DEFCONConference
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2016–2021
52:51 · 546K views · Jan 7, 2015
Zoz's DEF CON 22 talk on operational security in the age of pervasive surveillance. He shows how hard it is to avoid mistakes even for people who should know better.
It is the usual cite for why good OPSEC is so hard, including entry and exit point correlation and digital exhaust.
13 comments from Hacker News
I'm always reminded of Zoz's awesome talk "Don't Fuck It Up!"[0]. There's a ton of sketchy shit you can unfortunately (or fortunately depending on who you are) do online but not getting caught is still a non-trivial task. Successfully hiding is dependent upon the people who you're trying to hide from and your sophistication in hiding. [0] this video
According to Zoz in his excellent DEFCON 22 talk "Don't Fuck It Up!"[1] on the difficulties of OPSEC, this type of correlation has been in use for years. >[2] Matching entry / exit point – we know specifically they look for that, so don’t match the last use and first use of phones, overlap it. [1] this video [2] [LINK]
OPSEC in the age of mass surveillance is incredibly hard. Zoz gave[1] has a very good overview of modern OPSEC. Staying anonymous requires an attention to detail that most people probably cannot do. The hindsight bias is realizing how serious the situation might be and the level of OPSEC that is required. When the torrent site was first created the risk level wasn't known and most people didn't understand how hard it is to avoid the ubiquitous sensors of the surveillance-industriual-complex. Yes, more people probably should have assumed this level of risk much earlier, but that's easy to say now when we know names like Prism and XKEYSCORE. [1] (note: contains rude/strong language) this video
> you're only fucked if your OPSEC is weak The problem is that actually implementing not-weak OPSEC is much harder than most people understand (even those with technical backgrounds). For example, is your "secret" activity on TOR easily tied to your non-secret activity from a search of network entry/exit times (i.e. "secret" activity is the complement "non-secret" activity)? I recommend Zoz's DEFCON talk, "Don't Fuck It Up!"[1], for a very good overview of how hard OPSEC has become. [1] this video
> leaves their cellphones at home while committing crimes, using burner phones for any contact they need during that time That's getting a lot harder to do in practice. OPSEC is hard when you have to care about stuff like overlapping usage of the burner so the movement logs of the regular phone stopping don't correlate with when the burner starts moving. Zoz gave a great overview[1] of modern cellphone OPSEC at DEFCON 22. [1] this video