Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"Thou Shalt Get Sidetracked by Bullshit, Every Goddamned Time." -- The Ghoul

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck,
"FOFF" = Felonious Old Fat Fuck,
"COFF" = Convicted Old Felonious Fool,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset,
A/K/A P01135809, A/K/A Dementia Donnie, A/K/A Felon^34,
A/K/A Dolt-45, A/K/A Don Snoreleone

Sunday, September 8, 2013

More NSA Fuckery: You Might Want to Go Back to an Old-Fashioned Address Book

Whatever you have on your smartphone: Documents, lists of contacts, semi-porno selfies, the NSA has access to it. For they have cracked into all of them: iPhones, Androids, Blackberries, pretty much everything. (H/T)

It may be that the Brits persuaded Blackberry, Ltd., a Canadian company, to engineer in a back-door. Blackberry denies it.

So as far as keeping your data safe, forget any company located within the "Five Eyes".

Oh by the way, the Obama Administration apparently has a plan to salt the Federal judiciary with new judges who love the National Surveillance State, based on the nomination of Valerie Caproni to be a Federal judge. She was a top FBI lawyer who loved the idea of illegal surveillance and who allegedly lied about the scope of it.

2 comments:

Eck! said...

imple solution.. use a dead sim in the now not a telephone. Turn of networking and its air gaped. Sure when you enable those things your back on the grid but more time off than on requires a lot more effort to connect the dots.

In the end encryption is widely used often without choice (4G, HTTPS, VPN, trusted certificates) and the cost to check them even is low (in cpu cycles) is still overwhelmed by shear quantity, then the occasional use of more secure encryption is in the noise and requires more cycles to look. At some point the users overwhelm the lookers with too many fragmented things to see.

There are two groups to hide things from crooks that will use every trick to get it so its economic value is exposed (that is to rob me) and the NSA.

I'd really like to believe the NSA is using all that hovered data to catch crooks that are trying to rob me. However I am skeptical that they can or even care to.

So I use encryption to keep the crooks at bay as they are the greater threat, currently.

Eck!

BadTux said...

The NSA thus far has used the hoovered data only to solve crimes after they've occurred. For example the Boston marathon bombers, they checked all the phone calls from the vicinity of the explosions and found a couple of suspicious ones at just the right time, and zeroed in quickly. In the end unless they have reason to pay attention to you, you're under the radar so to speak, because there's just too much data to really trawl it for "terrorists" given current technology.

Regarding address books, if I were involved in political activities I'd definitely air-gap my address book (whether by putting it on paper or simply treating a smartphone as if it were an old-fashioned PDA w/no connectivity). Otherwise it's just not worth the trouble.