Welcome, Mr. Snowden!

Although the German government rejected Edward Snowden’s request for asylum, the German Pirate Party would be happy to welcome him to Germany. So happy, in fact, that today at 1 PM Pirates were waiting to welcome Mr. Snowden at eight airports throughout Germany, like these four in Hannover!

Four people with a sign saying "Mr. E. Snowden" in front of Hannover airport
Welcoming committee at Hannover airport, photo by Dirk Hillbrecht

While no-one seriously expected Mr. Snowden to arrive in Germany today, the demand to grant him asylum and protect him from extradition is very serious. He took a huge risk to let the world know about the massive surveillance. We should thank him for that, and not let the US hunt him down. It is a shame that the whistleblower who made the US government’s crimes public is now treated as if he was the criminal. The second demand connected to today’s event is for the EU to decisively take action against spying now. Pirate Parties worldwide have published a joint six step plan towards that goal.

I didn’t know about the welcome committee event beforehand, but when I started to see photos floating around Twitter, I decided to collect them. And here they are:

Continue reading “Welcome, Mr. Snowden!”

Surveillance: Fundamentally Wrong

“It seems to me that any government prepared to subject its citizens to mass surveillance is by definition the wrong one. No one can be trusted with powers as wide and inscrutable as these.”

— George Monbiot in The Guardian, 2013-06-24

At the point where a surveillance system of any kind is built, things are already going horribly wrong. Being watched all the time creates an atmosphere of fear which, as the German Federal Constitutional Court once put it, may deter people from exercising their rights. People will feel pressured into behaving like everyone else, and especially not in a way someone, somewhere could consider suspicious. Mass surveillance is never justified.

Network Investigation

Now my grandfather would say: “But we have to catch the bad guys!” However, investigation and surveillance are not the same. Investigation is taking a closer look at someone because of a reasonable suspicion of an actual crime. This is appropriate in principle, although safeguards against unreasonable measures are necessary (and need work in many countries). Investigation does not require mass surveillance. Mass surveillance, on the other hand, means watching everyone, trying to find something. And that something can be almost anything.

I’ve worked as a network administrator for a few years, I do network research now. And I can tell you that capturing someone’s traffic is quite easy from the perspective of a network administrator. I never had to do this in practice, but I know the necessary tools because I do need them for network analysis in research. My point here is that it would be easy to get suspects’ data without building surveillance into networks. Just get a warrant, and then present that warrant to the network administrator in charge. They’ll know what to do. Proper investigation does not require built-in access for police or intelligence agencies. Push-button access only invites abuse.

And that’s why I wrote that building a surveillance system is fundamentally wrong. It invites abuse and is by definition an instrument of oppression, while not having any real merit. Things like the NSA’s PRISM, the GCHQ’s Tempora, the EU data retention requirements or the recent German “stored data access” laws must be abolished without replacement.

Brain Damage

When I read Susan Cain’s book Quiet a while ago, I was very interested to learn that on the one hand group pressure alters our perception, and on the other choosing to stand against the perceived expectations of others takes a measurable toll on the brain, similar to pain. She calls this “the price of independence.” Surveillance creates a constant background of such pressure. In other words, surveillance harms your brain.

And this is something I feel quite often as well. I don’t want to be watched, I don’t want to create a nuisance, I want to be able to live my life in peace. But I can’t. I can’t watch silently as freedom disappears, as liberty is taken slice by slice. It is frustrating how little I can do, but I mustn’t give up. Today, I stand for freedom. What will you do?

No Access to Passwords!

Recently, here in Germany several laws were passed concerning law enforcement access to user data stored with internet access or service providers, like mail, social media or cloud storage. There are all kinds of things wrong with those laws, threatening privacy in principle, being overly broad, and severly lacking controls (details vary by state, summary in German here). Suits against them in front of the Federal Constitutional Court are being prepared, see stopp-bda.de (German) for the one against the federal law. It is organized by members of the German Pirate Party, but anyone affected can join, whether they’re German citizens or not.

In this post, however, I’m going to focus on just one thing included in some of these laws that is not only dangerous for privacy and civil rights, but also entirely pointless for law enforcement – unless they were made with the plan to abuse them: access to users’ passwords.

Intercepting communications or subpoenaing stored data may be appropriate under certain circumstances (although I think the restrictions in current German law are not strict enough by far), but there cannot ever be a justification for giving police or intelligence agencies access to passwords. If it’s about data stored in the accounts in question, that data can be intercepted or subpoenaed where appropriate, and there is no need to get the password. Instead, that would create two new problems.

Impersonation

Access to passwords provides complete control of the account, making it possible to impersonate the user. This includes performing illegal acts using the account in question. In fact, I will go as far as to say that if police had such access to someone’s account, all evidence gathered from it should be considered unreliable and therefore unusable. I’m not going to play criminal mastermind here, but I’m sure you can all imagine something that someone with full access to a social media or mail account of yours could do to implicate you of a crime, or otherwise ruin your life.

Breaking real security

Also, service providers that observe proper security practice will never, ever store passwords in a way that makes them recoverable. When a security breach occurs, the account database is usually one of the most interesting targets for the attacker, so storing passwords in plain text is essentially handing them over. Thus a responsible provider will never be able to fulfill a request to reveal passwords. As far as I know, the new laws do not contain rules that would force services to store passwords in plain text, but such demands could still severely harm security.

I don’t know if the reason such rules were written into law was malice or incompetence. Either way, this has to stop.

Standardized Evil is no less Evil

Maybe you’ve heard about the proposal to include „Encrypted Media Extensions“ (EME) into the HTML5 standard. In short, EME would provide a standardized way to require an unspecified decryption module to play media streams on an HTML5 page, mainly for the purpose of DRM.

Those who want to sell it say DRM is short for Digital Rights Management, but a more appropriate translation is Digital Restrictions Management, because that’s what it is all about: Restricting things users can do with their devices. Imagine you’d buy a hammer, and the manufacturer could control which kinds of nails you can hit with it. If you wanted to use it as a doorstop, you’d have to buy an upgrade first, and if you should get funny ideas and try to lend it to a friend, the manufacturer could make the hammer stop working altogether and all nails would fall out of the wall (sounds stupid, yes, but the electronic equivalents have happened).

The point is: DRM is evil, and will only work if the user is not in control of their device. And this is where the idea of integrating support for DRM into an open standard is obviously stupid, because DRM is the opposite of open in any imaginable way. Most arguments in favor of EME go along the lines of “If we don’t integrate this, websites are going to keep using Flash!” I’m not going to argue in favor of Flash, which is both proprietary and about as bad of a security disaster as possible. But: What good is replacing one proprietary plugin (Flash) with another (some EME decryption module) going to do? That’s right, none!

If anyone were to benefit, that would be the DRM vendors, because they could use some of the HTML5 features to build their media players, which would probably be easier than doing it in Flash. And they’re the last I’d want to benefit, and if the W3C really wants an open web, they shouldn’t want that either. This is why the EME draft must be rejected without any replacement.

Reading Recommendation: “The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On”

I’ve written about damage done by fear before, and here’s another example. Just one day after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, politicians here in Germany are calling for new surveillance laws. The same politicians who are always in favor of more surveillance, of course. This is terribly disrespectful towards the victims and their families, and it has the potential to do serious damage to our freedom. Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote a great article on the topic: “The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On“, which I recommend for you to read. The key point is:

When we react from fear, when we change our laws and policies to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed, even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we’re indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail, even if their attacks succeed.

— Bruce Schneier in The Atlantic

We need freedom, not fear.

Tsunami Cleanup Memories

Today is the second anniversary of the Great Tohoku Earthquake, and for this occasion I have put many of my memories from tsunami cleanup work into a drawing (click the image to see the high-resolution version).

Pencil Drawing of a Japanese coastal landscape with tsunami damaged towns in various stages of cleanup

This is not a real landscape, I have combined many things (some of which I’ve blogged about before) into a fictional coastline.

Continue reading “Tsunami Cleanup Memories”

Death Threats For Selling Vegetables

Farmer Noboru Saito from Nihonmatsu in Fukushima has received threats for selling his food in Tokyo.

He has received emails which have read: “How long are you going to bring radiation into the Metropolitan area?” and “I will kill you.”

From The Mainichi, 2013-03-06

However, Mr. Saito’s products have been tested and no contamination was found, and no amount of contamination could justify death threats anyway. Other customers demanded price cuts just because of the origin. I have blogged about the damage done by unnecessary fear before, and it makes me sad and angry to see these kinds of things are still happening.

Read the whole article from The Mainichi here: “Fukushima farmer fights uphill battle to sell vegetables amid radiation rumors“

Set Tab Width for Indentation in Emacs

I’ve been working with Strongswan for a while now and created a few patches to enhance conftest, the testing framework included in Strongswan. Like most software projects, Strongswan requires that patches adhere to their coding style. I wanted to configure my Emacs to take care of that, but only for the Strongswan source directory because I usually use a different style. The main difference is that Strongswan uses 4 character wide tabs. I quickly found that it is possible to put local Emacs settings into a .dir-locals.el file, which applies to everything contained in its parent directory. Finding the actual tab with and indentation settings took a bit more time, but here’s my solution:

;; local indentation settings
((nil . ((indent-tabs-mode . t)
         (c-basic-offset . 4)
         (tab-width . 4))))

The first word behind the opening parentheses selects the mode where the settings will apply. In this case it’s nil, so they will be used in all modes.

Not Just A Nokia Problem!

Death Twitches: Nokia Caught Wiretapping Encrypted Traffic From Its Handsets

You’ve probably heard about the Nokia wiretapping thing already, but if not the link above will fill you in. This is another example why it is bad that phone manufacturers usually remain in control of phones after sale, and it’s not just a Nokia problem. Most smartphones are made to prevent the user from changing the software without manufacturer or provider’s approval, leaving the user at their mercy as seen above. This is bad. I think phone manufacturers should be forced to give out all information the user needs to really own the device — at least hardware specifications (to write alternative operating systems) and a way to actually replace the OS.

If you say “Who would want to replace their smartphone’s OS?”: People are already doing that, but they need to figure out specifications and ways around the manufacturer’s countermeasures. They shouldn’t have to! Also, manufacturers often don’t provide software updates, including security updates, even for fairly new devices. Of course they make more money if the user is forced to buy a new phone to stay safe and can’t just do the update himself… 😈

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