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Massive US Military Social Media Spying Archive Left Wide Open In AWS S3 Buckets (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Three misconfigured AWS S3 buckets have been discovered wide open on the public internet containing "dozens of terabytes" of social media posts and similar pages -- all scraped from around the world by the U.S. military to identify and profile persons of interest. The archives were found by veteran security breach hunter UpGuard's Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and these ones weren't exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive. CENTCOM is the common abbreviation for the U.S. Central Command, which controls army operations in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. PACOM is the name for U.S. Pacific Command, covering the rest of southern Asia, China and Australasia.
"For the research I downloaded 400GB of samples but there were many terabytes of data up there," he said. "It's mainly compressed text files that can expand out by a factor of ten so there's dozens and dozens of terabytes out there and that's a conservative estimate." Just one of the buckets contained 1.8 billion social media posts automatically fetched over the past eight years up to today. It mainly contains postings made in central Asia, however Vickery noted that some of the material is taken from comments made by American citizens. The databases also reveal some interesting clues as to what this information is being used for. Documents make reference to the fact that the archive was collected as part of the U.S. government's Outpost program, which is a social media monitoring and influencing campaign designed to target overseas youths and steer them away from terrorism.
"For the research I downloaded 400GB of samples but there were many terabytes of data up there," he said. "It's mainly compressed text files that can expand out by a factor of ten so there's dozens and dozens of terabytes out there and that's a conservative estimate." Just one of the buckets contained 1.8 billion social media posts automatically fetched over the past eight years up to today. It mainly contains postings made in central Asia, however Vickery noted that some of the material is taken from comments made by American citizens. The databases also reveal some interesting clues as to what this information is being used for. Documents make reference to the fact that the archive was collected as part of the U.S. government's Outpost program, which is a social media monitoring and influencing campaign designed to target overseas youths and steer them away from terrorism.
Unless they're claiming these were private posts the spooks somehow hacked into, it's just another public copy of already public data.
Thanks Democrats for voting that clown in. He took the Bush-era surveillance and expanded it by leaps and bounds. It's time we appoint a special prosecutor and investigate all of the abuses of the Obama administration.
It's always interesting when this happens, because it means an admin went in and opened everything up on purpose.
What about Russia!?!?!
Why doesn't the military store their own stuff?
If you can still claim copyright etc, it doesn't mean you can claim anything on social media is 'secret'. If so. this is nothing more than what every Sysadmin with half a brain has been saying... containers on machines you don't control are not secure.
Moderators should not be permitted to mod down posts just because they're written by conservatives. As is always the case, posts expressing conservative views are ending up at -1. The censorship needs to be stopped.
Before you claim that moderation isn't censorship, those arguments have been thoroughly refuted in earlier posts. Users get very upset when you note that the moderation censorship is a form of censorship, and that it's being abused. However, this is the truth, no matter how angry users become, acting like you just insulted their mother or locked their dog. Your pet moderation system is a form of censorship, and it's ruining Slashdot by turning it into an echo chamber.
As typical, liberals can't tolerate any disagreement with their opinions.
does /. count as social media, antisocial media maybe ? Anyhow, did centcom scan slashdot ? Is centcom the new UI for slashdot ?
Nullius in verba
If it's in the cloud, even the secure cloud, it's open.
You may not think it is, but it is.
And, yes, other nations do - and will - have access to it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Justice says it is only reasonable to have encryption if they can read it.
It they can only protect it as well as this, reasonable is a sad story.
Yeah, right! lol
Or do they actuall want to un-train the terrorists that they themselvea previously recruited, financed, trained and armed? (Like the IS, or the Taliban, or even Iran, etc, etc, etc)
Are you absolutely nuts? Did you not read about that guy who had fun scraping porn into AWS to test how much he could use? They have no positive ID on who owns the AWS buckets.
...as my company switches to AWS Workspaces, someone asked me what AWS is. I explained it and summarized: it's a very powerful and capable platform, yet its users are perfectly capable of powerfully shooting themselves in both feet.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
... again.
I'm sure Russia is super-scared.
As for that guy who some day suggested that all other people was inferior: https://slashdot.org/comments....
At-least those willing to relocate to the US.. Well.. I'm pretty sure some Russian and even North Korean computer users will know their shit and could had been interested in doing something in the US too.
More Obama-era spying programs (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17, 2017 @07:18PM (#55573725)
Thanks Democrats for voting that clown in. He took the Bush-era surveillance and expanded it by leaps and bounds. It's time we appoint a special prosecutor and investigate all of the abuses of the Obama administration.
MODERATORS ARE CENSORING POSTS (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17, 2017 @07:36PM (#55573803)
Moderators should not be permitted to mod down posts just because they're written by conservatives. As is always the case, posts expressing conservative views are ending up at -1. The censorship needs to be stopped.
Before you claim that moderation isn't censorship, those arguments have been thoroughly refuted in earlier posts. Users get very upset when you note that the moderation censorship is a form of censorship, and that it's being abused. However, this is the truth, no matter how angry users become, acting like you just insulted their mother or locked their dog. Your pet moderation system is a form of censorship, and it's ruining Slashdot by turning it into an echo chamber.
As typical, liberals can't tolerate any disagreement with their opinions.
UK Parliament moved their email and documents into the *Microsoft* cloud in Ireland......
(From Snowden): CIA was/is spying on all its allies, and each day a brief on legislation was prepared for Bush (and later Obama) on who was considering what legislation. If it was bad for the USA, it could be headed off. The joke being that when allied leaders called the President he already knew the details of the legislation they were going to talk about, and already had lined up talking points and counter allies as leverage.
So now all that cloud data is used to inform Donald Trump, his various business partners, and potentially (via the secure link Jared asked the Russians to provide) Trump's Russian friends too.
It's quite staggering that GCHQ would permit the highest law making body in the land to put its data into a cloud they know they and NSA have access to. Exposing the law making process to known foreign surveillance. Theresa May complains of Putin's 100+ propaganda channels trying to stir up racism during the Brexit vote... yet Parliament are exposed to back channel orange.
So, you have nothing to worry about by posting here.
I mean collecting billions of people's private posts and leave them open online.
400 GB. Of mostly text files. Samples, my arse! Just say you wanted a copy of everybody's facebook. It's more honest.
...the government was caught leaving copies of books it found in the public library in places where the public could see them! Seriously, this seems like a complete non-story if all the information in the S3 bucket was already public information. They just went out and gathered a bunch of stuff that you or I could already get by simply googling it and stored it in one place. Now if some of the information was not public already, then that is a different story...and would have been highlighted in this one if it really was the case.
GZIP is more like a factor of 3-4 times for text. The only way they could get a factor of 10 compression ratio would be if they were using something like PAQAR 4.5, which I kinda doubt...
a) Amazon buckets didn't always come that way, it took some pressure for Amazon to accept that this was a poor default setting.
b) In most of these cases, it's simply incompetence - I can't get OAuth to work, let's just set it to public and hope nobody guesses the bucket name.
Occam's razor suggests someone made a big mistake (perhaps aided and abetted by random contextual factors), although there's always the chance it's deliberately public "by accident" so that someone else can use it. As in "we're not formally allowed to give you X in exchange for Y, but if you happen to look over here..."
That is basically how the wikileaks deal was set up, based on the evidence. (Two people walk into a room, pretend not to have done business together, and then one wikileaks damaging information about the DNC while the other tries to lift sanctions. What happened in the room?)
Neat! Do they have a copy of militaryphotos.net? Someone post a torrent please.