Ubuntu Unleashed

As Franklin says, "Those that would give up liberty in the pursuit of security shall have neither."
Recently the government has been infringing on our rights and privacy online globally. This doesnt just effect the United States, the NSA in the United States is and has been logging more than 50% of all internet communications. And most likely All smtp/pop/imap and webmail is probably logged and filtered for certain keywords.
I take Privacy & The freedoms we had and are now loosing seriously.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been fighting for our rights for years and needs more support. The EFF has fought the FBI for the past few years and got important information shedding light on DCS-3000 aka Red Hook. This system logs phone communications. And this is just the FBI.. The NSA has the biggest & best computer systems in the world with the most storage and could actively sort/log everything that it needs to.

NSA Affiliated IP ranges: These ip ranges are mostly Name Servers and also full isp's including qwest.net, comcast, cox, sprint, att.. to name a few.. These Ip ranges have been confirmed by thousands of sources that work in ISP's as well as whistleblowers.

I strongly suggest encrypting all your data communications online via the tor network that is sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation at tor.eff.org.

Surveillance & its Effects on society

Surveillance is a process of keeping people (such as customers and employees, as well as members of the public) under close supervision. What are the effects of surveillance? Here are two answers from an interesting blog (now called Into The Machine) whose main purpose seems to be to critique the authoritarian policies of the UK Home Secretary (past and present).

• All CCTV monitoring does is lock down the public face of our nation, allowing us in our public capacity to simply sweep aside all the factors that lead to the crime and attitude we're experiencing every day. (The Two Faces of CCTV)
• Surveillance will always produce nothing but underground revelry and a false sense of security. (The Ubiquity of Unnatural surveillance)

It is clearly important to understand the effects on those being observed. But it is also interesting to note the effects on those doing (or relying upon) the observing.

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was originally a prison so designed that the warder could watch all the prisoners at the same time. By extension, this term is used to describe any technical or institutional arrangement to watch/ monitor large numbers of people. It forms part of Foucault's analysis of discipline, and provides a useful metaphor for various modern technologies

• CCTV
• workforce monitoring
• database systems such as customer relationship management (CRM)
• Google

The panopticon provides surveillance and may result in a loss of privacy for the people being watched / monitored, but may also make people feel they are being looked after (better quality of service, safer). If you know you’re being watched, this may trigger various feelings – both positive and negative.

Besides the impact on the people being watched, the pantopticon often has an adverse effect on the watcher. The panopticon gives the illusion of transparency and completeness – so the watcher comes to believe three fallacies

• that everything visible is undistorted truth
• that everything visible is important
• that everything important is visible

This is one of the reasons why surveillance mechanisms often become dysfunctional even for those doing the surveillance. For example, instead of customer relationship management (CRM) promoting better relationships with the customer, it becomes a bureaucratic obsession with the content of the customer database

Why we need Tor

Using Tor protects you against a common form of Internet surveillance known as "traffic analysis." Traffic analysis can be used to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. Knowing the source and destination of your Internet traffic allows others to track your behavior and interests. This can impact your checkbook if, for example, an e-commerce site uses price discrimination based on your country or institution of origin. It can even threaten your job and physical safety by revealing who and where you are. For example, if you're travelling abroad and you connect to your employer's computers to check or send mail, you can inadvertently reveal your national origin and professional affiliation to anyone observing the network, even if the connection is encrypted.

How does traffic analysis work? Internet data packets have two parts: a data payload and a header used for routing. The data payload is whatever is being sent, whether that's an email message, a web page, or an audio file. Even if you encrypt the data payload of your communications, traffic analysis still reveals a great deal about what you're doing and, possibly, what you're saying. That's because it focuses on the header, which discloses source, destination, size, timing, and so on.

A basic problem for the privacy minded is that the recipient of your communications can see that you sent it by looking at headers. So can authorized intermediaries like Internet service providers, and sometimes unauthorized intermediaries as well. A very simple form of traffic analysis might involve sitting somewhere between sender and recipient on the network, looking at headers.

But there are also more powerful kinds of traffic analysis. Some attackers spy on multiple parts of the Internet and use sophisticated statistical techniques to track the communications patterns of many different organizations and individuals. Encryption does not help against these attackers, since it only hides the content of Internet traffic, not the headers.

Resources:
EFF ACTION CENTER - Support EFF by writing your Congress & State Representatives online for free via fax/email
EFF DEEPLINKS
Cryptome.org - Important Information & news on Privacy & Security Threats
howto on setting up Tor and Vidalia here