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To Avoid Detection, Terrorists Made Messages Seem Like Spam
HughPickens.com writes: It's common knowledge the NSA collects plenty of data on suspected terrorists as well as ordinary citizens, but the agency also has algorithms in place to filter out information that doesn't need to be collected or stored for further analysis, such as spam emails. Now Alice Truong reports that during operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, the U.S. was able to analyze laptops formerly owned by Taliban members. According to NSA officer Michael Wertheimer, they discovered an email written in English found on the computers contained a purposely spammy subject line: "CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT."
According to Wertheimer, the email was sent to and from nondescript addresses that were later confirmed to belong to combatants. "It is surely the case that the sender and receiver attempted to avoid allied collection of this operational message by triggering presumed "spam" filters (PDF)." From a surveillance perspective, Wertheimer writes that this highlights the importance of filtering algorithms. Implementing them makes parsing huge amounts of data easier, but it also presents opportunities for someone with a secret to figure out what type of information is being tossed out and exploit the loophole.
According to Wertheimer, the email was sent to and from nondescript addresses that were later confirmed to belong to combatants. "It is surely the case that the sender and receiver attempted to avoid allied collection of this operational message by triggering presumed "spam" filters (PDF)." From a surveillance perspective, Wertheimer writes that this highlights the importance of filtering algorithms. Implementing them makes parsing huge amounts of data easier, but it also presents opportunities for someone with a secret to figure out what type of information is being tossed out and exploit the loophole.
Applying the Cameron Solution, all we need to do is ban spam... or email. I confess I'm not quite clear.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I use spook-mode in Emacs to greet the voyeurs at NSA all the time.
Kh-11 SSL FBI cypherpunk Attorney General HAMASMOIS Roswell Power Syria Food Poisoning cryptanalysis North Korea Verisign halcon Nuclear facility
an ill wind that blows no good
Prince of Nigeria is really funding terror cells to cure his erectile disfunction.
If "Consolidate Your Debt" was a special subject for them, I wonder, how many proposals of that kind the assholes had to sift through to find messages from real comrades.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So does this mean the NSA will now filter my spam for me? Hooray!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
More interestingly, I wonder how many perfectly good terrorist emails I've deleted from my spam folder.
Sure we will get some actual spammers in with that, but better safe than sorry.
If "Consolidate Your Debt" was a special subject for them, I wonder, how many proposals of that kind the assholes had to sift through to find messages from real comrades.
The sender address? Or a special forged "from"?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Easy to do with specific words used in the body. This is no different than using the classifieds. Noteworthy because it's being done on a computer.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
According to Slashdot, Betty White is a terrorist?
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Watch the Home Shopping Network. All their plans are on display. Look for the hidden pictures in those artsy plates they sell. They're actually maps and blueprints.
And Hair Club for Men is a sleeper cell.
"I've fallen! And I can't get up!" is a call to arms.
They're everywhere. Am I not right?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
.......of something similar back in 2002. There were a lot of messages on UseNet that had been attributed to being either spammers or some college testing out an AI. I noticed that the messages all had the same subject but with an added "suffix" at the end and that the messages were all the same in the beginning but at the end of them they had what appeared as a word salad. I dropped a hint to the FBI that it looked like the "suffix" was giving the order in which to reassemble the message and that the word salad at the end was likely some form of steganography that contained the actual message. Two days later those messages stopped appearing on UseNet and were never seen again. Was it a terrorist? I don't know but they were made aware of it at that point at least. I would have contacted the NSA but I didn't want to deal with them on any level.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is correct; the NSA suspects we're all terrorists.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Since they always let the terrorist stuff through, so as not to tip their hand, when will the spammers start disguising their messages as jihadist cal to arms?
http://www.spammimic.com/
IF you think that is clever, let me introduce you to my dog. Being able to circumvent a silly little spam filter doesn't take a genius. I will not type out specific plans but there are many ways they can communicate that we cannot filter. We just have to hope that we are always vigilant and able to respond proactively at times and re-actively at times. This should be a good lesson for many who think that just tightening the bolts on privacy laws will help you catch the bad guys. It may catch one or ten, but you have given up so much more in return.
Finally, something good can come out of the "war on terror" and it can be a good use of the NSA's resources -- they can track down and eliminate spammers to prevent terrorist attacks.
What I would do is send it via Usenet. Because now they have found the link between sender and receiver. With email if you get one person, you can then start looking for other connections that person made and see where that leads you. This because there is a direct link. Even if they have no idea what it means when you sedn "Grandmother is not feeling well."
With Usenet there is no direct link.
I can send anything from Belgium to my providers Usenet feed and anybody anywhere can pick it up. When I send it I can use images, or just alt.test or whatever group. It can even be something on topic for that group. A reply can be in a completely unrelated group.
To be sure: this ONLY solves the direct link between people. Once they have both sides, it will be identical as if you were sending mail directly.
Now even if they would be able to see who reads alt.test (and all the other groups) it would mean that they would have to monitor everybody. Oh, wait. They do. [waves] "Hi mom!"
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If you can think of as many distinct sexual activities as there are symbols in your wrinting system, make a table and encode your secret messages as porn movies. (Spies will probably watch them, but probably also forget that they're supposed to be looking for messages.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
HIdden communicaTions doN't reallY take that muCh efforT tO create. Many cOuld be cReated in Relatively Overt Ways.
During WWII the 'beeb sent messages to the resistance in occupied Europe. (examples at http://www.struthof.fr/en/test... ... damn that is an insanely long url...). If I remember my history "innocuous" announcements in newspapers were used to send covert messages by all sides in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
Heck, if you controlled your own botnet (reasonable to do and a minor profit center for terrorists) you could put "random" text at the ends of your spams to confuse bayesian spam filters and piggyback coded messages in the random text as well.
Chaffing your messages this way has the bonus of making traffic analysis useless if you are sending your message to literally millions of people.
How f'ing dumb are they? They must've worked at M$ before the NSA.
NOTHING in the article says that it actually worked, and in fact there is NO FUCKING WAY the NSA is going to say one way or another. If the answer is not in the files Snowden took, we'll never know for sure. (But I rather suspect that it did not work.)
The ONE TIME one of those weird gibberish leet-speak "first-post-bsd-is-dying-you-fail-it" spam posts would be on-topic, I can't find one to cite!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There are infinite ways of encoding communication or circumventing contaminated channels. So trying to regulate communication or spying on data pipes is absolutely pointless. The NSA is only good for catching idiots and careless mistakes, and is at serious risk of being manipulated by those who can fabricate evidence. That's a low bar considering their cost and their cost on human rights.
Of course, never in History, not even in WW1 and 2 has any spy agency tried do collect ALL information that was there. Like every letter sent, every phone call made, every conversation made in public, etc... like spy organisations these days seem to try.
Former East Germany came closest in the last century I guess. Then again, they probably had 20% of the population working at least part-time as undercover agents to spy on the rest.
I followed his instructions but it did not increase the girth of my Kalashnikov girth even one tiny bit.
The terrorists have switched to concealing messages in GOP fundraising material.
Have gnu, will travel.
Its called steganography.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Hopefully this puts spam-senders on the NSA's watch-list..
More poignantly, does than mean we should be treating mass spammers like terrorist, oh my, I am torn between annoyance and justice, arghhh.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
NSA wants to further increase its surveillance of the American people, the NSA dreams up a bullshit story about terrorists using spam to hide msgs. Just who at the NSA would advise their staff to EXCLUDE spam from it's spying machine and why is slashdot posting this bullshit story on the front page?
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further reading ref
This made some member of the AMS very unhappy. Here is what angry mathematicians sound like:
If you read his statement, it is content free. As a admission of wrongdoing, it's completely worthless.
This is more of an apology for getting caught then anything else.
So when Dr. Wertheimer pontificates about filtering email and national security, you should not be very impressed. His agenda assumes the end of constitutional protections for privacy. He is not an honest man doing an honest job for an honest employer.
Why is Snark Required?
Get V1aggra strong enuf to last thru the 72 v1rgins you will s00n meat.
Table-ized A.I.
Train a compression algo using a spam corpus to build a dictionary. Compress and encrypt your message. Then use the spam dictionary to *decompress* it. Hey presto, your message looks exactly like a randomly generated spam message.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Re " Like every letter sent" was under consideration from some types of communications.
Project SHAMROCK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"started in August 1945 that involved the accumulation of all telegraphic data entering into or exiting from the United States. The Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and its successor NSA were given direct access to daily microfilm copies of all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT."
Just the early days of collect it all.
The UK had Defence of the Realm Act 1914 (DORA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... to help with letters.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Given the fact that France has had one of the most extensive data retension programs since 2006 and were still unable to prevent the terrorist attack should give a clue to politicians and police ... ... All three terrorists (much like the 9/11 ones) were on watch lists and known, yet they were able to buy guns and plan this whole ordeal. Good job, politicians! Fund the police instead of keeping tabs on all of your country's inhabitants and cutting in to their private lifes ... ...
I believe the contrary is true: By relying on being able to prevent attacks through data retention (which by definition will create floods of data hard or impossible to interpret) and expecting to catch anybody before the fact, police have obviously reduced their work on surveillance of suspects as well as regular police work
Even if you had 100% surveillance of ALL the people, including the contents of ALL the communication, any person just slightly intelligent and versed in computers will be able to hide their communication from the state. Also, who ever called for checking every single letter mailed through the postal service? Or listening in to every person-to-person talk? Just because technology makes listening in on people possibly doesn't mean it should be done, or would be helpful to prevent crimes
Terrorists have been sending me messages day and night for years. I didn't know and kept deleting them.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Oma gehts gut!
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
It's a public secret that the reason NSA 's billion dollar program doesn't intercept any terrorist communication is their spam filters