www.cryptogon.com
An informed reader sent in an interesting message. I decided to post my response, which some of you may find interesting:
-----Original Message-----
From: YS
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2002 9:02 PM
To: kevin@cryptogon.com
Subject: Don't Pack It In Yet
>>I'm almost to the point where I'm ready to throw in the towel on this
web
>>site. Trying to stop what is happening in this country is the epitome
of
>>futility.
There is hope. We know limited victory against the powerful evil forces is
possible.
Last year, the East Timorese defeated efforts by the world’s fourth and
fifth most populous countries to genocide them. Their survival would not
have been possible without determined and continuous agitation by ETAN, Noam
Chomsky, and legions of nameless heroic organizers here in the US. Noam
admitted recently that even he assumed that the Timorese would be crushed.
Yet, after 25 years of horror, the ETAN guys finally managed to turn first
Congress, and then the Executive, which leveraged Indonesia into
withdrawing.
Now, I don’t agree with a lot of what Noam & his commie pals have
to say.
But when it comes to opposing Ye Liveliest Awfulness of US foreign policy
and the coming police state, all the humanists who know the Score™ seem
to
end up on the same side.
Our side has two great problems:
The first problem is that the resistance forces lack of a coherent body of
information conveying The Score™ in a way which is believable to John
Q.
Public. If even 5% of our information turns out to be bullshit, or even 5%
of the resisters turn out to be cranks, guess which 5% will end up on the
corporate owned/government regulated news reports? Add to that the fact
that John Q. desperately doesn’t want to believe that the government that
takes 40% of his income is run by DEMONS, and we have a real information
warfare problem. Chomsky is merely the best the left has to offer -- he's a
saint, a hero, and a true patriot, but he still isn't nearly good enough in
this regard.
Finding information that John Q. simply can’t ignore is difficult.
Circumstantial and derived evidence is useless for this purpose. We need
smoking gun (de?)classified government document type stuff, and lots of it.
We need all of the testimony of all of the ex-CIA guys in one place. We
need all of the embarrassing quotations – in the PROPER CONTEXT –
of all of
the powerful people who blurted out The Score™. We need to be able to
prove
continuity of horror up to the present time. And we need to make it
accessible to a busy population.
The more serious problem involves what John Q. Public is supposed to do once
he learns his government is evil. Organizing (violently or non-violently)
can achieve limited success, but ultimately collects all the resisters into
targetable groups that are easier for the Leviathan to digest. Clearly
voting and calling congressmen is futile. I have great respect for the
Founders attempts at a limited government constitution, but ultimately we
have to observe that the constitution failed. I’m not sure how we would
go
about constructing a stable governmental system which would ensure liberty
without lots of citizen vigilance (always in short supply). Obviously
terrorism is counter-productive, stupid, and evil.
On the plus side, we have powerful allies. By far the strongest is CATO –
the guys there are honest, pro-freedom, have connections, and not prone to
foaming and frothing. They don’t quite understand quite how bad things
really are, and especially miss out on the institutional logic aspects of
the problem that make it so intractable. As a result, they still waste time
lecturing politicians on what’s best for the US electorate. They are
largely funded by Small and Mid-Sized Businessmen who are suspicious about
where their 40% is going. These businessmen still largely believe in Rule
of Law and Sanctity of Contract and Property, and are only just beginning to
realize that Big Corps and the Feds don’t play by the same rules.
We also have some time left. Time for the rest of the world to prepare for
the coming onslaught.
The cameras aren’t installed in our rooms yet. Publishing books critical
of
the government is still technically legal.
For now, we need to collect and organize data. We don’t yet have the
complete DVD of iron-clad, squeaky-clean evidence to hand to John Q. We
can’t reliably get that “OH MY GOD, THE HORROR” reaction out
of the public
yet.
We also need to work on security. Your web site conveys far too much
information about you personally, information which could eventually be used
against you. Neither our names nor any personal information about us has
any relevance to the problems at hand. If we are anonymous, it's harder for
the state to invent evidence against us in order to discredit our reasoning.
We need to be able to collect and distribute information anonymously --
any insight into how this can be done would be of great help.
_________________________________________________________________
Hi,
Thanks for the great letter. I agree with much of what you said. You are far more optimistic than I am, and I think that's great. I don't ever plan on giving up, because I don't feel like there's any other option but to keep trying to wake people up. This site may be gone, but I'll still be doing something. I just run the site because it's something that can be done on basically no budget. God knows, nobody supports me in what I'm doing.
Do you follow Alex Jones' work at all? He's posted one of his videos online that is pretty good. If you can manage to handle a couple "Christian" comments, it's basically damning info on .gov. Since it's a video, even the average imbecile can grasp the gist of what's happening.
The Road to Tyranny
http://www.infowars.com/video_clips.html
I don't think the written word is the way to go about any mass action. People are simply too dumb. All they understand is video/tv/movies. I think people need to start making documentaries, burning them to DVD and handing them out to people. I think web sites should be standing by with all the proof so the people out there who are inclined to check further can bring it all up easily. I've started writing books a couple of times, but there's no point since the story has already been written 10,000 times by authors who are much more eloquent than me. Not enough people read, so it doesn't matter that the information is out there. Reading and critical thinking have been bread out of us. It took several decades, but the Them managed to create a zoo, and we're (generally) the ignorant, grunting animals on display. Basically, I'm saying, you can post anything to the web you want, the most damning information that exists, and virtually nobody will care. Look at the Northwoods document:
http://www.cryptogon.com/docs/northwoods.pdf
Nobody gives a damn. We know the CIA runs cocaine. Nobody gives a damn. We know JFK wanted to break-up the Federal Reserve and revert to backing the dollar with silver (Executive Order 11110).
http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/executiveorder11110.htm
He was a U.S. president and he was publicly executed! No way is this thing going to change easily, my friend. If we don't get a mass consciousness shift, somehow, and soon, we are probably doomed.
The only way I see of taking this thing down, in a peaceful and constructive way, would be if people simply opted out: stopped buying crap from large corporations and stopped working for large corporations. Resist, refuse and revolt with your wallet. Without the tax revenue, this death machine world almost immediately grind to halt, along with the rest of things that get counted in GNP figures.
So, people need to be simultaneously trying to take down the system while learning how to rebuild their communities based on local production and a sensible division of enlightened labor. It's possible in some communities (http://www.ic.org) but they assume groups of people who are basically enlightened to the point where they are a different species from the average dunce on the street.
Under normal circumstances, I would say, "This will be a difficult goal to achieve, it will take hard work over a long period of time, but it is possible." But now, the entire system is at endgame. We are seeing it come down forcefully and fast. Governments all over the world are locking things down and people have literally no idea that all of the individual rights that have been secured over the past couple of hundred years are withering away. Since most people haven't ever read about the "bad old days," they aren't worried about what's happening right in front of their eyes today.
If you have further ideas of how to get "there" from "here" please let me know.
With regard to providing too much information about my identity and INFOSEC, etc.: The quick version is .gov and .mil know more about dissidents they've targeted for surveillance online than the dissidents know about themselves. Achieving true anonymity online is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
I was a system administrator for two years and I've followed developments in information warfare since 1995. You can keep your boss or your younger sister from knowing what you're doing online, but .gov and .mil are IN THE ROUTERS, they are in the choke points of the Internet in the U.S. and most of the rest of the world. It's a matter of point and click to determine who is accessing the Internet via ISPs. (There are a few exceptions, such as public libraries that don't require ID to surf.) Few people have "clean," that is anonymous Internet access. The people who "think" they have it are paying extra for it, and may just be supporting a NSA honeypot. I get a good chuckle when I seen webwasher and anonymiser hits in my log.
Read Sun Tzu's, "Art of War." If he wanted people to think they were anonymous online, so he could learn their maneuvers and tactics, how would he go about it? He'd set up an ISP offering "anonymous" surfing and post ads for it all over the dissident backwaters of the Internet. He might even require clients to run an executable in order to access the "anonymous" browsing system. That way, he gets every keystroke, in addition to all Internet activity. This is but one example. My point is this: If .gov or .mil decided they wanted to know who I am, where I am, and what I ate for breakfast, it would take them about 15 seconds and a few mouse clicks.
If you are interested in reading about some of the systems in place that provide the surveillance functionality to the feds, check out products like NetDiscovery that help ISPs comply with the, "Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994":
http://news.cnet.com/investor/news/newsitem-printer/0-9900-1021-9989083.html
This stuff is outside of, and in addition to, the ECHELON infrastructure, which doesn't even oficially exist.
Clearly, only the most extreme anonymity fetishists will ever approach the goal of true privacy online. If the feds paint a bull's eye on you, I wish you luck with trying to move around anonymously online.
I've taken measures that prevent the average lunatic from finding out who I am. But if law enforcement/government decide they're going to do me in, there's nothing I can do about it.
You asked for suggestions on technology people can use. There are programmers working on P2P solutions that purport to offer some measure of security for those who want to communicate online:
http://www.peek-a-booty.org/pbhtml/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1
I can't recommend any anonymizer type ISPs because I have no way of knowing whether or not they're NSA honeypots. It's as simple as that.
Crypto Caveats: Should you believe it's secure if you don't understand how it works?
The science of strong encryption is easily one of the most complex areas of inquiry accessible to the human mind. Well, it's definitely not accessible to my mind, and unless you happen to have a PhD in mathematics, or some special savant skills with prime numbers, chances are that a theoretical knowledge of encryption is not accessible to you either.
To make a long story short, we can't know for sure if our crypto tools are really as good as they purport to be. You can definitely encrypt things that will remain unreadable by your boss and your younger sister for at least a few decades. You probably can't, however, keep your secrets from the NSA. Now, the question becomes, how much of a pain in the ass are you to the Them? Am I worth the CPU cycles of whatever the Them have to break things like PGP, Blowfish and Twofish? Probably not. I probably don't even rate a physical break in to install a keylogger on my box.
There's simply no way to know what they have. One can, however, use some deductive reasoning. What could the Them have with an unlimited budget and the most PhDs in computer science and mathematics of any organization in the world? The answer is: Capabilities we can't even begin to theorize. My guess is quantum computers that break PGP in the blink of an eye, but actually several billion times faster than that.
Knowing what I know about other intelligence activities, I would guess that if PGP and other forms of crypto were actually secure, bodies would have been dropping all over the world when this stuff was in its early stages (80s). I mean, forget brute force attacks. Maybe it's much more subtle than that. Who knows what the vulnerabilities are? Maybe there are operating system or hardware level things happening that make things less random than we think. Maybe those 4096 bit keys contain only 56 bits of entropy. WHO KNOWS? Bruce Schneier is basically coy on what he thinks the NSA can do. He doesn't know. Nobody knows except the Them. I would be very surprised to learn that our crypto tools were actually secure against a foe like .gov. And we do know that when you send or receive encrypted material, both sides get flagged. If you weren't on any lists before your crypto antics, you will be afterwards. Bottom line: If you're really concerned about anonymity online, you don't belong online.
Al Qaeda doesn't use phones or email for operational communications.
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20021018/4547215s.htm
I'd trust a passenger pigeon more than any form of electronic communication. Seriously.
Thanks for writing and take care,
Kevin