User4/draft/TOR, the NSA, and CL security

TOR, the NSA, and CL security

Towards the end of 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron explained during a BBC interview that he had ordered the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British outlet analogous to the American CIA, to work with the National Security Agency of America in a joint operation to find a way to arrest those accessing child pornography in the "Darknet".

His actual words were, "There's been a lot in the news recently about the techniques, ability and brilliance of the people involved in the intelligence community, in GCHQ and the NSA in America. That expertise is going to be brought to bear to go after these revolting people sharing these images [of child abuse] on the dark net, and making them available more widely"

By Darknet, one should know that he is talking about the anonymous Tor network (https://www.torproject.org). It is helping political dissidents worldwide evade ISP censorship and communicate anonymously to debate about human rights. However, David Cameron is right that there is also crime going on within the Tor network. This brings up an essential question:

why are those creating child pornography and/or distributing it on Tor the number one target for law enforcement instead of those killing youths by selling them drugs?

The answer is that, by targeting child porn in Tor, it is easy to convince the population that any measure they take curtailing liberties is for the greater good. Even if all they accomplish is to shatter confidence in the Tor network and harm human rights activists' only means of secure communications to protect themselves from repressive governments, it would still be heralded as a worthwhile effort.

Targeting child porn is also a way for the big spy agencies to justify the illegal wiretapping of the whole world and get people to accept that reading their emails, listening in to their phone calls, and tracking their every move is for the just cause of stopping child porn. Even better, by defining cartoons and photos of kids in the bath as "child abuse images", they make it sound dramatic enough that nobody will be able to say anything against it without looking abominable.

This is not the first time that GCHQ, originally created to protect UK national security from foreign governments and terrorists, is given the task to act against child porn. Just last year during a UK Parliament public hearing, the director of the UK's eavesdropping nerve center revealed to Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee that they work with the Child Exploitation Online Protection Agency, stating that "in terms of working with them to uncover the identities and track down some of those who are involved in online sexual exploitation of children within the UK, including from overseas."

It was also GCHQ who assisted British police with cracking the password of the notorious UK child abuser Ian Watkins, who, if the press is to be believed, was storing child porn online with the notvery-clever password "ifuckkids".

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What is Tor and why should I care?

Tor is a software proxy that helps to protect the anonymity of its users while browsing the web. As opposed to most internet surfing, where your computer sends data (or packets) directly from your computer to a server that contains a website, Tor sends your network packets through a number of other Tor-enabled machines before that data reaches the user's desired web page. Due to this, it is much harder to tell which computers are passing other peoples' packets along apart from a computer which a request originated from.

Additionally, Tor gives its users the ability to use websites not normally accessible without it. Tor hidden services are websites which can only be accessed by using a Tor-enabled browser. Much like using Tor for surfing the web, Tor hidden services, or onion sites, are sites which send data destined to reach site visitors through multiple systems before reaching their users' computers. It is then rather hard to find where a server hosting onion sites may be physically located.

Why Girl Lovers should be worried about the NSA:

Although the first impression of Girl Lovers is that, because they love children, would never harm them, and hate all kinds of images depicting abuse, that the NSA and GCHQ targeting of child porn on Tor shouldn't cause their concern, this assumption is a foolish mistake.

Tor is an essential tool for Girl Lovers to protect their privacy. Using the tool allows them to express an opinion without worrying about having a brick thrown through their window or having obscene graffiti scrawled on their door by one of the many people who disagree with the views of Girl Lovers.

United Kingdom's legal definition of child abuse includes downloading images of fictitious cartoons that look underage. If a Girl Lover clicks on a mislabeled link that takes him to a site depicting cartoon children in sexual situations, he is, according to law, inadvertently abusing kids while looking at those fictional characters. If the unlucky Girl Lover were to be visited by the police, the cops would find their story of accidentally accessing child pornography absurd. At best, the person would have his opinions and attractions exposed to everyone he knows, but worse yet, he could gamer both exposure of his thoughts and be arrested for viewing child porn.

Miscarriages of justice are known to have happened in the past. You don't want to be falsely accused of having abused a kid through cartoons. The consequences would be prison and having to register on the sex offender registry each year for many years.

What can Girl Lovers do to stop these agencies from tracking them?

It is imperative that you take this privacy threat seriously. The NSA and GCHQ have the expertise and funds to target you, regardless of whether you are or are not involved in any kind of illegal activity. You will not be the first innocent person to fall into the huge NSA dragnet.

When the British Prime Minister says that they will target Tor, it is because he actually will follow through on that effort. If, after the Prime Minister's public announcement to the press, GCHQ accomplishes no results in 2014, many cloak and dagger staff could get fired from their jobs. They may be willing to set up Girl Lovers to take the fall, so that there are results to show the Prime Minister and they will remain part of the intelligence community. Besides, arresting a small number of Girl Lovers in tandem with the child porn arrests will not exactly cause riots.

With the NSA and GCHQ targeting Tor, those downloading anything from Tor are probably more at risk than those doing so from Usenet.

The NSA, and we know this for sure thanks to Snowden's leaked documents, has a list of undiscovered zero day software vulnerabilities that can be only burned for the most important targets. Since child pornography has now become the primary focus for the NSA and GCHQ, the spy agencies will be using resources previously reserved to catch terrorists for hunting down child pornographers, as well as anybody standing up for pedophiles'

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Freedom Host was taken over in 2013 by the FBI, claiming it hosted child porn before shutting down the site, incidentally also hosting Tormail. Now in the hands of the FBI too is a new JavaScript exploit in the Firefox browser, used by the Tor browser bundle to reveal visitors' real computer IP addresses.

People with the Firefox Noscript plug-in (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/) enabled in the Tor browser bundle were protected from the exploit, but others were not.

The Tor network is resilient, and it does not track you through the nodes. Spy agencies are not interested in tracking all of Tor's nodes either. If the NSA and GCHQ did this, no one would want to use the software anymore. The NSA does not want for this to happen because they run their own nodes to gather intelligence from the network. Additionally, it is the US government who partly funds Tor development.

Spy agencies will make it look as if only those visiting child porn pages or forums in Tor are being targeted, with the other users being safe. And the way they will do this is by exploiting software bugs and not the network, which would be challenging to do.

It is impossible to guarantee 100% protection against zero day vulnerabilities that nobody knows about, but you can minimize the risk of accidentally getting caught in this future law enforcement sting operation by making sure that you always run the latest updated version of Tails live CD (httpsz//tails.boum.org).

It would make sense for the NSA to target the Tor browser bundle default configuration for the simple reason that is what most people are using. Running Tor in Linux using the non-persistent storage of a live CD like Tails, specially configured to avoid leaks, greatly reduces the possibilities of getting your computer infected by NSA malware. Add to that using common sense, and not going to pages that you suspect to contain child porn, even if access to it is provided indirectly. Finally, those who do not accept all files and are weary of ignoring browser warnings without reading and understanding them will be safer on the Tor network.

I am not suggesting Tails will make its users invincible, because the NSA could find an exploit for them too. I am saying that, if you use Tor, Tails is the safest way to do this right now.

There is no magic wand for unbreakable security and there will never be one. There are limited resources by the part of the NSA, and they will have to prioritize who they will go after. If you make yourself awfully expensive and time consuming to get, the NSA is likely to leave you alone and move onto a child pornographer with lower security standards instead of a Girl Lover political dissident.

If you express dissent and lack protection, these agencies will be after you online. To catch those against the status quo, they will gladly ignore children and those putting minors in danger.

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Alicelovers Magazine-Issue-3, Feb. 2015, p.15

https://alicelovers.net/ezine.htm