I just got a question about security and paranoia. As just today I had a freind totally freak out on me because I talked about drugs to him over MSN. The thing is, that I talk about drugs all the time over MSN with my buddies and never give it a second thought. I know that MSN and ther other instant messenger programs are unencrypted and if someone did knew how to sniff around and wanted to see what I was saying and had the skillz they could read my MSN chats, just as they could read my email. But I never really gave it much concern, because I figure that someone, particularly some law enforcement agency would have to be putting the effort into putting me under surveilance, and I am not worthy of that, I am small time, ya know, hell I've never even grown.

Still it makes me wonder, is my freind just being a paranoid freak that worries the fbi and everyone else is out to get him and shit, or is it something we should not be so casual about and really shoudl be careful what we talk about over msn and email and shit ?

Whats everyone else think ?

Never assume that anything on the net is secure but I don't think that any LEO's have the budget to pay someone to hack the multitudes of chats going on in the slim hope of trapping some small time user or grower that is very unlikely to come under their jurisdiction anyway.

All they can get is an IP address. These can be spoofed (faked) by anyone anyway. If your ISP does not provide you with a static IP address you are even safer.

I would not worry about chatting one to one with a mate. Be more careful in chat rooms.

Bottom line: It is impossible to prove it was you online. The closest they could get is your house, but it could have been anyone in the house chatting!!

Unless you are a big time grower or drug king pin, relax and cone up...just watch the paranoia!!

well there are thousands of users that use instant messenging programs, and i would think there is plenty of people that would talk about drugs with friends, as well people just joking around talking about drugs. And as you said, you don't even grow so there would be no point putting the effort to track you down.
so as ffc99 said just relax and toke up

It would actually be easier to intercept your conversation over msn than it would be to get a warrant to tap your phone line, and with the new terroisim laws they are giving the police and other athorities all kinds of powers ,

a hypothetical situation would be basicly what equates to a bad word filter ( but ofcourse a bit more complex) on various msn servers which we all dial into when using msn this filter can then allow any conversation to be automaticly picked up on and then recorded from then on out. ( as far as the encryption goes msn designed your key so naturally they will be able to desifer it themselfs if they choose )

as for the question about your friend being parranoid , well thats all a matter of opinion some people have allot to worry about so I wouldn't blame them for not wanting to talk about certain things in detail or at all
but then there are people that are just overly parranoid and get worse and worse untill they snap

imo a little parranoia goes a long way to keep you from trouble at times because it makes you think about some of your actions.

Be cautious, not paranoid. Same to your friends. If it doesn't need discussing, don't discuss it - or discuss sensitive topics face to face only.

A few simple principles like that should have everyone getting along swimmingly.

Invent your own language, ie: Blinkt norpt aboboleet rocrop. No one will understand you but you'll never fear instant msger programs again!!!!!

Duuktanow Hanky,

Tinkachu pleep fornolop pingtableen quargle plorp! Ha ha ha! :thumbsup

Yoingu! Norftshritza ag hoost!! Bloorgle hams tocak feak.

lmao

At this point in time, I'd say there's no real risk. I mean, if I was shifting kilos of heroin between international borders, then yeah, I'd think about not using it, but for a few blokes just growing some choof for themselves in their back rooms like us, I wouldn't worry too much - just because of how hard they'd have to work to get a minimal bust.

I think even the police have to admit they have much bigger problems to worry about than that. I mean jeez, people post up pics of decent sized grows on here, has anyone ever been busted because of it? (btw that was not a rhetorical question)

With msn and mobile phones ya messegers are scaned for key words because of all this terror shit that is going on and if certin key words come up in your convo is taped to be cheacked out to see if you are planing to commit a torror act same with sms's as thay did in england when thay had the train bombings...

if you are really parranoid then use just email and enrypt it. you can get pretty much anonomous accounts from all over the world. get yourself an encryption program like gpg/gnupg set yourself a key and then distribute this key only to people you trust. then only the people who have the key can read it. and if or when it is intercepted it cant be read because it is well jumbled up. .. i run linux my system for web is firewalled encrypted and proxied. i try hard to stay anon. well most of the time.

encryption is the way. check out gnupg here http://www.gnupg.org/

Hiyas
Working in IT in Network security, I can also say that using encryption on messages will arouse suspicion. Information that is sensitive enough to be encrypted (even if its details of ur medical history, sex life, whatever), is enough to get the monitoring engines interested. And unfortunately, they have thousands of gigahertz of processing power which for the most part is being unused, and it doesnt take long to break encryption (even 256 bit WEP encryption can be cracked within a month using a 3ghz p4...tis why they switched to WPA and then WPA2....)

Nothing is illegible to these machines and software, so you're better off talking to ur pals as tho ur after something like 'spare tyres' or 'scrap metal' or whatever... tell em in person beforehand what it means and make it so damn obscure that nobody would twig... encryption, for the most part, is useless.

my 2c
-Doh

Dohmar is spot the fuck on. You simply arrange to speak in code face to face, so that when communicating with another medium - IM, email, mobile, phone etc that nothing is lost in the translation, but authorities are none the wiser.

For example: Could you pick me up a quarter roast chicken next time you're doing the late night shopping?

quarter = amount
roast chicken = ?
late night = taking shopping deliberately out of context to keep everyone on the straight and narrow

Yeah. Course the authorities probably can guess it, but proving it and actually getting it upheld in a court is practically impossible. Unless they have u on tape arranging the code

-Doh

dohmar was correct in saying anything encrypted does get attention, why else would you encrypt something unless you didnt want other people seeing whats inside?

+ when it comes down to it, everything looks the same in binary code and its just a matter of time + the NSA requests and goes totally nutcase if they dont have all the decryption keys and such, i seen a special about it on discovery channel on echelon...they were saying there are buildings dedicated to cracking electronic codes and the only reason it takes so long to crack the codes is because they have literally millions of terrahertz to examine daily

Its actually not that difficult...if you have a binary editor, hex editor, (or even the 'search/parse' thingy that comes with good old XTGold, you can scan a 100 meg file in a few seconds, on a p100 no less.

Encryption headers are the giveaway. Doesnt matter what the cipher is, what method is used, all packets need an identifier so that the software that parses the encryption knows where to start and stop, but its not limited to encryption, it pretty much works on all files. .exe files for example always starts with "MZ" (open up any .exe in a hex editor to see what I mean)

Echelon is only publicly known because it was retired a few years ago, theres another one out there dubbed 'echelon 2' but thats more a reference to the technology; its not officially been named (as you'd expect).

Binary code looks the same in the way theyre all 1's and 0's, however its the patterns of those 1's and 0's that give us stuff like ASCII/ANSI/Unicode etc...those things are real easy to find...

But the crux of WDC's point is totally correct; theres just *so* damn much info out there, they can't get it all. They'd rather use the processing power to bust terrorists, cartels, and other syndicated crime. Pot smokers are barely worth scanning for, so you can probably talk about bud all you want, its when you encrypt it that the "little red light" starts to flash

Oh, but also cos I'm a geek, i'm gonna have to correct my buddy...he meant 'terabytes' im sure (cause megahertz, gigahertz and the 'flops' are all referring to on-demand processing power and not the I/O traffic that keeps those brilliantly powered machines busy.) but even terabytes are a major under-estimation....a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes, and yes, I've met customers who have a terabyte of porn And no, I didn't shake their hairy palms... ;D

(Hertz = cycles per second...100 mhz = 100 million cycles per second)
-Doh

Let me guess - he had a terabyte of porn and no girlfriend?

I love cleaning up clients' workstations - you find all sorts of things. I had one guy who was into goat porn. No shit - real life, literal GOAT PORN.

Sick freak.

Dude ive been teching for over 10 yrs, including ISP work....seen it all...tubgirl, goatse, u name it...

had to work on a clients computer which was full of homemade gay porn....nothing wrong with that, cause i dont look at peoples files, but the fucker had it as his wallpaper... ahem ;\

if it was an 18 yr old girl doing...things........well then I'd be DOWN FOR IT! but hrm....

Clients workstations are great for warez too. They might have a legit copy of windows, but that'd be pushing it sometimes!!

Incidentally, when I used to work at an ISP, no matter what the content was, we would turn a blind eye, providing that a) It wasnt kiddie porn - nobody can tolerate that shit, Copyrighted material or c) Slanderous/Libelous data (Slander is spoken, so irc is slander, libel is print, so that means email).

However B and C were *rarely* enforced, and only when the issue was taken up by a third party (the one being vilified/copyrighted).

-Doh

Was that client Hanky ?.....just askin :whistling