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Tor Developer Created Malware for FBI to Hack Tor Users
Espionage works like this: identify a target who has the info you need. Determine what he wants to cooperate (usually money.) Be sure to appeal to his vanity and/or patriotism. Create a situation where he can never go back to his old life, and give him a path forward where it favors his ongoing cooperation in a new life. Recruit him, because you own him.
The FBI appears to have run a very successful, very classic, textbook recruitment on the guy above, Matt Edman, to use his insider-knowledge to defeat one of the best encryption/privacy software tools available. Aloha, privacy, and f*ck you, Fourth Amendment rights against unwarranted search and seizure.
Edman is a former Tor Project developer who created malware for the FBI that allows agents to unmask users of the anonymity software.
Tor is part of a software project that allows users to browse the web and send messages anonymously. In addition to interfacing with encryption, the basic way Tor works is by bouncing your info packets from server to server around the Internet, such that each server knows only a little bit about where the info originated. If you somehow break the chain, you can only trace it back so far, if at all. Tor uses various front ends, graphic user interfaces that make it very easy for non-tech people to use.Tor is used by (a small number of) bad guys, but it is also used by journalists to protect sources, democracy advocates in dangerous countries, and simply people choosing to exercise their rights to privacy because they are in fact entitled to do so and don’t need a reason to do so. Freedom and all that. It is up to me if I want to lock the door to my home and close the blinds, not anyone else.
Our boy Edman worked closely with the FBI to customize, configure, test, and deploy malware he called “Cornhusker” to collect identifying information on Tor users. The malware is also known as Torsploit. Cornhusker used a Flash application to deliver a user’s real Internet Protocol (IP) address to an FBI server outside the Tor network. Cornhusker was placed on three servers owned by a Nebraska man who ran multiple child pornography websites.
We all hate child pornographers and we all would like to see them crammed up Satan’s butthole to suffocate in a most terrible way. But at the same time, we should all hate the loss of our precious rights. Malware has a tendency to find its way into places it should not be, including into the hands of really bad dictators and crooks, and even if we fully trusted the FBI to only use its Tor-cracking tools for good, the danger is there.And of course we cannot trust the FBI to use its Tor-cracking tools only for good. If Tor can be taken away from a few bad actors, then it can be taken away from all of us. Our choice to browse the web privately and responsibly is stripped from us. Encryption and tools like Tor are like any tool, even guns, in that they can be used for good or for evil. You never want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, especially when fundamental Constitutional rights are at stake.
Rough and unpleasant as it is to accept, the broad, society-wide danger of the loss of those fundamental rights in the long run out-shadows the tragedy of child pornography.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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bloodypitchfork said...
1If anyone has any doubts that the Surveillance State isn’t real, please raise your hand.
Next thing you know the P’sTB will pass laws mandating cams in every room of your home. Even the shower.
Insert rolling eyes smiley at your own naivety.
While that may appear to some as impossible in this country.. the mere fact that the concept is already being used in a debate over the “definitions” of privacy and security at a blog concerned with those subjects, and one side of the debate has now come to the conclusion that a cam in your shower doesn’t necessarily compromise your privacy, I’d submit it’s only a matter of time before serious consideration of this abomination as law, will appear on the House floor, introduced by some scum sucking totalitarian wannabe Rep who licks the ass of the NSA. What’s even more alarming..is the person who wrote this article is the editor of Lawfare..and is OK with it.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/camera-my-shower-fine-0
Living proof Lawfare is now completely infested with brain sucking alien parasites.
05/5/16 10:26 AM | Comment Link
bloodypitchfork said...
2oh..btw Peter.. thanks for posting this. I hope this scum sucking pig fucking asshole gets his just reward for selling out humanity. He’ll go down in the annuls of Great Moments in Benedict Arnold Wannabe’s and the Death of America as we knew it in the early 21st Century. So will that cunt at Lawfare.
05/5/16 10:33 AM | Comment Link
bloodypitchfork said...
3ya know..just when you think nothing could get worse than yesterday…ie…Trump winning Indiana.. along comes stories of human insanity like above. The only good news is some journalist in Romania is claiming he hacked into Clinton’s server. Ut oh. Clinton’s campaign people’s heads must be exploding exponentially. Moreover, now she’s being compelled to testify. DOJ says this is now a criminal investigation. Cool.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/doj-clinton-probe-criminal-romanian-hacker-admits-it-easy-hack/
One can only pray this insidious cunt is going down in flames.
05/5/16 10:42 AM | Comment Link
Tor Developer Created Malware for #FBI to Crack #Tor http://wemeant… | Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊) said...
4[…] Developer Created Malware for #FBI to Crack #Tor https://wemeantwell.com/blog/2016/05/05/tor-developer-created-malware-for-fbi-to-hack-tor-users/ sometimes caused by bribes or entrapment (help us, or […]
05/5/16 11:05 AM | Comment Link
Links 6/5/2016: Neptune 4.5.1, Parts of Basho DB Liberated | Techrights said...
5[…] Tor Developer Created Malware for FBI to Hack Tor Users […]
05/6/16 6:53 AM | Comment Link
teri said...
6Surveillance state, loss of privacy, war on whistleblowers, corralled protest “zones”, erosion of rights…….
Check this out: For the first time, journalists who want to cover the conventions have to undergo Secret Service background checks before they will be allowed to attend. (Regular guests and attendees, party apparatchiks, speakers, delegates, etc, do not have to be vetted this way.) And as part two of the story, naturally the SS has outsourced the background checks to a private security firm.
The SS claims they have this right to do this based on a classified [i.e., secret] Obama directive.
————
“…Salant, for his part, told The Daily Beast that three months of constructive engagement and quiet diplomacy with the agency have yielded zero accommodations from the Secret Service, which is premising its unprecedented credentialing authority on a 2013 Obama administration national security directive—Presidential Policy Directive 22—whose language is classified and thus not publicly available.
“Needless to say, it is extremely unusual, at least in the American context, for a government agency to formulate a policy regarding the news media, based on the possibly tendentious interpretation of a secret directive that, because the content and purpose of the directive are a mystery, is not open for discussion. An official listing of President Obama’s directives mentions the existence of PPD 22 but otherwise offers no explanation, leaving the line blank. (An anonymous law enforcement official told Politico that the directive gives the Secret Service to power of enforcing “access control.”)…”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/american-police-state-secret-service-controlling-journalist-access-to-conventions-by-arbitrary-secretive-no-appeal-screening-process.html
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05/6/16 7:42 AM | Comment Link