'Project Vigilant' Recruits At Defcon To Track You

angry tapir writes "A secretive volunteer group that tries to track terrorists and criminals on the Internet went to the Defcon hacker conference in hopes of recruiting information security experts, but it will first have to overcome some skepticism. That's because most information security professionals have never heard of the group, called Project Vigilant."

Comments

Why not just call their company "NSAFront"?

[elrous0]

It would be no less obvious.

Re:Why not just call their company "NSAFront"?

[conspirator57]

As usual, Glenn Greenwald has several interesting things to say, even though he's not that technical and ascribes far too much credence to the technical prowess and savvy of high-level government officials with "cyber" or some variant in their name.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/02/privacy/index.html

Re:Why not just call their company "NSAFront"?

[FriendlyLurker]

Adrian Lamo worked as an Analyst for Project Vigilant - which specializes in collecting any and all data from major ISP's where the EULA permits third parties (i.e. pretty much all of them).

Lamo also just happened to turn in chat logs for military whistleblower Bradley Manning. There is already decent evidence to suggest that Lamo never talked to Manning, but was given the logs by this secretive private catch-all spy network "Project Vigilante" and told to turn them in.

bogus

[bsDaemon]

So, I got curious and clicked the link to the article. Then I clicked the link to the project's website, which beyond a splash screen with an INGSOC-esque logo with a half-assed latin slogan, you find a cheap-ass Drupal site which requires an OpenID account to log into. The list of logged-in users includes such gems as a guy named "poopcracker."

If this is cointelpro, its either extremely terrible, or extremely brilliant for looking so shoddy. Chances are, its just misguided vigilantism by people who read "gray hat python" and now think they can 'hack the Gibson'. I'm not sure which would disturb me more.

Re:bogus

[Anonymous Coward]

When you say "half-assed latin slogan," I hope you mean "pseudo-Latin slogan" - because that motto is the result of someone who doesn't know Latin trying to come up with something and getting it wrong. I think they were going for "We Watch Together," in which case they certainly shouldn't have used the first person *singular* of vigilo (not to mention misspelling "vigilo"). I think they meant Evigilamus Jugiter, to give the phrase the proper tone of menace (if they meant something less menacing, they should have gone with a variation on vigilamus pro te, which is the motto of the Canadian land forces and a translation of the chorus of O Canada).

Re:bogus

[FriendlyLurker]

Some of the names behind Project Vigilante:

...the list of its officials, which includes Mark Rasch, who headed the DOJ's Internet Crime Unit for 9 years; Kevin Manson, a retired Homeland Security official; George Johnson, who "develop[ed] secure tools for the exchange of sensitive information between federal agencies" for the Pentagon; Ira Winkler, a former NSA official; and Suzanne Gorman, former security chief of the New York Stock Exchange. These are people with extensive, sophisticated expertise in compiling highly invasive data about individuals' Internet activities, and more so -- given their background -- how to package it in a way that can be used by federal agencies.

From here and here.

So... perhaps it is a honeypot as well? In any case, the real operation is run backend to your ISP.

Re:bogus

[maxwell demon]

Romanes eunt domus!

EU already did it

[ZeroExistenZ]

EU already has a simular technology in place.

You can get the analysis at wikileaks: EU social network spy system brief, INDECT Work Package 4

"The aim of work package 4 (WP4) is the development of key technologies that facilitate the building of an intelligence gathering system by combining and extending the current state-of-the-art methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP). One of the goals of WP4 is to propose NLP and machine learning methods that learn relationships between people and organizations through websites and social networks. Key requirements for the development of such methods are: (1) the identification of entities, their relationships and the events in which they participate, and (2) the labelling of the entities, relationships and events in a corpus that will be used as a means both for developing the methods."

Follow the cash and access

[AHuxley]

Two links with some more reading on Project Vigilant.
"that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its "volunteers," researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April."..
but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users' Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies.
from:
Stealthy Government Contractor Monitors U.S. Internet Providers, Worked With Wikileaks Informant
http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/08/01/stealthy-government-contractor-monitors-u-s-internet-providers-says-it-employed-wikileaks-informant
"Elite US cyber team courts hackers to fight terror"
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hKoXQdL-L1HFYObz0_UUHMactSWg

Top tip, stop chatting to strangers, try a sneaker net gap and again stop chatting :)

Chet Uber?

[Sporkinum]

He must have the world's most awesome popped collar!

Re:Manning/wikileaks connection

[AHuxley]

"akin to being evil" really depends on the decade? the Church report, Iran contra, Operation Ajax, Room 641A, Sibel Edmond, COINTELPRO ...
Do you really want unaccountable, hidden, profit driven - mercs, private corporations, individuals and cyber vigilante types doing what the FBI should?

Re:Manning/wikileaks connection

[betterunixthanunix]

Was it specifically bad to turn in Manning? No, things are no black and white. From where I sit, though, Wikileaks is doing a good thing by exposing government lies -- we cannot trust the government to be honest about classified documents, which is why we need Wikileaks. If these guys are fighting against Wikileaks, that means they are pitted against those of us who want a more open government.

What worries me is that these guys are not required to abide by the constitution; they voluntarily collect information, and then turn it over to the government, which allows the government to obtain evidence that it would not otherwise be able to collect. These "fourth party" arrangements have been discussed in the past, and just because they are not hot news items anymore does not mean they are less worrysome.