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!
...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!
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.
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.
Not Much but here you go: http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/f713a0d2a6af715f4 a3d3292080951e5/index.html
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
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In other news, the US will declare war on Australia in six months time.
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
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?
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.
1. Sign up for "secret NSA mailing list" at http://www.biometrics.org/html/listserv.html
2. Read archives
3. Super haxxor!
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
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?"
go to the page that links to that image...t ions/Echelon/
http://www.greaterthings.com/Word-Number/Organiza
and you'll see that the author uses the words ecdysis and echidna to tell us why Echelon is so bad. Apparently they come either side of Echelon in his '71 Websters, so they must be related...
My point is that no matter how true your position is, we are more likely to accept it if you use exampels and proofs from someone on our side of reality. In fact, the less credible the source, the less likely we are to accept it at face value.