A source at Russia’s Federal Guard Service (FSO), which is in charge of safeguarding Kremlin communications and protecting President Vladimir Putin, claimed that the return to typewriters has been prompted by the publication of secret documents by WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website, as well as Edward Snowden, the fugitive US intelligence contractor.
http://rightreactions.blogspot.com/2013/07/assange-snowden.html
Smart. Very smart. Hand written is the only thing smarter. If western governments see the advantage to this, we would have to make changes in our education system, as most graduates can’t read, write or spell.
Can pigeons be far behind. Seems that google and 75% of all smart phones have been using NSA codes build in and the manufacturers have been working hand in glove with the STASI working for Obama. Kind of puts a different twist on his speech at the Berlin Wall. He should have said I am here to enslave you. Now it makes sense why he gave out Obama Phones, they know where every drug dealing criminal is all the time. And every welfare bum in the USA. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-09/nsa-has-inserted-its-code-android-os-bugging-three-quarters-all-smartphones
It sounds like the Fisher Space Pen. In 1965, Americans spend millions of dollars to invent a pressurized pen that can write in a zero gravity environment. Some cunning young wit asks, “What will the Soviets do to keep up?” Reply, “They’ll continue to write with pencils.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Ben Franklin
Some of us have no use for ‘smartphones’. A plain old cell phone with no camera and no GPS is adequate. It’s a communication device not an entertainment toy for the idiots.
This is BS because whatever capability NSA has to spy on internet traffic you can encode it to make it unbreakable (or better said encode to a level that makes the effort to decode it unpractical).
Any covert operator (spy or terrorist) with half a brain would assume his traffic could be intercepted and encode it sufficiently.
This also means that any claims by the sec services that intercepting internet is a powerful tool that has prevented terrorist attacks is suspect unless they are talking about amateurs and crazies. Or more likely they are tracking who is receiving/sending messages.
As for the Russians switching to typewriters it makes no sense so either the story is nonsense or the Russians are playing propaganda to make it look that Snowden´s leaks have negatively affected them (not quite the traitor). I mean, do you really think sensitive Russian intel would be crossing US internet servers?
“As for the Russians switching to typewriters it makes no sense”.
Makes no sense ? Please explain why in your opinion it make no sense.
Allegedly even the venerable IBM Selectric was vulnerable to eavesdropping. Somebody analyzed the minute line voltage changes associated with the rotation/tilting of the type element and determined that these could be translated to text. Part of the US Navy’s official Tempest standard was to retrofit all Selectrics in sensitive military and diplomatic locations with motors modified with a large dog clutch actuated flywheel to dampen these variations. Paranoia on steroids?
It’s a rare day that I post something good about government, never mind government surveillance, and even citing a CBC article. But it is what it is:
This part made me snicker:
“Allah be praised! Falafals are waiting for you at Ahmed’s, and bring 7.62mm fava beans, inshallah..”
” why he gave out Obama Phones, they know where every drug dealing criminal is all the time. And every welfare bum in the USA. ”
So they can always get in touch with them when they need them for votes, protests, race riots, etc.
Yeah well, it is established that a few years past the Israeli Mossad degenerated the terrorists by making them abandon their cell phones.
The Mossad established which cell phone was used by a certain terrorist leader…..then disabled it….then intercepted it when it was brought in for service. The cell was made active again with one signifigant alteration.
Later the Mossad called that cell, when the voice was identified, a button was pushed and Achmad the Aweful lost his mind…hair….all that stuff.
The Mossad couldn’t listen in after the crazies became terrified to use the cells…but the crazies had to resort to camel express….putting them back in the 7th century where they belonged.
Don’t mean to alarm anyone, but the following information is well known to those with nefarious intent.
No self-respecting terrorist would use common operating systems such as Windows, Ubuntu and so forth, as most popular OSs are reputed to have clandestine back-doors. AFAIK the one exception is BSD. By embedding strongly encrypted messages in innocuous image files using steganography their anonymity is assured.
I had one of those Fisher Space Pens at one time. The “bullet” model. You could cap it and carry it in a pants pocket, something not possible with many other pens, which tend to break when sat upon.
A step in the right direction. However, the electrical impulses associated with striking a key will set up EM emissions which can be read from a distance. Manual is best.
As Jessie James (the bike builder – not gun fighter) once said – “run carburetors – no electronic fuel injection or engine management”. Do it old style and stay clear of Big Brother.
The only computer in my diesel truck is in the CD player. Everything else is 24v electrical [not electronic], vacuum, and mechanical. It’ll probably survive an EMP hit, but I won’t be able to listen to tunes, oh well…
Did you read the wiki entry at all?
“A common urban legend states that, faced with the fact that ball-point pens will not write in zero-gravity, NASA spent a large amount of money to develop a pen that would write in the conditions experienced during spaceflight (the result purportedly being the Fisher Space Pen), while the Soviet Union took the simpler (and cheaper) route of just using pencils.[1]”
Read the entryfor more.
I retold the legend because it’s funny.
Here’s a nickel. Go buy yourself a sense of humour.
Several years ago I was a an Information Security (encryption) conference in the US and the some NSA guys showed up with a plan:
“We will take all of your encryption master keys and put them in escrow and, when we need them (with a court order of course) we can decrypt anything the bad guys sent or say to each other. ”
That was in the ’90’s and they were laughed out of the room. Oh, and the NSA thought that PGP public key encryption should be outlawed since they couldn’t crack it.
I’ve been away from that scene for 13 years now and I wonder who gave in and gave the NSA their master keys. MS? GOOGLE? FB? Verisign?
GJC, just to update you, Symantec bought PGP. But OpenPGP is still around.