Ridiculously Ineffective Federal Wiretapping Proposal
UUCP. UUCP equivalent by person to person network of flash drives. Barbara works at Intel. Her roommate Sarah works at McDonalds. Sarah's manager's wife works at Macy's. And so on. People have multiple pass-ons for the data stream. Neighbors. Workout partners. The owner of the 7 Eleven around the corner.
The individual emails in the data stream are public-key encrypted.
People who really want their data from friends and/or co-conspirators and/or family to be private use a "use once" code pad of multiple, successive public key addresses.
Cuba has the dictatorial authority to use any means at all to stop data passed by flash drives and finds it impossible to do so.
If a key in the code book is skipped, you know a message was intercepted and killed.
Use triple redundancy on which nodes you send each message through.
You can intercept data, but you can't kill it without revealing that you're intercepting. You can't decrypt it without at some point capturing the end recipient and forcing him to disclose his private key to you. The only recourse available to the legitimate court system to compel the disclosure of the public key is sanctioning the person under the court order for contempt.
And even then, it only gets you an individual message sequence, not the total message stream. If a use once pad is applied and they switch around phones, you can't even necessarily find the messages to an individual recipient.
I am not a security expert. I can see an easy way for terrorists to get around this measure by this simple strategy. Messages will take longer to arrive. For terrorists, this is a minor inconvenience.
For the rest of us, it is a major annoyance but nothing that can't be circumvented and it would be circumvented immediately by those of us who like our comms private.
Not only have the Cuban people succeeded at passing data virally by flash drive, you could never get courts in the US to allow the outlawing of people passing a data dump person to person, where they have no idea whose stack of papers in a whole sack are inside the dump. Not without open revolt by the populace.
Again, even if you could, enough individuals would risk it to make secure comms available to those who desire them and want to go to the trouble. And enough people willing to rot in jail over it, if caught, for as long as need be, as free speech, civil disobedience protesters, to render enforcement flat impossible.
It's not only a stupid idea, it's not only an unconstitutional idea, it's also not remotely enforceable as the people who bother to use public key encryption already are either free speech fanatics (the large majority) or do have something to hide. If you pass laws against it, the free speech fanatics will then fall in both categories.
Could you buy illegal drugs tonight if you really wanted some? Organized crime would be happy to supply nodes where they guarantee the "production" system will be up and running, and the transmission reasonably fast and reliable. This would make alcohol prohibition the equivalent of flashing your lights to indicate you passed a cop, by comparison.
Or do you underestimate how many ardent proponents of free speech occasionally smoke a joint, and are therefore easily connected up to the comms provider system.
This does not include software to detect the vocal range of a speaker or pair of speakers and run a digital data stream in the audio range just above or just below the patter of inconsequential talk about the weather or sports. Or send the data through a hacked bot network. Which is one way organized crime could, for a small fee, guarantee rapid node to node transmission. As fast as you normally check your email now, it's in your inbox on your flash drive as soon as you "check your email" with a member of the right gang in your town.
If you're expecting urgent messages, you could even collect them on a case by case basis by phoning any one of a gang's public numbers and getting your data drop on top of or underneath the audio of a "recorded" message from your pharmacy, or the local theater's theater times, or someone's voicemail message.
And this is just off the top of my head as I'm typing this. A couple of decent hackers with a few weeks to think about it could optimize the hell out of the network and streamline it, and keep improving it over time, and keep the system structure (architecture?) agile enough to outpace the authorities' computer experts.
Organized crime's and other nation state's hackers are better than the US government's, by far, and countries like China would love to hide their own secure messaging inside a whole big data stream of innocent but privacy-conscious users.
Users who would be too pissed off to give a rat's ass that criminals and foreign countries and anyone at all were also riding along the free data stream. At that point, those users would be so pissed off at the then-current US government that they would see it as a "domestic enemy" of the constitution and a bigger threat to liberty than the entities it was bitching about. Such a government would have completely lost it's legitimacy in their eyes. By which I mean its legitimacy as the lawful government of our country--it would be viewed as just as illegitimate as a government put in by coup or foreign invasion.
What the FBI and the rest of the current government want? It won't work. And simply proposing it severely endangers the perception of governmental legitimacy in the eyes of a demographic in the citizenry with a massively disproportionate ability to act on their fear, moral indignation, and rage.
And yes, this journal entry is rambling and stream of consciousness. You will note that I, a simple non-expert and not even relatively sophisticated user, brainstormed faster and faster and more reliable and more secure means of data transmission just in the course of typing the entry. That's the point. The pros could shoot down a lot of my proposals in a heartbeat--and replace them with a far more efficient, secure, and workable system. The government has made a stupid proposal, it won't work, and that their proposal got this far says far too much about the government's level of stupidity, technical ignorance, and complete isolation from anything remotely resembling morals or ethics.
The individual emails in the data stream are public-key encrypted.
People who really want their data from friends and/or co-conspirators and/or family to be private use a "use once" code pad of multiple, successive public key addresses.
Cuba has the dictatorial authority to use any means at all to stop data passed by flash drives and finds it impossible to do so.
If a key in the code book is skipped, you know a message was intercepted and killed.
Use triple redundancy on which nodes you send each message through.
You can intercept data, but you can't kill it without revealing that you're intercepting. You can't decrypt it without at some point capturing the end recipient and forcing him to disclose his private key to you. The only recourse available to the legitimate court system to compel the disclosure of the public key is sanctioning the person under the court order for contempt.
And even then, it only gets you an individual message sequence, not the total message stream. If a use once pad is applied and they switch around phones, you can't even necessarily find the messages to an individual recipient.
I am not a security expert. I can see an easy way for terrorists to get around this measure by this simple strategy. Messages will take longer to arrive. For terrorists, this is a minor inconvenience.
For the rest of us, it is a major annoyance but nothing that can't be circumvented and it would be circumvented immediately by those of us who like our comms private.
Not only have the Cuban people succeeded at passing data virally by flash drive, you could never get courts in the US to allow the outlawing of people passing a data dump person to person, where they have no idea whose stack of papers in a whole sack are inside the dump. Not without open revolt by the populace.
Again, even if you could, enough individuals would risk it to make secure comms available to those who desire them and want to go to the trouble. And enough people willing to rot in jail over it, if caught, for as long as need be, as free speech, civil disobedience protesters, to render enforcement flat impossible.
It's not only a stupid idea, it's not only an unconstitutional idea, it's also not remotely enforceable as the people who bother to use public key encryption already are either free speech fanatics (the large majority) or do have something to hide. If you pass laws against it, the free speech fanatics will then fall in both categories.
Could you buy illegal drugs tonight if you really wanted some? Organized crime would be happy to supply nodes where they guarantee the "production" system will be up and running, and the transmission reasonably fast and reliable. This would make alcohol prohibition the equivalent of flashing your lights to indicate you passed a cop, by comparison.
Or do you underestimate how many ardent proponents of free speech occasionally smoke a joint, and are therefore easily connected up to the comms provider system.
This does not include software to detect the vocal range of a speaker or pair of speakers and run a digital data stream in the audio range just above or just below the patter of inconsequential talk about the weather or sports. Or send the data through a hacked bot network. Which is one way organized crime could, for a small fee, guarantee rapid node to node transmission. As fast as you normally check your email now, it's in your inbox on your flash drive as soon as you "check your email" with a member of the right gang in your town.
If you're expecting urgent messages, you could even collect them on a case by case basis by phoning any one of a gang's public numbers and getting your data drop on top of or underneath the audio of a "recorded" message from your pharmacy, or the local theater's theater times, or someone's voicemail message.
And this is just off the top of my head as I'm typing this. A couple of decent hackers with a few weeks to think about it could optimize the hell out of the network and streamline it, and keep improving it over time, and keep the system structure (architecture?) agile enough to outpace the authorities' computer experts.
Organized crime's and other nation state's hackers are better than the US government's, by far, and countries like China would love to hide their own secure messaging inside a whole big data stream of innocent but privacy-conscious users.
Users who would be too pissed off to give a rat's ass that criminals and foreign countries and anyone at all were also riding along the free data stream. At that point, those users would be so pissed off at the then-current US government that they would see it as a "domestic enemy" of the constitution and a bigger threat to liberty than the entities it was bitching about. Such a government would have completely lost it's legitimacy in their eyes. By which I mean its legitimacy as the lawful government of our country--it would be viewed as just as illegitimate as a government put in by coup or foreign invasion.
What the FBI and the rest of the current government want? It won't work. And simply proposing it severely endangers the perception of governmental legitimacy in the eyes of a demographic in the citizenry with a massively disproportionate ability to act on their fear, moral indignation, and rage.
And yes, this journal entry is rambling and stream of consciousness. You will note that I, a simple non-expert and not even relatively sophisticated user, brainstormed faster and faster and more reliable and more secure means of data transmission just in the course of typing the entry. That's the point. The pros could shoot down a lot of my proposals in a heartbeat--and replace them with a far more efficient, secure, and workable system. The government has made a stupid proposal, it won't work, and that their proposal got this far says far too much about the government's level of stupidity, technical ignorance, and complete isolation from anything remotely resembling morals or ethics.