Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

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I'm interested in knowing how evidence obtained via Anonymous can be submitted in a court of law. When I did evidence collecting work as part of infosec work there are very strict criteria if the evidence is going to be used in a police case[1].

We have to sign off on everything and record how we obtained the information and have been told by a number of lawyers that in no way are we allowed to break the law when collecting evidence that could be forwarded to police or prosecutors.

Private detectives go through the same thing as well. If they are carrying out a private investigation for a corporate client they can't submit evidence that has been obtained illegally to be used at trial. For eg. you can submit evidence from public surveillance, but you can't submit anything that you obtain by hacking email accounts or placing a recording device on private property.

From what I understand, there are very very strict rules about both gathering evidence and then chain of custody. The person who collects the evidence has to sign off on it and then be prepared to testify in a court to back up what they found. I know for certain that this applies in the USA, UK and Australia.

I wonder how the FBI are able to use evidence collected by Anonymous, or if they just use that work as a basis for their own investigations which start from scratch. I can't imagine a judge would be impressed when told that key evidence was obtained via an illegal breakin perpetrated by a group of hackers.

Re: Sabu. I've read everything there is on that case and don't recall a reference to his handlers prompting him on Operation Darknet. The timing also doesn't seem to work - Sabu was taken offline last March while this arrest is the culmination of a 12-month investigation, which would suggest it started around 5 months after Sabu's work with the FBI was completed.

[1] Just a note - I was usually against prosecuting the defacement style hackers or guys who were just poking around for fun. In all my work i've only ever been involved in two cases where evidence I collected (IP addresses, email addresses etc.) ended up being used in an investigation and in both cases it was phishing attacks from Russia.

Interesting fact: How evidence was obtained is only important in the US. For example, in Austria where I live, it doesn't matter how the evidence was obtained.

In Austria, if someone illegally spies on you, the information they collect can be freely used in court. It is not important where the evidence comes from, it is only important if the evidence is credible or not.

This doesn't mean that the police can do whatever they want; if they torture someone, a potential confession would be worthless because it wouldn't be credible. And if the police used illegal means, that would bring about a separate trial (in theory).

But courts in Austria never have to pretend that some evidence doesn't exist.

> is only important in the US

It may not be important everywhere, but there are other places where the origin of evidence is indeed important (e.g. Spain, in the EU). Just because in Austria it isn't you can't conclude that it's only important in the US.

>But courts in Austria never have to pretend that some evidence doesn't exist.

Those restrictions are important to safeguard people's rights. The US since its founding has always had a bias for protecting individual civil rights, in theory at least. I rather this way of doing things.

Presumption of innocence is not directly enshrined in the US constitution. Some local jurisdictions purposefully relax it for the sake of balance. (For example, it is done in places where it is seen as much too hard to convict for rape.)

But courts in Austria never have to pretend that some evidence doesn't exist.

It's not about pretending the evidence doesn't exist, it's about protecting people from abuse of police power.

My understanding (and really, I was just a curious observer occasionally in irc at the time) is that the anons would submit the information anonymously, then the FBI would pass it on to LEAs in the appropriate countries or use the anonymous tip to get a search warrant in the US. I doubt anything grabbed by Anon would ever be used directly in court.

As for the timing, you may well be right. I simply remember Freedom Hosting being a target back in the day. While this case may not have anything to do with Op Darknet, it did ring some bells for me and arouse my suspicions of Op Darknet in general.

This might be a very naive question (I know nothing about these things) but is it possible that a piece of information obtained by such illegal means could be used to aid an investigation without using it as evidence in a court?

That is what I think they must be doing, but practically it must be difficult to work.

For eg. Anonymous hack a child porn site and dump the database, which they send to police. I can't see an easy way how the police can use that information without it coming up in court as to how they got the lead in the first place. If they were to subpoena that persons email account or apply for a search warrant, the probable cause would need to be something that the police discovered independently.

The database would be a good source of leads, which would have to be worked separately.

It is very possible for something to go wrong. Everybody needs to know about Operation Ore:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore

US feds sent a database of users of an online payments service that was servicing child porn sites to police in the UK. What was lost in the communication, or what the US feds didn't know, was that the same payment service was also being used by legal or legitimate adult sites.

The UK police treated each user as a child pornographer, and made 3,700+ arrests out of the 7,000+ suspects. Most of these people were innocent, and the dragnet caught up teachers, lawyers, police officers, etc. and resulted in 33 suicides. It took these people a very long time to have their names cleared, and most have never recovered.

> Most of these people were innocent, and the dragnet caught up teachers, lawyers, police officers, etc. and resulted in 33 suicides. It took these people a very long time to have their names cleared, and most have never recovered.

I'll bet some of them even had nothing to hide. If you just take into account the fall-out from this particular incident (which should have led to a few more heads to roll) then that alone is an excellent reason why dragnet style surveillance is a really bad thing. It leads to a large number of false positives and those in turn will have very negative real world consequences for innocent people that would have otherwise been able to just continue to live their lives.

Law enforcement should be done with the scalpel, not with the blunt end of an axe.

"it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" -- Ben Franklin...

Today it seems the government believes it is better for 100 innocent persons suffer than to allow 1 guilty to escape....

Yeah, back then hey just convicted really guilty people, like escaped slaves.

And today they would also hang some of the slaves that didn't flee under the assumption that they might try to escape at some point as well... (and it's possible that they did in the past - the cited passage wasn't law)

Slavery was a grave error of that time. But it doesn't devalue the other, unrelated principles of yore as presented in that Ben Franklin quote of the GP.

Yeah yeah, and witches, too.

But the fact that, centuries ago, non-whites and women weren't considered Persons with a capital P still doesn't negate the fact that the USA has abandoned its most important foundational principles (rule of law, fundamental and inalienable civil rights, freedom of speech) over the past 12 years.

12 years, you say? Where was the rule of law and fundamental civil rights when 80 000 citizens where sent to internment camps based solely on the nationality of their parents?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

Well, sadly absent, sure. That was a tragic wartime clusterfuck -- but bad as it was, it was still a far cry from the current disappearing people (including citizens) and interning and torturing them for years on end. And the Japanese interment camps were later officially repudiated by the government, and reparations were paid to the victimized families in the Reagan era. Not that reparations are sufficient to make it right, but it it still qualitatively different than the current situation.

I'm not claiming that the USA unhypocritically perfectly adhered to its stated values in the past. We broke the law and tortured people in WWII, in Vietnam, and in the guerrilla wars of South America, too. But you had to do those things below the radar. There were eventually consequences, if it was found out.

Now the US government disappears its citizens, or kills them (and whatever men, women and children that happen to be nearby) right out in the open, and the President goes on TV to talk about what a weighty thing it is on his conscience for him to approve all these murder lists in advance.

It's true, as some point out, that unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral things have always been done by the US government (and pretty much any government). However, it seems to me a fundamentally different thing when it is done without even pretending to adhere to the law or the constitution, in any more meaningful way than Nixon's claim that "when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal"[1][2].

[1]: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon

[2]: https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_white...

Rules have exceptions. Nobody can argue that the US government has never done anything wrong, but there is a difference between failing to uphold your principles and outright abandoning them.

We shouldn't let past abuses excuse future abuses.

> or if they just use that work as a basis for their own investigations which start from scratch.

That's a tough argument for them to make because even a 'from scratch' investigation needs to start somewhere and I can't see how they're going to do that short of anonymously tipping themselves about who to investigate.

Then is a reason they call this "anonymous" tips.

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