Interception Act now in effect

pookfuzz said:
So if I read this right only government can spy you or intercept or monitor the data you send but nobody else can.
Um as I understand it. It's any one with a court order or businesses can monitor their own provided they meet certain requirements for the monitoring.
 
Obelix said:
So now everyone just installs pgp in their mail client with a nice strong key ( 1023 bits long ).

Some yuts is going to spend a coupla years decrypting your message only do find a "hi mom" messgage.
One advantage to everyone doing it, is it then becomes unfeasable to try and decode that much, so the govt has no choice but to call in lonegunman and have him show them the backdoors so things can get done.
 
Encryption

In terms of the US International Trade Treaty; anyone using a form of encyption that the FBI are unable to decrypt is marked as "terrorist".

While this seems pretty inconsequential to a user outside the States, this also means that any company doing business with you is marked as "terrorist", and any company doing business with that company, etc. right up to Country level.
 
Well then - you may as well stop worrying, cos somebody somewhere has used Pretty Good Privacy in the company that you work for, and you will not be doing further harm, cos u're all already "terrorists" ...
 
built in NSA security doors HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA lonegunman is so whacked its unbelievable, hey lonegunman, are you accusing PGP of having backdoors in thier products for NSA officials to use? Gee thats funny as hell seeing as the top percentile of everse engineers actually reverse it almost EVERY YEAR at defcan,

Hey lonegunman, have you ever heard of a salt? do you know ANYTHING about encryption at all? yeah thought not,

even if there were magical NSA backdoors built into EVERY commercial security app (which BTW would be a little hard seeing as countries like India are churning them out and NSA is an American goverment organisation) you could just salt the cipher with whatever other data source and they would be screwed, whats more is if you use a TRUE random salt which is then encrypted using an algorythym with collisions such as DES, MD5 etc etc in a cipher, they now have to spend more time cracking the salt than the cipher and even once its cracked they have no guarantee they found the real salt or the collision, that will effectivly make the cracking proccess take much longer, oh and by the way we're talking years with super computers. So untill goverments can build cheap networks of quantum computers you can consider most 2 way salted algoryhtyms safe, the big bad FBI can't even crack blowfish with a key of over 256 characters

minor request from me to the idiots, go be kooks in the off topic forum where you belong (yeah that means you lonegunman)
 
bozz said:
In terms of the US International Trade Treaty; anyone using a form of encyption that the FBI are unable to decrypt is marked as "terrorist".

While this seems pretty inconsequential to a user outside the States, this also means that any company doing business with you is marked as "terrorist", and any company doing business with that company, etc. right up to Country level.

Oh well I am a terriorist then, so are the last two companies I worked for and so is the bulk of hardware suppliers and ISP's in South African, including Telkom who we all knew was a terrorist anyway but still.

BTW any one know Robert Mugabe's email address, I need him labeled as a terrorist next
 
dominic said:
will firm up on this when time allows but pretty sure that under the cryptography provisions of the ECT Act and under RICA it is going to be an offence to use encryption not registered

i.e. govt must have a way of deciphering

Not use, but provide and encryption service. Frankly they can take their US/UK-style police state nonsense and shove it.
 
bozz said:
In terms of the US International Trade Treaty; anyone using a form of encyption that the FBI are unable to decrypt is marked as "terrorist".

Right. References?
 
AntiThesis said:
I suppose the idea goes that you shouldn't have anything to hide from the government so you don't really need strong encryption. However, in a country such as ours where corruption seems to be the norm rather than the exception, there's a huge potential for abuse.

That is the standard argument used by police states everywhere. It has nothing to do with any unusual levels of local corruption - is there a government anywhere that can be trusted?

And any official who claims you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide must of course be willing to allow us to record all their phone conversations, read all their mail and watch them with cameras everywhere they go, including inside their home. They have nothing to hide so they shouldn't object. This applies to officials in every country that grab any excuse to push their country closer to a full-fledged police state.

People have a right to live their lives without interference from power-hungry government busybodies and overzealous security police. We should all do whatever we can to impede their ability to spy on citizens.
 
DFantom - its fairly standard knowledge that NSA backdoors are built into a wide range of software, especially the so-called 'encryption' technologies.

If you think this is conspiracy theory, then you don't know much about intelligence work, or PC security:
'NSA BACKDOOR KEYS IN ALL MS OPERATING SYSTEMS SINCE WIN95'
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2184
.
WIKIPEDIA ON NSA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA

Here's from 6 years ago - 'NSA BACKDOOR IN LOTUS NOTES': http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2898/1.html
Also from way back - 'NSA BACKDOOR KEY IN WINDOWS'
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/03/0940241

'MS DENIES GIVING NSA BACKDOOR KEY TO ALL WINDOWS'
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-515610.html?legacy=zdnn

CRYPTO - THE NSA'S TROJAN WHORE: http://www.meta-religion.com/Secret_societies/Conspiracies/CIA/crypto_ag.htm

READ: 'NSA BACKDOOR KEYS'
http://carthik.net/blog/vault/2003/03/07/nsa-backdoor-keys

So your basic OS is wide open and easily accessible - just as accessible as
the l33t easily crackable 'encryption' app you downloaded from Tucows or somewhere else..

The mere idea that you think you have any protection whatsoever from a commercial encryption app, shows a level of political-intel naivety, that means forget about doing anything of real secrecy..

'Backdoors' are standard structures in commercial encryption technology.

If you want real secrecy from the Authorities, you have to use 'other methods' - which I'm not detailing here.

By the way, a fairly old piece of legislation passed locally - means that 'cyber-inspectors' can enter your premises, and demand that you unencrypt anything that they want to look at - under penalty of jail-time, if you refuse.

This is already in law in the supposedly 'free' south africa.

(I'll see if I've got a copy of the article about the then 'new electronics bill' which few locally even noticed coming into law.. if so, I'll post it on its own thread..)
 
LoneGunman you sound like you have read Digital Fortress By Dan Brown :D
 
er nope - I've got some Dan Brown book that someone passed me, but I havent read any of his stuff yet..

Found the article - am going to post it on its own thread - its a scary look at a piece of legislation that almost none of the Corporate-whore-Media in SA, bothered to tell you folks about, which was quietly passed a couple of years ago..
 
Methinx for the ordinary local citizen, all of this can be lumped into the category of unjustified paranoia, seeing that nobody knows of any hanky-panky to date - maybe a naive comment, but then again there are more important things in life (for me, anyway)...
 
Well, its hardly 'paranoia' to want to know how your tax money is spent. It's a healthy interest in all areas of Government.

Pity the link has expired, I mean, for instance, you could've downloaded a Telkom-made 39 meg document detailing the names, phone numbers, addresses of a large quantity of intelligence operatives and agencies..
Look at the cache snapshot of this page, titled 'The South African Intelligence unlisted telephone database':
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cach...south+africa+military+site:cryptome.org&hl=en

The internet, is the best weapon, against those who'd like to keep us naive, ignorant and uninformed.
 
blablablablabla... okay....

apart from the apparent "now the government will read my emails I'm sending to my mistress" paranoia that is going on. This could actually help in combating REAL crime.

I for one don't care if anyone reads my emails or see what I download because it's never of a sensitive nature. You're just plain stupid if you take your child pornography or snuff film twisted nature online where it's much easier to get caught than in real life.
 
Rubbish noone.. all the criminals will do (and are most likely doing), is use encyption, or a webmail account. This will do fkall to combat real crime and to think otherwise is extremely naive.

Its not that I have something to hide, its that I have a problem with someone I dont know having accces to my personal infromation. for the record, i have already installed PGP and will be using it a lot more now. I recommend everyone else does the same.

,,, now heres a question.. a couple of my mail servers are in the states.... so they dont fall under this law right? As all the software and hardware is located in the states....
 
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Companys already make u sign an "Acceptable usage" policy and they Own your email and data already as its on "their" infrastructure..

This Act says nothing new.... it was instituted so that EMAIL and SMS and other electronic mediums are acceptable in a court of law... before if I sent an email to my boss saying "I am gonna kill your dog", the courts in SA could do nothing as Electronic is not proof of anything, now they can do something about it.

Richard
 
The time is ripe for people to start thinking hard what they say and don't say via email. I however believe that email should be concidered like normal postal service snail mail. It should not be opened and read by any party other than the person it was intended for. Yes companies can ask you to waver that right, but private mail on systems like those provided by ISP's to private enteties should be handled with respect.

To get back to my initial opinion. People working for government and corporates should try to steer clear of forwarding or sending mail that could get them slammed...

or... learn to encrypt...
 
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