They may have been scared, but they helped defeat two separate enemy countries, at great cost in loss of life.
Now they're running from a group that would fit into a small office building.
Where are the people like my Uncle Ken, who stood up to a continent full of enemies? Who climbed cliffs under fire at Pointe du Hoc to do so?
If he can defeat Google in open court, he can use the case as a precedent to defeat anyone. This is the brave litigant's version of "choose a good target". Cowardly litigants start with the person who has the worst chance of defending themselves, but if they cave, its doesn't set a precedent.
He's not after Google: he's after everyone.
Lawyer stuff is subtle (and some of them are quick to anger (:-))
There's a degree to which one watches each other, that used to be unspoken. IMHO, it needs to be publicized widely as "we will spy on your spies". Canada's RCMP, and the U.S. FBI are supposed to be counter-spies and spy on enemy spies.
They not only should do so, but they should be seen to do so. Brazil's ABIN, if they're the FBI-equivalent, should do so too.
Then we can go back to looking for regular evil spies and shooting them (:-))
Regrettably, ombudmen generally aren't allowed to challenge the board of directors, only report individual managers' or groups' misbehavior to the board, who then decide.
It's a fast path to management, but it only works if the people it goes to are not the ones who've created or signed off on the misbehavior.
Commons committees used to be the better alternative to ombuds in government, as they were lawmakers themselves and could change the law out from under a misbehaving executive. Alas, here in Canada they've been reduced to collections of trained seals, and in the U.S. to deadlocks.
An Attempted Entrapment
Posted by George Maschke on 3 November 2013, 1:34 pm
In May 2013, I was the target of an attempted entrapment.1 Whether it was a federal agent attempting to entrap me on a contrived material support for terrorism charge or simply an individual’s attempt to embarrass me and discredit AntiPolygraph.org remains unclear. In this post, I will provide a full public accounting of the attempt, including the raw source of communications received and the IP addresses involved.
As background, it should be borne in mind that a federal criminal investigation into providers of information on polygraph countermeasures, dubbed “Operation Lie Busters,” has been underway since at least November 2011, when an undercover U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, posing as a job applicant, contacted Chad Dixon of Marion, Indiana for help on passing the polygraph. In December, 2012, Dixon pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and obstruction of an agency proceeding, for which he has been sentenced to 8 months in federal prison.
Doug Williams of Norman, Oklahoma, a former police polygrapher who has been teaching people how to pass polygraph examinations for some three decades and operates the website Polygraph.com, was also the target of a sting operation and in February 2013, U.S. Customs and Border Protection executed search warrants on his home and office, seizing business records. He has been threatened with prosecution but to date has not been charged with any crime.
With this in mind, I received a most curious unsolicited communication on Saturday, 18 May 2013 from <mohammadali201333@yahoo.com>. The message was sent to my AntiPolygraph.org e-mail address <lt;maschke@antipolygraph.org> and was titled “help help help please” (155 kb EML file.) The message body was blank, but there was a PDF attachment with a short message written in Persian, the language of Iran:
I know Persian, a fact of which the writer was evidently cognizant. Here is a translation:
Greetings and respect to you, Mr. George Maschke,
I am Mohammad Aghazadeh and have been living in Iraq for five years. I am a member of an Islamic group that seeks to restore freedom to Iraq. Because the federal police are suspicious of me, they want to do a lie detector test on me. I ask that you send me a copy of your book about the lie behind the lie so that I can use it, or that you help me in any other way. I am very grateful to you.
The book to which the message refers is The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF), AntiPolygraph.org’s free e-book that, among other things, explains how to pass (or beat) a polygraph “test.” Factors that made me highly suspicious about this message include:
Why would someone who supposedly fears the police send an unencrypted e-mail acknowledging that he’s a member of an Islamic group that is trying to change the government of Iraq?
Why would such a person also provide his full name and how long he’s been in the country?
To my knowledge, there aren’t any Iranian-backed Islamic groups seeking to “restore freedom to Iraq.” In fact, Iran and Iraq have good diplomatic relations.
Why did this person ask me to send a book that is freely available on-line? Note that this message didn’t ask for a “Persian edition” of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.
I suspected the message was a likely attempt to set me up for prosecution on charges of material support for terrorism (or something similar).2 It seemed highly unlikely that the message could be genuine. Nonetheless, about half an hour after receiving the message, I provided “Mohammad Aghazadeh” the same advice I would give to anyone accused of a crime who has been asked to take a polygraph test:
Dear Mr. Mohammad Aghazadeh,
Our advice to everyone under such circumstances is not to submit to the so-called
A late comment: In Canada, they need not convict someone in court to hold them in custody, merely get a Ministerial order, so there is no risk in publicising putative terrorist plots detected by illegal wiretaps.
cat iptables | ip2if_compile | iftables_decompile
Passing it through a compiler to the iftables virtual machine and then decompiling/describing avoids some "that phrases does not translate" problems. If one can't compile arbitrary iftables code for the vm, then the vm is formally incomplete (:-))
Imagine that one wishes to prevent subversion by drug cartels but honour (or appeal) court orders. This is the problem that public libraries have dealt with since their creation. Someone always wants to know what person X has been reading, in hopes of using it against them....
Library software is normally written to preserve privacy, and discard the record that "X has book Y" when the book is returned. It can be written this way because several of the countries where it is sold require privacy as part of their legal system. Purchasers in other countries get privacy as a side-effect.
Countries prohibiting privacy would require a special version for a quite limited market, and the library software companies aren't motivated to deal with them: just doing an internationalization/localization to get into a small market is hard enough!
When an individual library is served with a court order, they can honour it by doing a lookup once a day and writing X's new books down on a piece of paper. As this doesn't scale, and is also a credible cost, the willingness of courts to order it is reduced, and the damage to privacy is limited.
Applying this to email, one wishes to keep routing data only until a message is delivered to the next host and we get a "250 OK" from SMTP. If a court wishes to collect that metadata, they can station an officer with a laptop at the ISP and gobble up the packets routed to/from him. This is onerous, and in Canada at least requires a "wiretap warrant", which the courts restrict more than ordinary search warrants.
The person wishing to provide this kind of information to a drug cartel has the same hard task, and is also more likely to be detected by the ISP.
To oversimplify, we're keeping far too much information about email: an author or vendor should take notice of the privacy laws of their preferred markets and discard debugging/diagnostic information at the end of a successful delivery. If they wish to cover themselves against customer complaints, they might send delivery notices that the customer can read or filter out at their convenience.
You also need to reduce the costs, so that you don't need to be a millionaire to have enough of your own money to fund getting into the primaries. Check out their backgrounds: in the U.S., the number of non-millionaire federal politicians is tiny.
Alas, the U.S. House of Representatives now has a higher (de-facto) property requirement that the British House of Lords (;-))
Perhaps we should ask for their charter to be withdrawn, on the basis of malfeasance?
W3c exists through an agreement between MIT, CERN, and these days ERCIM, Keio University and Beihang University. If one or more of them formally asked for their legal organization to be shut down fr cause, it might cause some careful reconsideration. If it happened, their non-profit or not-for-profit status would be lost, at least in the country in question.
A brilliant bit of pilpul: the statute is supposed to be read using the "ordinary meaning" of terms like radio. As radio can be distinguished from television in ordinary usage, radio waves therefor do not include television waves, do not include wifi waves, etc. Therefor wifi is not radio, and doesn't have the radio exception, even though it uses radio frequency electromagnetic waves.
The counter-argument is that in common usage and in the language used in the statute, the term "radio" includes "radio waves". The waves cannot be distinguished from one another in the same way, and the argument that "radio communication" does not include "television communication", etc fails. All electromagnetic communication in the radio wavelengths is radio communication.
Poor legal draftsmanship, plus a real desire to draw exceedingly fine distinctions about extremely broad language yields a decision that makes the judges feel proud, but dumps all over what is, IMHO, rather obvious legislative intent.
Yes: they need to publish more, and provide ways for end-users or their nerds to validate the work. In a previous life I ran stuff through a disassembler/decompiler and read the diffs. I think that's likely too hard for a program this big (;-))
Any kind of honest person gets you in trouble, if you're doing something they don't consider honest. Ditty any kind of ethical person, moral person, etc. Of course, any of these can be wrong about whether or not you're doing something dishonest.
Conversely, any kind of dishonest (unethical, immoral, etc) person can get you in trouble if they do something dishonest, unethical, etc.
It doesn't matter who you're hiring, if what you do can be misused, at some point you'll need to discover, usually publicly, if it's being misused or not.
Cops are used to that: they often have people "watching the watchers". Spies aren't used to it, they're used to keeping stuff secret, so they have way more trouble with it (:-))
Whereas I see the onus as going the other way, once you have replied with a defence of truth. I fear we may be arguing about exceedingly fine points and need someone who IAL and knows both the common law (Canada) and Civil Code (Quebec) (:-))
In Canada, you have to be proven to be acting maliciously [Halsbury's], in order to sustain a judgment against you where you're making one or more true statements. In general, if you're telling the truth and nothing but the truth, you can't be convicted. If it's a SLAPP suit and you're in Quebec, you'll get "costs against" the person who sued you, meaning that they will have to pay your lawyer and court costs.
You're arguably thinking of the UK, where almost anything can be used to justify a suit. We're not as bad as they are, but not nearly as good as parts of the U.S. in this area.
--dave
IANAL and this is not legal advice, etc, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
They may have been scared, but they helped defeat two separate enemy countries, at great cost in loss of life. Now they're running from a group that would fit into a small office building.
Where are the people like my Uncle Ken, who stood up to a continent full of enemies? Who climbed cliffs under fire at Pointe du Hoc to do so?
--dave
I didn't say he was trying to set a good precedent (;-)) --dave
If he can defeat Google in open court, he can use the case as a precedent to defeat anyone. This is the brave litigant's version of "choose a good target". Cowardly litigants start with the person who has the worst chance of defending themselves, but if they cave, its doesn't set a precedent.
He's not after Google: he's after everyone.
Lawyer stuff is subtle (and some of them are quick to anger (:-))
--dave
There's a degree to which one watches each other, that used to be unspoken. IMHO, it needs to be publicized widely as "we will spy on your spies". Canada's RCMP, and the U.S. FBI are supposed to be counter-spies and spy on enemy spies.
They not only should do so, but they should be seen to do so. Brazil's ABIN, if they're the FBI-equivalent, should do so too.
Then we can go back to looking for regular evil spies and shooting them (:-))
--dave
Regrettably, ombudmen generally aren't allowed to challenge the board of directors, only report individual managers' or groups' misbehavior to the board, who then decide.
It's a fast path to management, but it only works if the people it goes to are not the ones who've created or signed off on the misbehavior.
Commons committees used to be the better alternative to ombuds in government, as they were lawmakers themselves and could change the law out from under a misbehaving executive. Alas, here in Canada they've been reduced to collections of trained seals, and in the U.S. to deadlocks.
--dave
An Attempted Entrapment
Posted by George Maschke on 3 November 2013, 1:34 pm
In May 2013, I was the target of an attempted entrapment.1 Whether it was a federal agent attempting to entrap me on a contrived material support for terrorism charge or simply an individual’s attempt to embarrass me and discredit AntiPolygraph.org remains unclear. In this post, I will provide a full public accounting of the attempt, including the raw source of communications received and the IP addresses involved.
As background, it should be borne in mind that a federal criminal investigation into providers of information on polygraph countermeasures, dubbed “Operation Lie Busters,” has been underway since at least November 2011, when an undercover U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, posing as a job applicant, contacted Chad Dixon of Marion, Indiana for help on passing the polygraph. In December, 2012, Dixon pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and obstruction of an agency proceeding, for which he has been sentenced to 8 months in federal prison.
Doug Williams of Norman, Oklahoma, a former police polygrapher who has been teaching people how to pass polygraph examinations for some three decades and operates the website Polygraph.com, was also the target of a sting operation and in February 2013, U.S. Customs and Border Protection executed search warrants on his home and office, seizing business records. He has been threatened with prosecution but to date has not been charged with any crime.
With this in mind, I received a most curious unsolicited communication on Saturday, 18 May 2013 from <mohammadali201333@yahoo.com>. The message was sent to my AntiPolygraph.org e-mail address <lt;maschke@antipolygraph.org> and was titled “help help help please” (155 kb EML file.) The message body was blank, but there was a PDF attachment with a short message written in Persian, the language of Iran:
I know Persian, a fact of which the writer was evidently cognizant. Here is a translation:
Greetings and respect to you, Mr. George Maschke,
I am Mohammad Aghazadeh and have been living in Iraq for five years. I am a member of an Islamic group that seeks to restore freedom to Iraq. Because the federal police are suspicious of me, they want to do a lie detector test on me. I ask that you send me a copy of your book about the lie behind the lie so that I can use it, or that you help me in any other way. I am very grateful to you.
The book to which the message refers is The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF), AntiPolygraph.org’s free e-book that, among other things, explains how to pass (or beat) a polygraph “test.” Factors that made me highly suspicious about this message include:
Why would someone who supposedly fears the police send an unencrypted e-mail acknowledging that he’s a member of an Islamic group that is trying to change the government of Iraq?
Why would such a person also provide his full name and how long he’s been in the country?
To my knowledge, there aren’t any Iranian-backed Islamic groups seeking to “restore freedom to Iraq.” In fact, Iran and Iraq have good diplomatic relations.
Why did this person ask me to send a book that is freely available on-line? Note that this message didn’t ask for a “Persian edition” of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.
I suspected the message was a likely attempt to set me up for prosecution on charges of material support for terrorism (or something similar).2 It seemed highly unlikely that the message could be genuine. Nonetheless, about half an hour after receiving the message, I provided “Mohammad Aghazadeh” the same advice I would give to anyone accused of a crime who has been asked to take a polygraph test:
Dear Mr. Mohammad Aghazadeh,
Our advice to everyone under such circumstances is not to submit to the so-called
PGP's author is somewhat aware of that (;-)) He's a principal at Silent Circle
A late comment: In Canada, they need not convict someone in court to hold them in custody, merely get a Ministerial order, so there is no risk in publicising putative terrorist plots detected by illegal wiretaps.
As with the EU, there have been none.
--dave
--dave
Rick Falkvinge points out that "with 100% absolute certainty [we know] that the wiretapping industry – NSA, GCHQ, FRA, etc – has stopped a total of exactly zero terror plots". See http://feeds.falkvinge.net/~r/Falkvinge-on-Infopolicy/~3/0uW0HpNnG-k/
cat iptables | ip2if_compile | iftables_decompile
Passing it through a compiler to the iftables virtual machine and then decompiling/describing avoids some "that phrases does not translate" problems. If one can't compile arbitrary iftables code for the vm, then the vm is formally incomplete (:-))
--dave
Imagine that one wishes to prevent subversion by drug cartels but honour (or appeal) court orders. This is the problem that public libraries have dealt with since their creation. Someone always wants to know what person X has been reading, in hopes of using it against them....
Library software is normally written to preserve privacy, and discard the record that "X has book Y" when the book is returned. It can be written this way because several of the countries where it is sold require privacy as part of their legal system. Purchasers in other countries get privacy as a side-effect.
Countries prohibiting privacy would require a special version for a quite limited market, and the library software companies aren't motivated to deal with them: just doing an internationalization/localization to get into a small market is hard enough!
When an individual library is served with a court order, they can honour it by doing a lookup once a day and writing X's new books down on a piece of paper. As this doesn't scale, and is also a credible cost, the willingness of courts to order it is reduced, and the damage to privacy is limited.
Applying this to email, one wishes to keep routing data only until a message is delivered to the next host and we get a "250 OK" from SMTP. If a court wishes to collect that metadata, they can station an officer with a laptop at the ISP and gobble up the packets routed to/from him. This is onerous, and in Canada at least requires a "wiretap warrant", which the courts restrict more than ordinary search warrants.
The person wishing to provide this kind of information to a drug cartel has the same hard task, and is also more likely to be detected by the ISP.
To oversimplify, we're keeping far too much information about email: an author or vendor should take notice of the privacy laws of their preferred markets and discard debugging/diagnostic information at the end of a successful delivery. If they wish to cover themselves against customer complaints, they might send delivery notices that the customer can read or filter out at their convenience.
--dave
You also need to reduce the costs, so that you don't need to be a millionaire to have enough of your own money to fund getting into the primaries. Check out their backgrounds: in the U.S., the number of non-millionaire federal politicians is tiny.
Alas, the U.S. House of Representatives now has a higher (de-facto) property requirement that the British House of Lords (;-))
--dave
Perhaps we should ask for their charter to be withdrawn, on the basis of malfeasance? W3c exists through an agreement between MIT, CERN, and these days ERCIM, Keio University and Beihang University. If one or more of them formally asked for their legal organization to be shut down fr cause, it might cause some careful reconsideration. If it happened, their non-profit or not-for-profit status would be lost, at least in the country in question.
Author page, with links - http://demontjoye.com/projects.html
Their video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS1LgeQTO1A
The product page - http://openpds.media.mit.edu/
The Soviet security service Ian Fleming's James Bond had to deal with was "Smert Spionam", or in English, "Death to Spies".
Let's bring back the 1940s and wage war against spies instead of terrorists (;-))
--dave
How about the Pirate Party? They have Members of the Euro Parliament, why shouldn't they have members of ours? --dave
A brilliant bit of pilpul: the statute is supposed to be read using the "ordinary meaning" of terms like radio. As radio can be distinguished from television in ordinary usage, radio waves therefor do not include television waves, do not include wifi waves, etc. Therefor wifi is not radio, and doesn't have the radio exception, even though it uses radio frequency electromagnetic waves.
The counter-argument is that in common usage and in the language used in the statute, the term "radio" includes "radio waves". The waves cannot be distinguished from one another in the same way, and the argument that "radio communication" does not include "television communication", etc fails. All electromagnetic communication in the radio wavelengths is radio communication.
Poor legal draftsmanship, plus a real desire to draw exceedingly fine distinctions about extremely broad language yields a decision that makes the judges feel proud, but dumps all over what is, IMHO, rather obvious legislative intent.
--dave
Writer trying too hard for page-hits (;-)) Linus is about as scary here as my aunt's old kitty-cat.
Yes: they need to publish more, and provide ways for end-users or their nerds to validate the work. In a previous life I ran stuff through a disassembler/decompiler and read the diffs. I think that's likely too hard for a program this big (;-))
Available at https://github.com/SilentCircle, but now we have the problem of validating the binaries are built from the code. This is subtle: see, for example, https://lwn.net/Articles/565113/
Any kind of honest person gets you in trouble, if you're doing something they don't consider honest. Ditty any kind of ethical person, moral person, etc. Of course, any of these can be wrong about whether or not you're doing something dishonest.
Conversely, any kind of dishonest (unethical, immoral, etc) person can get you in trouble if they do something dishonest, unethical, etc.
It doesn't matter who you're hiring, if what you do can be misused, at some point you'll need to discover, usually publicly, if it's being misused or not.
Cops are used to that: they often have people "watching the watchers". Spies aren't used to it, they're used to keeping stuff secret, so they have way more trouble with it (:-))
--dave
Yes, but even at work management didn't like the whole development gang traveling in the same plane or the same car...
Whereas I see the onus as going the other way, once you have replied with a defence of truth. I fear we may be arguing about exceedingly fine points and need someone who IAL and knows both the common law (Canada) and Civil Code (Quebec) (:-))
Not in Canada.
In Canada, you have to be proven to be acting maliciously [Halsbury's], in order to sustain a judgment against you where you're making one or more true statements. In general, if you're telling the truth and nothing but the truth, you can't be convicted. If it's a SLAPP suit and you're in Quebec, you'll get "costs against" the person who sued you, meaning that they will have to pay your lawyer and court costs.
You're arguably thinking of the UK, where almost anything can be used to justify a suit. We're not as bad as they are, but not nearly as good as parts of the U.S. in this area.
--dave
IANAL and this is not legal advice, etc, etc.