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Espionage In Icelandic Parliament
bumburumbi writes "An unauthorised computer, apparently running encrypted software, was found hidden inside an unoccupied office in the Icelandic Parliament, Althingi, connected to the internal network. According to the Reykjavik Grapevine article, serial numbers had been removed and no fingerprints were found. The office had been used by substitute MPs from the Independence Party and The Movement, the Parliamentary group of Birgitta Jonsdottir, whose Twiiter account was recently subpoenaed by US authorities. The Icelandic daily Morgunbladid, under the editorship of Mr David Oddsson, former Prime Minister and Central Bank chief, has suggested that this might be an operation run by Wikileaks. The reporter for the Reykjavik Grapevine, Mr Paul Nikolov is a former substitute MP, having taken seat in Parliament in 2007 and 2008."
I love reading the stories posted by the readership about all of the odd systems found stuck in closets and under desks which nobody knows what are doing.
Specifically... does anyone have any about Wall Street or Congress?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
An iceland parlementarian's twitter account subpoenaed by u.s. government, yet, the operation to spy on the iceland government, for some godfrigging reason, is proposed to be the operation by wikileaks ?
can anyone provide any actual logic for this proposition ?
Read radical news here
So, Wikileaks is SPECTRE now?
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
The Icelandic daily Morgunbladid, under the editorship of Mr David Oddsson, former Prime Minister and Central Bank chief, has suggested that this might be an operation run by Wikileaks.
If nothing else, wikileaks will be valuable to governments as a convenient scapegoat.
--
pass
if it was just an old sysadmin's personal download machine. Given that most computers do not have serial numbers but the ones procurement gives them, it could have been a system that was decommissioned and the sticker peeled off. I've got a couple of those myself although they're not hooked up to my companies' gigabit internet service.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
An unauthorized computer, apparently running encrypted software, ...
Well, object code is cryptic but it's not encrypted.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Better call Sportacus!
Stephen Christian, a computer expert at Oxymap ehf, told the Grapevine that ... "Information written to disk can be recovered by experts even after being overwritten several times unless you let the computer run for a few hours constantly 'covering up' its information. Computer hackers know this."
I laugh whenever I see comments like this. Lest we forget that nobody ever accepted The Great Zero Challenge, let alone beat it.
isnt it possible that the third parties, who are extremely irritated by wikileaks, have intended to gather information on them ?
Read radical news here
I have worked with production of embedded computers for more than a decade. I wonder if they...
* Changed the MAC address in the MAC EEPROM
* Removed other proprietary (serial number) data potentially stored in MAC EEPROM
* Scratched off about ten or twenty other serial labels put on electronics in various steps of the production procedure
* Removed serial number information from hard drives
The serial number of the computer can likely be found using any of the above if the factory cooperates.
Gee, let's see. Who would stand to gain by smearing Wikileaks?
Governments, large financial institutions, covert military operations, corrupt diplomats, racketeers... Who among such entities does not have the necessary resources to set up such a smear?
Meanwhile, this "encrypted" system sure sounds like a load of bollocks. It's all, like, secret. Wow. Yet how convenient, considering that it was "hidden", that it showed up exactly where and when it did.
Let's see, there are two possibilities that come to mind since this was done in the proximity of the female Icelandic MP with connection to wikileaks:
Obviously we can throw out #1 because it does not at all fit with wikileaks modus operandi and cannot be carried out by their infrastructure. They're set up to anonymously accept documents and disseminate them, they're not spies. Moreover the icelandic MP in question would be risking much to do this only to access documents she probably already has access to.
So #2 becomes the most obvious culprit.
Liberty.
the new universal boogieman.
Physically locating a device? That's so 20th century. Let me guess, one of the janitors was suspiciously talking into his shoe.
They found my CS 1.3 server!
It is entirely possible to encrypt a hard drive that once powered down the data is "lost". It's called TrueCrypt System Disk Encryption. Where the decrypter is a boot loader and the decrypted key gets stores in ram. Power off, no more key. The key is needed again to unlock the drive after reboot. To take it to the next level one would put an encrypted file container inside the encrypted system that requires a USB key to unlock. It would take a very long time to decrypt both keys without some very very heavy computing power
This happened one year ago (see article) and what interesting data could one possibly hope to find within the walls of the Icelandic Parliament? And even if there was any, there are easier ways of looking for it than gaining entry to the offices and leaving a laptop there. It's even more silly to think Wikileaks were involved.
"spam? ohhhhhh iiiiiit might have been a hackkeeerrrrrr!!!"
"ohhhh i have a worm in my apple -- ooh! ooooohhhhh wikileeeaaakkkss!!"
"ooh, ohhh i just discovered there's no way i can look at the contents of my son's computer even if i ground his computer to my room, pull the hard drive out and put it in my packard bell... he says it's PGP and hell i dunno i heard that's what wikileeaakkkss is ussiiingg ... uhhhh hrrrmmmmm i can't believe my son is part of their operation! the government should deeewwww something about this!"
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
This reveals more about David Oddsson than Wikileaks. I bet Mr. Oddsson has some friends who were very deservedly burned by the Icelandic banking scandal that Wikileaks broke the story on. And, of course, that means Wikileaks must be at fault for anything else wrong involving spying or information leakage. It can't possibly be because Mr. Oddsson's friends are nasty people who deserve long jail sentences, no...
It's like a domestic abuse case where the abused refuses to implicate the abuser in anything the abuser has done and it must all somehow be the fault of the abused person or external entities.
*rolls eyes* Get better friends Mr. Oddsson. Accept that you have terrible taste and learn to overcome your shortcoming.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
It's more like the Kennedy assassination - who wouldn't gain by smearing Wikileaks here? Even Wikileaks themselves* might have planted it as a diversion as opposed to surreptitiously leaving it behind. Or maybe it's a Murder on the Orient Express plot, where either a whole bunch of players conspired together to do it, or else some stranger walked in the door, planted it, and walked out unseen.
*Yes, I do reject any of the conspiracy suggestions that say Kennedy himself was behind it, except the one on Red Dwarf which might have been true, but between several Mafia families, the CIA, Cuba, anti-Castro Cubans, the Pentagon, Military-Industrial Complex businesses, several jealous ex-husbands, Bobby, Jackie, Frankie, Marilyn, J.Edgar, J.Edgar's dress-maker, and the Lone Gunmen, it really was a race to get there first....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So a strange computer was found in a government office...
... which may have been used by someone affliated with an org that discloses government secrets...
... as insinuated by a newspaper edited by the former head of said government...
... as reported by someone who may also have had access to this office previously, as a government official.
Is this representative of the kind of media bias Iceland has to deal with? Don't get me wrong, it's not like any country has it better, but is it always so blatantly obvious?
Call the MAFIAA, they've been searching for that for ages! If that's true, the money worries of Iceland are at an end, they'll happily pay big bucks for such a technology!
Snideness aside, I guess I needn't mention that no computer on this planet is able to run "encrypted software". The OS has to be able to load the executable, hence it has to conform to standard. CPUs are only able to run instructions that match their instruction set, so that has to conform to that standard. It may be runtime encrypted, but every halfway decent game cracker has been stripping those for ages, and every halfway decent malware analyst for even longer (I sometimes wonder how much these groups overlap, considering how many problems they both have to overcome... but I digress).
Maybe the file system is encrypted (to some degree, the system has to run after all...), but it's hardly possible that the software is running "encrypted".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> But but planting a computer on someone's network is pretty much amateur hour don't you think?
They said the same thing about the mistakes made in the assassination of that Hamas leader by Israel and about the mistakes made in that virus that attacked Iran's nuclear program. "Wouldn't real spies be more professional than this?"
I think we're seeing the CSI effect applied to spies. In other words, people are so used to seeing perfect operations in James Bond movies and they have absolutely no idea what real spy operations are like.
It would be funny if it turned out that this is just some licensing server.
then why did it not happen with the censorship law in spain, after all that bullying ?
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As a side note a spokesman from CCP hf announced today that the EVE Online Tranquility server has gone offline unexpectedly and they are working on the problem...
(PS: Yes I know EVE is hosted from London, but I couldn't resist!)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"A professional would have written any acquired data to a public-key-encrypted disk that would only have been accessible to one who possessed the private key - like with Wikileaks 'insurance' file" This is basically saying that the best way the commentator says of doing it is how wikileaks has encrypted their file. There is not even how the harddrive was encrypted
In contrast, the James Randi Paranormal Challenge has a $1,000,000 prize, only has rules that disallow cheating, has been running since 1964 and is still running. The fact that no one has passed the preliminary stage of that challenge means something
It means nothing. James Randi is a con man and a fraud. The whole "challenge" is a setup. Only James Randi is judge and jury, there are no independent experts involved. The rules are not set in stone beforehand at all. He alters the rules at any time of predicament. He also intimidates and harasses those going for the challenge, making for an exceptional hard environment to perform anything successfully. He's a total prick. Many people have accomplished what they've claimed, but then Randi came up with extra tests, until they failed. Randi also rejects many many applicants based on his own suspicions wether they might actually pull it off or not. He's not interested in "statistics", but demands "undisputable show of magic", but without magic tricks. He reserves all rights to explain away any "magic", being an accomplished magician, there is no lack of knowledge and creativity in that area, on the contrary. He demands the super-natural, but in reality, nothing is beyond nature, so he can always reject the results on the premise that it is still natural in some way. So the challenge is unbeatable.
Being one who has actually had Out Of Body experience, seen auras, and experienced that there is more to this universe than the judgement of sciencific-minded people. These experiences are not enough to win the "challenge" by far, because it is designed to reject everything. I just have to both giggle and pity people, when I see them falling for the same traps that overly religious and superstitious people do. Superstitious people accepts prematurely, while supersceptics rejects prematurely. You're all in the same boat, unable to open your mind to more possibilities than the one you've already decided for. It's extremely limiting, just imagine a history without such people! Of course you're going to miss what's happening on a subtle level. There are rare moments in life one has the possibility to experience such things, but it's easy to fall into either camps (superstitious / supersceptical) and become deluded that one knows more than one really does.
One of the most spiritual and scientific statements is: "I don't really know, but I would like to know". Then there is suddenly NO CONFLICT AT ALL between them, but rather, complementary vehicles of broading the mind.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
It's just perl!
#DeleteChrome
...Twiiter [sic] account was recently subpoenaed...
I don't use it, but wouldn't one just "follow" someone on Twitter to see everything they "tweet"?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
""An unauthorised computer, apparently running encrypted software, was found hidden inside an unoccupied office in the Icelandic Parliament, Althingi, connected to the internal network. According to the Reykjavik Grapevine article, serial numbers had been removed and no fingerprints were found. The office had been used by substitute MPs from the Independence Party and The Movement, the Parliamentary group of Birgitta Jonsdottir, whose Twiiter account was recently subpoenaed by US authorities."
Ah the joy of deconstruction.
An unauthorised computer = lots of these, even billions around, several million lurking around Microsoft campus at any time.
apparently running encrypted software = all have some form or another.
was found hidden inside an unoccupied office = someone forgot all about it except the cleaning crew (see below).
connected to the internal network = needed to use a printer.
serial numbers had been removed = it was bought by someone from another someone (could have been stollen) for real cheap bucks.
no fingerprints were found = the nightly clean crew knew where it was all along and did their job to keep it clean anyway.
The rest of the guck is just spectulative BS to get a story in the local papers (i.e. the local papers payed for the copy).
Like I said, nothing here.
-308
And don't forget: "Professionals wouldn't have left John Wheeler's body in the garbage. Hey, look over there...WIKILEAKS!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
http://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owastand.display_standard_group?p_toc_level=1&p_part_number=1910
I scroll down to "Subpart S"...
General electrical regulations it seems; can you point to which part of the subpart you refer to?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
denounce them ( Wikileaks )
The police have apparently given up so it's up to us conspiracy theorists to solve the problem (yet again)!
First of all this is clearly a cover-up involving both the parliament security forces and the police. The computer was discovered over a year ago, but nobody was the wiser until now when the story was leaked. Nobody was questioned and the investigation seems to have dead-ended immediately. Also, the security cameras near the room in question were "unfortunately out of order" at the time.
Keep in mind also that the office where the computer was found was being shared by the Movement and the Independence Party. The former are known around here as the friends of Wikileaks while the latter are known in Iceland as simply "The Party". They are the single most powerful entity in Iceland and have in the last 50 years or so controlled both parliament and government as well as having strong influences over the police and judiciary (and the parliament security forces). During the cold war party membership could guaranty work while not being a member could loose you your job. It's also a documented fact that the Independence Party had a very effective local espionage network during the cold war and I doubt they just stopped such a successful operation when the Berlin wall fell.
Finally the daily Morgunbladid is run by one David Oddsson who is the godfather of the Independence Party; what he says goes. Wrongfully accusing someone to divert the attention away from the Party is just his MO, but because Morgunbladid is widely read it will probably work.
Put the pieces together and we see that this was a botched Party spying operation covered up by the police and parliament security. ... as conspiracy theorys go this one's actually not that unlikely!
Wikileaks lets people deliver info to them, they definitely don't sneak into the parliament buildings of foreign countries to install hidden computers loaded with crypto.
They should really be looking at political parties, both foreign and domestic.
This is just stupid. Wikileaks doesn't do spying, that's what governments do. This is just childing accusations and shouldn't merit attention.
Why would they? They are recieving more in-depth stuff than any spy can find.
Worth noting is that at the exact same timing a different publication comes with a similar accustion of spying. In the US!
I am well and truly aghast! Have such people no morals? No scruples? And their gardens are so, well, to put it mildly, bleak. And perhaps shoddy. Should they not care for those, first? Truly shocking!
How fortunate it is that chance favours the virtuous - to the point of revealing this otherwise unassailable artifice of these, latter-day, scandalous Moriarties.
"suggested that this might be an operation run by Wikileaks."
Or far more likely, a Karl Rove type of maneuver, bugging yourself and blaming someone else.
Just when you thought they couldn't treat an icelandic MP like an ordinary citizen of countries where the US would like their own jurisdiction to apply whenever they feel like it, they find a suspicious computer somehow connected to that MP! I guess it's up to the usual media conglomerates now to convince everyone it's just a coincidence and Wikileaks is baaaad.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Iceland is the only country to date to default on the banks, unlike all the other countries who have bent over for the banks.
Large powerful banking interests would have had a great deal of interest in the period leading up to the default in seeing how the govt felt about defaulting.
Blaming Wikileaks is absurd. Either US or some other pawn of the banks.