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Akamai Employee Tried To Sell Secrets To Israel
CWmike writes "A 43-year-old former Akamai employee has pleaded guilty to espionage charges after offering to hand over confidential information about the Web acceleration company to an agent posing as an Israeli consular official in Boston. Starting in September 2007, Elliot Doxer played an elaborate 18-month-long game of cloak-and-dagger with James Cromer, a man he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer. He handed over pages and pages of confidential data to Cromer, providing a list of Akamai's clients and contracts, information about the company's security practices, and even a list of 1,300 Akamai employees, including mobile numbers, departments and e-mail addresses. Doxer delivered the information to a dead drop box 62 times. His motivation: To help Israel and to get information on his son and estranged wife, who lived outside the U.S., prosecutors said in court filings. Doxer faces 15 years in prison on the charges."
1) Find a an exploitable employee
2) Seduce them with hopes of seeing their child again this century
3) Collect incriminating evidence
4) Profit!
They'd be hard pressed to get a conviction out of me if they set this guy up. If he instigated this then I'll still be disinclined to convict as they could have smacked him down and gotten a felony.
So this wasteful agent spent how much time and how many millions of dollars building up this whoop de do case? Maybe they could have nailed the guy with the simple felony, got a plea, destroyed their career saved us some tax dollars to be used hunting real criminals and not distraught fathers.
For several years I worked in Manhattan for one of those large privately held media Companies, one with both magazines and magazine websites galore, including ones you would know. We used to use Akamai. Sure they could cache our content and then absorb a lot of traffic from our servers, but they were expensive as hell--especially for what they did, in my opinion. I do seem to recall that our big company eventually dumped Akamai and all the money that went with it. Why they still exist I will never know.
what makes you think the engineer would do it for free?
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
we have moved just about every last fucking factory to China, along with all of the computers that control them. Then we sent the manufacturing of those computers to China too. All of the corporations made massive amoputns of money off of this. Do you think the Chinese PLA just sat back and didn't study anything? They are pulling the same game they did on the high-speed rail experts they 'contracted' to build the rail system.
And yet its all perfectly legal, because rich people are getting even richer off of it. Chinese workers arent getting rich - instead the government keeps the money and sticks it in Fannie and Freddie bonds and Treasury debt.
oh
but you want to possibly in theory sell a few secrets (like an email list... oh my god, how on earth did such a dangerous hacker acheive such a brilliant coup as an internal email list) to israel, which is a US ally... and youd think the world had come to a fucking end.
the whole country has gone ape shit, back asswards insane. people are just fucking stupid anymore. no fucking sense, not a drop left. sell the entire manufacturing and industrial base to China, a communist government that killed our own 'brave men in uniform' in the Korean War, but theoretically sell a few tiny corporate "secrets" to Israel and you get 15 years in the slammer.
how many secrets do you think are being funneled through our multinational corporations like , i dont know, chrysler? hummer? you know hummer is owned by the Chinese now right? the same hummers that our troops are driving around in Iraq and Afghanistan while they get blown up? Why dont we put the CEO of hummer in fucking prison for corporate espionage... he didn't sell a few email lists, he sold the whole fucking company!
Now don't get me wrong. I love China and it's culture, literature, people, etc. I'm just saying. Look at the fucking hypocrisy of these 'espionage' cases. Look who it benefits. the rich and the corporate elite. Look who it harms - the peons who want to give out information.
Now, I know this particular peon wanted to sell information, for money. But that is not what precedents like this get used for in the future. He is the 8th in history. 8th. The 8th guy is prosecuted for selling info. The 9th guy is prosecuted for thinking about selling info. The 10th guy is prosecuted for giving out info for free. The 11th guy is prosecuted for journalism.
That's the slippery slope of all this maniacal overcontrol of information, this obsession with secrecy... its not about secrecy, and it's not about protecting important information from espionage activity. It's about pure, blatant, bloody power, and who controls it, and who gets shafted. Espionage is a ruse. It's a red herring. The whole law is fucking corrupt to the point of banality.
Bradley Manning is being charged under Computer Espionage. For what? For "leaking" a gunship video. You know how many gunship videos are on youtube right now? You know there's a website that specializes specifically in gunship footage, all gunship footage all the time?
That's great. We now have three different kinds of Espionage - - - Plain old Espionage, Corporate Espionage, and Computer Espionage. How many more do we need? How many more can we invent? Well, just count the number of government agencies and power centers in the military industrial complex and then you will find out how many variations of thought-control law will be promulgated under 'national security'.
Its all a lie. Everything we see here is junk. It's all junk.
We have to save Toby.
The Uniform Trade Secrets Act makes trade secret "theft" a civil matter between the secret holder and the leaker. Apparently something went through in 1996 making it a Federal crime. The economy went fine for hundreds of years without the threat of jail for leakers -- why change? Especially since trade secret law can be and has been abused.
On another subject, there's a gaping gap in the story as we've seen it. How did the FBI know about his email to the Israeli consulate? Why did it take years before they followed up?
You are spot on. I deal with many CDN's and what I once admired about Akamai has now become a basic service.
That all said Akamai holds a special place in my heart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_M._Lewin
I mean, Israel is second only to the russians and chinese for technology theft, but...good grief.
Uh, third?
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
How it should have happened:
After a few transactions, the FBI realizes this guy is zero threat. They refer the case to the Massachusetts Attorney General "for further joint investigation". Based on the evidence, the AG charges the guy with larceny or embezzlement or whatever, Akamai takes their civil remedies for breach of contract, etc, and the FBI declines to prosecute. The guy loses his job, pays $150K in fines and does 6 months in minimum security + probation. His life gets pretty hard.
How it actually happened:
After a few transactions, the FBI realizes the information sucks. No source code, no proprietary technology, no M&A data, no insider-level financials. It's client lists, contracts and internal employee information. The information is so weak, they can't even charge him with anything under existing Federal statutes. But there's a foreign government involved, so all sense of proportion is lost. They keep asking the guy for more information. And more. 18 months and 62 transactions later, they finally get to a point where:
Now they can charge him under the Economic Espionage Act and prepare to drop him in a very deep, very dark hole. Slam dunk. Promotions all around for stopping a 'grave threat to U.S. economic security'. The guy loses his job, pays $400K in fines and goes to Federal prison for 10 years. His life is over.
Insane.
Actually, we had this story before, when they caught him. And no, there was no entrapment and whatnot. The guy is simply a flaming asshat, and he WOULD get a conviction out of me and then some.
For a start, they didn't seduce him, he actually contacted the embassy on his own proposing to sell them some "secrets" they didn't ask for and didn't need. Those guys promptly tipped off the FBI.
Second the whole "distraught father" and "patriotism" BS is just that: BS. I WOULD believe either of that if that were his primary motivation. It pretty obviously ain't.
The first thing the guy asked for was money. He tried to sell his employers' customer lists and whatnot, for plain old money. And see again: there was no social engineering, no seducing him, bla, bla, bla, he actually went to what he thought would be a buyer and HE proposed to sell that stuff.
When they told him they're not interested in paying for that, he basically asked that something bad happens to his ex. And I don't know about you, but trying to get a hit on someone isn't exactly a moral high ground any way I want to slice it.
His son only entered his equation as an after-thought, as he just asked for some photos of him. It wasn't his first or second price, and, you know, it's not like he even wanted the son back or anything, just some photos.
So, yeah, we have an asshat who actually goes looking to sell on his own, for money, and failing that, hey, maybe he can get them to whack his ex. Proving more than amply exactly what his morals are. Sorry, he's just scum, plain and simple, and more than deserves everything coming to him.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Right, right. Because OBVIOUSLY Israel couldn't figure out something like setting up a bunch of servers and redirecting to a different server. It's not like they're designing half of what goes into those servers.
Try something more like customer data.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.