Government in Chatting

[Qion]

I had a quite scary thought the other day. That thought was the government tracing or not tracing every single AIM conversation that goes on. Either way it's scary: If the government doesn't track the convo's, think of how easy it would be for terrorists to plan something without our countries' knowledge. If they do track the convo's, then think about how much personal information they see every day. Basicly what I'm asking is an opion.

Do you think the government plays in on all the chatting?

[(Lamont)]

I wouldn't put it past them to at least make the attempt. If you recall a few years ago their project Carnivore and the attempt to scan all emails for 'suspect' words (which I promptly added to my signature line on all emails). They are prone to try anything in the name of "Homeland Security" (for those of us in the US. Other countries have their own programs, no doubt).

The rule seems to be that they'll try anything they can think of. No matter how far out there. For the citizens, paranoia is just good policy and privacy should not be an option.

History has proven that most great civilizations are destroyed by corruption from within. We never seem to learn from it.

[Andrew Adamson]

Why care about the Internet? In every single city and at all times of the day, even as you read this, government agents are trolling the streets. They have a hawk-like gaze and simply watch you. They wait and watch. Then, for the unlucky, usually when they are unaware, these stormtroopers swoop down and snatch them up. Every day, thousands of people (!) are 'disappeared' to their extremely numerous centers. There, people are often locked in cages, like zoo animals. It's unbelievable they operate in plain sight and call themselves cops. Cops, I tells you.

You can read up on the FBI's Carnivore system (which was abandoned this year in favour of existing commercial products that do the same thing. There is, of course, also the NSA's ECHELON system, which operates under far less oversight. I'm not too concerned about ECHELON, though. You'd have to be up to some pretty scary stuff to attract their attention and they'd be just as likely to drop a bomb on you than arrest you. One must presume that other agencies have working systems right now and that other governments either have such systems or are investigating them, too.

You should note that in order to start capturing your emails, the FBI (or other police agency) would have to seek a court order before they could begin sniffing your traffic. Furthermore, if you were to go to court, the method in which this court order was sought would be open to challenge; if they said you were a terrorist, but busted you for p2p file sharing, the warrant probably wouldn't hold water.

The threat to privacy has never been greater than today. Computers have made it easier to sort through data and flag people for greater scrutiny. Abuses are becoming a major problem. I resent that I have no confidence in my online privacy and I personally don't think it's made things safer or better. But I don't lose any sleep over my IM transcripts.

I'm way more concerned about the eleventy-kajillion cameras they have now. A guy can't scratch his arse now without someone watching.

[Giaguara]

Well .. if you want to encrypt your AIMs, OTR proxy is your friend. In 10.4 it'll work just in Adium, but still .. .you can make it require encrypted messaging. Works fine as long as you both encrypt AIM.

[Satcomer]

In the US, they do need a court order. Other countries? I am not sure. The internet is international, so I use encryption to be on the safe side.

[ora]

NB: otr is built into adium from the 0.8 release that came out the other day, thus no need to fiddle with adding a proxy.

[markceltic]

It would surprise me if they haven't been checking on everything that goes on the web anyway,didn't the U.S. military build it in the first place.(plutonium) But alas I'm not the paranoid type so if they ever find my chatter interesting no one would be more amazed than me.(uranium) Really the ones who should worry are the nefarious riff raff that think violence is the only solution.

[Viro]

Encryption isn't a solution. In fact, encrypted IM may actually send some flags flying since most normal people don't encrypt their IM messages. Only terrorists, criminals, and pedophiles do such things.

Unless you have something to hide, even if you have something to hide, don't ever use encrypted IM. It just attracts loads of attention.

If you want to circumvent eavesdropping, have a look at steganography. It is basically hiding information in plain sight. Definitely much more secure than merely encrypting your IM messages, IMHO. Encrypt a message in some image (JPEGs do nicely), and send them to your friends. Unless they know to look, the message is very unlikely to be found.

Of course, this works well for emails. For IM perhaps something similar could be done if people were paranoid enough...