10 ms·

Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

169 points by MertsA 10y ago

breatheoften 10y ago
If some or all of this is real -- someone in the command chain above these resources needs to reshape their thinking and fast! Talk about a quick way to radicalize individuals against the society in which they are embedded: - Visitors from all over the country come to a welcoming self-supporting nature camp with friendly people behaving peacefully and protesting the destruction of nature for profit - Apply violence to those people - Attempt to disrupt these people's ability to communicate about their experience That kind of visceral experience is the stuff of which revolutions are made. Lately I can't stop thinking about this quote from JFK: Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  I've been following the DAPL protests for a couple of weeks now. The actions of the police have already begun to backfire massively. For example, around 2000 veterans are due to be arriving at Standing Rock over the next couple of days in support of the water protectors. Whilst these veterans have said they won't be bringing weapons, I suspect their presence will increase the mainstream media attention on the protests.
  - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
    It's sad that the only thing way to appeal to mass media is to be of a sympathetic social status. All they need now are (white) single moms and some cute puppies.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      I agree it's sad that the MSM has largely ignored the protests so far, but sympathetic social status is not the only way to get attention. The thing that really gets the MSM interested in a big story like this is when it fits into a narrative that doesn't undermine their corporate funders. For example, if the protesters had turned violent they'd be all over this like white on rice, as it let's them paint the protestors in a less favourable light. They're only reluctant to get involved because they'll find it hard to spin the story the way they want to.
MertsA 10y ago
I really wish they would have confirmed that the attacker was in a plane. If this really was the FBI, has there ever been a case where the U.S. government was this flagrant at hacking citizens?
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
Invalid SSL cert on the site. > There were even reports of people's Gmail accounts being hacked. This sounds suspiciously false - even if they are phones were forced to downgrade to A5/1 this should have no effect on TLS.
- sowbug 10y ago
  Without HSTS and cert pinning they don't even get as far as TLS.
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    If they've connected to Gmail before they would have received HSTS headers. So I'm not sure what you are suggesting? Could you elaborate on how you think GSM cipher downgrades lead to stolen Gmail credentials? edit: Furthermore Chrome/Firefox implement HSTS preload lists on which gmail.com is included. [0][1] [0] https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/net/http/transport_security_state_static.json https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/net/http/transport_secu... [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/11/01/preloading-hsts/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/11/01/preloading-hsts...
    - MertsA 10y ago
      I can see something simple like redirecting random pages to a fake login page. The average person will fall for the simplest of attacks so it wouldn't surprise me to hear that they were just using a captive portal that asked for their Google account credentials to use wifi.
      - breatheoften 10y ago
        This doesn't even seem that different from how gmail actually works -- before I stopped using it I was always astonished by the insane chain of redirects the browser is directed through before eventually seeing the login screen.
    - sowbug 10y ago
mtgx 10y ago
More details here: http://www.idsnews.com/article/2016/11/protestors-at-standing-rock-subject-to-24-hour-police-surveillanc http://www.idsnews.com/article/2016/11/protestors-at-standin...
vlunkr 10y ago
In other strange news, Cracked is on the front page of HN.
- nilved 10y ago
  Maybe they're going the way of Buzzfeed
  - dbg31415 10y ago
    It's... less good for Hacker News that click-baity article titls are getting more upvotes. This story was reported 3 times in the last 2 days... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=standing%20rock&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=standing%20rock&sort=byDate&pr...
    - DiabloD3 10y ago
      It has been reported, yet the government has still not backed down in attacking its own citizens over legal and morally correct actions. The news should continue to be reported until it is no longer news, especially given the large scale anti-American technological effort being mounted by our own government to protect the interests of Big Oil.
      - dbg31415 10y ago
        Morally correct? That's a pretty questionable statement. The protesters tried to cause a privately owned herd of buffalo to stampede into the construction site... This resulted in a number of buffalo and a horse being killed. The protesters are causing damage to construction equipment owned by individual owner-operators. Small businesses. This isn't right. This isn't standing up to the government, or civil disobedience, it's destruction of private property. And before someone accuses me of not caring about the people there... I grew up about 30 miles away from where the main protest is happening. These are my family members... on both sides. You going to give up your car and not use any oil? If so, great, you've got a leg to stand on. But we have thousands of miles of pipelines across this country. Pipelines are more efficient than trains or trucks... as long as people still use oil, we still need oil pipelines. What's the alternative?
jimrandomh 10y ago
If everything in this story is true (and I see no reason to doubt it), then there is a 0-day being used here in the wild to hack gmail accounts for political purposes. There really need to be some security engineers (ideally Google security engineers) on-site investigating, both to identify and fix the exploits being used, and to establish their use later for legal purposes.
- ihm 10y ago
  I don't think so. The phones connect to a honeypot network and send over their credentials. The person who controls the honeypot now has their gmail password and so can use it to login and change their password.
  - checker 10y ago
    I doubt your implication that they've broken the TLS layer just by having a honeypot. It sounds like they are taking advantage of exploits to own the phone itself based on their power on/off ability and may be stealing credentials straight out of memory. Or they are putting up a fake gmail honeypot as well and grabbing the passwords from there, but this seems less likely since most people use apps on their phones. Worst-case they actually do have a Google certificate and have in fact broken Google's TLS.
  - ynniv 10y ago
    Gmail credentials are supposed to be delivered over an encrypted connection. Controlling the network should be insufficient to see passwords in transit. That said, passwords are a poor form of authentication that is prone to interception by poorly configured clients, HTTP downgrade attacks, and typosquatting login forms. I wouldn't jump straight to "0day".
    - csdrane 10y ago
      If you're using a browser without certificate pinning wouldn't a MITM attack suffice? E.g. sslstrip
SwellJoe 10y ago
The tricky thing about stuff like this is that the majority of people at protests (and in the general population) are incredibly tech illiterate. They are easily exploitable, but also prone to misunderstanding what they're seeing when things go weird with their devices. We know that hacking and spying on protestors happens, because there are FOIA (and similar state level public information act) requests that have revealed it. We also know there is collusion between private tech firms and the government at all levels that utilize questionable tactics (Stratfor leaks; Barrett Brown just got out of jail for covering this collusion as a journalist and Jeremy Hammond is still in jail for leaking it). So, something is certainly happening at Standing Rock. It is a protest against perhaps the most powerful interests in the world (oil and gas and international finance) so surely every tool available is being used against them. So, this is probably half paranoia and half correct. It's hard to know which parts are correctly diagnosing the symptoms, however. Also, some of the practices are likely unconstitutional, by most reasonable interpretations, but we long passed the point where the US government gave a damn about that when it comes to tech privacy.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "So, this is probably half paranoia and half correct. It's hard to know which parts are correctly diagnosing the symptoms, however." If you believe the story, then tech-savvy people have caught attacks whilst they were happening (the article mentions they spoke to someone that demonstrated a Wireshark re-enactment of ARP attacks performed on networking equipment at the camp).
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    Even those parts of the story leave much to guessing and theorizing. I believe wholeheartedly that the government at many levels is spying on these folks, probably using illegal techniques. I just don't know that the explanations given in this article are right.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      Whilst it's healthy to have some cynicism about news stories (and the reasons they're spread), I wonder what level of proof you'd be looking for before you were convinced. Aside from finding equipment involved in the alleged signal jamming, what sort of information is likely to convince you? If someone took the time to triangulate the source of these attacks and could link those locations to government officials, would that suffice?
bogomipz 10y ago
I have a question: At the beginning of the article they author mentions that there is no cell signal once you reach the camp. Wouldn't a Cessna with a Stingray on board show up on your cell phone as a signal? It was my understanding that the way the Stingrays works is that they broadcast a pilot signal just like a regular cell tower albeit a spoofed one. Wouldn't you be able to see that your cell phone all of sudden has x bars signal when you hear or see the Cessna and then that signal would disappear when the Cessna leaves? Cessnas are not that quiet and they aren't capable of flying that high to the point that you couldn't hear or see them right?
- throwaway729 10y ago
  They could just as easily be jamming cell signals.
  - MertsA 10y ago
    There's no way they would stoop that low. They can just as easily block service with a stingray and avoid causing interference for everything other than the target. There's also the issue that a jammer will also block 911 calls so I don't really see why the FBI or any domestic law enforcement would want a simple jammer instead of using a stingray to selectively block service. There's really only downsides to it when compared to using a cell site simulator.
    - arca_vorago 10y ago
      "There's no way they would stoop that low." I'm not sure you are familiar with the history of the police state. Just when you think they won't go below a certain bar, then do. Why do you think, when performing any other manner of illegal and unconstitutional things, they wouldn't add one more to the list, especially when there seems to be no repercussions? I'm also reminded of occupy wall street, in which is was found out after the fact that: "Banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire..." - Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy - Naomi Wolf Much later we even found out the CIA had some involvement, and that's an organization which is not supposed to operate domestically! So, I think you are being naive in putting the abuse of zero-day cell exploits past them, especially when it might not even be the police forces themselves, any number of three-letters could just be seeing this as a good realistic training exercise to test out their latest toys.
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
Relevant: Lack of a Cipher Status Indicator on Android has been an open issue since 2009 (https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5353 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5353) There is also an open-source android app to detect fake base-stations: https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Dete...
- BuildTheRobots 10y ago
  Just to expand, lack of cipher status is a massive problem on every phone produced in the last decade. I've not had a warning on any smartphone I've used (Apple, HTC, Samsung, Microsoft etc) or for that matter on any feature phone I've used, including going back to things as old as the Nokia 3310, 6310, 8100 or as new as things like the Nokia 105 or E51. Even on a handset that supports the indicator (the spec says all should) the spec also says this can be overridden by the SIM card and apparently most sim producers and macro operators disable the warning by default anyway. It's also worth pointing out that I'm only aware of this being part of the GSM spec. I don't know what happens with CDMA (which I believe is prevalent in the USA) and 3G and 4G _can't_ run without encryption so it should (theoretically) be a non-issue there too.
mmastrac 10y ago
I've seen this particular article before and despite me being fairly liberal, seems kind of lazy for journalism. It's a bunch of heresay with no conclusion, but clearly wants to draw the reader's opinion. The author admits that they aren't a place with an investigation budget and "someone else" should look into it. This damages the story - which seems likely to be happening to some degree - to the point where it is completely lost to someone who isn't fully aligned with the conclusion ahead of time. I mean, a simple technical fact check of one paragraph that they could have enhanced by speaking with someone who understands these things: > would talk about their cellphone signals cutting out just as drones circled above. OK, plausible > Mobiles would switch themselves off and on again -- not in pocket but in hand. If they mean turn on and off, unlikely. Maybe rebooting via DDoS on the baseband, but we're jumping into suppositions and inventions here. > Camera apps were opened out of nowhere Pretty unlikely > and batteries would drain by enormous percentages, killing the phones in minutes, rather than the steady decline of any device pinging back and forth searching for a signal That seems plausible. DDoS on a phone by making the bandwidth burn power.
- rsync 10y ago
  ""That seems plausible. DDoS on a phone by making the bandwidth burn power." That's not what is happening. IMSI catchers are well known to ask their victim handsets to transmit at full power - which your phone almost never has to do normally.
  - mmastrac 10y ago
    This is a typo - I meant baseband.
- natch 10y ago
  >> Camera apps were opened out of nowhere >Pretty unlikely I thought the same thing, that this is pretty unlikely. But then, most of my personal experience is with iOS, which is pretty well buttoned down. With Android on the other hand, all bets are off. We can't even talk about the security of Android sensibly because there are so many old and unpatched versions out there. So from that perspective, maybe it's not as far fetched as it sounds.
arca_vorago 10y ago
Relevant part of the Constitution, the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging [...] the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Full first amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The real problem is, when all you need to justify a crackdown is to make a peaceable assembly unpeaceful, it's relatively trivial to insert agent provocateurs to instigate violence and fade into the background or through the police lines as they push. Therefore I think there needs to be a massive congressional inquiry into the use of agent provocateurs domestically, and laws passed to prevent that usurpation of our Constitutional rights.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "The real problem is, when all you need to justify a crackdown is to make a peaceable assembly unpeaceful, it's relatively trivial to insert agent provocateurs to instigate violence and fade into the background or through the police lines as they push." It has been suggested that this tactic has already been tried in the DAPL protest, with an DAPL-linked employee called Kyle Thompson: http://thedailyhaze.com/kyle-thompson-knightsbridge/ http://thedailyhaze.com/kyle-thompson-knightsbridge/
- greglindahl 10y ago
  There's even a name for it: "Police Riot" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot No need for agent provocateurs; most crowds react poorly when riot police start pushing them around. For example, to enforce a curfew against a peaceful crowd => riot => see, the curfew was justified! They were rioting!
puppetmaster3 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_assessmen...
protomyth 10y ago
First, someone should look at the coverage map of the area. Verizon and AT&T are iffy, and Sprint and T-Mobile are non-existent. Second, the article starts with "The demonstration at Standing Rock, North Dakota is the largest gathering of indigenous people in modern American history." which is taken from the source material's statement "The largest gathering of indigenous nations in modern American history". The article cannot even get its first fact correct, and frankly I would dispute NBC's statement as well. I guess we haven't heard of Pow Wows and government meetings. I also notice that both articles seem to gloss over the indigenous versus non-indigenous ratio. Not good for the narrative I guess. Also, to be truthful there was a fairly sustained attack on all North Dakota networks when that damned actor from the avengers said the state should be hacked. I guess he forgets that all the tribal schools are on the ND network. Maybe some of the protesters were caught in that? [okay fine, cracked is factually untrue, but I get down voted for being here - wtf?]
sitkack 10y ago
When humor sites are the best source of "the news", things are mostly likely in the shitter.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  I'd suggest there has been far better coverage of the protests that can be found from non-comedic sources, but you're not going to find insightful coverage from the mainstream news. Overall, the best coverage I've found has been from TYT Politics. Whilst I dislike the clickbaity nature of the main TYT channel, the TYT Politics channel is surprisingly decent. Here's one example of the coverage from TYT Politics, giving clear evidence that the police have been lying to the press: http://youtu.be/TarWzK2Swxs http://youtu.be/TarWzK2Swxs
- shostack 10y ago
  Having a flashback to Jon Stewart on Crossfire after reading your comment.
Teichopsia 10y ago
There are a few comments questioning the journalistic abilities of the article and despite that they did mention that someone else with more resources ought to take over, they could have done a bit more. A few days ago I came across a youtube video regarding this protest. It showed Peaceful protestors getting shot by rubber bullets, attacked by dogs and I don't remember what else against a heavy militarized police force. Wanting to know a bit more, I was surprised how good their website looked. And also, under special cases like this one, instead of criticizing certain pain points, support in any way should be given. Whether it be fact checking, increase awareness, whatever. What I saw on that video should never happen, anywhere, no matter the reason, and much less over the protection of WATER.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  > should never happen, anywhere, no matter the reason Okay. But to make it concrete, what alternative are you proposing?
  - devoply 10y ago
    Ship in the water in big tankers. Like they do in the Middle East. In any case heavy handed military sort of dealing with people can massively backfire. Right now it's American Indians with small numbers in the future it might be alt-right conservatives with millions of supporters and lots of guns. It's a two way street with violence, you could start an insurgency if the other side had enough numbers and felt that you were acting out a war scenario. This is not good for any sense of democracy or civil rights to engage in this sort of behavior with locals. Which again points to a sort of racism when dealing with rights of minorities, especially economically disadvantaged minorities, compared to advantaged minorities like Corporations.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      > compared to advantaged minorities like Corporations Do you have particular protests by corporations in mind?
  - Teichopsia 10y ago
wlkr 10y ago
Reading this I was immediately reminded of the Del Rio Water scenes from Sleep Dealer [0]. I find the prescience of that film quite remarkable, although I suppose events like these have played through before, just without the technology aspect. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer
pdkl95 10y ago
Speaking of radio... one of the water protectors has been flying a small drone with a camera to try to monitor the pipeline progress. He explained that sometimes this was difficult because he would lose control when the drone was within a small-ish (10-20m? maybe?) radius of a specific building or work site. The drone was programmed to auto-return if it lost signal, so the operator was usually able to regain control a few seconds later. Does anybody know what legal status is for jamming? I believe the FCC usually considers interfering with other transmissions to be some sort of violation, but it's been a very long time since I studied radio law (my amateur radio license expired >20 years ago).
dsfyu404ed 10y ago
I'm not really on board with the whole anti pipeline narrative but this kind of action is really inappropriate. The FBI can't catch two Russian kids with a pressure cooker before they become a problem but they can spend god knows what screwing around with protesters. If it was just doing "back-end" stuff to help out the state police who should be running the show then I'd be less not ok with it. If it was the typical dragnet eavesdropping bs applied to everyone they see come or go then I'd chalk it up to business as usual but I'm going to call foul on using cell site simulators anything but sparingly. The FCC should be very pissed off about the FBI for this. The Telecom companies should be very pissed off at the FBI anialiating their QoS.
flour_power 10y ago
cracked.com is a humor website is this definitely real?

169 points by MertsA 10y ago

If some or all of this is real -- someone in the command chain above these resources needs to reshape their thinking and fast! Talk about a quick way to radicalize individuals against the society in which they are embedded: - Visitors from all over the country come to a welcoming self-supporting nature camp with friendly people behaving peacefully and protesting the destruction of nature for profit - Apply violence to those people - Attempt to disrupt these people's ability to communicate about their experience That kind of visceral experience is the stuff of which revolutions are made. Lately I can't stop thinking about this quote from JFK: Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable

ZenoArrow 10y ago
I've been following the DAPL protests for a couple of weeks now. The actions of the police have already begun to backfire massively. For example, around 2000 veterans are due to be arriving at Standing Rock over the next couple of days in support of the water protectors. Whilst these veterans have said they won't be bringing weapons, I suspect their presence will increase the mainstream media attention on the protests.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  It's sad that the only thing way to appeal to mass media is to be of a sympathetic social status. All they need now are (white) single moms and some cute puppies.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    I agree it's sad that the MSM has largely ignored the protests so far, but sympathetic social status is not the only way to get attention. The thing that really gets the MSM interested in a big story like this is when it fits into a narrative that doesn't undermine their corporate funders. For example, if the protesters had turned violent they'd be all over this like white on rice, as it let's them paint the protestors in a less favourable light. They're only reluctant to get involved because they'll find it hard to spin the story the way they want to.

MertsA 10y ago

I really wish they would have confirmed that the attacker was in a plane. If this really was the FBI, has there ever been a case where the U.S. government was this flagrant at hacking citizens?

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

Invalid SSL cert on the site. > There were even reports of people's Gmail accounts being hacked. This sounds suspiciously false - even if they are phones were forced to downgrade to A5/1 this should have no effect on TLS.

sowbug 10y ago
Without HSTS and cert pinning they don't even get as far as TLS.
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  If they've connected to Gmail before they would have received HSTS headers. So I'm not sure what you are suggesting? Could you elaborate on how you think GSM cipher downgrades lead to stolen Gmail credentials? edit: Furthermore Chrome/Firefox implement HSTS preload lists on which gmail.com is included. [0][1] [0] https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/net/http/transport_security_state_static.json https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/net/http/transport_secu... [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/11/01/preloading-hsts/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/11/01/preloading-hsts...
  - MertsA 10y ago
    I can see something simple like redirecting random pages to a fake login page. The average person will fall for the simplest of attacks so it wouldn't surprise me to hear that they were just using a captive portal that asked for their Google account credentials to use wifi.
    - breatheoften 10y ago
      This doesn't even seem that different from how gmail actually works -- before I stopped using it I was always astonished by the insane chain of redirects the browser is directed through before eventually seeing the login screen.
  - sowbug 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago

More details here: http://www.idsnews.com/article/2016/11/protestors-at-standing-rock-subject-to-24-hour-police-surveillanc http://www.idsnews.com/article/2016/11/protestors-at-standin...

vlunkr 10y ago

In other strange news, Cracked is on the front page of HN.

nilved 10y ago
Maybe they're going the way of Buzzfeed
- dbg31415 10y ago
  It's... less good for Hacker News that click-baity article titls are getting more upvotes. This story was reported 3 times in the last 2 days... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=standing%20rock&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=standing%20rock&sort=byDate&pr...
  - DiabloD3 10y ago
    It has been reported, yet the government has still not backed down in attacking its own citizens over legal and morally correct actions. The news should continue to be reported until it is no longer news, especially given the large scale anti-American technological effort being mounted by our own government to protect the interests of Big Oil.
    - dbg31415 10y ago
      Morally correct? That's a pretty questionable statement. The protesters tried to cause a privately owned herd of buffalo to stampede into the construction site... This resulted in a number of buffalo and a horse being killed. The protesters are causing damage to construction equipment owned by individual owner-operators. Small businesses. This isn't right. This isn't standing up to the government, or civil disobedience, it's destruction of private property. And before someone accuses me of not caring about the people there... I grew up about 30 miles away from where the main protest is happening. These are my family members... on both sides. You going to give up your car and not use any oil? If so, great, you've got a leg to stand on. But we have thousands of miles of pipelines across this country. Pipelines are more efficient than trains or trucks... as long as people still use oil, we still need oil pipelines. What's the alternative?

jimrandomh 10y ago

If everything in this story is true (and I see no reason to doubt it), then there is a 0-day being used here in the wild to hack gmail accounts for political purposes. There really need to be some security engineers (ideally Google security engineers) on-site investigating, both to identify and fix the exploits being used, and to establish their use later for legal purposes.

ihm 10y ago
I don't think so. The phones connect to a honeypot network and send over their credentials. The person who controls the honeypot now has their gmail password and so can use it to login and change their password.
- checker 10y ago
  I doubt your implication that they've broken the TLS layer just by having a honeypot. It sounds like they are taking advantage of exploits to own the phone itself based on their power on/off ability and may be stealing credentials straight out of memory. Or they are putting up a fake gmail honeypot as well and grabbing the passwords from there, but this seems less likely since most people use apps on their phones. Worst-case they actually do have a Google certificate and have in fact broken Google's TLS.
- ynniv 10y ago
  Gmail credentials are supposed to be delivered over an encrypted connection. Controlling the network should be insufficient to see passwords in transit. That said, passwords are a poor form of authentication that is prone to interception by poorly configured clients, HTTP downgrade attacks, and typosquatting login forms. I wouldn't jump straight to "0day".
  - csdrane 10y ago
    If you're using a browser without certificate pinning wouldn't a MITM attack suffice? E.g. sslstrip

SwellJoe 10y ago

The tricky thing about stuff like this is that the majority of people at protests (and in the general population) are incredibly tech illiterate. They are easily exploitable, but also prone to misunderstanding what they're seeing when things go weird with their devices. We know that hacking and spying on protestors happens, because there are FOIA (and similar state level public information act) requests that have revealed it. We also know there is collusion between private tech firms and the government at all levels that utilize questionable tactics (Stratfor leaks; Barrett Brown just got out of jail for covering this collusion as a journalist and Jeremy Hammond is still in jail for leaking it). So, something is certainly happening at Standing Rock. It is a protest against perhaps the most powerful interests in the world (oil and gas and international finance) so surely every tool available is being used against them. So, this is probably half paranoia and half correct. It's hard to know which parts are correctly diagnosing the symptoms, however. Also, some of the practices are likely unconstitutional, by most reasonable interpretations, but we long passed the point where the US government gave a damn about that when it comes to tech privacy.

ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "So, this is probably half paranoia and half correct. It's hard to know which parts are correctly diagnosing the symptoms, however." If you believe the story, then tech-savvy people have caught attacks whilst they were happening (the article mentions they spoke to someone that demonstrated a Wireshark re-enactment of ARP attacks performed on networking equipment at the camp).
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Even those parts of the story leave much to guessing and theorizing. I believe wholeheartedly that the government at many levels is spying on these folks, probably using illegal techniques. I just don't know that the explanations given in this article are right.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Whilst it's healthy to have some cynicism about news stories (and the reasons they're spread), I wonder what level of proof you'd be looking for before you were convinced. Aside from finding equipment involved in the alleged signal jamming, what sort of information is likely to convince you? If someone took the time to triangulate the source of these attacks and could link those locations to government officials, would that suffice?

bogomipz 10y ago

I have a question: At the beginning of the article they author mentions that there is no cell signal once you reach the camp. Wouldn't a Cessna with a Stingray on board show up on your cell phone as a signal? It was my understanding that the way the Stingrays works is that they broadcast a pilot signal just like a regular cell tower albeit a spoofed one. Wouldn't you be able to see that your cell phone all of sudden has x bars signal when you hear or see the Cessna and then that signal would disappear when the Cessna leaves? Cessnas are not that quiet and they aren't capable of flying that high to the point that you couldn't hear or see them right?

throwaway729 10y ago
They could just as easily be jamming cell signals.
- MertsA 10y ago
  There's no way they would stoop that low. They can just as easily block service with a stingray and avoid causing interference for everything other than the target. There's also the issue that a jammer will also block 911 calls so I don't really see why the FBI or any domestic law enforcement would want a simple jammer instead of using a stingray to selectively block service. There's really only downsides to it when compared to using a cell site simulator.
  - arca_vorago 10y ago
    "There's no way they would stoop that low." I'm not sure you are familiar with the history of the police state. Just when you think they won't go below a certain bar, then do. Why do you think, when performing any other manner of illegal and unconstitutional things, they wouldn't add one more to the list, especially when there seems to be no repercussions? I'm also reminded of occupy wall street, in which is was found out after the fact that: "Banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire..." - Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy - Naomi Wolf Much later we even found out the CIA had some involvement, and that's an organization which is not supposed to operate domestically! So, I think you are being naive in putting the abuse of zero-day cell exploits past them, especially when it might not even be the police forces themselves, any number of three-letters could just be seeing this as a good realistic training exercise to test out their latest toys.

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

Relevant: Lack of a Cipher Status Indicator on Android has been an open issue since 2009 (https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5353 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5353) There is also an open-source android app to detect fake base-stations: https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Dete...

BuildTheRobots 10y ago
Just to expand, lack of cipher status is a massive problem on every phone produced in the last decade. I've not had a warning on any smartphone I've used (Apple, HTC, Samsung, Microsoft etc) or for that matter on any feature phone I've used, including going back to things as old as the Nokia 3310, 6310, 8100 or as new as things like the Nokia 105 or E51. Even on a handset that supports the indicator (the spec says all should) the spec also says this can be overridden by the SIM card and apparently most sim producers and macro operators disable the warning by default anyway. It's also worth pointing out that I'm only aware of this being part of the GSM spec. I don't know what happens with CDMA (which I believe is prevalent in the USA) and 3G and 4G _can't_ run without encryption so it should (theoretically) be a non-issue there too.

mmastrac 10y ago

I've seen this particular article before and despite me being fairly liberal, seems kind of lazy for journalism. It's a bunch of heresay with no conclusion, but clearly wants to draw the reader's opinion. The author admits that they aren't a place with an investigation budget and "someone else" should look into it. This damages the story - which seems likely to be happening to some degree - to the point where it is completely lost to someone who isn't fully aligned with the conclusion ahead of time. I mean, a simple technical fact check of one paragraph that they could have enhanced by speaking with someone who understands these things: > would talk about their cellphone signals cutting out just as drones circled above. OK, plausible > Mobiles would switch themselves off and on again -- not in pocket but in hand. If they mean turn on and off, unlikely. Maybe rebooting via DDoS on the baseband, but we're jumping into suppositions and inventions here. > Camera apps were opened out of nowhere Pretty unlikely > and batteries would drain by enormous percentages, killing the phones in minutes, rather than the steady decline of any device pinging back and forth searching for a signal That seems plausible. DDoS on a phone by making the bandwidth burn power.

rsync 10y ago
""That seems plausible. DDoS on a phone by making the bandwidth burn power." That's not what is happening. IMSI catchers are well known to ask their victim handsets to transmit at full power - which your phone almost never has to do normally.
- mmastrac 10y ago
  This is a typo - I meant baseband.
natch 10y ago
>> Camera apps were opened out of nowhere >Pretty unlikely I thought the same thing, that this is pretty unlikely. But then, most of my personal experience is with iOS, which is pretty well buttoned down. With Android on the other hand, all bets are off. We can't even talk about the security of Android sensibly because there are so many old and unpatched versions out there. So from that perspective, maybe it's not as far fetched as it sounds.

arca_vorago 10y ago

Relevant part of the Constitution, the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging [...] the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Full first amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The real problem is, when all you need to justify a crackdown is to make a peaceable assembly unpeaceful, it's relatively trivial to insert agent provocateurs to instigate violence and fade into the background or through the police lines as they push. Therefore I think there needs to be a massive congressional inquiry into the use of agent provocateurs domestically, and laws passed to prevent that usurpation of our Constitutional rights.

ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "The real problem is, when all you need to justify a crackdown is to make a peaceable assembly unpeaceful, it's relatively trivial to insert agent provocateurs to instigate violence and fade into the background or through the police lines as they push." It has been suggested that this tactic has already been tried in the DAPL protest, with an DAPL-linked employee called Kyle Thompson: http://thedailyhaze.com/kyle-thompson-knightsbridge/ http://thedailyhaze.com/kyle-thompson-knightsbridge/
greglindahl 10y ago
There's even a name for it: "Police Riot" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot No need for agent provocateurs; most crowds react poorly when riot police start pushing them around. For example, to enforce a curfew against a peaceful crowd => riot => see, the curfew was justified! They were rioting!

puppetmaster3 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain

DiabloD3 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_assessmen...

protomyth 10y ago

First, someone should look at the coverage map of the area. Verizon and AT&T are iffy, and Sprint and T-Mobile are non-existent. Second, the article starts with "The demonstration at Standing Rock, North Dakota is the largest gathering of indigenous people in modern American history." which is taken from the source material's statement "The largest gathering of indigenous nations in modern American history". The article cannot even get its first fact correct, and frankly I would dispute NBC's statement as well. I guess we haven't heard of Pow Wows and government meetings. I also notice that both articles seem to gloss over the indigenous versus non-indigenous ratio. Not good for the narrative I guess. Also, to be truthful there was a fairly sustained attack on all North Dakota networks when that damned actor from the avengers said the state should be hacked. I guess he forgets that all the tribal schools are on the ND network. Maybe some of the protesters were caught in that? [okay fine, cracked is factually untrue, but I get down voted for being here - wtf?]

sitkack 10y ago

When humor sites are the best source of "the news", things are mostly likely in the shitter.

ZenoArrow 10y ago
I'd suggest there has been far better coverage of the protests that can be found from non-comedic sources, but you're not going to find insightful coverage from the mainstream news. Overall, the best coverage I've found has been from TYT Politics. Whilst I dislike the clickbaity nature of the main TYT channel, the TYT Politics channel is surprisingly decent. Here's one example of the coverage from TYT Politics, giving clear evidence that the police have been lying to the press: http://youtu.be/TarWzK2Swxs http://youtu.be/TarWzK2Swxs
shostack 10y ago
Having a flashback to Jon Stewart on Crossfire after reading your comment.

Teichopsia 10y ago

There are a few comments questioning the journalistic abilities of the article and despite that they did mention that someone else with more resources ought to take over, they could have done a bit more. A few days ago I came across a youtube video regarding this protest. It showed Peaceful protestors getting shot by rubber bullets, attacked by dogs and I don't remember what else against a heavy militarized police force. Wanting to know a bit more, I was surprised how good their website looked. And also, under special cases like this one, instead of criticizing certain pain points, support in any way should be given. Whether it be fact checking, increase awareness, whatever. What I saw on that video should never happen, anywhere, no matter the reason, and much less over the protection of WATER.

paulddraper 10y ago
> should never happen, anywhere, no matter the reason Okay. But to make it concrete, what alternative are you proposing?
- devoply 10y ago
  Ship in the water in big tankers. Like they do in the Middle East. In any case heavy handed military sort of dealing with people can massively backfire. Right now it's American Indians with small numbers in the future it might be alt-right conservatives with millions of supporters and lots of guns. It's a two way street with violence, you could start an insurgency if the other side had enough numbers and felt that you were acting out a war scenario. This is not good for any sense of democracy or civil rights to engage in this sort of behavior with locals. Which again points to a sort of racism when dealing with rights of minorities, especially economically disadvantaged minorities, compared to advantaged minorities like Corporations.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    > compared to advantaged minorities like Corporations Do you have particular protests by corporations in mind?
- Teichopsia 10y ago

wlkr 10y ago

Reading this I was immediately reminded of the Del Rio Water scenes from Sleep Dealer [0]. I find the prescience of that film quite remarkable, although I suppose events like these have played through before, just without the technology aspect. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer

pdkl95 10y ago

Speaking of radio... one of the water protectors has been flying a small drone with a camera to try to monitor the pipeline progress. He explained that sometimes this was difficult because he would lose control when the drone was within a small-ish (10-20m? maybe?) radius of a specific building or work site. The drone was programmed to auto-return if it lost signal, so the operator was usually able to regain control a few seconds later. Does anybody know what legal status is for jamming? I believe the FCC usually considers interfering with other transmissions to be some sort of violation, but it's been a very long time since I studied radio law (my amateur radio license expired >20 years ago).

dsfyu404ed 10y ago

I'm not really on board with the whole anti pipeline narrative but this kind of action is really inappropriate. The FBI can't catch two Russian kids with a pressure cooker before they become a problem but they can spend god knows what screwing around with protesters. If it was just doing "back-end" stuff to help out the state police who should be running the show then I'd be less not ok with it. If it was the typical dragnet eavesdropping bs applied to everyone they see come or go then I'd chalk it up to business as usual but I'm going to call foul on using cell site simulators anything but sparingly. The FCC should be very pissed off about the FBI for this. The Telecom companies should be very pissed off at the FBI anialiating their QoS.

flour_power 10y ago

cracked.com is a humor website is this definitely real?