The government can read your email and tap your phone now. So, make sure to say hello whenever you use electronic communications devices.
Here’s a picture of Kid Oakland and BooMan sharing a moment.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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My default email account has a header (not visible without a bit of inspection) that reads: “Hello to my friends and fans in domestic surveillance.” Have done for some time.
I’m wondering if I shouldn’t start encrypting my mails with GPG (an open-source trapdoor encryption scheme) just to annoy anyone who might be trying to read them.
Don’t waste your time. When the NSA stopped pressuring Congress to suppress public-key cryptography, it can only be because they found a way to crack it easily.
Ironically, the best way to thwart government surveillance these days is probably communicating in manuscript on paper. The intelligence agencies are apparently more than capable of automatically sifting through electronic communications, but the humble letter still requires some schmuck to open envelopes and then key the contents if they prove interesting. Not cost effective at all.
Don’t be so sure. I’m afraid I don’t share your pessimism about the security of trapdoor encryption, especially since the complexity of cracking the message gets higher as the number of bits used to encode it increases.
True, you can brute force a public-key encrypted message, especially at a fairly low key length. It takes a lot of time and computer power, and keep in mind that the NSA aren’t supermen and there are limits to what even the equipment available to the NSA can accomplish. Plus, if the NSA is busy cracking a message I sent to you, that’s resources that they can’t devote to cracking a message somewhere else.
Rather than being able to quickly crack public-key encryption, I suspect they figured out that using pattern analysis of who’s sending what, from where, and to whom (among other techniques, I’m sure) is more effective than trying to crack messages one at a time until things really get urgent.
What concerns me isn’t that they have the computing power to perform a brute-force attack, it’s that they may well have found a weakness in the RSA algorithm that eliminates the need for brute force. The NSA employs a substantial proportion of the country’s mathematicians, and it would not surprise me if they have found a way to perform large number factorization in polynomial time.
I’ll admit that it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely. They employ a lot of good minds, but not all, and with the encryption to PGP and GPG being publicly available and well known, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the better minds in the crypto community aren’t actively attacking the problem as well.
Still, one’s tinfoil hat can’t be on too tight these days. Theories I would have dismissed a few years ago as wild speculative fantasy are suddenly sounding more and more reasonable with every passing day.
Has Georgie’s gang also given itself the right to open first-class mail? I still haven’t heard anything about this. In fact we’re living in czarist Russia.
The problem is that we don’t know what Georgie has given himself the power to do. The details remain classified.
Not a lot of detail required when the starting point is “I am on a mission from The One True God and He tells me what to do.”
No kidding, I’d say they have given themselves permission to do any damn thing they want to..and then some. They have operated from day one believing the rules don’t apply to them…rules, we don’t need no stinkin rules.
This has been my email sig for over a year now. I think it was courtesy of the Bush Impeachment Coalition peeps.
I easily deciphered the notice you have. I just took the 20th letter from the end, & put it with the 15th letter from the end, to spell FU.
Now my emails will all have the same message as yours. Let them figure it out.
Hey, what`s up Manny. That`s a nice notice.
hi knucklehead! clearly, we need to work on our encryption. you broke that code without breaking a sweat 😉
Um…Manny – you know how imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?….well I just stole your sig. 🙂
I’m sincerely flattered. hehe
For a long time I ended cell phone calls with “Fuck you NSA.”
I’m gonna have to start doing that again.
I want constructive feedback. If they are tracking their calls, can I get reminders if I forget to call my Mom on her birthday or Mother’s Day. Or like constructive criticism when I screw up a phone call to a girl?
Maybe the NSA can cut people off when they are being idiots give them a moment think before they say anything stupider.
One day my NSA minders told me my life was too boring and I really needed to spice it up. They said I was putting them to sleep. I’ve never been so insulted in my life.
(the play by Jules Pfeiffer) If I remember right from reading it in high school umpty-mumble years ago, one of the supporting characters made a hobby of sending himself letters with notes to the guy who was reading his email enclosed. Asking if what he was doing was really worth it, that sort of thing. At first there seemed to be no effect, but soon the opening of the envelopes starting getting sloppy, then torn corners, then a handwritten note saying PLEASE!!
Trolling the NSA. Who would have thought.
Open? Well- how about this wapo and C-span report re the missing arms report. GAO report available at GAO.org
Is k/o as cool in person as he is online?
Truth be told, he is even cooler in person.
that’s the truth.
Honestly of the people at YK2 that I haven’t met, Kid Oakland is the one I would most like to meet.
That doesn’t surprise me.
Booman, are you wearing orange?!!!
Protective camoflage.
Many species use this device when surrounded by hostile predators.
I want to know why he wasn’t wearing his BT T-shirt.
i’m shocked that he forgot his helmet. What kind of Brownback Backer is he?!?
Shameful.
I’m off Brownback. He turned out not to be everything I hoped for in a candidate.
Is that why my emails have been severely delayed (2 days!) since Saturday night?
No, it’s because your tubes are clogged from trucks dumping stuff into them. Please unhook your modem and call your ISP and have them blow the dirt out of your tubes for you.
Hay BooMan, is that a banana in your pocket or are you just happy to see KO?
I’m sincerely bummed out….I scrolled back up there really quick only to find you were kidding.
I need to stop posing for crotch photos…
I did get to meet Digby. And Bill in Portland Maine, and a number of other wonderful people! I missed seeing Kid Oakland, except across the vast expanse of the main ballroom when he got a standing ovation from all assembled.
I missed meeting clammyc, though. Bummers – maybe next time.
Juan Cole rocks.
I hear Drinking Liberally drained the Hyatt dry of everything except Bud Lite, or something like that… Way to go, guys’n’gals. 🙂
Miller Lite. If they had Bud Light, that would have been gone too.