Slashdot Mirror
Datamining the NSA
elmartinos writes "With official permission from the data protection committee in the Austrian Office of the Federal Chancellor, quintessence (an association for the re-establishment of information civil rights) has data mined an extensive mailing list related to the Biometric Consortium, which is part of the NSA. Heise (Google translation) writes that a quintessenz activist was able to get access to the mailing list through social engineering, and used a PHP script to extract 1GB worth of data. Quintessenz is using the open source tool Weka for data mining, and Kea for text mining. The first chapter of the gathered information is available online."
Now we're going to end up with a hundred thousand troops in Austria. Thanks!
Obviously then, Open Source Software should be banned for national security reasons!
"The first chapter of the gathered information is available online."
... the article is not loading already :( Mirrors anyone?
Was. Online.
Damn, this is something i want to read
...people will stop downplaying social engineering?
And why does it matter what language the script used was in, unless there was some bug in a script on the webserver related to the script parser...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
But, your honor, I'm not a Con Artist, I'm a professional Social Engineer!
Mother of God, that's got to be one of the worse translations I've ever tried to read.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:qosbTf6Ca3gJ: www.quintessenz.org/cgi-bin/index%3Fid%3D000100003 172+&hl=en Google cache.. site's down
If anyone can hear me, slap some sense into me But you turn your head, and I end up talking to myself
We are the Feds. And as soon as we can game access to your slashdotted server, we're coming after you.
Yours,
J. Edgar Hoover (deceased)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
As a taxpayer, I'm not so sure I want people to be mining our nation's most super-secret site - what will they think of next!?
How smart is it to make a fool of the NSA?
I mean look how fast they made their server disappear.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
The Austrian government gave someone permission to hack the NSA? That's got "serious diplomatic incident" written all over it.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
In related news, Austria was today added to the members of the "Axis of Evil"
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
That's one way to stop them from receiving the mails from the mailinglist ...
/.-ed all of their bandwidth...
We just
1) The Biometric Consortium is not "part of the NSA"
2) Somebody lied a bit to get onto a relatively open mailing list
3) This whole thing is on par with kids grabbing some telephone switch manuals out of a dumpster and bringing them to a 2600 meeting to show off to other losers.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
One man's activist is another man's terrorist.
The German article says that the NSA wants open or free patents for 'biometric' data.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
Looks like they are working on the right things.
And who of you running 2.6 kernel has turned off the SELinux hooks?
Paranoia is a dangerous thing.
Not everyone in government works on the same thing or agrees about the same thing. If you believe that all who work in secret agencies are facists, then I suggest that you reasses and understand that they may actually be anti-facist.
Think global, act loco
what this project is and what it means? I can see they got access to a mailing list, and they're putting together key dates in it, but I can't see the broader goal this is in support of.
Could some kind soul let me know?
Many thanks.
D
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It looks like this has started already...
In other news, the US will declare war on Australia in six months time.
I personally don't know a single person who is in support of biometrics and our government is still trying to push it on us against our will. This is very creepy and anything but democratic. What are our representatives doing? Getting bribed? Perhaps we should send them a couple more letters and explain why we don't need any biometrics in the US and that even without any biometrics the numer of terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11 is exactly 0 (zero).
I've conducted extensive analysis of a top-secret message board called "Slashdot". Slashdot is known to be regularly visited by employees of many government agencies, including military and espionage organizations.
Based on my expert analysis of the message traffic, I have determined:
1998-2000 - Using supercomputing VA-Linux beowulf clusters and drawing upon the grit-making skills of Natalie Portman, the NSA was doing bad things.
2000-2003 - Mr. Goatse and Tubgirl complete the VA-Linux transition to OSDN and formulate the Slashdot/NSA/CIA business plan:
1. Take distgusting pictures
2. Utilize legacy hot grits(tm) technology
3. ???
4. Profit!
2004-present - RIAA sues everyone. The universe is safe.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If you want to know what's going on in the US with respect to biometrics, head over to the site for the M1 working group which writes the standards.
This slashdot blurb is the most dense collection of buzzwords I think I've seen in months. I try to make sense of it and all I can see is "Linux crypto hackers open sourced the BSD Microsoft monopoly!"
I think it has its own gravitational field
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Don't let these new string comparators based on a fuzzy locale confuse you.
As a non-US citizen, I'm slightly happy to see that someone cares about keeping tabs on US activities. Especially military activities.
Contrary to popular belief most (or at least a lot) of what the NSA does isn't all that secret. They're mostly just concerned with improving I.T. security in general, both for the gub'mint and private corporations. The do research. They publish papers. The typical boring CompSci stuff. This mailing list was probably a bunch of people involved in this sort of low-level work.
The secret stuff is done by Central Security Services and the Information Assurance Directorate. They're the guys that "certify" trusted networks and systems. They basically do for networks what the FBI does for people when they investigate them for clearance. Of course, as part of their job, they "audit" the security of our critical systems remotely and covertly (i.e. Red Teaming).
The really secret stuff is done by the SIGINT folks. They're tasked with intercepting and analyzing any "interesting" communications while at the same time keeping our communications secure. They're the codemakers and the codebreakers. Even in this über-secretive area, they're pretty much just a bunch of crypto-geeks who never get their hands dirty (they leave HUMINT to the CIA).
Heck, the only guys at NSA HQ who even carry guns are the security guards. Well.. them and the several thousand soldiers surrounding them (they are in the middle of an Army base after all).
That all having been said, whoever "harvested" this information is asking for trouble. They can expect a visit from some counter-intelligence officers who will want to know exactly why these persons are so interested in who's on the NSA's payroll.
You are attempting to read sigs. Cancel or Allow?
N/A
Social engineering? Signing up for the listserv is a matter of going to this website., then filling out such hard hitting forms as "Name" and "Interest in Biometrics", and waiting for an e-mail confirmation stating you've been approved. Since the website says that its a free listserv for anyone interested in Biometrics, I don't think approval would be all that hard to get. After they signed up, they then summarized the most interesting things from each year that were posted to the listserv, and posted the results on the web. Wow! From the summary and translated article make it seem like they pulled a government approved hack of the NSA using cunning wit and unmatched skill or something.
It doesn't matter what your little groups of enlightened friends thinks. It's what Joe and Jane Q. Public think, and what they are led to believe by your government.
Unfortunately, I have encountered a lot of people who are for biometrics. Some can change their minds once they learn the truth about the insecurity of biometrics. This does not mean everyone can learn/understand why biometrics is not necessarily a good thing.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
So you're giving a grep command that will generate output to stderr and piping stdout to another grep command that will not accept any input, which completely doesn't make sense. Brilliant.
I had to put that out just to show how fucking stupid that statement or anything like it really is.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
1. Sign up for "secret NSA mailing list" at http://www.biometrics.org/html/listserv.html
2. Read archives
3. Super haxxor!
http://www.quintessenz.at.nyud.net:8090/cgi-bin/in dex?id=000100003123
Coral Link
coral cache here
It's slowly filling, but looks like I got to it before the quintessenz server imploded.
Austria: European nation. Speaks German.
NSA: American government agency.
Austria: Not part of the United States.
I'm confused. Are you?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
This elmartinos guy submitted this story so that the server would get the infamous /. effect. I believe that elmartinos is working with Mulder and Skully. The austrians are really aliens...
My Doom. The gift that keeps on giving
The story isn't that they got onto the mailing list.
/. and it's an entirely different thing to analyse thousands of postings to prove that and how they influence whom and when.
The story is that they have sifted through huge amounts of data to extract the interesting parts, and essentially made an analysis of the history of biometric standards, and the respective attempts of NSA people to push it this way or that.
It's one thing to post "I think the NSA is influencing biometric companies" to
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The thing about the Austrian goverment permitting a hack is total nonsense. It appears that the person responsible wanted to notify his database to the data processing register (read http://www.dsk.gv.at/notif.htm). They sent him a letter telling him that his notification had a ton of errors in it, and that he should fix it. That letter was published by quintessenz.org. This is defintely not a license. The letter does not mention the NSA either, so the notification was probably vague to the point of meaninglessness.
0 4_ 04_16,datenschutz_kommission1.jpg
0 4_ 04_16,datenschutz_kommission2.jpg
0 4_ 04_16,datenschutz_kommission3.jpg
Anyway, here are te links to the letter pages:
http://www.quintessenz.org/doqs/000100003127/20
http://www.quintessenz.org/doqs/000100003128/20
http://www.quintessenz.org/doqs/000100003129/20
In the heise.de-forum some guy already made a postig saying that this list is semi-public (just obscure) and that the "hack" is a bleeding joke.
In communist North Korea, slice is carved out of you!
I'd mod this troll, but it's actually a pretty mirror. Damn my flagrant metrosexuality...
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
It is part of the Department of Defense.
At least the NSA can relax now. The slashdotting is melting the server right now.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
For example, just yesterday I was informed that it is still relatively unsafe to travel to Liberia. I also know it is unsafe to travel to Iraq.
http://travel.state.gov/travel_warnings.html
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I think he is trying to imply that UFO's killed Kennedy.
http://www.greaterthings.com/Word-Number/Organizat ions/Echelon/images/echelon.jpg
...all over Europe. Some extracted data
of an public mailing list ist nothing.
What's a small script against a multi-billion-$
spy-network? So don't be slighted.
(The picture shows an ECHELON-facility)
But I think they do not want to prove how clever they are at hacking, that's not their style; instead they want to demonstrate the possible dangers of data-mining. They show that by collecting big heaps of more-or-less freely available data, then running some analysis on them, they (as everybody else) are able to gather data they probably should not be able to gather.
...coool.
Liechtenstein. They'll help you out if NATO invades.
Austria had a coast and a navy some 150+ years back when they held Trieste, which is now Italian.
Heh. Good one.
The new fascists know Arnold is their Best hope by far of getting the same kind of voter/market penetration they've got with W. The first step of putting him in the White House was to groom him for governorship of California, and as soon as he slapped that one down people were already talking about amending the constitution. He has said himself he thinks it should be amended so anyone who's been a citizen for 20 years (as he has) can run for president. He'll be on the ticket within 8 years, I promise you.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
I've been curious for a long time. Maybe you can tell me if Austrians also call themselves "Aussies"?
:-)
Cheers.
Now the truth will come out how the NSA and Micros~1 have been spying on all you evil-doing citizens.
In this case, it is likely true. The reference to Australia/Austria confusion is perfectly in line with studies showing geographic ignorance among Americans. Put that in your "I don't like it so it must be false" pipe and smoke it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Can't say for certain, but since the official language there is German and "Austria" is just an anglicised form of the country's real name "Österreich", they probably call themselves "Österreicher".
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The NSA is in Maryland and it's full of geeks and money. Like literally overflowing. They had to dig a run-off ditch but no one wanted to bit the bullet and pick up a shovel.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You can thank me later. I think you were having a seizure.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You kind of have to meet them before you can ask.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
This is excellent news. Our NSA is (by design, by nature, arguably by necessity, though I would suggest our Constitutional code on treason should serve as argument against that theory) much too opaque, and anything which increases the transparency of government is a good thing, IMO.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Gee, thanks! I was just missing the word "buzzword" in my bingo game! http://isd.usc.edu/~karl/Bingo/
Error #13: No coffee. Operator halted. Please place boot device at bottom.
Contrary to popular belief most (or at least a lot) of what the NSA does isn't all that secret.
Later on...
The really secret stuff is done by the SIGINT folks.
WTF!? They're "not that secret" but they do "really secret stuff"?
That fact is that the NSA is a highly secretive organization. Try reading their employee manual. As a matter of fact, if you asked me for an example of a "secretive organization", the NSA would be one of the first examples to come to mind.
Heck, the only guys at NSA HQ who even carry guns are the security guards.
OBVIOUSLY. If you're in a building that HAS SECURITY GUARDS, chances are you don't need to carry a gun inside that building. What point are you trying to make here?
That they don't run around shooting people inside their own building?
That all having been said, whoever "harvested" this information is asking for trouble.
I wouldn't say they are "asking" for trouble, but they might get it anyways. Look what the secret service did to Bernie S for taking pictures of an agent picking his nose.
Life is too short to proofread.
Right, we call ourselves "Österreicher". But the germans call us "Ösis" :).
>Who killed Kennedy?
The Mossad, because JFK wanted to force the zionists to abandon their secret a-bomb making factory at Dimona. Vanunu told this to BBC.