OHAI,
"When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the
woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space,
she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed.
As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness
with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was
stimulated during two days of experiments (Epilepsy and Behavior,
doi.org/tgn)."
-- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329762.700
Aleksander? :)
--
Pozdr
rysiek
Hej,
dobry polityczno-społeczny hack jest dobry. :)
Projekt przeprowadzenia się 20000 osób do New Hampshire w celu uzyskania
realnego wpływu na politykę stanu, w tym tematy związane z prywatnością, i
stworzenie "wolnego stanu":
http://freestateproject.org/
--
Pozdr
rysiek
Trololo.
---------- Treść przekazywanej wiadomości ----------
Temat: messing with XKeyScore
Data: piątek, 4 lipca 2014, 16:56:41
Od: Eugen Leitl
Do: cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org
http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/07/jamming-xkeyscore_4.html?m=1
Errata Security
Advanced persistent cybersecurity
Friday, July 04, 2014
Jamming XKeyScore
Back in the day there was talk about "jamming echelon" by adding keywords to
email that the echelon system was supposedly looking for. We can do the same
thing for XKeyScore: jam the system with more information than it can handle.
(I enumerate the bugs I find in the code as "xks-00xx").
For example, when sending emails, just send from the address
"bridges(a)torproject.org" and in the email body include:
https://bridges.torproject.org/
bridge = 0.0.0.1:443
bridge = 0.0.0.2:443
bridge = 0.0.0.3:443
...
Continue this for megabytes worth of bridges (xks-0001), and it'll totally
mess up XKeyScore. It has no defense against getting flooded with information
like this, as far as I can see.
Note that the regex only cares about 1 to 3 digit numbers, that means the
following will be accepted by the system (xks-0002):
bridge = 75.748.86.91:80
The port number matches on 2 to 4 digits ([0-9]{2,4}). Therefore, bridges with
port numbers below 10 and above 9999 will be safe. I don't know if this code
reflect a limitation in Tor, or but assuming high/low ports are possible, this
can be used to evade detection (xks-0011).
Strangely, when the port number is parsed, it'll capture the first non-digit
character after the port number (xks-0012). This is normally whitespace, but
we could generate an email with 256 entries, trying every possible character.
A character like < or ' might cause various problems in rendering on an HTML
page or generating SQL queries.
You can also jam the system with too many Onion addresses (xks-0003), but
there are additional ways to screw with those. When looking for Onion
addresses, the code uses a regex that contains the following capture clause:
([a-z]+):\/\/)
This is looking for a string like "http://" or "https://", but the regex has
no upper bounds (xks-0004) and there is no validation. Thus, you can include
"goscrewyourself://o987asgia7gsdfoi.onion:443/" in network traffic, and it'll
happily insert this into the database. But remember that "no upper bounds"
means just that: the prefix can be kilobytes long, megabytes long, or even
gigabytes long. You can open a TCP connection to a system you feel the NSA is
monitoring, send 5 gigabytes of lower-case letters, followed by the rest of
the Onion address, and see what happens. I mean, there is some practical upper
bound somewhere in the system,, and when you hit it, there's a good chance bad
things will happen.
Likewise, the port number for Onion address is captured by the regex (d+),
meaning any number of digits (xks-0005). Thus, we could get numbers that
overflow 16-bits, 32-bits, 64-bits, or 982745987-bits. Very long strings of
digits (megabytes) at this point might cause bad things to happen within the
system.
There is an extra-special thing that happens when the schema part of the Onion
address is exactly 16-bytes long (xks-0006). This will cause the address and
the scheme to reverse themselves when inserted into the database. Thus, we can
insert digits into the scheme field. This might foul up later code that
assumes schemes only contain letters, because only letters match in the regex.
In some protocol fields, the regexes appear to be partial matches. The system
appears to match on HTTP servers with "mixminion" anywhere in the name. Thus,
we start causing lots of traffic to go to our domains, such as
"mixminion.robertgraham.com", that will cause their servers to fill up with
long term storage of sessions they don't care about (xks-0007)
Let's talk X.509, and the following code:
fingerprint('anonymizer/tor/bridge/tls') =
ssl_x509_subject('bridges.torproject.org') or
ssl_dns_name('bridges.torproject.org');
Code that parses X.509 certificates is known to be flaky as all get out. The
simplest thing to do is find a data center you feel the NSA can monitor, and
then setup a hostile server that can do generic fuzzing of X.509 certificates,
trying to crash them.
It's likely that whatever code is parsing X.509 certificates is not validating
them. Thus, anybody can put certificates on their servers claiming to be
'bridges.torproject.org' (xks-0008). It's likely that the NSA is parsing SSL
on all ports, so just pick a random port on your server not being used for
anything else, create a self-signed CERT claiming to be
"bridges.torproject.org', then create incoming links to that port from other
places so at least search-engines will follow that link and generate traffic.
This will cause the NSA database of bridges to fill up with bad information --
assuming it's not already full from people screwing with the emails as noted
above :).
<img src="http://www.google.com/?q=tails+usb" />
Putting the above code in a web page like this one will cause every visitor to
trigger a search for TAILS in the XKeyScore rules. The more people who do
this, the less useful it becomes to the NSA (xks-0009) in labeling people as
suspicious. Likewise, putting <title>tails.boum.org/<.title> in your webpages
will cause the same effect, even when CSS/JavaScript makes such a title
invisible.
In theory, the NSA should only be monitoring foreign traffic, and not traffic
originating from the United States (or, apparently, the other five-eyes). So
here is the fun thing (xks-0010): run your jamming tools from United States IP
addresses against those servers in Iran you know the NSA is monitoring. Since
the code should already be ignoring the traffic because it originates from the
United States, then they can't complain if you've filled up their databases
full of Tor Onion and bridge addresses.
Robert Graham
-----------------------------------------
--
Pozdr
rysiek
Cześć,
po akcji z blokowaniem WikiLeaks, MailPile, a ostatnio ProtonMail, mam pomysł,
by im odpisać "spadajcie na drzewo, polskie haesy nie są zainteresowane
współpracą z FailPalem" (oczywiście nieco inaczej ubierając to w słowa). Co Wy
na to? Who's in?
---------- Treść przekazywanej wiadomości ----------
Temat: Invitation to compete in PayPal Hackathon> $100,000 Prize!
Data: środa, 2 lipca 2014, 16:50:12
Od: Daud, Muhammad <mdaud(a)paypal.com>
Do: kontakt(a)hackerspace.pl <kontakt(a)hackerspace.pl>
Hi,
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members to our hackathon ->
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great opportunity to gain exposure, have a chance to meet with other
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(plus, many other exciting prizes at BattleHack). We have John Lunn, Borys
Musielak, Krzysztof Kowalczyk and Brenden Arakaki on our judging panel.
Below is what we would like to share with your members regarding BattleHack
Warsaw, to be held on July 12-13 at Nowy Fort inWarsaw.
There is also an opportunity for PayPal Developer to sponsor your meetup/group
and I would love to talk to you about it. It will be great to collaborate,
strengthen our relationship and continue to innovate constantly.
Email Blast:
If you can please send out the following message to your meetup/group members,
it’ll be great. Please feel free to customize the message so that it fits your
voice, language and style.
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Warsaw are now available!
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If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at
mdaud(a)paypal.com<mailto:mdaud@paypal.com>. I am looking forward to talking to
you.
Thank you,
Muhammad Daud
Marketing Specialist
[cid:797D757A-7A06-4192-AB43-92707C5E22A9]
twitter.com/paypaldev<https://twitter.com/paypaldev>
WIN $100,000 USD: http://battlehack.org/
[Small axe]
-----------------------------------------
--
Pozdr
rysiek
Dzieje się.
---------- Treść przekazywanej wiadomości ----------
Temat: NSA targets the privacy-conscious
Data: czwartek, 3 lipca 2014, 17:29:47
Od: Eugen Leitl
http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/nsa230_page-1.html
NSA targets the privacy-conscious
von J. Appelbaum, A. Gibson, J. Goetz, V. Kabisch, L. Kampf, L. Ryge
The investigation discloses the following:
Two servers in Germany - in Berlin and Nuremberg - are under surveillance by
the NSA.
Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in
the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the
person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked,
but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked
by the NSA.
Among the NSA's targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US
government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.
The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server
that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It
also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux
operating system users called "the Linux Journal - the Original Magazine of
the Linux Community", and calls it an "extremist forum".
Disclosure
Three authors of this investigation have personal and professional ties to
the Tor Project, an American company mentioned within the following
investigation. Jacob Appelbaum is a paid employee of the Tor Project, Aaron
Gibson is a paid contractor for the Tor Project, and Leif Ryge is a volunteer
contributor to various Tor-related software projects. Their research in this
story is wholly independent from the Tor Project and does not reflect the
views of the Tor Project in any way. During the course of the investigation,
it was further discovered that an additional computer system run by Jacob
Appelbaum for his volunteer work with helping to run part of the Tor network
was targeted by the NSA. Moreover, all members of this team are Tor users and
appear to be have been targets of the mass surveillance described in the
investigation.
It is a small server that looks like any of the other dozens in the same row.
It is in a large room devoted to computers and computer storage, just like
every other room in this industrial park building on Am Tower Street just
outside the city of Nuremberg. That the grey building is surrounded by barbed
wire seems to indicate that the servers' provider is working hard to secure
their customers' data.
Yet despite these efforts, one of the servers is targeted by the NSA.
The IP address 212.212.245.170 is explicitly specified in the rules of the
powerful and invasive spy software program XKeyscore. The code is published
here exclusively for the first time.
After a year of NSA revelations based on documents that focus on program
names and high-level Powerpoint presentations, NDR and WDR are revealing NSA
source code that shows how these programs function and how they are
implemented in Germany and around the world.
Months of investigation by the German public television broadcasters NDR and
WDR, drawing on exclusive access to top secret NSA source code, interviews
with former NSA employees, and the review of secret documents of the German
government reveal that not only is the server in Nuremberg under observation
by the NSA, but so is virtually anyone who has taken an interest in several
well-known privacy software systems.
The NSA program XKeyscore is a collection and analysis tool and "a computer
network exploitation system", as described in an NSA presentation. It is one
of the agency’s most ambitious programs devoted to gathering "nearly
everything a user does on the internet." The source code contains several
rules that enable agents using XKeyscore to surveil privacy-conscious
internet users around the world. The rules published here are specifically
directed at the infrastructure and the users of the Tor Network, the Tails
operating system, and other privacy-related software.
Tor, also known as The Onion Router, is a network of several thousand
volunteer-operated servers, or nodes, that work in concert to conceal Tor
users' IP addresses and thus keep them anonymous while online.
Tails is a privacy-focused GNU/Linux-based operating system that runs
entirely from an external storage device such as a USB stick or CD. It comes
with Tor and other privacy tools pre-installed and configured, and each time
it reboots it automatically wipes everything that is not saved on an
encrypted persistent storage medium.
Normally a user's online traffic - such as emails, instant messages,
searches, or visits to websites - can be attributed to the IP address
assigned to them by their internet service provider. When a user goes online
over the Tor Network, their connections are relayed through a number of Tor
nodes using another layer of encryption between each server such that the
first server cannot see where the last server is located and vice-versa.
Tor is used by private individuals who want to conceal their online activity,
human rights activists in oppressive regimes such as China and Iran,
journalists who want to protect their sources, and even by the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency in their efforts to infiltrate criminal groups without
revealing their identity. The Tor Project is a non-profit charity based in
Massachusetts and is primarily funded by government agencies. Thus it is
ironic that the Tor Network has become such a high-priority target in the
NSA's worldwide surveillance system.
As revealed by the British newspaper The Guardian, there have been repeated
efforts to crack the Tor Network and de-anonymize its users. The top secret
presentations published in October last year show that Tor is anathema to the
NSA. In one presentation, agents refer to the network as "the king of
high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity". Another is titled "Tor Stinks".
Despite the snide remarks, the agents admit, "We will never be able to
de-anonymize all Tor users all the time".
The former NSA director General Keith Alexander stated that all those
communicating with encryption will be regarded as terror suspects and will be
monitored and stored as a method of prevention, as quoted by the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung in August last year. The top secret source code published
here indicates that the NSA is making a concerted effort to combat any and
all anonymous spaces that remain on the internet. Merely visiting
privacy-related websites is enough for a user's IP address to be logged into
an NSA database.
An examination of the XKeyscore rules published here goes beyond the slide
presentation and provides a window into the actual instructions given to NSA
computers. The code was deployed recently and former NSA employees and
experts are convinced that the same code or similar code is still in use
today. The XKeyscore rules include elements known as "appids",
"fingerprints", and "microplugins". Each connection a user makes online - to
a search engine, for example - can be assigned a single appid and any number
of fingerprints.
Appids are unique identifiers for a connection in XKeyscore. Appid rules have
weights assigned to them. When multiple appids match a given connection, the
one with the highest weight is chosen. Microplugins may contain software
written in general-purpose programming languages, such as C++, which can
extract and store specific types of data. The rules specifically target the
Tor Project's email and web infrastructure, as well as servers operated by
key volunteers in Germany, the United States, Sweden, Austria, and the
Netherlands. Beyond being ethically questionable, the attacks on Tor also
raise legal concerns. The IP addresses of Tor servers in the United States
are amongst the targets, which could violate the fourth amendment of the US
constitution.
The German attorney Thomas Stadler, who specializes in IT law, commented:
"The fact that a German citizen is specifically traced by the NSA, in my
opinion, justifies the reasonable suspicion of the NSA carrying out secret
service activities in Germany. For this reason, the German Federal Public
Prosecutor should look into this matter and initiate preliminary
proceedings."
One of NSA's German targets is 212.212.245.170. The string of numbers is an
IP address assigned to Sebastian Hahn, a computer science student at the
University of Erlangen. Hahn operates the server out of a grey high-security
building a few kilometers from where he lives. Hahn, 28 years old and
sporting a red beard, volunteers for the Tor Project in his free time. He is
especially trusted by the Tor community, as his server is not just a node, it
is a so-called Directory Authority. There are nine of these worldwide, and
they are central to the Tor Network, as they contain an index of all Tor
nodes. A user's traffic is automatically directed to one of the directory
authorities to download the newest list of Tor relays generated each hour.
Quellcode NSA "anonymizer/tor/node/authority" fingerprint.
Hahn's predecessor named the server Gabelmoo, or Fork Man, the nickname of a
local statue of Poseidon. After a look at the NSA source code, Hahn quickly
found his server's name listed in the XKeyscore rules. "Yes, I recognize the
IP address of my Tor server called 'gabelmoo'." he said. "Millions of people
use it to stay safe online, and by watching the server and collecting
metadata about its users, those people are put at risk." The rule shown to
Hahn, published below, has a fingerprint called
'anonymizer/tor/node/authority'. The fingerprint targets users who connect to
Gabelmoo and other Tor Directory Authority servers. In Germany, the Tor
Directory Authorities like Gabelmoo that are specifically targeted by
XKeyscore rules are in Berlin and Nuremberg. Additional targets are located
in Austria, Sweden, the United States, and the Netherlands.
Quellcode NSA Fragments of XKeyscore rules targetting Tor directory
authorities.
The expression below performs essentially the same function, but it specifies
the Tor directory authorities located in Five Eyes countries (Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) separately
from those in other countries. As the comment explains, the "goal is to find
potential Tor clients connecting to the Tor directory servers."
Another rule catalogs users connecting to known Tor relays. This is not
difficult, because the addresses of all normal Tor relays are published by
the directory authorities so that the Tor software on users' computers can
select its own path through the network. In addition to the public relays,
connections characterized as Tor based on protocol identifiers are also
cataloged.
Not only Metadata
Internet service providers in countries with strong censorship such as China
and Iran frequently block connections to known Tor relays. To avoid this
blocking, The Tor Project maintains a list of non-public relays called
"bridges" to allow users to avoid this type of blocking. Bridges are run by
volunteers and they share the details with the Tor Project to help censored
users reach the internet.
Quellcode NSA Microplugin which extracts bridge addresses from the full text
of Tor Project emails.
Users can request a bridge address via email or on the web. The following
fingerprints show two ways that XKeyscore attempts to track Tor bridge users.
First, the fingerprint "anonymizer/tor/bridge/tls" records connections to the
bridges.torproject.org server. Second, in order obtain the actual bridge
addresses for the purpose of tracking connections to them in the future, the
"microplugin" fingerprint called "anonymizer/tor/bridge/email" extracts data
from the body of the emails that the Tor Project sends to its users.
This code demonstrates the ease with which an XKeyscore rule can analyze the
full content of intercepted connections. The fingerprint first checks every
message using the "email_address" function to see if the message is to or
from "bridges(a)torproject.org". Next, if the address matched, it uses the
"email_body" function to search the full content of the email for a
particular piece of text - in this case, "https://bridges.torproject.org/".
If the "email_body" function finds what it is looking for, it passes the full
email text to a C++ program which extracts the bridge addresses and stores
them in a database.
Quellcode NSA Fingerprint to identify visitors to the Tor Project website.
The full content of the email must already be intercepted before this code
can analyze it. XKeyscore also keeps track of people who are not using Tor,
but who are merely visiting The Tor Project's website (www.torproject.org),
as this rule demonstrates:
Quellcode NSA Rules targeting people viewing the Tails or Linux Journal
websites, or performing Tails-related web searches.
It is interesting to note that this rule specifically avoids fingerprinting
users believed to be located in Five Eyes countries, while other rules make
no such distinction. For instance, the following fingerprint targets users
visiting the Tails and Linux Journal websites, or performing certain web
searches related to Tails, and makes no distinction about the country of the
user.
The comment in the source code above describes Tails as "a comsec mechanism
advocated by extremists on extremist forums". In actuality, the software is
used by journalists, human rights activists, and hundreds of thousands of
ordinary people who merely wish to protect their privacy.
The rules related to Tails clearly demonstrate how easily web searches and
website visits can be spied on by XKeyscore. On June 25, 2014, the United
States Supreme Court noted how sensitive this type of information is in their
Riley v. California decision against warrantless searches of mobile phones:
"An Internet search and browsing history [...] could reveal an individual’s
private interests or concerns - perhaps a search for certain symptoms of
disease, coupled with frequent visits to WebMD."
Quellcode NSA C++ program which searches "raw traffic" for .onion addresses.
In addition to anonymous internet access, Tor also provides a mechanism for
hosting anonymous internet services called "Hidden Services". These sites'
URLs contain a domain name in the pseudo-top-level-domain ".onion" which is
only accessible using Tor. The code shown below finds and catalogs URLs for
these sites which XKeyscore sees in "raw traffic", creating a unique
fingerprint for each onion address. Each .onion address found in raw traffic
is extracted and stored in an NSA database:
Quellcode NSA "anonymizer/mailer/mixminion" appid matching all connections
to 128.31.0.34.
There are also rules that target users of numerous other privacy-focused
internet services, including HotSpotShield, FreeNet, Centurian,
FreeProxies.org, MegaProxy, privacy.li and an anonymous email service called
MixMinion as well as its predecessor MixMaster. The appid rule for MixMinion
is extremely broad as it matches all traffic to or from the IP address
128.31.0.34, a server located on the MIT campus.
That server is operated by the Tor Project's leader Roger Dingledine, an MIT
alumnus. The machine at this IP address provides many services besides
MixMinion, and it is also one of the above-mentioned Tor directory
authorities. Dingledine said "That computer hosts many websites, ranging from
open source gaming libraries to the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
website."
Sebastian Hahn, the Tor volunteer who runs Gabelmoo, was stunned to learn
that his hobby could interest the NSA: "This shows that Tor is working well
enough that Tor has become a target for the intelligence services. For me
this means that I will definitely go ahead with the project.”
When asked for a reaction to the findings, the Tor Project's Roger Dingledine
stated the following: "We've been thinking of state surveillance for years
because of our work in places where journalists are threatened. Tor's
anonymity is based on distributed trust, so observing traffic at one place in
the Tor network, even a directory authority, isn't enough to break it. Tor
has gone mainstream in the past few years, and its wide diversity of users -
from civic-minded individuals and ordinary consumers to activists, law
enforcement, and companies - is part of its security. Just learning that
somebody visited the Tor or Tails website doesn't tell you whether that
person is a journalist source, someone concerned that her Internet Service
Provider will learn about her health conditions, or just someone irked that
cat videos are blocked in her location. Trying to make a list of Tor's
millions of daily users certainly counts as wide scale collection. Their
attack on the bridge address distribution service shows their "collect all
the things" mentality - it's worth emphasizing that we designed bridges for
users in countries like China and Iran, and here we are finding out about
attacks by our own country. Does reading the contents of those mails violate
the wiretap act? Now I understand how the Google engineers felt when they
learned about the attacks on their infrastructure.”
NDR and WDR wanted to know from the NSA how it justified attacking a service
funded by the U.S. government, under what legal authority Tor Network users
are monitored, and whether the German government has any knowledge of the
targeting of servers in Germany. Instead of adressing the questions
repeatedly posed to them, the NSA provided the following statement: "In
carrying out its mission, NSA collects only what it is authorized by law to
collect for valid foreign intelligence purposes - regardless of the technical
means used by foreign intelligence targets. The communications of people who
are not foreign intelligence targets are of no use to the agency. In January,
President Obama issued U.S. Presidential Policy Directive 28, which affirms
that all persons - regardless of nationality - have legitimate privacy
interests in the handling of their personal information, and that privacy and
civil liberties shall be integral considerations in the planning of U.S.
signals intelligence activities. The president's directive also makes clear
that the United States does not collect signals intelligence for the purpose
of suppressing or burdening criticism or dissent, or for disadvantaging
persons based on their ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, or
religion. XKeyscore is an analytic tool that is used as a part of NSA's
lawful foreign signals intelligence collection system. Such tools have
stringent oversight and compliance mechanisms built in at several levels. The
use of XKeyscore allows the agency to help defend the nation and protect U.S.
and allied troops abroad. All of NSA's operations are conducted in strict
accordance with the rule of law, including the President's new directive."
However, the research contradicts the United States' promise to Germany that
German citizens are not surveiled without suspicion. Using Tor in Germany
does not justify targeting someone, the German attorney Thomas Stadler
states: "Tor users do not breach any laws, it is absolutely legitimate to act
anonymously on the internet. There are many good reasons to remain
anonymous."
What is deep packet inspection?
Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI, refers to the class of technology which
examines the content of data packets as they travel across a network. A
packet is the fundamental unit of transfer in packet switched networks like
the internet. While DPI is commonly used by organizations to monitor their
own networks, its use on public networks for censorship and surveillance has
been widely condemned by privacy advocates and the United States government
alike.
In 2012, the head of the U.S. Delegation to the World Conference on
International Telecommunications, U.S. Ambassador Terry Kramer, said “some
companies have used deep packet inspection technologies to not look at
aggregate customer information, traffic information, et cetera, but to look
at individual customer information. So looking at individuals and what sites
they’re on and how much capacity they’re using, et cetera, as you can
imagine, we’re very much opposed to that because we feel that’s a violation
of people’s privacy and gets into, obviously, censorship, et cetera”.
Despite its public political condemnations of invasive DPI use, the United
States "Intelligence Community" and its "Five Eyes" partners (Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) operate massive internet-scale
DPI systems themselves, including XKeyscore. The use of XKeyscore is not
limited to these partners, however. The software has been shared with the
German BND and BfV, as well as the Swedish FRA, amongst others.
Active vs Passive
XKeyscore and the systems that feed it are considered "passive", meaning that
they silently listen but do not transmit anything on the networks that they
are targeting. However, through a process known as "tipping", data from these
programs can trigger other systems which perform "active" attacks.
Quantum is a family of such programs, including Quantuminsert, Quantumhand,
Quantumtheory, Quantumbot, and Quantumcopper, which are used for offensive
computer intrusion. Turmoil, Quantum, and other components of the Turbulence
architecture are running at so-called "defensive sites" including the
Ramstein Air Force base in Germany, Yokota Air Force base in Japan, and
numerous military and non-military locations within the United States.
Both Turmoil and XKeyscore feed selected data to real-time "tipping"
programs, such as Trafficthief, which can both alert NSA analysts when their
targets are communicating and trigger other software programs. Selected data
is "promoted" from the local XKeyscore data store to the NSA's so-called
"corporate repositories" for long term storage, analysis and exploitation.
More information about XKeyscore
In 2013, the British newspaper The Guardian revealed that by 2008 more than
150 internet surveillance facilities around the world were running the
XKeyscore Deep Packet Inspection software. All of the internet traffic
observed by XKeyscore, both metadata and full content, is analyzed and stored
temporarily at the collection sites for periods ranging from days to weeks,
while selected data is forwarded on to other locations for long-term storage.
The storage, indexing, and querying functions are performed at or near the
collection sites because the volume of data being collected is too large to
forward everything back to facilities in other countries. Analysts working
from various locations around the world may search specific XKeyscore sites,
or send their queries to a collection of sites.
XKeyscore provides a modular architecture in which tens of thousands of small
computer programs, or rules, written in XKeyscore's specialized programming
languages called Genesis and XKScript as well as general-purpose languages
such as C++ and Python, are run against all traffic to categorize it and
extract data. This indexing of the "full take" allows analysts to query the
temporary storage stored at the XKeyscore site, effectively sifting through
already pilfered communications which occurred before they had deemed them
interesting for a specific reason.
XKeyscore can be fed by several different programs, including Wealthycluster
and Turmoil. These programs "sessionize" the data, which means that
individual connections, such as a request for a web page, are reconstructed
from the stream of intercepted packets.
Locations where the NSA runs XKeyscore include Special Source Operations
(SSO) sites, typically found at or near major telecommunication providers'
infrastructure; Special Collection Service (SCS) sites, usually located
inside diplomatic facilities like embassies and consulates; and FORNSAT sites
where satellite communications are intercepted. All of these types of sites
are known to exist in Germany.
Other "Five Eyes" partners also operate XKeyscore installations. The United
Kingdom's Tempora program runs the largest instance of XKeyscore. Both the
software itself and limited access to NSA databases have been shared with
so-called "3rd party" partners including Germany. The German foreign
intelligence agency BND and the domestic intelligence agency BfV are testing
the Software.
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Pozdr
rysiek
Więcej o wyroku co do Tor exit node w Austrii.
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Temat: Re: [tor-talk] Tor Exit Operator convicted in Austrian lower court
Data: piątek, 4 lipca 2014, 01:34:02
Od: Zenaan Harkness
(Thread start:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/033573.html
)
On 7/3/14, Anders Andersson <pipatron(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 5:53 AM, Moritz Bartl <moritz(a)torservers.net> wrote:
>> On 07/02/2014 11:00 PM, Anders Andersson wrote:
>>> Unfortunately he doesn't seem to want to take this further, so the
>>> ruling will stand. It's his choice, but it could be a very bad
>>> deterrent to other potential exit node operators in Austria.
>>
>> We are in contact with William, and quite possibly there is the option
>> of following this further with another Austrian operator who
>> self-reports himself, with our help. Please everyone give us time to
>> look into this together with some lawyers.
>
> Thank you! That's amazing! I'm quite sure that the support you get
> from the Tor community when running an exit node really helps in
> giving people the courage to do so.
Agreed, great news.
In hindsight, it is clear that we as a community have an interest to
build a resource of amicus curiae briefs - friend of the court briefs.
So PLEASE make moves in the direction of contributing and collecting
documents which may be relevant to future cases - at the least a
simple collection of legal docs.
We have an interest in protecting our free-speech networks (Tor, I2P
etc), legally as well as technologically and politically. The
Torproject.org website does a good job IMHO of presenting the social
case for free-speech networks.
No matter the circumstances of a particular case (a particular free
speech node operator), we the global free-speech promoting and
free-speech facilitating community, have an interest to advise the
courts regarding matters of technology and free speech, in order to
maximise the sanity of the outcomes brought about by our courts (and
yes, another operators courts are as good as mine, in terms of global
impact). For example a tor-network node operator charged for actual
illegal activity, should not cause legal suppression of free-speech
networks in general.
To kick things off, here's the gist of what I have in mind (this is in
no way directly responsive to the case that started this thread, which
I know nothing about):
"
In this matter an individual has been charged with a [criminal] offence.
The case of a matter of an individual committing a proven criminal
defamation or incitement must not be used by the court to suppress
free speech generally by way of the court's power of judicial
sanction.
Similarly in this case the [Defendant] was the operator of a 'digital
communications facility' which facility was a node in a free-speech
network, in particular the [Tor|I2P} free speech network;
where the operator is found by this court to have committed unlawful
acts, then this court must only target those unlawful acts when it
makes its determinations, by way of this court's power of judicial
sanction exercised according to law;
and this court must not reach beyond those unlawful acts in its
determinations/ rulings/ sanctions;
if the court exercises its power in reaching beyond those unlawful
acts then such exercise of judicial power is likely to undermine
confidence in the court by all other operators of the free-speech
network and by users of the free speech network.
A ruling by this court will be seen by many humans around the world,
both operators of free speech nodes in the free speech networks, as
well as by users and by potential users of free speech networks around
the world.
In this case, the rulings of this court are visible globally, and
shall be watched by many;
there is therefore a great burden upon this court in this case, and
this court therefore has a special duty of care when it makes its
rulings/ determinations, to be conservative and cautious, in
particular regarding any general deterrents this court might
ordinarily be minded to create by its rulings which deterrents might
unintentionally dampen confidence in this court and/ or confidence in
the courts generally to protect our human rights including freedom of
communication.
This court must be especially careful in its rulings in this matter,
since the court is in a position to bring about chilling effects upon
the liberties of not only those humans within its immediate
jurisdictions, but also upon the broader global community.
"
(A glosary, localisation, much enhancement and other legal polishing
would be required of course, along with subroutined/ separate
submissions regarding each relevant law, and regarding each relevant
precedent in the jurisdiction in question and/ or in jurisdictions
relevant (some cases/precedents are so poignant, so timeless, that
they apply all over the world, e.g. the Credit River Decision, as well
as the trial of William Penn).)
Such advice or briefs to the court are ideally tailored to each
particular country/jurisdiction.
However, even a brief prepared for some country other than the country
at issue, is likely to be useful to those attempting to create a brief
for a particular case in another country, and may even be directly
useful as a filing in its own right, at least if the language is the
same :)
Regarding the filing of briefs, we need standing to file; that is, we
need an interest in the matter which interest is seen by the court.
In some countries particular organisations may be ideal for the filing
of such briefs, such as the FSF and EFF (USA) and EFA (Australia).
In other countries, if there is no directly applicable organisation,
then a "designated representative of the Torproject" who is resident
in that country, may have standing to make such a filing.
Alternatively, a local human-rights-friendly politician may be
amenable to making the filing on behalf of their constituent(s)
(that's us).
Finally, in general any individual should have standing to make such a
filing, since we have an interest in our own human rights - free
speech is a fundamental human right - so we should also aim for the
preparation and collection of briefs file-able by ourselves.
Take notice, we HAVE A DUTY OF CARE to each other, and to the broader
community, to contact Torproject and/ or others in this community, if
ever we find ourselves in a court case involving the operation of any
free speech network node (I2P, Tor, exit or relay), in order that
those in the community who have an interest, ie the rest of us (at
least those of us in the same country), are given the opportunity to
make our interest known to the respective court(s) in that
jurisdiction, by way of filing appropriate and standardized briefs.
Zenaan
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Pozdr
rysiek
Cześć,
Wyrok za hostowanie Tor exit node'a. :/
---------- Treść przekazywanej wiadomości ----------
Temat: Court – Official statement part #1
Data: środa, 2 lipca 2014, 18:41:25
Od: Eugen Leitl <eugen(a)leitl.org>
Do: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org, cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org
Apologies, not sure this has been posted already in the thread, I'm
backlogged.
https://rdns.im/court-official-statement-part-1
Court – Official statement part #1
Posted on July 2, 2014 by Will
As seen possibly here, or here i lost the Tor case and was sentenced to 3
years probation (instead of 3 months jail) and all fees (court and experts,
Assumption ~30000EUR, not less than 20k for sure).
The sentence is based on §12 which allows for anyone to be dealt with as
perpetrator (which is a pretty dictatorial law IMO) and this is based on that
i knew it *could* possibly be used for criminal activity (in this case child
pornography).
I won’t write much more yet before i have the written ruling (i do not even
know my probation terms yet) but merely want to explain why i won’t appeal
this sentence:
First would be that I simply can’t afford it anymore, donations covered a lot
of lawyer fees but i had to use my entire money on this case as well, i’m now
bankrupt and the garnishment (a rare word, DE: Pfändung) of my income (to pay
the 20k+ costs) does not help with it either. I have high medical costs as
well besides which are more important. I’m not really interested in more
external funding due to taxation issues with larger amounts (and i do not
want *another* crime on me). – Second is that i just want to be done with
this, i had now years of “issues” (i would write “harassment” but then i get
sued again for sure) (Ex: Citing my boss to the police for questioning (x3);
physically monitoring my boss in Vienna; citing friends to the police for
questioning (x2); confiscation of bank transaction data; Polish extradiction
threats for hacking cases there (x2); citing me for useless questioning
causing lawyer costs (x5+) etc. etc.) – It’s now finally over and besides the
cost i CAN live with this sentence, it does not show up in police registers
and won’t be an issue for work and alike in the future. – Third is the
mental component, this years of “horror” changed a lot up to me being
hospitalized (x3…) with paranoid schizophrenia (which was a wrong diagnosis,
but still it’s not helpful if you HAVE to assume permanent monitoring of
everything), PTSD (among other issues) and now taking medication – It took
it’s toll, including me getting fired for being in the clinic/sick stay for a
long time, i just can’t afford to loose my job or go the clinic again even if
i actually should be still there. – Fourth is the attention, media and
personal – I don’t really like any attention on myself, especially when
others should get it (like some public cause, Pirateparty or alike). –
So this is it for now, stay tuned for more in a few days.
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Pozdr
rysiek