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The FBI’s Contract to Buy Mass Internet Data
- datkam 4y agoWhen you know that they are doing illegal parallel construction, what can surprise you?
- worrycue 4y agoI wonder if this will be the silver lining of AI-generated spam. Online information might plummet in value due to reduced signal-noise ratio. People will become harder to read and manipulate.
- ShamelessC 4y agoPeople don’t care enough for it to matter.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- greyface- 4y agoThe document: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23722785/fbi-team-cymru.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23722785/fbi-team-cym...
- costco 4y agoIt's only $35k a month? I think we can all assume that basically any government has this now.
- kube-system 4y agoOr criminal group, blackmailers and harassers, private industry looking to extract more money from you, etc.
- advisedwang 4y agoWhich ISPs are giving our traffic data to Team Cymru? We need them named and shamed.
- soupfordummies 4y agoAbsolutely agree. However, even then, what am I gonna do, go to the ONE other alternative in my neighborhood?
- Syonyk 4y agoOf course they did. And they'll keep doing it, because they can. And because knowledge like that is power, and they like power. At this point, you can safely assume that anything muttered by a "tin foil hat nutter" sort in about 2005-2010 about the internet, computers, three letter agencies, and the like is correct. It's sure heading in that direction.
- LesZedCB 4y agogood thing everything is hidden cleverly behind this impenetrable username!
- dylan604 4y agocome now, we all now that you have to stand in front of a mirror holding your ID next to your face to take an image to send to dang to prove who you really are before hiding behind that anonymous username. and there's no way that dang stored those images on a bucket that accidentally got misconfigured to have public access. /s
- mattpallissard 4y ago> At this point, you can safely assume that anything muttered by a "tin foil hat nutter" sort in about 2005-2010 about the internet, computers, three letter agencies, and the like is correct. As one of the few software/tech guys for hundreds of miles I get a lot of "I suspect they're doing X, but that's probably not even possible". In regards to BigBrother/BigCo. I correct them all. Not possible, probable.
- dylan604 4y agowait, are you saying "but that's not even possible" should be s/possible/probable/ in that statement, or trying to say that not only is it possible but probable that they are doing it?
- mattpallissard 4y agoPoor grammar in my part. Not only is it possible, it's probable.
- justapassenger 4y ago"Mass Internet Data" and $35k per month? Anyone who dealt with government contracts and/or internet knows that those 2 statements don't align in any way. This data has to be extremely, extremely, extremely limited and/or useless.
- spydum 4y agoI have had access to this type of data before commercially for purpose. It's useful for knowing "who" has established connections to "who", but at just an IP level. Powerful for combining with other analysis on either the sender or receiver. You won't know what they said, but you know what ports they used. So if I see a sudden spike in IP addresses geocoded as being in the United States, and the destination is an unusual but specific port hosted in Belarus, it might be worth looking at a new C2 malware.
- justapassenger 4y agoYeah, I know those types of datasets. But did you see data, sold for $35k, to a government? I didn't, but I'm fairly confident in assuming it doesn't have much in it.
- YtGoodman 4y agoThen why did they buy it?
- hsdropout 4y ago*we
- justapassenger 4y agoBecause government is very efficient with all the funds.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DueDilligence 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cronix 4y agoOh, you mean ISP's sell data to whoever has money to buy it, including the FBI.
- xfitm3 4y agoAh yes, at my company many years ago we sold data to law enforcement when they didn't have a warrant but had a case someone really wanted to pursue. They were happy to pay quite high prices, and on a semi regular basis because we were a large "small business" that handled a lot of data. We'd allow them to come in and image disks, span ports, modify software, you name it.
- sockaddr 4y agoHmm yes. Find a loophole around my rights to privacy and make me pay for it with my own tax dollars and while you’re at it make sure you pay a crazy prices. Thanks Uncle Sam.
- fallingknife 4y agoIt's time to think about extending certain constitutional restrictions to corporations. It's becoming all to common that the government contracts out its rights violations to the private sector.
- Nifty3929 4y agoThis is the most important point! Again and again corporations and the government demonstrate that they are one-and-the-same, with the gov't using corporations to do the work that wouldn't (yet) be allowed for them to do directly.
- jrochkind1 4y ago> After Motherboard reported the U.S. Army and other purchases of Team Cymru data, the Tor Project, the organization behind the Tor anonymity network, said it was moving away from infrastructure that Team Cymru had donated. The Tor Project told Motherboard it expects that migration to be completed this Spring.
- grubbs 4y ago"Team Cymru explicitly markets its product’s capability of being able to track traffic through virtual private networks, and show which server traffic is originating from. " How does this work exactly?
- wmf 4y agoIf you see N bytes flow from IP A to a VPN server then N bytes from that VPN server to IP B at the same time, you can assume that A is accessing B through the VPN. It doesn't always work but the Feds only need to get lucky one time.
- timeon 4y agoIt is easier with obscure VPN servers.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoOr with very popular one, where thousands of users send thousands of packets N bytes big to the vpn server.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoI'm glad that in the EU, GDPR would make it illegal for ISPs to sell this kind of data (and culture would make it costly beyond just the cost of the fine). Y'all need not just GDPR, but a variant of it that comes with criminal penalties as well. Right now, if illegal behavior increases profit by more than 4% of your company's revenue, just doing it for as long as you can get away with it then paying the fine is unfortunately a no-brainer for companies.
- thebetatester 4y agoBut who would prosecute such a crime? The FBI? Seems unlikely in this scenario
- timeon 4y agoThat is just hypothetical scenario since FBI is doing it legally now.
- dns_snek 4y ago> I'm glad that in the EU, GDPR would make it illegal for ISPs to sell this kind of data As much as I wish this were true, they carved out exemptions for themselves and their own goals. As such, GDPR doesn't apply to abuses of data for "law enforcement" purposes or other government operations.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoStill prevents the middlemen that would sell to governments from existing in the first place.
- rodgerd 4y agoSomething something Tiktok. Ok, that's a bit snarky. But seriously, the problem here is surveillance capitalism and the willingness of surveillance capitalism to enable, well, anyone with a buck: good, bad, or indifferent, all while lobbying against any restrictions on doing so. Is TikTok bad? Is it's close relationship with the CCP awful? Yes. But this is, fundamentally, no different.
- maerF0x0 4y agoThe worst part of this / NSA spying on Americans is we pay for it. Prisoners constructing their own prison.
- Consumer8735 4y agoNot only prisoners, "slaves" being ruled by those (rich) in power with little ability to have any say. Similarly to how US prisoners are paid slave wages to manufacture american goods.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 4y agoA note that if the data is in fact NetFlow data (it's labeled "flow" in the contract data, but that's likely because there's a bunch of vendor-specific flow formats), then it by definition won't contain things like URLs and email addresses; NetFlow is 5-tuple keyed (src, dst, sport, dport, proto) packet and byte counts. It's usually heavily sampled. It is, of course, bad that Team Cymru is running a side hustle selling this stuff to the FBI. On the other hand, if this alarms you, you should be much more upset by how ISPs are monetizing your data elsewhere. Also: turn DOH on.