The Pirate Bay is an FBI honeypot? A disconcertingly plausible conspiracy theory
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
Plus, while the FBI is allowed to facilitate minor illegal actions during under-cover operations (like having one of their agents work as a mod at Silk Road), this would involve them essentially paying for and running the infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of acts of piracy. I'm pretty sceptical the people in charge would sign off on that, especially if most of the information could be gathered using other methods.
Yes!
They can glean the IP addresses of the people who upload torrent files to TPB by running a honeypot. There's a much stronger case going after the providers of stolen material than the consumers.
Does that mean they're doing that? I don't know.
EDIT - REPLY LIMIT HIT - REPLYING HERE SINCE I CAN'T RESPOND BELOW
> If that's what they wanted to do, couldn't they just set it up so they continuously downloaded all new torrents and looked at the ip of the initial seeder?
How do you know you got the new seeder and not the first consumer? That's less reliable than "hey look an HTTP/1.0 POST with the exact torrent file came from this IP address at this time".
Regardless, assume the FBI/NSA/CSIS/MI-X/etc... are capturing everything you do including the comments on here, reddit, twitter, Facebook, 4-chan, torrent, tor, and really everywhere else. The can unravel that onion, so unless it's carefully encrypted, and it on the internet, assume the governments either have it or have access to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...
The problem with discussions about the NSA on HN is that sense, reasoning and rationality seem to go out the window.
That claim contradicts what Glenn Greenwald says. Why is he wrong?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-...
Null hypothesis. His extraordinary claim required extraordinary evidence, and there was none. It is not up to me to prove a negative.
But this is a pointless conversation. There is something about the topic of the NSA on HN... the debate has no logic or sense.
They are not looking at you specifically but they are keeping your data in case one day they do want to look at you.
But add to it that they will look at every upclick, upvote, downvote, and comment of yours on Hacker News, Reddit, Ars Technica and other popular social media sites.
Theyll know you better than your own mother.
FBI TPB is possibly here to gather more filth to throw around normal people.
Much of what they capture can be stored temporarily for filtering, saving what looks interesting and discarding what isn't.
Sure, we can concede that they aren't storing absolutely everything. The point is: they're storing a lot, and they're trying to store as much as they possibly can.
The mistake you are making is using facts and logic. This is a discussion about the NSA on HackerNews. Facts and logic are of no interest here.
Errrr...
To do this, it grabs IP addresses (a number assigned to each internet-connected device by its internet service provider that can often be used to identify a person), which conspiracy-minded folks say would be a nice thing for the FBI to have. Theoretically, if CloudFlare is saving these IP addresses, the FBI could subpoena CloudFlare for that data. And if the government is actually running the site, then it would have those IP addresses by default.
This is a very confusing argument. If the FBI controls The Pirate Bay then it wouldn't need CloudFlare to be able to get the IP addresses of people connecting to The Pirate Bay because... they'd be The Pirate Bay and so would see people connecting.
http://www.wired.com/2013/08/freedom-hosting/
"It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia."
If the FBI does nothing else, they learn from past mistakes.
Yep.
> I don't really follow this argument.
It's not a piece of evidence in favor of the FBI being involved. It's an explanation for why they would use CloudFlare and/or what they would use CF for.
As I said elsewhere, I don't really buy the arguments. But I don't use TPB either. The only torrent I download are Linux/BSD ISOs. So I'm not going to risk my freedom on not buying arguments. :)
Not that I believe that, but it's simple to point out that all evidence for this theory is a bunch of Twitter messages with second hand information.
Nice journalism on Vice's part..
If the FBI were running PirateBay, why would they need CloudFlare to grab IP addresses?
Who knows if the FBI is running the new pirate bay, but this article provides no particular reason to think so.
More like: They're harvesting IP addresses, and they're using cloudflare to disguise the IP address of the server? That's what I would do if I were an FBI cybercrime team member assigned to this case.
If it is a honeypot, it's pretty crappily made one, with honey dribbling out through a crack and "hunny" written on it.
If there is no existing censorship infrastructure installed at the respondent ISPs which can fulfil the terms of the existing court order, the applicant may need to go back to court - and it may need a re-hearing, as the order was allowed only on the basis that existing infrastructure could do it. I don't think the Digital Economy Act site blocking provisions made it in, so there's no primary legislation, no case law that I know of (bearing in mind I'm just an interested layperson!), this specific thing was discussed and specifically dropped in Parliament, and the balance of harm has changed.
I don't know if it's a honeypot - the staff are reportedly locked out, and CloudFlare (US) might be as neutral as they can be when it comes to what they reverse-proxy, but The Pirate Bay (real or not) is possibly the most internationally-notorious website in the world; a ruthless test of CloudFlare's legal and technical resilience if it's not FBI. (I certainly wouldn't expect them to hold the line in these circumstances!)
But I can't see what the site itself would really get the FBI/etc. that they can't get by easier means: these are all public torrents and they run no tracker.
Either way, I'm getting popcorn.
Yeah, this could get good. Will countries block Cloudflare entirely, potentially forcing cloudflare to refuse to have piratebay as a customer? Will they require cloudflare to provide special IP's used just for piratebay? Will they give up?
It would not have occured to me that something as simple and widespread as using cloudflare -- so widespread by 'legit' businesses that nobody can think it's just a tool for criminals -- would put such a wrench in current censorship attempts.
Go internet!
I'm calling the bluff of Western governments taking the same line. They ask about it, sure, and they'd do it to little sites that wouldn't fight back or that they rule illegal, but to do it to powerful, well-known, extremely popular sites is a huge, overt, draconian step: one they and the populace supporting them will hopefully find too distasteful to bear. One that reminds them about the cost, drawbacks and hopelessness of what they are doing, and forces them to ask the hard questions about whatever they think the benefit is, and whether it's really worth it.
It's an interesting anti-censorship tactic I've studied for a while. It is however essentially playing chicken with nation-states to see what collateral damage they're willing to accept to take control of what their citizens have access to before they give up, however. It thus may fail, but the stakes can always, potentially, be raised again. The ultimate failure mode for it is a nation-state deciding to disconnect from the internet completely - but that's what so-called "guerrilla networking" is for, because fuck that noise.
The tactic is also potentially applicable to even the most advanced DPI-based protocol blocking, if you have a indistinguishable link protocol and a set of techniques to masquerade such a protocol as more recognisable protocols. I don't have anything to release regarding that yet. <g>
They'd try to work something out so the UK really just could block piratebay, or they'd fire piratebay as a customer.
Either one of which would be really bad PR for cloudflare among the digirati. They wouldn't want to do it. Perhaps they'd manage to work something else out with the (eg) UK government. But I don't think they'd just accept all their customers being blocked, they'd lose too much business.
No matter what happens, it'd keep the topic in the news, and demonstrate what a mess it is, so be a success on that front.
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That's the spirit.
There's a user story in this: "I use this thing to get stuff that I want". If the system backing that action isn't distributed then it's vulnerable.
For the average user, a legit torrent site is indistinguishable from a spam site. TPB have actually done an enormous service to the Internet for years by reducing the amount of malware installed by "download assistants" and so on. Despite the issues with many of the torrents themselves.
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2013/papers/sigcomm/p...
The pieces are there, it's just a matter of motivating a group of sophisticated developers to tackle this problem.
The problem is that the first moment such network gets traction, someone will set up a robot which will make submissions of random data named "Game of Thrones S0xE0y" every second, effectively rendering search useless. The real challenge is to solve problem of decentralised moderation, not to create a decentralised network.
Bittorrent is decentralized, but Bittorrent (the protocol) says nothing about how you retrieve a torrent. It starts the moment you have retrieved a torrent (or, possibly, a magnet link), and not before.
4chan, however...