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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.'"
But it's the compuserve psychos you have to watch out for.
Nothing can be done?! Nonsense. The National Security Act could be used to simply seize the entire operation, if it's that important.
Uh-oh!
As the system is based in Israel, American security service have had access.
While ICQ was founded in Israel, it's been owned by AOL for over a decade. The ICQ network has been integrated with AOL's AIM network many years ago and the servers are located in AOL's network supercenter in Virginia.
Do people still use ICQ? I thought it was a dying technology in 2000 when I first signed up for it as it was being supplanted by AIM, Yahoo, and MSN (which have been supplanted in many ways by Facebook).
My Sysadmin Blog
But good luck, they're behind 7 proxies.
kgb c u but usa no c u!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The US is sure that most criminals use ICQ
Proof ?
...other than "Prime Time Russia"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
A peer-to-peer architecture would be better for IM - no single point of failure at a server that impacts all conversations, end-to-end security rather than client to server, server to client, and no man in the middle attacks by government agencies or anybody else who chooses to record the conversations going through the servers. I sometimes wonder whether all the public IM servers are run by the "Air America" airline. The only use of a server in IM should be as a directory and participant availability service, not to carry the conversations, unless both participants are behind NAT. If one of the participants have a public IP address the conversations could go direct between the end-points. SIMPLE
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
i'd hide myself behind russian proxies and use ICQ. The "intelligence" community is *SO* trusting...
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
I dunno what's more shocking, that the government thinks ICQ has any relevance with anything anymore or that someone thought the network was worth $186 MILLION dollars. That's just insane.
In Soviet America government seeks you!
Do people still use ICQ? I thought it was a dying technology in 2000
ICQ is based in Israel and has always had strong regional loyalties. Bids are in for AOL's sale of ICQ--it's down to 'UN' of 4 buyers [Feb 8]
Use ICQ? Data/proof please? Or is this one of those "foreigners use ICQ therefore that's where all da crime at!"
My organization left ICQ a long time ago. We whisper each other in WOW. And if it's a really important deal, we insist on face to face meetings in Booty Bay.
I always knew AOL was a decoy network set up to trap black hats! But not even the grey beards of the US Gov't could match the talent pool that meets daily on ICQ to discuss their new devious missions.
The Admin and the Engineer
First off, if the 'US' is 'sure' of something (for example weapons of mass destruction), then you can be 100% certain the US is up to no good.
Second, "The US is sure that most criminals use ICQ and..." ---- really?? I will happily plunk down a $1,000,000 bet and walk down to the nearest prison and ask a random sampling of 'criminals' what they know about ICQ. Rest assured, almost none of the criminals will have a clue about ICQ. Kids however, would be able to tell you all about it. ...maybe the US is referring to kids who download shitty music as 'criminals'? If keeping ICQ in order to track a bunch of pimply-faced kids downloading music is 'National Security', then America is truly fucked.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
I'm not at all a fan of Russia, and I don't really believe that the cold war ended. We just stopped fighting it. At least I know that they still aren't our friend. That being said, I don't trust my own government here in the United States either.
This is actually a good thing. When they fight it out, the people win. Russia will have the exclusive right to part of the information, and the US will have the other part. If both of them refuse to cooperate, then perhaps our personal data is a little safer. After all, neither one of them is a freind to the people.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
Forget the U.S. potentially snooping ICQ, and pay attention to the fact that Russians almost certainly will. If you thought it was unsafe to send a CC or SSN over ICQ before now (which it was), well you better double down on that conviction and warn everyone you know that uses ICQ just where the traffic will be headed from now on...
I don't mean to offend anyone, but the simple fact is that bribery is not that uncommon in Russia so there are many more paths for organized crime to get to key numbers such as these from network techs that work in Russia. And it takes only one...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Re it stops being a honeypot People still buy MS products :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
i've been in a holding cell and i've never used ICQ.
(Although i wasn't actually convicted... so maybe we'll need someone else to come forward)
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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.
I eventually gave up using the service because I kept getting huge messages from people I didn't know with cyrillic names. I always assumed it was an attempted buffer overflow attempt and hoped because I was using a nonstandard client on linux that it didn't have the same leak, or that if it did, that the payload would simply crash in the linux environment. I wonder now if it was perhaps just cyrillic unicode explanations how some pill or another would enhance my virility, that displayed as extended ascii characters (all I allowed in the text window). All the people I know have migrated to other services now anyway.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Let me get this right, the US authorities are worried about the ICQ* service going to the Russians.... has the US seen just how much their economic rivals China own of the US economy? Get your priorities in order.
* Does anyone actually use ICQ any more?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
What are our hackers going to talk on now ... ??? All we have is IR....oh wait. Nobody's used ICQ in years.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Okay, seriously. People who claim or think ICQ is barely used by anybody nowadays obviously have their heads too far up their ass. You do realize that there exists a wide, grand world outside of the glorious US of fuckin' A, right? Just because ICQ isn't popular in the US doesn't mean it's the same way everywhere else. ICQ is very widely used in Germany, for example. Some other comment mentioned the ex-USSR countries as well. Even if you say it as a joke ... it's not funny. Those of us who know otherwise just facepalm and remember that the internet is full of blithering idiots like you.
Which page concludes with:
A 19th century American judge, Justice Bradley, put the point well in the course of delivering his opinion in a case heard in Louisiana in 1873:
“England has no written constitution, it is true; but it has an unwritten one..."
As the parent says, Britain does not have a formal, written constitution - it has an informal constitution which consists of both written statutes and unwritten conventions.
And that's exactly the problem with jabber. Some applications run better when each participant acts both as a client and a server at the same time - i.e. the dictionary definition of a peer. An IM conversation occurs between two peers - they both send and receive information. So the peers should communicate directly if they can, not via some intermediary unless they have to. NAT is a reason why they might have to, which is why IPv6's goal is to get rid of NAT - so that if a peer-to-peer application architecture suits, then the network fully supports it.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
That's got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever read on Slashdot... which is saying something.
The vast majority of criminals in the USA are people breaking the speed limit. I doubt that a significant percentage of them use ICQ, and even if they did, they probably wouldn't be talking about the speeding they're doing.
I piss off bigots.
ICQ is used in FSU via a convenient client "Qip" http://qip.ru/ Almost nobody is using an original ICQ client.
I think the US and RF governments should fight cyber-crime together.
Businesses in the FSU usually have a low profit margin. At the same time, the USA is one of the top spam generating countries http://www.projecthoneypot.org/spam_server_top_countries.php
Spam kills our businesses in FSU because colleagues spend a lot of working time on dealing with it. Spam filters do not help anymore. This is an area where the RF government should be interested in cooperation with the US authorities to reduce the amount of spam incoming into our businesses. Without an international effort this problem can not be solved.
I guess there could be criminals who may use ICQ, but I know for sure that there are criminals who flood our servers with spam. Significant part of this spam has the US origin. So there is a vast field for law enforcement agencies to cooperate.
For example, a mobile police team from Russia could bust a spam kings, say, in Alabama, destroy spam servers and go home in Russia. It is much harder task to do for local cops. And vice-versa. A team of the US police officers could bust, say, a soft pirates' sweetshop somewhere in Siberia and go home after destroying the illegal production and equipment. Again it is not an easy task for local police to come and destroy a business, even an illegal one.
Nowadays when we are in one and the same network it would be more productive to cooperate than to confront.
Disclosing your IP address and the fact you're using an certain versions AIM is an invitation to hackers.
Your computer is broadcasting an IP address. Click here to fix it.
I detect sarcasm. The "broadcasting an IP address" adverts appear to be for anonymizing web proxies. But there's a difference between disclosing your IP address to a legitimate machine listed in the DNS, such as a web site, and disclosing your IP address to another residential user. If a contact originating in the DNS turns malicious, you can pull info from Whois when you file the police report. AIM and ICQ, on the other hand, have no reliable counterpart to Whois as far as I know.
Presumably in a p2p network, where everything is a potential mitm attack, you wouldn't be able to ignore the possibility of it and would thus build encryption, signing, and data hiding into the protocol.
Verifying a digital signature requires some sort of public key infrastructure. OpenPGP has a web of trust, but it's not very useful if you've never been to a key signing party outside your home town. When you connect to an IM buddy in another country for the first time, how do you verify that the certificate actually belongs to the buddy and not a government man in the middle without having to fly to key-signing parties to build links to the web of trust in the country where the buddy lives?
walk down to the nearest prison and ask a random sampling of 'criminals'
The so-called "Russian Mafia" consists of organized crime syndicates. You won't find many members of these syndicates in a prison near you because if you did, the crime wasn't organized enough.
All you've done is copy the very same document I linked to way up-thread.
Which is the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Not a "Constitution".
You're digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole, Tastecicles. I'm sorry, but you're simply misinformed, and it's time to become silent, listen, and become more knowledgeable.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Certainly the loss of manufacturing has been a far greater blow to national security than anything else. If we can't build tanks, missiles, airplanes, etc. without relying on other countries, then what do we do if those countries become our enemies? Go back to bows and arrows?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Oh we will soon enough but not because of loss of manufacturing.
Criminals are already on Facebook... haven't you heard of Zynga? Though, I suppose that you meant criminals communicating to each other as peers, not looking for marks...
does that mean us intelligence uses icq to lure non-terrorists in, chat them up into a frothy rage, and then tell them they'll help them, thus turning them into terrorists?
...
My mistake. Even if the police refuse to get involved, it's easier to find whom to sue in civil court if you access a server behind its own domain than if you access a random member of a DSL pool.
Have you noticed that the decision to interfere with the free flow of commerce in the name of national security is a difficult one for our government, yet they find interfering in the rights and way of life of the American people for the same - or any other - reason to be a piece of cake?
Yet people call me a "liberal" for saying that the SCOTUS made corporations super-citizens when they made them de jure living entities complete with the right to free speech...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
ICQ hasn't been based in Israel for more than a decade.
Before that, its main "data center" was an office in New York.
Since then, it's been in America Online's data centers spread mostly in the US and several non-US locations, none of which are Israel.
Ubique was founded in Israel. That's about all you can say about Israel and ICQ in the past dozen years or so.
Kriston
Sorry, insulting me when I'm in the right doesn't help your case. He said, "the majority of criminals." Criminals are people who do or have committed crimes. There's only one interpretation of that: the majority of people who do or have committed crimes use ICQ.
Too many people make gross generalizations in the press already. Either speak precisely or STFU.
I piss off bigots.