Visit the Wrong Website, and the FBI Could End Up in Your Computer. Getty Security experts call it a “drive-by download”: a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website and then subverts it to deliver malware to every single visitor.
It’s one of the most powerful tools in the black hat arsenal, capable of delivering thousands of fresh victims into a hackers’ clutches within minutes. Now the technique is being adopted by a different kind of a hacker—the kind with a badge. For the last two years, the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement’s knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system. The approach has borne fruit—over a dozen alleged users of Tor-based child porn sites are now headed for trial as a result.
Why Won’t the FBI Tell the Public About its Drone Program? Today we’re publishing—for the first time—the FBI’s drone licenses and supporting records for the last several years.
Unfortunately, to say that the FBI has been less than forthcoming with these records would be a gross understatement. Just yesterday, Wired broke the story that the FBI has been using drones to surveil Americans. Wired noted that, during an FBI oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller let slip that the FBI flies surveillance drones on American soil.
Federal grand jury. Missing British-Somali man reappears in New York court: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Appellate Court Reinstates Lawsuit Challenging Wiretapping Powers. Civil liberties advocates opposed to the government’s expanded wiretapping powers can fight another day after an appellate court on Monday reinstated a lawsuit challenging an eavesdropping law passed by Congress three years ago.
The decision could put the Obama administration in the uncomfortable position of having to argue in support of broad executive authority to conduct surveillance operations – a position that President Obama, as a presidential candidate, had once opposed. Rights Are Curtailed for Terror Suspects. Patriot Act Debate: Is the FBI Collecting Your Phone Data? Update Appended: June 24, 2011 The U.S.
Senate Intelligence Committee is weighing fresh concerns about the sweeping nature of domestic spying using one controversial section of the Patriot Act. The FBI vs. Antiwar.com by Justin Raimondo. The phone rang.
It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon and it was my day off. Sitting in my rather neglected garden, as the late afternoon light sparkled golden on the tops of the plum trees, I put down my book – the 1995 edition of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois – with more than a little annoyance. I was smack dab in the middle of a short story, “Asylum,” by Katharine Kerr, a tale about a future military coup in the US, written from the point of view of a particularly earnest liberal with faintly radical leanings. The main character is a woman writer who is abroad when the generals take over, and is marked as an enemy of the state on account of her book, Christian Fascism: Its Roots and Rise. Her San Francisco office is raided and her files carted away. The phone kept ringing. Feds go overboard in prosecuting information activist. When I was in grad school, we had a "visitor" WiFi network available to people visiting campus.
The network was only supposed to be used by guests; access was automatically cut off after two weeks to force students and staff to register for the main campus network. But registering was a bit of a hassle, so when I first got to campus I simply used the visitor network. When my two weeks ran out, I was still too lazy to register—so I spoofed my media access control (MAC) address and got another two weeks of free access. Maybe that's why the federal government's aggressive prosecution of activist Aaron Swartz for "hacking" activities that include MAC address spoofing makes me so uncomfortable. Feds Order Banks To Spy On Medical Marijuana Dispensaries. Federal regulators stepped into a firestorm of controversy recently when they ordered banks in California's North Coast area to spy on the transactions of customers who are suspected of making money in the medical marijuana business.
Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI authorities claim they are not specifically targeting medical marijuana. They say they're just looking for "drug traffickers and money launderers," which of course under federal law includes any marijuana-related banking activity. The Real J. Edgar. Clint Eastwood's cinematic exploration of the FBI chief's rise to power is little more than a comforting myth.
Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar brings humanity to its subject, depicting a tortured love relationship between J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his second-in-command at the FBI. When it comes to politics, though, the film reverts to stereotype. According to J. FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites. The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance .
In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned. FBI says Carrier IQ files used for "law enforcement purposes" The FBI disclosed this weekend that data gathered by Carrier IQ software is used by it for "law enforcement purposes", but refused to give details of how it has done so.
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Muckrock, the FBI said that it held relevant records but that their release could interfere with pending or prospective law enforcement proceedings. FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical’ The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.” At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.”
Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.” These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity. But these documents aren’t relics from an earlier era. FBI ‘Islam 101′ Guide Depicted Muslims as 7th-Century Simpletons. As recently as January 2009, the FBI thought its agents ought to know the following crucial information about Muslims: Mother Jones - 07-28 Lulz, Security, Justice and the FBI. The recent news of alleged LulzSec spokesperson Topiary's arrest took the media spotlight away from WikiLeaks supporters' demonstration against PayPal.
But it also raises questions about how online laws are applied, and the credibility of those who enforce them. While doubts remain over whether the police have arrested the right person, Topiary's twitter account has been reduced to a single tweet: "You cannot arrest an idea. " Topiary served as LulzSec's witty media front-man and his clever humour was tempered by a strong sense of justice. Kucinich Asks Holder Why Justice Department Is Investigating Antiwar Activists. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has written a letter to Attorney General Eric J. Holder expressing concern about an investigation into antiwar activists in Minneapolis and Chicago.
In Surprise Appeal, TJX Hacker Claims U.S. Authorized His Crimes. Albert Gonzalez, the hacker who masterminded the largest credit card heists in U.S. history, is asking a federal judge to throw out his earlier guilty pleas and lift his record-breaking 20-year prison sentence, on allegations that the government authorized his years-long crime spree. Gonzalez, 29, admitted last year that he and accomplices hacked into TJX, Office Max, Dave & Busters, Heartland Payment Systems and other companies to steal more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers, in what the government deemed the biggest computer crime case ever prosecuted in the United States.
He’s currently serving time at the Milan low-security federal prison in southeastern Michigan, with a release date in the year 2025. The government has acknowledged that Gonzalez was a key undercover Secret Service informant at the time of the breaches. Now, in a March 24 habeas corpus petition filed in the U.S.
Judge orders FBI to cough up information about a previously secret computer drive. June files. Spies in blue. Sarah@sfbg.com San Francisco cops assigned to the FBI's terrorism task force can ignore local police orders and California privacy laws to spy on people without any evidence of a crime. Josef von Habsburg, F.B.I. Confidential Informant. Last January, Michael Grimm, a forty-year-old United States congressman from Staten Island, sat for an interview in his Washington office with Greta Van Susteren, of Fox News.
Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001 - 2008. January 2011 Executive Summary. F.B.I. Says Oregon Suspect Planned ‘Grand’ Attack. The FBI successfully thwarts its own Terrorist plot - Glenn Greenwald. 5 Outrageous Examples of FBI Intimidation and Entrapment. June 29, 2011 | Terrorists for the FBI Exclusive. DOJ review of flawed FBI forensics processes lacked transparency. The FBI can do what?!