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FBI Has Gained Access to Sci-Hub Founder's Apple Account, Email Claims
- judge2020 5y ago> The email’s authenticity (or otherwise) has indeed been considered by Elbakyan who says that after examining the metadata, has concluded that “it is too complicated and useless to be a spoof.” Indeed, the Sci-Hub founder also posted the email’s headers which at first blush do suggest that the email is genuine. Has the founder confirmed whether or not Gmail reports DKIM and SPF passed?
- upofadown 5y agoThat would confirm that it was sent from an Apple controlled email server. Then you would have to confirm that Apple does not allow a sender to spoof the "From:" address to "noreply@apple.com" somehow. Stuff like this should just be sent with a regular email signature...
- mrzool 5y agoSeems like both DKIM and SPF checks have passed: https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1391415257881530376/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1391415257881530376/ph...
- machinelearning 5y agoWho have vested interests in stopping something like sci-hub?
- LatteLazy 5y agoExisting journal publishers. Also the FBI are sort of infamous for going after foreign, easy targets in order to make their numbers. Sci hub is run by a guy in one of the -stans as a non profit community type org I believe?
- pg_bot 5y agoIt's run by a lady in Kazakhstan
- dredmorbius 5y agoIn the interests of accuracy: Yes, a woman, Kazak by birth, though AFAIK she's been residing in Russia of late. Her precise whereabouts are generally kept vague. Sources: My name is Alexandra Elbakyan, I'm a web developer who created this website. I was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan and I'm 32 years old. I'm a native speaker of Russian, know English very well, and some German and ancient languages. https://sci-hub.st/alexandra https://sci-hub.st/alexandra Her academic work has been at Satbayev University (in Almaty, Kazakhstan), internships and work in Italy and Germany, from 2005--2010. She returned to Kazakhstan in 2011: I was 23 and I returned to Kazakhstan and started working as a freelance programmer. ... and has since done academic work in Russia. 2017 started a masters program in Linguistics · Biblical Languages Saint-Petersburg State University in Russia 2019 graduated from masters program · with huge troubles suspected for being Russian spy by US authorities Applied for Russian citizenship but was rejected (in 2016). See: https://sci-hub.st/alexandra#bio https://sci-hub.st/alexandra#bio Elbakyan identifies as multiracial with armenian, slavic, and asian roots: https://nitter.cc/ringo_ring/status/700626318124134400#m https://nitter.cc/ringo_ring/status/700626318124134400#m
- afandian 5y agoFor-profit subscriptions publishers, to be clear. Not all journal publishers. An increasing number are open-access and have no interest in bringing down scihub (and the feeling is no doubt mututal!)
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agothis company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/elsevier https://www.linkedin.com/company/elsevier
- ta988 5y agoAnd the American Chemical Society that has never liked open science unless they can make money out of it.
- machinelearning 5y agoLet me rephrase, who is trying to take this down and has sufficient leverage to have the FBI focused on this instead of the multitude of other important things they could be doing.
- adventured 5y agoDuring the Obama Admin years Hollywood called in Joe Biden [1] to use the US Government's resources to pursue Kim Dotcom in New Zealand, to destroy Megaupload. One can probably safely assume Elsevier has powerful friends in DC doing their bidding, trading favors. [1] https://twitter.com/kimdotcom/status/1288926291949838336 https://twitter.com/kimdotcom/status/1288926291949838336
- DyslexicAtheist 5y ago> and has sufficient leverage to have the FBI focused RELX is certainly big enough to do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELX#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELX#Controversy
- mrweasel 5y agoI'm fairly certain that it's not the authors of the papers. Hiding away research behind paywalls and subscriptions is extremely weird and counter productive to free and open research. If you know that a paper exists, you can just email the authors and ask if they'll send you a pdf. My guess is that most will just send it to you, along with instructions on how to correctly cite them. Years ago I had a Danish university lawyer look at me weird and ask if I was serious, when I asked what right a public funded university had to sell a patent to a US company. My logic was, and still is, that Danish companies already paid for the research and the patent via their taxes, so they should be legally allowed to use it for free. Apparently it's crazy talk to assume that something paid for by the tax payers should actually belong to those tax payers.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y agoSo far I have not met a researcher who held the opinion that sci-hub is a bad thing. Actually the way I learnt about sci-hub a few years ago was when I asked an acquaintance of mine whether he'd share a copy of a paper he co-wrote with me, what I got from him was a sci-hub link.
- mc32 5y agoOh boy, that ever useful boogeyman >“In December 2019, the Washington Post reported that Elbakyan was being investigated by the US Justice Department on suspicion that she “may” be working with Russian intelligence to “steal U.S. military secrets...” When you start trotting that out, you know it’s a witch-hunt because if they had real reasons they’d have stated them, since they don’t they offer vague insinuations couched with ten ton weasel words like may and suspicion... But now they “have cause” and that’s all they need to go to town on her. And whatever happened to Apple who refused to work with FBI on the San Bernardino shooter but here is only happy to comply in a much less interesting case?
- laggyluke 5y ago> And whatever happened to Apple who refused to work with FBI on the San Bernardino shooter but here is only happy to comply in a much less interesting case? Nothing. It's just a matter of technical means. They had no means of unlocking that phone without potentially compromising all the rest of the phones they've made before that point. But Apple account / emails are "in the cloud", so Apple has full access to it.
- shockeychap 5y agoApple has always bragged about iMessage content being end-to-end encrypted, and thus inaccessible even to Apple. Why aren't they doing the same with email and other files, like other providers? (ProtonMail, to name one example)
- gok 5y agoIt is technically impossible to end-to-end encrypt email.
- __s 5y agoNot technically. You'd just have to apply encryption at a higher level Send email bodies encrypted to base64 along with a public key fingerprint, then receiver's client would decrypt if it had the private key for that fingerprint But this isn't compelling enough to get a network effect to topple in-browser gmail
- swiley 5y agoWhy would you use Apple software/services for anything like this? You know it's backdoored.
- colejohnson66 5y agoWhat are you going to switch to? Android?
- swiley 5y agoYou don't have to do everything on a phone.
- ddtaylor 5y agoYou don't have to do anything on a phone!
- kube-system 5y agoEven if you use pen and paper it can still be subpoenaed.
- ta988 5y agoHarder if you don't know that the paper exists and it is not in US controlled territories.
- fsflover 5y agoGNU/Linux phones?
- smoldesu 5y agoSure, because at least then I can have a top-down view of my security, instead of having it abstracted away into corners where I have to trust Apple to do the right thing (see article above as for why we don't do that).
- ProAm 5y agoGood luck finding something that isn't
- shockeychap 5y agoIf the email is genuine, then we are officially lost. Apple has gone from the company that refused to break into the San Bernadino shooter's phone (Anyone remember the feature by Last Week Tonight and Tim Cook talking about writing "the software equivalent of cancer"?) to the company that dutifully does what the authorities demand when they bring down the hammer over copyright claims.
- pc86 5y agoThis comment shows a gross misunderstanding of the technical differences between 1) basically breaking encryption for all iPhones on the market simultaneously, and 2) copying a file.
- shockeychap 5y agoOnly if the file contents are accessible. Why isn't end-to-end encryption utilized for storage of email on Apple's servers, the same way they do for iMessaging?
- thinkmassive 5y agoBecause 99.9999999% of emails are not encrypted before being sent.
- shockeychap 5y agoTrue. But I’m not talking about end-to-end between sender and receiver. I’m just talking about using public key encryption to encrypt received contents with one key and decrypt with another. There are a lot of technical challenges - particularly with maintaining compatibility with email clients - but it can be done. The inability of MTAs to negotiate and utilize any kind of SSL-style encryption when relaying messages is also a gross travesty in the year 2021.
- thinkmassive 5y agoAccording to Google, 82% of outbound email to other providers, and 93% of inbound from other providers, is encrypted in transit. https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agoI hope she will be OK, Kazakhstan isn't safe to hide from the US and made deals to resettle[1][2] former gitmo inmates now under surveillance 24/7 (payrolled by the US). If the charges are spun as working with Russian intelligence to “steal U.S. military secrets...” she will remain vulnerable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotfi_Bin_Ali#Transfer_to_Kazakhstan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotfi_Bin_Ali#Transfer_to_Kaza... [2] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Lotfi+Bin+Ali+kazakhstan https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Lotfi+Bin+Ali+k...
- sudosysgen 5y agoI think she moved to Russia since then?
- capableweb 5y agoI hope so too. Not sure we have to worry though, the email is referring to a data request that happened in February 2019. If they would have found something they could act on, it's likely they would have already. This case is just the "Apple Privacy & Law Enforcement Compliance" team being extremely slow at sending out notifications.
- alsetmusic 5y agoI really hope for the best for Elbakyan. Sorta related, the Darknet Diaries podcast just did an ep on the Pirate Bay. The ways in which US capital flexes it’s interests on sovereign nations makes me deeply uncomfortable. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/92/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/92/
- rickdeveloper 5y agoOff topic, but that podcast is amazing. Stories, guests, production quality, narration, music, everything. It's one of the only worth listening to at 1x speed. I highly recommend it.
- avh02 5y agowaaaaay too slow talking to be at 1x speed. I don't listen to podcasts that fast, but darknet diaries definitely needs a speed bump. I like the episodes I've listened to though (so far only 5-10 of them)
- MathYouF 5y agoAll of you people really listen to podcasts and youtube videos and lectures at more than 1x speed? What about just enjoying the emotional journey, the pregnant pauses, having time to consider possibilities and implications between narrative sections? I only ever met one person who basically always sped up any media they consumed, but I wonder if it's more common and if so what you think about your habit. Seems useful only in rare occasions where it's an information based media and the person is exceptionally slow.
- koheripbal 5y agoI speed up most. It allows me to fit them into a commute.
- freebuju 5y agoWhy not slim down the number of podcasts?
- londons_explore 5y agoI assume that when the FBI sends a request to a tech company about a user, they probably also contact lots of other tech companies too about the same user... Which raises the question: Where is the Google notification about the FBI request... How about the Facebook notification? The VK or OK notification? How about the Twitter notification? Did these tech companies hand over data without notice, even though the orders presumably had the same gagging timeout?
- rrdharan 5y ago> I assume that when the FBI sends a request to a tech company about a user, they probably also contact lots of other tech companies too about the same user... You assume a lot. I know it’s fun to pontificate about dragnet surveillance, but in general when issuing / granting a warrant there has to be some kind of specific target and scope. In this case it’s likely the FBI knew the Sci-Hub founder was using iCloud email and so they could get a warrant for that specific account for a specific time range.
- hassancf 5y agoWould they take a chance and miss a juicy account at Google/Facebook etc? I don’t think so. Therefore it’s likely they issued requests but Google/Facebook etc were less “inclined” to talk about these things.
- foobiekr 5y agoThis is the correct take. When have they ever?
- gowld 5y agoNo, it's absolutely false. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-03-24/federal-agencies-subpoena-google-personal-information https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-03-24... > In Google’s case, the company typically lets users know which agency is seeking their information.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoThey did this to Rudy Guilliani too. FBI was going into his iCloud for over a year. What makes it more egregious was that Guilliani was Trump's lawyer during the impeachment. So the government was both prosecuting him, and spying on his defence's lawyers private emails with his client. If they can do it to a presidents lawyer with no consequences. They can do it to anyone.
- RankingMember 5y agoAre we sure this actually happened? The only source I'm finding on this is Giuliani himself.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoThe government disclosed that they did this to Rudy's lawyer after the fact. https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/lawyer-feds-got-rudy-icloud-023335029.html https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/lawyer-feds-got-rudy-iclou... Rudy made a video detailing the FBI breach of his iCloud account. [Starts at the 18:30 minute mark] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcjaaBcmUVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcjaaBcmUVg
- smoldesu 5y agoThe "government" didn't make any such statement. A lawyer who was a longtime friend of Rudy came out and made a claim that was never corroborated or even acknowledged by the government, by the looks of it. Remember, it'll be fine in the end. The RNC's push to eliminate domestic encryption ensures a future where everyone has access to Giuliani's iCloud!
- dukeofdoom 5y agoI did not claim "government: made a statement". The government need not make statements when they disclose information to counsel, typically they don't. As per article, the government declined comment. If Rudy is friends with is own Lawyer is irrelevant.
- ddtaylor 5y agoCan anyone look up that case number?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rickdeveloper 5y agoRelated thread from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27086290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27086290.
- calibas 5y agoI dream of a golden age where scientific knowledge is freely available to everyone. Unfortunately, the "people in charge" seem hellbent on a different path...
- einpoklum 5y agoWhy would anyone concerned with privacy have an apple account? I would like to believe ElBakyan is wise enough not to have anything significant/private on such an account.
- titoCA321 5y agoWhy does she plaster her face all over Sci-Hub waving?
- SoonYoullKnow 5y agoIf you think Elbakyan is stealing secrets, wait until you find out how close Epstein was to the creation of COVID
- thunkshift1 5y agoWhy is fbi interested? Can anyone explain
- smoldesu 5y agoLikely private interests. With college-running mafiosos breathing down their neck, I'm sure the US government has no trouble justifying the seizure of someone's personal information.
- Analemma_ 5y agoBecause the main purpose of law enforcement is to enforce the property rights of the wealthy and well-connected. Things like catching murderers and rapists is a secondary concern that occasionally happens by accident.
- xgulfie 5y agoThe FBI's job is basically to quietly enforce the status quo and the interests of established powers. Look up cointelpro and it will make more sense.
- wolverine876 5y agoI'm surprised she has anything valuable on Apple (or Google) services. She clearly has the technical expertise to operate her own.
- darksaints 5y agoGoogle security in the face of a LE request: We'll need you to get a warrant, but here's a list of friendly judges with extremely efficient rubber stamps. We're here to serve you!! Apple security in the face of a LE request: We'll need you to get a warrant. The security we actually need and LE actually deserves: We'll need you to get a warrant, and then you can have access to that specific customer's E2E encrypted shitblob. Good luck. Maybe that sort of security wouldn't be needed or deserved if our government was well intentioned and we had good laws and a functioning judicial system. But no...we have the world's top security agency that would rather hoard zero days than protect its citizens, law enforcement that will never respect constitutionally-protected rights, and judges that play along for political points and appointment nominations.
- dflock 5y agoShe's doing good for the world; leave her alone.
- the_optimist 5y agoUnless US citizens regain oversight of their government, the only people who have any say in the matter are those throwing dollars. It's quite barbaric, excepting vague thrusts at plausible deniability.
- roody15 5y agoDoesn’t the FBI have better things to do? Seriously Sci-Hub is more of a public good than a serious threat to the US.
- ryanmarsh 5y agoYou must be new here. The flight logs of Jeffrey Epstein's jet were obtained via subpoena and published in the press and not a single indictment was brought forth from it. Every time there's a mass shooting we hear the shooter was "known to the FBI". The FBI has better things to do than harass Elbakyan, but it won't do them.
- TechBro8615 5y agoThe FBI is a political organization and domestic spying machine. The US is a police state.
- 0x5f3759df-i 5y agoThe same US that wouldn't even enforce their mask mandates is a police state? This is like running around and calling anything slightly bad a country does Nazi Germany. Nuance matters, think about the world a little more complexly.
- Sleepytime 5y agoSelective enforcement of laws to political ends is a hallmark of a police state. Also the US has the highest prison population per capita. If it quacks like a duck...
- 0x5f3759df-i 5y agoAnd was there some great selective enforcement of the mask mandate to target a political group and lock them up? No. It wasn't enforced by the state at all.
- karxxm 5y agoResearch funded by the public should always be public domain, change my mind!
- fareesh 5y agoThe FBI has shown that it will doctor emails in order to get FISA warrants. This fact is subverted by the narrative that one person was caught doing it, as if to imply that he woke up one morning and chose to do it all on his own.
- koheripbal 5y agosource?
- busymom0 5y agoThe IG Horowitz report from December 2019. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith doctored a email from the cia which originally said Carter page was a CIA source and he changed it to he was not a source which made a huge difference because if courts had known Carter Page was a cia source, then the FISA warrants and 3 renewals on him would have not ever been issued. Carter Page was helping his own country and working for the CIA. But Kevin Clinesmith turned it the opposite. And as expected Clinesmith got no jail time. > In Nov. 2019, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz issued a criminal referral for Clinesmith’s role in the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page. According to Horowitz’s final report on FISA abuse, Clinesmith–identified as “Office of General Counsel attorney“–altered an email used in a surveillance renewal application. > According to Horowitz, an FBI “Supervisory Special Agent 2” had requested “a definitive answer to whether Page had ever been a source for another U.S. government agency before he signed the final renewal application” of the third FISA warrant application seeking to maintain the wiretap on the former Trump 2016 campaign advisor. > A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) liaison told Clinesmith that Page “did, in fact, have a prior relationship with that other agency,” the IG report continued. Clinesmith, however, “altered the liaison’s email by inserting the words ‘not a source’ into it, thus making it appear that the liaison had said that Page was ‘not a source’ for the other agency” and passed it along to the FBI’s supervisory agent. > “Relying upon this altered email, [Clinesmith] signed the third renewal application that again failed to disclose Page’s past relationship with the other agency,” Horowitz concluded. > Horowitz’s report also showed that although the CIA told the FBI in August 2016 about Page’s relationship with the CIA, the FBI left that out in the initial FISA application, filed in September 2016. > The report said the first FISA application left out that Page had been approved as an “operational contact” for the CIA from 2008 to 2013 and that he had had “provided information to the other agency concerning his prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers.” > That information “overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application,” according to Horowitz’s report. The FISA warrant application on Page also left out that the CIA had given Page a “positive assessment,” the report said. https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/120919-examination.pdf https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/120919-e... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/former-fbi-lawyer-kevin-clinesmith-officially-admits-altering-email-used-to-surveil-carter-page-at-the-time-i-believed/ar-BB189QoS https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/former-fbi-lawyer-ke...
- londons_explore 5y agoI am disappointed Apple didn't attach a copy of the data sent to the FBI to the email. Since it's all Elbakyan's data, there shouldn't be any privacy reason not to attach it.
- ur-whale 5y agoYour tax dollar at work
- kingsuper20 5y agoIs Apple's domicile what makes this possible? or can any country demand to see your data? It makes me wonder about the state of the art on small countries becoming data havens, it seems like a natural thing to construct.
- swiley 5y agoApple's imports could be threatened so there's leverage. Really you shouldn't depend on the good nature of some large organization to protect your data. That means not using iOS though since it's pretty much unusable without Apple services (even push notifications go through them.)
- janandonly 5y agoSeriously: why would a public figure, who knows she will be the target of the FBI, use her own name to make an Apple ID? Or didn't she and did the agency use her phone number and SIM card and IMEI to track her to whatever device she happend to be using?
- titoCA321 5y agoThe same reason she plasters her face all over Sci-Hub waving. The same reason she's on Twitter and giving media interviews. And now she's got American FBI and Indian courts after along with the publishers.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- johnisgood 5y agoIs anyone downloading those articles and such for archival purposes in case it actually shuts down?
- bawana 5y agoHow timely. Just finished watching 'startup' on netflix. Wouldn't be ironic if 'some company' started a darknet for their apps.
- ionwake 5y agoDid sci-hub do something different in 2019 or something? I thought they just had user submitted scientific papers
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]