Slashdot is reporting this interesting video from this site. The wikileaks spy files (not related to the intelligence files) has been eye-opening reading. I wonder if vast document dumps like the spy files are any way to convince the public that they should cease cooperating with the fascist secret police apparatus and start making life harder (by becoming knowledgeable, for example, about COMSEC and OPSEC for starters). I think America is still asleep, and they don't want to wake up to the reality that we are rapidly moving into a dark technologically-empowered dystopia. We already live in a techno-empowered dystopia, but it seems if the present is any guide then the future is only going to get worse.
So what to file this post under? Tradecraft series? Showing the necessity of encrypting phones and sensitive documents? I would argue that, if nothing else, it is important to carry a lot of "white noise" on your handset and your laptops. Documents can easily be gotten from scribd which cover a variety of counter-terrorism topics which also happen to look, from a cursory glance, like terrorism related topics. One of the many down-sides to this police-state false-flag counter-terrorism propaganda used as a justification for the encroaching dystopian techno-dictatorship is that it produces a lot of documents and materials which are, for all interested parties, manuals on terrorism and terror operations.
These documents should be contained on everyone's phone in the highly unlikely event you are detained and your computers seized. The more citizens (read:"suspects") throw false positives the harder the system has to work. One goal of the concerned citizen is to nudge our system of state-sponsored unlawful domestic surveillance and suppression of political dissent into it's own paranoid world of delusions and unreality. When one thinks on the subject it becomes obvious that without too much effort it is very easy to "muddy the waters."
On the other hand, most persons (sheeple) think that since they "have nothing to hide" they have nothing to fear and therefore no reason to resist what is still very much an opaque and esoteric government surveillance apparatus. Many persons are already wary of researching any topic via the internet that might even remotely "put them on a list." The irony is that they are already on a list if they are connecting to the internet, and that "list" creation is largely a result of sophisticated packet switching interception equipment installed parallel to the service providers lines, transmission towers, etc. Many persons, who are bystanders still unmolested by the heavy hand of the Orwellian state, wish to remain at least for all outward appearances as bystanders. Unfortunately, as wikileaks spy files shows us, we are all subject to regimes of automated interception, inspection, and surveillance.
"As the video shows, a Micro Systemation application the firm calls XRY can quickly crack an iOS or Android phone’s passcode, dump its data to a PC, decrypt it, and display information like the user’s GPS location, files, call logs, contacts, messages, even a log of its keystrokes.
Mike Dickinson, the firm’s marketing director and the voice in the videos, says that the company sells products capable of accessing passcode-protected iOS and Android devices in over 60 countries. It supplies 98% of the U.K.’s police departments, for instance, as well as many American police departments and the FBI. Its largest single customer is the U.S. military. ”When people aren’t wearing uniforms, looking at mobile phones to identify people is quite helpful,” Dickinson says by way of explanation.
With smartphone adoption rocketing around the world, Dickinson says Micro Systemation’s “business is booming.” The small company has grown close to 25% in revenue year-over-year, earned $18 million in revenue in 2010 up from $12 million the year before, and doubled its employees since 2009.
“It’s a massive boom industry, the growth in evidence from mobile phones,” says Dickinson. “After twenty years or so, people understand they shouldn’t do naughty things on their personal computers, but they still don’t understand that about phones. From an evidential point of view, it’s of tremendous value.”
“If they’ve done something wrong,” he adds.
XRY works much like the jailbreak hacks that allow users to remove the installation restrictions on their devices, Dickinson says, though he wouldn’t say much about the exact security vulnerability that XRY exploits to gain access to the iPhone. He claims that the company doesn’t use backdoor vulnerabilities in the devices created by the manufacturer, but rather seeks out security flaws in the phone’s software just as jailbreakers do, one reason why half the company’s 75 employees are devoted to research and development. “Every week a new phone comes out with a different operating sytems and we have to reverse engineer them,” he says. “We’re constantly chasing the market.”
After bypassing the iPhone’s security restrictions to run its code on the phone, the tool “brute forces” the phone’s password, guessing every possible combination of numbers to find the correct code, as Dickinson describes it. In the video above, the process takes seconds. (Although admittedly, the phone’s example passcode is “0000″, about the most easily-guessed password possible.)"
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