>From Matt Cramer, aka X-Echelon-Bait: AK-47 jihad nuclear satan allah
anthrax bomb building blow disease hack X-Carnivore-Bait: terrorist
child pornographers on drugs.
I remember noticing this little preamble before---very funny. But hopefully we can disagree on security protocols.
So, I don't think that, ``...Technology provides much better security than good intentions or laws could ever deliver...'' I think that physical breaks in the chain of information flow, and not technology alone, is the better policy. In other words, different computers, different locations, different people, different devices, different formats, etc---so that each physical link is broken and can not be physically re-assembled.
Let's say, by some miracle I got a hold of the real daily system logs for some FBI, NSA, or CIA network. The information would be meaningless to me, since I know nothing about their operations or personnel. But I do know it would piss them off mightily, if those logs were ever posted on some radical anarchist web site. But how would I get them there?
This was the mental exercise I went through. I run freebsd, which immediately narrows the field down to a few thousand people in this area---down to a few hundred or few dozen in this particular city (Berkeley). So I decided I would first convert the logs to some form of win98 disk format and check them out on my win98 hardrive--even if they were straight ascii. My copy of win98 is completely bogus and I got it from my kid who got it from a friend in LA a couple of years ago who did up an installation CD. So I'd make a floppy from that drive.
Then with floppy in hand, I next thought of Kinko's up on Tele and Dwight about three blocks from me and used by half the undergrads at UCB. Pretty good, but still too physically close to my house. So I decided the best place was over in the city (SF), probably one of the copy centers or print places either in the downtown financial district where the customer load is in the hundreds per day or over in South of Market were a lot of graphic and advertising dot.coms live (or die regularly) with equally heavy customer loads. I figure those would be much safer than the local place up the street. They all have on-line systems, with fast uploads. I would probably pick a Mac which would auto-read the disk, then probably convert the file for upload---hopefully putting another break in the chain. I would probably wipe off the keyboard and floppy slot---or put super-glue on my finger tips(?), and pay cash for the machine time. Then of course destroy the disk and toss it in pieces in several places on the way back to the bart station.
If I wanted to check the site later to see my handy work, I would probably bring it up on another publicly accessible browser, maybe in Berkeley since they would likely get thousands of hits from here any way. There are several coffee places, the UCB campus and city libraries, and computer retail places with open stations running browsers that anyone can just walk in and use. These places usually disable uploads and down loads---presumably to keep the porn freaks at bay.
What a stupid and completely paranoid pig we have in power. I wonder how long the media can pretend not to notice---maybe right up until the first defensive nuclear strike?
Hey check out Ian's fwd on the anti-nuke rally in Leeds. They are already gearing up over there. Good for them. Maybe the old anti-nuke crew will join the anti-globalization movements and the whole freak'n circus will drown out the shit from the Bush junta stink-tanks.
Chuck Grimes