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25% of US Hackers Are FBI/CIA Informers
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian reports that the FBI and CIA have 'persuaded' up to 25% of US hackers to 'work' for them. 'In some cases, popular illegal forums used by cyber criminals as marketplaces for stolen identities and credit card numbers have been run by hacker turncoats acting as FBI moles. In others, undercover FBI agents posing as "carders" – hackers specialising in ID theft – have themselves taken over the management of crime forums, using the intelligence gathered to put dozens of people behind bars. ... The best-known example of the phenomenon is Adrian Lamo, a convicted hacker who turned informant on Bradley Manning, who is suspected of passing secret documents to WikiLeaks.' What implications does this hold for privacy? Or is it just good work by the authorities?"
As you may have guessed, the estimate appears to be based only on the number of black hats, rather than all hackers.
It's effective work by the authorities. However, if people under FBI or CIA are actively encouraging or facilitating illegal activities that may not have happened otherwise, I may have some heavy objections as to whether it's "good" work.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
In other news 47% of all news articles are speculative bullshit with no grounding in reality. See we can all make up numbers.
They say there are vast, anonymous networks of hackers, yet somehow they know they they've gotten 25% of them to work for the FBI? How do you calculate 25% of an unknown number? Or is there some Hacker registry at 2600 magazine that I'm not aware of (not being a hacker myself, I didn't get an invitation to join).
It's getting to the point these days where you just aren't sure which criminals you can trust.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is a natural by-product of the of a national gestapo using "useful idiots" as proxies for doing their dirty work. Federal informants are often permitted to break the law and are paid very handsomely, often with provided housing and up to hundreds of thousand dollars a year, for their work.
Since these informants work for money(what "hacker" works for the fame of being a snitch?!) , they are more likely to embellish or even fabricate evidence to back up their claims. The FBI don't care about that, because if charges are bogus they will entrap of go fishing to find another charge to justify the time and cost.
The real question is, how much money is being spent on informants("cyber" or otherwise)? Could that money be better spend on schools or infrastructure? Why is it that scumbags with questionable pasts are being paid forty-thousand dollars(or more) a year while we and our families are eating ramen noodles for dinner and wondering how we're gonna pay next month's rent?
The answer is part of the government's broader plan to turn half the population against the other half. The ones who drink the kool-aid get to feed their families. The rest are radicals and terrorist pedophiles who deserve to be jailed and even used as near-slave labor. The big security complex is the only future in an America with large numbers of returning warriors and no economy other than the unsustainable one of making and busting criminals. Greed eats itself.
Yes, all of those things are true. No, I will not look them up for you, use your Google Fu - start with "lodi ice cream man terrorist, " level/tier 1 informant," "FBI infiltrate environmental groups," "prison labor builds patriot missiles," and go from there.
Why are people wasting time whining about exposing foreign informants? What concerns us is the network of domestic informants, aka Stasi 2.0. McGruff the crime dog says - "If you snitch, you get a bullet in your dome for being a coward."
-- Ethanol-fueled
I call shenanigans.
There is simply no way this is anything CLOSE to accurate. This is pure FUD and self-promotion. First, they don't have accurate stats on how many ID theft operators there are (if they knew who was doing the stealing, they'd be able to close them down, right?), so this is just a "guestimate" to make people who deal with bulk operators worried that they might be dealing with a "dishonest crook", and to justify their budgets.
Pitifully transparent.
37% of FBI/CIA informers are double-agents.
what's good for the goose is good for the gander...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Both the "dirty old man" and the "innocent pubescent girl" of urban lore are likely to be law enforcement officers, and possibly even colleagues at neighboring desks.
For some reason, this scenario brought to mind the occasions on which, as Dungeon Master, I've caught myself roleplaying both sides of an exchange between two NPCs. I try to avoid that whenever possible because it's seldom entertaining for the players, usually pointless, and more than a little bit disturbing...
Hm. That's analogy actually holds up.
I can see the fnords!
Agreed. This could just as easily be a false leak. It would be ridiculous to take these statements at face-value, given that misinformation is one of the CIA's strongest suits.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
My biggest problem with this sort of scheme is that they are facilitating the very thing that they are claiming to combat.
Are they luring people into committing crimes that they would not have committed otherwise? I'm guessing that the answer is yes, even if it is unintentional. After all, a lot of wrong-doings wouldn't be done if there wasn't a social framework (e.g. forums) to reinforce the behaviour.
I wonder how much of illicit credit card money finds its way back into FBI budgets. To fight crime, you know.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
To put that in perspective, here's the current FBI Agent breakdown:
0% of known men
0% of known women
25% of known hackers
100% of known little girls.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
...aren't at liberty to say which agencies of which governments we're working for.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
What about ThinThread and other domestic surveillance programs? We know they're catching all US traffic at the ISP level. So if you're hacking computers in the US they can trace you back to the plug at the wall, from there they know you're either the person paying for the connection or someone leeching off his Wifi. A little detective work and they know if you live on the same block or if you're a roving wifi hacker who lives somewhere in downtown Portland.
Now how many non-US governments are doing the same thing and sharing this data with them? They already know who you are and what you're downloading, they simply don't have a reason to bust you right now.
So yeah, I bet they do have a pretty good estimate of the number of currently active hackers at least in the US. There's a profile on each one, and they know about zero-day attacks before anyone else does. It's just on the down-low since it's illegal. Do something big enough and they'll find a way to use it against you.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I've had my run-in with this before. I'm just a generic every day sysadmin and have no real involvement with the security community, short of idling on IRC with a bunch of more active people. Here are my experiences:
In 1997 or '98 I was the sysadmin for a mom 'n pop local ISP. We got hit by a massive DOS attack - keep in mind this was in the pre-smurf/DDOS era, so it really did warrant the attention of the feds. The owner contacted them, and they talked to me about getting any logs we might have (which of course I was ready to provide). I asked them where they wanted me to send them, and... "No, why don't you meet us out somewhere? We'll buy you lunch.". Despite the offer of free food, the alarm bells were going off by this point. So, I met them at a local coffee shop, and out of the 30 or so minutes I was there, they spent maybe two minutes discussing the DDOS with me, and the rest of the time attempting to get me to inform on the local 2600 group. I declined repeatedly, and they continued to make more forceful and threatening requests. Every time I disagreed with them, they looked at each other - and this was the creepiest (and obviously rehearsed) behavior I've ever seen. They never did get those logs from me.
After that I didn't hear anything until around 2005 or so when one of my ex-coworkers from another company called to tell me two men came by looking for me, and that they had government plates on their car. They left a card, but since I'm not under any obligation to call them, I never did. As the years went by, I received more calls from different people with a similar story.
And my last run-in with them was only a year or two ago - someone called me from a cell phone claiming he was with the FBI, and he had my computer and I needed to come to the local field office to pick it up. I found that to be rather unlikely since I tend to hang onto them until they're dead, I certainly wasn't missing one, and then they (minus the drives - I still have those) go into the bin. After a week of ignoring his calls he stopped bothering me.
To this day I have no idea what they wanted, but the entire thing reeked of ill-spent tax dollars.
I really don't care anymore, so the hell with posting as AC...
Insert witty
ah, that's not what happened. Lamo was not being pressured by the FBI nor tortured by the CIA. He was not being solicited by anyone. He took it upon himself to decide that someone like Manning, who like himself exhibited signs of mental illness, should not have access to state secrets. He believes he's a repatriated hero.
The Admin and the Engineer
The thing that makes me actually partially believe them is the remarkable efficiency of department of homeland security's incredible ability to recruit "neighbourhood spies".
The numbers may be inflated, but make no mistake - authorities have noted just how efficient it is to essentially make a lot of small people into informants on minimal pay. Stalin would have had a major hard-on if he saw what they did in the States, he tried really hard to make the system in USSR to be similar, but it failed because of lack of ability to process large amounts of data at rapid pace.
We have that thanks to computerization and networking, and USA authorities can proudly state that they already have more spies then USSR spying on their own people. I really don't see why lessons from that can't flow into even more valuable hacker world, where informants are so important. Hell, case Manning makes for a great example - the #1 enemy of intelligence machine wasn't caught because of awesome hardware, awesome software or great investigation work. He was caught because someone Manning viewed as a friend and a "comrade in arms" so to speak was actually a snitch who fingered him.
And it's the importance of having snitches like that anywhere you can have them, and making sure that even if you don't have a snitch in a particular organisation, they THINK you do is the proven, effective control maintenance strategy for authorities. So yes, we can doubt the exact number, but the argument that a very large portion of US hackers are snitches is beyond reasonable doubt.
And if you ever doubt that snitches are the most important part of intelligence, look at case Bin Laden. Hunted with best equipment and millions of men for years, no luck. And in the end, the one who killed him wasn't a bunch of SEALs, or an advanced helicopter. It was some pakistani guy who was a snitch and fingered him. And funnily enough, to show just how well our media is penetrated by intelligence, in between massive dick waving about SEALs, helicopters and other thing that really didn't matter in the end, we didn't hear a word about the one thing that really did matter - THE SNITCH.
You'd rather live in a society where everyone is so afraid that they're all looking for someone else to inform on?
Ask an East German how that worked out.
Better to set up rules for law enforcement that are no less strict than the ones the rest of us have to live by.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Lamo is a drama queen. If he sufferred rendition, that's all he'd be talking about. If you saw the PBS special last week, you would have seen him interviewed inexplicably wearing a trench coat indoors... like he was Deep Throat or something, which is some fantastic internal irony for him, because he dropped the dime on today's Deep Throat (Manning).
The Admin and the Engineer