Posted on 09/24/2016 9:40:29 AM PDT by Arthur Wildfire! March
Please brace for just one thick sentence:
ICANN's power is mainly legal, and a contract with ICANN could trigger a violent dispute over international law.
~ ~ ~
Bluntly stated: giving away ICANN could ultimately trigger a cyber war or worse.
~ ~ ~
Raw Power and International Law
When you face a super power like the USA it helps to have raw power. China probably assumes it will not come to that, but just like nuclear deterence, they need the war-making capability.
And the Chinese already enjoy raw power. Their encryption is superior, their nuclear capability suffices, and they are now experienced at cyber warfare.
Compare that to the US -- NSA recently got hacked. That was supposed to be the best encrypted, best protected agency in our nation. Imagine if all of our satellites got simultaneously hacked. We would be blind and appear weak in the eyes of the world.
International Law
The reason China is building a compound to welcome ICANN is international legitimacy. Other tyrants seeking to censor online speech can seek a shiny new contract with Obama's Free Range ICANN.
Bluntly stated: ICANN helps China build a large alliance to alienate the USA if it comes to a full-scale 'cyber-war'.
~~~
China's Cyber-Skirmishes, Probing with Bayonets
It's been widely reported that China is already waging a cyber-war. But in my opinion those are just skirmishes, raids to test their capability and possibly pick up more tech, intel to blackmail, etc.
~~~
Superior Chinese Encryption
China developed something revolutionary.
Back in 2014, the UK Telegraph reported that China developed 'quantum encryption'. It's a pioneering concept said to be impenetrable to hackers.
Here's a more recent headline:
Aug 20, 2016:
China's Latest Leap Forward Isn't Just Great—It's Quantum - WSJ
by The Verge:
China’s quantum network could soon span two continents, thanks to a satellite launched earlier today ... the Quantum Science Satellite is designed to distribute quantum-encrypted keys between relay stations in China and Europe. When working as planned, the result could enable unprecedented levels of security between parties on different continents. [snip]
That was written in August 15 -- mid-August of this year, the same time that Strickling boasted of his criminal transition plan of ICANN.
But actually, here's a March 2016 report ...
[Be advised -- the article is difficult to wrap your brain around.]
China's Quantum Satellite Could Change Cryptography Forever
-- by Jeffrey Lin, P.W. Singer, and John Costello [at popsci.com]
[snippets]
... China is poised to launch a project that may provide the path to an uncrackable communications system, by turning messages quantum and taking them into space. The new Quantum Space Satellite (QUESS) program is no mere science experiment. China is already becoming a world leader in quantum communications technology ... a strategic asset for Chinese power worldwide.
[snip]
Quantum entanglement is the act of fusing two or more particles into complementary “quantum states.” In such states, no particle can be independently described, instead the particles exist in a hazy shared quantum state that “collapses” when observed. Quantum encryption thus takes advantage of this feature, using it to detect would-be eavesdroppers, whose presence causes quantum states to collapse and reveal their spying to legitimate parties. Additionally, the complexity of quantum mechanics makes it virtually impossible to reverse engineer the quantum key generated through quantum entanglement.
[snip]
[link to be provided in followup post]
...
I am left to believe that it's unlikely that the USA currently stands a chance against China in a cyber-war until we work out better encryption ourselves, and we would have to develop it WHILE sustaining cyber-bombardment. We would need our developers to get off the internet completely, and that would slow down their progress.
The only reason why China doesn't dominate the internet yet is probably because they want us to keep importing their goods.
But it runs deeper than that. What about satellites?
Satellites are critical to dominance of today's internet.
Back in March 16 Bill Gertz wrote:
~
China, Russia Planning Space Attacks on U.S. Satellites
China and Russia are preparing to attack and disrupt critical U.S. military and intelligence satellites in a future conflict with crippling space missile, maneuvering satellite, and laser attacks, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials told Congress on Tuesday. [snip]
[The the primary concern in the article was a direct military threat ...]
U.S. Global Positioning System satellites remain vulnerable to attack or jamming.
[snip]
~
So yes, our targeting systems would be blinded. That in itself would would be decisive in cyber-warfare.
But destruction of GPS satellites is also a 'raw force' threat to our communications satellites as well. While our GPS is blinded, they can pick off our com-sats one-by-one. No more cell phones, no more wireless internet -- just landlines. We would be back in the '70s while China becomes the world's hub of online communications.
I doubt that China wants to destroy our economy let alone 'nuke' our cities. However, they would love to prove their super power status and be viewed as the world's new technological leader. And if they can't beat us via encryption, they can wipe out our communications satellites directly, one at a time, until we kowtow to their 'reasonable' demands.
In fact, it might be prudent to ask President Obama if it is already too late to oppose China's dominance. Behind closed doors he might be feeling 'blackmail pressure' to hand over ICANN to them as a gesture of surrender.
~~~
Brain Drain to China Quite Possible
If the US loses prestige regarding ICANN, it is possible that talent will 'drain' into China rather than the US. We currently draw in so much talent from the world that some of us feel contempt toward 'foreign geeks', but mark my words -- we benefited greatly from the 'foreign geeks' who fled from Nazi Germany into the US. And our weakness [loss of prestige] could cause us to lose that edge.
Even US college grads could feel enticed by job offers in China.
In such a climate, how could we ever hope to improve our encryption and win a prolonged cyber-war?
~~~
We should Not Trust Obama -- specifically why
The most glaring reason to not trust Obama is that his administration refuses to even contemplate the dangers in public.
Instead, they attempted two brazen stabs at spin:
1. Deregulation
The Obama administration claims that he is 'deregulating' the internet with a 'Free Range ICANN'.
First off, ICANN is assisting China in suppression of free speech. That's a good indicator of what a 'Free Range ICANN' looks like.
Secondly, the internet is the USA's most deregulated industry, and that all foreign governments want to do is increase its regulation.
A man who ought to know something about how foreign governments tick is John Bolton: “But the fact is, under American control, it’s had remarkable growth. It’s been kept free. It’s been able to withstand a lot of pressure to try and set rules that favor one side or another. And in an international environment, I can tell you from my own experience, when you get all kinds of governments from all over the world setting standards and making decisions, it will be far less free than it is now ... "
Bolton called the Internet handover “a mistake of such colossal proportions that you would have thought we’d have a huge debate about it in this country.”
2. A 'Gift to Russia'
The Obama administration also claims that renewing the contract would be a 'gift to Russia'.
First off, I'm not yet aware of Russia building any facilities for ICANN's relocation. China is.
Secondly, many in Obama's adminstration are or were close to the Clinton family. And it is well-documented that the Clinton administration sold US technology to China in exchange for illegal campaign funding. That includes satellite technology and encryption technology as well -- a corrupt gift from the Clintons.
[More on how Bill Clinton paved the way for this coming up in a followup post.]
Thirdly, Obama and Hillary Clinton dropped the ball on encryption. Why?
Fourthly, Obama has been begging China to buy bonds throughout his administration. He is beholden to them and thus this administration should recuse itself from this debate for that reason alone.
~~~
Conclusion:
Military intel is nothing like modern media. Your enemy doesn't 'spell out' his plans -- he simply attacks. And surprise preemption has been the trend in the history of modern warfare. So you don't have the luxury of being certain about 'friend or foe' until it is too late.
Renewing ICANN's IANA functions contract may help unravel China's apparent designs. While that could make us appear to be 'control freaks' in the world's eyes, we need a competent Executive Branch to navigate this clear and present danger.
More importantly, trusting the Clintons with our military and communications technology another time around would only make the problem worse. They gave massive amounts of it away before and would most likely do it again.
I'm putting libertarians on notice -- if you have any love for internet freedom of speech and online intellectual property rights, your choice is clear: Hillary Clinton must lose this election unless you think that high-tech drone development will fail to suppress China's people even more than they already are. The helplessness of China's people is getting worse every year. The government's technology outstrips human iniative.
It's true that ICANN could fracture. It's true that China's cyber-war might escalate regardless. But we are talking about the USA's Number 1 exporter. China might prefer a seamless transition -- a clean contract with the official ICANN organization.
We might owe China a lot of bond debt, but we do not owe them our nation's soul.
BBC experiments with holographic TV...
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/could-holographic-televisions-next-big-8897419
The brain drain begins to shift out of the USA.
Why bring cutting edge tech to the US when we keep getting hacked? It’s too hazardous for innovators.
It's not quite that easy and not free. If I were going to run the web servers for some Chinese dissidents I would get a $5 / month virtual server at digital ocean, plus backups at other hosting sites. Those usually come with one "free" IPV4 address (you are paying $5 / month for disk space and bandwidth). The lowest tier server at $5 / month would have more than enough bandwidth and storage for the content. Then I would get that IPV4 address into the hands of the dissidents through some other channel.
There is also a free option provided I have a routable IPV6 address. In that case I could route the dissidents to a server at work with an IPV6 address. Wouldn't cost me anything. Some people can do that with their home service providers.
But there is a catch with both of those solutions, IPV4 or IPV6. We would probably quickly end up on a Chinese government blacklist of addresses. The Chinese government may disallow routing to IPV6 somehow (I have no idea) preferring to stay on IPV4 because it's easier for them to track and control. To counter the blacklisting I would have to not only obtain new addresses all the time (clunky at best) but get those addresses into the hands of the dissidents.
The solution for all of those problems is TOR. But TOR brings its own problem which is that it is full of illicit or illegal content and just plain old crap. The Chinese government is not stupid so they will create TOR sites and fill them with bait that might catch dissidents. There's no authentication with such sites, at least no central authentication. Here's a description of what one guy found within China: https://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2015/06/17/the-chinese-darknet/ It gives you a flavor although it doesn't describe TOR itself.
If I ran a TOR relay on my $5 virtual server it would quickly max out my allocated bandwidth (and probably storage). I would have to configure it to greatly throttle it. Since I can't really know what is passing through I can't just throttle the crap and illegal stuff. Also I don't know enough about it to do that, not to mention I would get pinged with guilt by association and potentially tossed by my provider.
I guess I could also run a normal web server and try to get dissidents to access it via TOR thus circumventing the Great Firewall of China which banned by IP addresses. But I would have to figure out how to get that address out to the dissidents without interference by the Chinese govt within TOR. I definitely do not know how much they interfere or how, but I can't believe they do not do that.
All that said, the internet will gradually evolve to incorporate easy-to-use anonymity and encryption. Bitcoin is a good example. It doesn't have enough bandwidth to get much content to the dissidents but it could at least send tweets or short addresses (either as domain names or IP addresses) to dissidents who know that they are there and know how to decrypt them. I have a lot of experience with that particular tech so i could definitely vouch that it is doable with the caveats that you have to pay for every message via a bitcoin transaction and you have a limit of maybe 20-40 bytes of data per message.
Because everything I described in my previous comment can be done with 20 year old non-advanced encryption and cannot be thwarted by any advanced encryption (or quantum anything).
However, if ICANN subjects a TLD to a new “Registry Operator Code of Conduct” [due to a new globalist contract that favors China of course], that backdoor could be slammed shut.
Because things like TOR are independent of TLD operations. Like I said in my previous comment, I get my server and IP address from digital ocean, and they and I don't have to deal with any TLD operators. We are not subject to any ICANN rules except indirectly and if those rules were stupid we could ignore them (but that would turn the internet into a nameless mess, see below).
Otherwise, China has a cassis belli to escalate cyber-attacks.
They use that excuse already. They are constantly at war against tech like TOR because they say (correctly) that it is full of illegal content. The current and coming cyberwars use TOR already. They use illegal botnets set up on ordinary people's computers that got hacked. The entire dark web is a giant mess because it is not under anyone's control and the criminals like it that way.
When you think about your scenario, China taking over ICANN, think about it this way: Look up how people try to access the dark web and sift through all the crap to get what they want. Read the link in my previous comment. I can barely figure out what he is doing and how he is going about it and I am an internet geek. Imagine if everyone had to do that instead of typing "ford.com".
So basically, the IP addresses need above-board agreements, and if the TLD is in a totalitarian jurisdiction, that could be put to a stop.
[Thank you so much for the time!]
Doubtful. Also anyone who develops their own encryption is stupid. No offense to you, AW!M, but your encryption is much much much easier to break than any known encryption algorithm,. The analysts would use information theory, entropy, and other concepts and quickly figure it out.
There is a truism with encryption that people need to realize. Against a determined and smart adversary it is much easier for them (in your case much much much easier) to figure out the algorithm than to reverse engineer a key with a legitimate know algorithm. In fact what most attackers do when faced with encryption is try to hack beneath it and find the plaintext before it gets encrypted.
Here's a simple example. You connect to your bank with HTTPS. My goal is to insert a new destination bank account into one of your transactions so I can get the money instead. I tap your connection. Can I break HTTPS and figure out the key? No way. Can I insert new content into that connection? Even more difficult.
Instead I would try to get you to connect to a fake version of your bank. Or even easier I would try to get you to connect to a "free stuff" website and install some malicious app on your computer and insert the account into the message right before it gets encrypted and sent to your bank.
People don't break encryption unless they are the NSA (and probably China) and they only would do that for extremely high value targets and even then it is going to take time and resources. If you were such a high value target and used the encryption you described, or even something 100 times better, your adversaries would thank their lucky stars that you did that instead of using AES256.
[Your posting about Tor made me reach. Thank you.]
[this was a 2013 report]
China DDoS attack shows not all TLD servers equally secure
http://www.csoonline.com/article/738803
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took down a portion of China’s Internet over the weekend demonstrates that the strength of the global network varies greatly across domains.
Servers running China’s “.cn” top level domain (TLD) came under attack Sunday starting at about 2 a.m. Eastern time. The China Internet Network Information Center, which runs the TLD servers, confirmed the attack and apologized to affected users.
The organization said it was working to “enhance the service capabilities” of the system, but did not provide any more details.
[snip — more on followup posts to all]
[more reg. above ...]
MORE ON CSO: How to spot a phishing email
CloudFlare, which provides security and performance services to more than 1 million websites, found that .cn suffered a limited outage that lasted between two and four hours. A drop in server performance by as much as 32 percent compared to 24 hours earlier caused the down time.
CloudFlare’s Chief Executive, Matthew Prince, said on Monday that the CINIC would likely have to make its infrastructure “substantially beefier.”
“Obviously, an attacker has shown that there is some bottleneck,” he said.
Arbor Networks, which also protects websites against DDoS attacks, said the .cn servers had to contend with traffic that was four times higher than average. The attack also appeared to go on into Sunday afternoon.
“A serious attack was carried out,” said Dan Holden, director of security research at Arbor.
During the bombardment, not everyone heading to a website using the .cn domain would have been shutout. That’s because Internet service providers temporarily hold website IP addresses in caches to avoid querying a TLD server for each website every time.
[In-depth: 7 essentials for defending againts DDoS attacks]
However, if the attack had gone on for 24 hours, then more websites would have been affected gradually, since caches are routinely purged after a number of hours.
“Had it gone on longer than 24 hours, then literally no .cn domain would likely have been able to be reached,” Prince said.
The fact that China’s TLD servers would take a hit in a DDoS attack is surprising, given the overall sophistication of the country’s Internet capabilities. The country has one of the most sophisticated Internet filtering systems in the world, and is credited with mounting some of the most advanced cyberespionage campaigns to steal corporate and government secrets from other countries.
If the CINIC stumbled against an attack, how would the many smaller TLDs expected to launch soon across the Internet stand up?
In 2011, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) ended most restrictions on generic top-level domains, such as .com, .net and .biz. As a result, companies and organizations will eventually be able to choose their own gTLDs.
The first batch of ICANN-approved generic domains is expected to be operational by next month. Experts expect as man as 1,000 new gTLDs over time, with most of them reflecting names of companies and products and cities. There will also be more generic names, such as “.bank” and “.sport.”
The attack on .cn is a reminder that if a country code TLD can be crippled, then users of generic TLDs should make it a point to check the infrastructure of the organizations running the domain name registry underneath.
“The more obscure the TLD, the more likely they have less infrastructure to protect themselves,” CloudFlare’s Prince said.
The IP addresses require peering agreements among all the interconnected service providers. The simplest case is that my Digital Ocean provider tells your internet provider how to route to my IPV4 on the server they provided to me. Then I type that IPV4 into a comment here. Then you type that address into your browser and we are done, and there’s no real TLD or ICANN involvement.
Great find, thanks. Even though that attack against them, that's a great example of what they try to do to the rest of us if they were able to undermine the TLD system and desired to attack.
“Didn’t Wikileaks hack their emails? “
Not aware of that, but if they did it was because they didn’t use proper protocols.
Hacking isn’t black magic whereby they can hack anything if someone just puts a gun to their head and gives them 30 seconds, like in the movies.
Hacking merely takes advantage of vulnerabilities built into a system or systems where users fail to follow proper protocols.
“Our algorithms are not secure because no one knows them. Heck, we could publish them and they would still be secure. We don’t publish them because we don’t want our enemies to use such good stuff.
That is completely incorrect. Here is AES, made 100% public
“
You actually supported my point, but missed my second point altogether.
Thank you for your patience. I’m really, really glad there are workarounds that can bypass TLDs.
Like you said, it would be chaos.
I’m just now loading info about ‘digital ocean’.
One thing — China is attracting a lot of unicorn companies ...
“Lin estimates that more unicorn firms are likely to appear in service fields including big data, cloud computing and mobile health.”
A total of 70 unicorns out of 173 [unless this is sheer propaganda from China]
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-03/02/content_23703670.htm
What makes this worse is that Chinese tech talent is not as eager to work for Western employers. As they learn on-the-job more and more of them would prefer to leave their Western employers and start working for a true Chinese employer instead.
[Brain drain pole flipping]
Well, I’m veering too far off my main political ressearch because you make it all so very intereting!
God bless you. Thank you for the time.
FRegards ....
But by all means, your posts are enriching this thread!
So if you want to post more here, that is outstanding!
I realized I must have missed something, like we are not talking about the same kinds of algorithms. Can you make your point again please?
For example searching for Trump lies gets lots of dedicated anti-Trump sites. Searching for Hillary lies gets articles from the Washington Post, politifact and other liberal sources mixed with a few genuine anti-Hillary sites. This is all by design but they are clever enough to never have any algorithm directly biased against Trump or against conservatism. They do it all indirectly.
For example think about the characteristics of the old media (e.g. types of ads, incoming links, outgoing links, etc) versus the new media. If they can bias results to bring up more old media hits that will benefit Hillary.
Appreciate your giving an easy to understand example of how hackers work with easy targets.
This is an excellent Thread! I think it should be sent to the Trump campaign...Mr. Trump is against the Internet transfer! He supports the PROTECTION OF INTERNET FREEDOM ACT and has many concerns about China’s dominance in various industries.
WAIT! You are saying CHINA IS BUILDING A COMPOUND TO HOUSE ICANN - even before Congress has voted???!?!?!
_______________________________________
From article:
And the Chinese already enjoy raw power. Their encryption is superior, their nuclear capability suffices, and they are now experienced at cyber warfare.
Compare that to the US — NSA recently got hacked. That was supposed to be the best encrypted, best protected agency in our nation. Imagine if all of our satellites got simultaneously hacked. We would be blind and appear weak in the eyes of the world.
International Law
The reason CHINA IS BUILDING A COMPOUND a compound to welcome ICANN is international legitimacy. Other tyrants seeking to censor online speech can seek a shiny new contract with Obama’s Free Range ICANN.
Bluntly stated: ICANN helps China build a large alliance to alienate the USA if it comes to a full-scale ‘cyber-war’.
Brilliant, original thinking by our own Artthur Wildfire! March.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.