Russian spyboss brands Tor a crook's paradise, demands a total ban Russia's spybosses are contemplating blocking access to the Tor network and similar privacy tools that try to prevent netizens from being traced online. The proposal - pushed by Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (the FSB) - sets out a clampdown on technologies top spooks branded tools for "weapon traffickers, …
What sort of world are they going to inherit? one where free speech is seen as 'the enemy'?
Ok, so some people use TOR for bad things, but cars aren't banned because some drivers have accidents, (or even 'deliberates'), it's the people that are 'bad', not the technology.
ttfn
"....but cars aren't banned because some drivers have accidents....." But driving is a very good example - laws, speed limits and licenses were all brought in to control the roads. With current levels of lawlessness on the Web it is only a matter of time before more and more controls are brought in.
"....Exactly how many speed limits have a scientific basis?...." I assume you are not from the UK, otherwise you would know a lot of scientific thought went into our speed limits. In particular, our urban speed limit of 30mph is based on calculations of reaction time and stopping distance, and is not an arbitrary figure pulled out of thin air. It's one of the reasons we have much lower per-capita road deaths than places like Germany or the US.
As to all the people posting about how they want the Internet to be "free", all they do is remind me of the a$$h0les you see bombing down the motorway in their poorly and often illegally souped-up imitation GTis, cutting people up and generally being just accidents in waiting. As a road user with years of driving experience I look at them with sad resignation and just hope they manage to live long enough to learn how to drive properly.
/stop sign, obviously.
Child molesters use lots of things -- cars, plumbing, money, etc. They can move from place to place. Nobody would suggest we lock everybody up in their homes (yet). The cure to the problem of child molesters does not reside in removing all rights from everyone.
Secure communication is absolutely necessary for freedom.
You don't actually think that Russian spybosses really care about child molesters, right?
The goal is to suppress political dissidents. Pedophiles are just a convenient justification, since everyone hates pedophiles and don't want to be seen defending them.
Opposing free speech and imprisoning dissidents is par for the course. It is much more troubling that the west is moving in the same direction.
On a positive note, moves to outlaw TOR suggests that it still works, despite recent reports that TOR could be spied upon.
Let's not get carried away, hmm ? The United States has seriously tarnished its Medal of Freedom, that is true and a stain of shame that will take a long time to remove.
But in the US you can still criticize your government without having a black van show up in the middle of the night to knock your door down and take you away for extended "leave" without explanation.
So let's refrain from comparing Russia to a "freaking paradise" compared to the US. The US is still better, but it's on a damn slippery slope.
Going down.
"But in the US you can still criticize your government without having a black van show up in the middle of the night to knock your door down and take you away for extended "leave" without explanation."
Depends how you criticize them. They have a tendency to clamp down on freedom of expression through controlled explosions.
>But in the US you can still criticize your government without having a black van show up in the middle of the night to knock your door down and take you away for extended "leave" without explanation.
That might be so but you just try to buy a pressure cooker and a backpack at the same time and see how long it takes for the black vans to arrive.
You are being monitored by the state and if you seriously think the government doesn't take note just because a black van doesn't show up when you crticise it then you need to be a liitle less patriotic.
It's always nice to read comments from the other side when one of the super powers does something. Let's see the US/NSA has just been exposed for bugging the UN and numerous embassies, not that we would have expected otherwise anyway but obviously that's to protect free speech. Russia no doubt would do the same but in that case you'd say it was an assault on free speech.
".....That might be so but you just try to buy a pressure cooker and a backpack at the same time and see how long it takes for the black vans to arrive....." I know an Indian Muslim contractor in Georgia that bought something called a "Green Egg", apparently it is the bee's knees of barbecue pressure cookers. He also does a lot of hiking and camping and bought a new rucksack during the same week. According to your paranoid delusions, he should have been long past the black van stage by now, but nothing happened.
"...,you need to be a liitle less patriotic...." You need to be a lot less tinfoil-attired and stop thinking Sandra Bernhard is anything more than just a comedienne.
Matt, I refer you to
Terror cops swoop on couple who Googled 'backpacks' and 'pressure cooker'
Chris W: see this little part of that same article:
"...source of the tip was not PRISM-style surveillance, but a tip from hubby's employer to the local Suffolk Police Department. The fine men and women of that department have confirmed the source of the tip."
The NSA or any 3 letter agency had fuck all to do with this. This is the same over-reaction bullshit that led people to believe the Boston attack was part of a larger terror plot. Ignore actual facts in front one's face because imagination is more fun (<-making fun of human nature, not Chris W).
<Yawn> Have you ever heard the phrase "one swallow does not a summer make"? By your count, the Eggtoberfest (http://www.biggreenegg.com/features/16th-annual-eggtoberfest/) should be raided by SWAT, but I'm betting it won't. My Muslim colleague is going so I'll be very aware of any such raid should it happen. But by then I bet you won't be willing to eat humble pie, you'll be happily bleating about something else.
Amusingly, Michele Catalano has blogged for the rather right-of-center PJ Media site (http://pjmedia.com/blog/author/michelecatalano/), but I bet you won't be shrieking that there is some conspiracy against right-wing bloggers.
Unless your gay
Say something bad about the government
Think something bad about Putin
But hey, if you like spending long, cold winters working 18+ hours in a slave labor camp then I would agree with you.
Get real, every government does what the USA does - the only difference is the degree and if there are open dialogs about it.
But anyone who lives in the USA thinks it is that bad then move. Maybe China, Russia, many South American countries, (especially if you are a women or gay) any middle east country or India. There list goes on..
As long as the entity you're avoiding doesn't control most of the nodes, and thus the chances of it having both the guard and exit nodes within its control is slim.
FSB only has Russia, and most nodes are in Western countries. So what works for the NSA, works against the FSB thus their "concerns".
You could ban the entire internet tomorrow, and I doubt it would have any effect on child molesters hanging around the local park.
It seems to me that Aleksandr Bortnikov is trying to treat a symptom rather than trying to treat the cause. ( If we assume that he is in earnest and he really does want to protect children )
Mainly because child molesters rarely hang around parks and tend to just molest their own children / close friends or family children.
So both closing parks and the internet would do little to stop child molestation. Now, a sure fire way to stop child molestation is to ban children from being born!
Paul,
I agree completely.
There is nothing black and white about the Internet, there is good and bad and grey in almost everything.
Good cannot exist without evil. Most terrorism is mental, not physical. The mental variety is is almost always "self imposed" as are it's negative effects on everyday life and society. This is exactly what the "terrorists" are trying to achieve.
The physical kind occurs far less often and is frequently unsuccessful. Also, It is almost always impossible to prevent. No amount of money or technology can stop determined individuals.
What I find most disingenuous are the comments that always use getting rid of a bad thing as an excuse to ban the good things. Even worse when these comments come from some government lackey who works for an agency that could NEVER be considered a reliable truthful source whether it be Russian, American, or British.
There is only one provable truth remaining. All politicians, government agencies and their employees are lying scum.
"Good cannot exist without evil."
Balderdash. Of course it can. This may be presumptuous, but I have a hunch what you really mean is a whole lot closer to "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." It's not at all the same thing.
In a post last week, (here) where there was a discussion about using Tor to evade interception of web browsing by Google, the NSA or anyone else, I made the following comment:
I notice that certain sections of the UK press have cottoned on to the use of the Tor network, and have labelled it "a tool of paedos".
It would not surprise me if we soon see calls for knee-jerk legislation to try and block anonymising services, VPNs and encryption software.
It appears I was partially correct, I just got the country wrong...
It has been happening in Europe too in a different way, although in that case it's credit card processors blocking access to payment systems to VPN providers.
<sarcasm>Of course the government would never lean on them to do something like that. Right?</sarcasm>
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/04/payment_block_swedish_vpns/
It's believed he ran an ISP that provided server nodes for the Tor network.
First I'd heard of it.
What Eric Eoin Marques is believed to have done as far as I know, is run a specialized web host for people who wanted hidden sites that are only accessible through the Tor network (hidden services).
We had 20ish years of a decent Internet where governments pretty much left stuff alone. Now they want their people back because they've noticed that without them they haven't got anything to do, and if they have nothing to do, somebody might point out the emperor has no clothes and suggest a smaller government.
Much better to make the Internet unusable unless you want to watch something with roughly the content value of the Teletubbies and accept it as collateral damage. At least if nobody's using the Internet they'll be out rioting or something and government will have a function.
"I'm surprised no government has taken the step of banning ALL encryption outside of state use. And then only vetting the ones for state use such that they're always with a random overseer."
That would be the US "Clipper" chip proposal.
If one were of a paranoid PoV the MS "Trusted Computing"* BS is another incarnation of this nonsense.
*As in your PC is "trusted" to not play any content we don't like.
I say "Light'em up", the real solution is to take the whole damn thing down and let the bastards get a taste of what they are asking for.
Only when they capitulate without any terms should the switch get turned back on.
300 million internet addicted crazed daughters ought to be able to whine them to death. "Oh Daddy, why did you have to block Tor? I'll never access my Facelessbook again"
I hear that it's possible to play with backbone router tables to that degree of effect.
Just to give a little perspective after some of the comments I have just read.
My wife is Russian, although she lives with me in Spain she is in touch daily with her family and friends in Russia and returns as often as she can. Having just asked her a few questions based on comments above, based on her answers I can say:
Criticising the government on the net or in the middle of Red Square is not a problem and will not get you a six o clock knock and a life long membership of a gulag, however being gay will get you no sympathy from either the population or the government which still has homosexuality (male) on the statute books as a crime.
One of the worst forms of child abuse ( if any is truly worse than another) is that children have in a number of occasions been abucted for organ harvesting but child abuse as a sex crime is also prevalent.
I am not certain if this is a kind of urban myth ( organ harvesting) or fact but it is a subject for discussion occasionally.
A problem is that there are no independent sources of news and information in Russia. They're all pre-censored by the Kremlin except the bloggers, and any bloggers who write about human rights abuses or corruption do get those late night visits (sometimes from the police, sometimes from ultranationalists with knives and iron pipes, depending on how much trouble they've caused).
So even though the russian population is aware that the government is corrupt and oppressive, it's not particularly well informed about the extent or details, and believe that most of the things it reads in newspapers/see on TV is approximately accurate.
On top of that, the soaring price of oil and gas has increased Russia's revenues 600% since Putin came to power, and that wealth is, in the mind of the public, compensating for the abuses and corruption.
I agree.
I am in daily contact with parts of the former Soviet Union, and regularly see Russian comedy, and yes I speak Russian.
Most of the information in English about Russia comes from Moscow based bloggers. While this is not a bad thing, some perspective has to be kept. If my only information about the UK was from The Guardian or the Torygraph I would have a very skewed view of the UK.
Also, the Muscovite is a stock character is comedy - someone who is effete and out of touch with the rest of the country. There is a reason for Putin's antics - they are popular in regional Russia.
But at the ILETS meetings (still continuing since the nineties), Russian SORM II guys meet & talk to UKUSA guys & gals, presumably Russian Federation are an MoU signatory, same as rest of EU/World. Any initiative from one member could either represent an STC / ILETS joint policy or a go-it-alone upset over another State Department needle - it's hard to know as ILETS deny being an organization, and publish no agenda, minutes nor annual reports - at least not in plaintext.
Colleagues are considering replacing the Tor honeypot with millions of WSPR HF mesh (NASA deep space digital comms protocols) that can run on a bareback raspberry Pi, for example, slow data but might meet the absolute need for a communication system that isn't covered by the current worldwide implemented Poindexter Total Information Awareness.
Governments / Security services are finally noticing that public perception of the Internet can be manipulated and skewed to suit their aims. I'm amazed MPAA didn't push the peado link with torrents harder. For those that weren't around, the us used to ban all exports of code with strong encryption, it turned into a farce when you had to agree to complicated legislature before downloading the latest web browser!!
I expect Mums net et al campaigning hard to have tor, BitTorrent and non crackable encryption banned, I'm sure Dave & Theresa will bend over backwards to accommodate them, even though they have no idea what the technology is about.
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