Slashdot Mirror
US Fears Loss of ICQ Honeypot
AHuxley writes "US law enforcement bodies view the sale of instant messaging service ICQ to a Russian company as a threat to homeland security. In spring 2010, Russia's largest Internet investment company, Digital Sky Technologies, agreed to purchase the service for $187 million from AOL. The US is sure that most criminals use ICQ and, therefore, constant access to the ICQ servers is needed to track them down. As the system is based in Israel, American security service have had access. The article concludes, 'Lawyers [of unspecified nationality] say that to block the deal the US Committee on Foreign Investment needed to cancel it no later than within 30 days after the deal has been announced — so unless the rules are broken, nothing can be changed.'"
And why should they seize it? Last I heard, ICQ was a private company selling to another private company. Do we *really* want the Feds seizing private property / assets (corporate or otherwise) under the guise of national security? Not only does that set a dangerous precedent, it dilutes the true mention of national security. A power-grab if I ever saw one.
The Feds should only be seizing weapons with premeditation that would constitute a clear and present danger. ICQ is not that.
Life is not for the lazy.
And why wouldn't they develop their own protocols for communication?
I can think of various ways to communicate, most of them rather narrow-banded but still useful for key information.
If you are into big time crime you can even get news media to communicate for you, but that means that you must have exchanged some protocol first. Let's say that you agree that news reported in a certain newspaper online can contain some key information - like where a bank heist shall occur. You can then communicate a lot of information through other channels to coordinate the "when" and "how". Then just cause some other happening - like a large fire that will be reported in the news in the area where you shall pull it off.
And even in computer communication you can get around direct tracking, like posting on Slashdot or ping some servers with an incorrect sender address that will cause the ping reply to end up at your expected target system.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
So it would seem that the ICQ purchase is a Russian security issue, I suppose it is because of the location of the servers in Israel. So is US security really complaining or are they the puppets of Israeli security yet again, as you can bet the servers for ICQ will not remain where Israeli security can control them, once a Russian company owns them.
The US President and Russian President chumming it up at a burger joint http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDzHvAcysWQ (I wonder if nutburger Palin is still paranoid about the Russian President leering into her yard), would mean the cold war is well and truly over and Israel's significance in the region (due to Russian support of Arabic nations) is dwindling.
From a Russian perspective it makes normal commercial sense for them to expand into global internet market as can readily be witnessed by the growth of Russian today http://www.rt.com/, pretty much middle of the road english news site in terms of reliability, well ahead of Fox News.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
A warning to people out here: RT is the Russian international propaganda channel - ANYTHING it reports should be taken with a grain of salt and verified through other sources.
RT is a farely new Russian government owned news channel, and has been gaining more and more presence everywhere lately. Their journalism is extremely untrustworthy - fabrications are common and government anti-america propaganda is rampant.
What about the Jews who were kicked out of Persia, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen?
The insanity was the Arab world's decision to throw the Jews into the sea in 1947, 1967 and 1973. No, the Arab world couldn't stand the thought of a tiny trip of land with Jews on it, so they decided to refuse Israel's right to exist, something that blew up in their faces.
Had Poland, the United Kingdom and France not treated the Holocaust survivors like the cause of the Second World War and given them some options other than death and concentration camps things might have turned out differently.
Israel is not founded on a religion, it's founded on an racial heritage, something that's true from Morocco to Vietnam across Africa and Asia.
ICQ has millions of users in the former eastern bloc. ICQ is for Russia and most of its Slavic neighbors pretty much the same as QQ is for China and their neighbors.
People with these ethnic backgrounds living abroad have usually the same preference for their IM networks, of course, to reach the rest of the family back home. Now no one would ever dare to suggest that emigrants from the Eastern Bloc - those that use ICQ - have a high involvement in crime, but I'm sure there's some people who have more than a hunch on that. I wonder where all these new AK47s used in street crime from Belgium to California come from anyway...