Queer✨Anarchist Anti-fascist

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 14th, 2023

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  • apparently you don’t read TechDirt

    I don’t read TechDirt

    the NSA has … been leaking stuff to the FBI

    Oh, I know about this, I thought you were talking about local law enforcement offices, which is not something I’ve seen.

    As far as the unconstitutionality of the NSA’s actions, I fully agree with you. From the perspective of of an anarchist, I don’t exactly see any alphabet agencies or the branches of government in a good light. I fully expect the NSA to be involved in shenanigans, just as I expect the FBI or CIA to do so.

    the FISC has always been a rubber stamp court so it shouldn’t be necessary for law enforcement to circumvent warrants for NSA information, but it turns out it’s just easier using the NSA backdoor access

    If you are talking about the FBI when you saw law enforcement, the FBI has it’s own malware it uses, such as Magic Lantern historically, and certainly others that are not public. There is also some info about them possibly using the NSO group’s Pegasus spyware, which is obscenely hard to detect, and has, at times, been 0-click, meaning you don’t need to take any actions, and it has cleaned up evidence of tampering. Since the FBI has to make sure their evidence is admissible in court, they do need to make sure their evidence is gathered in such a way that it does not violate laws.

    However, I have listened to interviews with people who argued their case was built on unconstitutional evidence, and claimed that the feds told them “if you try and attack the case like this, we will tack on more charges,” so I’m not saying they always deal with admissibility in court when starting investigations.

    The only gripe I still have is the your statement about the NSA’s lax security, since the breaches I’ve read about have all been done by nation state actors, which tend to be the most capable groups in the world.

    My experience with the NSA, as someone who works in security, does not indicate they have lax security. From their leaked tools (I <3 ghidra), to their security guidelines, to their malware like stuxnet, to their public tools like SELinux (and eventually ghidra), their security capabilities seem solid.

    I don’t want this to come out as me liking the NSA, since I hate a lot of what they do. But as someone who is a huge security nerd and malware enthusiast, I find their tools fascinating, and do have some respect for them from that perspective, in the same way someone might like Kanye’s music and respect his talent, but hate his guts for being a nazi.

    If there are any good techdirt articles, please send them my way, I’d love to read them



  • the NSA’s information security is lax and outdated

    As someone who has read the unclassified reccomendations on infosec written by the NSA and CISA, no, it isn’t. The NSA has some sophisticated security infrastructure, and if stuxnet or eternal blue has shown us, their infosec capabilities are incredible.

    we’re pretty sure Russia and China are unofficially privy to any data they want.

    I have literally never heard anyone say this before and this goes everything I know about cybersecurity, intelligence, and geopolitics.

    The NSA ECC bullshit was to support surveillance, not to weaken their own security. The theoretical vulnerability lies in the usage of the suggested parameters of their curve, not ECC itself. Making surveillance easier is something that the NSA has historically supported.

    at this point NSA leaks stuff to other law enforcement

    I genuinely have never seen anything to support this that is substantial.

    Holy shit I cant believe you’ve made an anarchist defend the NSA but this is so damn wrong.


  • Learning about norway made me a prison reformist, learning about the US prison system made me an abolitionist. I’m skeptical that the leviathan of the prison-industrial complex can be reformed.

    Our system is so fucked up its insane. Inside, it’s terrible. Outside? Good luck getting a job with a criminal record. It’ll force you to steal to live, then you’ll be thrown back in.

    Eric King is an ex political prisoner who has just recently been released, and he has been on a ton of leftist and anarchist podcasts in the past two or three weeks. His interview with The Final Straw Radio gives good insights on how halfway houses suck, and his interview with IGD is a good eye inside prison.

    Fuck prisons, fuck cops, this shit sucks.


  • The main way criminals are caught is when they transfer their crypto to an exchange so they can convert it to cash. Law enforcement will subpoena the exange and ask “Hey, who exchanged 0.7886 bitcoin for cash on this date?” and they will get their identity. Using the public ledger, they will be able to trace the transactions done and show that this person sent money to an address advertised as belonging to a trafficking site, an illegal market, or recieved money from the bad wallet address.

    The address owner is anonymous until there is a source of data that ties information the wallet, and often transactions can be used to do that, just as any way to advertise a wallet belongs to you can, or any way to exchange crypto to cash can.



  • I often buy books written by shitheads when I end up studying fascism or other radical right wing movements. Heck, even more mainstream conservative movements with radical imagery or frequent dogwhistles. Reading books by shitty people on shitty topics is very important on understanding how the movements work and think.

    Reading about fascism from antifascists is good and all, but understanding fascist movements when they are most active requires reading fascist works. Heck, even with books like Mien Kampf, a book with a ton of analysis done by antifascists could still be a potentially useful read for antifascists.