7 ms·

E-Mail Leaves an Evidence Trail

164 points by wardn 9y ago

auntienomen 9y ago
Remarkably, it was less than 30 minutes before some troll posted a comment on Schneier's post, trying to change the topic from Paul Manafort by ranting about Hillary Clinton's irrelevant misdeeds.
- wand3r 9y ago
  While that was a wildly off topic flamebait troll, if you boil down the facts of that post I agree. Of the emails I did read, there was some scandolous stuff. She did (or someone did) delete the emails. She also used a non-secure & unsupported device. I don't know about the trolls claim about several or more "lost" devices. So while it was off topic and pbvious trolling, Hillary was (in my eyes) doing some nefarious shit. So was Manafort, Trump and many many others. There is scumbaggery widespread accross the isle.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    Just like the secretary of state before her and the secretary of state before her and pretty much the entire current administration. Was it stupid? Yes. Should she be locked up? Only if you lock up everybody else. The whole thing was a nothingburger trumped up because she, like Obama, was too scandal-free; and the press needed something to talk about to keep stories "balanced" when her opponent had a new scandal every day.
    - bsder 9y ago
      Stop. I suspect you are replying to a shill or troll.
- slashink 9y ago
  I also found this very weird. Correct me if i'm wrong but while this blog seems creditable and by a good author it isn't "huge" in any sense which makes it even more confusing that someone shows up that fast to comment on topics relating to Manafort and Gates. Comment is deleted now sadly but it basically stated that "the US needs to investigate HILLARIOUS CLINTON" etc etc, completely unrelated to the content of the article.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    Schneier's blog is a regularly visited blog for many in the security space. With HN linking to a page on this blog, it's very possibl that page will have uncorrelated comments that are not security related.
    - bsder 9y ago
      And given the prevalence of Russians associated with the government in the security space (to be fair--a lot of security people are associated with their own governments), I suspect that it has a tight feedback loop with the troll factories.
ams6110 9y ago
Um, duh? Who would think at this point in history, with all the very public data leaks and hacks, that email does not leave an evidence trail?
- askvictor 9y ago
  Evidently, a lot of people. Powerful people.
  - ChristianBundy 9y ago
    Yet somehow people think capitalism is a meritocracy.
    - wwweston 9y ago
      While I agree that as practiced capitalism is far from strictly meritocratic (and even in general think that any kind meritocracy is harder to achieve than many of its proponents seem to have thought about)... I don't think fuzzy conceptions of how email or other technologies necessarily refute it. Merit can be domain specific (in fact, specialized merit pretty deeply underlies most of our socioeconomic system at this point).
      - d0lph 9y ago
        I think this is not correct, because companies that act more meritocratic will be more likely to succeed, and there you have capitalism.
    - programmarchy 9y ago
      Capitalism approximates meritocracy, but democracy certainly does not.
      - _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
        Only if you 'reset' it every year. Eventually particular companies become big enough that they hard to compete against (e.g. they can artificially depress prices until their competition goes out of business) and bribe governments etc etc
tlb 9y ago
Not to defend the intelligence of crooks, but... Although you can convert a PDF to Word and back in a few clicks, the layout won't match perfectly (depending on how the PDF was generated). If you're trying to forge a PDF document, you want it to look exactly the same as the original, which probably requires some fiddling with formatting. So it's not unreasonable to delegate that to a trusted henchman.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The correct solution is to use a paid version of Adobe Acrobat, which will let you do minor revisions to text. Bet he's wishing he shelled out that $150 or so now.
  - bringtheaction 9y ago
    Why would a criminal not just pirate the software? Wouldn’t even have had to spend those $150 then. (PS I am not encouraging software piracy in general - just saying why would a criminal care?) (PPS there are some cases where piracy is ok and it is not all negative, let your moral compass guide you.)
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      When you're doing seven-figure crime, a three-figure piece of software is not even a footnote worth worrying about, and bear in mind, successful software piracy requires some manner of technical proficiency, which obviously, he does not have. (In a general sense, criminals should probably stay legit where possible, if you're stealing millions of dollars of art from a museum, you wouldn't want to get pinched because you got caught stealing a candy bar from the convenience store a block over.)
      - bringtheaction 9y ago
        Well I mean he had a loss of $600,000. You are right that he probably wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to apply a crack though, let alone find a pirated version in the first place.
bringtheaction 9y ago
> The FBI is 100% wrong that they're going dark; it's really the golden age of surveillance, and the FBI's panic is really just its own lack of technical sophistication. Does it even have to be lack of technical sophistication? No matter how good the FBI is at doing its job it will almost always be better for it to argue in favor of whatever will make its job easier. Exception: If FBI ends up giving everyone the impression that they are truly incompetent then there should be no reason for the public to want tax payer money to fund its continued operation.
vengefulduck 9y ago
Alternative link if the site is still down: https://web.archive.org/web/20180226230019/https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/02/e-mail_leaves_a.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180226230019/https://www.schne...
downandout 9y ago
While the email exchange certainly didn’t help things, the feds could have easily uncovered this anyway by looking at the data given to the bank and comparing it to his actual income. It’s possible that they only discovered this because of the emails, but whether or not that happened isn’t clear. My guess is that issuing subpoenas for loan application data of a given target is standard practice among federal prosecutors when looking to destroy or pressure someone in cases where there is little evidence of the crime that actually sparked the investigation. They fire a shotgun and watch to see which pellets hit. Income inflation is one of the most common types of fraud perpetrated by consumers - even innocently overstating one’s income by rounding up ($100k stated vs $95k actual) on an online credit card application can technically lead to felony charges like this. So it’s at least possible that they discovered the crime at issue here through subpoenaed loan documents, and the emails only provided additional evidence. Once you’re on the government’s shit list, it’s only a matter of time before they find something that you may not even know you did that is technically a crime.
- josh2600 9y ago
  Just curious, it’s also fraud to understate your income, right? So if you made $95k, but put $94k, that would also be a felony, right?
  - downandout 9y ago
    That would probably be prosecuted as perjury instead of fraud, but it’s a felony regardless. Fraud generally requires an element of actual or attempted pecuniary gain, and understating income would likely make that element difficult to prove. However, perjury covers any false statement made under penalty of perjury (which many credit applications are). It could be prosecuted as fraud if you attempted to use the understated income in order to avoid/minimize collection activity or negotiate a favorable write-down of a debt etc.
    - vog 9y ago
      [deleted]
mirimir 9y ago
Well, sure. And so do fraudulent loan applications. But unlike them, email can be secured. IP addresses can be hidden using VPNs plus Tor. Identities can be hidden with unlinked personas. Messages can be encrypted in transit, and stored on encrypted disks. So yeah, focusing on the email trail is silly. When the fact of the fraud is sitting in banking records. And furthermore, having a conspirator who knows the whole story is a huge fail.
AnnoyingSwede 9y ago
Be glad the current administration don't know technology better, as this undoubtedly will be a main part of their downfall. I am sure that not only emailing that file back and forward would have been sufficient to prove anything if the email-trails were deleted, however i suspect these emails were all still in Paul's inbox when the fed's ceased his computers. So when does Trumps impeachment start? Need to get my popcorns ready.
gagabity 9y ago
That's why a lot of people at the top avoid email completely, not only is it an evidence trail it can be open to interpretation later on. Remember reading that bank CEOs use email very sparingly, all the details are worked out in person, Trump also doesn't use email.
- exelius 9y ago
  Yup; pretty much any top executive at a public company actually. E-mail is only used in those instances where you want a paper trail. With the personal liability placed on executives under SOX, many simply do it out of personal protection. One of the unintended consequences of SOX that has ironically lead to less transparency.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- anonbanker 9y ago
  Keep your email entirely in a jurisdiction that doesn't cooperate with your country's law enforcement. I can think of three off the top of my head. Sensitive topics are only discussed with someone located in the same domain as you. Quite easy to avoid criminal charges when your email is out of reach of a subpoena.
  - zaphar 9y ago
    In practical terms it is impossible to keep your email in a particular jurisdiction. The proposal gives you no way to ensure it. And any steps you might take only serve to reduce everything that makes email useful. You are safer just not using it and will probably have a better user experience as well.
imaginenore 9y ago
> The FBI is 100% wrong that they're going dark That story doesn't prove that they are not going dark. There will always be dumb criminals who leave the trail. But the smart ones are not getting caught, because their opsec is stellar. If you're using VPN/TOR, encrypted documents, disposable email addresses, it will be close to impossible even for the FBI to collect any data required for a successful prosecution.
sch313r187 9y ago
Let's sum this up. It is impossible to prove that the currently available hardware or software works according to provided manual. However, it is not that difficult to prove that it is actually otherwise (please refer to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures entries). Every single bit of information can be accidentally swapped or deliberately forged. Sometimes, it is possible to detect the change, sometimes not. Except for specifically designed protocols (which run on untrustworthy hardware anyway), there is no way to be able to successfully challenge the authorship of the information or validity of an associated contract (non-repudiation). E-mails, log records, spoofed traffic flow, fingerprinting of browsers, operating systems etc. are no exceptions, since they are just text information stored as files or in databases. Having an e-mail in one's mailbox has never been proof what-so-ever that a particular person created it. Having an IP address logged has never been proof what-so-ever that a connection was made by a particular machine having this IP assigned (or even a person made that connection, LOL). Yet for "some" reason, masses are being "massaged" almost everyday to believe otherwise...
GeorgeCarlin123 9y ago
Let's sum this up. It is impossible to prove that the currently available hardware or software works according to provided manual. However, it is not that difficult to prove that it is actually otherwise (please refer to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures entries). Every single bit of information can be accidentally swapped or deliberately forged. Sometimes, it is possible to detect the change, sometimes not. Except for specifically designed protocols (which run on untrustworthy hardware anyway), there is no way to be able to successfully challenge the authorship of the information or validity of an associated contract (non-repudiation). E-mails, log records, spoofed traffic flow, fingerprinting of browsers, operating systems etc. are no exceptions, since they are just text information stored as files or in databases. Having an e-mail in one's mailbox has never been proof what-so-ever that a particular person created it. Having an IP address logged has never been proof what-so-ever that a connection was made by a particular machine having this IP assigned (or even a person made that connection, LOL). Yet for "some" reason, masses are being "massaged" almost everyday to believe otherwise...

164 points by wardn 9y ago

Remarkably, it was less than 30 minutes before some troll posted a comment on Schneier's post, trying to change the topic from Paul Manafort by ranting about Hillary Clinton's irrelevant misdeeds.

wand3r 9y ago
While that was a wildly off topic flamebait troll, if you boil down the facts of that post I agree. Of the emails I did read, there was some scandolous stuff. She did (or someone did) delete the emails. She also used a non-secure & unsupported device. I don't know about the trolls claim about several or more "lost" devices. So while it was off topic and pbvious trolling, Hillary was (in my eyes) doing some nefarious shit. So was Manafort, Trump and many many others. There is scumbaggery widespread accross the isle.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  Just like the secretary of state before her and the secretary of state before her and pretty much the entire current administration. Was it stupid? Yes. Should she be locked up? Only if you lock up everybody else. The whole thing was a nothingburger trumped up because she, like Obama, was too scandal-free; and the press needed something to talk about to keep stories "balanced" when her opponent had a new scandal every day.
  - bsder 9y ago
    Stop. I suspect you are replying to a shill or troll.
slashink 9y ago
I also found this very weird. Correct me if i'm wrong but while this blog seems creditable and by a good author it isn't "huge" in any sense which makes it even more confusing that someone shows up that fast to comment on topics relating to Manafort and Gates. Comment is deleted now sadly but it basically stated that "the US needs to investigate HILLARIOUS CLINTON" etc etc, completely unrelated to the content of the article.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  Schneier's blog is a regularly visited blog for many in the security space. With HN linking to a page on this blog, it's very possibl that page will have uncorrelated comments that are not security related.
  - bsder 9y ago
    And given the prevalence of Russians associated with the government in the security space (to be fair--a lot of security people are associated with their own governments), I suspect that it has a tight feedback loop with the troll factories.

ams6110 9y ago

Um, duh? Who would think at this point in history, with all the very public data leaks and hacks, that email does not leave an evidence trail?

askvictor 9y ago
Evidently, a lot of people. Powerful people.
- ChristianBundy 9y ago
  Yet somehow people think capitalism is a meritocracy.
  - wwweston 9y ago
    While I agree that as practiced capitalism is far from strictly meritocratic (and even in general think that any kind meritocracy is harder to achieve than many of its proponents seem to have thought about)... I don't think fuzzy conceptions of how email or other technologies necessarily refute it. Merit can be domain specific (in fact, specialized merit pretty deeply underlies most of our socioeconomic system at this point).
    - d0lph 9y ago
      I think this is not correct, because companies that act more meritocratic will be more likely to succeed, and there you have capitalism.
  - programmarchy 9y ago
    Capitalism approximates meritocracy, but democracy certainly does not.
    - _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
      Only if you 'reset' it every year. Eventually particular companies become big enough that they hard to compete against (e.g. they can artificially depress prices until their competition goes out of business) and bribe governments etc etc

tlb 9y ago

Not to defend the intelligence of crooks, but... Although you can convert a PDF to Word and back in a few clicks, the layout won't match perfectly (depending on how the PDF was generated). If you're trying to forge a PDF document, you want it to look exactly the same as the original, which probably requires some fiddling with formatting. So it's not unreasonable to delegate that to a trusted henchman.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
The correct solution is to use a paid version of Adobe Acrobat, which will let you do minor revisions to text. Bet he's wishing he shelled out that $150 or so now.
- bringtheaction 9y ago
  Why would a criminal not just pirate the software? Wouldn’t even have had to spend those $150 then. (PS I am not encouraging software piracy in general - just saying why would a criminal care?) (PPS there are some cases where piracy is ok and it is not all negative, let your moral compass guide you.)
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    When you're doing seven-figure crime, a three-figure piece of software is not even a footnote worth worrying about, and bear in mind, successful software piracy requires some manner of technical proficiency, which obviously, he does not have. (In a general sense, criminals should probably stay legit where possible, if you're stealing millions of dollars of art from a museum, you wouldn't want to get pinched because you got caught stealing a candy bar from the convenience store a block over.)
    - bringtheaction 9y ago
      Well I mean he had a loss of $600,000. You are right that he probably wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to apply a crack though, let alone find a pirated version in the first place.

bringtheaction 9y ago

> The FBI is 100% wrong that they're going dark; it's really the golden age of surveillance, and the FBI's panic is really just its own lack of technical sophistication. Does it even have to be lack of technical sophistication? No matter how good the FBI is at doing its job it will almost always be better for it to argue in favor of whatever will make its job easier. Exception: If FBI ends up giving everyone the impression that they are truly incompetent then there should be no reason for the public to want tax payer money to fund its continued operation.

vengefulduck 9y ago

Alternative link if the site is still down: https://web.archive.org/web/20180226230019/https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/02/e-mail_leaves_a.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180226230019/https://www.schne...

downandout 9y ago

While the email exchange certainly didn’t help things, the feds could have easily uncovered this anyway by looking at the data given to the bank and comparing it to his actual income. It’s possible that they only discovered this because of the emails, but whether or not that happened isn’t clear. My guess is that issuing subpoenas for loan application data of a given target is standard practice among federal prosecutors when looking to destroy or pressure someone in cases where there is little evidence of the crime that actually sparked the investigation. They fire a shotgun and watch to see which pellets hit. Income inflation is one of the most common types of fraud perpetrated by consumers - even innocently overstating one’s income by rounding up ($100k stated vs $95k actual) on an online credit card application can technically lead to felony charges like this. So it’s at least possible that they discovered the crime at issue here through subpoenaed loan documents, and the emails only provided additional evidence. Once you’re on the government’s shit list, it’s only a matter of time before they find something that you may not even know you did that is technically a crime.

josh2600 9y ago
Just curious, it’s also fraud to understate your income, right? So if you made $95k, but put $94k, that would also be a felony, right?
- downandout 9y ago
  That would probably be prosecuted as perjury instead of fraud, but it’s a felony regardless. Fraud generally requires an element of actual or attempted pecuniary gain, and understating income would likely make that element difficult to prove. However, perjury covers any false statement made under penalty of perjury (which many credit applications are). It could be prosecuted as fraud if you attempted to use the understated income in order to avoid/minimize collection activity or negotiate a favorable write-down of a debt etc.
  - vog 9y ago
    [deleted]

mirimir 9y ago

Well, sure. And so do fraudulent loan applications. But unlike them, email can be secured. IP addresses can be hidden using VPNs plus Tor. Identities can be hidden with unlinked personas. Messages can be encrypted in transit, and stored on encrypted disks. So yeah, focusing on the email trail is silly. When the fact of the fraud is sitting in banking records. And furthermore, having a conspirator who knows the whole story is a huge fail.

AnnoyingSwede 9y ago

Be glad the current administration don't know technology better, as this undoubtedly will be a main part of their downfall. I am sure that not only emailing that file back and forward would have been sufficient to prove anything if the email-trails were deleted, however i suspect these emails were all still in Paul's inbox when the fed's ceased his computers. So when does Trumps impeachment start? Need to get my popcorns ready.

gagabity 9y ago

That's why a lot of people at the top avoid email completely, not only is it an evidence trail it can be open to interpretation later on. Remember reading that bank CEOs use email very sparingly, all the details are worked out in person, Trump also doesn't use email.

exelius 9y ago
Yup; pretty much any top executive at a public company actually. E-mail is only used in those instances where you want a paper trail. With the personal liability placed on executives under SOX, many simply do it out of personal protection. One of the unintended consequences of SOX that has ironically lead to less transparency.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
anonbanker 9y ago
Keep your email entirely in a jurisdiction that doesn't cooperate with your country's law enforcement. I can think of three off the top of my head. Sensitive topics are only discussed with someone located in the same domain as you. Quite easy to avoid criminal charges when your email is out of reach of a subpoena.
- zaphar 9y ago
  In practical terms it is impossible to keep your email in a particular jurisdiction. The proposal gives you no way to ensure it. And any steps you might take only serve to reduce everything that makes email useful. You are safer just not using it and will probably have a better user experience as well.

imaginenore 9y ago

> The FBI is 100% wrong that they're going dark That story doesn't prove that they are not going dark. There will always be dumb criminals who leave the trail. But the smart ones are not getting caught, because their opsec is stellar. If you're using VPN/TOR, encrypted documents, disposable email addresses, it will be close to impossible even for the FBI to collect any data required for a successful prosecution.

sch313r187 9y ago

Let's sum this up. It is impossible to prove that the currently available hardware or software works according to provided manual. However, it is not that difficult to prove that it is actually otherwise (please refer to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures entries). Every single bit of information can be accidentally swapped or deliberately forged. Sometimes, it is possible to detect the change, sometimes not. Except for specifically designed protocols (which run on untrustworthy hardware anyway), there is no way to be able to successfully challenge the authorship of the information or validity of an associated contract (non-repudiation). E-mails, log records, spoofed traffic flow, fingerprinting of browsers, operating systems etc. are no exceptions, since they are just text information stored as files or in databases. Having an e-mail in one's mailbox has never been proof what-so-ever that a particular person created it. Having an IP address logged has never been proof what-so-ever that a connection was made by a particular machine having this IP assigned (or even a person made that connection, LOL). Yet for "some" reason, masses are being "massaged" almost everyday to believe otherwise...

GeorgeCarlin123 9y ago