Prism and Verizon surveillance discussion thread

[The Johnny]

Well, if they say they arent doing industrial espionage AND use asterisks, why would anyone feel suspicious?

[Cain]

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[Cain]

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[Junkenstein]

TOTALLY UNRELATED:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24373759

The FBI has announced the arrest of the suspected operator of the Silk Road - a clandestine online marketplace for drugs and other illegal items.

A spokeswoman said that Ross William Ulbricht was arrested "without incident" by its agents at a public library in San Francisco on Tuesday.

She added he had been charged with conspiracy to traffic narcotics.

The FBI said it has also seized approximately $3.6m (£2.2m) worth of bitcoins - a virtual currency.

The agency described it as the biggest Bitcoin seizure to date.

HAHAHAHA

[Lord Cataplanga]

So, the NSA and GCHQ have been trying to de-anonymize Tor users for a while, according to the latest leaked document.

Good news, they can't. Tor is actually still very secure.
Bad news, that may be just what they want us to think (check the last slide) 

[Forsooth]

TOTALLY UNRELATED:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24373759

The FBI said it has also seized approximately $3.6m (£2.2m) worth of bitcoins - a virtual currency.

The agency described it as the biggest Bitcoin seizure to date.

HAHAHAHA

I'd laugh so hard if the exchange rate plummets and they have seized $36,000 worth of bitcoins

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

So, the NSA and GCHQ have been trying to de-anonymize Tor users for a while, according to the latest leaked document.

Good news, they can't. Tor is actually still very secure.
Bad news, that may be just what they want us to think (check the last slide) 

No. Tor is not very secure.

There's a flaw in the design that means, basically, if you control enough of the exit nodes, you can see where all the traffic is going. The price tag on enough servers is well under the insanity that is the NSA's budget. Tor is sufficient privacy for "lol let's go read shit on the Scientology website and maybe post some idiot comments on their YouTube channel," it's not enough for, say, running the Silk Road.

[Lord Cataplanga]

So, the NSA and GCHQ have been trying to de-anonymize Tor users for a while, according to the latest leaked document.

Good news, they can't. Tor is actually still very secure.
Bad news, that may be just what they want us to think (check the last slide) 

No. Tor is not very secure.

There's a flaw in the design that means, basically, if you control enough of the exit nodes, you can see where all the traffic is going. The price tag on enough servers is well under the insanity that is the NSA's budget. Tor is sufficient privacy for "lol let's go read shit on the Scientology website and maybe post some idiot comments on their YouTube channel," it's not enough for, say, running the Silk Road.

But the NSA, (according to that leaked document) doesn't (yet?) control enough nodes.
The Silk Road case is very interesting. Let me see if I can find the document explaining how they caught the guy. If I remember correctly, he needed an ID document to rent some servers, so he ordered fake ones and someone opened the package in a random(?) search. The IDs had his picture.

edit: here it is
http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf

also here, the same document:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/2013-silkroad-indictment.pdf

[Cain]

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[tyrannosaurus vex]

Being paranoid, I tend to think the NSA either has or is very close to compromising TOR. The document above says otherwise, but consider the actual effect, which is to encourage continued monitoring of the service. Maybe the NSA's technique relies on gathering as much of this monitoring from as many sources as possible.

[Golden Applesauce]

I doubt that the Silk Road arrest was NSA breaking Tor, if only because the national security value of nobody else knowing you can break Tor is higher than the Silk Road guy. The NSA doesn't particularly care about drug crimes except for use as blackmail to get drug networks to share what they know about the links between that drug network and terrorism / foreign intelligence. Not saying that the NSA hadn't tracked down the Silk Road guy beforehand, but if they did there's some senior NSA officials very pissed at the FBI for arresting one of their best placed informants and turning off the servers they were using to track terrorists with drug habits.

I also doubt the breakthrough came through Tor itself - usually the way these things work is that the guy slips up and forgets to encrypt absolutely everything, and they catch that and use it to sidestep the hard encryption stuff.

Here's a snippet of Brian Kreb's post on the arrest:

the information contained on the server seized by investigators indicates that Ulbricht/Dread Pirate Roberts routinely failed to heed his own advice to fellow Silk Road users: Prominent on the Silk Road site were links to tutorials DPR penned which laid out the technologies and techniques that users should adopt if they want to keep off the radar of federal investigators.

"This shows me that the head of the Silk Road wasn't using [encryption] for all his communications, because [the government] wouldn't have all of this information otherwise, unless of course he stored his encryption key on the server that was seized," Weaver said. "Either [the government] got his encryption key off of this server or another server that they were able to access, or he wasn't using encryption at all."

The complaint also suggests that in June 2013, Ulbricht accessed a server used to control the Silk Road site from an Internet cafe that was 500 feet from the hotel he was staying at in San Francisco.


"In other words, he wasn't even using Tor to administer the Silk Road," Weaver said. "Given that, it's amazing that he was able to keep this site running for three years."

Other rookie mistakes also contributed to DPR's identification as Ross William Ulbricht. In 2011, a person using the nickname "Altoid" posted a comment to the Bitcoin Talk forum trying to get users there to visit the Silk Road. Later in the year, Altoid posted again on the Bitcoin Talk forum, this time seeking an "IT pro" in the Bitcoin community to help with Silk Road administration. In that comment, he posted his Gmail address, the contents of which were later subpoenaed by federal investigators.

Finally, DPR tripped himself up when he ordered some fake IDs from an international Silk Road vendor and had them sent to his residence. The fraudulent IDs were intercepted at the border by customs agents working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which paid a visit to the address to which the documents were to be delivered. The agents noted that while Ulbricht refused to answer any questions about the alleged purchase, one of the identity documents was a California driver's license bearing Ulbricht's photo and true date of birth, but with a different name.

The Silk Road case is very interesting. Let me see if I can find the document explaining how they caught the guy. If I remember correctly, he needed an ID document to rent some servers, so he ordered fake ones and someone opened the package in a random(?) search. The IDs had his picture.

If I were the FBI wanting to discover the identities of a lot of people involved in Silk Road, I'd start by buying some fake IDs and tracking the shipment backward to the source. Then I'd intercept all outbound packages, note the fake IDs, send them to the buyer, and alert other agencies to pay special attention to people claiming to have the same name/DOB as people in the fake IDs.

If tracking that was too hard, I'd set up shop on Silk Road selling IDs, and establish myself as the preferred seller in terms of cost (since I'm not trying to make money) and undetectable forgeries (since I can just ask the appropriate agency to print me an actual ID.)

[Cain]

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[Cain]

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[Golden Applesauce]

The NSA doesn't particularly care about drug crimes except for use as blackmail to get drug networks to share what they know about the links between that drug network and terrorism / foreign intelligence. Not saying that the NSA hadn't tracked down the Silk Road guy beforehand, but if they did there's some senior NSA officials very pissed at the FBI for arresting one of their best placed informants and turning off the servers they were using to track terrorists with drug habits.

Actually, the NSA mandate specifically states they are to combat the flow of drugs into America.  As a DoD agency, they often perform in conjunction with military anti-drug programs like Plan Colombia and Plan Medina (though on whose side is open to interpretation, given "ex"-NSA assistance to certain cartel leaders).

And as we now know, the NSA was specifically cited as the agency which passed on intelligence to the DEA's Special Operations Division, which then underwent "parallel construction" to conceal the source of said information.

That's what I get for pretending I know things I don't. Appreciate the correction.

[Cain]

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