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Would-Be Akamai Spy Busted By Feds
itwbennett writes "Elliot Doxer, an Akamai Technologies staffer, was charged on Wednesday with wire fraud. The case began in June 2006 when Doxer sent an e-mail to the consulate of a foreign country (referred to as 'country X') in which he 'expressed his desire to help that country with whatever information he could obtain in his position,' according to an article on ITworld. 'The foreign consulate that Doxer contacted turned his e-mail over to law enforcement authorities, and a little over a year later, he was contacted by an FBI agent posing as a representative of 'country X.' Over the next 18 months, Doxer left confidential business information such as customer lists and contracts at a designated spot called a dead drop, acts captured via video surveillance.'"
An Akamai employee is using an analog dead drop? Surely he could have set up some sort of digital delivery served up by his employer, no?
It describe itself as "Akamai: The Leader in Web Application Acceleration and Performance Management, Streaming Media Services and Content Delivery" (source : http://www.akamai.com/ )
That is all.
Many countries do not trust spies. Astounding.
automatically assumes that a foreign country is interested in pedestrian industrial espionage, particularly when there is no technology involved, just business contact and contract info? Oh boy, freepills.com pays Akamai $200/month to host their images, that was totally worth the expense and risk of a diplomatic incident!
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Why wasn't he charged with attempted espionage?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I hated playing as that stupid wolf.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Anybody know why that information would be particularly valuable to a _country_? I thought Akamai was just a distributed web cache people used to distribute software updates. Akamai is required to comply with local laws (eg. China's website identification requirements) so I've no idea.
The funny thing is, almost everyone has probably used Akami without realising it. They provide up to 30% of web traffic. I assume most of that comes in the form of updates and software downloads that loads of big players seem to use them for.
He also seemed preoccupied with ill will toward his ex-wife, writing at one point that "not enough bad things can happen to her if you know what I mean." And he offered to drop his request for monetary compensation in return for information or pictures of his son.
So.. look I'll give you this information and you put a good hurtin on the b*tch. Oh and get my son back from her. K, thanks.
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2010/10/07/2741170/jewish-internet-company-employee-arrested-for-selling-secrets Jewish Internet company employee arrested for selling secrets October 7, 2010 (JTA) -- A Jewish employee of a Boston-area Internet company was arrested on suspicion of selling confidential information to a foreign company. Elliot Doxer, 42, who works in the finance department of Akamai Technologies Inc., was charged Wednesday with wire fraud for providing confidential business information to an undercover FBI agent that he believed was a foreign government agent. The information included contract details, employee information and customer lists. The country was identified in the indictment as Country X. "I am a Jewish American who lives in Boston," Doxer reportedly wrote in an e-mail to a foreign country's consulate in Boston. "I know you are always looking for information and I am offering the little I may have." Doxer, who had access to invoices and customer contact information, also said in a later message that his goal was "to help our homeland and our war against our enemies." He informed the agent that his company served the U.S. Department of Defense, Airbus and several Arab companies. Doxer reportedly asked for $3,000 in compensation for his actions. According to the complaint, Doxer provided the agent with a list of Akamai's customers, several contracts and a list of employees and their contact information. Doxer and the agent first made contact in September 2007.
Entrapment would be if the FBI offered him money to divulge company secrets out of the blue. He made an offer to Country X; the intent to commit a crime was his alone, not prompted by law enforcement.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
"...a little over a year later..."
What were they doing all this time? Searching for an agent who could speak with the 'country X' accent?
On another note: did anyone see Burn Before Reading? :)
There aren't enough details in TFA, but this sure sounds like entrapment. i.e. no crime would have been committed if the FBI had not engaged him...
He was the one who contacted the "country X" with the clear intention of selling confidential information. He took the first step. As such the fault lies all on him. It would be different if "country X" or the FBI had contacted him first.
No, entrapment would be if the FBI came to you (posing as a foreign power) out of the blue to ask if you would share secret info and then you did. e.g. they enticed or entrapped you into doing it. In this case, the guy initiated the action all on his own. The FBI in this case was just proving that the guy really wanted to do this, not just making an offer that he never intended to follow through with. From wikipedia: Government agents entrapped him if three conditions are fulfilled: 1. The idea for committing the crime came from the government agents and not from the person accused of the crime. 2. Government agents then persuaded or talked the person into committing the crime. Simply giving him the opportunity to commit the crime is not the same as persuading him to commit the crime. 3. The person was not ready and willing to commit the crime before the government agents spoke with him. On the issue of entrapment, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not entrapped by government agents.
More specifically, Akamai is a content distribution company that serves as a local mirror for it's customers and their customer's clients. You'll see them everywhere from streaming video at Yahoo! to deploying Windows Updates with Microsoft. You would be surprised with how much content is delivered to your computer from their servers.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
Exactly. If a LEO approaches me and offers to murder my estranged ex-wife for $20,000 that's entrapment. If I'm seeking out a hitman on my own and a LEO poses as one that's not entrapment.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"I am a Jewish American who lives in Boston," Doxer reportedly wrote in an e-mail to a foreign country's consulate in Boston. "I know you are always looking for information and I am offering the little I may have."
Doxer, who had access to invoices and customer contact information, also said in a later message that his goal was "to help our homeland and our war against our enemies."
He informed the agent that his company served the U.S. Department of Defense, Airbus and several Arab companies. Doxer reportedly asked for $3,000 in compensation for his actions.
I'm sure I'm getting part of this wrong, because it's been about ten years since I sat through a presentation by an Akamai dude in the waning dot-com days, but their main offering was a sort of content caching/mirroring system with servers all over the place to back it up.
So for example, you're Fox and you sign up to have your streaming TV episodes "Akamaized". The day after a new episode of American Idol is posted to the web, probably a lot of people are downloading/streaming it. Akamai's setup would automatically mirror it out to a bunch of local servers all over the place, so in theory, no matter where you the watcher are, you're streaming from a server a low number of hops/latency from you, and you're not slashdotting Fox's own servers.
Many sites also used/use Akamai for delivery of things such as Javascripts, cascading style sheets (CCS files), and images. Much the same as many use Amazon's Elastic Cloud Storage service.
By that logic then the following would also be entrapment:
I threaten to beat-up a co-worker, so I arrive at their house the next day, and on seeing them standing outside of their house, begin whacking them with a plank of wood. The actual victim though was an undercover police officer taking the place of the intended victim, so really the crime could not have been committed had they not been there, but it'd be an incredible stretch to describe that as entrapment.
It's not entrapment for law enforcement agencies to take people up on their offers to break the law.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
This guy's second mistake (after thinking he was capable of any espionage at all) was to approach a foreign consulate. This isn't the 1940s anymore people. Consulates are not the hotbeds of espionage that they used to be. If he wanted to be an agent for a foreign intelligence organization, he should have tried to contact them directly in a manner not easily intercepted by SIGINT such as an old fashioned letter (or even better, contact them through a sympathetic radical political organization). Don't think that a nation's State Department or Ministry of Foreign Affairs is going to have time or interest in your petty cloak and dagger.
(The previous is no more than commentary and opinion and should not be construed as encouragement or advice to commit treason/fraud/etc.)
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
How the hell does Low Earth Orbit approach you? Ohhh, you mean a Lunar Exploration Orbiter! No, that would not make sense either... I'm running out of geek-explanations here, and am forced to seek my solution in the inexplicable.
So please explain to me why a person born under the astrological sign of the zodiac Leo would be more likely to entrap you?
Doesn't something seem wrong with the response of the foreigner who informed on him. Wouldn't the proper response be to say something like, "we value transparent relations with the US and wouldn't want to jeopardize them" instead of turning over the man's emails to the US.
Think of this in reverse. Let's say the man worked for Baidu, the Chinese Internet search engine and his loyalty was to the US. The man emails a member of the US government saying, if they wanted help he'd be willing to help them out. Now, wouldn't it then seem really wrong to then turn over that man's emails to the Chinese government so they could use them to trap him in some set up?
Shouldn't the US or anyone else in that situation just say "thanks, but no thanks" instead of starting these cloak and dagger games?
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Are you an idiot or going for sarcasm? I honestly can't tell. Next time use <moron> or <sarcasm> tags.
LEO = Law Enforcement Officer
"law enforcement officer" im assuming
Allow me to be the first to say:
Who gives a flying fsck?
Can anyone masquerade as representatives of a foreign power? Seems that it should be forbidden but if not then I'd like to be the Roman Ambassador to the UN!
"If a LEO approaches me and offers to murder my estranged ex-wife for $20,000 that's entrapment."
No, that's a bargain!
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Entrapment laws were setup to keep the police in line, so when no governmental abuse is found, entrapment is usually waived. The only way to really get an entrapment defense to work is if the police were extraordinarily out of line. I do know that some east coast Police Departments were doing naughty things like putting a wallet on the sidewalk and then arresting anyone who picked it up, even though the law states you have up to 24 hours to turn it in. Its this kind of stuff that entrapment laws are intended to stop.
Good-bye
Ohhh, I accidentally the LEO. ;-)
I go with <_>, also known as the Derp tag.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Whenever there is a spy scandal and people want to avoid talking about which country it was, it's usually Israel. Nobody likes to admit that a supposed ally is spying on us, but they spy on us more than anyone since the Soviet Union fell apart.
Prior to reading your post, I suspected that Doxer was trying to deal with Israel. He had nothing of value for them so this provided a perfect opportunity for them to "help" the US by reporting it so they can say, in effect, "See. We don't always spy on you." Some of you out there may not know this, but quite a few recent espionage cases in the USA have involved Americans spying on behalf of Israel. I have to wonder if Doxer actually worked for the US government and had access to things that Israel would be interested in knowing about if they would have been so quick to rat him out to the Feds.
It could even be construed as justification for self defense if you wound up assaulting the under cover guy.
Some hit man comes in offering bling to kill your wife...maybe you'd think it's just hush money to keep you quiet.
He went to *Israel* and offered them dishwater-grade intelligence?
Well it saves Akamai the hassle of doing staff intelligence tests.
[FrLz]
The assault and battery was intentional, and under the doctrine of transferred intent, your intended target becomes the undercover cop.
There seems to be potential for escalation from a simple misdemeanor assault to a felonious assault on a peace officer.
That's just marketing blather. Akami is one of those services that would be called "cloud hosting" if it had been invented more recently. It's just a big web hosting operation what has lots of geographically-dispersed, load-balanced server farms. If you have a heavy-traffic site and you want to make sure it feels fast to your customers, you host it on Akami.
On our network, a large portion of our traffic goes to Akami IP space just from user browsing.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
This story supports the assertion that more spies are busted through snitching rather than sleuthing
I wasn't aware of the transferred intent doctrine. Thanks for the tip.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
There's some hoops you have to jump through to tell Akamai that the content has changed, if you do so.
dig www.apple.com
; > DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 > www.apple.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 8838 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 8, ADDITIONAL: 8 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.apple.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ;; Query time: 1 msec ;; SERVER: 131.251.0.4#53(131.251.0.4) ;; WHEN: Thu Oct 7 16:40:40 2010 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 430
www.apple.com. 1453 IN CNAME www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net.
www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net. 30 IN CNAME www.apple.com.edgekey.net.
www.apple.com.edgekey.net. 6295 IN CNAME e3191.c.akamaiedge.net.
e3191.c.akamaiedge.net. 10 IN A 2.19.205.15
c.akamaiedge.net. 372 IN NS n5c.akamaiedge.net.
c.akamaiedge.net. 372 IN NS n6c.akamaiedge.net.
c.akamaiedge.net. 372 IN NS n0c.akamaiedge.net.
c.akamaiedge.net. 372 IN NS n3c.akamaiedge.net.
c.akamaiedge.net. 372 IN NS n4c.akamaiedge.net.
c.akamaiedge.net. 372 IN NS n7c.akamaiedge.net.
c.akamaiedge.net. 372 IN NS n2c.akamaiedge.net.
c.akamaiedge.net. 372 IN NS n1c.akamaiedge.net.
n3c.akamaiedge.net. 1609 IN A 195.12.231.131
n6c.akamaiedge.net. 1609 IN A 195.12.231.135
n1c.akamaiedge.net. 1442 IN A 195.12.231.136
n7c.akamaiedge.net. 1608 IN A 195.12.231.140
n0c.akamaiedge.net. 1609 IN A 195.12.231.130
n2c.akamaiedge.net. 1078 IN A 195.12.231.140
n5c.akamaiedge.net. 1078 IN A 195.12.231.133
n4c.akamaiedge.net. 1608 IN A 195.12.231.133
While I have sympathy for your situation, I see nothing so far except unsuported postulates that his situation is the same.
I don't actually see anywhere the piece of info that his ex-wife actually kidnapped his son or disappeared anywhere. A more common -- and Occam's Razor compliant -- assumption would be that she simply won the custody.
Also note that this wasn't even the payment he originally asked for. He first just asked for $3000, and there was no mention of his son at all. Only when they tried to haggle the price down, he dropped the price to basically "not enough bad things can happen" to his ex-wife. Sorry, it doesn't sound to me like some desperate guy and some kidnapping. If that were his motivation, he'd ask for that from the start. Whereas for this guy it was the second best, if he's not getting his $3000.
Also, note that he didn't actually ask for his son back. He just wanted his ex-wife hurt and some _photos_ of his son. Doesn't sound like there was any kidnapping involved, if anyone asks me. You'd expect him to actually want his son rescued, if there was some kidnapping thereof, not just some photos. But at any rate that was just an addendum to the real payment he was falling back to, namely that something bad happens to his ex.
I.e., it's more likely that, basically, you're cheering for someone who was just a douchebag trying to sell some info from work for money, or if that fails, use the Mossad to carry his personal vengeances. He doesn't seem to actually have more of a moral high ground there than the AOL admin who sold the client database to spammers. He just was even dumber about it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... 'country X' was the USA.
According to the news, he faces 20 years in prison.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe I can get information from the various places I work at. So, who would pay the most for samples of KFC "7 herbs and spices", or McD "Special sauce", or maybe a sampling of TB "hot sauce"?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
and how is this different from what the US government did for Boeing when they leaked info from Airbus in a contract Airbus were winning?
I take it we'll see US government officials facing similar jail time, yes?
If the newspapers won't name the country then it is Israel.
Well, no. If they ask you to commit a crime and you commit the crime, that's not entrapment.
If they induce you to commit a crime you don't want to commit, that's entrapment.
Offering you money isn't enough of an inducement to be entrapment. Offering to let you know where your child is might be. Telling you they'll harm your child if you don't definitely is.
Again, no, just asking you to do it or offering you some benefit to do it is not entrapment.
Forcing you somehow to do it when you don't want to is entrapment.
If I'm seeking out a hitman on my own and a LEO poses as one that's not entrapment.
No, but it raises the question of what crime would've been committed if the police hadn't done this.
Consider this hypothetical example: I want to buy some cocaine. I try to find a dealer, and an undercover police officer poses as one; we get in touch, he hands me a pack of cocaine, I hand him some money in return. At this point, I have committed a crime by buying drugs.
However, it is not immediately clear I would've done so if it hadn't been for the police officer in question. One could say I would probably have found another dealer and bought from him instead, but "the defendant would probably have" is not enough for a conviction. So if we focus on the actual events, we'll find that yes, I did break the law, and no, I wouldn't have broken it, at least not to the same extent, if it hadn't been for the police.
Even if you assume that attempts are crimes, too (I'm not sure if this is the case here, but it doesn't matter), the question is meaningful: will I be convicted of the greater or the lesser crime?
It's not entrapment, but I think that given that "the defendant would probably have" is not enough to justify a conviction, I think it's necessary for a conviction to only be handed down for the things that clearly did happen without the involvement of the police.
Threatening to harm a child isn't just entrapment, that's beginning to look more like duress.
I got a very different result..
...probably not treason. ...Treason definitely isn't the best way to go but maybe the guy was just that desperate.
It's not treason. Just corporate espionage -- and not really all that much of that either.
Aside from the details of the contracts, Akamai's customers are readily identifiable -- A web crawler indexing links to Akamai sites could come up with a pretty good approximation of Akamai's customer list.
Are there seriously slashdotters who don't know what akamai is? What is this world coming to?
So it took 1 year + 18 months to setup an operation and catch this guy?
I'm sure they (FBI, NSA, whatever) wanted to have a case against him, but:
How much did it cost?
But that's exactly the question, innit? Is his situation actually all that similar in the first place? Because from everything I can find about it -- and yes, I even spent some time googling, not just TFA -- there is absolutely no mention of any kidnapping being involved or alleged or anything. And again, even his demands and behaviour, don't seem to even remotely resemble any kind of rescue.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"If a LEO approaches me and offers to murder my estranged ex-wife for $20,000 that's entrapment."
No, that's a bargain!
But you'd have her hanging over your head!
then this story is a sign that we should bomb the fuck out of Peking. just because.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It's not entrapment for law enforcement agencies to take people up on their offers to break the law.
It is not entrapment but it is a bit paradoxical. Even if the original idea to commit a crime was the criminal's idea, the crime would not necessarily have been committed had the police not taken some sort of action. I think you could argue that preventing crime is more important than punishing crime, so facilitating the commission of a crime just to punish a person for that crime is a paradox. Why not take the course of action which leads to a universe where the crime does not get committed?
It almost seems vindictive, and detrimental to society. Yes, it was the bad guy's idea to do it in the first place, but if you could have taken (or not taken) some specific action that resulted in no crime being committed I think that is a pretty obvious choice.
It's called attempted karma whoring. Fortunately doesn't seem to be working so well.
Dude, you need to an hero. if Country X was China, the news media would have SAID China, as would the indictment. It's ISRAEL, tard -every time those chumps get caught spying on the US, their is every step taken to conceal it from the Great unwashed. The guy is one of those who claim that a burning shrub promised a chunk of desert to some escaped slaves, in exchanged for tasty bits of foreskin. Mmmm, foreskin. So there was no need for Israel to 'turn' him - they just exploited his adherence to their particular form of tribal lunatic belief in mutilating children's genitals in order to propitiate an invisible Sky Wizard. No biggie - at least his actions didn't cause the decloaking of several dozen US intelligence assets in hostile environments as Jonathan Pollard did... the national hero of Israel who betrayed his birth country and cost 112 - and counting - US operatives their lives (and for whose release the tribal lunatics keep clamouring). CHINA? Jesus... the stupid burns my eyes.
It's kind of difficult to come up with a one-size fits all approach. The consulate people he spoke to could have said no, and that could have been the end of this guy's foray in to international industrial espionage. They could have informed his company, who would then have taken disciplinary action against him. I've no idea what his mental state was, but his references to his wife and son certainly seem a bit strange - and it's certainly not normal for the average office guy to make these offers to foreign governments. Had he been working for something related to national security then I'd say that the FBI would be right to see if he was serious, and then throw the book at him when he produced the goods. As it stands, I honestly don't know if the FBI did the right thing here. A simple warning early on may have been enough of a wake-up call to allow this guy to lead a semblance of a normal life (presumably beginning with looking for a new job).
There are obviously limits to "enabling" a crime. If a guy was drinking in a bar and said that he was sick of his wife and wished she was dead, it would most likely be vindictive for an undercover officer to offer to sell him a gun, and then pick him up later when he returned to his home. In most cases the drunk would be spewing hyperbole, and it's unlikely that he'd actually want to see his wife dead.
It'd be different though if the guy in question was actively seeking a gun in order to commit murder. i.e. he specifically asked the undercover officer if he had a gun for sale, or he had placed an advert in the local paper looking for a hit-man. Particularly in the latter example, I'd be happy if law enforcement answered his advert and picked him up for questioning.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
You sound like Tom Clancy's girlfriend.
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Now if only they can stop whining about the tough sentence handed out to real spies like Jonathan Pollard etc.
By the way, a very thought provoking post you have there.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
They turned him in, fearing a crude "gotcha" sting.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The internet on phones in Australia is now hyped as 'free' twitter /facebook.
In a few years that will be the 'net' for many.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They've got some servers co-located at the data-center where I work
I don't work for that business unit so I don't know much about it, except that I once got a misdirected phone call from them asking to have an unresponsive server power cycled.
It wouldn't be too expensive to have a few terabytes in every town over 50k people in the U.S if you just cram them into a few RU of space at inexpensive hosting companies.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Hosting with cheap hosting companies probablly wouldn't bring what a provider like akamai needs which is high bandwidth, low (or zero) cost per traffic connections to end users. The cost for the rackspace is probablly negligable compared to the advantages (both to akamai and the company hosting the server) to getting the machines in the right place network wise.
IIRC who pays who with akamai servers varies, sometimes akamai will pay a provider to host a server and sometimes a provider will pay akamai to provide them with one (having an akamai server locally saves bandwidth costs).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
A little more complicated than that these days. They're still a giant reverse proxy in that they cache content. They also do acceleration now for non-cacheable conent using all sorts of clever tricks including TCP modifications and overriding BGP routing. Video streaming is their big thing these days and you'll see a lot of press releases about it. Saw a sales presentation from them the other day which said they had 70000+ servers and deliver around 20% of all Internet traffic. Kinda scary numbers
(full dsclosure: work for an Akamai customer)