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Showing posts from August, 2013

NSA Tapping and Cloud Computing

Recent revelations from the U.S. have informed the public that conspiracy theorist fantasy's are all too real, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been installing taps at key Internet points to absorb vast quantities of email and Internet traffic. As IT professionals, publically available information (no inside information or secret information is utilized in the preparation of this article) and an understanding of the Internet as a series of routers and servers, we understand that “taping key Internet points” means copying streams of Internet traffic via router configurations and having monitoring software installed on email servers and the like (directing copies to the government monitoring servers). The NSA isn’t secretly tapping into some sort of vast Internet cable bundles.  Rather they’re walking into AT&T, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Internet backbone and primary service providers, and installing software on their routers and servers as well as installing NS

The Reality - Email Privacy or the Lack Therefore

Today a top law blogger freaked out after realizing that their emails can be read and monitored... "The owner of (a encrypted protected email service that just shut down) tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too.  There is no way to (blog) without email. Therein lies the conundrum.  What to do? ...the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how "clean" we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don't know how to function in such an atmosphere. I feel (unclean), knowing that persons I don't know can paw through all my thoughts and hopes and plans in my emails...  They tell us that if you send or receive an email from outside the US, it will be read.  (And many emails inside the US are accidentally picked up by those capture engines.)  If it's encrypted, they keep it for five years, presum