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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.
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?
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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.
..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?
To which I reply "They need to find a different way to discourage or stop them from sending bomb threats. Inflicting me with collateral damage in the quest for better law enforcement is unacceptable, and so is removing my ability to speak with anonymity."
Given the choice, I think I'd rather deal with the occasional bomb threat than not be able to speak anonymously.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
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There: Translated that for you.
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To which I reply "They need to find a different way to discourage or stop them from sending bomb threats. Inflicting me with collateral damage in the quest for better law enforcement is unacceptable, and so is removing my ability to speak with anonymity."
Given the choice, I think I'd rather deal with the occasional bomb threat than not be able to speak anonymously.
Or, to totally mangle a famous quote:
"First they came for the anonymous, but I was not anonymous, so I did nothing." That's probably true to life for most people actually....
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!"
FYI, we're not dealing with "the occasional bomb threat" here.
The University of Pittsburgh (which is down the street from where I work) has gotten multiple bomb threats per day every day for weeks now.
Many students have been driven out of their dorms, to live off campus, because the evacuations were too disruptive. The campus police are no doubt way over budget. Classes are disrupted to the point where folks on academic probation were told this semester "doesn't count".
At this moment, as I type this, two buildings have evacuation notices. Earlier today, eleven buildings had to be evacuated.
And today was not exceptional.
If you want to follow this yourselves, evacuation notices go out over the @PittTweet twitter account.
Now, I'm not trying to say "knocking every anonymous remailer off the internet is justified". Please don't assume I think that. I'm just pointing out that this very much isn't a case of "the occasional bomb threat". It's basically a full-on ongoing multi-day denial-of-service attack on the Pitt police, Pittsburgh police, and a bunch of the university, happening in meatspace.
Well, hell, in that case, let's nuke NYC, LA, DC, Detroit, etc. There's gotta be more than a few criminals in those towns. Sucks for the collateral damage, but, you know, gotta weed out those bad guys. They probably hate America, too, so all the more reason.
"Stand back... I'm going to try LOGIC..."
FYI, we're not dealing with "the occasional bomb threat" here.
The University of Pittsburgh (which is down the street from where I work) has gotten multiple bomb threats per day every day for weeks now.
Many students have been driven out of their dorms, to live off campus, because the evacuations were too disruptive.
...
I agree that this situation stinks, and that obviously constantly evacuating buildings is very disruptive. However at the same time, can't the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburg police stop doing that and ignore the bomb threats, knowing that their leg is being pulled? I realize that there may be some legal precident why they can't... but at some point logic and common sense, along with the knowlege of "The boy who cried wolf" should also come into play. :-/
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?
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The question that is begging to be asked is ---
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However at the same time, can't the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburg police stop doing that and ignore the bomb threats, knowing that their leg is being pulled?
No. The next time it might not be a joke.
Universities are being sued for not doing enough to stop violence on campus when it happens, as rare as it is, and as much as they do. It's never enough for the lawyers and "grieving heirs".
It's a large "corporation" to start with, and state schools have the combined pockets of the taxpayer to pick. You can't sue a school for being too careful, only if something happens and you can convince a judge that they might not have done enough. Why make it a slam-dunk victory for millions by ignoring the last, valid threat?
This is the same reason that cops have to go check out 911 hangup calls. Most likely, it was someone who dialed by accident and then said "oh shit" and hung up. If they try to dodge the problem by turning their cell phone off, or not answering, the cops will show up to see if everything is ok. If the cops just ignored the call, they'd be sued by everyone involved when it turns out that the caller was forced to hang up, or the wire was ripped out of the wall, by her violent husband or vice versa, and someone wound up dead.
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.
continual random searches of people and places
That sounds about as awful of a solution as the TSA. If the solution violates people's privacy, I don't want it. I'd rather them evacuate the building for the 50th time.
And not only that, it is one that other mail servers have every right to refuse data or connections from if they want only communications which are fully traceable. Think about what objective exists by the FBI seizing a computer that was used (let's assume for sake of argument that this really was used in that way) to transmit these threats, but has no record of what was sent or where it came from. All it's doing is interrupting the ability to send anonymous mail. But specifically it interrupts the ability of the person making these threats from doing so. Is that a good idea? If it is, then why not configure the UofP computers to refuse connections from this or any other anonymous remailer. That should be just as effective. Why not just ignore the threats? These are all basically the same effect in that the threat maker is deprived of the communications.
What are the implications of ignoring a threat? The threat might represent a real danger. Maybe there is a real bomb ... this time. Then ANY form of interrupting the communication represents the equivalent of ignoring the threat.
I don't know what the best solution is. But we are currently acting irrationally out of insane public policy. On the one hand by not communicating we risk danger. On the other hand by communicating we real idle threats. We are our own problem and we need to find a solution to that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
can't the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburg police stop doing that and ignore the bomb threats, knowing that their leg is being pulled? [...] "The boy who cried wolf" should also come into play
There are two morals to the story of "The boy who cried wolf":
Don't consistently lie or you'll get eaten (the moral for children)
Sometimes, children's lies end up being the truth, so pay attention every time or they'll get eaten (the moral for adults)
If you want to discourage lying, punish the liars when they're caught, but don't ignore what seems like a lie because it might be the truth.