Opt out of PRISM

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Re: Opt out of PRISM

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Firestarter wrote:
The best from this article are “smart” street lights to spy on us...
In Britain Middlesbrough in 2006, streetlights with speakers were introduced to give warnings to people.
In 2011, Illuminating Concepts began installing the system “Intellistreets” in Farmington Hills, Michigan. These “smart” streetlights got microphones to monitor conversations.
Intellistreets is also equipped with proximity sensors to record pedestrian and road traffic
I don't have the link at-hand, but I read awhile back that when a whole neighborhood is outfitted with these microphone-streetlights, then whenever there are loud noises in the neighborhood, such as gunshots, explosions, or other disturbances, law enforcement is able to use the timestamped recordings from the various streetlamps to triangulate the position of the noise to within fewer than ten feet.

I don't believe everything I read. For example, any intelligent person knows the television-show propaganda about law-enforcement's use of fingerprints over the years has been mostly fiction. But given enough microphones, and assuming the exact positions of each microphone is known, and that the microphones are recording continuously with accurate timestamps, I think locating a gunshot to within ten feet is trivial.

Here's a video I just saw that blew me away-- I think too much about it looks dead-on for this to be faked... Have a look at the newest tech in night-vision:

http://vidmax.com/video/155121-Crazy-30 ... o-Daytime-

http://vidmax.com/video/155121-Crazy-30 ... o-Daytime-
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Web Beacons -- Scribbles

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Here's the one-liner anyone should take from this article:
If you want to have any chance at all at privacy, ditch all Microsoft products immediately.

Original source: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-2 ... tleblowers
WikiLeaks Reveals The "Snowden Stopper": CIA Tool To Track Whistleblowers
by Tyler Durden
Apr 28, 2017 11:16 AM

As the latest installment of it's 'Vault 7' series, WikiLeaks has just dropped a user manual describing a CIA project known as ‘Scribbles’ (a.k.a. the "Snowden Stopper"), a piece of software purportedly designed to allow the embedding of ‘web beacon’ tags into documents “likely to be stolen.” The web beacon tags are apparently able to collect information about an end user of a document and relay that information back to the beacon's creator without being detected. Per WikiLeaks' press release:
Today, April 28th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the documentation and source code for CIA's "Scribbles" project, a document-watermarking preprocessing system to embed "Web beacon"-style tags into documents that are likely to be copied by Insiders, Whistleblowers, Journalists or others. The released version (v1.0 RC1) is dated March, 1st 2016 and classified SECRET//ORCON/NOFORN until 2066.

Scribbles is intended for off-line preprocessing of Microsoft Office documents. For reasons of operational security the user guide demands that "[t]he Scribbles executable, parameter files, receipts and log files should not be installed on a target machine, nor left in a location where it might be collected by an adversary."

WikiLeaks releases 'Scribbles' the CIA's secret anti-leak "Snowden Stopper" software https://t.co/8ynyk8GJxg
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 28, 2017

CIA's first rule of stopping the next Manning/Snowden - don't leave CIA document tracking software on suspected source's computer pic.twitter.com/Jn3eAjw7tN
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 28, 2017
The ‘Scribbles’ User Guide explains how the tool generates a random watermark for each document, inserts that watermark into the document, saves all such processed documents in an output directory, and creates a log file which identifies the watermarks inserted into each document.

Scribbles can watermark multiple documents in one batch and is designed to watermark several groups of documents.
RELEASE: "Scribble" the CIA's secret system to track leakers. Full source code and documentation included. #vault7 https://t.co/Mgph7jQkFC pic.twitter.com/5WZTYfG7pZ
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 28, 2017

Dr. Martin McHugh, Information Technology Programme chair at Dublin Institute of Technology, gave the RT more details on how the "Scribbles" tool can be used for "bad as well as good."
“Methods of tracking have historically been developed for our protection but have evolved to become used to track us without our knowledge."

“Web beacons typically go unnoticed. A tiny file is loaded as part of a webpage. Once this file is accessed, it records unique information about you, such as your IP address and sends this back to the creator of the beacon.”
But, the "Scribbles" user guide notes there is just one small problem with the program...it only works with Microsoft Office products. So, if end users use other programs such as OpenOffice of LibreOffice then the CIA's watermarks become visible to the end user and their cover is blown.
According to the documentation, "the Scribbles document watermarking tool has been successfully tested on [...] Microsoft Office 2013 (on Windows 8.1 x64), documents from Office versions 97-2016 (Office 95 documents will not work!) [and d]ocuments that are not be locked forms, encrypted, or password-protected". But this limitation to Microsoft Office documents seems to create problems: "If the targeted end-user opens them up in a different application, such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice, the watermark images and URLs may be visible to the end-user. For this reason, always make sure that the host names and URL components are logically consistent with the original content. If you are concerned that the targeted end-user may open these documents in a non-Microsoft Office application, please take some test documents and evaluate them in the likely application before deploying them."
So if you plan to steal some government documents at some point in the near future you may want to ditch Microsoft Word.
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HP Computers have built-in Keyloggers

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I've been warning people for years to not buy HP computers under any condition. My reason was they are all built with sub-standard components, and often require special proprietary drivers to run at all-- I'm saying, for example, you can't buy a copy of Windows-Professional (not that I recommend that), and expect to install it and have it run. I actually had an HP tech once admit that to me on the phone.

Now we find out the rabbit hole goes much deeper:

Original source: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-1 ... -keylogger
HP Laptops Discovered To Be Spying On Users With Keylogger
ZeroPointNow's picture
by ZeroPointNow
May 12, 2017 3:28 PM
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Swiss cybersecurity firm Modzero has discovered that 28 models of HP laptops running the "MicTray64.exe" audio driver on Windows 7 and 10 systems - a little over 20% of all laptops - have been spying on users via a 'keylogger,' a program which records every keystroke made on the device. This means that passwords for banking, email accounts, and private communications on affected laptops are being stored locally - which "leads to a high risk of leaking sensitive user input."

"Users are not aware that every keystroke made while entering sensitive information - such as passphrases (or) passwords on local or remote systems - are captured by (the software)" -Modzero

When Modzero contacted HP about the issue the company went radio silent, so the Swiss firm went public with it's findings. When UK based Sky News picked up the story and reached out to HP, the company said they were "aware of the keylogger issue on select HP PCs."
HP told Sky News: "Our supplier partner developed software to test audio functionality prior to product launch and it should not have been included in the final shipped version. Fixes will be available shortly via HP.com." -Sky News
A full list of affected laptops can be found here.

Here is Modzero's writeup on how the keylogger works:

Conexant's MicTray64.exe is installed with the Conexant audio driver
package and registered as a Microsoft Scheduled Task to run after each
user login. The program monitors all keystrokes made by the user to
capture and react to functions such as microphone mute/unmute
keys/hotkeys. Monitoring of keystrokes is added by implementing a low-
level keyboard input hook [1] function...

In addition to the handling of hotkey/function key strokes, all key-
scancode information [2] is written into a logfile in a world-readable
path (C:\Users\Public\MicTray.log).

Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com * Follow on Twitter @ZeroPointNow
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Are You Still Running MS-Windows?

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If you are still running Microsoft Windows, you are officially retarded.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-1 ... lobal-huge

http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/
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Re: Opt out of PRISM

Post by JessK »

So much usefu linfo, thank you so much guys, lots of food for thought. I remember stumbling across a book by Ted Claypoole and Theresa Payton - Protecting Your Internet Identity. Has anyone read it?
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Re: Opt out of PRISM

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As my computer activity is firmly based on walking around with an USB-stick in my pocket with thousands of hours of research, I’m probably more interested in privacy-issues concerning a flash drive than the average person.
There is hardware or software that can copy all the files on my USB as soon as I connect it to a computer.
Devices like these can easily be found on the internet (of course the intelligence agencies have more advanced technology). See for example: http://steppschuh.net/software/usbcopier/


The following is a story by somebody in the UK, who found out that his new LG Smart telescreen was spying on him and his family, and then did his own investigation.
He noticed an option in the system settings called "Collection of watching info" which is ON by default. After he switched it off, it continued to send information unencrypted over the internet every time he changed the channel.

One of the ads, which was displayed on his TV, showed that it analyses users’ favourite programs, online behaviour, search keywords and other information to offer relevant ads to target audiences.
LG Smart Ad advertises its products, with the claim it offers useful advertising performance reports, to identify advertising effectiveness.
He also noticed that filenames stored on his external USB hard drive were posted to LG's servers. They were shocked to see their children's names being transmitted after watching a video file from USB.

He sent a message to LG to complain about this invasion of his privacy, he got a response that he should take it up with the retailer (see the following quote): http://doctorbeet.blogspot.nl/2013/11/l ... s-and.html
The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T's and C's at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions.

I end this post with a story that details how MS Windows logs all sorts of information (this is regular Windows, not something specifically designed by NSA or GCHQ).
Whether you launch an application, open a file, tweak a setting, visit a website, just about everything is recorded, and saved in a list.
When you delete a reference from a particular document, this won't necessarily be removed from the jump list. And even if it is, it can possibly be recovered.
Windows is very good at tracking hardware. It maintains details on every USB device which has ever connected to your PC, and when it did.
Windows also records every wireless network your system has connected to: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing ... es-1029906

The last article ends with the following well meant advice:
So our advice would be not to get too paranoid, and don't take actions which will adversely affect your PC (like turning off prefetching): the privacy gains will be minimal, and it anyone wants to discover more about your activities then there are plenty of other ways to do so, anyway.
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Re: Opt out of PRISM

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On 12 July, the Dutch Senate (Eerste kamer) passed the new “tapping law” which gives the intelligence agencies (AIVD and MIVD) the right to gather data practically without limitations.
The law was passed with broad support from Dutch parliament, and according to the NOS will go into effect on 1 January 2018.

This includes hacking into devices (for example computers or cell phones) of (large) groups that aren’t suspected of any crime.
The AIVD can for example make telecom providers deliver them the chat traffic in a city of 400,000 inhabitants, under the guise of wanting the communication of 200 users.

The intelligence agencies can intercept all internet communication.
The intelligence agencies are allowed to hack into devices, of people who aren't suspected of anything, but know somebody who is a suspect.
The intelligence agencies can read or destroy documents.
The intelligence agencies can use devices’ microphones to listen in on conversations.

The AIVD and MIVD can set up companies, to spy on people.
Companies provide the intelligence agencies with real-time information.

The intelligence agencies can store the information for a maximum allowed time of 3 years: http://nltimes.nl/2017/07/12/dutch-sena ... mining-law

The “tapping law” also gives the intelligence agencies the right to sell this information to “reliable” partners, like the British and American intelligence agencies.

The intelligence agencies can enter houses, to install (surveillance) equipment and confiscate things found.
The intelligence agencies can also spy on “old type” mail (in an envelope).


Here is the new accepted law “Wet op de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten” (in Dutch): https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten ... idsdienten

In my opinion the most interesting is article 21 (the translation is mine).
According to article 21 of the “Wet op de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten”, the intelligence agencies can provide agents with new identities for their wonderful work.
These agents are allowed to participate in any criminal activity. Combine this with the fact that the AIVD and MIVD are allowed to set up companies to support “national interests”…
1.
The services are authorised to:
a. employ natural persons, whether or not undercover of an assumed identity or capacity, which are the responsibility of an intelligence service:
1 °. to collect information about persons and organisations that may be of importance to an intelligence service;
2 °. to promote or take measures to protect the interests of an intelligence service.
b. establish and deploy legal entities to support operational activities.
(…)
3.
The natural person, referred to in the first paragraph, under a, may also be instructed by the intelligence service to carry out actions that result in cooperation with a criminal offense or commit a criminal offense. An instruction as referred to in the first sentence is only given if the proper execution performance of the task of the intelligence service or the safety of the natural person involved so requires.
(…)
7.
By or pursuant to a general Order in Council, on the recommendation of the relevant Ministers and Our Minister of Security and Justice jointly, further rules may be laid down with regard to:
a. the conditions under which and the cases in which, in order to execute an instruction by a natural person as referred to in the first paragraph, part a, actions may be carried out which may result in cooperation in the commission of a criminal offense, or commit a criminal offense;

In 2017 for some reason art. 21 was deleted and returned as art.41 of the Wet op de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten (in Dutch): https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0039896/ ... _Artikel41
(https://archive.is/Xl0SJ)


The state media are spreading rumours that some civil rights organisations will start a court case over this clear disregard for our privacy. I really don’t understand what this could be based on.
In the dictatorship the Netherlands, judges cannot rule over violations of constitutional rights. The Dutch judges can only rule based on the law. This makes it impossible for any judge to decide that a law violates human rights…
Last edited by Firestarter on Mon Sep 07, 2020 3:30 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Opt out of PRISM

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Firestarter,

You wrote in an earlier message that most of your computer activity is done using a flash drive in your pocket, and you'd be interested in privacy measures that help you achieve greater security.

Let me suggest the following:

Today's flash drives have amazingly large capacities. For example, on Amazon a 128GB flash drive is currently only $36, and a 256GB drive is $65. This makes them very flexible.

You can install a working Linux operating system on a flash drive, which you can then plug into the USB socket of most any PC-type computer and boot that computer from the flash drive. All your activity while using that computer will be saved on the flash drive, and no trace left of the host computer.

A Linux OS, together with all the software you'll probably ever care to use, will occupy less than 20GB on the flash drive. This leaves you plenty of space for whatever data you want to store.

Flash drives can be partitioned, just like physical hard drives. This means you can set up separate partitions for the operating system, and your data.

You can easily configure the operating system to automatically encrypt, on the fly, every bit of data saved to your data partition. From the user-perspective, the process is invisible-- as long as you are logged in through the OS on your flash drive, using the password you provide upon each login, you can use your files as you normally would.

Without the login password, or whenever it's in your pocket, stolen, or lost, it may as well be a grain of sand on the beach.

Since these drives have such a large capacity, I also suggest making a third partition-- a regular unencrypted VFAT partition which allows the copy/reading of files just as any ordinary flash drive normally does. This makes it appear to the casual observer like an ordinary flash drive.

Using this tool, you now have the equivalent of your own personal computer in your pocket. Plug it in anywhere, and it's YOUR system that comes up. Even your desktop settings, display background, and preferences will move with you from one computer to the next.
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Tor Project

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editor wrote: Sat Jul 15, 2017 5:20 pmYou wrote in an earlier message that most of your computer activity is done using a flash drive in your pocket, and you'd be interested in privacy measures that help you achieve greater security.
In my opinion, the only way to prevent spying is to never use any device with a computer chip...
I have already informed you that Linux isn't secure.

I only use the computer in internetcafes, but stay away from the internet most of the time. I copy the information from interesting sites to either Word or save the PDFs (that I somtimes later convert to Word). I use "old" Word, usually I have 2 documents open at the same time (one with information and one with my writings). I don't think Word is a "good" tool, but it's usable.
When I use Word "newer" than 2007, the "Compatibility" mode of Word deletes a lot of spaces from the documents. Sometimes when I copy a document to USB it saves an empty file. I've found out that this has to do with knowing the names of a document I'm working on. This informs me on what information they don't want me to post.

One by one the owners of the internetcafes are "replaced" (art. 21 of the Dutch Law “Wet op de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten”), and then they upgrade their software...
I also have some legal procedures, but don't really worry if the intelligence agnecies find out, as I'll have to file them anyway.


The Tor Project is supposedly a private non-profit that provides encryption that is “NSA-proof”.
The Tor sham has been supported by respected limited hangout operations, like: ACLU, Fight for the Future, Wired, Vice, The Intercept, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg that have pumped up Tor's rebel status to mythical proportions.

In reality Tor is almost 100% funded by the US government, it received millions of dollars from 3 US national security agencies: CIA spinoff Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the Navy and the State Department.
The BBG is the biggest sponsor of Tor with more than $6 million in contracts from 2007 through 2015. Tor has been a military contractor with its own government contractor number: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fac ... nment-ties
(archived here: http://archive.is/SeyOx)

Tor has pledged it would never put any backdoors into their software.
It’s known that Tor has informed the BBG on security vulnerabilities. This is formally not building a backdoor, but in a sense informing them on backdoors. And... all software is hackable!
Because much of Tor’s funding is under the umbrella of private government corporation Radio Free Asia's, that refuses to comply with journalists' FOIA requests, there is no information on most communication. There is also no public information on the correspondence between Tor, the State Department and the US Navy.
That’s not even counting what Roger Dingledine and other Tor managers have discussed in meetings with US intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

In October 2007, Tor developer Steven Murdoch sent a report on the vulnerabilities connected to Tor encryption. They intentionally made Tor stand out from the rest of the internet traffic, which makes it easier to single out (target) people who use Tor.
This is formally not a backdoor, but it shows that they privately tip off the federal government, which makes it highly improbable that Tor is “NSA-proof”.

After Tor cofounder Roger Dingledine informed his BBG handlers in 2007, it took until 2011 before this information was shared with the public: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/cla ... government
(archived here: http://archive.is/GsyCy)
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Re: Opt out of PRISM

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What amazes is that our deaf, dumb and blind media claim to be shocked when information like this cannot be denied anymore.
You really don’t have to be a “computer whiz” to know that big brother is watching us. The intelligence agencies, under the guise of fighting terrorism, demand (and get access) to all computer databases, and “datamine” the combined information, looking for “dangerous” people...

Web developer Dylan Curran found out that his Google data file is 5.5 gB and Facebook keeps a file of him with a size of 600 mB.

Google keeps information on, every:
Search made;
Event in Google calendar;
Webpage visited (including when and how long);
Ad viewed or clicked on;
Email ever sent or received.

Facebook records information on, every:
Messenger, text message and Facebook call sent, made or received;
Facebook friend;
Phone call;
Smartphone contact;
File sent or received;
Log in into Facebook.

Kelly Shortridge, found out that Google Chrome's built-in anti-virus Chrome Cleanup Tool (CCT) scans files on her computer. It was originally an optional add on for Chrome, but in October 2017, it became a compulsory part of the Chrome installation.
Chrome’s head of security Justin Schuh responded:
CCT's sole purpose is to detect and remove unwanted software manipulating Chrome.
Potential data collection and associated consents are described in the Chrome Privacy Whitepaper, and every cleanup action requires an explicit user approval.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... puter.html
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