thedaywefightback.org -THE DAY WE FIGHT BACK AGAINST MASS SURVEILLANCE

https://thedaywefightback.org/

A great resource for learning about the NSA spying and pratical things to do about it!

 

They'll never win if they keep doing this kind of sissy things. SOPA and PIPA proposals were not stopped. They're just delayed. They'll be back someday in other forms or even in the same packages.

 

Where are these "practical things" we can do about it? Your description suggests the link contains information and steps to lowering exposure to spying, but all it does is say contact your congress rep and complain. The truth is that there is no practical way to avoid it unless you get off the web entirely. Every somewhat effective method involves too much inconvenience for the masses to adopt.

 

Don't you see? It's yet another petition thingy again. This is what people do when they're so desperate.

The truth is if they can't get you in the internet, they'll get you in real-life.

 

They had you in real life before the internet even came to be. But yeah, petitions aren't going to cut it.

 

Just sharing a resource.

 

I kind of agree with you, but it sure beats doing nothing at all. Raising awareness is a start and it is way better than sitting and waiting for things to get worse. I think there are better things that can be done, but they are politics-related and not tech-related, so they are not the subject of this forum.

 

As I said in a previous and now mysteriously edited post, people have stopped caring:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/...-didnt-fight-back/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

I mean, when DuckDuckGo doesn't even bother putting the pointless banner up to support it, you know people no longer give a s***.

 

So we give up then?

 

"We" as regular citizens? We never had a chance to begin with. As I said before, the ones who can change it are the Googles, Facebooks, Yahoos, ISPs..the ones with the money and influence. Writing letters to congressmen doesn't cut it, because you don't really elect them anyway, and the letters mostly get read by their secretaries and sat aside unless it's threatening or you are extremely important.

What can you do? Stop using the services of the above companies and send them the letters. Will 20 people convince them to fight harder? Nope. Will 20,000? Maybe not, but you'll get their attention. But, the question is will you do it? Will 20,000 people do it? Likely not. We've got to learn as a society to stop waiting until after the fact to complain and attempt to change things. Legislation once passed is harder to get rid of than it is to stop from passing in the first place. SOPA was a decent example of stopping things before they start. But it was also a very good example of the government tendency to withdraw and slip things in later once the furor has died down and nobody is paying much attention.

 

Well said. We as a people need to stop this. Maybe the website is useless, but it is better then doing nothing. As for the description I wrote for the website, I could have described it better.

 

Another 20,000 Tor relays and exits would get their attention big time.

 

Yeah..they'd hijack and take over them like they have so many of the current ones. Even with the risks involved with VPN companies, you're safer using them than you are Tor at this point.

 

long live the EFF

 

I don't think that they're hijacking existing nodes. If it was that easy to compromise the nodes, they wouldn't be concerned with cracking Tor itself. It's more likely that they've set up a bunch of their own. The best way to reduce the chances of being routed through a malicious or hijacked node is to create more good nodes. Users can easily create many more nodes than they can. There's also the safety in numbers factor. It's one thing to arrest a couple hundred people. It's quite another to arrest several thousand under such pretenses.

 

They don't need to hijack Tor relays, because they can create as many of them as they like.

However, they can't just create numerous relays (as VMs or whatever) in some IP range, because that would be totally obvious. The necessity of creating relays with unassociated IPs somewhat reduces their immense resource advantages.

 

Their resources are immense for a government agency. That said, the combined resources of the people in this country alone is so much greater. There's no technical reason that the people couldn't create a half million more nodes in a very short time, if they'd just get mad enough to do it. Other than shutting down the internet entirely, there is very little they could do about it. There is no easy, convenient, and risk-free way to force an end to mass surveillance. It's going to take much more than complaining to representatives and signing online petitions. History is full of examples of what freedom in any form costs.

 

Maybe there's no technical reason, but there are human reasons. Outside the tech community, I suspect that most people learn about Tor when they need the anonymity that it can provide. At that point, they probably don't want their IP address showing up in Tor's public relay directory.

For this to work, it would be necessary to reach numerous people who don't need Tor, and motivate them to run Tor relays. They would need to understand the public relay database. Some sites block IPs that show up there, even though they're not exit relays. Also, to be useful, middle relays need substantial bandwidth.

 

The day we fight back....there is no such day. Aside from the ones that really care, the rest of the world don't give a damn. Even if they do, not all would be able to 'fight back'. The convenience is too tempting to give up. The technical knowledge is too high a requisite.

Meanwhile, let me enjoy my corner on the web....surveillance be damned.

 

Well, I wouldn't go as far as "don't give a damn". It's more like they're busy with their lives, and are afraid to stand up/out. There's also the technical-knowledge hurdle, but aren't most kids today skilled enough to install Tor and enable relaying?

If they cared enough, they could do it. The key is crafting the right message, and getting it to them effectively. The NSA revelations provide the perfect context. They're generally threatening, but pose no immediate personal threat.

 

Actually, contrary to the idea that the generation of kids today are tech whizzes, most of them don't really know much beyond texting, Facebook usage and doing things with services like SnapChat. There's some strange assumption that growing up or living in a tech-obsessed world means everyone knows their bits from their bytes. As far as relays go, I would never suggest to anyone I know to run as a relay or an exit node. Why put yourself at the increased and unnecessary risk so someone else has a better experience on Tor? There's your problem right there. I also highly disagree with your view that people give a damn, Mirimir. If people did, we'd still be talking about it outside of Wilders and other places like it. I don't know what it may be like where you are, but here in the U.S the subject has pretty much been dropped from the media and from the minds of most people.

Though if we're going to continue Tor talk and such, we might as well move it over the the NSA thread. Considering the "day we fought back" no one even cared, let alone fought, this thread is really done.

 

You may be right. I don't have much personal experience.

And even so, running a middle relay isn't necessarily very complicated. And I'm sure that the Tor Project could simplify more, if it were part of a mass campaign.

There's no criminal/legal risk in running a middle relay. Everything going through your machine is encrypted, and there are no direct connections to users or websites. You can even run a middle relay totally in RAM, so nothing remains on your computer after it shuts down. As I recall, it wipes RAM during shutdown, and if it doesn't, I'm sure that's doable.

There is the "sticking it to the Man" factor

People who I know still talk some about it. I hear that the Tea Party in the US has taken up the issue. Privacy/freedom is an issue that appeals to people accross the political spectrum. Or, at least, to those on both ends

I can't speak directly about the US. It's pretty hot still in much of Europe. Nobody -- people, business or government -- is complacent about NSA etc spying on them. There's discussion about globalizing Internet management, using local/national cloud services, etc.

I disagree. The NSA revelations provide a context, but this is a far larger issue.

 

In the US, very little of the material Snowden leaked ever made the news. Most of the "coverage" was the government bashing and labelling him.

That's the reason the issue has never been properly covered in mainstream news. It's not done publicly or openly, but the news from this country is controlled. They report what they're told to report. They won't put themselves at risk even if it is their job.

If you take that argument to its natural conclusion, it becomes:
"Why should anyone do anything at all?" That kind of complacency is directly responsible for a government that doesn't feel that it needs to answer to its people. Speaking as a US citizen, this is being done in our name, supposedly for our protection by a government that's supposed to be by the people and for the people. If it's not our problem, then whose problem is it? How far does this have to go before people stand up and say "This is wrong. You won't do this in our name." Making our own government answer to us for their actions is exclusively our problem and responsibility.

Tor is legal. Running an exit node in the US is legal. Running a reduced exit policy greatly reduces the risk of abuse. The fact that exit node IPs are publicly listed provides evidence that the traffic leaving your IP is not necessarily yours. Courts have ruled that an IP alone is not sufficient to identify a user. The risk is exaggerated to scare people away from running Tor nodes and exits in particular.

 

Well, now see, as I understand it running an exit node is just asking for trouble because everything coming out of it is plain text. Am I wrong here? I don't know a lot about relays so I probably had no business commenting on that, but I thought it was just as risky. As to what the citizens will put up with before actively fighting back..hell if I know. I mean, look how far its gotten and we're always back to chasing celebrity news a few weeks later. I won't even get into the Tea Party, as that little "revolution" has turned into a cluster****. Europe just seems to take these things more seriously and its citizens seem much more willing to fight it out than Americans do. Perhaps it is due to them having to deal with oppression much more in their longer history than us. Perhaps they just aren't as lazy and don't shrug their shoulders so much as Americans. I really don't know.

Great point about the media, they've basically been hijacked here in the U.S and it's incredibly hard to get news that stays in the middle instead of leaning over to one side or another. I still say these tech companies are our best hope, yet they don't seem all that interested in rocking any boats.

 

The traffic coming out of the exit would be the same as traffic exiting a browser connecting directly to that site. Since TorBrowser includes HTTPS everywhere, much of it will be HTTPS. Depending on the exit nodes policy, that traffic can include different chat and IM programs, e-mail, IRC, etc. Most P2P and torrent traffic can be blocked by not permitting the default ports those apps use. If an adversary or law enforcement is monitoring the traffic of an exit, they will also see a corresponding amount of traffic coming into the relay for the Tor traffic. That traffic will track back to another relay and then another. One can look at some of the recent porn troll cases and see that their suing based on an IP address hasn't held up in court.

European people know firsthand what it's like to be conquered. Several watched dictators rise to power and saw their country and homes destroyed. In some of them they still find land mines and unexploded bombs to remind them. They learned the hard way that "it can happen here." Nazi Germany had a war on terror that lead to much of their surveillance. They know what the road leading there looks like. By comparison, most in the US still don't think it can happen here and refuse to see that it's happening right now.

Regarding accurate and reliable news, there are no completely trustworthy sources. For myself, I compare the news from several sources, US, Russia, mideast, etc, then draw my own conclusions.

Regarding tech companies, they're part of the problem. Global surveillance wouldn't be possible without their cooperation, regardless of what they claim. Government agencies couldn't harvest data from them if they weren't collecting it in the first place. Microsoft doesn't need records of every app we use or every page we visit. Those are for government and law enforcement, aka collaboration. IMO, government and industry/business are one and the same. Each looks out for the other and gives the other what they want. Both get richer and more powerful in the process. By definition, it's Facism, and that's what we're facing.