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."

Comments

Run by wikileaks ?

[unity100]

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 ?

Re:Run by wikileaks ?

[cHiphead]

"They" are trying to turn wikileaks into the new imaginary Al Qaeda boogeyman.

Hang on a second...

[AceCaseOR]

So, Wikileaks is SPECTRE now?

Wikileaks == scapegoat

[presspass]

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

Re:Wikileaks == scapegoat

[Pharmboy]

When, exactly, has Wikileaks actively gathered evidence? Oh, never. Wikileaks just waits for others to the gathering, they just do the publishing. Next, they will be blaming global warming on Wikileaks.

Re:Wikileaks == scapegoat

[Dunbal]

former Prime Minister and Central Bank chief, has suggested that this might be an operation run by Wikileaks.

      This, brought to you by the mind that collapsed Iceland's economy.

Re:Wikileaks == scapegoat

[bug]

There's a strong possibility that you're mistaken in your assertions there. There has been some reporting in the press that Wikileaks activists have actively eavesdropped on data by running one or more rogue Tor servers:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all#ixzz0pWdlAepe
There has also been reporting as recently as today that Wikileaks actively gathered data from peer-to-peer file sharing networks:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-20/wikileaks-may-have-exploited-music-photo-networks-to-get-classified-data.html

Re:Rogue servers

[digsbo]

does anyone have any about Wall Street or Congress?

Why bother? They steal openly now.

Recovery Fairy Tales again

[scdeimos]

From TFA:

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.

Re:Recovery Fairy Tales again

[ladadadada]

There are four problems with the Great Zero Challenge that I could identify at a glance:

1. No incentive. The prize is $40. Data recovery companies charge tens of thousands to recover a drive. (Depending on how hard it is.)
2. No disassembly. Any technique that "reads residual magnetism" is going to require custom read heads and access to the platters.
3. No longer running. The challenge ended in January 2009 and only ran for one year. That blog post is from September 2008.
4. Full disclosure. This is a show-stopper. Data recovery companies guard their secret methods very closely. Those secrets are their only competitive advantage. Telling everyone how they did it for $40 ? I don't think so.

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

Re:Recovery Fairy Tales again

[DavidTC]

If the NSA really wanted the data on that drive they may be able to do it.

The point is this is all a nonsense urban legend that actually started on an entirely different type of drive entirely, an MFM drive, with much fuzzier bits, and someone hypothesized that data recover might theoretically be possible even after an overwrite, and you might want to do it with different patterns.

This hypothetical 'might' on much older drives has somehow become the actual literal truth, resulting in people running multiple wipe operations and even physically destroying drives, despite no one ever demonstrating recovery of a once-wiped file in the entire history of computers. Ever. At all. It has never once happened, no actual data recovery firm claims they can do.

In fact, the hypothetical recovery concept is near nonsense anyway. Even if we imagine that hard drives bits are something like ________ wide, and sometimes they write __++++++ and sometimes ------__, resulting in ------++, you can't actually recover from that. You don't know when that ++ got there. For all you know, that was a piece let over from two years ago, and the bit before the wipe was 0. Hell, for all you know, the bit started as +++++++ when the drive was made, and the first low-level format and every single write afterward just wrote to the last 6/8th of the bit, so you don't even know it ever was actually a one at all.

It's the equivalent of asserting that you can look at a dartboard and claim you can find the score of the last game. Uh, no, you can't. You might can see, with a microscope, every single dart that ever hit the board...but that tells you fuck all about the previous score, or who won, or what order they were thrown in.

For data to be recovered from 'before the wipe', you have to imagine that somehow the wipe was fundamentally different than every other write operation that happened before. That all other write operations helpfully left no traces of the previous state behind, but the 0 wipe did.

Before you say 'Well, a lot of places are only written once', I have to point out that a) It's exactly the changing places, the data, that is important. You know, the new stuff that got put over that file you deleted the other day. Recovering a Windows system file that got written to the disk at install and hasn't been written to again is not very useful. And b) all places on a hard drive are written to start with, it's called a low-level format. Before that they hold random 'data', which means there's nice, utterly random 'data' sitting there in the parts of the drive that don't get written to. How you can tell that from parts of the drive that did get written to at some point but somehow not written to in the wipe is a very very very interesting question...

Oh, and it's even worse than that. Because of how hard drives encode data, if you guess on one bit, you'll blow up the entire rest of the byte. If you don't know the value of bit 2, you can't know 3-8 either.

The entire thing is preposterous. The shame is that the only people who've ever called the urban legend what it is were so poorly funded. Someone should set up a Randi Foundation open-donation thing for that...I might kick in $10.

And talking about what the NSA 'might' do is insane. There's all sorts of magical tech the NSA might have, but, as I said, even pretending that hard drives actually had incredibly crappy wandering-all-over-the-drive tracks, which they do not, this would not actually let you put together an actual stream of any particular point in time. All you know is that every bit on the drive was zero at one point (because it was wiped) and not zero at one point (Because it was random before low-level format.). Good job figuring that out.

Re:Rogue servers

[Dachannien]

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.

Well, with regard to Congress, there are roughly 535 of them at any given time.

Re:so ?

[icebike]

Certainly possible.

But but planting a computer on someone's network is pretty much amateur hour don't you think? Unless it was done for "once you find this you will stop looking" purposes.

Wikileaks must have hired the CIA to do it

[7-Vodka]

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:

1. The member of parliament who is a friend of wikileaks is in on this and wikileaks conducted the spying as is being ignorantly claimed
2. Agents on behalf of the US government conducted this in order to spy on the icelandic MP and others nearby because of her 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.

Re:Wikileaks must have hired the CIA to do it

[TheEyes]

Well, the other possibility is that this is a backup Wikileaks server, running from within the Icelandic parliament.

Re:Wikileaks must have hired the CIA to do it

[snowgirl]

So #2 becomes the most obvious culprit.

Fallacy of the false dichotomy. There are more than just two possibilities here.

Re:Running encrypted software?

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer placebo encryption. I tell people its encrypted and any methods they try to decrypt it wont work.

It looks like donkey porn, but I can't decrypt it into the military secrets I know it must be!

What a tangled web we weave

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Rogue servers

[Black Parrot]

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.

Well, with regard to Congress, there are roughly 535 of them at any given time.

Actually, it's the interns that are under the desks.

But lots of CongressCritters still in the closet, I trow.

Re:Rogue servers

[hitmark]

My favorite is the opposite. It was a unix server at a university that none knew where was physically, but that was happily doing its thing for the network. Eventually they found it by following the network cabling and knocking down a drywall.

Re:TrueCrypt

[snowgirl]

I am now officially setting up a background program for my two master servers to ping each other, and should the ping ever fail, they will auto shutdown...

$paranoia++

Re:James Randi is a fraud

[DavidTC]

Many people have accomplished what they've claimed, but then Randi came up with extra tests, until they failed.

Randi very clearly lays out of the bounds of any tests beforehand, and what is considered proof.

If anyone had actually passed that test, they would, you know, sue him, because they were promised payment of a million dollars if they did that. There is an actual contract with actual winning conditions.

But since you've made that claim, you should be able to demonstrate that Randi has, at least once, laid out a test and winning conditions, and then backpeddled once someone actually won.

Or you are a liar and a slanderer who has accused someone of criminal fraud.

He's not interested in "statistics", but demands "undisputable show of magic", but without magic tricks.

Yeah, you moron, because that's what he's testing.

If he let people win by 'statistics', he'd have a constant stream of people claiming they could predict a coin toss 75% of the time....and eventually one of them would happen to do that. Because that's how statistics work.