Google Has Notified At Least Dozens of People Targeted by Secret FBI Investigation (vice.com) 103
At least dozens of people have received an email from Google informing them that the internet giant responded to a request from the FBI demanding the release of user data, news outlet Motherboard reported Tuesday, citing several people who claimed to have received the email. The email did not specify whether Google released the requested data to the FBI. From the report: The unusual notice appears to be related to the case of Colton Grubbs, one of the creators of LuminosityLink, a $40 remote access tool (or RAT), that was marketed to hack and control computers remotely. Grubs pleaded guilty last year to creating and distributing the hacking tool to hundreds of people. Several people on Reddit, Twitter, and on HackForums, a popular forum where criminals and cybersecurity enthusiast discuss and sometimes share hacking tools, reported receiving the email. [...] The email included a legal process number. When Motherboard searched for it within PACER, the US government's database for court cases documents, it showed that it was part of a case that's still under seal.
Trump is a retard, in his own words : (Score:1, Informative)
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/04/politics/trump-woodward-phone-call/index.html
I picked out the most fascinating parts of the call. They're below.
1. "It's really too bad, because nobody told me about it, and I would've loved to have spoken to you. You know I'm very open to you. I think you've always been fair."
Trump is right -- Woodward is fair -- but the President saying this on tape(!) makes what undoubtedly will be the White House's attempt to discredit Woodward that much tougher. Also, it becomes clear tim
"Smart move?" (Score:2, Offtopic)
Is this aing in avoiding arrest, or obstructing an investigation?
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Hey, I'm just keeping up the tradition here! :)
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As if Vice would know the truth if it smacked the in the face with a tuna.
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I applaud Google for this.
Subpoenas are supposed to be served. Getting around this by serving the holder rather than the owner is an abuse.
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Nixon didn't get busted for "spying on a campaign". He got busted for hiring a bunch of actual criminals to burglarize the DNC headquarters.
Sound familiar? Stealing stuff from the DNC in order to help a Republican candidate?
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I don't think Nixon was actually "busted". There was no impeachment, no criminal case.
So arguing over what he was "busted for" would seem to be moot.
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Not technically true. Only if you are an applicant plowing through the Justice Department the hard way.
The president is under no such constraint if he does not wish to be, nor can Congress add conditions to the exercise of a direct presidential power.
Nixon (and draft dodgers under Carter) are such examples.
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There is a difference between covering up said crime under investigation, and some tangential crime, such as Clinton lying under oath about sex "with that woman".
It was just as well he wasn't removed from office for such a thing, as opposed to the reason for the investigation, Whitewater.
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Nixon was BUSTED as all bloody get-out. They had him dead to rights and were about to nail him as the blatent crook that he most certainly was. But he stepped down before it happened because he knew he was busted. If you ever even remotely THINK that "he wasn't technically busted" then you have absolutely ZERO sense for politics.
So arguing over what he was "busted for" would seem to be moot.
No, the details are actually quite pertinent as it comes to precedence for current affairs.
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Nixon didn't get busted for "spying on a campaign". He got busted for hiring a bunch of actual criminals to burglarize the DNC headquarters.
Sound familiar? Stealing stuff from the DNC in order to help a Republican candidate?
This is just flat wrong. He got in trouble for trying to cover it up after he had been made aware that it took place. You make it sound like he was in on it from the get go.
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As with the infamous "Trump Tower Meeting", it's simply naive to believe the principle beneficiary, on whose behalf the entire enterprise was undertaken, was not "in on it". Especially with a famous micromanager like Nixon (or Trump).
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It may not be illegal, but happily taking Russian hacking intel is a horrid black eye for any politician, and deservedly so.
Ironically, paying for it might indeed implicate him in the crime as hacking is illegal. Taking it free can arguably be freedom of speech, as per a journalist organization. But woe be to he who pays for the hacking...or the leak.
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No, it was plenty illegal.
Federal law prohibits a foreign national from giving anything of value to a campaign engaged in a U.S. election. Further, it’s also a crime to solicit a foreign national to give anything of value to a campaign, or even to "knowingly provide substantial assistance" in receivi
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Just a casual meetup that includes Trump's son, his son-in-law, and his campaign chairman (now in prison). And the president knows nothing about it. Sure, that's the ticket.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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You and everyone else need to read up on The White House Plumbers [wikipedia.org].
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"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
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Those "bunch of actual criminals" were actual CIA operatives. I thought all of them had moved on from the CIA at the time of the burglary, but Eugenio Martinez was still getting paid.
James W. McCord Jr., GS-15 (top pay) in the CIA. Served 2 months in prison.[97]
Virgilio Gonzalez, the locksmith that got them busted. Cuban-born activist. Original sentence of up to 40 years in prison.[92][96] Served 13 months in prison.[97]
Bernard Barker, undercover agent of the FBI and CIA. Original sentence of up to 40 years
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Those things go together.
Re: "Smart move?" (Score:3)
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Ironically, it's the dems (not you boris) who are most likely to have russian collaborator traitors in their ranks. Or have you forgotten which head of state used to be a communist
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When will you Trump haters realize that's a lot bigger than bringing Trump down?
Maybe you'll hate the out-of-control secret police when they turn on you?
First they came for the pussy grabbers and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a misogynist.
So you're not a Democrat Bill Clinton, Al Franken, Keith Ellison, or Harvey Weinstein?
Was the tool itself malicious? (Score:2)
Or software that could technically be used for good / neutral purposes? There's plenty of "Remote Access Tool" products such as TeamViewer and GoToAssist; TV and others are occasionally used in security breaches and social-engineering scams by hackers. Don't see any managers of those companies going to jail for "distributing a remote access tool/tool that can be used for hacking"
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Re: Was the tool itself malicious? (Score:2)
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Tell you what. Carry around a set of lock picks with you and see what happens if you get noticed by the police. Be sure to have this quote printed out for them.
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Tell you what. Carry around a set of lock picks with you and see what happens if you get noticed by the police.
I think the police aren't going to care unless you engage in suspicious activity such as going to a neighborhood where they are on patrol, or where the police are called to report a suspicious person, and you are seen wandering around with apparently no obvious reason for being there.
Even then you are likely to be free to go if you show ID and provide a remotely plausible reason for being the
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I think that depending on how it was marketed, buying one can constitute probable cause.
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Or software that could technically be used for good / neutral purposes?
That's what seems especially strange here.
From the original case, the author was originally targeted for "producing hacking tools", but that later got dropped because he only advertised it to be used for lawful purposes on your own hardware.
The FBI then came back showing he used it himself for unlawful purposes and with charges to match.
At the time that seemed fair enough, but now going after other buyers and users of the tool, one has to wonder how trumped up that claim might have been...
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JFC dude. It's right in the fricking summary.
> The unusual notice appears to be related to the case of Colton Grubbs, one of the creators of LuminosityLink, a $40 remote access tool (or RAT), that was marketed to hack and control computers remotely. Grubs pleaded guilty last year to creating and distributing the hacking tool to hundreds of p
Probably part of the SCO-IBM case (Score:4, Funny)
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I'll Play Devil's Court Appointed Attourney (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, if the FBI wasn't researching users of hacking tools, then they'd be wasting your tax dollars, eh?
I write crypto and have to email nsa.gov & BIS every time I update my tool. It's a violation of export regulations not to. That puts you on the radar... if you do this kind of thing, just know you're being surveiled. If you publish tools for hacking and they include capabilities not disclosed to the proper authorities, it deserves investigation. The goal is so that if the feds come across encrypted traffic or some exploit they have a library to compare against so they can begin cracking it -- perhaps even contact the authors of said software to enlist their help.
Imagine if it had been some Nazi Cyber-Terrorist that hacked the US power grid instead of the more negotiable Chinese government? Imagine such a hack had used an unknown remote access toolkit, and that a subsequent great recession COULD have been prevented if the toolkit had been known about in advance. Would you rather NSA / FBI / etc. do their job? Or instead sit back with hands tied so you could blame them for "incompetence" after some great cyber-terror core infrastructure attack?
To be perfectly clear, we live in a realm ruled by Hydraulic Despotism. This means cities and states are unsustainable without external power, food, etc. resource. Only ignorant plebs dispute the fact that this control of resource supply and artificial scarcity is why we don't live in barbarism and constant war. However this means the system we live in is incredibly vulnerable. A city can't rebel because you can cut off their fuel, power, food, etc. and they'll fall into zombie-apocalypse mode. However, this means that our system is fragile, and you folks don't know the Herculean efforts carried out in secret to ensure some home-grown lone-wolf rogue Nazi Cyber Terrorist doesn't destroy your world.
TL;DR: The Eye of Sauron is upon you when you don a ring of power, even if it's just a clever way to get CPU ring zero...
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Would you rather NSA / FBI / etc. do their job? Or instead sit back with hands tied so you could blame them for "incompetence"
You already know the sad, sad answer to that question...
Re:I'll Play Devil's Court Appointed Attourney (Score:4, Interesting)
That's actually a well reasoned stance. Up to the 2nd to last paragraph. Then it veers off into pointless philosophy. Rebelling city-states? Really? Get off it dude. Anyway, yes, our society is fragile and the ease of wounding it is WAY easier than protecting it. Stick to that part and you're golden.
But yes, I want the FBI to do their job. I really DO want them to catch the bad guys. All my bitching and moaning about warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance, parallel construction, bullshit about "metadata", kangaroo FISA courts, and practically anything the CIA does is rooted in preserving the system of checks and balances that give us rights as citizens. If the cops go get a real warrant, I'm perfectly fine with them pulling out the stops and violating the fuck out of Capone's and Osama's privacy. The CIA shouldn't be operating within US borders and I'm not so sure anything they do within other nation's legal systems are all that "legal" and they've got a bad track-record of doing "good". So I'm up in the air on whether I want the CIA doing their job. It's fundamentally hard to know. And that all by itself is grounds to be skeptic.
This story, if anything, is a sign that the system works. They had a gag on Google. Then it was removed. Then Google informed people. Because while the cops enjoy operating in secret while investigating people, there's a perfectly legit use-case for purchasing this stuff. Least we want any network engineering to be thought-crime. And so off came the gag. That probably cost Google some coin just getting the lawyers to walk through all that paperwork. Good on them. And good on the courts for actually letting the gag come off. And good on the FBI for (presumably) getting an warrant and gag in the first place as they ought to do. So while it might all sound scary... the system works. And we should celebrate that.
Remote Access Tool (Score:3)
For sale? How could this be a problem when this is actually built into Windows?*
*As anyone who has ever received a bogus tech support call and then dutifully executed the commands dictated to them by 'Microsoft support'. And then had their system pwned.
Shucks! (Score:1)
I didn't get a notice. What's a guy got to do to get targeted around here!?!
Some entity needs to keep an eye... (Score:1)
And also, at the same time, on the idiots that put them in office!
https://youtu.be/XUeHi47Lovo (Score:1)