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Carnivore Comes To India 155

Posted by timothy from the ravenous dept.
pamri writes: "India is getting its own version of Carnivore. According to this Times of India article,'...after investigations have revealed that Mohammad, alias "Burger," who led the Parliament attack, was in constant touch with his counterparts in Pakistan as well as within India through email ... The Intelligence Bureau (IB) has prepared a list of new keywords that are to be used to intercept mails emanating from IP addresses in India.'"
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Carnivore Comes To India More

Carnivore Comes To India

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  • as long as it's kept away from the Sacred Cows.

  • This sounds like... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ieshan ( 409693 ) <ieshan@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Tuesday December 25, 2001 @05:33AM (#2749000) Homepage Journal
    This sounds like a supreme waste of time. The sad part is, people wont agree with me.

    Firstly, it's been directly stated by terrorists themselves (watch the video!) that transmissions to the lower-level parties involved which *contain instructions* usually don't occur until mere hours before the terrorist act. It isn't as if the terrorists know that they'll be bombing a specific target for months, they find out shortly before. This means that any flagged transmissions will have to be analyzed, which I guarrentee takes a longer amount of time than it does for some terrorist to prepare, ready himself, and carry out the final attack.

    Secondly, these things are going to be spammed or encrypted into oblivion. See point one about time constraints, and then realize that India has a large population. If you scan every email for content and come up with 5 million emails per day that are flagged by the server, how long will it take to process that data? How long do they have?

    Yikes. They'd have better luck issueing a statement like, "Mr. Terrorist? Please stop it. We'll give you penguin dolls."

    • Could be done, especially if good NLP is used (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2001 @06:14AM (#2749020) Homepage Journal
      Natural language processing has come a long way in just the last couple of years. Astonishingly effective applications such as Sinope Summarizer [sinope.nl] are freely available; I can only imagine what an organization with the motivation and resources of the IB, NSA, FBI or CIA might have. I'd feel somewhat disappointed if their software weren't vastly superior to anything I've seen.

      I'd imagine it might be based on Cyc [cyc.com] or a similar dark project, and might achieve a 97% or better success rate at identifying questionable messages, with very few false negatives.

      Assuming a billion emails a day, and five million of them being questionable, I'd suspect such a system could cull that number down to a few thousand—if the target messages were truly that few in number. As a matter of fact, I'd suggest that if sufficient computing power were available, to skip the keyword-scanning filter entirely, since such communications might be carried on with an alternate vocabulary substituted for hotbutton terms. Finding those messages requires more language processing intelligence than Carnivore would seem to have currently.
    • Well, did the development of Carnivore in the U.S. have anything to do with catching terrorists? Did Ashcrofts "patriot" bill have anything to do with catching terrorists? Does the Indian version of Carnivore have anything to do with catching terrorists? No, no, and no. And ev-ry-body knows it. Carnivores ineffectiveness at catching terrorists is irrelevant because that is not the purpose.
  • Egads, you mean terrorists are using email now?
    Whats going to happen when they learn how to encrypt the stuff?

    Don't you all feel so much safer knowing that the various governments have started tracking emails. At the very least it will weed out the more stupid terrorists who don't know how encrypt their emails.
    Just leaving the smart ones, kind of Darwinian selection.

    OK, carnivore, feeding time: Burger attack.
  • Till now, the IB had concentrated more on email IDs with reference to obvious giveaways such as Kashmir, Lashkar, Pakistan, Musharraf etc. For example, an email ID such as Lashkar@hotmail.com should be under the surveillance of the IB.

    umm.. jeez... you could pretty much use ROT-13 on those words and get past the mail filter!! then again... they use a different language... and eventually the government will catch on... heh... can't we all just GPG?

    Happy Holidays to all

  • Wait! This could be a good thing! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2001 @05:45AM (#2749008) Homepage Journal
    If we gave them a list of keywords such as "amazing," "opportunity," "cash" and "enlargement," do you think they could go ahead and filter out all the spam while they're at it? A lot of that comes from India anyway, and they'd be killing two birds with one Carnivore.
  • The system works like this: A software filters mails that repeatedly use the words that the IB has shortlisted. The more obvious keywords would include Jaish, Kashmir, Lashkar. Others are attack, kill, rocket. Let us not forget "Fragged." ...oh, wait... thought we were talking about a LAN party.
  • Much of the data that's shipped around the United States is carried on privately-owned cable/fiber/whatever (ie Qwest, MCI, AT&T, etc), isn't it? Is this the case in India? A Carnivore would be lots easier to implement on state-owned data pipelines. That way the government would be able to bypass the ISPs completely.
  • What I do think that would be the problem is of course, different ways to word things, and also using various code. Not nessiary the usage of Hindu here, but Arabic too. If they -really- wanted to be paranoid, the usage of keywords in English and Chinese could be used as well.

    Now, counterpoint to all the crypto-related flaws: There are chances where snooping would cause a situation where the actual criminal were to slip and send an unencrypted email msg. It's very possible. A point that I agree with is that the crypto -will- hurt efforts because of the need to have the computer power to crack the crypto, which based on some technologies this could be a very time-consuming task that wouldn't help on timely matters.

    Ho hum -- in India I'm sure they don't have the US rights the US people all love and enjoy, so the Indians are going to just have to deal with it.
    • The Indian constitution does gaurantee freedom of speech, but privacy is a rather gray area. Given the fraction of people using email and the like in India fall into the educated faction of society, you can rest assured they won't take it lying down. Sadly with the recent muddle of events of December 13th / September 11th, both American and Indian goverments are likely to cross the line all in the name of "National Security" (tm).

    • in India I'm sure they don't have the US rights the US people all love and enjoy, so the Indians are going to just have to deal with it.

      All i would say dear sir is that It would be better if you were to read the Indian Constitution and the Indian Penal Code.

    • Ho hum -- in India I'm sure they don't have the US rights the US people all love and enjoy, so the Indians are going to just have to deal with it.

      My experience is that the US is not really freer than a lot of other countries, and it is selective in which "freedoms" are really available. The US probably has as much or more economic freedom than most any other first-world place - that is, lower taxes and fewer bureaucratic obstacles to doing business. But in other freedoms, the US lags behind. The Sklyarov case is a good indication of that, as is the war on drugs and the rights that the police have to sieze property they even suspect is related to it, without so much as a court order. In much of Europe, small-scale drug use and possession is tolerated openly. In most other countries, there is more freedom of speech when such freedom threatens corporate "property".

      I guess you're talking about procedural protections for people suspected of a crime; in that regard, the US has, or at least used to have, a number of safeguards that most other countries lacked. But that's changing.

      • No you're correct here; 1/2 our "Bill of Rights" is protections for crimials (4,5,6,7,8). 1 is the most reverended here, 9 is where things like privacy, abortion, etc, come in, 10 is a matter of juristictions, 2 is our guns, and 3 doesn't really matter anymore (we don't have a real need to quarter soldiers in homes with all the bases).

        Unfortuately, since I'm stuck in the US, it gets difficult to aquire other legal texts outside the US... and I'm too lazy to search Google :-)
    • Remember when the US used the Navajo language to encode their communications during World War II?

      Why not use Unicode to write in some obscure language (like Elven? :), make the bytes opposite-endian, and rotate the bits of every byte by x notches?

  • Totalitarian future (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is just coming. Deep inequalities between nations and between different citizens of the same state are not new, but a complete and widespread awareness of these facts and the awareness of the fact that world as a whole has non-renewable sources of wealth, destroyed continiously by the rich will make democracy an option of the past. Totalitarian governments are coming in small steps, the first rules are applicable to strangers and terrorists, and states that thake those first steps are the richest or the most populated nations. But this is just the beginning. Fear it, get ready for it but don't fight it, resistance is futile and may reduce life expectancy drastically.

  • Code Words (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2001 @06:17AM (#2749022) Homepage
    Tell Mr. Bunny to deliver the green Megaman to the Big House at 0900 on Wednesday.

    How are they going to find that message, or understand its significance? The NSA intercepted and decrypted a large number of Soviet diplomatic/intelligence messages in the 1940s (VENONA [nsa.gov]). Despite a large amount of work, the identities of many of the agents referred to in the messages are unknown.

    • Counter intelegence sometimes decodes a codeword about a target is and creats an event to see if it gets reported. An example I remember vagely but don't remember the details is:

      An attack was planned on our military in which we intercepted some messages. We were not sure of the target because it was referred to by a code word. We had the suspected target send a plain text message indicating the water desalination plant failed and needed parts. When the oposition reported the failure, we confirmed the codeword as equating to that base. Does anybody have the details on that incident? I think it was WW2 and one of the small Pacific Islands.

  • Priorities: India, Kashmir and the Internet (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward


    Keep in mind that India is the country with a right-wing fundamentalist Hindu nationalist government that practises a form of legalized Apartheid called the Caste system.

    India has coveted Kashmir for decades and is carrying out a brutal military occupation against the majority Muslim Kashmiri population that is well-documented by international human rights groups and in violation of UN Security Council Resolutions.

    Considering that both India and Pakistan have their military forces on high alert as I write this, with inflammatory rhetoric flying and threats of nuclear war, you can be sure to view anything that India's spy agency says to the press as probable propaganda and posturing.

    That said, India should stick to doing more important things like feeding and housing its people. The number of people who don't even have a meal far outstrip -- by orders of magnitude -- those who use the Internet in that impoverished and backwards country. I'd be very surprised if many average people know what the Internet is, let alone have knowledge of subjects like digital privacy rights and the like.

    Still, small details like those never stopped any country from finding new ways to spy on its citizens.

    • Interesting.

      Your comment about finding new ways to spy on citizens is true although we probably will never know how much surveillance has gone on by various govenments against their citizens through the ages.

      The fact that the current political climate is giving rise to privacy violations such as these should be of concern to Indians in particular and freedom-loving people everywhere.

      However a country that miltarily occupies another nation usually isn't too concerned about minor things such as Internet privacy rights.

      I believe you are correct that most Indians will not even know about these measures and that they can do something about them (even if they aren't affected at this point in time) due to more basic issues such as survival.

      • Indian Human Rights Abuses / Digital Rights Abuses (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Someone was asking for evidence of this - I know its somewhat off-topic but here's some info from Human Rights Watch's report on India's "secret army" in Kashmir:

        Indian security forces have intensified their efforts against militant groups, stepping up cordon-and-search operations and summarily executing captured militant leaders. Alongside them, operating as a secret, illegal army, have been state-sponsored paramilitary groups, composed of captured or surrendered former militants described as "renegades" by the Indian government. Many of these groups have been responsible for grave human rights abuses, including summary executions, torture, and illegal detention as well as election-related intimidation of voters.

        Again, if India's willing to do this sort of thing, then Digital Rights are of no consequence. That doesn't sound like any kind of democracy to me

      • I believe you are correct that most Indians will not even know about these measures and that they can do something about them (even if they aren't affected at this point in time) due to more basic issues such as survival.


        Dude, we don't exactly live in caves here. :-)

        It is not like we are going to let our privacy be taken overnight. There are LUGs around the country which are also active in privacy issues.
        But, at this moment, it is more important that we preserve our sovereignity and our integrity.

        Benjamin Franklin's quote of those who compromise freedom for safety deserve neither sounds great, but when terrorists are out there waiting to wreck havoc, it isn't exactly that simple.

        Democratic nations will preserve the interests of their people. There may be instances when it may seem otherwise, but ultimately the people will win. History has proved this to us, and Argentina is the latest example of this.

        You said that a country pre-occupied with a war has little time for concern with such things as Internet privacy. True, but people are not going to keep quiet either. The amount of people involved in IT is *too* high in India to just ignore such troubles.

        But anyways, they are not taking our rights just like that, not for now atleast ;-)
      • The moment I saw read this story, I knew there were going to be zillions of such bone-headed comments about India being a police state, no freedom of press, blah blah blah............

        Most of these comments are ofcourse sadly misguided and completely uninformed. However it is very commendable to see that the slashdot moderation system allowed only one such comment to get to level 3 (which personally I think is too much for it)

    • That's a bad load of anti-Indian slander from 'Anonymous Coward'. Just about the only thing right in his post was that India should focus on improving life for her downtrodden.

      Here's why the post's wrong: First: India is a constitutionally secular [alfa.nic.in] country, not a Hindu one. (I myself am an Indian Christian, a recent convert from Hinduism). The Caste system is illegal [alfa.nic.in], and practising it prosecuted under Indian law. The implementation of these laws, however, is not thorough [dalits.org] -- inefficiency and corruption plague the Indian administration and justice systems. (Though recently, things have been improving faster)

      Secondy, as far as coveting Kashmir goes, the state of Jammu and Kashmir legally merged with India sometime in 1948. A UN resolution passed then, required Pakistan to withdraw it's forces, and let Kashmir come under complete *Indian* control. India was then to host a plebiscite over the entire state. However Pakistan never withdrew... and the rest is history. You can verify this here [un.org] (see page 11).

      Lastly, getting down to the main topic -- I think using a Carnivore-like system to promiscuously trawl for information without a court order is wrong. An analogy would be a policeman habitually entering into people's homes to check for thieves. And I also think that the spook (it must be one of ours) who released this to our media was simply indulging in wishful thinking (fundamental rights are -- we don't have that many supercomputers.

      • Here's why the post's wrong: First: India is a constitutionally secular [alfa.nic.in] country, not a Hindu one.

        Maybe. But what's going to stop all the right-wing Hindu politicians from passing laws that hurt non-Hindus? Like you said "inefficiency and corruption plague the Indian administration and justice systems". And given this ineffectiveness of making the caste system illegal, one could argue it's just a token law to shift blame when the shit hits the fan. Particularly here [cnn.com], here [yahoo.com], here [worthynews.com], and here [fwbo.org], all courtesy of google [google.com].

        • > > Here's why the post's wrong: First: India is a constitutionally secular [alfa.nic.in] country, not a Hindu one.

          Maybe. But what's going to stop all the right-wing Hindu politicians from passing laws that hurt non-Hindus

          The same thing that stops them in other countries - a national constitution. If I remember my civics lessons correctly, changing the Indian constitution requires a 66% majority in parliament, assent from a majority of states, and the assent of the Indian president (the current one - KR Narayanan - is a former 'untouchable')

          And given this ineffectiveness of making the caste system illegal, one could argue it's just a token law to shift blame when the shit hits the fan. Particularly here [cnn.com],...

          It's easy to knock something done imperfectly (like the abolition of untouchablity in India), but India is in a *much* better state than it was when the British left, thanks to her constitution and hundreds of thousands of honest people who enforce it. Remember George Wallace and Alabama? It's been only a few decades since blacks got the right to vote in the USA -- things changed for the better rapidly once a critical mass for change was reached. India is pretty close to that stage now.

          The Google postings on the conversion -- yes, it did happen, but from one false faith, to another.

      • "Secondy, as far as coveting Kashmir goes, the state of Jammu and Kashmir legally merged with India sometime in 1948. A UN resolution passed then, required Pakistan to withdraw it's forces, and let Kashmir come under complete *Indian* control. India was then to host a plebiscite over the entire state. However Pakistan never withdrew... and the rest is history. You can verify this here [un.org] (see page 11). "

        You're not serious! Those 1948 UN resolutions were especially made to create dissent by dividing ethnic groups and uniting rival ethnic groups.

        This was a post-colonial strategy dreamed up in Europe, nothing more.

        Stephan

        • Firstly, too many people opposed to India on the matter of Kashmir utter the words "UN resolution" as a sort of magic chant that automatically validates all that they say - they should first comprehend what the resolutions actually states.

          Secondly, 'post-colonial' motives may or may not have been at play in the UN in 1948 (personally I think it's possible, but unlikely... reasons below: _

          By end 1948, India had a legal basis to annex Jummu and Kashmir (the treaty of accession signed by it's Maharaja), however thin this may sound. Pakistan did not. The Indian Prime Minister at the time was a from a Hindu family from the Kashmir valley. He had participated in the movement that won freedom for both India and Pakistan, and he and his family had considerable respect in the valley. Virtually no support for joining Pakistan existed in J& K itself -- J&K had more in common in terms of culture and tradition with India than the newly formed Pakistan. J&K political leaders like Sheikh Abdullah (the father of the current J&K chief minister) were also partial to India. Many observers state that a fair plebescite at the time would have been in India's favor (of course it's hard to imagine this now).

          All this would have weighed in the minds of the UN delegates when they came up with the resolution they did.

          Look at the top of the webpage below for a Paksitani military perspective on their 1948 Kashmir infiltration. It's pretty clear that Pakistan had little to no sympathy in the valley itself -- they wouldn't have had to inject foreign tribals and their own troops surreptitiously -- they could simply incite and arm a local rebellion as they are doing now.

          http://www.defencejournal.com/2001/august/anatomy. htm [defencejournal.com]

    • Of course, another way to control its population growth is to have a nice juicy war to rid itself of the lower castes.

      This whole thing between India and Pakistan really sucks. When will humanity grow up?

  • I can't stop laughing! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2001 @06:30AM (#2749031) Homepage Journal
    The Times of India story [indiatimes.com] lists several of these hotbutton words—Kashmir, Lashkar, Pakistan, Musharraf, Jaish, attack, kill, rocket— along with an assurance that those who send email using these keywords will be put under surveillance.

    Then they put a link at the bottom to email the story to your friends!!!

    I can barely catch my breath, I'm laughing so hard!
  • I hope they don't call it Carnivore. Most Hindus (who are vegetarian) wouldnt take too kindly to having a meat-eating piece of software.

    Maybe Herbivore will do! :)
    • hardly, that's a common misconception. it's not forbidden or anything.
    • Most Hindus (who are vegetarian) wouldnt take too kindly to having a meat-eating piece of software.

      I was always under the impression that Hindus aren't homogeneous religion-wise, meaning there's different variaties of "Hinduism". Also, Sihks aren't vegetarian, are they? Not to mention that there may be a minority of Atheists in India, given the increasing level of education the average Indian has.

  • I thought they were vegetarians over there... :)

  • India ?. now way man (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2001 @07:22AM (#2749055) Homepage Journal
    India has a carnivore clone ?. Well with 15 languages and even more encoding schemes for native languages I would like to see India government filter through this mess of Utf8,UCS4,IsCII, TScii (encodings). But personally I will say that india government is wating public money to slow down the currently shaky internet. But terrorism is a real threat and we have found to our error when our parliament was attacked. But monitoring email is no solution when people talk "onnu poda , chumma adipidi koodathe" (malyalam written in roman script) Well just wasting their time , and our money
    • "onnu poda , chumma adipidi koodathe"

      The suspense is killing me. What does it mean?

      • I do speak Malayalam. Colloquially speaking, it translates to : "Move along. Stop quarreling for fun.". The "fun" bit is added only because there isnt an exact translation of the idiom. Quarelling for the sake of quarelling is more like it.

    • Mone gopale......

      Adi poli comment!!!!

      This is the simple example of how any key word based mail scans will be defeated. You simply cannot write keywords for non standard roman translitatations in more than 15 languages.

      raj

      PS:"Adi poli comment" means good comment in Malayalam, and only a person from Kerala will be able to understand this!
    • well okay, there are many many encoding schemes. what about full encryption? i assume some level of it is not outlawed...say 40 bit, which can be cracked. thing is, by the time they've cracked it, it will be too late. even still, how about throwing key letters, encrypted if you want, at regular intervals, into a plain old message. it would just look like spelling mistakes, or, if you're really on the ball you can even make a flawless message.

      these sorts of systems would be a joke to would be criminals with half a mind... oh no... i've said too much. they're watching....

      perhaps i will speek in elvish....
      lasto beth nin, tolo dan na ngalad
    • Some info about Malayalam to those who are wondering

      Malayalam is the language spoken in the state of Kerala [keralatourism.com] located in the south eastern part of India. Kerala was selected as one of the 50 must see places by National Geographic. [nationalgeographic.com] Malayalam is located from +U0D00 to +U0D7F in the Unicode.

      In case their are any TeXis here, the TUG 2002 [tug.org.in] will be held in Kerala and is a nice time to come and visit Kerala.

      raj

      • Kollam..Oru fellow malayali..athum /. vayikkunna viruthan..enikku eshtamayi mone..

        i would like to find out how many mallus read slashdot, and if possible bring them all together for another forum.

        mail me back at kodguru@hotmail.com if you are interested.

        www.hackorama.com
  • Up early for some reason today, Tim?

  • This is bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DreamingReal ( 216288 ) <dreamingreal&yahoo,com> on Tuesday December 25, 2001 @07:34AM (#2749062) Homepage


    Goddammit, I am so fed up with these constant assassinations of Internet privacy anytime it is revealed that a terrorist group used email or cryptography to coordinate their attacks. I bet they also used telephones, cell phones, and snail mail to communicate as well. Why the fuck aren't these sodding politicians calling for monitoring of voice conversations and physical inspection of packages and letters? If they are serious about security why not go the whole nine yards? Speech recognition technology could surely make the former feasible. &ltsarcasm&gtAfter all, only those who are doing something wrong have something to hide.&lt/sarcasm&gt


    That bullshit never happens because most people, whether here in the US or over in India, wouldn't stand for such a blatant invasion of their privacy. Just because technology makes monitoring Internet communications an order of magnitude easier, doesn't fucking make it right! Whether it is listening in on a phone conversation, sniffing a packet, or tearing open a letter the intrusion is still the same.


    It takes a nation of millions to wage war, but only a single man to commit terrorism. Until we address the factors that lead people to such desperation that they are willing to give their lives to cold-hearted violence, we will wage this war until we inevitably lose it.


    We have always had the means to destroy ourselves - but terrorists have finally given us the motivation to do so. And like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, we are slowly selling out our treasured civil liberties for an illusion of security. And the day we lose this so-called War on Terror is when we have silently replaced the republics of the world with police states that hide behind masks of democracy and pay lip-service to freedom.

  • EMailtaps or not,What is needed is to prevent these guys from getting near sensitive installations
  • Hmmm...not my choice for a hindu name.

  • open source fascism (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Some of the independant project (such as altavore) seem to have fallen off the face of the earth.

    I'm intersted in putting together a set of tools that aren't driven by the FBI/CIA/TLA of your choice (and this has the distinct smell of the Justice department's distribution of INSLAW's PROMISE software to thrid world "justice processes").

    Idealy, I'd like to see something like Rayeton's Slient Runner, Network Flight Recorder or Carnivore (who makes that software? I forget), but if I must piece together as set of tools using things like the dsniff suite of utilities, that's fine too. Ultimately, the goal is to be able to tap into any communication stream (file sharing, web browsing, instant messaging/IRC, e-mail (including SSL protected web mail), Usenet News, etc.)... NFR and dsniff make it fairly easy to add new protocol parsing/decoding to the survailed stream; however it would be far better if the project/effort were open source so taht an infinate number of monkies could add new protocols (a la Snort).

    Some things that I think are missing, however, include things like RADIUS/dhcp/DNS services integration that would allow an authenticated and assigned IP address to be assigned a name by the LDAP lookup of the customer/subject name/ID.

    One of the other projects I like is that little utility that apple guy at stanford wrote that grabs .jpg/.gif/etc. out of the thin airport that wireless users using.

    I found it funny when Zimmerman expressed regret for his work on PGP after 911... least he could do is begin work on a project that could undo the potential damage (oh, wait, NA already did that for him...). Well, at least he could start a new project in the opposite direction...

    my take on the current situation? open source and facism (and if you only know what that term means from it's connative meaning... look it up; the USA is currently heading straight into the loving arms of mother fascism) are *not* incompatable by any streach of the imagination... In fact, open source would do well to cash in on some of the defensive stock/security product hedging that is happening right now.

    So, what do you guys thing? Up for the challenge?
  • What else can it be?

    Forget encryption. Forget the use of substitute words such as "supari" for a "contract". Forget the huge volume of mail.

    What are you going to do about the 15 official languages, the different encodings, Indian languages written in roman script and a few others I haven't thought of?
  • What is the point? What is the point of spending money on a system that is so useless? i bet it could even be fooled by a zip-compressed attachment or the rot-13 feature on most email clients. Is it multi-lingual? i think not, oh well there goes messages in over 200 different languages. can it tell that bo.mb or b-o-m-b = bomb? i have a feeling it can't, oh look someone rendered their text and diagrams to a bit-map, can it do ocr? hmmm, in realtime with multi-gigabytes of data per second? um.. no. These are just simple ways around the system without even using compression. why would politicians put themselves in a position like this when the system they are proposing has no use what-so-ever.

    [begin carnivore bait] I'm going to hi-jack a plane and bomb the whitehouse where those bloody afgans messed up. Bin Laden Rules!!! long live bin laden. Drugs cocaine bomb bombs nuclear plane flight hi-jack attack terrorist allah lord bush force anthrax [end carnivore bait]
    • sorry:

      These are just simple ways around the system without even using encryption
    • I can understand why we're all so focused on the predictive aspect of this technology. Can it realistically be used to help stop a terrorist act? Will it work? Maybe, maybe not.

      But that wouldn't be its only use. After a terrorist act has taken place, an archive of this information could be used to help identify if there were associates, and possibly even help round them up. And at that task, even with encryption, it could be very effective.

      - ordinarius
  • There is only one isp in india, govemrnet controlled of course. It is going to be privitised soon though. There are about 1/4 million "internet cafes" in india alone, some in the most remote parts of india, with no supervision. And most internet users in india know english, or access the web through a hindi(main language of india) language pack. So there are only two languages to worry about really, encryption is of barely any concern because it would take too long to acquire it. True, there is tons of pirated software floating around india, but thats mostly games.
    How do I know all this? Because ive been there about 300x so know the place pretty well, and alot of my relatives are in the gov't so i got an idea of how they think.
    • https://www.hushmail.com/ [hushmail.com] or some other java applet should do the trick. Of course, this is assuming hushmail is not a CIA installation.

      Stephan

    • India does not have one ISP, there are atleast a few thousand, each sizable town has several private ISPs and there are more than 5 which have their own International Gateways.

      India has 15 languages, but there is only one webmail provider which provides services to mail in languages other than English, and anyway devnagari scripts are hard to type on your normal 108 key keyboard

      The stupid things like lashkar@hotmail.com were probably "intelligent guesses" bye the Times of India reporter, who you must admit is not any dumber than non-tech reporters in the US, or even your ex presideng Al-Gore who thinks he "invented" the internet.

      So There!
  • I have it on good authority that the terrorists obtained food and beverages at their local supermarkets, and as such these are support centers and must be shut down immediately.
  • ...after investigations have revealed that Mohammad, alias "Burger," who led the Parliament attack, was in constant touch with his counterparts in Pakistan

    Screw Burger, he had his time. [kultspiele.net]

  • Yes, there are many languages and their dialects used around India. How the hell are they going to handle the different languages? And even if they manage to handle the different scripts, how will they filter people who write marathi or hindi in the roman script? There are many ways of spelling a marathi/hindi/XYZ word in roman script, and while they do make sense to a human who knows the language, how the hell will an algorithm differentiate between two different words?

  • what if everyone rot13'd their messages? keyword search that, buddy!

    And, Emacs has a "spook" command [gnu.org] (M-x spook) which adds a line of "subversive" text to your email. It was originally to distract the NSA, which would have to work so much harder to throw away your email from the important ones. It's rather dated though: words like "nuclear" "bomb" "kill" and maybe "Reagan". Lots of fun!
  • I notice a major problem with this operation. What about webmail? Hotmail.com although started by an Indian is located in the USA. Are they also going to monitor all HTTP traffic? Infact 100 to 1 I'd bet that a terrorist wouldn't be using POP3. I mean you'd rather lug an AK47 than a laptop. Plus he can walk into any browsing center and log into his account. What about those super secure webmails that have 128 bit encrypted java applets which act as you MUAs? Heck I can get a web mail account from Russia if I wanted.

    BTW, a lot of incorrect facts about India have been bandied about, and being in the heart of it all, (I live and hack in India) I'd like to set facts straight.

    a)
    Myth: There is only one ISP in India
    Fact: There are hundreds of ISPs in India. VSNL was the sole ISP only till 1998. Even the CIA world fact book gets the major ISPs right. There are 48 major ISPs! (read Class A).
    http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ in.html [cia.gov]

    I get cable [cyberwaveindia.com] at home in Madras from a gateway in Singapore (singnet). It travels via a dedicated undersea line that is not government controlled. Heck even my DNS lookup goes to Singapore (3000 odd kms.) Mine is a Class B ISP that the CIA page does not even recognise. There are Classes A through E! So, no there isn't one major check point like China.

    b)
    Myth: Internet penetration in India is low.
    Fact:There are millions (literally) of cybercafes in India. Satyam iWay [satyamiway.com] , one of the medium sized chains has some 400 iWays with global profile and roaming facility and they say they have 12.5 million users. And these are only located in the major cities, what about the rest of India. Nin-urban population comprises 85% of India. You are looking at a staggering number of people in the billions.

    c)
    Myth: Hindi & English are the only languages that are important.
    Fact: Hindi & English yes, but India has 2000+ languages, and only 15 official ones. Try any Indian email service even the web based ones like rediff.com and you'll find more than 10 languages in which you can send an email.

    d)
    Myth: Encryption is not avaialble easily
    Fact: Encryption is freely available. Heck ever heard of GPG anyone? or PGP? It's only 5 minutes to download... even in India. Besides we have the largest number of software professionals in the world. Wanna reconsider?

    e)
    Myth: The government doesn't have mammoth computing resources
    Fact: Yes, super computers like the Cray were not allowed into India until recently. So we had to build our own (Param [cdacindia.com]). We built the Like all governments in the world they are still coming to terms with the technology, but they do have tons of cash, so don't put it past them to be on top of things given a while.
  • All they have to do is datastream over a ham set, plug a modem into a satellite phone, or dial up a low-speed connection to an ISP in another country, and they suddenly can talk to the world as though they're somewhere else.

    For the ham set, they need only be gauranteed of a connection suitable for some sort of TCP-like functionality. This would be the cheapest alternative. No paper trail, and you can encrypt your transmissions so nobody would be able to make sense of whatever they heard.

    For the satellite phone, well, they can use whatever's still available. (Haven't kept any sort of track. I don't even remember if Irridium is still up.) Granted, it can cost a great deal of money per minute, but if you're a terrorist with megabucks at your disposal, this isn't a problem, right? However, this method is very traceable, as paying for a satellite phone is likely to leave a wide paper trail.

    And modems are the simplest solution. I have family members that often have to connect to ISPs in America, from Korea. (For commercial reasons, and it counts as a business expense) Paper trails can be almost non-existant. Just buy some prepaid telephone cards from Walgreens in Michigan, and mail 'em!

    And, just because I'm a little nervous as to how people would react to my thinking of this, let me point out that security by obscurity won't work against anyone with most of a brain.
  • Back in the 80s, rumor had it that the NSA was filtering email and Usenet news for keywords, such as "bomb", "nuclear", "explosive", etc. The solution that many came up with was to overload the system by including such keywords in every message.

    If you really want to counter-act such a system, always add some of the keywords on the list to your emails. Not even the government can afford to monitor every single email.

    Also remember to encrypt everything. That raises the amount of work the government would have to do even more, reducing the number of messages they could actually monitor. I'd recommend PGP or GnuPG.
  • beware ....
  • let me be frank . I would not like someone going through my mails but if it can prevent something like 9/11 or 12/13 Why the hell not ??
  • Where's RAW when you need him?

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