6 ms·

Chinese “spy” caught with NASA laptop full of porn, not secrets

66 points by shawndumas 14y ago

X4 14y ago
Steganography + Porn, that's a really neat idea.. You wouldn't easily get officials to analyze those files together with a forensics team. That scenario is awkward. An error the official did was making his company a public target, by revealing that they might have sensitive data, without being prepared to an attack. Not so clever move, sorry.
- jjoonathan 14y ago
  Surely the NSA has hashes of nearly everything on the internet (bloom filters, perhaps?). Finding images that didn't match would be a simple and automated task. There isn't even a need for the person doing the scan to know that it's porn -- from the point of view of the hash database, porn, system files, and ripped DVDs all fall into the category of "seen before, not interesting." After the forensics team found files that didn't match the DB, they would have a good reason to investigate further and officials / the media wouldn't let nekked bodies stop them from commenting. Porn would make a poor choice of background media because reverse image search is ubiquitous. Finding the originals would be easy, and showing that the differences between the stego'd images and the originals didn't happen via compression would probably not be too hard either. If the encryption is good they probably wouldn't get any further than that. Still, any significant quantity of hidden files would generate a large body of evidence that would be very difficult to explain away. Why go to the trouble of hiding info on the hard drive of a guy who was already under suspicion when a prerecorded skype call or controlled packet latency system would make for a stego medium that was much harder to detect and easier to plausibly deny?
  - X4 14y ago
    You're correct and personally I would never underestimate the NSA/FBI or any other organization. Remember Aaron Schwartz. But there is too much evidence that they might be much less professional and less equipped with such high-quality hash-databases. I don't believe that they could allocate enough professional resources (in such a "low priority" target) to actually give clearance of the case and green lights to the officers with certainty. If the porn movies are avis and 700mb, but with SD-quality, then you couldn't notice the difference. Take 20 porn files porn-a.avi (500MB original or 600MB with hidden data) There are so many rips or rips of rips that you cannot have a complete porn-database. And phew 2GB of compressed and hidden Data. Even if he didn't have used Steganography, he could easily use imageshack.us, imgur.com and other file-hosting sites, heck even upload to porn-sites to hide the data. Additionally you could get bad hashes into your database, when they upload the porn movies themself.
    - yk 14y ago
      I am pretty sure the NSA has a high quality hash database for porn and movie files. Probably the codename is the piratebay.
    - jjoonathan 14y ago
      How do you figure this is a low priority target? This certainly falls within their mandate and the guy might have been trying to steal legitimately sensitive information! > Take 20 porn files porn-a.avi (500MB original or 600MB with hidden data) There are so many rips or rips of rips that you cannot have a complete porn-database. And phew 2GB of compressed and hidden Data. The smallest SSD I own could handily fit that data whole and the bloom filter would fit in an arduino a thousand times over. The NSA's shiny new Utah datacenter had a $2B budget for construction alone, do you really think "rips of rips" are going to be a problem? These guys scrape web traffic by putting a T on major junctions of the internet and duplicating everything that comes down the pipes. You could set all of 4chan to making rips with permuted settings and not begin to stress infrastructure of that capacity. I don't want to be rude, but you seem to be in denial.
  - slig 14y ago
    > controlled packet latency system That sounds very cool. Do you have any interesting links about it?
    - jjoonathan 14y ago
      Sure: http://static.usenix.org/events/sec06/tech/shah/shah_html/jbug-Usenix06.html http://static.usenix.org/events/sec06/tech/shah/shah_html/jb... The covert channel discussed in the paper doesn't control network traffic directly but if you were maximizing bandwidth and didn't have to hide from an intrusion detection system you would almost certainly want to do so.
- shaggyfrog 14y ago
  > You wouldn't easily get officials to analyze those files together with a forensics team. That scenario is awkward. Why, naked bodies make the FBI blush?
  - X4 14y ago
    eww, you got me in a moment where I was almost thinking of them in a too romantic way. I've fallen down to reality and can imagine now how their forensic team could possibly enjoy those movies on a (4k/HD Laser) Projector..
- nwh 14y ago
  >That scenario is awkward. You are clearly mistaken. I recently read a paper about people who's jobs involve sitting down and looking at child abuse photos, and then trekking off to the councillor. A few blurry porn videos are nothing compared with that.
  - X4 14y ago
    whoa... ok, I didn't know that I'm that naive. Thanks for opening my eyes. Yes now I remember that there are people, behind the cameras that monitor how people are getting tortured.. someone is always doing the dirty job, even when nobody wants to know it.
    - maaku 14y ago
      There are people out there in law enforcement who's job it is to collect child pornography, categorizing and filing it in the hope of identifying the victim and the perpetrator. When there is a breakthrough and the child gets saved, these people are the heroes that make it happen. However I imagine that for every perp caught there are a dozen more that escape justice... personally I can't imagine doing such a job - it'd tear me up inside to know these people are out there. But someone's got to do it.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    It still takes an exceptionally rugged individual to be able to sift through that much of that sort of thing and not want a different line of work. Though, perhaps like some people that work to clean up extremely gory crime or accident scenes and aren't bothered by it at all, there may be a few that can maintain some kind of separation.
- est 14y ago
  He can prove his innocence by re-downloading the exact same porn again.
  - saalweachter 14y ago
    People shouldn't have to prove their innocence.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    1) saalweachter is dead on. 2) Even an innocent man would likely have a very difficult time actually doing that. In many cases it could be straight up impossible; websites go out of business, torrents go unseeded, image boards 404 in a matter of hours, reddit has a search system that makes me look back on old card catalogs fondly...
    - est 14y ago
      Yes I agree with saalweachter, but just if in case of steganography, A quick Google for file sha1 or md5 usually reveals ed2k or magnet links.
- Apocryphon 14y ago
  After porn was found in the Abbottabad compound and everyone had a good laugh at the hypocrisy of Osama Bin Laden, wasn't there talk that the porn there might have hidden messages enclosed? Could be the same case here, it's just a decoy.
lolcraft 14y ago
Whomever wrote that headline missed a much more significant, and painfully biting, point: "Jiang, a former contractor at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, had recently been let go by his employer because of pressure from Republican congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia. Wolf had claimed Jiang and other Chinese engineers employed by NASA contractors were a security risk." "But it quickly became apparent that Jiang was at worst guilty of violating NASA policies. [...] Jiang had not had clearance to such projects at Langley as an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace" "A press release issued by Wolf after the arrest and copy of Jiang's arrest warrant have since disappeared off the the congressman's website. In the release (cached by Google here), Wolf had said, 'I am particularly concerned that (the) information (on Jiang's laptop) may pertain to the source code for high-tech imaging technology that Jiang has been working on with NASA. This information could have significant military applications for the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army.'" Confirmed, the USA has entered back into full McCarthyism. Request title change to 'Chinese contractor fired on suspicion by Republican senator'.
- mjn 14y ago
  Political pressure from ignorant Republican congressmen not only resulted in Jiang being fired over this non-incident, but something even more serious for science in general: the entire NASA technical-report archive [1], with documents dating back decades, has been forced offline indefinitely [2]. Frank Wolf and his ilk are worried [3] that the Red Chinese might be reading some 1970s document in a way that compromises American national security. Never mind that the Chinese likely have copied a mirror of any documents they find interesting already. So now it's only American researchers who can't access it: there are no complete mirrors of which I'm aware, because U.S. libraries and archives naively assumed that NASA was a reliable long-term host for the documents, meaning there were no serious mirroring efforts. Maybe we can ask China to take pity on us and make a mirror available, since ntrs.nasa.gov being down breaks thousands of references in papers and elsewhere. [1] http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ [2] http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/03/ntrs_dark/ http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/03/ntrs_dark/ [3] http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=40365 http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=40365
  - 14y ago
coopdog 14y ago
Why would anyone think a potential spy would physically carry source code over the border? If he was going to leak it, it would have been sent months earlier over the internet, duh! Especially if he knew that someone was suspicious of him. Someone has been watching too many movies.
laurentoget 14y ago
Pretty clearly, the worse threat to the security of the United States are republican congresspersons.
- noonespecial 14y ago
  I think we're past the point of needing to prepend "republican" or "democrat" to that particular noun.
joemaller1 14y ago
"Damnit, he's not guilty of anything. Can we humiliate him or something to save face?" So proud.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
deservingend 14y ago
LOL pirated movies. How on Earth will he find such things when he's back in China?
- astrodust 14y ago
  I think NASA's bandwidth is better than what he'd get on some random ISP in China.
- fatjokes 14y ago
  I presume it was for his 10+ hr flight home.
cromwellian 14y ago
Gives new meaning to the term "honey pot" :-p
rajanikanthr 14y ago
ROFL I did my MS in computer science from Old Dominion University.. proud of you :D :D
ioanpopovici 14y ago
Paranoid Americans...
tlrobinson 14y ago
What better material to steganographically hide lots of data in than porn?
droithomme 14y ago
The secrets thing doesn't even have to matter. The guy STOLE a computer from NASA. The "at worst guilty of violating NASA policies" is complete nonsense. Theft of items exceeding $200 in value is a Grand Theft and is a felony in Virginia. This person committed a felony which in Virginia has a minimum one year prison sentence and up to twenty years. He should have been arrested and it is completely absurd that he wasn't. It's bizarre that the author of the article believes that a person can just steal a computer and it's not a crime.
- corin_ 14y ago
  I'd guess the legal difference could be between taking something you have no right to (theft) and keeping hold of something you had a right to but should have given back (he could argue he forgot, or hadn't yet sent it back). But from a cultural point of view it's obviously completely different. Anyone sane who let an employee go and realised he hadn't given back his laptop would tell them to give it back, not scream for jail team.
- geon 14y ago
  Stealing for $200 gives you one year in prison? Ouch.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Ouch for the taxpayers who pay for the prison places. According to a freedom of information request in 2008, it costs just over £200 per day per prisoner in the UK. About £60 per day is direct costs and the rest is amortisation of buildings &c. Made me think... weekend prison like in Scandanavia, alternatives to prison &c
  - illuminate 14y ago
    Fiscal conservatism means the state pays the eager prison industrials what, $60k+ for your 200 dollar loss.
  - droithomme 14y ago
    Virginia lawmakers have tried to change the felony threshold to $500, but the law-and-order crowd in the state prefers the older $200 limit which has been there for decades and was more reasonable when originally set up. Even with a $500 limit though, most likely the cost to NASA of replacing a laptop meets that limit.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nnq 14y ago
...now they'll assume all the top secret data is stenoed in his porn collection, so they'll keep him in jail for a long long time until they prove it isn't ...or was that brit law?
adrr 14y ago
Weird that a contractor has a employer provided computer. Providing a computer could qualify the contractor as a full time employee.
- jrockway 14y ago
  That could be true for private companies, but the government plays by different rules. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_United_States#Federal_sovereign_immunity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unite...
geon 14y ago
If he wanted data transferred to China, why on earth would he bring a complete laptop? The whole thing is so retarded. If he actually wanted to get data to china, he would have already done so, using the internet. Stopping him on a plane for a suspicion like that is just absurd.

66 points by shawndumas 14y ago

X4 14y ago

Steganography + Porn, that's a really neat idea.. You wouldn't easily get officials to analyze those files together with a forensics team. That scenario is awkward. An error the official did was making his company a public target, by revealing that they might have sensitive data, without being prepared to an attack. Not so clever move, sorry.

jjoonathan 14y ago
Surely the NSA has hashes of nearly everything on the internet (bloom filters, perhaps?). Finding images that didn't match would be a simple and automated task. There isn't even a need for the person doing the scan to know that it's porn -- from the point of view of the hash database, porn, system files, and ripped DVDs all fall into the category of "seen before, not interesting." After the forensics team found files that didn't match the DB, they would have a good reason to investigate further and officials / the media wouldn't let nekked bodies stop them from commenting. Porn would make a poor choice of background media because reverse image search is ubiquitous. Finding the originals would be easy, and showing that the differences between the stego'd images and the originals didn't happen via compression would probably not be too hard either. If the encryption is good they probably wouldn't get any further than that. Still, any significant quantity of hidden files would generate a large body of evidence that would be very difficult to explain away. Why go to the trouble of hiding info on the hard drive of a guy who was already under suspicion when a prerecorded skype call or controlled packet latency system would make for a stego medium that was much harder to detect and easier to plausibly deny?
- X4 14y ago
  You're correct and personally I would never underestimate the NSA/FBI or any other organization. Remember Aaron Schwartz. But there is too much evidence that they might be much less professional and less equipped with such high-quality hash-databases. I don't believe that they could allocate enough professional resources (in such a "low priority" target) to actually give clearance of the case and green lights to the officers with certainty. If the porn movies are avis and 700mb, but with SD-quality, then you couldn't notice the difference. Take 20 porn files porn-a.avi (500MB original or 600MB with hidden data) There are so many rips or rips of rips that you cannot have a complete porn-database. And phew 2GB of compressed and hidden Data. Even if he didn't have used Steganography, he could easily use imageshack.us, imgur.com and other file-hosting sites, heck even upload to porn-sites to hide the data. Additionally you could get bad hashes into your database, when they upload the porn movies themself.
  - yk 14y ago
    I am pretty sure the NSA has a high quality hash database for porn and movie files. Probably the codename is the piratebay.
  - jjoonathan 14y ago
    How do you figure this is a low priority target? This certainly falls within their mandate and the guy might have been trying to steal legitimately sensitive information! > Take 20 porn files porn-a.avi (500MB original or 600MB with hidden data) There are so many rips or rips of rips that you cannot have a complete porn-database. And phew 2GB of compressed and hidden Data. The smallest SSD I own could handily fit that data whole and the bloom filter would fit in an arduino a thousand times over. The NSA's shiny new Utah datacenter had a $2B budget for construction alone, do you really think "rips of rips" are going to be a problem? These guys scrape web traffic by putting a T on major junctions of the internet and duplicating everything that comes down the pipes. You could set all of 4chan to making rips with permuted settings and not begin to stress infrastructure of that capacity. I don't want to be rude, but you seem to be in denial.
- slig 14y ago
  > controlled packet latency system That sounds very cool. Do you have any interesting links about it?
  - jjoonathan 14y ago
    Sure: http://static.usenix.org/events/sec06/tech/shah/shah_html/jbug-Usenix06.html http://static.usenix.org/events/sec06/tech/shah/shah_html/jb... The covert channel discussed in the paper doesn't control network traffic directly but if you were maximizing bandwidth and didn't have to hide from an intrusion detection system you would almost certainly want to do so.
shaggyfrog 14y ago
> You wouldn't easily get officials to analyze those files together with a forensics team. That scenario is awkward. Why, naked bodies make the FBI blush?
- X4 14y ago
  eww, you got me in a moment where I was almost thinking of them in a too romantic way. I've fallen down to reality and can imagine now how their forensic team could possibly enjoy those movies on a (4k/HD Laser) Projector..
nwh 14y ago
>That scenario is awkward. You are clearly mistaken. I recently read a paper about people who's jobs involve sitting down and looking at child abuse photos, and then trekking off to the councillor. A few blurry porn videos are nothing compared with that.
- X4 14y ago
  whoa... ok, I didn't know that I'm that naive. Thanks for opening my eyes. Yes now I remember that there are people, behind the cameras that monitor how people are getting tortured.. someone is always doing the dirty job, even when nobody wants to know it.
  - maaku 14y ago
    There are people out there in law enforcement who's job it is to collect child pornography, categorizing and filing it in the hope of identifying the victim and the perpetrator. When there is a breakthrough and the child gets saved, these people are the heroes that make it happen. However I imagine that for every perp caught there are a dozen more that escape justice... personally I can't imagine doing such a job - it'd tear me up inside to know these people are out there. But someone's got to do it.
- astrodust 14y ago
  It still takes an exceptionally rugged individual to be able to sift through that much of that sort of thing and not want a different line of work. Though, perhaps like some people that work to clean up extremely gory crime or accident scenes and aren't bothered by it at all, there may be a few that can maintain some kind of separation.
est 14y ago
He can prove his innocence by re-downloading the exact same porn again.
- saalweachter 14y ago
  People shouldn't have to prove their innocence.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  1) saalweachter is dead on. 2) Even an innocent man would likely have a very difficult time actually doing that. In many cases it could be straight up impossible; websites go out of business, torrents go unseeded, image boards 404 in a matter of hours, reddit has a search system that makes me look back on old card catalogs fondly...
  - est 14y ago
    Yes I agree with saalweachter, but just if in case of steganography, A quick Google for file sha1 or md5 usually reveals ed2k or magnet links.
Apocryphon 14y ago
After porn was found in the Abbottabad compound and everyone had a good laugh at the hypocrisy of Osama Bin Laden, wasn't there talk that the porn there might have hidden messages enclosed? Could be the same case here, it's just a decoy.

lolcraft 14y ago

Whomever wrote that headline missed a much more significant, and painfully biting, point: "Jiang, a former contractor at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, had recently been let go by his employer because of pressure from Republican congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia. Wolf had claimed Jiang and other Chinese engineers employed by NASA contractors were a security risk." "But it quickly became apparent that Jiang was at worst guilty of violating NASA policies. [...] Jiang had not had clearance to such projects at Langley as an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace" "A press release issued by Wolf after the arrest and copy of Jiang's arrest warrant have since disappeared off the the congressman's website. In the release (cached by Google here), Wolf had said, 'I am particularly concerned that (the) information (on Jiang's laptop) may pertain to the source code for high-tech imaging technology that Jiang has been working on with NASA. This information could have significant military applications for the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army.'" Confirmed, the USA has entered back into full McCarthyism. Request title change to 'Chinese contractor fired on suspicion by Republican senator'.

mjn 14y ago
Political pressure from ignorant Republican congressmen not only resulted in Jiang being fired over this non-incident, but something even more serious for science in general: the entire NASA technical-report archive [1], with documents dating back decades, has been forced offline indefinitely [2]. Frank Wolf and his ilk are worried [3] that the Red Chinese might be reading some 1970s document in a way that compromises American national security. Never mind that the Chinese likely have copied a mirror of any documents they find interesting already. So now it's only American researchers who can't access it: there are no complete mirrors of which I'm aware, because U.S. libraries and archives naively assumed that NASA was a reliable long-term host for the documents, meaning there were no serious mirroring efforts. Maybe we can ask China to take pity on us and make a mirror available, since ntrs.nasa.gov being down breaks thousands of references in papers and elsewhere. [1] http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ [2] http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/03/ntrs_dark/ http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/03/ntrs_dark/ [3] http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=40365 http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=40365
- 14y ago

coopdog 14y ago

Why would anyone think a potential spy would physically carry source code over the border? If he was going to leak it, it would have been sent months earlier over the internet, duh! Especially if he knew that someone was suspicious of him. Someone has been watching too many movies.

laurentoget 14y ago

Pretty clearly, the worse threat to the security of the United States are republican congresspersons.

noonespecial 14y ago
I think we're past the point of needing to prepend "republican" or "democrat" to that particular noun.

joemaller1 14y ago

"Damnit, he's not guilty of anything. Can we humiliate him or something to save face?" So proud.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

deservingend 14y ago

LOL pirated movies. How on Earth will he find such things when he's back in China?

astrodust 14y ago
I think NASA's bandwidth is better than what he'd get on some random ISP in China.
fatjokes 14y ago
I presume it was for his 10+ hr flight home.

cromwellian 14y ago

Gives new meaning to the term "honey pot" :-p

rajanikanthr 14y ago

ROFL I did my MS in computer science from Old Dominion University.. proud of you :D :D

ioanpopovici 14y ago

Paranoid Americans...

tlrobinson 14y ago

What better material to steganographically hide lots of data in than porn?

droithomme 14y ago

The secrets thing doesn't even have to matter. The guy STOLE a computer from NASA. The "at worst guilty of violating NASA policies" is complete nonsense. Theft of items exceeding $200 in value is a Grand Theft and is a felony in Virginia. This person committed a felony which in Virginia has a minimum one year prison sentence and up to twenty years. He should have been arrested and it is completely absurd that he wasn't. It's bizarre that the author of the article believes that a person can just steal a computer and it's not a crime.

corin_ 14y ago
I'd guess the legal difference could be between taking something you have no right to (theft) and keeping hold of something you had a right to but should have given back (he could argue he forgot, or hadn't yet sent it back). But from a cultural point of view it's obviously completely different. Anyone sane who let an employee go and realised he hadn't given back his laptop would tell them to give it back, not scream for jail team.
geon 14y ago
Stealing for $200 gives you one year in prison? Ouch.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Ouch for the taxpayers who pay for the prison places. According to a freedom of information request in 2008, it costs just over £200 per day per prisoner in the UK. About £60 per day is direct costs and the rest is amortisation of buildings &c. Made me think... weekend prison like in Scandanavia, alternatives to prison &c
- illuminate 14y ago
  Fiscal conservatism means the state pays the eager prison industrials what, $60k+ for your 200 dollar loss.
- droithomme 14y ago
  Virginia lawmakers have tried to change the felony threshold to $500, but the law-and-order crowd in the state prefers the older $200 limit which has been there for decades and was more reasonable when originally set up. Even with a $500 limit though, most likely the cost to NASA of replacing a laptop meets that limit.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

nnq 14y ago

...now they'll assume all the top secret data is stenoed in his porn collection, so they'll keep him in jail for a long long time until they prove it isn't ...or was that brit law?

adrr 14y ago

Weird that a contractor has a employer provided computer. Providing a computer could qualify the contractor as a full time employee.

jrockway 14y ago
That could be true for private companies, but the government plays by different rules. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_United_States#Federal_sovereign_immunity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unite...

geon 14y ago

If he wanted data transferred to China, why on earth would he bring a complete laptop? The whole thing is so retarded. If he actually wanted to get data to china, he would have already done so, using the internet. Stopping him on a plane for a suspicion like that is just absurd.