How private are PMs

[El Gordo]

I would imagine M15 keep an eye on proceedings hereand you dont have to be doing anything illeagle for those feckes to nail you.Some one with a spouse and family would be quite useful to those punks.So anyone in the North East of the country be aware,you could be putting yourself in an compromising postion.

They're typically going to be quite careful about that. Blackmail is only effective if you are willing to release the information, which is hard to do without outing yourself as a blackmailer. That applies not just to MI5 but to anyone else who has access to your confidential information. And it's GCHQ who are reading your pm's, by the way, not MI5, although GHCQ will pass information on to MI5, MI6 or DIS, as appropriate.

By the way, if you are of interest to them then they can connect your E-I username with your real name. There is no anonymity as far as they are concerned.

[luther]

They're typically going to be quite careful about that. Blackmail is only effective if you are willing to release the information, which is hard to do without outing yourself as a blackmailer. That applies not just to MI5 but to anyone else who has access to your confidential information. And it's GCHQ who are reading your pm's, by the way, not MI5, although GHCQ will pass information on to MI5, MI6 or DIS, as appropriate.

By the way, if you are of interest to them then they can connect your E-I username with your real name. There is no anonymity as far as they are concerned.

Thank you El Gordo, for frightening the shit out of everyone here................

PS - no, I can't see other peoples PM's..............

[punterminator]

Lad's just remember Uncle Bob's golden rule of the internet. Never say anything to anyone, anywhere that you wouldn't want read back to your mum. Stuff has a nasty habit of sticking around on the internet and can come back to haunt you at some stage. Just google Claire Swires for a cracking example.

Crikey I was involved in some pretty bad flame wars on Usenet back in the 80's before anyone knew better and they're are still cached in google if you know what to look for!!

[Quarterpoundher]

although GHCQ will pass information on to MI5, MI6 or DIS, as appropriate.

Phew!!!.. I am glad you put GHC on that...

[nicegirlsarenice]

The question is how many people can read your pm's, and the answer is probably far more than you might think. Probably none of these people do, but they can. So don't write anything very private in them.

Here's a list, starting with the obvious and then continuing to some you might not have thought about.
- Patricia can and anyone she authorises can. She's posted above, so not much more to say about this one.

Patricia can, however I was reading up on this here and the admins can't always read pms, such as in the TurboIsland message board. They physically can't access them because they're encrypted and neither can anyone else ever even if asked to by law enforcement they can't.

5. No Turbo Island manager has access to Members’ PMs. No hack has been installed to make such access possible (such hacks breach the Proboards Terms of Service). No Turbo Island manager can see who is PMing whom at any given time. No Turbo Island manager can access the database to search for PMs.

You see the mention of the word "hack"? There's a whole community out there designed to try to hack into forum boards so the admins can read the pms!!

- Her hosting company can. E-I runs off hosted servers. The company which owns the servers can obviously read anything stored on them, including your pm's.

It's not obviously, the only people who can read them are people with access to the database and people who know how to get the data from it (which could be encrypted).

- Your ISP, the recipient's ISP, the hosting company's ISP, and lots of companies in between. All of them can read your pm's as they travel. They can because your pm's aren't encrypted, just sent in plain text. There are probably a lot of computers between yours and E-I's server, 15 in my case, and anyone who controls one of those can read your pm's, as can the people who control the wires, satellites, etc.

You're probably right about E-I but that's not always necessarily the way. With SSL your password is encrypted by the site with the help of the web browser on leaving and decrypted by the site/web browser again when it reaches them. Your ISP can't read that because only the yahoo server or whatever has the key to decrypt it. So unless you've used a sniffer to see if they're being sent plaintext, you can't be sure on that. Anyway I know that my ISP doesn't sniff my traffic because they told me.

- Various spy agencies can read your pm's. At a minimum, I'm sure the National Security Agency in the US is scanning them automatically. E-I's servers are in the States, and they monitor all network traffic coming in and out.

I would say that's an urban myth. It could be physically impossible to monitor every single private message into and out of the states, which would probably be hundreds of thousands each minute. Scanning is one thing and would be hard enough, "retaining" them would probably be impossible even given their resources. This is the main reason your ISP doesn't retain data from every user, it'd be ridiculously impossible.... even retaining log-on and log-off files ALONE, to show who had a certain IP address at a certain time is in the region of thousands of terabytes for a few million users. The NSA doesn't care about your mickey mouse PMs to escorts.

- Probably your neighbours, colleagues, family, etc. can. This depends on how your network connection works and how technically skilled they are. Snooping network connections is generally not very difficult, if you're close by and know what you are doing. For obvious reasons I'm not going to post instructions here.

Not really, only if you're using for example wifi and it's unencrypted or poorly encrypted, otherwise it would be very hard and need lots of criminal activity. I'm using WiMax so it may be more insecure for me, but I would send anything that's extremely highly sensitive completely encrypted anyway.

So all of these people or organisations can read your pm's. The question is how many of them want to. Probably none. If you're running the Irish branch of Al Qaeda then doing it by pm is probably a bad idea.

How do we go from "could possibly" read your pms to "all of these people or organizations can" read them? I would guess maybe 10 people can read your pms if they want to.

Patricia just needs to be careful who she hands admin status to. I doubt Patricia is handing out admin status to that many people.

Maybe Patricia should consider the idea of encrypted private messages. There is talk about hacking some of these systems but I'm pretty sure that you could use a system that would be of government top-secret standard and almost literally impossible to hack.... without trillions of years of supercomputers working on it trying to brute-force it.

PGP is a system that encrypts email. "Pretty good privacy" is a misnomer because there is no known way to possibly decrypt it without the password/key.... they called it that in a kind of ironic way.... sort of like Little John in Robin Hood and maybe as a philosophical argument that nothing is perfectly private/encrypted.

One final note: Patricia recommends deleting messages for privacy. Don't bother. It wouldn't prevent any of the above from reading your pm's.

This isn't true, if you delete them it doesn't mean that it'd be impossible for anyone to access what was written in the database before it was deleted. But it would be extremely harder, if not impossible. The data could be wiped 5 times over as soon as they're deleted from the database, maybe partly because you're not allowed to keep records of data from someone except in certain circumstances. So don't be so quick to say something Patricia is saying is wrong.

There's a huge difference between something being absolutely impossible and something being plausible or practical. If you want to assume that because it wouldn't be physically impossible for them to get it that suddenly everyone has extremely fast access to it then that's fine... but it's only a theoretical/philosophical comment on how EVERYTHING is unsafe no matter WHAT. It's not realistic.

[bhoywonder]

i did a search on the word galway and a few posts down there seems to be a personal message sent by the hulk to alexis.

https://www.escort-ireland.com/board...earchid=143835

[Westsidex]

i did a search on the word galway and a few posts down there seems to be a personal message sent by the hulk to alexis.

https://www.escort-ireland.com/board...earchid=143835

if they are so private how come i can read this?

I cant see anything on that link apart from a return for no matches.

Westside.

[Westsidex]

its downright insulting to think that we would even read ppls pms even if we had access. Who the fuck are you ppl to judge us just because we mod. What about you lot? If you could read pms ,would you?

one wonders,
Westside.

[nicegirlsarenice]

i did a search on the word galway and a few posts down there seems to be a personal message sent by the hulk to alexis.

https://www.escort-ireland.com/board...earchid=143835

That's a visitor message he wrote on her page, not a private message.

[bhoywonder]

im probably wrong but its about 7th or 8th down on the list