* How to Deny Service to a Federal Wiretap

It turns out that the standard sets aside very little bandwidth — 64K bits per second — for keeping track of information about phone calls being made on the tapped line. When a wire tap is on, the switch is supposed to set up a 64Kbps Call Data Channel to send this information between the telco and the law enforcement agency doing the wiretap. Normally this channel has more than enough bandwidth for the whole system to work, but if someone tries to flood it with information by making dozens of SMS messages or VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) phone calls simultaneously, the channel could be overwhelmed and simply drop network traffic.

That means that law enforcement could lose records of who was called and when, and possibly miss entire call recordings as well, Sherr said.

…

Of course, criminals have plenty of easier ways to dodge police surveillance. They can use cash to buy prepaid mobile phones anonymously, or reach out to their accomplices with encrypted Skype calls, said Robert Graham, CEO with Errata Security. Luckily for the cops, criminals usually don’t take their communications security that seriously. “Most criminals are stupid,” he said. “They just use their same cell phone.”

* Microsoft Police Forensics Tool Leaked

The police-only forensics tool made by Microsoft to capture forensics data from a live system has been leaked online. The tool, Coffee, has been the subject of much speculation by the tech media who now finally has a chance to see it. According to reports, it grabs process information, network data, user passwords, and all sorts of information. Could the methods needed to gather that data be exploited by others? Given Microsoft’s security history the answer is most likely.

Coffee is hosted on Cryptome. User guide here.

This new book from AK Press, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers On Fiction combines two of our favorite topics. I’ll definitely have to check that one out. I may even check out Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction while I’m at it.

Speaking of @ and sci-fi, Bruce Sterling’s recent post on sci-fi and anarchism brought these two resources to our attention:

• Anarchism and Science Fiction Readling List (organized by author)
• Recommendations from the “”Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction” panel at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair last weekend.

So we’ve been too busy elsewhere to post here lately, so until we get back in the game, here are some interesting links that we’ve been perusing over the past couple of weeks/months:

• SentDev on Cognitive Liberty and the Right to One’s Mind
• The democratization of virulence
• How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science
• On sleeplessness, the iphone, and you
• Economics of the singularity
• The economic impact of intelligent machines
• Cascio on three possible economic models: part one, part two (connects to previous talk on economic forecasting we did here)
• Cascio on the desktop manufacturing revolution
• Rebooting environmentalism for the 21st century
• Anarchist Arrested for Twittering (more)
• “Project Gaydar” and Online Privacy
• US Spies Buy Stake In Firm That Monitors Blogs and Tweets
• Oklahoma and Abortion
• Anarchybuntu — project for a new linux version made for anarchists
• Build your own DIY Bedazzler
• Hack your phone to prevent snooping
• “Evil maid” attacks on encrypted hard drives

This Vanish program/service for limiting data persistence on things you post online has some interesting implications:

Computing and communicating through the Web makes it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview; a lost or stolen laptop can expose personal photos or messages; or a legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating or just embarrassing details from the past.

Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.

For example, using the Firefox Vanish plugin, a user can create an email, a Google Doc document, a Facebook message, or a blog comment — specifying that the document or message should “vanish” in 8 hours. Before that 8-hour timeout expires, anyone who has access to the data can read it; however after that timer expires, nobody can read that web content — not the user, not Google, not Facebook, not a hacker who breaks into the cloud service, and not even someone who obtains a warrant for that data. That data — regardless of where stored or archived prior to the timeout — simply self-destructs and becomes permanently unreadable.

Though this is a research prototype, it’s available as a downloadable program (with a firefox plugin) or an online service. It will be interesting to see how projects like this develop and what legal ramifications they will have.

[Link]

A new FAQ is being put together for DIY Bio questions. Check it out and/or add to it (it’s a wiki).

Given the increasing number of countries and corporations that are seeking to censor or control the internet, it is fantastic to see an initiative to establish a community-based wireless mesh network as a free alternative. Introducing the autonomous internet, or auto-net:

How? Advances in wireless technology such as ubiquitous wireless routers, community mesh networks which are easily expandable and self-healing as well as long range wireless efforts such as HPWREN indicate a possible future for a community based internet free of the centralized control of telephone corporations and governments. While this is definitely a fork, more forks are to come and we can only hope that a few networks will emerge which can be broad enough to span most of the globe.

Imagine if all of the hacker spaces around the globe started contributing to this?

Read more about it. Sign up to support it.

(Via HackBloc)

James Hughes, who is doing a panel with me tomorrow on Science & Technology for Liberation, pointed out this syllabus and bibliography he put together for a science fiction and politics study group several years back, and so I figured I’d share with the class.

This piece by Cindy Milstein provides a nice overview of modern anarchist currents while identifying anarchism’s key placement as a idea that can really challenge capitalism and frame the debate as we head towards a postcapitalist future.

Nevertheless, this libertarian form of socialism may well have been ahead of its day in advocating a world of transnational and multidimensional identities, in struggling for a qualitative humanism based on cooperation and differentiation. It is only in the context of globalization that anarchism may finally be able to speak to the times and thus peoples’ hopes. Whether it can fulfill its own aspirations remains to be seen.

Link (via Anarchist News)

BoingBoing and Tachyon Publications recently offered up the opportunity for people to ask questions that legendary sci-fi/fantasy author Michael Moorcock would answer. I was an avid reader of Moorcock’s books when I was a kid, and I took an even greater interest in him when I found out he was an anarchist. He wrote an interesting piece on radical politics and sci-fi called Starship Stormtroopers that I recommend to radical sci-fi types. Pebrhaps ironically, one of my favorite quotes also comes from Moorcock: “Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.”

In any case, I pitched a question to Moorcock, and he answered it. I was a bit disappointed to see that he’s not into transhumanist sci-fi at all (hrm, maybe I need to revisit that quote of his again), but it’s good to see he’s still waving the black flag. Here’s my question (and one posed by another) and his responses:

Moorcock has been critical of authoritarian tendencies in science fiction in the past and I’m curious what he thinks about the state of modern sci-fi and if there are any authors he thinks excel or fail here. In particular I’m curious what his take is on the transhumanist genre of science fiction (Ken Macleod, Alistair Reynolds, Iain Banks, Richard Morgan, etc.) and their take on technology and politics. Also, does Moorcock still consider himself an anarchist and how does he view the prospects for a horizontal, non-hierarchical, egalitarian society actually emerging?

I’m not entirely sure about transhumanist fiction. It holds no attractions for me. Assuming I really know what it is. I’ve only really ever been interested in ‘humanist’ fiction. That is, fiction about people. As I’ve said, I don’t read sf for pleasure and very little of it for review, so I’m no expert. I think I’m probably sympathetic to the writers you mention, but personally believe political fiction should be set in at least some version of the here and now. When I want to tackle a political theme I’ll do either a Jerry Cornelius story or something like a Pyat story, making it clear to the reader what I’m doing. To abstract a theme — that is, to put it in the future — seems to move it away from relevance. Even Mieville’s Iron Council would have been more satisfying to me if he had set the story in, say, South America or Central Africa. This was always my argument about sf — that generally, by abstracting it, putting it in some ‘other place’, you lost some of the relevance. That said, I haven’t been vastly interested in technological advance since I was young. I have every sympathy with Banks, Mcleod et al, but to be honest I’ve been no more able to read more than a page of their stuff than I have Heinlein’s or Asimov’s. The moment a spaceship turns up, you’ve lost me. I tried to watch 2001 (the first time in the company of Arthur Clarke) three times and fell asleep all three times. I’ve said this many times, but the moment that big, long spaceship starts to move across the screen, I’m heading for Planet Zzzz. Can’t help it. Have nothing against people who enjoy it, but I really don’t. In fact, in some ways, I’m answering your questions under false pretences in that my preferred default reading for the past fifty years has been mostly fiction about the here and now. My favourite fantasy writers are Jonathan Carroll, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford and China Mieville. I still love Disch, Ballard and Bayley! ‘Light’ reading includes, as said, Wodehouse, Allingham. My favourite relatively recent 20th century literary writers are Aldous Huxley (never read Brave New World, though), Elizabeth Bowen (though I haven’t read her horror fiction!) followed by Elizabeth Taylor, Angus Wilson, Albert Camus, Blaise Cendrars, Colette, Peake I also enjoy Wells, Bennett and Pett Ridge. Favourite contemporaries include Iain Sinclair, Walter Mosley (in all his variety), Don DeLillo, Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon. Favourite moderns include Ford Madox Ford, Conrad, Mann, Woolf, Proust. Favourite ‘classics’ include Scott, Dumas, Balzac, Dickens, In other words, there are very few fantastic writers there, although almost all had a fantastic turn of mind.

I’ve often wondered why I had such a facility for writing fantasy, but clearly I did! So I guess I’m saying I’m not the best person to ask about transhumanist science fiction! I answer the anarchist part of the question below.

I remember in the foreword to one of your novels you said you are an optimist. I was wondering, in view of your anarchist sentiments and the current insidious morphing of England (and elsewhere) into a police state, if you still feel optimism and if so, what do you think will improve?

I remain a great optimist, though I have few theories how we’re going to get out of our present predicaments. I remain a Kropotkinist anarchist, which many people will see as unrealistic, but, if I’m unrealistic, so be it. I see my anarchism as a moral position, in that it’s scarcely a realistic political one! But from that position I can very quickly determine what action to take.

I am of course concerned about the erosion of civil liberties in our democracies. There was a wonderful period in the 60s and 70s when many of the basic liberties we now take for granted were established in the UK and US. Since around 1980 a variety of politicians under a variety of political flags have been trying to take those liberties away from us. I’m not as worried about CCTV cameras as the symbol of that erosion since they seem to have been as useful in catching crooks and crooked cops as anything else, at least so far. I am more worried about any extension of police powers, erosion of civil liberties in general and rationales allowing ‘authorities’ further unchecked, unsupervised behaviour. It’s up to us to remain vigilant and aggressively vocal wherever we can be heard. I believe we also have to extend our civil liberties, building on the gains made in that 60s/70s decade. I think we can do it, and that we have to keep a clear eye on what’s happening. Moreover we have to extend other civil rights, including the right to improve healthcare, education and the legal system according to our needs. We can do this by increasing our power at a local level and extending it up to national level. We don’t serve such ambitions by being nostalgic about a past that never really was. Politicians have always been pretty corrupt and need a good press to keep an eye on them. It’s up to us to demand the highest standards from our press and to adapt to every change in the nature of that press so that we’re clear about what’s going on. We need sturdy laws and good law-makers to ensure that we’re as far ahead of the corrupt guys as possible. If we have to take to the streets, flood our politicians’ mailboxes, make it harder for them not to hear us than to hear us and so on, then we must be prepared to spend the time doing it. We can’t afford to be lazy and there’s no point in just sitting around talking and making ourselves feel virtuous. We must feel virtuous from the actions we take not the fingers we wag at others. My argument against ‘liberal’ sf has always been that it can easily be a substitute for real action. And by action I don’t mean sentimental exhortations to our politicians to be nicer, sweeter people. We need sturdy laws and real rights. We have to let the bastards know that not only are they not above the law but that the law demands MORE of them because they have been elected to maintain it, they need to be better than the average person, not worse.

I have to say that I completely disagree with his assertion that once you place a political issue within a future setting you remove it from relevance. To me science fiction has always been about examining modern issues, and taking advantage of those future settings to explore possibilities that the here-and-now modern simply doesn’t allow.

On a side note, sci-fi author and radical Ken Macleod also took note of the question and response.

I’m participating on a panel this weekend at Think GalactiCon, a radical science fiction convention in Chicago. The panel will be on the topic of Science & Technology for Liberation. Here’s the description:

Counter to dystopian futures and the portrayal of technology as a tool of oppression, many writers illustrate how technology can also be implemented for liberatory uses and to instigate radical social change. (A few examples include sousveillance, boundary-collapsing communications, and post-scarcity via nanofabrication, among others.) What can we learn from these explorations and how can we apply them to develop a real-world anarchist/egalitarian/technoprogressive/left approach to science and technology?

Joining me on the panel will be James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg, board member for Humanity Plus, executive director for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and all-around very busy and prolific transhumanist guy. I presume I’ll be giving the non-state ideas while he throws down his technoprogressive arguments.

There are some other interesting-looking discussions scheduled at the con. I’m particularly looking forward to the Continuing Appeal of the Apocalypse.