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FBI Seizes Server Providing Anonymous Remailer Service
sunbird writes "At 16:00 ET on April 18, federal agents seized a server located in a New York colocation facility shared by May First / People Link and Riseup.net. The server was operated by the European Counter Network ("ECN"), the oldest independent internet service provider in Europe. The server was seized as a part of the investigation into bomb threats sent via the Mixmaster anonymous remailer received by the University of Pittsburgh that were previously discussed on Slashdot. As a result of the seizure, hundreds of unrelated people and organizations have been disrupted."
Unless the server was keeping logs, and I presume that it wasn't, how could seizing it possibly help the investigation?
Or did they just kick over all the racks and rip everything out like they seem to do on a regular basis?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
FBI seizes terrorist server run by commies.
Grateful American people throw candy and flowers at heroic agents.
When their reply was basically "If we dont let them send bomb threats, we're undermining free speech and the Internet"
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
...because organisations believed to provide anonymity have an annoying habit of keeping substantial logs which turn up when their servers are seized / information is demanded. See also moot / 4chan.
More importantly: Unless the server operator was a total dofus, this brings them exactly zero steps towards resolving their problem, because this is exactly the kind of attack that Mixmasters was designed to withstand.
Idiots. Is nobody teaching these fools basics about the stuff they encounter?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I can't wait for the elections to come!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Whenever they take servers "down" it's like a ogre killing a spider with a tree trunk. They smash the table, furniture, and destroy the house along with the poor spider.
This is the stage in CISPA legislation where they try to win over people by pointing out, "Look, everyone got disrupted so we could find one user. If the service would just share information with the Government..." These disruptions aren't necessary. If the government wants to scrounge through logs they can do so while the servers are running. Who are the judges approving all these stupid warrants?
This is absolutely pathetic levels of basic networking knowledge.
How does an agency even exist so thick as that when it comes to actually policing the internet?
Get a grip already FBI, you are embarrassing.
Hope they get sued for disruptions.
Oh, wait, suing FBI is like pissing in the cornflakes of the leader of a country.
Good luck winning.
If the intent is to stop bomb threats at University of Pittsburgh, it much easier and simplier to stop all internet and mobile traffic at the University of Pittsburgh. Stopping a mail server that do not store any logs will do nothing beside give the police some newspaper headlines.
..and the FBI seizes the server they used?
Anyone else think this is more believable as a denial of service attack, or as a pretext for taking down a troublesome server they couldn't legally seize by any other means, than as an actual threat?
Unless the person sending them was stupid enough to think that a remailer would protect them from ever being caught, and didn't care that it was going to mean taking down the whole service for everyone else using it..
Someone bosts a gazillion bomb threats, and computers associated with OWS and other protests get seized.
Awfully convenient.
Any guess as to whether the bomb threats can be traced back th Langley or Ft. Meade?
Than to be used for dastardly and nefarious things.
I am sure more than one bomb threat has been sent via their networks.
Better haul all their equipment into the base to make sure we get the evidence we need.
Stupid cop, no donut.
Could you develop a service for allowing anonymous communication that you gave the FBI pre-emptive visibility into without compromising the anonymity of the system?
Allow the FBI to snapshot the whole hard drive and peruse it at their leisure any time they requested.
Perhaps the FBI wouldn't trust you and your fancy transparency, but maybe you could make it plausibly accurate enough such that a server confiscation would be equal to an unwarranted attack from a legal standpoint.
From what I can tell, the service was providing anonymous re-mailer services, not re-mailer services to Anonymous. This being the case, they're not going after a service used by the hacker group; they're going after a service offering anonymous communications to your average citizen. Not cool, gov'mint, not cool.
They followed proper constitutional procedure (for a change). So blame the judge not the fbi.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Why should a server EVER be seized as "evidence"?
Why not just have an FBI team come in, temporarily shut down the server, clone all the data, and then leave, and the server comes back up?
--PM
Hey, we are in a war with something or other.. a little collateral damage is expected.
Suck it up or get put on a dissident watched-list.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Man, you would not believe the rush you get from going all commando on racks of servers. "Blink those lights funny at me, beeyotch, and I'll bust a cap right between your USB ports!"
What else could be expected? We have almost unlimited power of a "law enforcement agency" mixed with technical ignorance and a high dose of arrogance
The first may have been Goliath or God, definitely not Captain America.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Aaron, Aaron, Aaron.... calm the fuck down man.
I'm not stating an opinion one way or the other, I'm honestly asking, what do we really gain from truly anonymous communication? The things we lose (i.e. accountability for things you say) are clear, so I'm just asking, what are the benefits to society?
Isn't free speech enough? If we truly had the right to free speech, why would anonymity even be necessary?
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
I get the FBI just destroys everything. I am not defending them. It seems a fact was left out of this-
One of my direct relatives works for the University in question, and has personally kept me up to date on now over 100 separate
individual bomb threats at totally random times over the last month. They come for certain schools within the University, and sometimes
at 4 am for dorms, removing all the students. They are specific. It is a major University, and driving them insane.
Who ever this worthless fucker is, I hope they throw them in jail, but I agree, heavy handed, idiotic removal of anonymous servers does
nothing at all technically speaking. It's amazing how inept the FBI is. It would be the equivalent of a 12 yr. old not knowing they shouldn't
shit their own pants when they have to go to the bathroom.
Doesn't anyone train these tools? Is basic IT knowledge unknown to them? How can they be just that stupid and do the job they do?
I wonder if it has occurred to the FBI that by yanking a server with other individuals and business' stuff on it, that they are conducting a DOS much like anonymous. It seems they played right into their hands even if it wasn't their intention to offer said hand. To the FBI: smooth move ex-lax.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Take your hacked router, your raspberry pi, your beagle board and fire up a remailer service off of some public wifi or other, run it off solar, coil leech, thermal gradient sucker, piezo traffic leech or whatever power you can get.
Didn't someone do a patch to mixmaster so it could do hold and forward like fidonet?
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
"Look, We're the FBI. That means your fucked, no matter what you do."
The question that is begging to be asked is ---
Who will FBI the FBI ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Depending on how the machines are setup there could be evidence on them if they aren't properly configured.
Interesting comments about this server by and the Pittsburgh community here:
https://support.mayfirst.org/ticket/5583
This is not a Rush Limbaugh forum, and your retarded post has nothing to do with the topic. If you watch the BBC documentary Madagascar, Lemurs and Spies, you'll see that Gibson looks guilty as hell. A researcher working with an endangered group of Lemurs sees illegal logging in protected wilderness, and they get a hidden camera lawyer posing as an American wood buyer to go deep inside the logging operation, documenting the mass harvesting and lumber mills there producing pallets of fingerboard blanks with the Gibson front company name all over. The sawmill owner even brags on camera about what they are doing.
By your logic, you would shut up and go away if the justice department put people at Gibson in jail. More likely, you would be here bitching about how another American company was shut down by the feds.
Who is cohosting on a single server now a days?
Could the business that are not the warrent sue the Feds for the disuption of their bussinesses?
Since in a sense that they were not part the names on the warrent.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
You had me at "USB ports". No way these guys would know how to pronounce that.
There are twenty or so remailers that are active at any time. Typically people chain the remailers, so that no single system knows both the sender and receiver of a message. One remailer going down is not an uncommon event; a different remailer will be used to send the messages, and nobody will bat an eye.
Maybe the FBI wants that to happen, so they can take down the entire network, one node at a time, with legal justification.
Palm trees and 8
They tell you in the summary.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
...then make sure you ALSO host the servers for important things.
Like the servers for the local sewage treatment plant, for example. I can see the conversation now...
FBI: "Alright, we're taking this server. It's hosting a criminal "x" and we're going to confiscate it as evidence."
Network Admin: "I don't think you wanna do that?"
FBI: "Why not?"
NA: "It would cause a shit-storm."
FBI: "Hah! You're funny!"
NA: *grins* "Yeah, ain't I a stinker?"
...bc they don't normally connect to regular Internet services.
Its probably a forgone conclusion that Mixmaster and even Tor will be attacked by authorities (yes, even by 'free and democratic' regimes) because someone will use it to make meatspace threats.
With a P2P only anonymizer like I2P, connections/proxies to the regular Internet are rare so the anon network as a whole is less likely to come under attack due to threats made by some hothead or provocateur. And threats made within the anon space are far less worrisome because the threat recipient is also protected by a significant degree of anonymity.
When are people going to learn? If your site is at all controversial, don't register it or host it in the U.S.
One server can do quite a lot, especially if you ditch Windows and put BSD on there.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
At least they are doing *something*.
(In reference to better to be doing something [wrong] than nothing at all)
People might point out that with a search warrant this could have happened anywhere, but this is not entirely true. It seems that in the US servers are more and more often seized as a sort of harassment in cases like this, where it is clear that there is no useful evidence can be obtained.
Sorry if this offends a few alleged 'patriots', but the lesson to learn from this story is once more:
Do not host your software or potentially controversial content on US servers or servers run by US companies!
There has not been a single criminal case that I can remember where data was overwritten and then recovered on modern drives
I think this might be the case you are looking for: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/manning-assange-laptop/
Johnson testified that he found two attempts to delete data on Manning’s laptop. Sometime in January 2010, the computer’s OS was re-installed, deleting information prior to that time. Then, on or around Jan. 31, someone attempted to erase the drive by doing what’s called a “zerofill” — a process of overwriting data with zeroes. Whoever initiated the process chose an option for overwriting the data 35 times — a high-security option that results in thorough deletion — but that operation was canceled. Later, the operation was initiated again, but the person chose the option to overwrite the information only once — a much less secure and less thorough option.
All the data that Johnson was able to retrieve from un-allocated space came after that overwrite, he said.
-- ab1
.... lowest common denominator rules the world?
And so the FBI becomes a proxy DoS attack.
Anybody at the Bureau lookup 'irony' in a dictionary lately?
..given how the us gov is screwing its people nowadays.
Send a fake bomb mail to give a legal context to seizing the servers.
d'oh!
You leftys are so cute. #Occupy whatever you think you have a right to do and ruin a business or park, but the second one of your servers are impounded you whine like stuck pigs.
America Fuck Yeah!
The University of Pittsburgh is definitely dealing with an ongoing disruptive problem. However, the message delivery system is not the issue. What if the threats were delivered via snail mail? Surely all the post offices the mail passed through, around the country or world, would not be seized.
Why do you have it in for capacitors?