Use Tor or 'extremist' Tails Linux? Congrats, you're on an NSA list Alleged leaked documents about the NSA's XKeyscore snooping software appear to show the paranoid agency is targeting Tor and Tails users, Linux Journal readers – and anyone else interested in online privacy. At the heart of the claims is this sample configuration file for the XKeyscore system. The top-secret documents were …
I'm on the list? Really?! 8-}
oh, dear me, what SHALL I do?! If it is the case that the NSA thinks all Linux users are suitable targets, then if they are any good at what they do, they will know that I've been using Linux for years, am not a terrorist, and thus I have nothing to worry about from them - except for the fact that they're a pack of foreigners spying on me, which I object to, and they happen to be doing so illegally which makes them criminals - so why not see if we can give them some grief over it? If the NSA don't know much about me, then they're incompetent, and again, I have nothing to worry about. Of course, they might get annoyed at my calling them a bunch of foreign criminals, but if they then start playing nasty, well.. - more ammo for those that remain, eh?
The thing is, if everyone stays quiet when evil is done, then evil doesn't get punished. Only if enough complain about it is there any chance of anything being done about it. And in my book, pervasive spying of the general populace by any governments agencies is an evil. Therefore, I will make my concerns known to my MP and MEP. If If no-one else does, doubtless nothing will happen. If large numbers do, perhaps something will be done - and perhaps not. All one can do is act according to one's conscience in an effort to try to improve things, no?
"Right - I'm contacting my MP and MEP."
Lot's of luck with that. I _know_ that the NSA doesn't care what _American_ politicians, you know, the ones who write the checks to run the thing, think. I suspect that the yapping of furriners simply will not register... except to tell them who to have a close look at next.
...the NSA doesn't care what _American_ politicians...
That's because they know whatever happens, *they* have jobs -- important ones, like defending the free world against the forces of evil, and stuff like that.
Unlike the poiliticians, who drift in and out of the government at the whim of the voters -- along with their investigations and reforms.
"Unlike the politicians, who drift in and out of the government at the whim of the voters -- along with their investigations and reforms."
Oh, if only! Presidents come and go, likewise Governors, but Federal and State Congress critters usually go on and on for decades, because the voters don't know who they are, and just vote red or blue.
Saddest part? Most Congress critters regularly swap party affiliation according to which is least on the shit-list, so when the voters "Vote out that @$#^ arsehole!", they're actually re-electing him!
> Right - I'm contacting my MP and MEP
I spent Wednesday evening in a pub sat next to my (likely) next MP. She kinda impressed me with her superpowers of "listening" and "comprehension".
Then I looked her up on the web and found that she's been caught out telling porkies on her website on a number of occasions. Plus ca change... :-(
Vic.
Dear Kiddies,
do not dispair...
There are no hidden files in Linux, or Unix. ;) There are such files that start with a dot, but they are not hidden, they are simply not shown when one runs 'ls'.
In most Linux installation there's this alias:
ll='ls -l' (sometimes / oftentimes followed by --color=auto)
In good (IMHO) installations you also have the alias 'l.' to show you those .* files only ;)
if you want it all just put alias la='ls -la' in your shell profile and away you go...
seriously, just running 'alias' at the prompt may indeed give you a number of life savers / keystroke savers that you weren't quite aware about...
Regards,
Guus
Disgusting. Beyond redemption, a cancer for any attempt to return to a semblance of a liberal society. Only deep cleaning will ever put us on the tracks of sanity again.
Frankly, the fact that only Snowden ragequit out of that festering bureaucratic freakshow of self-justifying career mummies says it all.
Yup. Plus how do you prove that nothing wrong is happening to your data, if not by monitoring every single transaction? An open source software increases the risk of discovery of the whole operation. Or how do you provide all the information your political masters and their investors demand of you in the time of international crisis, if not by spying on everyone abroad? On the other hand the free software simply irritates the hell out of the sponsors who come from big software business, but you can use just the tax authorities to deal with the threat of losing them.
as an internal piece of research we found whole wodges of "Who Do You Think You Are" type histories about many FVEY Spooks, partners, offspring, etc on Mumsnet. We're not publishing it! - it's on a USB memory stick in...which drawer was it now? maybe the boss left it on the train?
Mumsnet is just another example of poor opsec & soft leakage
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mumsnet+harrogate
Greetings to floor -7, under the hospital, under the field, under the sheep
"These include Linux Journal, which the code calls an "extremist forum," "
Well of course you're an extremist if you run Linux. If you support Linux or any other open source or free software then you are not doing your bit to support US corporates. As eny fule know failure to support US corporations by throwing money at them is exactly the same as being a communist islamist jihadist fundamentalist.
And who knows maybe those last four words together will put me on some NSA blacklist. And El Reg with me if you're not already there.
So, if by registering an interest in Linux I am defined as an extremist, just what sort of rating do I get by actually USING IT as my primary OS? Oh, I can hear a helicopter approaching right now - I wonder if its a black one..........
And just to make matters worse I'm a Register reader as well......
Anyone got a spare tin hat........
One of the problems with Linux is it's probably a hell of a lot harder to insert spyware, if you're any sort of a halfway decent admin.
If you look at the Windows processes list, you have no idea what half that shit is. They could probably run xkeyscore.exe and I sure as hell wouldn't find it.
However, on my Linux box I know what every single process in pstree is doing and why it is there. I also know what's going on in the network activity bar of xosview and the netstat listing. Anything reporting back to NSA HQ would have to be pretty subtle.
"on my Linux box I know what every single process in pstree is doing and why it is there."
Ever heard of Linux rootkits? The first thing they do is ensure their processes don't show up in ps.
I suspect that if the NSA is really after you, it does not help very much if you use Linux.
"One of the problems with Linux is it's probably a hell of a lot harder to insert spyware, if you're any sort of a halfway decent admin."
Ummm - no actually it isn't. Where did you get your distro? How do you update it? Which repos do you use? Are you /certain/ that last update was completely free of any /deliberate/ trojan? Are you /certain/ that last update didn't contain any remotely exploitable vulnerability?
"If you look at the Windows processes list, you have no idea what half that shit is. They could probably run xkeyscore.exe and I sure as hell wouldn't find it."
Thay just says that you are not a windows admin. It does not mean that no-one else understands the windows process listing. But see the argument above. The same applies (but worse because the software is proprietary.)
"However, on my Linux box I know what every single process in pstree is doing and why it is there. I also know what's going on in the network activity bar of xosview and the netstat listing. Anything reporting back to NSA HQ would have to be pretty subtle."
No you don't. You just think you do. And even if you did, your pstree could be tojaned and not show processes it wanted to hide. So could netstat, or wireshark. That cupsd may not be just listening for print commands you know.
The point is, unless you have an external monitor (say a /known/ /provably/ clean network monitor running on a /known/ /provably/ clean OS) sitting on the wire between you and your ISP you have no guarantee whatosever that what is going in or out of you nice safe secure linux box is all it should be.
And even if you have, you could still be stuffed unless you /really/ understand network protocols in depth (Ever hear of DNS being used as a wrapper for file exfiltration? Or long time based UDP to call home?)
Don't be complacent. The only secure computer is one not switched on, not connected to anything and buried in a lead lined box in concrete.
And even then I'd worry in case it was exhumed and disk forensics run on it......
"One of the problems with Linux is it's probably a hell of a lot harder to insert spyware, if you're any sort of a halfway decent admin."
Completely disagree.
You can't compare a competent and experienced linux admin setting up their box with a heavily customised configuration, with the typical windows user who went with the defaults.
I heavily customised my windows install and am at least passingly familiar with what runs and what doesn't. If your linux box is more secure, its likely that you're simply more competent than I am, rather than which OS we've installed.
I've managed to get through decades with no trojans, worms, viruses, or malware installed on my windows boxes. However, I bet if I setup a linux distro, you'd be in, out, and shaking it all about before I could say "hokey cokey".
However, I bet if I setup a linux distro, you'd be in, out, and shaking it all about before I could say "hokey cokey".
Actually, no.
The defaults for *most*[1] distros is to set up for secure operation, and let the admin punch holes in it as he sees fit. As long as you don't take stupid advice from idiots on fora[2], it remains pretty secure.
Windows, although perfectly securable these days, comes with many of the defaults set to "insecure" to make sure that users don't get confronted with any sort of "access denied" errors. That's a shame.
Vic.
[1] Not all. There have been moves to make Linux "friendlier". This invariably makes it a steaming pile of security nightmare in return for a very minor increase in (temporary) user satisfaction.
[2] The most common one is to chmod everything in sight to 777. This makes it writable by everyone - so the immediate errors go away. And it makes your server *trivial* to take over. I've had customers pay me big money to secure their boxes, then *insist* that I 777 everything because they read it from a starnger on a website. I need written instruction to do that...
Should set up a honeytrap in a vm box on a super-secure Linux. Then set up the honeytrap with 777 - though if you're particularly diabolical, you could set up a vm box with a halfway secure OS, then have it point to "the real goodies", and then get them arriving at a vm box that automatically chroots them, and then changes permissions to 444, and logs them onto an 0900 number.
There's more than one way to skin a cat, and this is guaranteed to produce some heartwarming yowls.
Wouldn't the real people the NSA want be well versed in spycraft:
MAC spoofing|proxies|2nd hand hardware bought in cash|public\cracked wifi|cloned sim with an all you can eat data tariff|etc.
But yes, they are likely well versed in gnu/Linux.
This also reminds me of when I went on holiday as a teenager with my family and my best mate came round to feed and walk the dog when we were away... and rack up a bill for several hundred £s of porn on our dial up. Dirty sod! :) Should you trust the people around you with your NSA/GCHQ web browsing profile??? Obligatory Rolf Harris reference...
Don't you know the NSA have already compromised (or just flat out own) most of the endpoints, meaning they can sniff a large chunk of TOR traffic in the clear?
There's no way to hide Internet traffic properly without making it hopelessly inefficient like Freenet. The means by which Internet traffic is routed efficiently ALSO makes it traceable. It's like finding a car with a Google Navigation printout on the dashboard.
"Is that documented?"
I believe we tweeted about it - but yes, a friendly top-level chap from the DA-Notice committee (part of the MoD) came around for a chat in the wake of Duncan Campbell's GCHQ coverage. It was to share advice, rather than impose rules or guidelines.
C.
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