April 13, 2021 • 40 mins
In this classic episode, our friends at TechStuff join us for a closer look at the tricky business of staying anonymous on the internet, as well as the facts about the NSA's surveillance program.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thank you so much for tuning in to this classic episode.
Yes you we know who you are. Well, maybe we don't,
but someone does. Right. Oh man, you guys we made
this in twenty wow. Yeah, and we asked the question
way back then, can you be anonymous on the Internet? Yeah,
(00:23):
it's a question still being asked today. Uh and I
think we all kind of know the answer. But there's
a lot too And it's really interesting to hear this
take from this oldie but goody classic episode. Check it
out from UFOs two Ghosts and Government cover Ups. History
is writ with unexplained events. You can turn back now
or learn the stuff that don't want you to now.
(00:51):
All right, hello, welcome to the show. If that intro
by our super producer Noel was familiar, then that means
you are in the right place. Lady and gentlemen. This
is stuff they don't want you to know. I'm Ben.
You're probably wondering where Matt is. He is off on
an adventure that maybe we'll get to in the course
(01:12):
of this show. But in place of Matt today we
have not one but two very special guests from tech Stuff,
from brain Stuff, from Forward Thinking. I don't even know
how you guys found time to come on this show.
Jonathan Strickland and Lauren Vogel bomb Ben. We we found
time because we literally just recorded another tech stuff episode
(01:34):
with you, like like ten minutes ago. Thanks for not
giving away our time travel scheme. That was good. I'm
glad that we have got that out of the bag
out of the bag man, which is only gonna be
funny if you listen to the other episode, right, because
this is a sequel, that's a compacitorie, a sister episode.
It is it is now. You guys were kind enough
(01:57):
or add poor enough taste to have me on your
show just a few minutes ago when we recorded a
great episode on how to serve the Web anonymously or
whether it's even possible, And this was us to something
that we thought was right up the stuff they don't
want you to know, Ali because listeners out there now,
(02:19):
you guys know as well as everybody else does now
that it turns out the United States government in particular
was putting a lot more energy into tracking people than
we had all thought. Yeah, I mean, even if you
take it at face value, where you know you have
this this system, specifically the n s A, we're talking
about here with the end prison specifically with yes, but
(02:43):
if even if you take it at face value that
what they were looking for were foreign agents. So if
you are a United States citizen, then in theory you
would not a United States citizen who is not involved
in one of these schemes, you would not be considered
a foreign agent and therefore not part of the surveillance.
Even if you take that at face value, they would
(03:06):
look for people who they did identify as foreign agents,
and the people that that those folks talked to, right, Yeah,
they played the Kevin Bacon game. Yeah, And if you've
ever played the Kevin Bacon game, you know that it
gets pretty easy to start linking two people you never
thought would have had a connection to each other together.
It doesn't really take that many levels of separation, right, right.
(03:31):
And furthermore, they're really collecting information on everyone and sorting
through it in order to find these specific people. But
the fact that they're collecting and storing this information about
all of us, it's creepy, it's problematic. So again, even
taken on face value, it's it's it's troublesome. And then
when you realize the actual methodology, it becomes downright concerning.
(03:54):
I mean it's not just that, Oh, there's some issues here.
From a technological perspective, the very methodology is problematic. I
think that's well said. So one of my first questions
for you guys before you really get into this is, uh, if,
let's say twenty years ago, if someone had come up
to you in and said the government is watching everything
(04:19):
and it's just going to watch more, would you have
would you have thought it was sort of conspiracy bunk
or would you have thought there was a possibility of
it happening. I would have thought bunk for sure. And
it's and it's largely because uh, well, I mean the
capability just wasn't there any Yeah, when you're talking about
(04:41):
how much data gets created or transferred or copied or
transmitted however you want to look at it, it's an
astronomical number. It is an enormous number. Just let's just
take YouTube as the example of data creation. Okay, So
on YouTube, every single minute that passes more than a
(05:01):
hundred hours of video footage is being uploaded to YouTube.
Some of that's duplicate footage, but it doesn't really matter.
That's a huge amount of information. Now, just kind of extrapolate.
Imagine that the entire Internet, this network of computer networks,
is filled with people who are either creating information or
accessing it in some way, and the accessing of information
(05:23):
does in itself create a certain amount of meta data information.
There's information about who, who accessed what and when. This
is such an enormous amount that most of us would
think that being able to to capture it and filter
it and make any meaning of it would be a
Gardentian task beyond our capabilities. But it is a Gardentian task.
(05:44):
But it's not, as it turns out, beyond our capability exactly.
It turns out that our our technology is sufficiently sophisticated
enough to be able to weed through that kind of stuff,
or at least we're working very hard on it. I mean,
not the three of us at this table, but I'm
personally aware of and and Google is a perfect example
of how we should have really kind of re evaluated
(06:07):
this idea that it's just too big, right, because Google
has created a business that or at least the forward
facing part of their business that that's the search engine.
You know, arguably you would say that the real business
is advertising, But but the search engine is the thing,
the product that we're all familiar with, and it's really
really good. It's a really good search engine if you're
(06:28):
trying to find something specific. And once we realize how
much information is out there and how Google has developed
an algorithm that can effectively find the stuff you actually
want to see, then you start to realize, Oh, I
guess it really is possible to build in that a
similar kind of tool that could be useful if you're
(06:49):
looking for signs of activity. Uh, if you happen to
be an enormous government organization that is in charge of
discovering cryptic messages that between foreign agents that could potentially
affect your country, or friends of foreign agents, yes, or
people who know friends of foreign agents. Yes. That's the
problem is that this this ripples outward. Right if if
(07:11):
it were just the foreign agents, that becomes an issue
because then you have to be able to to reliably
identify a foreign agent versus someone who is not a
foreign agent. But then if you go one ripple outward,
who are these people talking to and why? Well, I
can understand why you would be interested in that, but
they're going to be people in that that one ripple
outward who are not in any way connected with anything nefarious,
(07:33):
but they're going to get swept up in that surveillance anyway.
If you go a further ring out, go for it.
That's an enormous number of people. This is what Facebook
is completely built upon, the whole idea of that social network.
If you ever see any of their presentations, you just
see how this, this this one small group of people
(07:54):
who have these inner connections between each other, become this
ginormous mass of people when you just go out a
couple of steps. Yet now this I'm glad that we're
talking about this because this is something that escapes a
lot of people that the uh, the government agency, the
n s A has automated the collection and analysis of
(08:17):
this of this stuff. For people who are concerned, you know,
the n s A is listening in on my phone
calls and reading my emails. They're taking your phone calls
and emails and they're keeping them like like you said, Lauren,
And what they'll do is if you pop up on
a different algorithm than they'll actually have a human Like
any other big organization, from a call center to the FBI,
(08:39):
it's kind of difficult to actually get to a human,
You have to go through a few steps. You gotta
dial one, wait for stuff, you listen to a robot voice.
And I hate it this side note. I hate it
when the the automated line won't let you just push
a button and you have to stand there wherever you
are and look really stupid and go operator operate or
(09:01):
you're saying yes, yes, yeah, and everybody is so solemn.
We all just said the same yes. But um. But
moving from this, we before we go too deep on
the government, we should make a point that they're not
the only people looking at web activity when we talk. Yeah,
(09:21):
I mean, companies obviously are looking at a lot of
web activity as well, for multiple reasons. Uh. Mostly companies
are looking at activity in order to make more money. Right,
they want to be able to sell you stuff better,
or to sell you as a consumer to an advertising
company so that that advertising company can sell you stuff better. Yeah. Yeah,
it all comes down to, you know, where are the dollars,
(09:43):
where are they coming from, and where are they going to?
And so we the users end up playing a big
role in that. I mean we we are the ones
who generate revenue for companies. And you know, if it
weren't that way, the Internet would be a very different place.
For one thing, it would not be near as robust
as it is, right it would it would be mainly
limited to communication lines between things like research institutes and
(10:07):
the government, which, big surprise, that's what originally the Internet
was all about. Yeah, ur ponnette was essentially connections between
scientific research institutes, universities, and government installations. And that was it,
and and that was because you know, that was what
it was built for. Was built to be this really
fast communications and networking ability so that people could share
(10:31):
things very effectively. What it's grown into is this crazy
world that melds things like entertainment and commerce and communications
all into one big package, which in many ways is
legitimately awesome. Obviously, we wouldn't have jobs if there were
an internet, or at least we wouldn't have these jobs
we are on the internet right now. Yeah, well, you
(10:54):
guys get paid. I'm here for community service. Your internship
has lasted longer than any other I've ever seen, that's true. Hey,
will you sign off for my hours? Before this? One
question though, that a lot of people will have is
the following. Just a little bit of background here, Um,
(11:15):
the question is is surfing anonymously legal? Uh. The background
here is that often the desire to surf anonymously is
depicted as one that is inherently sinister. That is the
same sort of uh perception that is given to things
(11:36):
like torrents now or peer to peer networks. Peer to
peer networks as they are by themselves, are not sinister
or shady or illegal. Right. Appear to peer network is
just a means of distribution of files. Right. But when
you start distributing files that you don't have the right
to distribute network, that's where the illegal activity comes, and
(11:58):
then you end up sort of casting this shadow across
the entire technology. So there are companies like music and
movie companies that just say peer to peer networks alone
are bad, because those are a lot of the ways
that that illegal file sharing got spread around, you know,
just a few years ago. Now it's not even that
(12:18):
big of a deal because you can get pretty much
everything in a billion different places. But uh, you know,
if you're talking about just trying to serve anonymously, it
all depends upon where you are in the world. In
the United States, it's not a big deal. There's no
law that you'd be breaking by trying to hide your
IP address. The laws that you would be breaking would
(12:41):
be if you try to do anything illegal while you
were doing that, or even if you weren't, whether or
not you're trying to hide what you're doing. If you're
doing something illegal, that's against the law, right, Yeah, Like
like you like you don't have to use tour to
buy drugs. There are many other reasons that you can
use tour, Yeah, but if you do buy drugs, that's
against the law. And then if you're caught, you could
be punished for it, or you will be if you're caught.
(13:03):
I see. Yeah. So so here in the West and
the United States, Canada and so on. Uh, there is
not a law against uh surfing the web anonymously. I don't.
I don't think it's even against the law to uh
go into some of the deep web stuff to which
we alluded, um, which you guys have covered in a
previous episode and Matt and I have covered as well.
(13:25):
We're talking about this Silk Road and and not the
historic one through Central Asia. But as you said, other
countries have different perspectives, Like you've got a great example
about China. Sure, Yeah, China. They have a program in
China that is called the Golden Shield Project, also more
commonly known as the Great Firewall of China UH. And
(13:47):
the reason for this is that it said effort i'll
um on part of the Chinese government to censor and
and have surveillance over Internet activities within China, so that
the main purpose of it is to perfect event objectionable
material as defined by the Chinese government from getting to
Chinese citizens using the internet. So flat out block some
(14:09):
websites and some search terms and like some yeah things
like Facebook. You can't access Facebook in China using if
you were just trying to connect to a Chinese I
s P and go through normal methods domain name server.
So if you were to if you were to just
use like plug and play, you're you're just trying to
(14:30):
use your browser to get to certain places. You would
find out that there's some websites you just cannot access
that way in China. In order to access those websites,
you have to circumvent the protections that have been put
in place. UH. In general, this is not seen as
a huge deal, right. It's it's it's it's frowned upon.
You're not supposed to do it. But as far as
(14:52):
I am aware, no one has been uh persecuted and
or prosecuted for trying to circumnavigate the firewall of China. However,
if you were to do something such as post messages
that are anti Chinese government to websites, then that is
very much considered against the law, and you will they
(15:15):
will look for you, and if they find you and
catch you, they'll punish you. Right, And it might also
be used as perhaps a pretext for arresting someone, at
least in that country, kind of the same way the
tax evasion was the crime for which Capone was ultimately arrested. Yeah.
That in some cases, depending again upon what country you
(15:35):
are in, uh, this might be the the door that
opens up so that they can get you for what
they really want you for. Right. And and when we
say we're not especially picking on China, oh, although I
do have to say, there's one really cool thing that
that freaks me out a bit. And if you are
on just the regular you know, the version of the
(15:57):
inner State uh Internet in China, every so often these
two cartoon police characters will pop up on the screen
just to let you know that they're they're looking out
for you. They're protecting you. They're protecting and serving by
making sure you're not doing anything wrong. Actually, what they're
doing is they're protecting you by making sure all that
terrible information that would flood flood your browser if if
(16:20):
it only had the chance, because they know you are
an upstanding Chinese sitizen and would never try to access
that kind of stuff. But that stuff is trying to
get it you no matter what, and those cops they
are making sure that you are going to be safe
from it. They also have blue eyes, which is very weird.
Their names are Chinging and cha Cha. It's based on
a pun that means police in Chinese. So check check
(16:42):
it out and google it if you have a chance.
Just remember that China will know you looked at it.
And uh so earlier, um, we we mentioned toward the
onion router right, and uh what I wanted to ask
about is if you could, because you guys are the
experts here on technical matters, if you could outline briefly
(17:05):
for our listeners, what's the difference between like a privacy
mode on a browser and something like tour That's a
great question. Yeah, in brief, a privacy browser on your
home computer does absolutely nothing to to protect what you
are doing from anyone aside from someone who is looking
(17:25):
purely at your home computer. Yeah, exactly, the text real quick,
while you're doing that, I'll continue to explain. So, yeah,
the privacy mode, what it's doing is it's preventing stuff
that would normally show up and say, your search history,
your browsing history cookies, is preventing all that kind of
stuff from happening, so that someone who gets access to
(17:45):
your machine can't just look and see what it is
you've been up to. However, anyone who can see the
traffic that's going across your local network that includes perhaps
other machines that are also on the local network, your router,
the modem, your I s P, all of these entities
know exactly what you're doing because in order for you
(18:06):
to get the stuff you're trying to get, they these
entities have to know where to send it, right, right,
This is so you know, up to and including the
website that you're accessing, they know who you are as well, right, Yeah,
at least they know the I P EDG yes, and
they know they know what network it's going to. So
really it's it's you know, you can't hide your IP
address perfectly because if you did, no information would ever
(18:30):
come back to your computer. Now we, uh, we do
have an interesting fact here, and by interesting I mean disturbing.
So I'll just go ahead and ask how much information
does someone a company or a government or whomever need
about you before they can figure out who you are?
All right? This is a kind of fascinating. Did you
(18:51):
ever hear the story about how Target had identified a
customer as being pregnant? It was it turned out to
be a young lady, teenager, and so Target pregnant people
are ladies, that that would be true. That is true, Lauren,
thank you? Is a good point. A young lady pregnant,
(19:13):
uh don't know. Parents don't know, parents don't know, she
has not told them, and Target starts proactively sending her
offers for things that a pregnant lady wouldn't possibly need.
And her father found the offers and got very upset,
saying like, why is Target sending this unsolit solicited stuff?
(19:35):
What do you what are you saying about? My daughter
raised a big fuss about it. You have offended mod dignity.
That's how I picture him speaking. Yes, it was a
Southern gentleman from the fun city of Savannah there with
a white glove and just slapped the front door. Yeah
challenge you, I challenge you on tie organization to a duel.
Yeah no, that's not exactly what happened, but he did
(19:57):
raise a fuss and then later wrote a second a
follow up message saying I had to talk with my daughter.
It turns out that I did not. I was not
aware that she was pregnant. But this raised the point
of how did Target know? What was it that gave
Target the information? How did they predict this? And as
it turned out, it had the company had been watching
(20:19):
her purchase patterns and determined that statistically speaking, she was
very likely pregnant. And so this is an illustration that
you don't have to have actively shared some information about
yourself for an entity or a person to draw conclusions
about at least your what your physical state is, or
(20:42):
what your your state of mind might be. Even if
it's not your specific name and identity, it could be
enough to be able to single out who you are
from a level that's separate from my name is Jonathan
Strickland and I live in Atlanta, right That actually would
be very easy. Then they're probably very few Strickland's living
(21:05):
in Atlanta. There might be a few, because you know,
there are a lot of other Johnathan Stricklands. Lauren vocal
Bam might be the easiest to paying directly to zoom
in pretty quickly. So the real answer to this question,
according to research specialists, is that thirty three bits of
information called bits of entropy and this in this identification business,
(21:29):
are required in order to narrow it down to a
specific person out of all the people on earth. And
and these these bits of information can be anything from
from your gender to the type of car you drive,
to your zip code to like like, it doesn't have
to be the same thirty three bits in order it
could be any thirty three bits, and bit in this
(21:51):
case means something specific, like like in the computer world
we talk about digital Uh, you know these binary digits.
That that's what it is. It's either a zero or
a one, which you could think of as either a
no or yes. Well, uh, some bits, some pieces of
information represent a single bit, like gender is considered to
(22:12):
be a single bit, putting gender discussions aside. For for
many people, this would be male or female, all right,
That that obviously oversimplifies things, but for the purposes purposes
for identification male female tends to be uh. The way
that they look at it, very black and white kind
of approach that represents one bit. Something like your zip
(22:34):
code might be several bits of information that would make
up just one zip code, but all it takes is
thirty three bits. Some of those bits might be connected
to a larger concept, like the your model of car, uh,
the specific region you live in, whatever it is, your age,
that's another good one. But all you need are thirty
(22:56):
three bits worth of this information to be able to
identify in the reason for that is you take this
yes or no. That's a base of two, right, you've
got two options. You take that too, Then you have
the thirty three different bits. That's two to the power
of thirty three. If you work that out, that ends
up being more than eight billion. Two to the thirty
(23:17):
third powers more than eight billion. There are seven billion
people on Earth. Wait, we've got made up people in
this It means that we have more than enough information
to to account for the seven billion people who are
actually alive. So uh, if you the idea is that
with those thirty three bits, you can then have enough
personal identifiable information to narrow it down to a specific individual.
(23:40):
And also it's devilishly easy to forget that what you're
putting out on the Internet personally identifies you, right say,
all sorts of things that they imagine are innocuous. I mean,
Twitter is in the Congressional Library. Now, yeah, you can
get an entire or you can download an entire Twitter history,
(24:02):
which is for some of us quite a large file.
It turns out I think I have more than seventeen
dozen tweets. So um, I clearly am not as as
worried about anonymity as some people are. Perhaps that is
a foolish thing on my part, but uh, there's an
interesting example of this as well. Researchers at Stanford and
(24:23):
the University of Texas. We're able to identify Netflix viewers
based upon their activity, and part of that was because
these are the same These viewers would do things like
leave reviews for movies on other sites, and just by
looking at this stuff that you wouldn't think would personally
identify you, right because it's just it's just you your
(24:43):
opinion about a movie. It's not hey, I happen to
be five foot whatever. I'm not telling you, yeah, but
they But the point being then is that there's uh there,
there's some puzzle solving that can happen very easily, really,
because they say, oh, um, Anonymous user A watch this
(25:06):
thing on Netflix at this time, and then oh surprise,
shortly thereafter Anonymous user oh wait, it's Anonymous user A.
And they said that this was they gave it three stars,
and what they did on Netflix like like this, this
Anonymous user A watched a particular movie at a particular time.
This other person whose identity we know left a review
(25:28):
on IMDb, and based upon the time between these two events,
were reasonably certain that Anonymous user A is this person
we know. And Anonymous User A is completely wrong about
Big Trouble and Little Chin, which is an amazing movie,
is not It is not a good bad movie. It
is a good good movie because he's this sidekick the
(25:48):
whole time. He got up express. Come on, So what
is the tour project about? You guys have done a
you guys done a podcast on this. Um Matt and
I have done some videos, but we've never done a
full podcast on it. So it's tour, you know, kind
of stands for the Onion router, it's really its own name.
Now it's just tour sure. Originally the Onion router was
(26:11):
based on the idea that, um, it's encrypting things in layers, yes,
so that you would go uh an information from point
A to point z, let's say, would go through all
these different layers, and between each layer things would get
encrypted in a different way. So from layer one to
layer two it would get encrypted, layer two to layer
three it would get encrypted. Layer three to layer for
(26:32):
get a different level of encryption. And and furthermore, each
each layer, each node in this connection only knows the
node before it and after it, which is key. It
doesn't know the entire chain exactly. So the idea of
being that this node, this series of nodes makes a circuit.
That circuit is connecting your computer running a tour browser
(26:56):
to whatever site or whatever information you were trying to retreat.
But that circuit of nodes has very limited information in
any individual piece of the overall circuit. Right, So if
you identified that there's one node in this network, and
you see that information is coming from uh the node
(27:17):
immediately preceding it, and it's going to the node following it,
you wouldn't be able to reconstruct the rest of the circuit.
That's all the information you would be able to get.
So if there are like six nodes in this circuit
and you've identified node number three, you can only see
that information is coming from node two and it's going
to node four. You wouldn't be able to see where
node one, five, or six, where those are in that circuit. Yeah,
(27:39):
you wouldn't be able to see the original sender or
the intended receiver. And hopefully if it's encrypted well enough,
you wouldn't be able to read the message either exactly,
because again it gets encrypted between each node in that circuit. Uh,
it sounds pretty secure, right, Yeah, it sounds it sounds
pretty cool. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as it
turns out, there are ways to try and figure out
(28:04):
who is trying to access what so so in this
world where you're looking at all these connections that get
hidden because it's traveling through all these nodes, you might
be able to see all the potential start points and
all the potential end points, but you don't really know
which people are trying to access which sites or which servers. However,
(28:26):
if you were to be able to analyze all the
traffic across the network and build enough of a statistical
model you could start weeding people out and start looking
at the potential people going to the potential end points.
You could play the something like the target game. You
could use big data to uh analyze and then maybe
(28:46):
even predict. Yeah, so essentially what you're this is really
oversimplifying it. But essentially you might see that, uh that,
let's say person A, the anonymous A is trying to
access silk row, all right, and so you see an
anonymous person's a's connection light up. It then goes across
(29:08):
these nodes which mix everything else up, and you are
already looking at silk Road, so you are specifically you've
already identified the potential target and the potential destination. And
then you see that the silk Road one lights up
in the amount of time you would expect for this
message to have to transfer across these modes. Then you'd say, uhh,
(29:29):
this is a potential hit. And then you continue to
analyze traffic. This can actually help duh and anemonize. I
can't even say it, and how do we thank you?
Anemone d anemone the network. So but you know, it
really is this is a potential way where you can
(29:50):
figure out at least which connection was trying to connect
to which server. Uh. And it just it steps back
from the actual circuit entirely. And it may not be
enough to move on a person you know with full
legal backing, but it might be enough to convince you
to really look into that person more closely. So there's
really no safe harbor for complete anonymity on tour because
(30:16):
if somebody wants to find you, or if they want
to find find the needle in the haystack, with enough diligence,
they can well, I mean it would it's at least
possible for them to for for someone really determined and
with the right resources to be able to start narrowing
things down right. Uh, certainly. And there there are a
(30:38):
few other problems with with tour. I mean, it's an
open source thing. That's part of the way that this
is tom actually protects itself and a kind of anti
logical encounterintuitive, but it really is because it means that
anyone can can go in and look at this. So
if someone changes something or someone puts in a change,
this is a community that's looking after the whole the
(31:01):
whole product, so it's not something that would be easy
to slip in without anyone taking notice of it. Also,
its origins kind of raise some eyebrows to yes, the
origin from naval research, right, Yeah, well, I mean, as
it turns out, uh, there are reasons why, say a
military organization would want to be able to send information
(31:26):
uh secretly or perhaps access information in secret and itself, yeah,
even without itself, even even apart from other organizations within
that same government. Uh, when we talk about the n
s A, there are other government organizations that are equally
upset as yea, quite a few that, like you know,
you know, there are citizens who are up in, up,
(31:47):
up all about this. I mean they're very upset about it,
as I think they should be. Um that's my own
personal opinion. But there are government organizations they're they're working
for the same people wore who are equally upset. Their
wheels within wheels would be the X files line. I mean,
you've got those, You've got those great rivalries between the
(32:08):
CIA and n s A. The date back to the
beginning of both organizations, and recently, as we're recording this,
more and more information about what we would call friendly
fire surveillance has leaked people who had not only the wherewithal,
but the motivation to keep their communications private or anonymous,
(32:30):
Like congres Members of Congress found that UM not only
was the n s A, but the FBI as well,
UH monitoring their monitoring their day to day emails and
phone calls, whatnot. The the thing that was was really
important to underline here is that it's not inherently sinister
(32:52):
to serve the web anonymously. And it's possible to do it,
as we said an earlier thing, but it's not really
plausible and not for a long term solution. No, No,
it's once off and we U we do tell you guys,
listeners in UH and Jonathan Lawns show, we show you
how theoretically you could make yourself, if not impossible to trace,
(33:16):
very very inconvenient to do so. Right. But it's basically
like like burner phone, burner, internet connection, burner face, like
you have to go, yeah, you gotta pretty much be uh.
You have to really limit what it is you want
to do, and you have to very much limit the
way you do it. So in other words, it's not
(33:36):
like you can just use that methodology to do everything
you would want to do on the web because there's
some cool stuff that's on the web that I love
to do that there's just no way to do anonymously,
not not truly right, like can you really have a
full decorgy watching experience if you can't log in and comment.
That also is a reference to the Text Stuff episode.
(34:00):
You'll learn way more about corky obsessions in that show.
I think it's enthusiasm. I don't think we've crossed the
line into obsession yet. We're just let me close out
a couple of taps. So while Jonathan's closing out a
couple of tabs, I do just want to set you
guys up for one more big question. UM, if you
if you like our show Stuff, then want you to
(34:21):
know listeners, then then you'll love tech Stuff because they
have also been talking about several different revelations, um, both
both with security and the nuts and bolts about how
these kind of things work. So we highly recommend their show.
And I have to ask you, guys, since you're the
ones with to know how UM, if you had to
(34:42):
guess or speculate, do you think that there would be
more news forthcoming like the whole Snowden disclosure thing where
he said, you know, he kicked down the door of
the news organizations and said this, but on everybody, Is
there anything else that would happen, because it seems like
that's the big Well, I mean, we only know what
(35:04):
we know, right, there's there's you can bet a couple
of things. You can bet that anything that has happened
since Snowdon has left is largely unknown to us because
he was the source of the leak. So anything that
has been done to address that or change things, evolve
the technologies that's being used, or or to find tune
(35:26):
them in different ways, or even apply them and even
more broad applications, or to fine tune the process by
which they make sure that other people don't link their information. Yeah,
all of that is unknown to us, so we can't
really be sure what's going on. What we do know
is just based upon the information that's been revealed so far.
There already have been abuses of the system. So that's
the other thing to keep in mind. Even if somehow
(35:48):
you could agree that the n s A system is
on its own, maybe you could call it flawed, but
it mostly works. Let's say that you even make that assumption,
the problem is it's run by people, and people, as
it turns out, our flawed very much so, and some
people will take advantage of having the opportunity to use
(36:09):
such a powerful tool to do things like snoop on
X girlfriends. Yeah, and even if someone isn't doing it
nefariously there there could certainly be mistakes made. Yeah. So
so there are a lot of issues that will probably
come to light as we get more people investigating this. Um.
The interesting thing to me is really seeing how much
(36:30):
movement we see in political circles to actually address this
in a meaningful way, because you do have lots of people, Uh,
you have lots of representatives who are at least saying
that they want more, more, more transparency because their constituents
are demanding it. Right, They're they're kind of demanding it too.
(36:50):
I mean it sounds like, yeah, once they found out
that they were also included. Yes, but uh there That's
one of the big debates always is uh, is it
a matter of sincere offense or fashionable offense fashionable indignation?
And and that's something that I think we will see
(37:10):
in the future with our listeners. We'd like to we'd
like to hear from you guys as well. What do
you think the next big revelations about the Internet would be? Um? Oh,
and here's one. Uh, can you or have you served
the web anonymously? Let's see if you could right in
(37:32):
and let us know and still stay anonymous. I don't know,
Let's just see if it works. Uh. In the meantime,
I'd like to thank Jonathan and Lauren you guys, thank
you so much for coming on our show. Um, I
wish I knew what had happened to Matt. We haven't
really said it on air, but if you want to
go ahead, and actually I can reveal at this point
(37:53):
that Matt in fact, was buried under a pile of
quirky puppies. And he's he's all right, but he's penned
and cannot move. He's the happiest that he has ever been.
He is stuck. He has been saying that I cannot
breathe and that's okay. Uh, in various languages. It's weird.
He actually is really fluent, but only in that one phrase. Yeah,
(38:16):
he's really smart, but it's strange that he only knows
that phrase. So, UM, I guess maybe I'll go try
to find him. And get him out because we still
need him for the show. Yeah, he's got some stuff
he needs to edit to and uh, and honestly, those
puppies are starting to get tired, and he just keeps
on picking up the ones that are wearing a nap
(38:36):
and putting him back on his stomach. So there's okay,
I know the pile of puppies you were talking about. Okay, No,
he's under there, yes, the third pile. Yes, yeah, okay. Great. Um.
As I said, guys, want to thank you so much
for coming on the show and being our very first guest.
(38:56):
I'd also like to let listeners know that if you
like this show, as you said, you'll enjoy tech stuff.
But these folks aren't just on tech stuff. They are
on another excellent podcast called Forward Thinking That which is
also a video series, and you can see all three
of us they think at various points, participating in everyday
(39:17):
science shananigans on a show called brain Stuff. You can
actually see all three of us in in the episode
about about product placement. Oh boy, that one I forgot
about that. Yeah. Well, if you want to see why
they're laughing at me, you can check that one out
to Uh, you can find Stuff they Don't Want You
to Know dot com for every video and every podcast
(39:41):
we've ever made, and of course we're all over the internet.
You can drop us a line with a suggestion or
feedback on Twitter or Facebook. That's where we put a
lot of the stories that don't make it into videos
or podcasts, So do check it out. And that's the
end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts
or questions about this episode mode, you can get into
contact with us in a number of different ways. One
(40:03):
of the best is to give us a call. Our
number is one eight three three std w y t K.
If you don't want to do that, you can send
us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at
i heart radio dot com. Stuff they Don't Want You
to Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
(40:23):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Thank you so much for tuning in to this classic episode.
Yes you we know who you are. Well, maybe we don't,
but someone does. Right. Oh man, you guys we made
this in twenty wow. Yeah, and we asked the question
way back then, can you be anonymous on the Internet? Yeah,
(00:23):
it's a question still being asked today. Uh and I
think we all kind of know the answer. But there's
a lot too And it's really interesting to hear this
take from this oldie but goody classic episode. Check it
out from UFOs two Ghosts and Government cover Ups. History
is writ with unexplained events. You can turn back now
or learn the stuff that don't want you to now.
(00:51):
All right, hello, welcome to the show. If that intro
by our super producer Noel was familiar, then that means
you are in the right place. Lady and gentlemen. This
is stuff they don't want you to know. I'm Ben.
You're probably wondering where Matt is. He is off on
an adventure that maybe we'll get to in the course
(01:12):
of this show. But in place of Matt today we
have not one but two very special guests from tech Stuff,
from brain Stuff, from Forward Thinking. I don't even know
how you guys found time to come on this show.
Jonathan Strickland and Lauren Vogel bomb Ben. We we found
time because we literally just recorded another tech stuff episode
(01:34):
with you, like like ten minutes ago. Thanks for not
giving away our time travel scheme. That was good. I'm
glad that we have got that out of the bag
out of the bag man, which is only gonna be
funny if you listen to the other episode, right, because
this is a sequel, that's a compacitorie, a sister episode.
It is it is now. You guys were kind enough
(01:57):
or add poor enough taste to have me on your
show just a few minutes ago when we recorded a
great episode on how to serve the Web anonymously or
whether it's even possible, And this was us to something
that we thought was right up the stuff they don't
want you to know, Ali because listeners out there now,
(02:19):
you guys know as well as everybody else does now
that it turns out the United States government in particular
was putting a lot more energy into tracking people than
we had all thought. Yeah, I mean, even if you
take it at face value, where you know you have
this this system, specifically the n s A, we're talking
about here with the end prison specifically with yes, but
(02:43):
if even if you take it at face value that
what they were looking for were foreign agents. So if
you are a United States citizen, then in theory you
would not a United States citizen who is not involved
in one of these schemes, you would not be considered
a foreign agent and therefore not part of the surveillance.
Even if you take that at face value, they would
(03:06):
look for people who they did identify as foreign agents,
and the people that that those folks talked to, right, Yeah,
they played the Kevin Bacon game. Yeah, And if you've
ever played the Kevin Bacon game, you know that it
gets pretty easy to start linking two people you never
thought would have had a connection to each other together.
It doesn't really take that many levels of separation, right, right.
(03:31):
And furthermore, they're really collecting information on everyone and sorting
through it in order to find these specific people. But
the fact that they're collecting and storing this information about
all of us, it's creepy, it's problematic. So again, even
taken on face value, it's it's it's troublesome. And then
when you realize the actual methodology, it becomes downright concerning.
(03:54):
I mean it's not just that, Oh, there's some issues here.
From a technological perspective, the very methodology is problematic. I
think that's well said. So one of my first questions
for you guys before you really get into this is, uh, if,
let's say twenty years ago, if someone had come up
to you in and said the government is watching everything
(04:19):
and it's just going to watch more, would you have
would you have thought it was sort of conspiracy bunk
or would you have thought there was a possibility of
it happening. I would have thought bunk for sure. And
it's and it's largely because uh, well, I mean the
capability just wasn't there any Yeah, when you're talking about
(04:41):
how much data gets created or transferred or copied or
transmitted however you want to look at it, it's an
astronomical number. It is an enormous number. Just let's just
take YouTube as the example of data creation. Okay, So
on YouTube, every single minute that passes more than a
(05:01):
hundred hours of video footage is being uploaded to YouTube.
Some of that's duplicate footage, but it doesn't really matter.
That's a huge amount of information. Now, just kind of extrapolate.
Imagine that the entire Internet, this network of computer networks,
is filled with people who are either creating information or
accessing it in some way, and the accessing of information
(05:23):
does in itself create a certain amount of meta data information.
There's information about who, who accessed what and when. This
is such an enormous amount that most of us would
think that being able to to capture it and filter
it and make any meaning of it would be a
Gardentian task beyond our capabilities. But it is a Gardentian task.
(05:44):
But it's not, as it turns out, beyond our capability exactly.
It turns out that our our technology is sufficiently sophisticated
enough to be able to weed through that kind of stuff,
or at least we're working very hard on it. I mean,
not the three of us at this table, but I'm
personally aware of and and Google is a perfect example
of how we should have really kind of re evaluated
(06:07):
this idea that it's just too big, right, because Google
has created a business that or at least the forward
facing part of their business that that's the search engine.
You know, arguably you would say that the real business
is advertising, But but the search engine is the thing,
the product that we're all familiar with, and it's really
really good. It's a really good search engine if you're
(06:28):
trying to find something specific. And once we realize how
much information is out there and how Google has developed
an algorithm that can effectively find the stuff you actually
want to see, then you start to realize, Oh, I
guess it really is possible to build in that a
similar kind of tool that could be useful if you're
(06:49):
looking for signs of activity. Uh, if you happen to
be an enormous government organization that is in charge of
discovering cryptic messages that between foreign agents that could potentially
affect your country, or friends of foreign agents, yes, or
people who know friends of foreign agents. Yes. That's the
problem is that this this ripples outward. Right if if
(07:11):
it were just the foreign agents, that becomes an issue
because then you have to be able to to reliably
identify a foreign agent versus someone who is not a
foreign agent. But then if you go one ripple outward,
who are these people talking to and why? Well, I
can understand why you would be interested in that, but
they're going to be people in that that one ripple
outward who are not in any way connected with anything nefarious,
(07:33):
but they're going to get swept up in that surveillance anyway.
If you go a further ring out, go for it.
That's an enormous number of people. This is what Facebook
is completely built upon, the whole idea of that social network.
If you ever see any of their presentations, you just
see how this, this this one small group of people
(07:54):
who have these inner connections between each other, become this
ginormous mass of people when you just go out a
couple of steps. Yet now this I'm glad that we're
talking about this because this is something that escapes a
lot of people that the uh, the government agency, the
n s A has automated the collection and analysis of
(08:17):
this of this stuff. For people who are concerned, you know,
the n s A is listening in on my phone
calls and reading my emails. They're taking your phone calls
and emails and they're keeping them like like you said, Lauren,
And what they'll do is if you pop up on
a different algorithm than they'll actually have a human Like
any other big organization, from a call center to the FBI,
(08:39):
it's kind of difficult to actually get to a human,
You have to go through a few steps. You gotta
dial one, wait for stuff, you listen to a robot voice.
And I hate it this side note. I hate it
when the the automated line won't let you just push
a button and you have to stand there wherever you
are and look really stupid and go operator operate or
(09:01):
you're saying yes, yes, yeah, and everybody is so solemn.
We all just said the same yes. But um. But
moving from this, we before we go too deep on
the government, we should make a point that they're not
the only people looking at web activity when we talk. Yeah,
(09:21):
I mean, companies obviously are looking at a lot of
web activity as well, for multiple reasons. Uh. Mostly companies
are looking at activity in order to make more money. Right,
they want to be able to sell you stuff better,
or to sell you as a consumer to an advertising
company so that that advertising company can sell you stuff better. Yeah. Yeah,
it all comes down to, you know, where are the dollars,
(09:43):
where are they coming from, and where are they going to?
And so we the users end up playing a big
role in that. I mean we we are the ones
who generate revenue for companies. And you know, if it
weren't that way, the Internet would be a very different place.
For one thing, it would not be near as robust
as it is, right it would it would be mainly
limited to communication lines between things like research institutes and
(10:07):
the government, which, big surprise, that's what originally the Internet
was all about. Yeah, ur ponnette was essentially connections between
scientific research institutes, universities, and government installations. And that was it,
and and that was because you know, that was what
it was built for. Was built to be this really
fast communications and networking ability so that people could share
(10:31):
things very effectively. What it's grown into is this crazy
world that melds things like entertainment and commerce and communications
all into one big package, which in many ways is
legitimately awesome. Obviously, we wouldn't have jobs if there were
an internet, or at least we wouldn't have these jobs
we are on the internet right now. Yeah, well, you
(10:54):
guys get paid. I'm here for community service. Your internship
has lasted longer than any other I've ever seen, that's true. Hey,
will you sign off for my hours? Before this? One
question though, that a lot of people will have is
the following. Just a little bit of background here, Um,
(11:15):
the question is is surfing anonymously legal? Uh. The background
here is that often the desire to surf anonymously is
depicted as one that is inherently sinister. That is the
same sort of uh perception that is given to things
(11:36):
like torrents now or peer to peer networks. Peer to
peer networks as they are by themselves, are not sinister
or shady or illegal. Right. Appear to peer network is
just a means of distribution of files. Right. But when
you start distributing files that you don't have the right
to distribute network, that's where the illegal activity comes, and
(11:58):
then you end up sort of casting this shadow across
the entire technology. So there are companies like music and
movie companies that just say peer to peer networks alone
are bad, because those are a lot of the ways
that that illegal file sharing got spread around, you know,
just a few years ago. Now it's not even that
(12:18):
big of a deal because you can get pretty much
everything in a billion different places. But uh, you know,
if you're talking about just trying to serve anonymously, it
all depends upon where you are in the world. In
the United States, it's not a big deal. There's no
law that you'd be breaking by trying to hide your
IP address. The laws that you would be breaking would
(12:41):
be if you try to do anything illegal while you
were doing that, or even if you weren't, whether or
not you're trying to hide what you're doing. If you're
doing something illegal, that's against the law, right, Yeah, Like
like you like you don't have to use tour to
buy drugs. There are many other reasons that you can
use tour, Yeah, but if you do buy drugs, that's
against the law. And then if you're caught, you could
be punished for it, or you will be if you're caught.
(13:03):
I see. Yeah. So so here in the West and
the United States, Canada and so on. Uh, there is
not a law against uh surfing the web anonymously. I don't.
I don't think it's even against the law to uh
go into some of the deep web stuff to which
we alluded, um, which you guys have covered in a
previous episode and Matt and I have covered as well.
(13:25):
We're talking about this Silk Road and and not the
historic one through Central Asia. But as you said, other
countries have different perspectives, Like you've got a great example
about China. Sure, Yeah, China. They have a program in
China that is called the Golden Shield Project, also more
commonly known as the Great Firewall of China UH. And
(13:47):
the reason for this is that it said effort i'll
um on part of the Chinese government to censor and
and have surveillance over Internet activities within China, so that
the main purpose of it is to perfect event objectionable
material as defined by the Chinese government from getting to
Chinese citizens using the internet. So flat out block some
(14:09):
websites and some search terms and like some yeah things
like Facebook. You can't access Facebook in China using if
you were just trying to connect to a Chinese I
s P and go through normal methods domain name server.
So if you were to if you were to just
use like plug and play, you're you're just trying to
(14:30):
use your browser to get to certain places. You would
find out that there's some websites you just cannot access
that way in China. In order to access those websites,
you have to circumvent the protections that have been put
in place. UH. In general, this is not seen as
a huge deal, right. It's it's it's it's frowned upon.
You're not supposed to do it. But as far as
(14:52):
I am aware, no one has been uh persecuted and
or prosecuted for trying to circumnavigate the firewall of China. However,
if you were to do something such as post messages
that are anti Chinese government to websites, then that is
very much considered against the law, and you will they
(15:15):
will look for you, and if they find you and
catch you, they'll punish you. Right, And it might also
be used as perhaps a pretext for arresting someone, at
least in that country, kind of the same way the
tax evasion was the crime for which Capone was ultimately arrested. Yeah.
That in some cases, depending again upon what country you
(15:35):
are in, uh, this might be the the door that
opens up so that they can get you for what
they really want you for. Right. And and when we
say we're not especially picking on China, oh, although I
do have to say, there's one really cool thing that
that freaks me out a bit. And if you are
on just the regular you know, the version of the
(15:57):
inner State uh Internet in China, every so often these
two cartoon police characters will pop up on the screen
just to let you know that they're they're looking out
for you. They're protecting you. They're protecting and serving by
making sure you're not doing anything wrong. Actually, what they're
doing is they're protecting you by making sure all that
terrible information that would flood flood your browser if if
(16:20):
it only had the chance, because they know you are
an upstanding Chinese sitizen and would never try to access
that kind of stuff. But that stuff is trying to
get it you no matter what, and those cops they
are making sure that you are going to be safe
from it. They also have blue eyes, which is very weird.
Their names are Chinging and cha Cha. It's based on
a pun that means police in Chinese. So check check
(16:42):
it out and google it if you have a chance.
Just remember that China will know you looked at it.
And uh so earlier, um, we we mentioned toward the
onion router right, and uh what I wanted to ask
about is if you could, because you guys are the
experts here on technical matters, if you could outline briefly
(17:05):
for our listeners, what's the difference between like a privacy
mode on a browser and something like tour That's a
great question. Yeah, in brief, a privacy browser on your
home computer does absolutely nothing to to protect what you
are doing from anyone aside from someone who is looking
(17:25):
purely at your home computer. Yeah, exactly, the text real quick,
while you're doing that, I'll continue to explain. So, yeah,
the privacy mode, what it's doing is it's preventing stuff
that would normally show up and say, your search history,
your browsing history cookies, is preventing all that kind of
stuff from happening, so that someone who gets access to
(17:45):
your machine can't just look and see what it is
you've been up to. However, anyone who can see the
traffic that's going across your local network that includes perhaps
other machines that are also on the local network, your router,
the modem, your I s P, all of these entities
know exactly what you're doing because in order for you
(18:06):
to get the stuff you're trying to get, they these
entities have to know where to send it, right, right,
This is so you know, up to and including the
website that you're accessing, they know who you are as well, right, Yeah,
at least they know the I P EDG yes, and
they know they know what network it's going to. So
really it's it's you know, you can't hide your IP
address perfectly because if you did, no information would ever
(18:30):
come back to your computer. Now we, uh, we do
have an interesting fact here, and by interesting I mean disturbing.
So I'll just go ahead and ask how much information
does someone a company or a government or whomever need
about you before they can figure out who you are?
All right? This is a kind of fascinating. Did you
(18:51):
ever hear the story about how Target had identified a
customer as being pregnant? It was it turned out to
be a young lady, teenager, and so Target pregnant people
are ladies, that that would be true. That is true, Lauren,
thank you? Is a good point. A young lady pregnant,
(19:13):
uh don't know. Parents don't know, parents don't know, she
has not told them, and Target starts proactively sending her
offers for things that a pregnant lady wouldn't possibly need.
And her father found the offers and got very upset,
saying like, why is Target sending this unsolit solicited stuff?
(19:35):
What do you what are you saying about? My daughter
raised a big fuss about it. You have offended mod dignity.
That's how I picture him speaking. Yes, it was a
Southern gentleman from the fun city of Savannah there with
a white glove and just slapped the front door. Yeah
challenge you, I challenge you on tie organization to a duel.
Yeah no, that's not exactly what happened, but he did
(19:57):
raise a fuss and then later wrote a second a
follow up message saying I had to talk with my daughter.
It turns out that I did not. I was not
aware that she was pregnant. But this raised the point
of how did Target know? What was it that gave
Target the information? How did they predict this? And as
it turned out, it had the company had been watching
(20:19):
her purchase patterns and determined that statistically speaking, she was
very likely pregnant. And so this is an illustration that
you don't have to have actively shared some information about
yourself for an entity or a person to draw conclusions
about at least your what your physical state is, or
(20:42):
what your your state of mind might be. Even if
it's not your specific name and identity, it could be
enough to be able to single out who you are
from a level that's separate from my name is Jonathan
Strickland and I live in Atlanta, right That actually would
be very easy. Then they're probably very few Strickland's living
(21:05):
in Atlanta. There might be a few, because you know,
there are a lot of other Johnathan Stricklands. Lauren vocal
Bam might be the easiest to paying directly to zoom
in pretty quickly. So the real answer to this question,
according to research specialists, is that thirty three bits of
information called bits of entropy and this in this identification business,
(21:29):
are required in order to narrow it down to a
specific person out of all the people on earth. And
and these these bits of information can be anything from
from your gender to the type of car you drive,
to your zip code to like like, it doesn't have
to be the same thirty three bits in order it
could be any thirty three bits, and bit in this
(21:51):
case means something specific, like like in the computer world
we talk about digital Uh, you know these binary digits.
That that's what it is. It's either a zero or
a one, which you could think of as either a
no or yes. Well, uh, some bits, some pieces of
information represent a single bit, like gender is considered to
(22:12):
be a single bit, putting gender discussions aside. For for
many people, this would be male or female, all right,
That that obviously oversimplifies things, but for the purposes purposes
for identification male female tends to be uh. The way
that they look at it, very black and white kind
of approach that represents one bit. Something like your zip
(22:34):
code might be several bits of information that would make
up just one zip code, but all it takes is
thirty three bits. Some of those bits might be connected
to a larger concept, like the your model of car, uh,
the specific region you live in, whatever it is, your age,
that's another good one. But all you need are thirty
(22:56):
three bits worth of this information to be able to
identify in the reason for that is you take this
yes or no. That's a base of two, right, you've
got two options. You take that too, Then you have
the thirty three different bits. That's two to the power
of thirty three. If you work that out, that ends
up being more than eight billion. Two to the thirty
(23:17):
third powers more than eight billion. There are seven billion
people on Earth. Wait, we've got made up people in
this It means that we have more than enough information
to to account for the seven billion people who are
actually alive. So uh, if you the idea is that
with those thirty three bits, you can then have enough
personal identifiable information to narrow it down to a specific individual.
(23:40):
And also it's devilishly easy to forget that what you're
putting out on the Internet personally identifies you, right say,
all sorts of things that they imagine are innocuous. I mean,
Twitter is in the Congressional Library. Now, yeah, you can
get an entire or you can download an entire Twitter history,
(24:02):
which is for some of us quite a large file.
It turns out I think I have more than seventeen
dozen tweets. So um, I clearly am not as as
worried about anonymity as some people are. Perhaps that is
a foolish thing on my part, but uh, there's an
interesting example of this as well. Researchers at Stanford and
(24:23):
the University of Texas. We're able to identify Netflix viewers
based upon their activity, and part of that was because
these are the same These viewers would do things like
leave reviews for movies on other sites, and just by
looking at this stuff that you wouldn't think would personally
identify you, right because it's just it's just you your
(24:43):
opinion about a movie. It's not hey, I happen to
be five foot whatever. I'm not telling you, yeah, but
they But the point being then is that there's uh there,
there's some puzzle solving that can happen very easily, really,
because they say, oh, um, Anonymous user A watch this
(25:06):
thing on Netflix at this time, and then oh surprise,
shortly thereafter Anonymous user oh wait, it's Anonymous user A.
And they said that this was they gave it three stars,
and what they did on Netflix like like this, this
Anonymous user A watched a particular movie at a particular time.
This other person whose identity we know left a review
(25:28):
on IMDb, and based upon the time between these two events,
were reasonably certain that Anonymous user A is this person
we know. And Anonymous User A is completely wrong about
Big Trouble and Little Chin, which is an amazing movie,
is not It is not a good bad movie. It
is a good good movie because he's this sidekick the
(25:48):
whole time. He got up express. Come on, So what
is the tour project about? You guys have done a
you guys done a podcast on this. Um Matt and
I have done some videos, but we've never done a
full podcast on it. So it's tour, you know, kind
of stands for the Onion router, it's really its own name.
Now it's just tour sure. Originally the Onion router was
(26:11):
based on the idea that, um, it's encrypting things in layers, yes,
so that you would go uh an information from point
A to point z, let's say, would go through all
these different layers, and between each layer things would get
encrypted in a different way. So from layer one to
layer two it would get encrypted, layer two to layer
three it would get encrypted. Layer three to layer for
(26:32):
get a different level of encryption. And and furthermore, each
each layer, each node in this connection only knows the
node before it and after it, which is key. It
doesn't know the entire chain exactly. So the idea of
being that this node, this series of nodes makes a circuit.
That circuit is connecting your computer running a tour browser
(26:56):
to whatever site or whatever information you were trying to retreat.
But that circuit of nodes has very limited information in
any individual piece of the overall circuit. Right, So if
you identified that there's one node in this network, and
you see that information is coming from uh the node
(27:17):
immediately preceding it, and it's going to the node following it,
you wouldn't be able to reconstruct the rest of the circuit.
That's all the information you would be able to get.
So if there are like six nodes in this circuit
and you've identified node number three, you can only see
that information is coming from node two and it's going
to node four. You wouldn't be able to see where
node one, five, or six, where those are in that circuit. Yeah,
(27:39):
you wouldn't be able to see the original sender or
the intended receiver. And hopefully if it's encrypted well enough,
you wouldn't be able to read the message either exactly,
because again it gets encrypted between each node in that circuit. Uh,
it sounds pretty secure, right, Yeah, it sounds it sounds
pretty cool. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as it
turns out, there are ways to try and figure out
(28:04):
who is trying to access what so so in this
world where you're looking at all these connections that get
hidden because it's traveling through all these nodes, you might
be able to see all the potential start points and
all the potential end points, but you don't really know
which people are trying to access which sites or which servers. However,
(28:26):
if you were to be able to analyze all the
traffic across the network and build enough of a statistical
model you could start weeding people out and start looking
at the potential people going to the potential end points.
You could play the something like the target game. You
could use big data to uh analyze and then maybe
(28:46):
even predict. Yeah, so essentially what you're this is really
oversimplifying it. But essentially you might see that, uh that,
let's say person A, the anonymous A is trying to
access silk row, all right, and so you see an
anonymous person's a's connection light up. It then goes across
(29:08):
these nodes which mix everything else up, and you are
already looking at silk Road, so you are specifically you've
already identified the potential target and the potential destination. And
then you see that the silk Road one lights up
in the amount of time you would expect for this
message to have to transfer across these modes. Then you'd say, uhh,
(29:29):
this is a potential hit. And then you continue to
analyze traffic. This can actually help duh and anemonize. I
can't even say it, and how do we thank you?
Anemone d anemone the network. So but you know, it
really is this is a potential way where you can
(29:50):
figure out at least which connection was trying to connect
to which server. Uh. And it just it steps back
from the actual circuit entirely. And it may not be
enough to move on a person you know with full
legal backing, but it might be enough to convince you
to really look into that person more closely. So there's
really no safe harbor for complete anonymity on tour because
(30:16):
if somebody wants to find you, or if they want
to find find the needle in the haystack, with enough diligence,
they can well, I mean it would it's at least
possible for them to for for someone really determined and
with the right resources to be able to start narrowing
things down right. Uh, certainly. And there there are a
(30:38):
few other problems with with tour. I mean, it's an
open source thing. That's part of the way that this
is tom actually protects itself and a kind of anti
logical encounterintuitive, but it really is because it means that
anyone can can go in and look at this. So
if someone changes something or someone puts in a change,
this is a community that's looking after the whole the
(31:01):
whole product, so it's not something that would be easy
to slip in without anyone taking notice of it. Also,
its origins kind of raise some eyebrows to yes, the
origin from naval research, right, Yeah, well, I mean, as
it turns out, uh, there are reasons why, say a
military organization would want to be able to send information
(31:26):
uh secretly or perhaps access information in secret and itself, yeah,
even without itself, even even apart from other organizations within
that same government. Uh, when we talk about the n
s A, there are other government organizations that are equally
upset as yea, quite a few that, like you know,
you know, there are citizens who are up in, up,
(31:47):
up all about this. I mean they're very upset about it,
as I think they should be. Um that's my own
personal opinion. But there are government organizations they're they're working
for the same people wore who are equally upset. Their
wheels within wheels would be the X files line. I mean,
you've got those, You've got those great rivalries between the
(32:08):
CIA and n s A. The date back to the
beginning of both organizations, and recently, as we're recording this,
more and more information about what we would call friendly
fire surveillance has leaked people who had not only the wherewithal,
but the motivation to keep their communications private or anonymous,
(32:30):
Like congres Members of Congress found that UM not only
was the n s A, but the FBI as well,
UH monitoring their monitoring their day to day emails and
phone calls, whatnot. The the thing that was was really
important to underline here is that it's not inherently sinister
(32:52):
to serve the web anonymously. And it's possible to do it,
as we said an earlier thing, but it's not really
plausible and not for a long term solution. No, No,
it's once off and we U we do tell you guys,
listeners in UH and Jonathan Lawns show, we show you
how theoretically you could make yourself, if not impossible to trace,
(33:16):
very very inconvenient to do so. Right. But it's basically
like like burner phone, burner, internet connection, burner face, like
you have to go, yeah, you gotta pretty much be uh.
You have to really limit what it is you want
to do, and you have to very much limit the
way you do it. So in other words, it's not
(33:36):
like you can just use that methodology to do everything
you would want to do on the web because there's
some cool stuff that's on the web that I love
to do that there's just no way to do anonymously,
not not truly right, like can you really have a
full decorgy watching experience if you can't log in and comment.
That also is a reference to the Text Stuff episode.
(34:00):
You'll learn way more about corky obsessions in that show.
I think it's enthusiasm. I don't think we've crossed the
line into obsession yet. We're just let me close out
a couple of taps. So while Jonathan's closing out a
couple of tabs, I do just want to set you
guys up for one more big question. UM, if you
if you like our show Stuff, then want you to
(34:21):
know listeners, then then you'll love tech Stuff because they
have also been talking about several different revelations, um, both
both with security and the nuts and bolts about how
these kind of things work. So we highly recommend their show.
And I have to ask you, guys, since you're the
ones with to know how UM, if you had to
(34:42):
guess or speculate, do you think that there would be
more news forthcoming like the whole Snowden disclosure thing where
he said, you know, he kicked down the door of
the news organizations and said this, but on everybody, Is
there anything else that would happen, because it seems like
that's the big Well, I mean, we only know what
(35:04):
we know, right, there's there's you can bet a couple
of things. You can bet that anything that has happened
since Snowdon has left is largely unknown to us because
he was the source of the leak. So anything that
has been done to address that or change things, evolve
the technologies that's being used, or or to find tune
(35:26):
them in different ways, or even apply them and even
more broad applications, or to fine tune the process by
which they make sure that other people don't link their information. Yeah,
all of that is unknown to us, so we can't
really be sure what's going on. What we do know
is just based upon the information that's been revealed so far.
There already have been abuses of the system. So that's
the other thing to keep in mind. Even if somehow
(35:48):
you could agree that the n s A system is
on its own, maybe you could call it flawed, but
it mostly works. Let's say that you even make that assumption,
the problem is it's run by people, and people, as
it turns out, our flawed very much so, and some
people will take advantage of having the opportunity to use
(36:09):
such a powerful tool to do things like snoop on
X girlfriends. Yeah, and even if someone isn't doing it
nefariously there there could certainly be mistakes made. Yeah. So
so there are a lot of issues that will probably
come to light as we get more people investigating this. Um.
The interesting thing to me is really seeing how much
(36:30):
movement we see in political circles to actually address this
in a meaningful way, because you do have lots of people, Uh,
you have lots of representatives who are at least saying
that they want more, more, more transparency because their constituents
are demanding it. Right, They're they're kind of demanding it too.
(36:50):
I mean it sounds like, yeah, once they found out
that they were also included. Yes, but uh there That's
one of the big debates always is uh, is it
a matter of sincere offense or fashionable offense fashionable indignation?
And and that's something that I think we will see
(37:10):
in the future with our listeners. We'd like to we'd
like to hear from you guys as well. What do
you think the next big revelations about the Internet would be? Um? Oh,
and here's one. Uh, can you or have you served
the web anonymously? Let's see if you could right in
(37:32):
and let us know and still stay anonymous. I don't know,
Let's just see if it works. Uh. In the meantime,
I'd like to thank Jonathan and Lauren you guys, thank
you so much for coming on our show. Um, I
wish I knew what had happened to Matt. We haven't
really said it on air, but if you want to
go ahead, and actually I can reveal at this point
(37:53):
that Matt in fact, was buried under a pile of
quirky puppies. And he's he's all right, but he's penned
and cannot move. He's the happiest that he has ever been.
He is stuck. He has been saying that I cannot
breathe and that's okay. Uh, in various languages. It's weird.
He actually is really fluent, but only in that one phrase. Yeah,
(38:16):
he's really smart, but it's strange that he only knows
that phrase. So, UM, I guess maybe I'll go try
to find him. And get him out because we still
need him for the show. Yeah, he's got some stuff
he needs to edit to and uh, and honestly, those
puppies are starting to get tired, and he just keeps
on picking up the ones that are wearing a nap
(38:36):
and putting him back on his stomach. So there's okay,
I know the pile of puppies you were talking about. Okay, No,
he's under there, yes, the third pile. Yes, yeah, okay. Great. Um.
As I said, guys, want to thank you so much
for coming on the show and being our very first guest.
(38:56):
I'd also like to let listeners know that if you
like this show, as you said, you'll enjoy tech stuff.
But these folks aren't just on tech stuff. They are
on another excellent podcast called Forward Thinking That which is
also a video series, and you can see all three
of us they think at various points, participating in everyday
(39:17):
science shananigans on a show called brain Stuff. You can
actually see all three of us in in the episode
about about product placement. Oh boy, that one I forgot
about that. Yeah. Well, if you want to see why
they're laughing at me, you can check that one out
to Uh, you can find Stuff they Don't Want You
to Know dot com for every video and every podcast
(39:41):
we've ever made, and of course we're all over the internet.
You can drop us a line with a suggestion or
feedback on Twitter or Facebook. That's where we put a
lot of the stories that don't make it into videos
or podcasts, So do check it out. And that's the
end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts
or questions about this episode mode, you can get into
contact with us in a number of different ways. One
(40:03):
of the best is to give us a call. Our
number is one eight three three std w y t K.
If you don't want to do that, you can send
us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at
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