Chaos Program

Two unrelated things clicked in my head today as actually being related on a theoretical level. Thing one I spent some time the other day looking over the websites of some potential vendors. I’ve done this sort of thing lots of times before. As per usual, I was unimpressed by the websites themselves (which may or may not say much about the company itself). Thing two: Someone cracked the algorithm for cell phone signal encryption (really a sort of hiding) to the internet. Both these things show the conflict between the old industrial era way of doing things (let’s call it web 0.5) and the newer Twitter-ified way of doing things (web X.0). It tells us a lot about the changing generations and the growing struggles of the information age.

After that slightly pompous lead in, it’s tempting to just stop but I’ll add some detail, starting with the cell phone encryption code, which is a pretty big deal news-wise. The biggest weakness of cell phone security – and it’s a very big weakness – is that, in order to work, cells broadcast their signal in all directions at once. It’s not like the old fashioned landline phones that send their signal down a wire. In order to intercept the signal of one of those old phones, you have to tap the physical wire. In order to intercept a broadcast signal, on the other hand, you just need to be within range with the right equipment.

For a couple decades now, most cell phones have attempted to evade broadcast interception by (somewhat) randomly changing frequency multiple times during every transmission. That way it’s very hard to intercept more than a single tiny portion of the signal, hopefully too tiny a portion to make sense out of the message. The flaw in this scheme is that for the message to be received, the other end (the cell tower) must be able to follow all the frequency hops and put the complete transmission back together. So both ends need to be synchronized. True randomness is impossible.
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How can you not love a domain named “cryptohippie.com?”

Okay, so it’s a business that sells unusual and interesting services that broadly fall under the heading of “security.” I say broadly because this is not the usual anti-virus or hacker proofing kind of stuff. Check out the website if you like. For now let’s just say that CryptoHippie lives up to its name.

What I really want to discuss is CryptoHippie’s report on the Electronic Police State, 2008. (Available here). The title caught my eye immediately, partly because I recently finished a class that included in the reading list a couple books that were chock full of scare stories about that same topic, more or less [See No Place to Hide by Robert O'Harrow, Jr. and Darknet: Hollywood's War against the Digital Generation by J.D. Lasica]. The class wasn’t quite about that, though. It was about the law as it relates to computer and internet security and privacy (It was also brutal but it looks like I got the A).

Of course, some of what we covered included the hoops the government has to jump through to gather and the way that was changed by the USA PATRIOT Act. Privacy policies and the laws that govern or even require them were also a large part of the class. And other interesting things. Never did the phrase “Electronic Police State” come up. That would be worth another class by itself and I hope to take it one of these days.

The first topic should be What does “Electronic police state” mean?

First, what is a “regular” police state? According to Wikipedia, the term “describes a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population” (Police state). This is a nice start but doesn’t tell the half of it. A police state is one where citizens have few, if any, rights. It’s a place where they can be arrested at any time with, or without a reason. In the old Soviet Union the crime of committing “anti-soviet activities” (or was it un-Soviet?) was a catchall that could be used to collect dissidents or prostitutes with equal ease (the story goes that it was used against prostitutes because there were no laws against prostitution, since that was said to exist only in decadent western countries like the U.S.A. But that law could be used to nab almost anybody for almost anything, so it worked just fine).
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