US Fears Loss of ICQ Honeypot 319
AHuxley writes "US law enforcement bodies view the sale of instant messaging service ICQ to a Russian company as a threat to homeland security. In spring 2010, Russia's largest Internet investment company, Digital Sky Technologies, agreed to purchase the service for $187 million from AOL. The US is sure that most criminals use ICQ and, therefore, constant access to the ICQ servers is needed to track them down. As the system is based in Israel, American security service have had access. The article concludes, 'Lawyers [of unspecified nationality] say that to block the deal the US Committee on Foreign Investment needed to cancel it no later than within 30 days after the deal has been announced — so unless the rules are broken, nothing can be changed.'"
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ICQ is AIM (Score:1, Interesting)
Northern Virginia, as it happens; conveniently close to both the CIA and the NSA. :D
Re:Surprise, surprise (Score:1, Interesting)
You're assuming that the directory server would honestly connect you to your intended interlocutor and not to a transparent proxy that would in turn connect to the recipient in order to record the conversation. You would have to trust the directory server to give you the IP of your interlocutor... there's no way to verify that it's not a proxy instead.
Re:ICQ is AIM (Score:3, Interesting)
Anybody who was watching MSNBC's Countdown around 2008-2009 know that there's a highly controlled rooms at AT&T where nearly all long distance telephone traffic flow through and while curious AT&Ters are not allowed, government agents are.
Anybody who's been reading the Telecom Informer in 2600 [2600.com] for years now has been aware of the scope of the governments monitoring capabilities in that sector. And I'm sure they're not the only source but I'll be damned if I let you attribute that information to an MSNBC program.
lol.
Re:Criminals use ICQ... (Score:4, Interesting)
And why wouldn't they develop their own protocols for communication?
I can think of various ways to communicate, most of them rather narrow-banded but still useful for key information.
If you are into big time crime you can even get news media to communicate for you, but that means that you must have exchanged some protocol first. Let's say that you agree that news reported in a certain newspaper online can contain some key information - like where a bank heist shall occur. You can then communicate a lot of information through other channels to coordinate the "when" and "how". Then just cause some other happening - like a large fire that will be reported in the news in the area where you shall pull it off.
And even in computer communication you can get around direct tracking, like posting on Slashdot or ping some servers with an incorrect sender address that will cause the ping reply to end up at your expected target system.
Re:National Security Act (Score:3, Interesting)
So it would seem that the ICQ purchase is a Russian security issue, I suppose it is because of the location of the servers in Israel. So is US security really complaining or are they the puppets of Israeli security yet again, as you can bet the servers for ICQ will not remain where Israeli security can control them, once a Russian company owns them.
The US President and Russian President chumming it up at a burger joint http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDzHvAcysWQ [youtube.com] (I wonder if nutburger Palin is still paranoid about the Russian President leering into her yard), would mean the cold war is well and truly over and Israel's significance in the region (due to Russian support of Arabic nations) is dwindling.
From a Russian perspective it makes normal commercial sense for them to expand into global internet market as can readily be witnessed by the growth of Russian today http://www.rt.com/ [rt.com], pretty much middle of the road english news site in terms of reliability, well ahead of Fox News.
Don't listen to RT propaganda (Score:3, Interesting)
A warning to people out here: RT is the Russian international propaganda channel - ANYTHING it reports should be taken with a grain of salt and verified through other sources.
RT is a farely new Russian government owned news channel, and has been gaining more and more presence everywhere lately. Their journalism is extremely untrustworthy - fabrications are common and government anti-america propaganda is rampant.
Re:ICQ used by any people at all ? (Score:2, Interesting)
LOL, that's actually the funny part.
You see, ICQ is very popular in Russia - hence the interest to buy it. RT, being a propaganda horn of the lowest caliber, doesn't realize that by issuing such generalizations it actually reaffirms the public's view of modern Russia: criminal and corrupt. Which, by the way, is actually true :)
Anyhoo, anything coming from RT must be taken with a grain of salt - it is a propaganda channel after all....
Re:National Security Act (Score:3, Interesting)
What about the Jews who were kicked out of Persia, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen?
The insanity was the Arab world's decision to throw the Jews into the sea in 1947, 1967 and 1973. No, the Arab world couldn't stand the thought of a tiny trip of land with Jews on it, so they decided to refuse Israel's right to exist, something that blew up in their faces.
Had Poland, the United Kingdom and France not treated the Holocaust survivors like the cause of the Second World War and given them some options other than death and concentration camps things might have turned out differently.
Israel is not founded on a religion, it's founded on an racial heritage, something that's true from Morocco to Vietnam across Africa and Asia.
Re:Criminals use ICQ... (Score:5, Interesting)
ICQ has millions of users in the former eastern bloc. ICQ is for Russia and most of its Slavic neighbors pretty much the same as QQ is for China and their neighbors.
People with these ethnic backgrounds living abroad have usually the same preference for their IM networks, of course, to reach the rest of the family back home. Now no one would ever dare to suggest that emigrants from the Eastern Bloc - those that use ICQ - have a high involvement in crime, but I'm sure there's some people who have more than a hunch on that. I wonder where all these new AK47s used in street crime from Belgium to California come from anyway...
Re:National Security Act (Score:3, Interesting)
A properly limited government is defined as follows:
A government with sufficient limits that it leaves me alone, but with sufficient powers to bother everybody else to make sure that they leave me alone.
Re:National Security Act (Score:2, Interesting)
The White Man is responsible for all evil in the world. Didn't you get the memo?
It was on telly only yesterday:
Nigeria: all other religions are slowly extinguished, entire provinces convert to Islam, complete with Sharia law and beheadings, stonings and all the other things we've learned to expect from an Islamic state.
Yet, the documentary (done by White Men) blamed the White Man, notably the British, to be responsible for religious warfare in 2010 because of something they did prior to Nigerian independence - what was back in 1950s.
Nigeria is independent since Oct. 1st, 1960, and religious warfare 50 years later is still attributed to White Man even by White Men's documentaries.
I have much respect for the impact that history has on current events, but it's getting increasingly ridiculous.
ICQ vie QIP (Score:3, Interesting)
ICQ is used in FSU via a convenient client "Qip" http://qip.ru/ [qip.ru] Almost nobody is using an original ICQ client.
I think the US and RF governments should fight cyber-crime together.
Businesses in the FSU usually have a low profit margin. At the same time, the USA is one of the top spam generating countries http://www.projecthoneypot.org/spam_server_top_countries.php [projecthoneypot.org]
Spam kills our businesses in FSU because colleagues spend a lot of working time on dealing with it. Spam filters do not help anymore. This is an area where the RF government should be interested in cooperation with the US authorities to reduce the amount of spam incoming into our businesses. Without an international effort this problem can not be solved.
I guess there could be criminals who may use ICQ, but I know for sure that there are criminals who flood our servers with spam. Significant part of this spam has the US origin. So there is a vast field for law enforcement agencies to cooperate.
For example, a mobile police team from Russia could bust a spam kings, say, in Alabama, destroy spam servers and go home in Russia. It is much harder task to do for local cops. And vice-versa. A team of the US police officers could bust, say, a soft pirates' sweetshop somewhere in Siberia and go home after destroying the illegal production and equipment. Again it is not an easy task for local police to come and destroy a business, even an illegal one.
Nowadays when we are in one and the same network it would be more productive to cooperate than to confront.