An interesting story today of a college professor chastised for using the Tor onion-router network at his job, and for teaching students about it.

I’m glad he stood up for his principles, but it’s chilling to see how much attention merely trying to make use of your right to privacy can attract. I both use the Tor network, and run a node on it, and while a lot of the use to which the network gets put isn’t terribly noteworthy (downloading pornography and pirated software, for example), it’s usefulness, and availability, to the people who really need it makes it worthwhile. I also make use of other, similar technologies that hide my online activities. Not because I have anything much to hide, but because I choose to do something proactive about my privacy, rather than relying on others to have my best interests at heart.

New York Representative Gary Ackerman to Condi, today, about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”:

“For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they’re very brave with the terrorists. If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they’d get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad.”

Now there’s an image.

There’s been a lot of coverage in past months of the “unaccounted for” millions of dollars (in cash) delivered by the U.S. into post-invasion Iraq. Pallets and pallets of cash, in fact; so much money we only know how much it weighed, not how much it was worth. Much speculation has gone on about where the money went, and why. Looking for information last night about the infrequently-wondered question “Where’d the money come from?”, I came up with an interesting, and unprovable, theory I haven’t seen suggested elsewhere.
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An anonymous contributor provided Cryptome a list of netblocks supposedly used by the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”. There are two problems with this list - the netblocks are uselessly huge, and there’s absolutely zero evidence to back up the allegation.

We’re not talking little /24 netblocks here; the list includes several /10s, /11s, /9s, and even a /8. That’s an absurdly large number of IP addreses. First of all, there’s no legitimate use for blocking or filtering that large a netblock (many of which appear to be disused or invalid, anyway). Secondly, there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the claims, anyway. Thirdly, they’re such broad claims, it’s basically equivelant to stating “suspicious activity comes from Korean IP space”. Well, duh.

Lists like this one demonstrate why it’s not a good idea to trust random “experts”. When the crackpot conspiracy theorist presents his “findings” in a geeky and technical-looking way, it’s easy for the layperson to mistakenly judge those “findings” as legitimate, when they’re not.

You really want to block government-sponsored surveillance? Block 192.80.55.74, or even 192.80.55.0/24, if you’re really paranoid. That IP is used to monitor websites for DHS, and the netblock belongs only to the contractor doing it, not their upstream or national ISP… But, then again, you’d just have to trust me on that, wouldn’t you?