Your Web Traffic Is Being Monitored. What To Do About That?

[InD]

Ideally stop being so scared and voting for idiots that make you feel "safe"... but that's a whole other discussion.

If you want to protect your internet traffic it's actually pretty easy. Sign up for a VPN service. I paid around $7 a month for mine and can us it on my laptop, iphone, tablet, etc. Originally I bought it to get Netflix content from a country other than my own, but in light of this weeks announcements I think I'll be using it whenever I connect to the net.

Yes I realize there are counter-measures to VPN encrption. But let's be honest, if the gov't is going to attempt to crack your VPN enconded data... you're already in trouble

Lastly, I would like to see more alternative sites follow fetlife's HTTPS inititave a couple years back. 100% of traffic on Fetlife is encypted. Hopefully this is something DailyDiapers implements in the near future.

[wayney]

I don't get to excited over this stuff.

[BoTox]

I use encryption and proxies to obfuscate my traffic. This is a separate machine on a separate network with a unique IP. If I pull the thumb drive out, it boots up to a different OS that can't see this partition.

[Zander]

Haven't we been through this in other posts enough times already?

[Guest]

I feel sorry for the guy that has to monitor me, I come up with some pretty gross stuff sometimes

[Zander]

I feel sorry for the guy that has to monitor me, I come up with some pretty gross stuff sometimes

[Bettypooh]

"Paranoia strikes deep.

Into your life it will creep.

It starts when you're always afraid.

You step out of line, the man come and take you away"

(Credit: Buffalo Springfield)

[InD]

Haven't we been through this in other posts enough times already?

[InD]

I don't get to excited over this stuff.

[Fulldiaper]

The problem isn't what they're doing with it now, it's what can be done with the data. They're not monitoring people, they're monitoring bits and bytes of repetitive data from foreign nationals and students along with high profile organizations that have a bone to pick with the US Government. A fair example would be, let's say some ABDL is involved in a militia and gets arrested, computer and cellphones seized and they find Botox's name and other long term ABDL's and so an investigation ensues and other legal gun owners are also ABDL's. The Government could classify ABDL's as potential combatants at the Federal level and thereby putting all ABDL's in their cross hairs as potential terrorists. No

[OmutsuSuki]

Yup. The Nazi-like South Korean government is still moderating my internet usage.

[Guest Diaperdragon]

I recommend using Tor, PGP any web encryption gear

[underwhere]

I don't get to excited over this stuff.

[Dill_Pickle]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130603/02204423292/new-anti-prenda-court-filing-lays-out-tons-evidence-suggesting-john-steele-uploaded-videos-to-bittorrent-himself.shtml

This post discusses how a private investigator and computer expert identified a bit torrent uploader and pirate with no cooperation at all from the ISPs, and basically no physical resources beyond a PC and an internet connection.

I am at the point where I pretty well assume wherever I send my data will eventually get hacked....The recent Ars Technica article on password security made an excellent point...keeping track of passwords and made-up nonsense answers to security questions in a little black book on your person is starting to look very attractive. See also Krebs On Security if you regularly handle more than about ten thousand dollars.

[anned]

there are around 273,800,000 internet users in the US. that is a lot of people to track.

[BabyJune]

I don't get to excited over this stuff.

[Zander]

there are around 273,800,000 internet users in the US. that is a lot of people to track.

And the technology to track them is very advanced, highly automated and comparatively cheap to operate. In times past the fire-hose of data (filtering out the good from the useless) was hard - actually very hard. These days stream processing technology is much faster (compared to even 5 years ago, we're talking multiple orders of magnitude faster), behaviour modelling and pattern detection is far better and identification systems much more robust. Also, storage is cheap enough now that we can simply store everything and wait for the processing and data-mining technology to catch up or fall in price enough to do something with it.

[DavidMW]

Reportedly 60% of Americans shop at Walmart every month. They've been leaders in commercial data mining in retail. Most major web search engines and other online retail providers capture and analyze the behavior of their users in order to improve recommendations and serve up ads that users are more likely respond to. My employer does amazing things with public records - turns out that people who attempt to hide their identities or create multiple identities often make predictable mistakes that can be detected in such pools of data. Google averages more than a billion searches a day and processes 20 petabytes of content daily. Facebook loads 60 terabytes of data daily. These are all massive scale applications - if you hear the term "big data" in the news, this is what they're talking about. I'm with Zander when talking about our ability to address the scale. My first PC was a Radio Shack TRS-80 with 16K (kilobytes) of memory. My current desktop is hooked up to terabytes of storage. As some who remembers the old days, I'm still quite impressed by the progress - but to the younger software experts this is what they've grown up with.

And of course, Americans have gotten used to giving away lots of information, with everything they post online about themselves for anyone to see. (Funniest moment in the recent news coverage about the NSA was when I saw a young woman complaining that what she posts on Facebook should be private.)

I don't carry a phone, I leave the credit card at home unless I plan to use it, I walk for most of my errands and pay cash for most purchases - and for just about everything under $100. No paranoia, it's just how I've always done it. I also don't Facebook, Tweet, etc. because there isn't anyone I dislike enough to want to bore them to death with the mundane details of my life. Of course, all of that once-routine now-abnormal behavior would probably flagged me to whomever may be watching as someone trying to hide something.

[Diapered Jason]

"Your web traffic is being monitored.

[Zander]

"Your web traffic is being monitored.

[Red Barchetta]

Just something else to get to me, although I "knew" it anyway, now definitely confirmed....

I am not too concerned about anything I do online - but the idea of all that still dose not sit too easy with me...

Pick up the radar just for a second at any point, and even if the inital investigation shows it was really nothing, everything done in forever is right there...

[DiapermanAl]

There not going to bother most folks. If you start researching how to make bombs then i would be worried. If i was that person.

[Red Barchetta]

There not going to bother most folks. If you start researching how to make bombs then i would be worried. If i was that person.

Say that now, and it might be true NOW, it's what happens later that's the problem with that...

I know the claim is they are basically just looking for direct stuff like that...BUT, where do you stop the tracking? - What about the guy that happen to use a tech support forum that is also used by a guy that is a terror suspect, but that tech board is the only connection between the two - and the only conversations between the two involved some sort of computer/internet issue - but there is that connection...Is that enough to look at that history to...

No it's not likely that I personally am ever going to personally be effected in any noticeable way - but not likely dose not mean not possible, and just that much history whenever they want it.....Well, it's a bit frightening....

[Diapered Jason]

[CDLover]

I was thinking this morning about changing all my account passwords to: