Big brother watching you

[Jordan]

I remember when CARNIVORE was released and it was a major subject in security/hack related sites.

CARNIVORE turned out to be a program run on a PC that had to be physically connected to the computer it was monitoring, I think. Which sucks, because I spent a lot of time coming up with a code language that would use only words that would raise red flags to express totally banal things, thinking if it got popular enough, it would overload CARNIVORE.

What about ECHELON?

[tiny_tove]

Echelon was mostly fake. Although now it sounds realistic consodering what happened ehheh. Conspiracy nutters were claiming the Italian base was 1 h from my place while it was just the local astro- physic laboratory where everybody could go if requested and was run by my ex physic professor (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_Lamberti).
Everybody was obsessed by that back in the days - me too ehehe -

[ARKHE]

It will be itneresting to watch the reactions from the EU unfold, now that it turns out they were spying on Germany for example. As someone said, just like Soviet did back in the days.

[andy vomit]

this isn't really "news", because it's been going on for a long time now, but still..  fucked up:

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement
"It's a treasure trove of information," said James J. Wedick, a former F.B.I. agent who spent 34 years at the agency and who said he used mail covers in a number of investigations, including one that led to the prosecution of several elected officials in California on corruption charges. "Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena."  But, he said: "It can be easily abused because it's so easy to use and you don't have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0

[Jordan]

Echelon was mostly fake. Although now it sounds realistic consodering what happened ehheh. Conspiracy nutters were claiming the Italian base was 1 h from my place while it was just the local astro- physic laboratory where everybody could go if requested and was run by my ex physic professor (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_Lamberti).
Everybody was obsessed by that back in the days - me too ehehe -

Italy wasn't a member state though, right?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy

[tiny_tove]

The Italian wiki page says Italy was.

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#ECHELON_in_Italia

as said most information on the subject were spread by conspiracy theorist who are now into alex jones/david icke

[tiny_tove]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/04/nsa-us-embassy-closures-terrorist-threat

I remember they said exactly the same thing a few years ago, turning big cities in ghost town for nothing.
Real threat or just an excuse to show NSA as something necessary after the last scandal?

[Jordan]

Real threat or just an excuse to show NSA as something necessary after the last scandal?

I've been wondering that as well.

[RyanWreck]

Here is a post I made in the Porn thread concerning the recent Deep Web/Tor busts:

Welp, the Deep has been severely compromised this week. Javascript exploit that uses Firefox (which is the browser used in the Tor bundle) to get information about the users. The owner of Freedom Hosting was arrested in Ireland and because he hosted many different boards and sites, is being labeled as the biggest CeePee dealer on Earth. A few Americans have been arrested as well, and we can expect many more.

Too early to understand what is happening but the general consensus is that the FBI was working with blue teams/pentesters to create said exploit and waited until the Defcon convention started before putting it into play in the wild. After compromising the host itself they injected the exploit to all hosted, mainly illegal, sites to harvest clear IP's. There is a warning circulating that states "IF you visited a FH site during this small window of time, expect to be raided". Pretty big shit storm down there, especially on some specific boards. Here are a few links/info/headlines:

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/fbi-bids-to-extradite-largest-childporn-dealer-on-planet-29469402.html

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1rlo0uu

And the message being spread around the DeepWeb itself reads:

"UNKNOWN JAVASCRIPT IN THE BOARD PAGES POINTING TO IFRAME TO A VERIZON SERVER ON THE OPEN WEB!!!!!!! THEY ARE INSERTED BY FH! I WOULD CONSIDER FH COMPROMISED!!!! THEY ARE ALSO IN TLZ AND OTHER SITES PAGES!! STAY AWAY FROM ALL FH HOSTED SITES, including TLZ, LC, TORMAIL, ALL OF THESE ARE HOSTED ON FH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALL BOARDS HAVE BEEN DELETED TO PROTECT YOU!! IF THE BOARDS COME BACK UP, IT IS NOT ME RUNNING THE SITE ANYMORE, ALL ADMIN/MOD ACCOUNTS HAVE BEEN DELETED!!"

Also, Hacking group Anonymous claims that they are going to be releasing thousands of clear text entries taken from TorMail. They have been very active against ped's and ped sites, trying to out as many people as they can and shut down as many sites and boards as they can (#Operation Darknet). They have nothing to do with the latest info on Tor, but it is significant information nonetheless.

[HongKongGoolagong]

The .js on the compromised Tor sites (which I have little doubt included illegal material) phoned home user IPs to Reston, VA according to Vlad Tsrklevich.

Trapwire is based in Reston. http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Trapwire

This is probably about more than just finding paedos.

[bitewerksMTB]

http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/05/tor-browser-anonymity-compromised-maybe#comments

It had to happen, right?

If Anonymous releases pedo texts, that should definitely be interesting reading!

Researching Op.Darknet, everything I read is from 2011 with user names from Lolita City posted on PasteBin.

[RyanWreck]

Researching Op.Darknet, everything I read is from 2011 with user names from Lolita City posted on PasteBin.

Yea it may have a different name now, but how I understand it, it is just a continuous name they are using for the outing of said lists and will use the same Operations name on this up-and-coming list. But yes the last list they made was 2011.

BBC is picking up on the story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23573048

The .js on the compromised Tor sites (which I have little doubt included illegal material) phoned home user IPs to Reston, VA according to Vlad Tsrklevich.

I'm not a Java Script programmer (Python, Perl, PHP and of course bash are what I know) but from looking over it it seems like a pretty cut-and-dry, ugly code. For the exploit to work you have to 1 be using windows, 2 be using that bundle, 3 have java enabled and 4 NoScript set to *allow* scripts, and of course visit the exploited sites within the small time frame.

From the reverse engineers and blackhats that have been working through the code we have come to understand this isn't the FBI, rather the NSA and SAIC. Who the fuck are they? This fits nicely with the topic of this thread now...


http://pop.robtex.com/nsa.gov.html#records

That IP address is part of IP space directly allocated to the NSA's Autonomous Systems (AS). It's not FBI; it's NSA. And why was that IP address just there for everyone to see? One simply does not write hand-obfuscated code like that and then put one's IP:80 in plain view. The placement was certainly intentional. What the security world is thinking is this is some sort of "psyops" shit; FUD on meth".  They want to scare you off Tor, scare you off all privacy services. They want people to feel vulnerable, insecure, uncertain, they want them to doubt everything they think they know about online security.

I don't know what I believe yet, but in any case the questions that needs to be asked is, what the fuck is an NSA IP address doing as a command & control contact for javascript malware being deployed in the torsploit attack?