Fool Me Twice… | a.nolen

Final slide from Guardian-leaked NSA document ‘Tor Stinks’.

My favorite adage is an unfashionable one: ‘God helps those who help themselves’.

It’s a tough-love piece of advice that doesn’t sit well with bleeding hearts of any stripe. But like any unfashionable truth, it needs to be heard. I think that in the wake of the revelations that Snowden made, and Obama’s predictable speech on the NSA, this adage needs another airing.

Nobody can expect a corrupt government to fix itself; especially when the rot has had so long to get established. One of the ancient Greek philosophers said it is a citizen’s duty to change the law where the law goes against his conscience, but if after a time he fails to change things, it’s his duty to leave the city.

How do you ‘leave the city’  in an age of global surveillance? a.nolen suggests readers take a first step outside the city gates by ‘helping themselves’ and embracing an uncomfortable truth:

‘Solutions’ to government surveillance which are presented by the media are not real solutions. I’m talking about Tor, ‘dark’ anything, and that silver bullet, encryption.

The screenshot at the top of this post is from “Tor Stinks“, one of the documents that The Guardian claims is part of Edward Snowden’s leaks. This is the final slide in a presentation on Tor; its authors talk about how to track people using the Tor network. Please read these three bullet points again.

Remember back in 2010 when almost 300 Pentagon computers were found with child pornography on them? That story just fell off the radar, and to this day, nobody at the Defense Department (DoD) has been charged FOR HAVING CHILD PORN (bad enough) ON THEIR WORK COMPUTER. Tor is targeted in Russia under the guise that it is– perhaps truthfully– one of the largest distributors of this type of poison. This slide suggests providing more Tor “client IPs” (computers that Tor can route between) will help the NSA track Tor users.

Let’s connect the dots: The Pentagon’s nearly 300 kiddie porn computers were never shut down. The NSA believes that more DoD-friendly computers on the Tor network will help them track Tor users. The Tor network just happens to include an exceptional number of computers involved in child exploitation. (And Tor’s 40% DoD funded in the first place! At least 60% of its funding is US government.)

Is Tor a solution to our spy-state problem? I think not.

Need more convincing? This morning I found a news story that reads like a wet-dream for European statists: 25-Year-Old Arrested After Selling Gun for Bitcoin on Black Market. The story is a trifecta of everything uninformed European apparatchiks love to hate: an American kid sells  GUNS for CRYPTOCURRENCY through TOR. ‘Terror, terror, terror!,’ they cry, ‘The boy’s probably one of those patriots!’ Note how the article points to Snowden documents, then says these documents show Tor is secure when (look above) the documents do precisely the opposite. Readers, what makes this story newsworthy is that the Dutch found the kid after only one gun.

Still not enough to put you off Tor? Silk Road, the website that sold drugs for bitcoins, operated as a Tor hidden service. One month after the FBI shuts Silk Road down in a blaze of media fireworks, Silk Road is back up and running. ONE MONTH. God helps those who help themselves.

So if you can’t rely on Tor can you rely on digital currencies for privacy? The benefit from digital currencies comes from their decentralization and how hard they are to inflate, not necessarily from increased user privacy. Anyone who understands digital currencies will tell you that most of these currencies– including the most popular Bitcoin– are not designed for anonymity. Maintaining anonymity is very difficult at best, you have to know what you’re doing, and even then, the encryption tools you use might be compromised:

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says. [From Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security, ProPublica.org Sep. 5, 2013.]

Encryption standards like SHA-256 may not be designed with weaknesses, but the way they are popularly implemented may be– do you read all of the code that you use? Do you know what every line does, even the undocumented lines? Back in 2012 Bill Binney told us that using encryption was a red flag in the NSA’s eyes; it made them more likely to want to watch you. We should all face the fact that we can’t trust the NIST or IOS to do our thinking for us. God helps those who help themselves.

So, erm, what do you do? If you want to organize a political party that you think NSA’ers won’t like, time to do what the real ‘terrorists’ do, and set up a face-to-face network. You know, that old ‘flesh-and-blood’ friend network.

Real ‘terrorists’ write messages on bits of paper, unsigned, and leave them in dumpsters, under rocks etc. where the recipient knows to look. Real ‘terrorists’ trust their family and members of their ‘in’ social group to do what Tor claims to do. That’s why the Russians are mulling the ugly but practical notion of targeting the families of ‘terrorists’; it’s why the US government infiltrators targeted the ‘Patriot’ movement in the 1990s  and why NYC police target Muslim communities. This is where American political rhetoric flies in the face of American practice. In an effort to cut adversaries off from their resources, ‘law enforcement’ ends up criminalizing ideas, rather than specific actions.

This practice, criminalizing ideas, gives lie to the claim that Snowden’s revelations help ‘terrorists’ work better. ‘Terrorists’ have known that online networks were untrustworthy for a long time. (That’s why Osama used couriers!) The NSA’s Facebook, Google, Apple connections are, pure and simple, for watching domestic opposition to the domestic regime and nipping viable political movements off ‘in the bud’. Nobody expecting to be targeted by the NSA uses Facebook to organize, or Google docx to write their manifestos!

If you are a concerned citizen who would like to ‘leave the city’ and found something better, you’re going to have to take a page out of the ‘terrorists’ playbook and leave the easy world of instant messaging, Reddit and Facebook behind. You’re going to have to leave Tor and dreams of encryption behind. Step out into the sunshine and talk to the real people around you– Dianne Feinstein melts in sunlight. God helps those who help themselves.

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