Passive E-Mail Monitoring Leads To Arrest

www.2advanced.net writes "The world's first arrest resulting from passive monitoring of electronic communications is being reported by Globe Technology. In the article, sources reveal that 'an e-mail message intercepted by NSA spies precipitated a massive investigation by intelligence officials in several countries that culminated in the arrest of nine men in Britain and one in suburban Orleans, Ont. -- 24-year-old software developer Mohammed Momin Khawaja, who has since been charged with facilitating a terrorist act and being part of a terrorist group.'"

not good

[Anonymous Coward]

is this echelon and the aquinas router combined? Who is runing the show, if not the WTO? We must all watch ourselves carefully, for there are malicious entities out to get us. Those who would choose safety over liberty deserve neither.

Today it's a different Story

[rwiedower]

Today, we must FEAR those EVIL Canadians and their rum-running abilities. In fact, we have to use our "army of cryptographers, chaos theorists, mathematicians and computer scientists" to defeat just one of those crazy canuck masterminds.

Re:Yeah right...

[shackma2]

Good thing terrorists waste time on the monkey bars instead of learning about computers.

Terrorism & spam

[Dr_Ish]

Although this news is probably bad for YRO issues, there may be an upside. If the NSA is packet-sniffing e-mail traffic, then maybe they will be motivated to find a way of reducing the amount of Nigerean printer cartridge enlargement spam messages. If we are really lucky, they may even share the solution with us all. Of course, it is also possible that the guys at the NSA may all suddenly become hung like donkeys, NOT!

Re:Nice to hear

[good(k)night]

just wait until someone get arrested from passive reading of /. comments...

Quick

[BenBenBen]

I've often wondered just how fast their turn-around time was once you started using words like Great Satan, infidels, chemical, Bin LaCARRIER LOST

Re:Orleans

[the real darkskye]

maybe those are 3.5 canadian hours, given the current exchange rates that could translate to 12 US hours.

Its funny, laugh

Re:Anyone...

[bcmm]

No no no, people with guns are good patriotic guys who elect Bush.

New Spam Solution

[mackman]

We need a group of people to start discussing how cheap Viagra, a larger penis, and low-interest home mortages can be used for terrorism. Blip! Suddenly all the spam vanishes off the internet. I always hoped the NSA could be used for good as well as evil.

It's sad...

[waterford0069]

when the most interesting thing to you about the entire story is the fact that there is now an IT job open in Ottawa.

Re:Yeah right...

[3waygeek]

Well, the NSA is 200 years ahead of the rest of the world in maths theory [milk.com].

Stenography

[pr0nbot]

Oh for ALLah's sake! I can't believe the waY OUR governments spy on us. Any AraB, AS Ever, is a suspect. This is going too fAR Even for Bush. It won't BE LONG before they'll be trawling slashdot looking for hidden messages. I certainly won't be moving TO the US any time soon.

Re:The US should watch the Canadian border!

[A55M0NKEY]

Fess up! Canada's insideous evil OOZES down over the border like Maple Syrup!

Re:Yeah right...

[meringuoid]

It's down to a thousand years? That has me worried. I felt comfortable when we were talking 'given every computer on earth in parallel, you'd need about a billion times the age of the universe' - now we're down to a paltry millennium? Give NSA a couple of factors of ten to err on the side of caution, that puts them in the decade range. Moore's law being what it is, we're buggered.

Re:Somebody forgot to use encryption!

[Tackhead]

> > Would the NSA investigate if PGP or similar encryption was used?
>
> Surely the guys from the NSA reading this now can answer that for us...

The guys from the FBI probably could answer that, and might answer it without even knowing they'd done so. The guys from CIA could, but probably wouldn't, answer it. The guys from NSA definitely can answer that, but are smart enough not to. :)

Clue hierarchy is as follows: NSA > CIA > FBI. Not sure where the UK and Russian Federation intelligence agencies fit in here - probably somewhere between NSA and CIA.

I have no problem with NSA or CIA logging every packet I send or receive. Because I have nothing to hide that's worth hiding (in the sense that it can be used to "turn"/blackmail me into a threat to national security), I have nothing to fear.

The FeeBs, on the other hand, would see me posting snarky comments (like this one!) about them on Slashdot, a recent wisecrack I made about Bukkake and Krispy Kreme in the "Ashcroft Declars War On Pr0n" thread, take a look at the electric bill for running an overclocked Athlon 64 and a Prescott in the same house, and immediately conclude that I'm... well, concluding I was a pornographer would be wrong but still make too much sense, so they'll just bust my door down while I'm at work and claim my cat was growing drugs. Or something equally off-the-wall wrong.

A secret police force with a complete picture of my activities would file me correctly as "Cynical, harmless, weird sense of humor, might be useful if we get really desperate for propaganda writers someday."

The only thing that frightens me about the future of America is that the FBI, reporting to General Ashcroft, is not - and so long as a whackjob like Ashcroft has the post of Attorney General - can never be that secret police force.

Inter-service rivalry that gets in the way of military operations costs lives, and the .mil folks have made great strides in reducing it. It's just as bad for the domestic intelligence game. Is it too much to ask that the .gov folks do likewise?

Re:Stenography

[rcs1000]

Hmmm...

According to dictionary.co that means...

4 entries found for Stenography.
stenography ( P ) Pronunciation Key (st-ngr-f)
n.
The art or process of writing in shorthand.
The art or practice of transcribing speech with a stenograph machine.
Material transcribed in shorthand.

Do you perhaps mean Steganography

NSA - Please root out the 419'ers, too!

[Seng]

Ok! We have proof you DO monitor email traffic. Add some sniffers for the various 419 scams.

Re:Stenography

[Anonymous Coward]

the parent is a terrorist!!!

if you look at these letters like this...and highlite some of these...then you get...

Hmmm...

AccordIng to dictionary.co thAt Means...

4 entries found for StenogrAphy.
sTEnogRaphy ( P ) PROnunciation Key (st-ngR-f)
n.
The art or process of wrIting in ShorThand.
The art or practice of transcribing speech with a stenograph machine.
Material transcribed in shorthand.

Do you perhaps mean Steganography

...which spells "i am a terrorist"!!!

Re:Shouldn't this be YRO?

[_Qiang_]

The terriosts should learn from the spammer, how they hide their spam mail from filter.

something like this :

let's B@MB the N5A at Jan 1st, 2010.

I am sure others who familiar with all the VIGRA spam can come up something better than mine.

Imagine what it must be like

[TheTranceFan]

Imagine what it must be like for the NSA's programs that are sitting on the Internet backbone, watching packets go by...

Pr0n Pr0n Pr0n Pr0n Pr0n B0mb Pr0n Pr0n Pr0n Pr0n Pr0n Pr0n

You could definitely miss something if you blinked at 10 Gbits/sec or whatever it runs at...