[LINK] Fwd: [PRIVACY] [apfma] AAP: AFP to use DPI to collect email metadata

Frank O'Connor francisoconnor3 at bigpond.com
Tue Dec 10 17:10:01 AEDT 2013


Yo Jan, 

e-Mail has always been pretty vulnerable ... at its simplest it's basically just an unencrypted text stream. All you have to know is the relevant Port(s), and monitor the traffic on that ... and the so-called 'deep packet inspection' is a breeze. The Ports are a matter of record ... for SMTP for example it's typically Port 25, from memory, whilst other proprietary protocols also tend to be well known.

Ways to (temporarily) stymie the data stream collection and analysis include: Encryption ... via PGP or the like, VPN's through which you stream your SMTP/mail traffic, and use of other means to scramble to contents during transmission (i.e between clients and servers and/or clients).

That said, to set some of these puppies up can require a bit of coordination (between your clients and the servers - best to use a product that works solely from the client end from my perspective ... the intervening servers are too easily compromised.) 

I still like PGP (Phil Zimmerman designed a great product), but there are other packages out there that are also quite good. The problem with packages like PGP of course is safeguarding the private keys (the public ones are known to all and sundry), and the various glitches that can occur if they are lost.

Personally, I don't give much of a damn who read my e-mails ... the content of 99.99999% of them is so bland as to be boring beyond belief ... but I do give a damn that my privacy isn't respected. I've said it before ... the only two things that I regard as completely non-negotiable in life are my privacy and independence. If the cops are doing this under a warrant or court mediated process, I have no problems with it ... but if they can simply do it at will, then I (continue to) have real problems about where our society is heading.
---
On 10 Dec 2013, at 4:13 pm, Jan Whitaker <jwhit at janwhitaker.com> wrote:

> Any way to protect against this?
> Jan
> 
> 
>> Australian police to adopt technology capable of collecting emails
>> Published: December 10, 2013
>> Source:
>> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/australian-police-to-adopt-technology-capable-of-collecting-emails
>> 
>> 
>> Controversial new technology capable of collecting and storing emails
>> and other information sent via computer in real time will be rolled out
>> by the Australian Federal Police next year.
>> 
>> The agency plans to trial "deep packet inspection" (DPI) technology in
>> February before a full rollout in April.
>> 
>> DPI systems are used by many organisations as firewalls but they can
>> also collect information such as email subject headers and message content.
> 
> 
> Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
> jwhit at janwhitaker.com
> 
> Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how 
> do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
> ~Margaret Atwood, writer
> 
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