You’ve probably heard the talk, you can take it from me it is true, have seen it with my own eyes, the unbranded unlabelled unidentified yes they really are black, boxes, sitting right there on the backbone for at least three of the major backbone / network providers.
These boxes can potentially tap into anything and everything they are connected to, which essentially means they can for all practical purposes tap into 100% of network traffic, irrespective of source, destination or protocol.
I had this discussion with someone, they were saying GCHQ is in reality no different to, for example, Google, in their ability to slurp data.
I conceded the point, even though it isn’t factually correct, for the sake of argument, and countered with this;
“Yeah buddy, give me a call when Google operate their own police force, courts, prisons and control all the laws in the country I reside in….”
And that really is the point.
Google are not going to make a case on incomplete data, because the fact is these boxes and what they are connected to CANNOT store everything that passes by for a number of years, that is like building a fucking great lake on a river, what they are is a bridge across the river that you can drop nets or buckets anywhere you like, or sluice gates to divert flow, so chances are the data is incomplete, in effect, call records, you sent 2 emails to Mr X, and Mr X sent two emails to you, we no longer have the content, or the greater context in which they were sent, and since WE now know Mr X is a crazed raghead paedo terr’rist, 2 + 2 = 22, so you muct be one toooooo… haul his ass off to jail, via court and a “fair” trial… har de har…
Today BT, who are one of the telco’s hosting these black boxes, changed their system, if you want to access, for example, a perfectly legal swinging site, you must call them and ask for the adult filters to be turned off.
You just made the first prong of the case against you, you DELIBERATELY sought access to whatever it was at some point in the future, say, Mr X’s blog.
I proved this point some years ago to some stuck up assholes, they were convinced that only those who have something to hide etc.
I created a small web page, in that page I embedded photo… this is it.
It is the album cover from Scorpions, Virgin Killer, I bought this when it came out in a record shop in London, in fact it was the first Virgin Megastore.
Now, strictly according to the letter of the law, this is an obscene image of child pornography, but then so are the pics of my kids naked at bath-time etc, given that this was an actual album cover on sale in the UK and legally bought, and given that the purpose of putting it here is for example, not sexual gratification, you’re actually pretty safe.
The point was, when you loaded this particular blog page, you click a link, you don’t know the actual content BEFORE you click the link.
However, in law, just because of the way your computer and the internet works, you just “made” another copy, stay on this page with the firefox reload page plugin set to 6 seconds and you are, in law, “making” 10 kiddie porn images an minute, or 600 an hour, and that is all the newspaper headlines will read.
SICK PERV MADE 600 VILE KIDDIE PORN PICS PER HOUR!!!!
But, things being what they are, at least you can see the fucking image, even if you got tricked into downloading it, so you can flush your temporary internet files after navigating away from this blog page, and you should be safe enough. (except for GCHQ knowing you visited this page 600 times an hour)
But, what I did in the example I am talking about was not displaying an image with an original size of for example 1024 x 768 at a page size of 512 x 380, no, what I did was take an original image that was 800 x 600 pixels, and displayed it at 1 x 1 in the page.
It looked like this.
The “this” being, specifically, “.” the period / full stop that came after “this”
In that scenario, nobody knew they had download the image, nevertheless, they had, therefore, legally, they had “made” it also.
They only knew when I published the full size image, and told them to look in their browser cache / temporary internet files for it by name… then they found it…. then they got seriously pissed off… at ME…
Go figure.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Of course, any seekrit black box sitting on the backbone that can dip into absolutely any traffic and look and see what is there, can also dip into traffic and alter it, either by simply re-routing it as in last weeks major BGP routing hack that sent a bunch of USA guvvmint traffic on a long trip via Iceland before going back to the USA mainland, or, by altering it or injecting content into it.
Is this gonna be your defence, Mr Nobody? That you did not do X, that you are in fact innocent, so it must have been done by the black boxes, that legally do not exist, in an effort to frame you…?
