Most recently, however, the FBI has announced its goal for the year 2013 is to address what it calls the “going dark” problem, which means because criminals are increasingly using the internet to conduct their activities, and because services are increasingly making use of TLS and legal forms of strong cryptography for peer-to-peer and client-server communications, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the United States government to obtain useful leads or evidence from tapping the encrypted data across the wire.
Their solution is to mandate service providers (which encompasses ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, as well as online service providers like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, et al.) to build backdoors into their products to make them more “wiretap friendly.” Failure to comply after a short period where government assistance is provided will result in a steep fine every day until compliance is met.
“What’s the problem? I have nothing to hide.”
Many people feel that privacy invasions are fine because they don’t have anything to hide. But if that were true, they would be enthusiastic about the notion of joining a nudist colony. Privacy is a fundamental component of any functioning society. “Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world,” says Eric Hughes, the author of the Cypherpunk Manifesto, which was authored around the time of the Zimmermann case.
“But we have to stop the [hackers/criminals/terrorists].”
I’d hate to be the one to break it to you, but hackers and career criminals already know how to use all of the tools on this page. In fact, they can go a step further than anything outlined here by writing malware, infecting thousands of computers, forming a botnet, and doing all their misdeeds over a remote desktop protocol (such as VNC) so all the evidence is on someone else’s machine (and most of the connections would connect back to there).
Furthermore, creating mandated backdoors in existing services and software, for the purpose of being wiretap friendly, will actually decrease the overall security of the internet. All it would take is a bored programmer to go spend a few weeks on http://www.binary-auditing.com and develop a knack for reverse engineering before the law enforcement backdoor becomes a backdoor that hackers everywhere can use.
So without further ado, here are some of the tools that netizens can use to drop off the surveillance grid and enjoy some privacy
