How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive
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Here are some of my suggestions in response: 1. Stand up on mass, digitally and in person, for what you believe in - don't shy from people sneering or judging that you are distrustful of the existing structures of powers. 2. Exclude the people who support this type of spookery, from investment bankers, to hawking politicians, from polite company. Whether you meet them at a party, or a plane, shun and shame them. 3. Crank up the noise. Write, make, do what you can to get more stuff out there. 4. Don't be singular. Be the complexity. 5. Never believe again. Demand evidence, oversight, & review processes. Demand transparency. 6. Commit to fixing what's broken. Fix the drug wars, fix the election system, fix the income inequalities, fix the racial divide. etc. 7. ? what else?
ps. Any obligatory comments about the obligatory NSA jokes?
This is a remarkably effective method to alienate people who are "on the fence." These are precisely the people that you need for suggestion #1 to be effective.
this passage from Catch-22 comes to mind whenever I see someone desperately demanding moderation between a ruthless right and a radical left
Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to go far in the academic world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging out around modern museums with both eyes glued together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger's predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies, and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope. He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterwards in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
I am curious how you came to this conclusion? Maybe this is more of a personal observations and is colored by your political leanings and those that you are surrounded by? I know a lot of people that were not turned on by the "with us or against us" line. I also think that it did not go over well in the international political arena.
We've found a reason to demand this stuff every single year for the past 200 years. At some point, you need to go beyond demanding it and actually get it.
> Commit to fixing what's broken. Fix the drug wars, fix the election system, fix the income inequalities, fix the racial divide. etc.
And I think this is the closest thing to the correct answer. I think privacy advocates would be absolutely shocked to discover that fixing things like this would naturally help fix NSA abuses. And TSA abuses. And police brutality.
I agree absolutely. With everything you mention. These things are intertwined. The solutions need to be intertwined as well.
Nobody should get away with that.
This isn't just an attack on the internet, as Greenwald portrays it, it's an attack on people and free will. It's intended to get people to do or say something that they might have done differently otherwise, in response to the "crime" of being a pain in the ass, or even a threat, to the powerful.
> In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, ...
Is this the best we can do with this civilization, to wear away and destroy people because they're inconvenient to the powerful?
> extrajudicial
That's why it's secret.
Deleted comment
Isn't that a good definition for terrorism?
"Terrorism is the systematic use of violence (terror) as a means of coercion for political purposes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism
They're not using violence, terror, they're using non-violent and subtle psy-ops. Terrorists want you to know who did it and why they did it. These psy-ops spies would prefer that they're never discovered.
Although if we were doing something like this, they would call that terrorism. Because anything that they can possibly insert themselves into automatically becomes terrorism.
That's an interesting way of looking at it.
I would have said it the other way around: "If the 'good guys' found out the 'bad guys' were doing something like this, they'd call it terrorism.
By "we" I meant everyone who is not a spy. By "they" I meant the spy agencies. And so, if the spy agencies take an interest in some activity, it becomes by (their) definition terrorism, so that they can claim that it's within their charter.
So, by definition if we agree the "good guys" would call this terrorism, then isn't this terrorism ?
(After all, the "good guys" are writing the history books, and they're making the definitions, because whatever the "good guys" say is obviously correct)
But no, it's not terrorism, especially not merely because they say it is. There's no violence, and the perpetrators not only don't want to be found out, they don't even want people to realize that something happened. Not all evil is terrorism (but all terrorism is evil).
You're going by the dictionary definition, I'm going by "it's whatever they say it is".
Personally, I am disgusted by not surprised that the same authoritarianism can be found all over the world, even in a nominal democracy like the US.
So the question is: how can we protect ourselves from any of these efforts (may or may not be coming from a government)?
Good question.
One is to live as honestly as possible. Including making others aware of attacks on your character. This may mean admitting your own faults or deviations, which can be painful, but it deprives your opponents of a lever or fulcrum against you.
Reading the FBI blackmail letter to Martin Luther King recently, I was struck by how similar the language was to that of many modern-day trolls. Some tactics simply don't change.
I'm looking for some good guides, though I'm not aware of any in particular (and the Albert Einstein Institution seems oddly silent on this point).
This page has some good bits (under "WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?"): http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?action=printpage;top...
What's been working for me so far is just being pretty boring. Although I guess I could be even more boring (e.g. less arguing online ;).
2. Assimilate significant quantities of incriminating information.
3. Disseminate this to the world via a leaking portal or sympathetic journalist.
4. Profit!
This is real, but so is companies just having people online who naturally do these things. God knows you can't poke Google around too much without a Googler making an impassioned plea for them. Same goes for Facebook, or any of the other large SV employers.
And then there's just fans. Seems like I remember Amazon coming to the conclusion, after digging through spurious bad reviews of products, that many of them were just from people who had other brands and didn't like that one. So they made up fake reviews. That's not some mysterious spy agency; that's the guy who runs the garage down the street.
And that's why these things are so effective -- they blend into the noise that is the crap that is the internet at large.
I'm concerned about this in general, but I need more information about how this is being used as part of an extra-judicial punishment before I start bouncing off the walls.
1. If you're stupid enough to get caught up doing illegal crap online in PUBLIC domains then...yeah...I mean do you think they're NOT looking?
2. this is actual spy-craft and when applied abroad, I have NO qualms about using it to the USA's advantage
3. How is any of this new information? After Operation Mockingbird, how is anyone surprised?
Which is to say that US netizens are quite likely among the prime targets here.
The practices alluded to - a battery of psychological techniques designed to influence group dynamics of, and disrupt the sharing of information by, online communities - seem at least as suitable for controlling dissent as for action against overtly illegal activities. How does destroying the reputation of a company help with the latter, for example?
I'll tell you what though, fascinating though this is, I wish we had got the 'real poop' - materials which must surely exist for the training alluded to, fleshing out the practical details, with illustrative examples!
I want the data on false flag stuff and covert James Bond missions.
Snowden needs to drop the REAL gems.
Hey, any GCHQ 'magicians' here? C'mon, the cat's out of the bag... Lighten up! Strut your magic here and show us how it's done!
You know that story about the soccer match between the trenches.. This could be that, right?
As a side note, this has been standard practice since the time of Hammurabi, where political asylum was granted but only if the seeker stopped agitating against his original state.
Also note that the article is about the GCHQ, so anyone in the U.S. is "abroad" to them.
You say it's fine if it's applied abroad. But assume that someone abroad is applying it to what is to them "abroad", that is, what to us is domestically. But it's a foreign operation trying to influence domestic policy. That is, to apply this against foreign operators, it may well need to be applied domestically.
Now, the gotcha: I see the need. But do I trust the NSA/CIA/FBI/whoever to apply it only against foreign-controlled domestic operations? No, I don't.
But let's say your facebook suddenly has "accidental" porn searches for "big black gay cocks". Or your picture mysteriously turns up in a set of pictures for Occupy Wall Street (dirty hippy!) even when you were not there.
However, the only good about this is that the more revelations come out the more courts and people will ignore internet "evidence". And that's as it should be.
This is from the British spies. So using it abroad would be eg against the US.
(And why are foreigners worth less caring than Americans anyway?)
If we really want reform, the uncomfortable truth is that the only way to reform the system is to reduce the amount of money flowing to defence contractors. Unfortunately I think, aside from a total economic collapse, pigs will sooner evolve wings.
The only thing that has really "scaled" here is the people themselves, and I don't find it strange that all the normal real-life problems have followed people as they migrated online.
As if this nation of 300M+ people is all on the same page?
See the fallacy of your logic there?
> The broader point is that, far beyond hacktivists, these surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.
Is it a matter of saying "Hey GCHQ we have a guy who is in the US who we can't do these things to but he's related to this guy over here in foreign country ?" Wouldn't traditionally that example include the CIA/FBI instead? Or for less oversight would it make more sense to use one of the Five Eyes Alliance nations. I think that in that example that's troublesome in that it undermines what for better or worse where bureaucracy protects the citizenry of the US.
Edit to include the CIA
The line is drawn officially at the point they can use legalese verbiage to avoid any problems. So that line was supposed to be, at least for the NSA and CIA, "Never spy on American's without a warrant." (according to William Binney, Thomas Drake, et al) The real line though, is whatever they can get away with. The USUK (five eyes) was setup in 1947, and has been used as a giant loophole of sharing ever since.
The real issue though, the one everyone likes to ignore, is the origins of the US and British intelligence world in the first place, as a covert arm for banker elites in Wall Street and in The City (London). These are entities and groups of entities who have very little allegiance to a single nation (British aristocratic royalists as the rare exception) and use nation against nation as if they were simply pieces on what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls the "Grand Chessboard'.
I am continually awaiting the day that everyone realizes the NSA/CIA/DIA/DoD...etc violations of privacy are simply a small part of a larger issue, namely, that the supranational corporate elite realized that technology has finally gotten to the point where if they make a power play now, they or their grandchildren can be "gods" among the proletariat masses. Our entire American government system of checks and balances is utterly corrupt, including all three branches and the fourth estate.
I used to be part of their action arm (USMC combat vet), and it took many years of study since I got out to come to these conclusions. What really frustrates me though, is that, just like the NSA issues before Snowden, no one is going to realize or admit these things until they stare them in the face. The irony is that the main reason people won't is because of the much larger than realized mass propaganda efforts (including the efforts described in this latest documentation) which keep a large enough of percentage of the populous distracted, apathetic, afraid, or even complicit enough to render any real opposition power null and void.
The main issue I have been debating for the past few years is: "Should we be going underground subversive now, or should we make one last stand?" Either way, I fear freedom will be a long lost memory until the days that people can travel in space freely, if we don't destroy the planet and the species by then.
As cliched as it is, the rabbit hole is not only deeper than most realize, but it's actually really uncomfortable to explore. (especially when you have a hand in the game, like many on HN)
However, surely by now people like Glen Greenwald have heard such feedback so if someone from the other side of the aisle wanted to reverse false flag they would just use atrocious designs.
However, now the govt. has read THIS, so I clearly cannot choose the cup in front of me...
I mean, I could fabricate documents that detail how the moon landing was faked, but I would be called out on my fabrication immediately. In this case however the only people floating the "the documents are fake" theory are third parties with no unique insight into the allegations, notably not the accused.
Unless through all the noise I've missed where the govt. has said this or that document in particular is in fact genuine. I'm not saying it hasn't happened but I haven't seen it. Even acknowledgement of a program (PRISM, for example) isn't acknowledgement of PRISM slide #4, although it does make it's authenticity more likely than not.
1) Disclosing additional information, or inadvertently attesting to the validity of documents. (obvious attack: release two plausible contradictory "top secret" documents" which cover the whole space you care about; when people discredit one, you have strong evidence of the latter.)
2) Complicating later CI investigations -- if MAJ Snuffy has downloaded wikileaks docs onto his personal laptop, and a scan finds a bunch of TS/NOFORNicate documents on it (heh), it will be a false positive. If SSG Evil wants to exfiltrate documents, she can just fill a laptop with wikileaks stuff and her own documents and then, if caught, claim it was just wikileaks downloads.
But CI investigators are allowed to touch this stuff. Just like some FBI people see child porn all the time (which has to be one of the shittiest jobs in infosec).
My point is that although the government has not officially declared the documents to be authentic, their failure to merely laugh them off as obvious fakes created by a kook is more than telling.
Um. It's ridiculously bad PR to respond to every such claim. The best possible scenario is that a couple people will take your word for it. Most people will instead just take such a response as a legitimization of the criticism. You might be particularly credulous and accept the government's say-so, but I wouldn't.
There have been responses, just no accusations of fabrication....
I'm seeing .pngs when I click the slides where, if I was thinking there's a proveable origin, it would be a digitally signed pdf or something like what the GPO (government printing office) uses, but for secret things of course...
Falsification would be a lot more likely if anyone handed you docs after Snowden went public, but before it was public, it was either a set up (by Snowden), or pretty strongly authenticated.
The arrow of time cannot be defeated.
-Snowden hands you paper/digital files, possibly with no trail that you can verify (besides govt. acknowledgment of any specific document)
- You (likely) immediately make (many) digital copies, this is a trail others can verify later - like with an md5 sum or something (not my forte, obviously).
- Before you assist with releasing the whole cache and risk another wikileaks-style attack for not being more sensitive to the content in each document, you start the long process of reviewing each document.
- You find acceptable publications
- You publish the documents from step 2 (which have a digital trail to verify they were handed to GG from Snowden at the time they say they were)
That last step hasn't happened as far as I know, we're getting pictures of documents...
I could google but if you wouldn't mind linking anything you might have offhand in that regard, I'd appreciate it.
but not, "never directly connect it to the Internet"? Seems odd to me since you can use the same air-gap to configure the computer for your needs in the first place instead of turning a networked computer into an air-gapped one.
"But for Windows full-disk encryption it's that..."
But not an open-source operating system with access to the exact same security solutions? Why isn't using Tails or other Linux something that's at a minimum instead of a "you could if you like".
No mention of better air-gapping the computer by keeping modules attached to the motherboard to a minimum (usb cd-drives, removable 3.5" media readers).
Overall: I am by no means a security expert, but as a lawyer who has to do due diligence on cloud providers (most fail as far as what they advertise or in being truly eligible), I would consider his described setup as very weak if the motive that makes you consider air-gapping in the first place is your first priority. It seems more like his second or third priority...
2) My opinion of Schneier's technical competence, at least on a tactical level, is not actually (nor has it ever been) particularly high. He's a Windows guy, and "management level". He is a good politician and spokesperson. He's still good enough for this particular thing, and much better at the human side, and essentially famous/rich enough to be immune from legal action as long as he's careful, and well known to people like GG. So, a good choice.
It's like he's trying to air-gap in the way that I try a tomato every 7 years to see if my taste buds have changed. They haven't, so I'll stick to what tastes good. But if a famine overtakes the world and tomatoes are somehow part of a new staple diet, I'll allow myself to be inconvenienced if it means that much to my survival.
https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/2014/02/de...
https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/2014/02/de...
No source, no link, nothing.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/documents/
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/02/24/art-d...
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1021...
I would like to bring the attention of people who read this article back to the tactics such as the real-time spying on Wikileaks viewers. Tactics discussed by the likes of HB Gary's Aaron Barr like going after activists by their families and careers, or the US Chamber of Commerce's interest in such work.
There is a profound amount of moral hazards here that companies are wading deep into for cash and possible immunity such as what AT&T was granted.
If we leaked more emails from inside the NSA, how many more gung-ho morons would there be pushing the envelope to make a name for themselves?
You've gotta get ahead somehow. Make some waves, you know?
[0] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cia-backed-palantir-technologi...
I could go on, if you like. In-Q-Tel has backed a lot of stuff.
[1] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia...
You could of had the advantage of people not knowing more about this type of work enlisted by governments/carried out by for-profit concerns, instead you choose to be highly corrosive in an attempt to elicit some reaction.
But by golly here you are again doing the same. So while your attention is clearly engaged upon me, could you answer the question above?
If you're going to write a conspiracy theory for us, "streetnigga", at least do it with some style. Throw an "Ewige Blumenkraft" or two in there.
Have Karl Koch and a downvote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker)
I have a very hard time taking people who believe in the Michael Hastings conspiracy seriously, and that's just one of the goofy conspiracy theories the parent commenter has promoted on HN.
I agree the most likely situation with Hastings was he had personal issues, but maybe got spooked by someone calling him or otherwise being threatening, and crashed his car. After writing some pretty good articles. And Barrett Brown has some serious issues as well, although (like aaronsw and weev, and manning's pre-trial detention conditions) the way the legal system is being used is itself unconscionable.
I still think "punch up" applies.
I don't understand where you're even coming from regarding Hastings. He had a history of abusing drugs and alcohol. His car crashed. A bunch of Internet conspiracy theorists decided that crashed cars don't burst into flames the way video showed Hastings car had, even as other Internet people, including (here on HN) an EMT, pointed out that they actually do exactly that surprisingly often; some even presented videos. The LA Coroner released a report that pointed out Hastings had amphetamines and cannabis in his system when his car crashed.
From where, exactly, do you get the notion that he received a threatening phone call? Is there any evidence anywhere at all that that ever happened, or does it just make for a good story?
(I recall reading somewhere that he was convinced someone was monitoring him. But I suspect occam's razor in this case was being used to cut up lines.)
Also: are you seriously telling me you haven't read Robert Anton Wilson? You seem like, I don't know, the type.
I haven't, and don't really have feelings on the case either way - it seems inactionable and thus uninteresting. But it seems to me that the reasonable uninvolved opinion should be to treat views on Michael Hastings's death as unindicative of much else at all.
That is the entirety of the Hastings conspiracy theory, which the commenter leading this thread has promoted on HN in the past.
Hastings was a journalist who had covered "national security" topics. Hastings sent the following email:
"Hey (redacted names) -- the Feds are interviewing my "close friends and associates." Perhaps if the authorities arrive "BuzzFeed GQ," er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues. Also: I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the rada[r] for a bit. All the best, and hope to see you all soon. Michael"
Hasting died 14 hours later at 4:20 AM when his speeding car veered into one of the many trees lining the road. There were no skidmarks, suggesting that the vehicle was under control. Nobody knows why he was driving at that time.
It's hardly ironclad proof of a conspiracy, but you are not contributing to the discussion.
To everyone not tptacek: Look at my comments, none suggest Hastings died due to tptacek suggested conspiracy.
There are lots of things we can't prove or disprove, and it's good to acknowledge that. But that doesn't make ideas based on huge logical leaps and not much evidence reasonable. It's possible (in the sense of not impossible) that leprechauns are real and do manipulate human history, but the reasons anyone would think so right now are so paltry that even if it did somehow turn out to be the case, the people who supported the theory right now would still not seem any more credible than a broken clock.
It's not that true/false are equally credible, it's that assertion of either one starts off utterly non-credible. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. This applies to proving the existence of leprechauns. But it also applies to positively disproving the existence of (a specific definition of) leprechauns, especially with the goal of using that result to imply something else.
Insisting the definitiveness of either take on a middleground is akin to rooting for sports teams (not that that isn't fun, but don't think you're helping spread truth).
Retract your outright fallacy.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7084938
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083406
[2] http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/why-democrats-love-to-spy-...
That's even better than Tang from the space program!
Having one of your 27-year-old SEs eagerly working alongside Barr to move a deal forward has bad optics. But believing that Glenn Greenwald should be thwarted is an opinion that, while obviously objectionable on HN, not actually unethical.
"believing that Glenn Greenwald should be thwarted is an opinion that, while obviously objectionable on HN, not actually unethical."
Are you trying to say that an employee for NSA contractor Palantir discussing targeting a journalist because of his work on a topic is separate from the employee's beliefs, therefore is not actually unethical?
How exactly did the journalist, or his career get brought up in a conversation between federal contractors about solicitation for work again? Was it to talk about of the reports they liked from him?
Now, some important caveats:
(1) It is obviously possible to unethically thwart any writer's agenda. Publishing things you know to be untrue, even in the service of what you believe is a higher truth, is unethical; it's exactly what someone might accuse Greenwald of having done. For that matter, invading Greenwald's privacy by, I don't know, stealing his bank records would also be deeply unethical. But Palantir hasn't been accused of either of these, or, for that matter, anything else unethical w/r/t Greenwald. Feel free to enlighten me here.
(2) If you can't tell, I'm not a major Greenwald fan. Having said that, I also believe the best antidote for bad speech is good speech, so orchestrating a campaign to suppress him doesn't seem like a good strategy to me. It apparently sounded like a good idea to one of Palantir's SEs, which ended up getting the guy fired.
GMail is not secure against the NSA or even a state judge's warrant. That has numerous advantages for society but regardless it's not and never will be secure against government orders. That's never been its design. Levinson's service was secure against them for certain clients.
The reason the anti-NSA crowd is intrigued by him is the same reason sources told their secrets to Bob Woodward. He proved willing to protect Deep Throat's identity despite immense effort to out it. Similarly Levinson was willing to risk his business and contempt proceedings to protect Snowden.
The government's wiretap order and the subsequent contempt proceedings suggests that despite the technical problems of Lavabit, the government did not get the data they sought. Had Snowden used GMail, do you believe the government would have received the information they sought?
This isn't security in the sense you'd use it in an audit. It's just a design decision. In the vernacular, designs that permit the release of private information are sometimes called insecure.
Weren't the people trying to (order people to) thwart him in the best position to know whether details were actually made up?
Unless a service enables you to put your data really truly out of reach of any demand for it, those NSA slides about which companies are part of the Prism program are probably an accurate list of companies enabling dragnet surveillance.
All of these are standard practise in business. Any business that doesn't do them get demolished or taken over by one that does.
And any person who doesn't do them gets knifed by one who does, not only in business but also in open source software so I've found out. Perhaps the NSA/GCHQ have simply been taken over by business people.