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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.
..from a gmail address, or what?
notwithstanding, they doubtless have access to the entire gmail dbase anyway.
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.
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
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
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..
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.
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.
"the TorMail e-mail server"
The server. Singular. Did TorMail's creators and users skip class the day they explained how Tor worked?
What does all that have to do with national security?
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?
Who would fight whom?
That's a serious question. What two (or more) large groups of Americans would organize themselves into armies of any respectable amount of strength?
Anyone trying to fight a loyal US military would get squashed faster than you can say "daisy cutter", I don't care how many M-16s and RPGs you have in your basement bunker. Maybe mutiny, turning the US Army into God's Army? Or how about Walmart and Monsanto *really* putting the competition out of business?
The states that keep threatening secession: Would we go to war to keep them, or just tell them not to let the door hit 'em where the Lord split 'em?
What's most likely is that the next civil war will be manufactured by the people selling arms to both sides.
I think you overestimate the US military's ability to turn out ruthless, cold blood killers (stow the cynicism here, there's obviously a few cases where a couple of bad actors have done terrible things, but that's not the norm.) I seriously, seriously doubt soldiers would follow orders that result in the slaughter (and it would be slaughter) of thousands of Americans.
Also, look how much trouble we had policing and 'holding' Iraq, a much smaller country (in terms of both population and geographical area.). Realistically the military would get spread too thin, supply lines would get cut, and yeah... done.
goosestepping takes on a whole new meaning.
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.
Good question. If only there was a modern day precedent for the US Military having a difficult time overcoming a vastly inferior enemy of insurgents.
This signature is false.
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?
It is if you do it right.
"I seriously, seriously doubt soldiers would follow orders that result in the slaughter (and it would be slaughter) of thousands of Americans. "
You mean like in the Civil War?
as some of you seem to have noticed,this is just a sympton of the multiple large problems that america appears to have.
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."
not unless it was taken for sexual gratification or you were engaged in sexual activities
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Think of something more like the Arab Spring vs the Civil War. Maybe i'm being optimistic, but I can't see the US army rolling tanks through the streets to quash widespread revolt. In the US. Killing US civilians.
In other words, fighting an opposing ARMY is probably quite a bit different than fighting CIVILIANS -- and only a sociopath would think it appropriate to use the same level of force in both situations. Doubly so against your own country.
Think of something more like the Arab Spring vs the Civil War. Maybe i'm being optimistic, but I can't see the US army rolling tanks through the streets to quash widespread revolt. In the US. Killing US civilians.
Arab spring is civil war. It's just named differently since it was backed by the west
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.
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.
Yes, the mass hysteria in Britain is terrifying.
Children evacuated from swimming pool after prosthetic leg mistaken for paedophile
WOLVERINES!
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
Better examples would be the New York draft riots or the eviction of the Bonus Marchers. In the first, troops machine gunned citizens. In the second, the Army with tanks and bayonets evicted peaceful demonstrators from Washington DC. Look them up for more information.