Secret Military Telephone Buttons
computer.rip
computer.rip
He was released after great efforts by many people and is forever banned entry to the US. So I wouldn't touch anything 'secret' and 'military' even with a 2 meter pole.
the reaction to the crime may have lacked proportionality but there are more details to the story.
It just wouldn’t fucking happen because America think themselves above every other nation. Case in point, Anne Sacoolas.
Furthermore, it wasn’t that long ago when Russia invaded Georgia and essentially annexed portions of its territory. It’s clearly in their national interest to cooperate with laws that seek to prevent technology transfers to Russia.
However, if you defraud a little old lady living in England of her money over the internet, you may very well be extradited to the UK despite being from the US. Would that be the UK riding rough shot over US sovereignty?
The American legal system (for all its faults) is independent and has strong safe guards for the rights of defendants. The Russian legal system is not independent and routinely uses as a tool to suppress descent and prevent potential challengers from standing for election as observed in the many cases against Navalny.
You reckon? It's only crimes that happen on the USA's side of the road that don't count?
Imagine some US citizen had bought "can't leave the country" documents about some British military things via a London middle-man (very hypothetical because I'd assume secrecy to work very differently in the UK). Would one expect the UK to skip that middle-man wrt consequences?
https://web.archive.org/web/20190514124604/https://www.stand...
>The Texas man was indicted along with Tishchenko, but District Judge Dale Kimball in 2017 signed an 18-month deferral-of-prosecution agreement. Then, on Wednesday, all charges against the Texan were dismissed.
People often have irrational emotions about teh evil Amerika, so forget them. Say you're an Argentinian in Argentina and commit a ransomware attack against an Irish bank, but somehow give yourself away. Do you not expect trouble upon landing in a country with which they have an extradition treaty, merely because your crime was committed from Buenos Aires?
Should we extradite Americans living in America to China if they mock Xi or dishonor Chinese heroes?
However, in this scenario, depending on your importance/visibility, you should absolutely read up on extradition treaties when visiting China-friendly nations.
Any American who visibly supported the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests should definitely think twice about ever visiting China and (again depending on visibility/importance) any friendly nations with extradition treaties and the numerous countries around the world without rule of law.
Well when it concerns their own citizens, this bizarre notion comes at least from the USA who even threaten judges working at the International Court of Justice, and their families... So maybe sometimes the emotions about "evil" USA are not completely irrational.
I'm in Canada and resenting Americans is our national past time :-), but still most comments here about evil tendrils of American empire are besides the point. Interpol, extradition, etc are a thing outside of America.
But in principle you're correct.
If Bob commits a crime in country Ypso and flies home to country Zorg then Zorg will only extradite him if the crime he committed is also a crime in Zorg.
As a more practical example: Switzerland makes a distinction between tax evasion (which is not a crime, but a misdemeanor) and tax fraud, which is a crime. The difference is that when you "forget" to declare income this is tax evasion (to a degree), while if you cook the books that's tax fraud. Most countries don't make this distinction.
Switzerland got a lot of heat for neither providing information, nor extraditing people accused of tax evasion to another country. The reason being that it's not a crime in Switzerland.
Practically, that doesn't really matter much any more due to the whole information exchange on tax issues, which the country is also part of.
There are other reasons for not extraditing a person. For example if such a person is a citizen in a country that doesn't extradite its citizens then any extradition request from another country will be denied.
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have happened if the things had been reversed (US guy buying Mig 29 flight manuals).
Notice the first word - "Arms"
>> I don't like it one bit when I see US law reach into what should be sovereign countries.
The US govt also does not like it when people attempt to use US arms to kill US people, military or civilian.
So, yes, your nationality or location are irrelevant. If you are actively exporting US military goods or information without a license, you should expect that the US will do whatever it can, including asking favors of other nations, to find and imprison you.
In Other Words - do not f'n do that - or get a proper license and do it right (or make sure your smuggling is sufficiently profitable and you are sufficiently clever that you can live the rest of your live always positioned out of their reach - good luck).
It is not that hard to avoid shipping US Arms information & goods without a license.
The handset was a 'regular' one, not the one illustrated.
The phone system started out entirely manual and slowly migrated to fully automatic over decades. Switching was automated before billing and routing. What you see in that video is an operator who is placing a long distance call for a customer. When this film was made, around 1949, local calls were mostly automatic dial, but long distance was only semi-automatic. The operator is doing the routing and billing. They have to find an idle outgoing trunk on their board to the next toll office along the route. Then they can use the keyboard to remote control that toll switch to connect them another step forward. When they get to the desired end office, which connects to customer lines, they can punch in the number of the final destination phone and complete the call. Lots of things can go wrong; hence all the different blinking light signals.
All this was gradually automated, before computers, using relays and special purpose hardware.
Some background info:[2]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/AUTOVON_...
Now we have the answer to one of lifes burning questions, what does the FO button do?
* https://sse.co.uk/asset/pdf/guide-to-call-features-with-your...
* https://plus.net/help/phone/call-features/
The downside of a single button would be that even with the existing systems it is all too easy to accidentally blacklist the wrong people. I know someone who was accidentally blacklisted by one of xyr elderly friends. It caused all sorts of interesting fallout until the two of them had the opportunity to speak in person.
One can imagine what a single button could do in the hands of small children. And, indeed, we have known for a couple of decades what anti-spam buttons can do in the hands of people who (say) decide to "junk" every mail message after reading it.
For Australia, see rather the Do Not Call Register, which is the better option as these blacklisting systems are usually restricted to a couple of handfuls of numbers.
As to what the FO button does, it cuts off whatever call the number you were dialing is on and connects your call instead. So you had better be sure your call is is important enough to potentially cut off a General Officer.
At least that's how it was explained to me back in 2003. Never had occasion to use the priority modes.
traditional phone network would give a fast busy or an "all circuits are busy" message if all lines between two switches are busy. the special buttons let you assign priority for your use of those lines. F0 is just max priority.
I can imagine it every day when I deal with WiFi problems! Ugh...
I don't know what went on, but I can only imagine it was related to FO. My thought was he punched in to somewhere that would let him use a non normal button by way of numeric entry and connected the call - but I don't have a clue.
Regarding MF being an informal or loose standard, it was described in detail in the the 1955 AT&T publication "Notes on Nationwide Dialing" (http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nond1955.pdf, pdf page 95) and the 11956 AT&T subsequent technical publication "Notes on Distance Dialing" (http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nodd1956.pdf, starting pdf page 82) and then in subsequent editions of "Notes on Distance Dialing" (1968, 1975) and then in "Notes on the Network" 1980. It was also specified in several international standards (CCITT, now ITU). For those interested in this kind of stuff, this page will be of interest: http://explodingthephone.com/docs.php
Search of autovon docs: http://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=autovon&sort=relev... Some interesting stuff there because you get a sense of AT&T, FBI,, and NSA being worried about this stuff. Also, this particular hack is interesting -- it describes a clever technique called guardbanding to get into AUTOVON from the civilian telephone network: http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx1032.pdf
Here are allegedly the guidance on what the precedence levels should be used for. http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/Autovon.html
You think you're joking.
ToS morphed into DSCP [1], which is sometimes used in residential networks to prioritize VoIP. (I can't speak to business or industrial networks; presumably it finds use there as well.) WLAN networks can be configured to heed this priority, more aggressively grabbing airtime for high-priority packets. I configure my home network that way.
DSCP does not generally cross the home network<->Internet boundary, but there is one major exception I know of: Comcast. They tag all non-CATV traffic as the lowest priority (DSCP 8), resulting in terrible performance of any home network configured to heed DSCP values. (You can avoid this by stripping DSCP values from inbound packets.)
In parallel, most modern military/IC telephone systems are commodity Cisco with specialty features added somewhat awkwardly. Not nearly as exciting as it once was.
What type of functionality does the US military need that individual customers wouldn't want?
The bigger issue is TEMPEST and other COMSEC concerns, which lead the government to pay companies like CIS to perform an authorized aftermarket modification of off-the-shelf IP phones.
A major issue is that NSA guidance requires that all telephone instruments in a secure area have a feature usually called "on hook protection" or "on hook security," where the phone physically being on the hook switch electromechanically ensures that microphones are disabled. This was easy with many earlier phones because they were often physically wired this way (hook switch connected the voice circuit). For modern IP phones this is all software controlled, so for secure variants like those made by CIS some dedicated electronics have been added that disconnect the microphones until the user presses a physical button to enable them. This is outside of software control to prevent a network intrusion being able to use the phone as a listening device. The modification is usually somewhat clunky and you can regularly recognize it in photos from military, white house, etc environments due to the Cisco phone's awkward looking and unusually large rear enclosure (added RF shielding against emissions) and a small red button added via a hole drilled in the faceplate, once again awkwardly.
I bring this up in detail because I find it very interesting that the government has chosen to pay a third party to modify a COTS product in this way when they used to just have the phones custom made. I'm sure it's more cost effective but seems like a surprising failure by e.g. Raytheon, who used to make several secure phones, to win the contract. It's probably also a factor that there are nowadays a surprisingly large number of independent secure telephone systems operated by different agencies, which has diluted the buying power somewhat. The days when it was DoD making central purchasing decisions are gone, these days much of secure telephony is in the intelligence community where despite efforts of the ODNI the level of standardization on secure networks is rather poor. There are some good reasons for this but there's also a lot of plain bureaucratic lockup.
electrospaces.net is the blog of a person interested in secure telephony who knows more about the actual instruments than I do. If you look through the archive he has photos of many current and historic models. I believe I have more information about the cryptographic and switching systems, which I do plan to write about, but there's only so much to know since the details of these things often start out classified and thus end up obscure. The historic military systems are much better documented than the IC systems, mostly because DoD and AT&T produced a lot more documentation on them that gets declassified as they go out of use. The IC likes to use a lot more suite A crypto (classified algorithms) and systems tend to be smaller and have shorter lifespans, which all leads to less stuff preserved for history.
The topic is interesting in general though, and I will probably write a future post about exotic government telephone technology like the STUs with Fortezza cards and the earlier Crypto Ignition Keys. These are honestly rather smart designs that never really made it to private industry.
Back in the 90s when I first learned about this, and had a modem that would dial these additional digits just fine, I used to see how various PSTN LECs would handle them. Mostly ignored, but some results were interesting.
Also, back then I was living in the Greater Houston (Texas) area, and had to have a "metro" phone line to be able to get local calling to various NXXs outside of the core Houston (some even still came with a toll charge!). Often when dialing between these zones, the in-band MF tones used by the switching systems were audible to the caller.
A lot of this stuff really interested me, and I really got into phreaking and such as a teenager. See also red box, blue box, and all the other colors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Emergency_Telecommu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Wireless_Priority_S...
After 9/11 the company I worked for then (a quasi-government non-profit company) ramped up their security and disaster planning a bit. The whole department I was in had to get national security clearances, and they also issued cards for the GETS system. On 9/11 I remember it was very hard to get any call through.
Significantly less useful in an era when inter city phone and data traffic goes by fiber optic cable and not 6GHz microwave on horn antennas. Some have found re-use for cellular purposes and vhf/uhf radio repeater, public safety, etc.
Some of the key long lines and AUTOVON sites out there also carried data circuits linking the SAGE network together.
For a long time I’ve been wondering exactly what the mechanism of this kind of phone call would have been and I wonder if it was one of these priority keys that was used.
Incidentally, now whenever I get a call from my pal Scam Likely I answer it with “FBI Fraud Prevention Division, this is Brennan” or “911, what’s the location of your emergency?” or “is he dead? I told you not to call me unless he is dead!” I’ve had a bit of good fun with these.
That’s is apparently the guide.