It was inevitable: the Advanced Research Projects Agency, later to become DARPA, right out of the Pentagon, created the internet. The RAND Corporation invented modern packet switching. DARPA and ARPANET recruited Vint Cerf of Stanford University to work on TCP/IP. Cerf is regarded as "the father of the Internet," or maybe that should be the military-NSA snoop network.
Now we learn NSA increasingly controls SSL, now called Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic protocol that provides secure communications on the internet for web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers.
In other words, increasingly, the NSA is reading your email and everything you type in your IM client — and in real time, that is to say there is no delay in the timeliness of the information, the underwear drawer snoopers have the ability to read your IMs as you type them.
"Certain privacy/full session SSL email hosting services have been purchased/changed operational control by NSA and affiliates within the past few months, through private intermediary entities," notes Cryptome.
Hushmail: now fully owned by private entity NSA affiliate; has had informal
relationship with NSA for a number of years that effectively provided NSA with
real time access to Hushmail's hosting servers.
Safe-mail.net: Israeli-based, ironically privately lauded by
NSA and US military several years ago for its sound implementation of SendMail
with SSL webmail GUI frontend. Now provides mail server info to NSA in real
time.
Guardster.com (SSH/SSL proxy): NSA contractors have "bought"
full access rights to Guardster servers a few days ago. Separate but related:
facilitated port sniffing of hosting servers at Everyones Internet, on NSA
affiliates' behalf, has been ongoing for a number of months now.
Geekspeak aside, what this means is that the NSA is buying up key
technology in an effort to snoop you even more closely. If this trend continues,
we may as well call the internet the NSAnet.
Moreover, according to Cryptome's research, if you own "security" software produced by Zone Alarm, Symantec, and MacAfee, you are in essence throwing out a welcome mat for the NSA and its bevy of underwear drawer sniffing goons. "All facilitate Microsoft's NSA-controlled remote admin access via IP/TCP ports 1024 through 1030," and without a "security flag," that it to say you will be none the wiser.
It won't be long now before Winston Smith's telescreen is barking orders.
One of the problems I see here is that with all these U.S.-government-based corporations controlling the rights to various snooping software the United Nations will have a very good case for taking over the Internet, as they have been attempting to do.
Then, you can really kiss your freedom goodbye.
9 comments:
Uh oh. Pastorius, remember when I asked you if you'd gotten any strange email? Well that had to do with someone very high up in the NSA I'm unfortunate enough to have personal knowledge of and I went asking questions on email and he emailed me a warning to back off so I know for a fact they are monitoring emails. I think I got stung because I emailed someone he had been monitoring because she had brought legal action against him a few years back. I dont' want to mention this individual's name because I don't know how this monitoring technology works so I don't know what he can pick up, but there is stuff about him on the net, unfortunately on a Digg site run by a Paulian: http://digg.com/people/Admitted_Satanist_Serving_As_Top_General_At_The_National_Security_Agency. If I didn't have personal experience with this story I wouldn't believe it either, but what we have here is a busted clock: it's right twice a day. If you are on let me know if this is the most secure place to discuss this.
"... increasingly, the NSA is reading your email ..."
not really accurate.
they don't *read* the vast amount of email the sift though; it's data-mining and they look for patterns/links.
only if the email addresses are linked by certain repeated tags do they read them.
it's all by computer.
it doesn't bother me in the least.
i'm glad they do it.
i've nothing to hide.
I can tell you from personal experience that at least one high-ranking NSA employee uses it to settle personal scores. I understand about the computerized pattern/link searches, all well and good, but in my case an individual who had tried to take legal action against an NSA employee for criminal activities obviously was having her email monitored by this individual and when I sent her a question about his whereabouts I got a warning email from him in return. I don't call that innocent pattern searching. I call it intimidation. In the case of this specific individual, if he has really acquired top general rank I find it alarming because he is a bizarre religious fanatic who I have good reason to believe has engaged in serious criminal activity and whose motives I suspect on a very fundamental level.
Reliapundit,
I should have specified: Yes, I agree with you. This is pattern-searching stuff they are working with and it doesn't bother me either.
Problem is, as I note, the UN will use this kind of stuff (and the fact that NSA affiliated comapnies own the rights to it) as a reason to make a grab for the internet.
I'm guessing you agree with me on that, right?
RRA,
The situation you describe pretty much falls outside the parameters of what is being discussed in this article I link.
The situation you describe is abuse, kind of similar to the Clinton's using the power of the Presidency to have their enemies audited by the IRS.
It is frightening that people in positions of power can and will abuse their power like that, but it is inevitable. I'm sorry to hear you have, apparently, gotten in the way to some extent. I hope you don't ever land in any hot water because of it.
I have nothing to hide also. I agree with the politicos who view the US Constitution as merely an archaic piece of paper...written by uncultured fools who never heard of Paris Hilton, Nascar,, Entertainment Talk Radio or Reality TV. We are much shmarter than those old farts..we don't need no fuckin' Constitution! We have the comfort of being personality cultists. Cool!
I wonder who our next Chairman will be?
Thanks Pastorius. Something I don't need is to have to go another round with some fruitcake who thinks the patterns of his chest hair have religious significance. (That's just on the off chance that our anonymous blogger above is visiting where he isn't welcome, and if he is he's a fine one to talk about personality cults.) You're right, it's abuse of power in a personal situation. Can you specify about how the UN can use it to grab the Internet though?
Something about this idea produces chaos in an otherwise homogeneous group of people.
It's kind of funny.
RRA,
It was an American who invented the internet. The internet is just a way to send information around. An American company called ICAAN has been administering the internet for years. There are many people around the world who think that since the internet effects the lives of so many people it should not be in the hands of one group of people in an individual nation. Instead, they believe the UN ought to control it. In fact, there have been serious efforts to put the internet under UN control already.
The very fact that the American National Security Agency owns companies which own patents on various technologies having to do with the procurement of intelligence will bother people. And this will then become generate more will to take away America's control.
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