Hack the Planet

You a fan of ’95 Angelina Jolie movies? Oh well.

An 18-year-old college student in Canada – majoring in Chemistry, mind – built a small lab in his garage. Of course, the police decided he was making meth and arrested him. Then, after admitting several days later that the lab was not, in fact, used for making drugs, kept the student in jail because he had some materials which could be used in the making of explosives.

Apparently, the Canadian Keystones were tipped off to the presence of the lab by a woman from whom the student had purchased fertilizer. It was her concern that it was being used to make meth. Conveniently, the article neglected to note how much fertilizer had been purchased, but I imagine there’s a significant difference in the quantities needed to fill a beaker, and those necessary to churn out a drum of crystal.

Now, I’ve looked up the ingredients for making meth (for which search I am probably on a watch list now), because I know that the majority of meth producers in my county are under-educated trailer trash, and I assumed it couldn’t be that hard to produce. I think with that list, and maybe a couple of reference books or a local chemist, I could probably walk into a lab and determine within a couple of hours if they had been making meth there. It certainly wouldn’t take days. And the bullshit explosives charge (HA! A pun.) is just the cops trying to justify their heavy-handed inanity. Everyone has explosive-making material in their home. Ammonia, bleach, fertilizer, foil, drain cleaner, gasoline, Styrofoam – all can be used to create explosives. Hell…Mythbusters gives you enough information to make them. We’ve come a long way from the 80s, when the FBI forced the writers for MacGyver to either substitute incorrect materials or skip crucial steps for Mac’s off-the-cuff brand of troubleshooting. To protect the kids, don’cha know.

See, government is not nimble – especially the bloated bureaucracy ol’ George has saddled us with – so it passes laws that allow it to detain people on a pretext (Patriot Act, anyone?) until it can figure things out. The problem is that individuals are faster at learning how to circumvent laws and technology. Most DRM protections are broken within hours of their release (using such high-tech devices as a Sharpie), you can buy DVDs of movies that are still in theaters, and people Twitter locations of traffic stops.

And these are mainly benign examples. What if you want to cause mischief? According to this story (http://www.thesentinel.com/302730670790449.php), local teens are making copies of license plates and speeding past county speed cameras. The owner of the real plate gets the ticket, and the official justification behind the cams (it’s not about the money…honest) goes out the window.

I recently checked out a stack of books at the library. When I handed them to the woman behind the counter, she set the whole stack on an electronic pad about the size of a medium-sized scanner. A couple of button taps later, and she handed the stack back to me. “All done,” she chirped. “Are you using RFID tags?” I asked. She reluctantly confirmed that yes, they are. If you’re unfamiliar with the “arphids,” they’re Radio-Frequency IDentification tags. They’re similar to the metallic tags retailers use to protect electronic items from being stolen. The pad at the library read all of the tags at once, and noted that I was the patron checking them out. Theoretically, the library could tie their RFID system into some sort of cell network and use that to locate their books and, presumably, me.

Now, think of the money that went into this system. All of the hardware that was purchased. The software and training. Programming the tags themselves. The man-hours required to tag every book, magazine, and DVD.

30 seconds in a microwave will burn out the tag.

Governments and corporations spend millions of dollars in implementing “solutions” that can be foiled by determined individuals using low-tech or low-cost methods.

Those RFID tags? They can be cloned using a ten-dollar machine from Radio Shack. Doesn’t sound like a problem for anyone but the library? A lot of credit cards and hotel keys use RFIDs.

Gait-recognition cameras can be defeated by a handful of gravel in one shoe.

You can get ATM default passwords from the technical manuals. A lot of the retailers that have third-party ATMs in their stores don’t change them.

As Cory Doctorow states in his book Little Brother, “The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.”

I suppose that student in Saskatchewan, who is forbidden from using any lab outside of the school, and had to notify the school of the pending charges against him (his trial continues later this month), knows pretty well how they fail.