Anonymous and Antisec Attack Law Enforcement Websites

Anonymous and Antisec factions dumped files on the net Friday detailing data from the computer systems of multiple law enforcement agencies and a law enforcement vendor, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association and the Baldwin County Sheriff’s office in Alabama.

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Additionally, the groups took down a number of law enforcement domains hosted together. According to the notice, the site’s homepages were defaced, replaced with an anti-police rap video. At the time of publication, the domains simply failed to load, sending a “Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)” message.

The notice says the attack is in support of the so-called 99% movement, a reference to the Occupy Wall Street protests spreading around the world. The action is described as retaliation against law enforcement for mistreatment of #occupywallstreet, particularly in Boston.

The notice references a 600MB data dump which reportedly includes the IACP membership roster; 1000 names, ranks, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbesr for police officers in Birmingham and Jefferson Counties; 1,000 names and cleartext passwords for the BPPA; and the client list and financials for Matrix Group, a DC-based web design and marketing firm with law enforcement customers.

The BPPA website has a notice under current events that reads: “* Please Note: Starting Monday October 17th 2011 all Users who access the secure section of the site will have to re-register for a NEW Username and Password.”

But the site doesn’t say why, or warn users that usernames and passwords, which users commonly re-use on other sites, may have been compromised.

The notice contains a details about the compromised servers, but Wired has not been able to locate a publicly available dump of the data, which may not have been released yet.

Matrix Networks, Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, and Boston PD did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

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Comcast No Longer Choking File Sharers’ Connections, Study Says

Comcast appears to be in compliance with a Federal Communications Commission decision demanding the ISP stop throttling BitTorrent traffic, according to a new study.

A study this week by the Measurement Lab, first reported by TorrentFreak, verifies for the first time that Comcast has virtually stopped its throttling practices in the wake of the FCC’s order, which concluded that Philadelphia-based Comcast breached so-called net neutrality rules. A federal appeals court, however, said the FCC overstepped its authority, and the issue is tied up in the courts after the FCC introduced a new net neutrality plan.

Comcast has said it would comply with the FCC order, despite its legal uncertainty, and said it had the right to throttle to manage heavy traffic loads. Comcast says it has moved to a system that throttles heavy users during times of congestion, without picking on any particular application, a kind of network management policy generally accepted by network-neutrality advocates.

The study by the Google-funded lab also shows how disingenuous Comcast was when the FCC ordered it in 2008 to end its throttling practices. Throttling is the slowing or blocking of BitTorrent data, which consumes a large amount of bandwidth and is often associated with pirated movies, music and software.

“We did not block access to websites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services,” Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said back in 2008. Six weeks after the order, however, Comcast came clean and disclosed its throttling practices.

According to the study, Comcast throttled 49 percent of all BitTorrent traffic in early 2008. Last year, according to the study’s most recent data, the number dropped to 3 percent.

Photo: Torkildr/Flickr

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Researchers Found Way to ID Skype Users Who Also Use BitTorrent

A group of researchers have found a way to tie Skype users to their peer-to-peer networks in order to identify who might be responsible for sharing files on Bit Torrent and other P2P networks.

The research looks at how a Skype user’s IP address can be determined without the user knowing and then linked to files that are being shared through peer-to-peer networks, according to a report by IDG News Service.

The researchers were able to sift out the nodes through which Skype calls are routed and sniff the packets to determine a user’s IP address and then match that to the IP address of people sharing files on peer-to-peer networks.

Then, using information that users provide for Skype’s directory, such as their name, location, and birth date, the researchers were able to get close to identifying the person doing the sharing. They caution, however, that the method can match machines but may not specifically identify the person who was at the machine at any one time.

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Aging ‘Privacy’ Law Leaves Cloud E-Mail Open to Cops

President Ronald Reagan signed sweeping privacy legislation in 1986 that has morphed into a government backdoor to acquire Americans' online communications

Twenty-five years ago Friday, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that for the first time provided Americans with sweeping digital-privacy protections.

The law came at a time when e-mail was used mostly by nerdy scientists, when phones without wires hardly worked as you stepped out into the backyard, and when the World Wide Web didn’t exist. Four presidencies later, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act has aged dramatically, providing little protection for citizens from the government’s prying eyes — despite the law’s language remaining much the same.

The silver anniversary of ECPA has prompted the nation’s biggest tech companies and prominent civil liberties groups to lobby for updates to what was once the nation’s leading “privacy” legislation protecting Americans’ electronic communications from warrantless searches and seizures.

Without such a change, the police will continue to be able to get Americans’ e-mail, or their documents stored online that are more than six months old, without having to acquire a judge’s permission, as long as the authorities promise it is “relevant” to a criminal investigation.

Yet there appears to be little government willpower to alter course. Apathy and outright opposition are keeping a giant swath of Americans’ electronic communications exposed to warrantless government surveillance.

It wasn’t always that way.

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Feds Say China’s Net Censorship Imposes ‘Barriers’ to Free Trade

U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Photo: AP Photo/Jacques Brinon

The Obama administration publicly admonished China Wednesday for its vast online censorship policies, for the first time officially complaining that blocking U.S.-based internet sites creates “barriers” to free trade.

The administration, citing World Trade Organization rules, is demanding that China explain its censorship policies. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk’s office made the demands after a three-year lobbying campaign by the First Amendment Coalition.

“This development is important because it signals the U.S. government’s implicit acceptance of FAC’s position that censorship of the internet can breach the international trade rules enforced by the WTO,” said Peter Scheer, the group’s executive director.

U.S.-based websites blocked in whole or in part by the so-called “Great Firewall of China” include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and even the Huffington Post.

In response, China on Thursday blasted the administration.

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Flash Bug Allows Miscreants to Remotely Operate Your Web Cam

Adobe Systems has announced it’s in the process of fixing a security vulnerability in Flash that would allow malicious web sites to remotely operate a user’s webcam and microphone.

The vulnerability is on Adobe’s server side, not on client-side software, and therefore does not require users to update their software.

Adobe told CNET it was hoping to have the fix done by the end of this week.

The vulnerability was discovered by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a Stanford University computer science student. Someone could use the vulnerability for a “clickjacking” attack, which involves hiding malicious code on a web page so that people who click on parts of the page would have their computers exploited. Aboukhadijeh prepared a video (above) demonstrating an attack scenario using the vulnerability.

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Diplomat Loses Top Secret Clearance for Linking to WikiLeaks

U.S. State Department veteran Peter Van Buren has lost his Top Secret security clearance after linking to WikiLeaks. Photo courtesy of Van Buren

A veteran U.S. State Department foreign service officer lost his security clearance and diplomatic passport this week while the department investigates him over linking to a WikiLeaks document on his blog and publishing a book critical of the government.

Peter Van Buren, who is 51 and has worked for the department for 23 years, had his Top Secret security clearance suspended indefinitely for what the department calls his unwillingness to comply with rules and regulations regarding “writing and speaking on matters of official concern.” This is according to a memo the State Department sent Van Buren.

The move is purely vindictive, according to Van Buren.

“I’m fairly close to retirement [from government work] and this is a way of not allowing me to retire with a security clearance,” he said. “It’s like having a big scarlet ‘loser’ painted on my forehead.”

Van Buren said the State Department is deliberately suspending his clearance, instead of revoking it, in order to place him in limbo and deny him the ability to appeal the decision.

“If they go as far as revocation, that can be challenged right up through federal court,” he said. “The problem is the diplomatic security people know the rules, so they use temporary suspension as a way of taking away security clearance in a way that is unchallengeable.”

Until his case is closed, he can’t do anything about it, and investigators have been known to leave cases open for years, he said, denying workers the ability to appeal and effectively ending their careers.

“This is just their way of sending a message and creating an extrajudicial punishment that can’t be questioned or challenged,” he said.

Van Buren, whose new book is critical of U.S. reconstruction projects in Iraq, revealed last month that the State Department had launched an investigation against him for disclosing classified information.

The investigation started shortly before his book was to be released and right after he posted a link in an August 25 blog post about the hypocrisy of recent U.S. actions against Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi. The link went to a WikiLeaks-published 2009 U.S. State Department cable about the sale of U.S. military spare parts to Qadaffi through a Portuguese middleman.

State Department investigators interrogated him twice, demanding to know who had helped him with his blog post and also drilling him about the details of the publishing contract for his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, according to Van Buren.

Van Buren was warned that his refusal to answer questions would lead to his firing and that he could be charged with interfering with a government investigation if he wrote publicly about the investigation against him, which he did anyway.

The Principal Deputy Secretary of State subsequently wrote Van Buren’s publisher demanding three small redactions from a chapter of his book, which had already shipped to bookstores. The chapter, titled “Spooky Dinner,” is about a dinner Van Buren and other Department staff had with the CIA in Baghdad long after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The meeting took place in one of Hussein’s former palaces, which the CIA had taken possession of, and dinner was served with Hussein’s former chinaware and stemware. The chapter discussed speculation about what secrets the dinnerware could reveal if it could talk — among them what Hussein and his CIA handlers might have said to each other when they met in 1983 to discuss the Iran-Iraq War.

The cable to which Van Buren linked in August was just one in a cache of more than 250,000 cables that WikiLeaks began publishing last November in concert with media partners in the U.S. and Europe. WikiLeaks had allegedly obtained the cables from former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who is currently awaiting trial on charges that he passed classified material to a third party.

In December 2010 the White House issued a directive warning federal employees not to access the government documents WikiLeaks published online.

“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority,” the directive said.

Ironically, Van Buren had worked across the hallway from Manning for about six months in Iraq in 2009 and 2010 at Forward Operating Base Hammer, he told Wired in a phone interview Wednesday.

That’s where Manning allegedly downloaded the cables to a CD-Rom while pretending to lip-sync to Lady Gaga music that was supposedly on the disc. Now Van Buren is being punished for linking to something that Manning allegedly downloaded from the Army’s classified network and leaked to WikiLeaks.

“I literally had my office across the hall from where he worked,” Van Buren said. “I don’t think I actually ever met the guy. The last time I had access to U.S. government secrets was on the Army system that Bradley Manning used.”

Van Buren said State Department security staff who informed him of his suspension this week didn’t even know who Manning was when he mentioned the name. The security guys, Van Buren said, thought he was trying to brag about his department connections.

“Don’t try to impress me with the people you know,” he says one of the staffers told him. “You could work for Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton; the rules are the same.”

According to the memo announcing his suspension, Van Buren’s failure to obtain the department’s review before publishing his blog posts raised “serious security concerns” about his judgment in handling protected information and about his continued access to classified material and the safety of national security interests.

“These considerations dictate that, in the interim, you must, at a minimum, remain assigned to a position that does not include sensitive duties,” the memo reads.

Strangely, Van Buren works in the human resources division of the State Department – a job that doesn’t involve sensitive duties or classified information, he says. Although he doesn’t need a Top Secret security clearance for the work he currently does, the fact that the Department has suspended his clearance makes him look like a troublemaker to potential future employers.

“It’s a way of bending the rules and hiding behind security to slap down an employee whose done something that they don’t like,” he said.

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Supreme Court of Canada OKs Internet Linking

Justice Abella

University of Ottawa legal scholar Michael Geist points out a major court ruling Wednesday for internet freedom.

The Supreme Court of Canada today issued its much anticipated ruling in Crookes v. Newton, a case that focused on the issue of liability for linking to allegedly defamatory content. The court provided a huge win for the internet as it clearly understood the significance of linking to freedom of expression and the way the internet functions by ruling that there is no liability for a mere hyperlink.

“I would conclude that a hyperlink, by itself, should never be seen as ‘publication’ of the content to which it refers,” Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella wrote.

It’s alarming that the legality of linking was uncertain in Canada until Wednesday.

via Michael Geist – Supreme Court of Canada Stands Up for the Internet: No Liability for Linking.

Photo: Supreme Court of Canada

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In a Single Month, the Occupation Became a Force

On Sept. 17, Constitution Day, about 1,000 people assembled in lower Manhattan to protest Wall Street, the government’s bailout of too-big-to-fail banks, and the growing gap everywhere between rich and poor.

The world ignored them.

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Around 150 stayed to “occupy” the park, living there in sleeping bags, laying claim to this New York, this America, as theirs. They were a curiosity. Tourists visited them. They were largely mocked or overlooked by the media. On Sept. 26, NPR’s news director, Dick Meyer, summarized big media’s collective view: “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.” The implicit message was this: Without these things, #occupywallstreet could not matter.

But they went on occupying. They marched, carrying handmade signs with slogans serious and funny. They chanted “Whose street? Our Street!” and “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!”  Their numbers swelled during the day, and dropped off at night. They got into some trouble with police, but they stayed.

They talked about representing the 99 percent of the population left behind by an economy that’s increasingly rigged against them. Something in the conversation changed, and people in city after city picked up and moved to parks, lawns, bit of sidewalk. They pitched tents, built kitchens, opened Twitter accounts, started to #occupy their city.

By Oct. 15, the occupation had spread to hundreds of cities, in America and across the world, and that Saturday witnessed mostly peaceful marches comprised of tens of thousands of citizens across the world.

For much of my adult life I’ve been told that the American Body Politic was apathetic. We didn’t vote, we didn’t get politically active the way people had in the 1960s with the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam war. We didn’t serve the way we had in WWII, we didn’t work together the way we had in the Great Depression. After 9/11, the government’s siren call to citizens asked us simply to continue shopping and to report suspicious neighbors. We were ill-informed, checked out, and would put up with anything.

But this was never what I saw and heard around me in America. Americans want to be masters of their own fates. The great ideas about what it means to be an American are around self-determination, work, and responsibility — both individual and civic. If Americans were checked out of the political process, it was because the process had failed them — not that Americans had stopped being the democratic people that Alexis de Toqueville found himself oddly smitten with in the 1830s.

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Wired.com Embeds With #Occupy and Anonymous

I’m Quinn Norton, and for the next few months I’ll be your guide to the #OccupyWallStreet (#ows) protests as they move across the internet and the world.

I’ll be staying on top of the latest big news for Threat Level as best I can in the #occupations all over America and the world, but more than that I’ll be bringing you analysis of the methods and the meaning of the #occupation. I’ll be traveling to many sites and staying with the protestors. I’ll be talking with the police and city officials, and a few of those being protested.

I’ll see if the protests can survive the change of seasons, and if they can, explain how they manage it. I’ll be reporting from General Assemblies and describing the successes and failures as people try to use urban space, the tools of the network, and each other, to create new ways of running a society as well as reform the old ones. I will tell the stories of the people on the ground and on the net engaging in this long-shot experiment to change everything.

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During the same time I’ll cover a separate but not unrelated phenomenon: the rise of Anonymous. I’ll be writing a concise history of the lulzy collective, and will explain their social structure and the patterns of their values. I’ll document their exploits and raids as they arise, but I will never seek to unmask any Anons.

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The point of Anonymous isn’t whether or not you know who they are, but that who they are individually doesn’t matter. I’ll be exploring how that works, and how, counterintuitively, this kind of anonymity coupled with an institutional sense of humor have made them players on the global stage. I’ll be visiting irc channels and Scientology raids, political protests and 4chan. I’ll be interviewing anons, those who study them, and those they come into conflict with.

It might seem odd that I’m covering #occupy and Anonymous together, but it’s not. Both #occupy and Anonymous are each examples of a new kind of hybrid entity, one that breaks the boundaries between “real life” and the internet, creatures of the network embodied as citizens in the real world. As one member of The Pirate Bay explained on IRC, “We prefer afk (away from keyboard) to irl (in real life). This is real life.”

Over the next weeks and months, I’ll look to discover just how real it can become.

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