I spy with my little eye encrypted darknets on the horizon

March 1, 2005 2:40 AM

we have talked about darknets before. The motivation exists. Some solutions exist, speculation is prevalent. What would it take for you to become faceless.
posted by sourbrew (6 comments total)

apologies for any dated materials, would love any other information any of you might be hoarding.
posted by sourbrew at 2:41 AM on March 1, 2005

and crapola some is more of a technical solution for monitoring malicious attacks on a network.... not really a darknet proposal in of itself... shows what i get for just throwing in links from a bookmark folder without rechecking.
posted by sourbrew at 2:47 AM on March 1, 2005

Someone once told me, "... but why would you need to hide your identity if you are not doing anything illegal?"

Why indeed, but then I read the articles you linked:
The words "papers please" have terrible echoes of Europe's most repressive history. The rounding up of Jews, the oppression of migrant workers, and the removal of political undesirables have all been made easier by efficient identity controls.

And how about that recent incident in Australia where "a mentally-ill Australian woman was wrongly detained as an illegal immigrant for 10 months because she spoke German misled authorities about her identity."

ID cards, "papers", and the digital age equivalents are a slippery slope to oppression that governments and business will find far to tempting to ignore. Just imagine our brave digital future where all web usage must be tracked, all online purchases recorded, and media are DRM protected so you can't watch TV or listen to music without your identity being confirmed with a central licensing server. Imagine powerful pattern-matching software monitoring all your web visits, your purchases, your forum postings, your IM chats, and your emails and then flagging "suspicious" activity for further investigation.

That is not a pleasant future, but at the moment it is a future that seems sadly inevitable.
posted by Meridian at 4:11 AM on March 1, 2005

are a slippery slope

The things you mention are not yet to come...they are already here. Your web usage is tracked and your online purchases are recorded. These activities are just not yet analyzed as a whole because they reside in corporate databases. Plus there is carnivore (now renamed cuddly puppy) which likely monitors all traffic flowing through net chokepoints.

Darknets and filesharing in general are going to be killed when the major carriers start dropping packets based on deep packet inspection. One whiff of encryption and the packet will be discarded..
posted by srboisvert at 6:02 AM on March 1, 2005

Darknets and filesharing in general are going to be killed when the major carriers start dropping packets based on deep packet inspection. One whiff of encryption and the packet will be discarded..

i disagree, not only is encryption used for many many MANY legit uses (VPN, transactions, etc), id imagine this deep packet inspection you speak of would be neigh impossible because of the sheer number of packets travelling through the internet.

this post makes me want to set up a darknet sniffer like Team Cymru did at my work.
posted by Mach5 at 9:50 AM on March 1, 2005

I think it's safe to assume that someone out there is passively recording a whole lot of your internet usage. "Flagging suspicious activity for further investigation" is probably among the things they do, but the threshold for what counts as "suspicious" is probably a lot higher than anything that's ever going to happen on metafilter.

Of course, any random hacker, or a bored sysadmin at your ISP, could well be reading all your email. Strong crypto has been freely available and relatively easy to use for a decade or so. If you want to keep stuff private, use it.
posted by sfenders at 12:32 PM on March 1, 2005