntled government employee who has a bone to pick with the world? Or with furries? Or with me specifically?

For me, I don't want strangers knowing what products I buy, what my hobbies are, what anime I'm watching, what my friend and I are fighting about in email, what my sleep schedule is, what family dramas are unfolding, whether I'm thinking about switching jobs, what my financial passwords are, what kind of massages I like, what my identity codewords are, what my PayPal password is, what my social security # is, .... all of this is easily discerned if the 's' in https becomes moot. Yes, some commercial entities know some of this data (but not all of it), and yes, internet sites are hacked all the time and little bits of this information leak out occasionally or be abused by evildoers. But that's different than all of this information leaking out simultaneously, which is basically what's happening with the government decrypting all this data and storing it somewhere for 'safe keeping'.

Think about the many things you transmit over secure channels, such as anything with 'https' at the front. Now imagine that getting into the wrong hands. That's what we're talking about. If you don't want it escaping into the wrong hands, you should resist it being collected on such a massive scale in the first place.

Point is, it doesn't have to be something you've done wrong, or bad, or illegal that you want to cover up. It could simply be embarrassing, irrelevant, inconvenient if discovered (like a password!), or just "none of your business" kinda things that you'd prefer to keep to yourself and your loved ones. No single entity should have so much knowledge about you except you, and the people you trust. If you trust every single person who works for the government to know all this information that you exchange with friends and businesses and keep it secure, then you're right, there's no reason to protect this myth we call "privacy". If you've never kept a single secret in your life, then you also have no reason to worry about all your web activity being monitored (or other things like cameras, which will inevitably follow if we just roll over every time the government chips away at our privacy).

(PS - I didn't really mention it, but the potential for rampant identity theft is immense, and in today's society, our identity is extremely important to how we live day-to-day .. arguably more important than who we're calling or what we like to do with our time)

Wow chill.
Government people just don't get paid to stalk you, ok?

Ignore that one too, I'll simplify it even further:

Are you saying that it's ok for the government to collect as much data as it wants on you, so long as it doesn't look at that data?

If the data was anonymous, I wouldn't care.

On that I agree. Though of course, the government's data is not anonymous. That would defeat the purpose of collecting it, in their case.

Anonymous unless demanded not to be, which requires human interaction.

I don't think I follow. The government is run by humans, last I checked. O.o

But government empoyees don't manually select each computer and extract info

But your data is not stored anonymously. It's swept and scanned regularly, along with all the other data, looking for 'bad stuff', which they get to define for themselves and which may or may not be approved by your representatives, and therefore may or may not be approved by those they represent (you and me).

The sheer act of collecting it without approval is an intrusion on your privacy. Whether a human flips through your files daily, or a computer does it, doesn't make a difference.

Bah
I'm tired of this

Added tangential thought -- this is a democratic country. Despite the guarantees of the Constitution, and despite the arguments I'm making here, if you genuinely feel this level of nationa-scale monitoring is okay, you're perfectly within your rights to vote that way. I might disagree with your point of view, but I respect your POV and when it comes to the voting box, your POV carries the same weight as mine. If 66% of the country somehow decided to pass a Constitutional amendment adding an 'exception' clause for the NSA, then that's the world we'll be living in. But there's enormous resistance to that across the country, and what I've been attempting to do here is to elaborate on why, for the benefit of you *and* the readers of this journal.

I want to be clear: I'm not picking on you, I'm not upset with you or judging of you. You're asking the right questions and making cases in the right way to draw contrast on this issue.

I found this link in the comments. https://optin.stopwatching.us/

Your thoughts?

Nixon you fucking asshole.

Well I wouldnt say it was Nixon, Nixon was a liar and a scumbag according to history, and if you read All the Presidents Men. This however started during the Reagan years and got worse and worse over time.

I've been reading a lot about Nixon lately, which is precisely why I pinned this kind of chicanery straight to him.

Reagan's no saint, either, but this really got ugly with Nixon and just snowballed from there.

most encryption programs are now null and useless.
They still serve to protect us from everyone but the government. At least until the 'adversaries' (or anyone really) get a hold of this technology or data. Then you'll be right.

It'll be interesting to see where this drives cryptology technology. There's already been some fascinating research on the use of quantum computers to do on-the-fly decryption far beyond what even the NSA is capable of. Really it's only a matter of time before 256-bit AES is as useless as you state. Heck, the encryption we were using 10 years ago is already useless .. will we reach a point where the march toward 'unbreakable' consumer-grade encryption is matched or overtaken by the march toward consumer-grade technology to defeat it?

I'm uh... not sure, i dont know tech speak so well XD I just read that Toshiba has recently added quantum cryptology to their systems making it way harder to stop the NSA, but its all about implementation. However... the government has been way ahead any of us in terms of technology but most of our politicians just don't seem to understand it... I sincerely apologize for seeming rude or whatnot, I just really think at this point we have lost all our rights to privacy and now we just need to do something. I also have a feeling something big is coming in the next decade. I'm not sure what.

<5> I'm a fan of big! </5> ;)

Toshiba has quantum cryptography available to consumers? Really? O.o

One moment. http://qz.com/121143/toshiba-has-in.....nsa-cant-hack/

I read through the article, it seems good but the title may be a bit sensationalist...

Very interesting! $50k a link is totally affordable for big companies.

I didn't realize they were that far along already. 64 end users is probably just the beginning. Hell, the infant Internet was only able to have something like 16 nodes, and started out with just 4 (although they were in geographically different parts of the US). I'm sure this quantum thing will grow pretty rapidly just from demand that the NSA leak caused (ooo, could there be a conspiratorial connection? Quick, dig up all the NSA employees who are making tons of money on Toshiba stock! *grin*)

The thing is, even if the data can't be intercepted without detection, the interception detectors (and the receivers themselves, and the transmitter that encrypts the data) need to be bullet-proof or they'll be the targets of attack. I once saw a seminar TEN YEARS AGO describing how VPNs can be infiltrated without detection (Virtual Private Network -- a very similar concept with more rudimentary technology designed to detect when the signal is being intercepted or tampered with). I'm holding out for a counter-article from some hacker martial artist describing how easy it would be to get the data in transit.

Or put another way: anytime some claim comes out saying "doing X is impossible", it's later shown to be possible. Case in point: teleportation.

Sorry for all that babble with no point.

I think the point I'm trying to make is something you've also touched on: absolute privacy is a myth. When you live in a community, you give up some degree of privacy in exchange for some greater good. Franklin would say that giving some up for the sake of safety isn't good enough. What his quote didn't cover (though his books might) was that there may be other elements to the calculus that does make the small sacrifice better overall. Perhaps it's just an improvement in convenience, or efficiency, or life expectancy, or clearer communication, or better entertainment (?!), but ... it can add up and make for less-than-absolute privacy becoming more tolerable.

Damn dude you really are a smart individual! ^.^ I honestly dont know what to think, but i can see what you mean about having less than absolute privacy. It is true we give up some privacy to function in society, but what the NSA is doing is a whole different level. We have the choice as individuals to give up some information if we want to, especially with those we care about, but we do that for ourselves. What the NSA has done is its practically went through your backdoor, stole your information and is now using for some means that I'm unsure about. The human will is usually about choices right? So what happens when those choices are taken from us?

I'm probably not making sense, I'm just trying to explain it in the best way I can and I'm sorry that I'm not good at explaining things even though I have a grasp on whats being talked about and have good knowledge on whats going on. I really hope I'm not sounding weird... ^^;

aww Ive never thought of you as spreading fear :3
you just like informing people but worry you scare people :3
thats a good thing so dont be upset about it :D