Anyone want to go conspiracy theory with me and wonder if some government agency wants more power to go after groups like anonymous and wikileaks and so are doing this themselves to get both people and the rest of government on board to give them more broad and exciting new powers (at our expense) to go after the real groups?
I keep hearing this conspiracy theory pop up in almost every thread both here and on reddit about lulzsec's activities.
Can somebody give me a "worst case" scenario for a government crackdown on the internet?
What's to stop me from running tor? From VPNing out of the country myself? How would this alleged crackdown affect me?
And are you all new to the internet? Hacker groups like this have been around since...ever. I will admit that their publicity seems to have been waning in the last 5-6 years, but we're not really seeing anything new here. The only new thing about it is that this time it's happening on twitter.
This isn't a government cover-up. This isn't a conspiracy. It's one or several nerds doing what most nerds love to do: cause trouble. It's just that this time, it's happening on a much more public forum.
What's to stop you? the government making it illegal to run hacking tools like "tor" (see the silk road/bitcoin post on HN from earlier) etc illegal and forcing your ISP to record any use of such and block you off the internet (see france's 3 strikes, you as a person are not allowed on the internet law) and report you and then possibly criminally prosecute you as well.
>the government making it illegal to run hacking tools like "tor"
Do you think that there is nothing illegal that happens on the internet now? How long was it illegal to export encryption? How many people actually cared?
>forcing your ISP to record any use of such and block you off the internet
The encryption standards that we all use are the same encryption standards that are recommended by the NSA. Unless my ISP knows something that the rest of the world doesn't, it's functionally impossible for them to see what I'm doing if I'm either using tor, or tunneling out of the country on the back of a VPN.
Tor was invented by the NSA, by the way, for exactly this purpose.
Look at what Iran/Egypt/etc have done to try and crack down on internet usage. Or even China. Look at how successful that has been.
Taking Egypt as an example, their attempt was technically pretty successful. The problem that government had was political, and that was because it was a dictator enforcing it on his people without being able to convince the people that it was the right thing to do.
If the US Government were to bring it in as anti-terrorism laws, while some people wouldn't like it, it wouldn't cause riots on the streets and firefights between the army and the citizens.
Will the US try and do this? I doubt it. If they tried, would political opposition prevent them from getting it done? I think and hope so. But the point is that if it did happen, it wouldn't happen in the same way as Egypt, and so wouldn't face the same reaction. In Egypt, action preceded debate. In the US, if it ever happened, by that time the chance to prevent it would have been lost.
Depends on your definition of successful. But I consider it a failure for the people (in the case of China) when the government has a list of people they consider dissidents and when those middle eastern rebellions kicked off they just preemptively arrested them all. I don't know how that list was generated, but if tor usage was enough to get you on well then...
Yes tor was made to hide what you are doing, but if using tor alone is enough to cast suspicion or guilt on you then what?
Actually, Paul Syverson, Roger Dingledine, and Nick Mathewson orginated Tor, and Dr Syverson did the original onion routing work at the Naval Research Lab.
I don't recall seeing "NSA" anywhere on any their resumes, in their papers, etc.
Syverson has made it pretty clear Tor is not so good for serious security, eg, trying to evade nation-states. Evading nation-states is what PGP is for. Fundamentally, if you want a pizza, the pizza delivery guy has to know your address, no matter how many intermediate stops he makes. Also, have you used Tor? Speed is a major issue.
Actually, I'll admit that I can't either. I may be wrong about this, and it may have just been a rumor that sounded about right (NSA has made several contributions to the cryptography community)
Discuss secure coding techniques, perform security analysis on software (and closed-source services with bug bounty programs!), make sure your own projects/products are secure, and generally just keep security -- not just attacks -- in the limelight.
