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FBI Has Tor Mail's Entire Email Database
An anonymous reader writes "Tor Mail was an anonymized email service run over Tor. It was operated by a company called Freedom Hosting, which was shut down by the FBI last August. The owner was arrested for 'enabling child porn,' and the Tor Mail servers suddenly began hosting FBI malware that attempted to de-anonymize users. Now, Wired reports on a new court filing which indicates that the FBI was also able to grab Tor Mail's entire email database. 'The filings show the FBI built its case in part by executing a search warrant on a Gmail account used by the counterfeiters, where they found that orders for forged cards were being sent to a TorMail e-mail account: "platplus@tormail.net." Acting on that lead in September, the FBI obtained a search warrant for the TorMail account, and then accessed it from the bureau's own copy of "data and information from the TorMail e-mail server, including the content of TorMail e-mail accounts," according to the complaint (PDF) sworn out by U.S. Postal Inspector Eric Malecki.'"
Anyone with an Internet connection is capable of 'enabling child porn'.
Fuck sakes - is CP now the backdoor to the whole US Constitution (not to mention the means by which anyone, anywhere, can be arrested for any reason?)
Someone needs to seriously put a curb on this.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
In those zombie movies, no matter how well the humans are barricaded in a place, eventually the slow-witted zombies will always break in. They have all the numbers and time required.
The owner was arrested for 'enabling child porn,' ...
The FBI that cried Wolf. Or the security service that cried wolf -would be more apt.
Let's take a step back here. Is child porn really that big of a problem?
Even the media - which loves to sensationalize the littlest thing - hasn't been harping on this. And when I google, I haven't gotten past the folks who are trying to ban online porn outright to get any decent stats and the real problem.
What I'm trying to say, is that this child porn consumption, "crisis" or whatever the word is to get people's emotions up and their rational thinking down, is a bogeyman created by the media for rating and is now being exploited by the spy and security services for carte blanche monitoring.
They FBI also has Slashdot's username and password database, which explains the increasingly poor quality of posts.
..from a gmail address, or what?
notwithstanding, they doubtless have access to the entire gmail dbase anyway.
please raise your mouse... fair enough? with 100s of millions of unsuspecting unchosens being counted over & over how can we lose? like becoming accustomed to a festering boil? one possible way; http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=scott%20olsen&sm=3 consider ourselves in relation to one another & our good spirits... socially interact as though the moms are watching too because they are
I don't know if it was designed for that purpose, but in practice Tor is a honeypot. Encryption too? (though not by design). Maybe it's time to consider steganography more, though it has its limits in terms of bandwidth, and if encryption isn't widely used, steganography certainly won't be.
You have NO right to privacy any more. Best you remember that.
Your entire life will be recorded and cataloged for when you run afowl of 'the law' then it will be used to crucify you.
i don't understand why people think that the FBI and NSA and CIA are just going to stand by and allow criminal activity when informants (no doubt where law enforcement gets 90% of its info) tell them how and where it's happening.
technology may slow them down a bit, but people are foolish if you think your VPN and Tor browser is going to protect you for long *if* a three-letter agency really decides to getya.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
When you trust a third party, with whom you have no actual connection, to keep your data private, you are pretty much asking to have it compromised. The best encryption and anonymity schemes in the world are useless in the face of a court order or questionable system administration. Did you really think some anonymous person was willing to go to jail for your privacy? You're both silly and naive if you think so.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
or one of the chosens? pretense is the key do not look back
What kind of pron is it? A girl of 17 years, 364 days, looking "provocative"? I better check the pics on my computer. Somewhere I probably have one of my young daughter eating a pickle or something. Those perverts get off on anything. Does it matter if the pickle is half sour or full sour?
So, are the users of TorMail being presumed guilty because they dared to use a system that the NSA couldn't intercept?
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
A few weeks ago i went for a hunt, searching through posts about "extra secret mail accounts",
It took me 2 hours to find out about tormail, and finally another 30 minutes to download tails, set it up on a usb stick, reboot and start the torbrowser - just to find out it was dead already.
If only i had known the obvious:
in times like these people use Gmail ON PURPOSE!
If you care about your privacy or want that your data is still yours, don't host it there, even encryption can be surpassed if you can control the hardware that decrypts it. UK, Australia, Israel, and others allies in the intelligence operations should be avoided too. And is not just for privacy paranoids only, companies should be worried too, and is not limited to just IP, managing data that can get you sued if disclosed will make you liable.
Wonder what countries with strong citizens privacy laws will require to any company that want to work there.
please, STOP thinking about the children!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think that would only apply to gerkins..
My mom took a picture of my two brothers and me bathing naked in a tub (ages 6-8 y.o.). You can see our baby junk and everything. Was she a child pornographer?
It's like expecting your dog to ignore the roast you left on the counter while you went to work. Sure, it could happen, but there's no reason an intelligent person would expect it to happen.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
You have to be daft to consider email over the public internet to be private. It never has been and never will be.
Wrong technology to use in carrying out any kind of sensitive communications of any sort.
Wish I had some mod points for you today.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Then why don't they give US access to all of THEIR emails? I mean, it's all well and good to try to get a specific user's email account when you've got a case and a warrant, but to simply grab everyone's email addresses is just sick. Surely we deserve to read their emails too, if they're going to read all of ours? For that matter, how can we be sure they aren't enabling child porn? Methinks we need someone to watch the watchers, and it might as well be all of us. It's not like international borders matter to them, so I think the entire world should be privy to their info as well.
Let's take a step back here. Is child porn really that big of a problem?
Yes it is. If you have to ask then you just don't get what CP is or does to tens of thousands of young children every year.
BUT
Mentioning the words "child porn" or "terrorist" or any one of those constitutional rights killing buzzwords should not mean that a judge grants any law enforcement agency carte blanche to do as they please.
They still need to have some kind of evidence to justify getting a subpoena or a warrant. The judges are complicit in the degradation of our constitutional rights just by giving LEAs a wink and a rubber stamp of approval. Part of the court's responsibilities is to keep LEAs in check.
Of course. Never mind that she was probably a great mom. In this day and age she'd probably be sent to prison (possibly with a reduced sentence because she's a women) and CPS would have abducted you and your brother. Be grateful you weren't born later.
Fuck sakes - is CP now the backdoor to the whole US Constitution (not to mention the means by which anyone, anywhere, can be arrested for any reason?)
"Fighting the War on: terrorism, drugs, freedom er preserving out way of life, ...." is still relevant.
See, the security services are now using people's fear and subsequent irrationality to justify their violations of the Constitution and people's basic unalienable Rights.
Our Government has become out of control.
NO! Violence! EVER! (Contrary to the NRA's position of "fighting tyranny" - but what do you expect from a bunch of fat blowhards who shoot at stationary targets once a week or so and feel real BIG. ). Violence will just lead to the Government labeling you as a terrorist and child killer or whatever and the media - all the media - will eat it up: the media is just a bunch of unquestioning sheep (especially Fox) and they only ask "questions" when it can boost ratings while fitting into their audience's World view - like Fox.
We the People need to stop being distracted by issues like abortion, gay marriage, and even government finances - for the time being. The ruling class is using those issues to divide us and distract us!
If you vote on social or fiscal issues, you are being distracted and manipulated.
Go ahead and flame me. Hate me. Please. BUT in November and in November of 2016, please listen to yourself and say, "Fuck AC he's an asshole! But I WILL NOT BE MANIPULATED BY THE RULING CLASS!"
And IF abortion IS really all that you live for, please, go ahead and vote with your heart.
All I'm saying is that we're being manipulated for purposes that I don't understand - yes, I AM coming across as a kook and no, I will NOT use the naysayers of NSA spying years ago as an example on how I "could" be right.
Just look for yourselfs - and I want to be labeled a kook because then the security services will - sort of - ignore me.
By any chance, does anyone have a reading list for those that fought the Stazi?
Do you have any pictures of her eating a banana? Or maybe a Popsicle? Even better: a Creamsicle. What about a corn dog? Or just holding a pair of grapefruits?
why aren't they arresting all of google? I am sure a picture of a child was sent using gmail at some point int time.
"the TorMail e-mail server"
The server. Singular. Did TorMail's creators and users skip class the day they explained how Tor worked?
Dude if your adversary is the government, any government, you might as well assume you are compromised already.
Using Tor is just a flag to prioritize your communications for more scrutiny, and always has been.
Speeding is what the cops use to be able to pull over and arrest anybody.
What does all that have to do with national security?
We have kidnappers, serial killers, rapist, and people making it and our biggest priority is fucking tor!?..
What kind of pron is it? A girl of 17 years, 364 days, looking "provocative"?
No. Next question?
It matters if you are shoving the pickle up her ass.
Now do you see the difference?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Great. Now I can't get the image of sweet & sour pickle child porn out of my head.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
See, that's the thing. They weren't providing hosting services SPECIFICALLY to child pornographers. They were providing services to ANYONE. Anyone at all. No questions asked.
Some of those people happened to be child pornographers. The vast majority of them were not.
You're arguing it's reasonable to presume that any user of a service that is ALSO used by criminals should reasonably be treated as suspect? Oh, child. You don't think there's child pornographers on GMail? Using EC2? With Instagram accounts? What service that's open to all ISN'T "a crime ridden neighborhood" in your example?
Let's take a step back here. Is child porn really that big of a problem?
Yes it is. If you have to ask then you just don't get what CP is or does to tens of thousands of young children every year.
BUT
Which is what the parent post you responded to is asking -- where did you get your "tens of thousands" number? When do we have a practical conversation about the scale of actual harm done and the ins/outs of the various possible methods to reduce that harm? 9/11 was a horrible event by any account -- have the various actions taken by our government in response to that mass-murdering of 3000 people been consistent with preventing what made that day so horrible in the first place?
The original formulation of Zeno's paradoxes concerned hair-splitting the age of consent, but posterity abstracted the quivering quibbling to better suit the Victoria era.
From TFS "the FBI obtained a search warrant for the TorMail account, and then accessed it from the bureau's own copy of data". That nuance is very comforting, that the FBI had to get a search warrant to investigate data they had seized, but didn't have probably cause to search for this particular crime. For all that's fucked up, this is a sign of something still working right.
Let's take a step back here. Is child porn really that big of a problem?
Yes it is. If you have to ask then you just don't get what CP is or does to tens of thousands of young children every year.
There are seven million children growing up in poverty in Mumbai alone. Half the children in India are malnourished. 16 million kids in America are growing up in poverty. I'm sure they're all happy, healthy, and well-adjusted, though.
Don't ignore child pornography, but treat it with a sense of perspective when talking about the harm it does to children and the number of children it harms instead of using it as a lever with which to move the legislative world.
It's old hat by now that Constitutional protections don't seem to apply to the Internet, because when it's computers, it's somehow different.
But the FBI's actions here seem to be a step beyond that: this was computers on a different kind of network, and therefore, virgin legal territory.
It's not that I'm upset that the FBI tried to catch a specific criminal, mind you. But running malware programs and taking all the data they can physically get their hands on? That's not just retrieving evidence for court cases, but ruling that any attempt to keep your private conversations private is prohibited. Take the computers and the Tor network away, and it would sound ridiculous: because a single person did something illegal, the government sabotaged a courier system's vehicles and confiscated everyone's letters, "just in case."
To say nothing of the precedent this could set. The NSA might not even have to "legally" collect "metadata" if this new standard gets applied to traditional web sites. "Well, we've found evidence that a coke dealer ran deals on Facebook. We'll need a copy of his records, and, hmm, why not just throw every other user's data in there, too, since this site is fostering all sorts of illegal activity. And keep us continuously updated, just in case our perp registers a new account. And while we're here, put in this JavaScript exploit, because why wait for future warrants when we can get citiz--er, criminals to send their info to us directly?"
I actually did use Tor Mail, and I'd normally think I was fine unless the FBI has an intense interest in people registering for video game forums, but I don't know how this might come back to haunt me. Five years from now, am I going to be prevented from boarding a plane because I've been flagged as "suspicious" for using an anonymizing client? Now that I am presumably on some sort of list, is the FBI going to ask for my diary as well, since the state has a proven right to see my 'suspiciously private' thoughts?
Well, since 9/11 no airplane that was took over by terrorist crashed into a building on US soil. This means homeland security obviously works.
Yet another instance of the world not working in the way some people wish.
While there may be techniques to communicate securely, email is not one of them. End of story. Get used to it.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
as some of you seem to have noticed,this is just a sympton of the multiple large problems that america appears to have.
More power to them.
correlation = causation ftw!
ps: I got the sarcasm, I'm just injecting a little of my own.
Considering that the official definition of "Child Porn" includes cartoons, and has been in the past used to arrest people for the possession of cartoons of "apparently underage" (don't remember the rest, sorry), I'm not willing to accept ANYTHING they say about the child porn problem.
Enforce the laws that already exist against violence and abuse. Do that and the entire problem goes away. (And if people want to see provocative cartoons, so what. It doesn't hurt anybody, and if you don't like it, just don't watch it.)
FWIW, given the prevalence of anime, I'd say that there's a huge market for cartoon child porn, given a strict enough definition of porn. And so what! It just doesn't matter. Enforce the laws against violence and abuse, and the problem goes away.
P.S.: Before this became an issue, it was, or appeared to be, much less of a problem. Most parents had explicit photographs of their children. And I just don't see that as a problem.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Its based on P2P principles (i.e. users contributing bandwidth) and the result is much less centralized than Tor.
There is also a DHT (distributed) email system that runs over I2P, although it is not the default I2P email yet. This new email system has no servers to raid; it is all distributed P2P.
Phone lines, but only if you speak in Navajo.
Historical trivia -- the Navajo codetalkers didn't just speak in the Navajo language, they spoke in a strange code that used Navajo vocabulary. So instead of simply translating the word abreast for so many people walking shoulder-to-shoulder, they would encode that first as ant breast, and then translate that into the corresponding Navajo, probably wóláchíí be’. More here. Other Navajo speakers who hadn't been trained in the code wouldn't understand what was being said. The Japanese even captured a native Navajo speaker in the Philippines, Joe Keiyoomia, but since he hadn't ever been trained as a codetalker, he wasn't able to make any sense of the codetalker code.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Won't someone arrest the children?
After all, there's nothing more enabling of child porn than children existing in the first place.
Every time I hear about the damage child porn causes, I think of two things: the fact that past cultures (i.e. that of ancient Sparta) had some child-adult sexual interactions as a normal component of their society, and the question about where that damage really comes from. I say the second part because it seems that rape victims are harmed more by the reaction of society to learning of the existence of the incident than the original incident could have ever reached, and it seems that societal responses effectively re-victimize perpetually. Cue the ACs coming down on me with "YOU ARE A SICK FUCK THAT SHOULD BE MURDERED BECAUSE THAT'S AN APPROPRIATE RESPONSE!!!!11"
not unless it was taken for sexual gratification or you were engaged in sexual activities
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Offtopic, but we live in an age where drawings of young anime characters can classify as "child pornography," which it isn't and is something I'm vehemently against.
I personally love anime, hentai (that does include loli), and otaku culture in general.
However, I'd prefer to see money being spent going after the people who (sexually) abuse children rather than a person who masturbates to drawings. Or is that too difficult?
This whole mass hysteria and paranoid delusion of child molesters being everywhere (in your closet, under your bed, etc.) has to fucking stop. (And the British are the worst offenders of this.)
Why was it on one server? Why did the company have access to the content of the emails? Appparently this never was a secure service, because that would mean end-to-end encryption.
We can't know what these sickos are thinking about (until the machine that does this is invented), we can only assume it's very perverse.
your whole comment can be summarized as "speculation"
Hey FBI, some other figures from the tech world who should perhaps be arrested for 'enabling child porn,': Joseph Nicéphore Niépce John Logie Baird Tim Berners-Lee William Henry Gates III Steve Jobs Linus Torvalds
Or you live in the UK, and you get your pictures processed at Boots Chemists.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/julia-somerville-defends-innocent-family-photos-1538516.html (there have been other cases too)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Before this became an issue, it was, or appeared to be, much less of a problem. Most parents had explicit photographs of their children. And I just don't see that as a problem.
At my sons' 21st birthdays, among the many photos shown, were several of them in the bath, or in the backyard under a sprinkler, with genitalia showing. They were 1 or 2 at the time. These were shown simply to amuse the crowd. My sons were certainly not upset, I doubt anyone in the crowd was upset. I would bet serious money that no one present felt these photos were pornographic in any way.
Two bricks to the testicles of paedophiles would not upset me. Innocent photos of my kids being labelled as pornographic does.
nice
That isn't THE official definition. It may well be so in some jurisdictions.
In mine, as far as I can tell, it is an explicitly sexual image of an identifiable female known to be under 18 at the time. I wouldn't bet that every prosecutor in the region would abide by that, but it appears to be the law.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Not so long ago a man was prosecuted for getting pictures of his grandkids like these developed. He was lucky to get a public defender who cared enough to notice that the prosecution's evidence was ridiculous and was zealous enough to persuade the judge to let him see the photos in question. If he had been even slightly lazier the old man would have been jailed on nothing more than a description dressed up in language that would make any photo "evidence of CP"
I have a friend who is fighting a totalitarian government that used to protect himself from that government with tormail. If that data ever gets out or is leaked from the FBI my friend will probably be killed. This is a very scary situation to be in. Also, a lot of the people he contacted would also be at risk. Journalists and people inside that corrupt government used to communicate to him through it. This raid by the FBI has put them all at risk.