Introducing JackPair – A New Hardware Tool to Encrypt Cellphone Conversations

Screen Shot 2014-09-05 at 3.07.22 PMWell, I’m not actually introducing JackPair at all. The creators of the device have had their project on Kickstarter for quite some time now, but it just passed its funding goal today (it had a $35,000 goal and has already raised close to $45,000 as of publication). Congrats guys!

While encryption between cell phones is already available via apps you can download, there are several reasons I have decided to highlight the project. First, I tend to focus quite a bit on all the things going wrong in the world, so when something comes across my screen that is encouraging and should be supported, I try to mention it. Second, I was really inspired by the description of the project, which contained an added personal touch by the creator when he describes growing up in authoritarian Taiwan. Third, while there appear to be other methods to achieve similar goals, this could serve as user friendly option for the non tech savvy amongst us. Finally, security guru Bruce Schneier seems to be impressed by the device.

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The Obama Administration is Trying to Cover up the VA Scandal by Issuing Subpoenas to Whistle-Blower Sites

Screen Shot 2014-06-11 at 11.55.02 AMOne of the most significant realizations to emerge since the Edward Snowden revelations, is the understanding that we need more secure tools for would be whistle-blowers to more easily provide sensitive information in a secure and anonymous manner. As such, we have seen the deployment of encrypted drop boxes by several media outlets. I highlighted one of these a little over a year ago called Strongbox, which was a project announced by the New Yorker and was what Aaron Swartz was working on just before his death.

Recently, the Washington Post and the Guardian have released something similar called SecureDrop. The Washington Post described it as such:

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Conan O’Brien Does Bitcoin

This is the second humorous Bitcoin related video I have posted within the past week. The last one being the very funny: Shit Bitcoin Fanatics Say. Well now the always hilarious Conan O’Brien is having a go at it. Unfortunately, the way he pokes fun at Bitcoin is actually how the majority of people out there … Read more

The Comcast/Time Warner Merger and the War Between Centralization and Decentralization

Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.

-Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited (1958) 

Until recent years, the struggle between the forces of “centralization” and “decentralization” was more of a full on slaughter-fest than an actually battle or war. As Americans sat there blissfully asleep for decades, every facet of our lives has been carefully consolidated into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of corporations, and hence individual executives. This trend is undeniable in everything from food, banking, media and everything in between.

Myself and many others saw the financial crisis of 2008 as a gigantic wakeup call. The disasters caused by powerful financial institutions and the greedy people that ran them should have been used as a rallying cry to break these institutions up. To recognize the dangers of too much power in one particular place. This is especially important in something as crucial as banking. However, as we are all painfully aware, this is not what happened. Rather, the institutions were bailed out, the industry consolidated even more than it was before, and the perpetrators of the crisis emerged from it even more wealthy and powerful.

My personal focus on this website has been to expose the unique dangers presented by centralization in the financial industry and the monetary system. However, many others are dedicated to the equally important and disturbing trends in other industries. Consumer goods is one of these areas, and a very telling diagram went around late last year showing how 10 companies basically control everything you buy. Take a look below:

10corporations

Dangerous consolidation of the media is a trend that has also been discussed by many people on many occasions, and many of us by now have heard the stat that in the U.S. just six media giants control 90% of all TV, news, radio and film. Now that Comcast is set to buy Time Warner, the situation is about to get that much worse. The International Business Times made some poignant points:

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GoldMoney Adds Bitcoin to its Suite of Services

The explosion in the price and popularity of Bitcoin over the past six months has caused a major rift within the precious metals community. It is quite clear which side I am on, and quite frankly, I am having a hard time understanding the outright hostility toward Bitcoin from many gold and silver stackers. The disdain toward Bitcoin borders on dogmatic religious type hostility characterized by a “gold and silver or nothing” mentality, while the attitude from folks in my camp consists of a “let’s support this experiment and see how it works” mentality, while still maintaining a very positive stance on the precious metals as a store of value. As I have said many times before, gold is a store of value, while Bitcoin is primarily a disruptive technology and innovative payment system that is now in direct competition with the traditional financial system. Seeing value in one, doesn’t preclude seeing value in the other.

It appears that the folks at GoldMoney understand this, and have just announced Bitcoin cold storage as a new service.

From the the UK’s Independent: 

One of the UK’s leading precious metals storage firms is adding an altogether more unusual commodity to its vaults – Bitcoin.

GoldMoney Group, which holds $1.4 billion worth of precious metals for customers, is setting up a new business specializing in “cold” storage of Bitcoin, an increasingly popular digital currency. Netagio will encrypt Bitcoins and store them on offline storage devices in secure vaults.

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My Thoughts on Last Night’s BTC Crash and a Guest Post on “Why Bitcoin Will Succeed”

I haven’t seen action in Bitcoin like we saw last night since earlier this year in the spring when the price went from $10 in January to $260 in April, and then crashed down to $50 before stabilizing in the $80-$120 range for months before beginning the latest parabolic move. I was so taken by the action in BTC China last night that I wasn’t able to sleep until 5am Rocky Mountain time, trying to buy what I could at the best prices possible. I saw every single tick. It was a crazy evening.

Yesterday I posted that while I thought BTC was at the lower end of the range at $650, there was the potential for some near-term headline risk. I thought that it might come from the U.S. banking system, but instead it came from China when they banned new renminbi deposits into the leading global exchange BTC China. While I am not saying that the price will now quickly launch to new highs, there was complete and total panic in the air last night. No question about that. In addition I tweeted that:

Now I think we have a much more positive setup going forward, although a similar period of consolidation such as we saw earlier in this year is likely. The news out of China cannot get any worse, and BTC China as far as an exchange and price discovery mechanism is basically dead. The big risk now is that other nations take similar actions, but the sentiment is now sufficiently bad and people expect bad news. Last night represented the most BTC I have bought since the spring crash.

In light of all this, a reader of my blog going by the handle Anon Wibble posted an excellent comment and I have decided to republish it here. Would love to get reader feedback as well. Enjoy!

Bitcoin will prevail. This isn’t just another e-currency, this is an entire framework for communicating information and money unlike no other ever before. This is the biggest revolution since linux and the more you use bitcoin the better and more complex you realise it is.

Look at the following things:

1) bitcoin can do everything a bank can do

2) while it’s true that unlike credit cards, btc has no way to chargeback claims, also consider that in the past chargeback scams have defrauded business through payers likes paypal etc. Chargeback doesn’t prevent fraud at all, it moves the person being defrauded from one person to another. Also consider that escrow services do chargeback for far cheaper than credit cards do.

3) bitcoin isn’t just a currency it’s a protocol that can be used to exchange information, nowhere in the headlines is this even mentioned files and information can be exchanged through bitcoin nobody has even looked at this yet

4) JPMorgan wouldn’t have tried to patent their own version of bitcoin 170 times, if they didn’t think crypto currency wasn’t the future

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Censored in the USA: John Hopkins Cryptography Professor Told to Take Down Blog Post

There’s nothing like waking up to the smell of censorship in the morning…and that’s exactly what happened to John Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green on September 9th. I’ve seen Matthew’s tweets come across my stream from time to time so I knew that he was highly regarded. ArsTechnica reports that: Matthew Green is a well-known cryptography professor, … Read more

Tor Usage Doubles Globally in the Wake of Snowden Revelations

I recently mentioned Tor in my article highlighting The Silk Road, the online illegal substances marketplace that you must run Tor to access and where the only currency accepted is Bitcoin. As we have seen with statistics showing tremendous growth in alternative search engines, technology users worldwide have indeed adjusted their habits in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. We now learn from the Daily Dot that:

Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency data monitoring sent Internet users scrambling for ways to regain their privacy.

Since Snowden came forward with details about the NSA’s PRISM program in June, the number of global Tor users has doubled. Tor is a open source network by which users obscure their online activity by navigating a network of computer relays. In the U.S., the number of users has grown by more than 75 percent.

Tor1

Tor2

Graphs via metrics.torproject.org

Maybe that’s why Americans, far and away, lead the rates of average daily usage. Americans account for 17.54 percent of daily Tor traffic—the only nation to account for more than 10 percent.

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As its Currency Collapses, India Doubles Down on Big Brother Surveillance

What’s a clueless government trying to micromanage the affairs of over a billion people supposed to do when the wheels start coming off the wagon? If you’re India, you blame the country’s financial and societal woes on the buying of gold and attempt to prevent people from purchasing it. When that doesn’t work, and your currency continues to collapse, then what?

Well, you decide to double down on a surveillance state. That’s precisely what the enlightened government bureaucrats at India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) have decided to do. From The Hindu:

Amid a raging global debate on privacy versus surveillance, monitoring and use of intrusive technologies by governments, the Directorate of Forensic Sciences in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) is set to purchase a range of equipment and software that will allow it to conduct deep search, surveillance and monitoring of voice calls, SMS, email, video, Internet, chat, browsing and Skype sessions on an unprecedented scale.

The MHA document of July 12, 2013 also lists software-based tool kits for logical level analysis of GSM and CDMA mobile phones — which will comprehensively cover phones and SIMs used by India’s 860 million subscribers across 2G and 3G networks. This will be capable of extracting the phone’s basic information and SIM card data, including in your phonebook and contact list, call logs, caller group information, organizer, notes, live and deleted SMSs, web browser artifacts, multimedia and email messages with attachments, multimedia image audio and video files and details of installed applications, their data, traffic and sessions log. It will allow access to iPhone backup analysis, including those which are password protected. Blackberry, considered safe by unsuspecting users, will also be fair game, since it will support Blackberry IPD backup analysis, even when password protected.

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Meet The Meshnet: A New Wave of Decentralized Internet Access

Across the US, from Maryland to Seattle, work is underway to construct user-owned wireless networks that will permit secure communication without surveillance or any centralized organization. They are known as meshnets and ultimately, if their designers get their way, they will span the country.

 From the New Scientist article, Let’s Start the Net Again

In the wake of the NSA spy revelations, many people have become disillusioned or despondent regarding the seemingly unstoppable pervasiveness of the surveillance state. I am not one of those people. As James Baldwin famously stated: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

There’s a reason the highest levels of the U.S. military-industrial complex went to such extremes to keep all of this information hidden from the American public and much of Congress. They don’t want us to know that we are merely lab rats in their perverted real life Truman Show. What we don’t know about spying makes the spying all the more effective. I do not for a moment believe that they want us to know all of the details of this program so that we “self-censor.” All the evidence demonstrates that they wanted to keep this stuff deeply buried.

So now at least we all know we have a serious problem, or at least enough of us know. Now it is our duty to dismantle the surveillance state and create something better in its place. Fortunately, many very smart, dedicated people have already been working on this problem, and the information provided by Edward Snowden will merely accelerate our implementation of solutions. One exciting example of this are Meshnets. From the New Scientist:

The internet is neither neutral nor private, in case you were in any doubt. The US National Security Agency can reportedly collect nearly everything a user does on the net, while internet service providers (ISPs) move traffic according to business agreements, rather than what is best for its customers. So some people have decided to take matters into their own hands, and are building their own net from scratch.

Across the US, from Maryland to Seattle, work is underway to construct user-owned wireless networks that will permit secure communication without surveillance or any centralized organization. They are known as meshnets and ultimately, if their designers get their way, they will span the country.

Each node in the mesh, consisting of a radio transceiver and a computer, relays messages from other parts of the network. If the data can’t be passed by one route, the meshnet finds an alternative way through to its destination.

While these projects are just getting off the ground, a mesh network in Catalonia, Spain, is going from strength to strength. Guifi was started in the early 2000s by Ramon Roca, an Oracle employee who wanted broadband at his rural home. The local network now has more than 21,000 wireless nodes, spanning much of Catalonia. As well as allowing users to communicate with each other, Guifi also hosts web servers, videoconferencing services and internet radio broadcasts, all of which would work if the internet went down for the rest of the country.

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