Friday, May 21, 2010

Internet control isssues



The Internet is being taken - as a conquest - by changing the structure of the Internet’s mesh
network.
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The first step is to setup choke points.
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This is accomplished by governments asserting control over all Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
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Governments world-wide are passing laws that force local ISPs to monitor and record everything you do online.
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Then, if the police or the Feds want a record of your online activity, the ISP must provide it, and in many cases is forbidden (under pain of imprisonment) from letting you know that an inquiry was made.
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Fortunately, bypassing these choke points is fairly easy.

It involves creating a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection from your computer to the other side of the ISP.
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Here’s what that looks like
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This type of connection is often called a “tunnel,” because it tunnels through your ISP.
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Your traffic still passes through the ISP, but it is encrypted, so there is no intelligible information that can be seen, just a long string of gibberish that looks something like this:
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FK9Hs1uYFt7hOpSJUHlmYcrHjXdHrnUiFB3bM/36Ceq8OBcNDyYzGKgdieFvokId
3a9tA32uS0yrKEsxDZTItv/7ZJoj5H+D1CsU+bnnGwRy3I5vHytFDRnJOFpn2wFc
rUp7rSavV65tirOlagEIvf/AODY9yGH22HY75ChCPo9SP9P3SOvm1nEkBbDd6WK9
aMhAbZf5y1Rs6iCkRG2EHADlXupU2AIctC0SGZieYNF...
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The other technique for asserting control over the Internet, and the harder one to evade, is mass
surveillance.
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The US, the UK, most of the EU nations, China, Russia, and other states are conducting mass
Internet surveillance continuously.
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Plenty of criminal groups and semi-autonomous intelligence agencies are doing it too.
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It’s not as expensive as you might think, and certainly within the budget of an international player.
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The VPN tunnel shown above is great for beating the choke point, but it is not effective for
beating mass surveillance.
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By watching the amount of traffic that comes to your ISP and matching it with what comes out the other side of the tunnel, the watcher can simply pick up the trail there.
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In order to beat mass surveillance, two more steps are required:
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1. Obscuring the traffic much better.
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2. Removing your return address.
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These two things are accomplished with an anonymity network.
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Here is a simplified view the anonymity network we operate at Cryptohippie:
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In this example, the client is in the US and a VPN tunnel runs from their computer to an entry
node in either Canada or Panama, where the return address is also stripped-off.
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This means that a single surveillance operation is likely to lose the traffic here.
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Then, the traffic goes through one or more cascades.
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Think of this as a MixMaster for data.
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Finally, it comes out the other side in still another jurisdiction, where the network’s return
address is added, so the sites you visit can respond to you anonymously.
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There is more to our operation than this (we do some exotic things like rotating IP addresses),
but this is how mass surveillance is beaten.
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A network of this type allows you to surf the web, use voice communications like Skype, email,
chat, download files, etc., while remaining anonymous.
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At any point, it can be seen that signals are being sent, but the point of origin (and with it your identity) remains unknown.
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Cryptohippie

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