Is the Internet a security risk?

[Stoney McToke]

Hey everybody,
I have been visiting IC for about two years now and though I haven't posted much, I've spent countless hours reading and learning. And I haven't seen a lot of discussion on internet security lately, aside from the OG and CW business. So I wanted to see what people have to say about the security of a post. How anonymous is it nowadays? Can I trust my government to respect my privacy? Is IC a safe place to be?

If any of this is taken offensively please trust that it is not intended to be. I'm sure there are many other regular visitors like me who do not post or even have accounts because of security issues. I have learned so much here and I would like to be more active in the community but am worried that it could endanger me.

 

[Guest]

security

security

here at IC Mag we take the greatest care to protect our members security
we don't log IP's, our servers are in a safe country
but thats just half of it, its up to the members to take there own precautions
there are lots of threads on protecting yourself when your on line
I suggest people take the precautions to protect themselfs esp if you live
in a country that has harsh laws on cannabis cultivation

but in saying that i've only heard of a case where someones posts
on the internet we used in a court, but the bust had nothng to do with
his posts, they got his computer used that as evidence
so make sure you don't store password's, cookie's etc and always clear your
history when you log off esp if its not your own computer

as to your government respecting privicy
well most governments snoop into our private lives at some point
but I doubt they will spend hours searching web sites to try to nail a
small time grower

OP

 

[Verite]

Posting here is safe, just dont leave the house. When you do this guy will go thru your underwear drawer.

 

[Fat Albert]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And won't he be surprised to find a little Cuban in there LOL

Fat A

 

[Stoney McToke]

yeah i like IC. it's a chill place to hang out.

 

[supermanlives]

yes it is. anytime you say or type anything in a phone or the net its a security risk. but dont go and make a foil hat and hide in the closet just use common sense

 

[Wacky Tobacky]

hey OP wut about the whole POM thing. the site went down for like 20 min so i went to PG to see if there was any info on why and i read a bunch of shit by POM talking about u n gypsy not being admins anymore or something. i dunno i just dont want him to win and take over ICMag cause then every1 will be runnin for the hills.

 

[Verite]

Beverly Hills that is ...

 

[Sundance]

Swimming pools .... Movie Stars

Git up Duke ... Sleeping all the time .... Were going

Pretty funny Pagan

 

[tricky]

lead my main diet cheers verite

 

[Guest]

To answer your question... IF you live in the USA... YES!

April 07, 2006

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Wednesday filed the legal briefs and evidence supporting its motion for a preliminary injunction in its class-action lawsuit against AT&T.

The gist of that was... ALL internet traffic that rides on AT&T bandwith gets split off into top secret NSA centers where it can be datamined. NO traffic is safe once it crosses into AT&T space.

Complete story is located here:
http://www.spamdailynews.com/publish/ATT_forwards_all_Internet_traffic_into_NSA_says_EFF.asp

As a sidebar...
Bush administration to intervene in AT&T surveillance case
April 29, 2006

The United States government filed a Statement of Interest Friday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) class-action lawsuit against ATT, announcing that the government would assert the military and state secrets privilege and intervene to seek dismissal of the case.

In other words... big brother IS watching... Apparently... this not only involves AT&T but pretty much EVERY major ISP doing business in the USA.

The rest of that story:
http://www.spamdailynews.com/publish/Bush_administration_to_intervene_in_ATT_surveillance_case.asp

This is scarey shit...

 

[Guest]

To fully understand this... checkout what the AT&T employee has to say about it...

Whistleblower outs NSA's secret spy room at AT&T
April 08, 2006

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, said the company shunted all Internet traffic--including traffic from peering links connecting to other Internet backbone providers-- to semantic traffic analyzers, installed in a secret room inside the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco. Similar rooms were built in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.
"Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue, it appears the NSA (National Security Agency) is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet," Klein said. "This potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of Internet communications of countless citizens."

In 2003, the National Security Agency set up a secret room inside the phone company's San Francisco office building that was not accessible to AT&T technicians, Klein said.

The former employee's statement, as well as several documents saved by him after he left the company in 2004, shows further evidence of domestic spying initiatives by the federal government.

Klein's statement is being incorporated into a class action filed in San Francisco federal court, in which lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, and Traber & Voorhees in Pasadena claim that AT&T illegally allowed the NSA taps.

"Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA's spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA's charter or with FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]," Klein said.

News that the NSA was working with major telecommunications companies first surfaced shortly before Christmas. The Bush administration has acknowledged the existence of a domestic spying program, but claims the executive order was limited to those individuals with known terrorist ties.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency in its massive program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications.

"The evidence that we are filing supports our claim that AT&T is diverting Internet traffic into the hands of the NSA wholesale, in violation of federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment," EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston said in a statement.

NarusInsight Intercept Suite - Packet-level, flow-level, and application-level usage information is captured and analyzed as well as raw user session packets for forensic analysis, surveillance or in satisfying regulatory compliance for lawful intercept. The capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of Web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. (source: Narus.com)


On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.

After asking for a preview copy of the documents last week, the government did not object to the EFF filing the paper under seal, although the EFF asked the court Wednesday to make the documents public.

One of the documents is titled "Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco," and is dated 2002. The others are allegedly a design document instructing technicians how to wire up the taps, and a document that lists the equipment installed in the secret room.

The list includes a Narus STA 6400, which is a semantic traffic analyzer. The Narus STA technology is known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets.

The NarusInsight Discover Suite (NDS) captures and classifies traffic and data on monitored links in real time at true carrier speeds (up to 10G/OC-192). Detailed layer 3 to layer 7 data are collected and correlated across every link and element on the network. NDS empowers users to manage IP traffic and applications including VoIP, Skype, P2P (e.g., BitTorrent, e-Donkey/e-Mule, FastTrack/Kazaa, Gnutella, etc.), messaging (AOL IM/ICQ, Yahoo IM, MSN Messenger, Jabber, IRC, MMS), streaming media (RTP, RTCP, RTSP), e-mail (SMTP,POP3,IMAP), Web browsing and push to talk (PTT). (source: Narus)


In a letter to the EFF, AT&T objected to the filing of the documents, arguing that they contain sensitive trade secrets, Wired magazine reports.

According to court rules, AT&T has until Thursday to file a motion to keep the documents sealed. The government could also step in to the case and request that the documents not be made public, or even that the entire lawsuit be barred under the seldom-used State Secrets Privilege, says Wired.

AT&T Corp. (which was recently acquired by the new AT&T, Inc,. formerly known as SBC Communications) maintains domestic telecommunications facilities over which millions of Americans' telephone and Internet communications pass every day. It also manages some of the largest databases in the world, containing records of most or all communications made through its myriad telecommunications services.

 

[Guest 10952]

What is a good program to help mask my ip? Insane that At&T has a spy room. But i suppose i did here they opened up all lines to beable to be tapped by the Feds at anytime. Total Access from what i heard. But scary never the less.

 

[Stoney McToke]

Jubei- if the NSA room is real an IP masker won't do much good.

Anyone ever run a trace route to ic?
I came up with some at&t routers, but then again it's the same with any website I go to. And I don't have at&t service, but there is always an at&t address between me and my destination




peace

 

[Guest]

What is a good program to help mask my ip? Insane that At&T has a spy room. But i suppose i did here they opened up all lines to beable to be tapped by the Feds at anytime. Total Access from what i heard. But scary never the less.

The organization that filed the class action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has a program called TOR (The Onion Router), that uses another program called Privoxy to encrypt and route your TCP communications through three random servers. There are two GUI's that can be downloaded and installed for most platforms. I have tried both and they are relatively similar. Each is a package deal, download and install, setup is that easy.

The first, TORCP can be found here: (Windows only)
http://tor.eff.org/download.html.en

The other, Vidalia, can be found here: (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux or other Unix variants using the X11 window system)
http://www.vidalia-project.net/

Another point to remember (if you're using windows) is that you should not be using Internet Explorer as a web browser. There are many free alternatives available that are more secure, Mozilla Firefox being the most popular. It can be found here:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Also, if you have Java enabled, even if you are using a proxy, your real IP can be accessed. JavaScript will show platform info such as OS, browser, etc., but not IP. JavaScript is needed for the pull-down menus at ICMag to work, so for ease of use you may leave it enabled, but make sure you disable Java.

Lastly, after everything is installed and running, go here to check and make sure the proxy is working correctly:
http://www.stilllistener.com/checkpoint1/

Everything should be pretty self explanatory, the TOR packages make installation and use much easier than it was a year ago. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Good luck

 

[2buds]

Another piece of advice that I've read is always run your pics through a program like photoshop etc... and resave the pic. Your trying to eliminate the digital serial number/signature that matches your camera in the photo info.

 

[Postman Pot]

^^ very good point, although some camera's use a signature embedded inside the picture, much in the same way Xerox & cannon high end printers do, this means output from every machine can be tracked.

 

[senseless]

i think the government would be more interested in finding real criminals on the internet like child molesters, pedifles and online preditors. not a bunch a small time pot growers like we have here