eavesdropping, etc.
by Vasil Kolev(as usual, the opinion is mine only and can even be wrong :) )
With all the crap around the data retention I decided to explain some things (which may be the base for a lecture on the blog meeting on the 23rd) – mostly how it looks like from a technical standpoint.
First, to be honest. Nothing and nobody has ever stopped the ISPs to listen and analyze their customers’ traffic. The recording and analysis of traffic (to some layer) is something that helps debugging problems and optimizing the network. Just until now nobody has seen the point in recording all the traffic, analyzing and sorting it – mostly because there’s nothing there interesting for the ISPs themselves…
(I guess everyone has had the fear of the admin looking at their traffic, reading their email, etc. – people, sleep tight, there’s nothing interesting in your email anyway).
So. There’s no global surveillance, because nobody sees why and people are lazy.
Second, if it’s not done in totally incompetent way there’s no way to find out that someone is listening to your traffic. There were a few developments that were able with black magic and a crystal ball to tell you up to some certainty on some operating systems that the network interface is in promiscuous mode, which in the end doesn’t help as you don’t know what’s it listening for.
Third, there’s no real anonymity in Internet, unless you try really hard. Any way we look at it, everyone’s IP address is tied with him/her in some logs, which are needed for billing or something like that. It’s another question how useful such stuff is in court…
Fourth, the listening and traffic analysis aren’t that hard and expensive. To listen to 1Gbps constant stream one machine that costs about 3000 leva is enough, which with about 1000 users of this gigabit (because the over-subscription is something like that, correct me if I’m wrong) can be paid off in three months with 1 lev per user. And that’s without the sales of this information…
(the keeping of the logs of the mail server is even easier, one 1TB hard drive is cheap these days, and there’s nobody in Bulgaria with logs bigger than this).
Fifth, everything in Internet can be spoofed (e.g. to pretend to be someone else), most machine can be trojaned, etc..
And finally, do you know that even before this directive the ministry of interior and the other around it had the possibility to listen to the network traffic? There should be at least a few people there that know how easy this is.
The short conclusion from all this is “We’re fucked”.
(to the crowd “but they don’t have a reason to track me”, “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide” and “they can be trusted” I’ll tell to go read a bit in google, I’m tired of explaining it)
What follows – end-to-end cryptography, more complex to analyze protocols, less email traffic (it’s mostly spam nowadays), and the realization of the facts above by most people. We have a lot of processor power even in our phones, we should finally start using it with some good purpose.
I’ll be really happy of someone proves me wrong…