Emails and websites to be watched

[Sheepykins]

bad boys bad boys, watcha gonna do...

BBC News - Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws

The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon.

big brother where art thou ... still, in countries like ours that have been bombed its probably a prudent measure

- though tbh the guy in the video is a dong. hes right, its very easy to spy on people. and hes wrong, we can trace them back to the source. and GCHQ are just doing what they've done for years, just without a warrant

 

[Yami]

I had been hoping it was an April Fool's joke, but nope This pretty much cements me in moving to Tor, TrueCrypt, and moving to another country in future (kind of already wanted to).

and hes wrong, we can trace them back to the source.

It depends, but there are ways.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

If you saw what the American Gov was building in Utah you would flip, even going with TrueCrypt/TOR would be useless sadly.

 

[Yami]

Yeah I heard about that. It's like a GCHQ * 50.

even going with TrueCrypt/TOR would be useless sadly.

I could understand TOR being useless, but why TrueCrypt? Unless they've discovered some sort of backdoor in AES (not impossible), they just aren't going to break it.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Because this data center is being built to break encryption of any type in a matter of days.

 

[Yami]

4096-bit AES with a decent >30-character password will still take billions of years even with all the world's computing power. Standard 256-bit... maybe. Very maybe.

This is where I first heard about the whole idea; Bruce Schneier says it's unlikely, and I'm inclined to believe him
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/can_the_nsa_bre.html

Though, one comment in particular I like is

I think the main point of the new Utah facility is to crack the past, not the present. The NSA has been hovering up encrypted comms for decades and it may be that the combination of a petaflop computer plus terabytes of data might be enough to crack crypto weaker than 128-bit (and especially 64-bit).

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

The theory is, if your already logged in, if they want your information, they will pull it. The American Government has already admitted to having "Spyware" and Malware that can silently be installed on a PC, and no AV program will ever pick it up. Once that is done, they basically have all the contents of your HDD, 10000000000bit encryption or not, if it's online, then it is vulnerable. Heck, with the way things are getting, even offline isn't secure anymore.

If they pull a single email that has 256bit AES, it could take a few weeks or months, but the more messages from the same machine, the more likely it is to break it sooner, as there is a high chance of a pattern being seen in the encryption.

Sure, today some ridiculous encryption make take millions of years to break, but next year a processor could (in our dreams) be released that contains the computing power of every single device.

 

[Yami]

The theory is, if your already logged in, if they want your information, they will pull it. The American Government has already admitted to having "Spyware" and Malware that can silently be installed on a PC, and no AV program will ever pick it up. Once that is done, they basically have all the contents of your HDD, 10000000000bit encryption or not, if it's online, then it is vulnerable. Heck, with the way things are getting, even offline isn't secure anymore.

Point taken. (Currently) Undetectable malware isn't too hard; even if you don't have any experience, Metasploit has a fair few payloads that can be used in situations like that. Plus there's always exploits like MS1220.
(As an aside, Chrome doesn't think 'malware' is a word.)

If they pull a single email that has 256bit AES, it could take a few weeks or months, but the more messages from the same machine, the more likely it is to break it sooner, as there is a high chance of a pattern being seen in the encryption.

Have to say, encryption isn't my strong suit but that sounds pretty cool.

Sure, today some ridiculous encryption make take millions of years to break, but next year a processor could (in our dreams) be released that contains the computing power of every single device.

Well, a decent, viable quantum processor would make current encryption methods insignificant.



Anyway, looks like I'll be buying a VPN soon Currently looking at https://ipredator.se/

 

[Sheepykins]

unfortunatly the official secrets act forbids me to tell you what i do know

and take it from me some of the nations populace are definatly f'ed up

 

[PP Mguire]

Said this before, I'll say it again. It doesn't matter what anyone does, hackers will always find a way around it. It works both ways.