Chinese “spy” caught with NASA laptop full of porn, not secrets
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
"Jiang, a former contractor at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, had recently been let go by his employer because of pressure from Republican congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia. Wolf had claimed Jiang and other Chinese engineers employed by NASA contractors were a security risk."
"But it quickly became apparent that Jiang was at worst guilty of violating NASA policies. [...] Jiang had not had clearance to such projects at Langley as an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace"
"A press release issued by Wolf after the arrest and copy of Jiang's arrest warrant have since disappeared off the the congressman's website. In the release (cached by Google here), Wolf had said, 'I am particularly concerned that (the) information (on Jiang's laptop) may pertain to the source code for high-tech imaging technology that Jiang has been working on with NASA. This information could have significant military applications for the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army.'"
Confirmed, the USA has entered back into full McCarthyism. Request title change to 'Chinese contractor fired on suspicion by Republican senator'.
Unfortunately, this is also the case for the majority of commercially-published science. And no, JSTOR is not a good response because JSTOR doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of science. Science is one of the most important efforts in human history, and we don't have backups, or even mirrors. Great.
Edit: does anyone know some orgs with deep pockets that would be willing to accept and host 30-50 terabytes of papers? I can't seem to find anyone that doesn't wuss out. I know it's risky, but it's also critically important.
The Pirate Bay?
Sorry, but TPB doesn't actually host any content.
You guys are all crazy.. torrents consisting of this type of content already exist, and they have only one seeder. For example, the excellent Library Genesis collection. Why should I believe you when you tell me countless people will come to the rescue this time? Your average seeder doesn't have piles of terabytes, and evidently doesn't care to seed one or two parts out of thousands.
What is your objective, give it to people that don't want it, or make it available to people that do? The later is not rocket science, the former impossible and pointless. If you are telling me that nobody is interested in your content then I am not going to argue with you... If people are interested in having your content then the only thing standing in their way is your weird objection to attempting to distribute it.
If I am so wrong, so what? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
> the only thing standing in their way is your weird objection
> to attempting to distribute it.
Also, if the collection was only 95%, 98%, 99%, or 99.5% complete, would you mirror it? Keep in mind that you would also have to purchase/acquire about $500-$1500 of storage space.
Thank you, it helps me gauge WTF is going on.
Google?
mail me please.
Jacques
As for the accusation of "wild" exaggeration; granted, it's an exaggeration, and I should probably stop rabble-rousing someday. Still, nationalistic prejudice? Check. Paranoiac delusions of espionage/propaganda? Check. Lack of any reasonable oversight such as, you know, asking NASA by the phone? Check. Harassment of foreign nationals? Check. If anything is lacking, is scale.
If he was going to leak it, it would have been sent months earlier over the internet, duh!
Especially if he knew that someone was suspicious of him. Someone has been watching too many movies.
So proud.
The whole thing is so retarded. If he actually wanted to get data to china, he would have already done so, using the internet. Stopping him on a plane for a suspicion like that is just absurd.
How on Earth will he find such things when he's back in China?
The guy STOLE a computer from NASA.
The "at worst guilty of violating NASA policies" is complete nonsense.
Theft of items exceeding $200 in value is a Grand Theft and is a felony in Virginia. This person committed a felony which in Virginia has a minimum one year prison sentence and up to twenty years. He should have been arrested and it is completely absurd that he wasn't. It's bizarre that the author of the article believes that a person can just steal a computer and it's not a crime.
But from a cultural point of view it's obviously completely different. Anyone sane who let an employee go and realised he hadn't given back his laptop would tell them to give it back, not scream for jail team.
Made me think... weekend prison like in Scandanavia, alternatives to prison &c
Even with a $500 limit though, most likely the cost to NASA of replacing a laptop meets that limit.
A charge of lying to the FBI about the laptop has been "resolved," according to the filings. There is no mention of charges regarding theft of government property.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unite...
An error the official did was making his company a public target, by revealing that they might have sensitive data, without being prepared to an attack. Not so clever move, sorry.
After the forensics team found files that didn't match the DB, they would have a good reason to investigate further and officials / the media wouldn't let nekked bodies stop them from commenting.
Porn would make a poor choice of background media because reverse image search is ubiquitous. Finding the originals would be easy, and showing that the differences between the stego'd images and the originals didn't happen via compression would probably not be too hard either.
If the encryption is good they probably wouldn't get any further than that. Still, any significant quantity of hidden files would generate a large body of evidence that would be very difficult to explain away.
Why go to the trouble of hiding info on the hard drive of a guy who was already under suspicion when a prerecorded skype call or controlled packet latency system would make for a stego medium that was much harder to detect and easier to plausibly deny?
Remember Aaron Schwartz.
But there is too much evidence that they might be much less professional and less equipped with such high-quality hash-databases.
I don't believe that they could allocate enough professional resources (in such a "low priority" target) to actually give clearance of the case and green lights to the officers with certainty. If the porn movies are avis and 700mb, but with SD-quality, then you couldn't notice the difference.
Take 20 porn files porn-a.avi (500MB original or 600MB with hidden data) There are so many rips or rips of rips that you cannot have a complete porn-database. And phew 2GB of compressed and hidden Data. Even if he didn't have used Steganography, he could easily use imageshack.us, imgur.com and other file-hosting sites, heck even upload to porn-sites to hide the data. Additionally you could get bad hashes into your database, when they upload the porn movies themself.
> Take 20 porn files porn-a.avi (500MB original or 600MB with hidden data) There are so many rips or rips of rips that you cannot have a complete porn-database. And phew 2GB of compressed and hidden Data.
The smallest SSD I own could handily fit that data whole and the bloom filter would fit in an arduino a thousand times over. The NSA's shiny new Utah datacenter had a $2B budget for construction alone, do you really think "rips of rips" are going to be a problem? These guys scrape web traffic by putting a T on major junctions of the internet and duplicating everything that comes down the pipes. You could set all of 4chan to making rips with permuted settings and not begin to stress infrastructure of that capacity.
I don't want to be rude, but you seem to be in denial.
That sounds very cool. Do you have any interesting links about it?
The covert channel discussed in the paper doesn't control network traffic directly but if you were maximizing bandwidth and didn't have to hide from an intrusion detection system you would almost certainly want to do so.
Why, naked bodies make the FBI blush?
You are clearly mistaken. I recently read a paper about people who's jobs involve sitting down and looking at child abuse photos, and then trekking off to the councillor. A few blurry porn videos are nothing compared with that.
When there is a breakthrough and the child gets saved, these people are the heroes that make it happen. However I imagine that for every perp caught there are a dozen more that escape justice... personally I can't imagine doing such a job - it'd tear me up inside to know these people are out there. But someone's got to do it.
Though, perhaps like some people that work to clean up extremely gory crime or accident scenes and aren't bothered by it at all, there may be a few that can maintain some kind of separation.
2) Even an innocent man would likely have a very difficult time actually doing that. In many cases it could be straight up impossible; websites go out of business, torrents go unseeded, image boards 404 in a matter of hours, reddit has a search system that makes me look back on old card catalogs fondly...