14 ms·

Michael Hastings Sent Panicked Email Hours Before Car Crash

298 points by ctoth 13y ago

andyl 13y ago
"Hey [redacted] the Feds are interviewing my close friends and associates." So - who was interviewed? What questions were asked?
- l0c0b0x 13y ago
  That's classified!
- fixxer 13y ago
  Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. I wonder if his editor was in the loop. I read it wasn't about Jill Kelly... doesn't really narrow it down. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-jill-kelley-reporting_n_3502003.html?utm_hp_ref=media http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-ji...
stfu 13y ago
Anybody read through http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf already? My car-tech knowledge is way to rudimentary to get a better idea on that stuff.
- ynniv 13y ago
  Well, page 6 sounds a lot like the mysterious magic car openers the police have been seeing (compromise the CAN bus through wireless device exploits, use CAN to unlock the doors). [From the PDF:] To be clear, for every vulnerability we demonstrate, we are able to obtain complete control over the vehicle’s systems. The latest Fast and Furious movie employes magnetically attached exploit devices that lock the ABS system on a single wheel at speed, causing the car to immediately pull hard in that direction. With an available attack vector, it's depressingly easy.
  - meepmorp 13y ago
    > The latest Fast and Furious movie employes magnetically attached exploit devices that lock the ABS system on a single wheel at speed, causing the car to immediately pull hard in that direction. Are you seriously citing an action movie to support a point about how easy this would be?
    - ynniv 13y ago
      No, I'm pointing out that even Hollywood thought of this. When Hollywood is using a technology, you can usually assume it's either fantasy or old hat. This doesn't look like fantasy.
      - JshWright 13y ago
        It also doesn't look like old hat... Wouldn't that make it fantasy?
- incision 13y ago
  >"Anybody read through http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf already?" To what end? At a glance: * These attacks were demonstrated on a "moderately priced late model sedan" which is surely a bit of a different situation than a brand new luxury car. That could mean more sophisticated systems and likely less time to reverse engineer - assuming you don't believe the manufacturer is complicit. * On page 5 and 6 they describe the work necessary to pull the exploits off. They dumped over two dozen ECUs, desoldering them where necessary and, if I'm not mistaken - reverse engineered them and injected the code which was necessary to support the follow-on attacks. Assuming the same type and method of attack, the attacker would have had to succesfully generate attack knowledge for a 2013 model-year car then gain intimate physical access to the vehicle to seed the exploits before eventually remotely exploiting them. That reads like a tall order to me, but it could be the opposite. I could certainly imagine newer, increasingly connected vehicles being more exploitable.
  - ynniv 13y ago
    That could mean more sophisticated systems and likely less time to reverse engineer Car electronics change very little year to year. If you have an unreported exploit, it wouldn't surprise me if it were valid for more than 5 production years. The bigger issue is that the networks in these cars are only secured by physical access, and there are more devices on the bus every year. A remote exploit must fetch a pretty penny, so I would expect professionals to get to work on pre-production units as soon as they are available in the hope that they don't change substantially. then gain intimate physical access to the vehicle to seed the exploits before eventually remotely exploiting them I think you read this wrong - the car was disassembled to explore the systems, but after vulnerability development, physical access to a target was not required. This is suggested by "Sniff MAC address, brute force PIN, buffer overﬂow" and "Call car, authentication exploit, buffer overﬂow". If modification was required, executing an exploit would involve a predetermined handshake (which is described later in the paper), not something as crude as buffer overflows.
    - incision 13y ago
      ">Car electronics change very little year to year. If you have an unreported exploit, it wouldn't surprise me if it were valid for more than 5 production years." Anecdotally, most ECUs I've seen change up 1-3 years. I have no idea if later units might be code compatible with prior, but I'd doubt it. >I think you read this wrong - the car was disassembled to explore the systems, but after vulnerability development, physical access to a target was not required. Obviously, I'm not certain, but looking at the previous work they reference [0 .p12-13] seems to say that the bridging exploits [1 .p5] are dependent on re-flashing. Perhaps the 2011 Bluetooth overflow is injecting 2010 re-flash equivalent code? 0: http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf "We were able to successfully reprogram our car’s telematics unit from a device connected to the car’s low-speed bus (in our experiments, a laptop running CARSHARK). Once reprogrammed, our telematics unit acts as a bridge, relaying packets from the lowspeed bus onto the high-speed bus." 1: http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf "Note, such interbus bridging is critical to many of the attacks we explore since it exposes the attack surface of one set of components to components on a separate bus; we explain brieﬂy here."
- mehmehshoe 13y ago
  I've heard about bugs in the throttle position channel from a few coworkers that worked for several different manufacturers. This was awhile ago though and most bugs have been sorted. Creating a car crash through brake or steering manipulation sounds a bit far fetched. Throttle position on the other hand does not have any type of redundancy in most modern cars (no mechanical means of restoring control). If you have access to change TP, either by GPS coordinates or remote, you could cause a crash pretty easily by sticking the throttle body WFO. The driver always has options to stop the car, but in panic mode...who knows. I am still withholding judgement and will watch the investigation with interest.
  - foobarqux 13y ago
    You can put the car in neutral or turn off the ignition.
    - lawnchair_larry 13y ago
      If you do that, your steering wheel will lock, perhaps sending you into a tree or something.
      - mehmehshoe 13y ago
        Throwing your Mercedes transmission into neutral should not lock your steering wheel...hopefully.
      - Jam0864 13y ago
        not in neutral
        mehmehshoe 13y ago
        "not in neutral" Damn....Damn it all to hell.
      - foobarqux 13y ago
        If you kill the ignition you lose power steering and possibly power brakes but wheel doesn't lock for good reason.
kenjackson 13y ago
Have they confirmed the body in the car is his?
- mikeyouse 13y ago
  According to the AP, yes they have. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/la-coroner-ids-body-journalist-michael-hastings http://bigstory.ap.org/article/la-coroner-ids-body-journalis...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
corresation 13y ago
Another possibility is that he had a nervous breakdown or substance abuse episode, leading to both the paranoid emails and the irrational vehicle operations. Obviously I'm not saying that's the case, but the extremely irrational driving goes fits a theory of paranoid delusions (brought on by any number of mechanisms), just as the hacked car system goes with about to uncover something big.
- sage_joch 13y ago
  Yeah, we really don't know. But I'm extremely uncomfortable by the fact that foul play is a real possibility. We already know that the federal government is operating largely in secret and without regard to the law (their insistence that are indeed following their own secret set of laws doesn't provide me much solace). We already know that various press organizations have been wiretapped. I feel like I've woken up into a country I no longer recognize. How long will it be before people no longer feel safe expressing opinions online?
  - ForrestN 13y ago
    I definitely already feel some sense of pause. I remember reading this article when it came out; does anyone know if there have been any further developments in the case?
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    Foul play is always a possibility, but it takes evidence to make it real. All we have now is a car crash, a reporter working on a story, and an email. There are lots of car crashes, and lots of reporters working on big stories--many on the same stories Hastings was pursuing. We can't rule out foul play but I'm not ready, personally, to rule it in either. There's just not enough there.
    - TechNewb 13y ago
      Is it known what story he was pursuing?
meepmorp 13y ago
So.... what? Is the implication here that he was assassinated? The email doesn't really seem all that panicked to me - I didn't know the guy, so maybe is he being panicked, but it just sounds like a guy who's writing to let people he works with know about possible legal problems.
darkchasma 13y ago
I used to say that people were paranoid who thought the government was spying on them. So I'm not quite ready to dismiss this as a crazy conspiracy just yet.
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
- maaku 13y ago
  I thought stealthy black helicopters was the ultimate ridiculous conspiracy theory.. until they crashed one in Pakistan. I knew the NSA could listen in wherever they wanted, but I thought mass surveillance and storage of all communications was outlandish 1984-like paranoia.. until Edward Snowden. Now I don't know what to think.
  - derleth 13y ago
    The helicopter in Pakistan was hardly stealthy. Someone tweeted about it as it was flying overhead.
    - flyinRyan 13y ago
      Twitter should run this ad: "Osama Bin Laden died because he wasn't on Twitter! Sign up today!"
fixxer 13y ago
Any idea what the big story was?
- mrschwabe 13y ago
  According to this article, "Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith has said that Hastings was working on a story on Barrett Brown." http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Palantir-Prism-Facebook-The-Industrial-Surveillance-Complex# http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Pal...
- ChrisAntaki 13y ago
  Maybe it was related to TrapWire, a cloud service that has facial, emotional, and behavioral recognition. It would tie in well with the upstream fibertap, and PRISM programs.
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    Doubtful, trapwire is entirely public if you do research on it. Also, emotion and behavioral recognition is pretty far fetched.
    - ChrisAntaki 13y ago
      Behavioral recognition is pretty much TrapWire's value proposition.
DigitalSea 13y ago
How does a 2013 model Mercedes Benz with a five star ANCAP safety rating (the highest rating you can get) scoring 35.51 points scored out of 37 (an Australian car safety rating for reference) with more airbags than wheels (8 airbags for those of you playing at home including a curtain airbag that drops in-front of the passenger and driver protecting the head and upper-body from impacting anything) crash into a tree without there even being another vehicle involved? The car has stability control, traction control, ABS, EBD, brake assist and three-point pre-tensioning seatbelts. If you've ever driven a modern BMW, Mercedes or any other premium European vehicle than you'd know it's impossible to crash these things unless you honestly wanted to crash them. I am pretty sure it has been standard on most cars in this price bracket for a while now to respond to impacts by shutting off fuel, disconnecting battery terminals and unlocking doors. It varies from model to model, but most premium cars react to emergencies by cutting off as many points of danger as possible. Something doesn't add up here. Was he drunk? Was he poisoned with a cocktail of drugs that perhaps made him lose concentration and crash into a tree? A new 2013 Mercedes don't just malfunction and crash killing its occupants so easily. They build these cars to withstand a lot of impact, this isn't the movies, new cars don't just crash and explode on impact. You hear of gruesome accidents everyday in vehicles, but you rarely hear of them exploding, mangling in a ball of metal and plastic yes, but rarely exploding. Is there CCTV footage of the minutes before he crashed showing perhaps what happened? Perhaps a recreation of the accident might help shed some light on what really happened. A computer simulation I am sure would be more than enough, coupled with CCTV footage and you should have a pretty close to accurate simulation of how it all went down and how the car would fare. If the FBI were interviewing close friends and family, someone needs to come out at least dispelling the suggestion he went crazy or was suffering from paranoia. Because at present, there's nothing to suggest foul play other than speculation. And as usual, we all point fingers and call someone crazy when they claim the FBI is watching them and after all of this PRISM controversy, claims like that don't sound as crazy as they once did...
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  This is how conspiracy theories are promulgated: propose an preposterous alternate reality and then find real facts wanting in comparison. In this case the alternate reality is that it is "impossible" to crash recent model year Mercedes unless you intend to. This is obviously preposterous since it's not hard to find reports of such crashes with 5 minutes on Google.
glasz 13y ago
while this story is about a week old and got lost in all this nsa nonsense, listen to what mr. hastings said before his death. even on tv. i am german and i can tell you that a mercedes benz DOES NOT just blow up and spit its engine 100yd down the street. the car wasn't even really against the tree... sometimes you just need to apply a little grain of common sense, ppl.
- eridius 13y ago
  I never even heard of Michael Hasting's death before today, so I don't have an opinion yet, but I find it hilarious that someone who is implying that a conspiracy is at work here is telling everyone to "apply a little grain of common sense". Conspiracy theories are not common sense.
  - beedogs 13y ago
    ... says who?
  - jamieb 13y ago
    Watergate "Scandal". From wikipedia: "On September 15, a grand jury indicted them, as well as Hunt and Liddy,[9] for conspiracy, burglary, and violation of federal wiretapping laws." I find it interesting that when the Watergate "Conspiracy Theory" was proven, two things happened: 1. The perpetrators were charged with conspiracy (proving it was a conspiracy), and yet: 2. The Watergate Conspiracy was henceforth known as the Watergate Scandal. In the Iran-Contra "Affair", "Fawn Hall, Oliver North's secretary was given immunity from prosecution on charges of conspiracy and destroying documents in exchange for her testimony." Again: 1. Perpetrators charged with conspiracy. 2. The conspiracy is henceforth known as The Iran-Contra Affair. Rinse, repeat.
    - derleth 13y ago
      You're being dishonest. That isn't what 'conspiracy theory' means and you know it. Noun phrases aren't defined by taking their words one by one; they have to be understood as a unit.
kailuowang 13y ago
I thought the best way to murder a person is to make him disappear and that should be pretty easy for an assassinate from the most powerful government. "Off the radar" would be convenient.
lesslaw 13y ago
Or, his murderers sent it as a smoke screen. It doesn't say "an electronically signed email" using Hastings' PGP key, it doesn't say it was DKIM signed. telnet hotmail.com 25 MAIL FROM: micheal.hastings@domain.com RCPT TO: wikileakseditor@hotmail.com Subject: I'm going out for a walk I might be some time. Don't come looking for me. . ^D
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ForrestN 13y ago
At the time it was widely reported that the story he was working on was related to a socialite from Florida named Jill Kelley, but it looks like that isn't true: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-jill-kelley-reporting_n_3502003.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-ji... I won't pretend I read all of his work, but whenever I saw his name attached to something I was impressed. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3eKaXVe-7A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3eKaXVe-7A
kposehn 13y ago
This email has already been in circulation for quite some time - nothing new here by the look of it.
quackerhacker 13y ago
A more thorough article with pictures: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/email-sent-by-michael-hastings-hours-before-his-death-mentions-a-big-story-and-a-need-to-go-off-the-radar/ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/email-sent-by-mic... Wanted to share this since there was alot of great opinions about what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5943251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5943251
mrschwabe 13y ago
This Hastings incident has interesting parallels to Andrew Breitbart's death. http://rt.com/usa/coroner-arsenic-death-breitbart-456/ http://rt.com/usa/coroner-arsenic-death-breitbart-456/ Namely the fact that both of these men were prominent journalists, living in the US, each with 'big stories' they were working on that have not seen the light of day due to their untimely death shortly after proclaiming they were working on said stories. To compound the dire possibilities, in February the US Justice Department confirmed the existence of legal justification for the assassination of American citizens: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/politics/obama-orders-release-of-drone-memos-to-lawmakers.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/politics/obama-orders-r... Not drawing conclusions here, but I think it's important in this day and age to be diligent in connecting dots and evaluating ALL possibilities.
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  Meh. Breitbart died of an enlarged heart and also had a major heart attack a few months prior.
- groby_b 13y ago
  Uh, no. Breitbart was a lot of things, but certainly not a journalist of nearly the same caliber. And given that he claimed to work on "big stories" pretty much all the time, we can take that out of the equation, too. And your disingenuous argument trying to tie drone attacks into that is an utter disservice to truth. To quote from the fine article: "could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible." Whatever your position on this is, you need to stretch mightily to make this into "the government is indiscriminately killing people it doesn't like". So please remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And try to bring at least the tiniest bit of evidence to a post that's rather light on them.
  - mrschwabe 13y ago
    So please remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Thank-you, I will remember that. I will also remember that, on occasion, extraordinary crimes happen in secret. And that there exist criminals in this world who have successfully suppressed, destroyed, or hidden evidence of their crimes; and as a result have not - and may not ever be - brought to justice. Note that I wasn't making any claims - just pointing out some relevant information to consider.
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
He really should have sent the story, in the email.
dano416 13y ago
As a mechanic, I have never seen any vechicle burn like that vechicle. I know it has a high pressure EFI system, but it has one way valves and other safety features. It looked like someone poured lighter fluid throughout the car. I imagine the Government has access to odorless flamable fluid? As the my own paranoia, I am not thrilled about even talking about this incident. I'm definetly more concerned about privacy since the NSA reporting. I am also using DuckDuckGo, but it's horrid right now.
- JshWright 13y ago
  As a firefighter, I've seen many cars burn like that. That's what vehicle fires look like. Car interiors are _full_ of flammable stuff. Seat cushions, plastics, rubber... etc... The energy output of a burning car is really incredible.
  - derleth 13y ago
    As an experienced Internet denizen who has seen dozens of conspiracy theories play out, the person I'm responding to is playing a fool's game and will be shouted down and ignored by everyone who wants a neat little conspiratorial story to go with their morning breakfast. Clear, simple explanations are death to conspiracy theories, so they are ignored and the people who make them are vilified at every turn.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      The 'utterly dismissive of the possibility' people are also all over discussions like these, dismissing speculation with arguments that tend to amount to "oh, please!" and "oh, come on!" In fact, these discussions usually amount to amateur physicists insisting that somewhat unusual phenomena are physically impossible (usually citing retired fire chiefs, their uncle who is a mechanic, and 'common sense'), and a bunch of authoritarians replying with "Oh, please - tinfoil hat!" I'm surprised that people don't know how eager cars are to burn esp in light of this recent fire: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-06/news/chi-california-limo-fire-20130506_1_town-car-partition-five-women http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-06/news/chi-calif... There wasn't even a crash and five women burned to death during the time it took to notice the fire, communicate that to the driver, pull over, and open the back door.
NatW 13y ago
(pure speculation) I wonder if he might have signed the email, "...hope to see you all soon" to indicate to others that he was not suicidal.
Angostura 13y ago
I hate to say it, but really if you read the e-mail it does not really appear to be panicked in any way, to me.

298 points by ctoth 13y ago

andyl 13y ago

"Hey [redacted] the Feds are interviewing my close friends and associates." So - who was interviewed? What questions were asked?

l0c0b0x 13y ago
That's classified!
fixxer 13y ago
Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. I wonder if his editor was in the loop. I read it wasn't about Jill Kelly... doesn't really narrow it down. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-jill-kelley-reporting_n_3502003.html?utm_hp_ref=media http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-ji...

stfu 13y ago

Anybody read through http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf already? My car-tech knowledge is way to rudimentary to get a better idea on that stuff.

ynniv 13y ago
Well, page 6 sounds a lot like the mysterious magic car openers the police have been seeing (compromise the CAN bus through wireless device exploits, use CAN to unlock the doors). [From the PDF:] To be clear, for every vulnerability we demonstrate, we are able to obtain complete control over the vehicle’s systems. The latest Fast and Furious movie employes magnetically attached exploit devices that lock the ABS system on a single wheel at speed, causing the car to immediately pull hard in that direction. With an available attack vector, it's depressingly easy.
- meepmorp 13y ago
  > The latest Fast and Furious movie employes magnetically attached exploit devices that lock the ABS system on a single wheel at speed, causing the car to immediately pull hard in that direction. Are you seriously citing an action movie to support a point about how easy this would be?
  - ynniv 13y ago
    No, I'm pointing out that even Hollywood thought of this. When Hollywood is using a technology, you can usually assume it's either fantasy or old hat. This doesn't look like fantasy.
    - JshWright 13y ago
      It also doesn't look like old hat... Wouldn't that make it fantasy?
incision 13y ago
>"Anybody read through http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf already?" To what end? At a glance: * These attacks were demonstrated on a "moderately priced late model sedan" which is surely a bit of a different situation than a brand new luxury car. That could mean more sophisticated systems and likely less time to reverse engineer - assuming you don't believe the manufacturer is complicit. * On page 5 and 6 they describe the work necessary to pull the exploits off. They dumped over two dozen ECUs, desoldering them where necessary and, if I'm not mistaken - reverse engineered them and injected the code which was necessary to support the follow-on attacks. Assuming the same type and method of attack, the attacker would have had to succesfully generate attack knowledge for a 2013 model-year car then gain intimate physical access to the vehicle to seed the exploits before eventually remotely exploiting them. That reads like a tall order to me, but it could be the opposite. I could certainly imagine newer, increasingly connected vehicles being more exploitable.
- ynniv 13y ago
  That could mean more sophisticated systems and likely less time to reverse engineer Car electronics change very little year to year. If you have an unreported exploit, it wouldn't surprise me if it were valid for more than 5 production years. The bigger issue is that the networks in these cars are only secured by physical access, and there are more devices on the bus every year. A remote exploit must fetch a pretty penny, so I would expect professionals to get to work on pre-production units as soon as they are available in the hope that they don't change substantially. then gain intimate physical access to the vehicle to seed the exploits before eventually remotely exploiting them I think you read this wrong - the car was disassembled to explore the systems, but after vulnerability development, physical access to a target was not required. This is suggested by "Sniff MAC address, brute force PIN, buffer overﬂow" and "Call car, authentication exploit, buffer overﬂow". If modification was required, executing an exploit would involve a predetermined handshake (which is described later in the paper), not something as crude as buffer overflows.
  - incision 13y ago
    ">Car electronics change very little year to year. If you have an unreported exploit, it wouldn't surprise me if it were valid for more than 5 production years." Anecdotally, most ECUs I've seen change up 1-3 years. I have no idea if later units might be code compatible with prior, but I'd doubt it. >I think you read this wrong - the car was disassembled to explore the systems, but after vulnerability development, physical access to a target was not required. Obviously, I'm not certain, but looking at the previous work they reference [0 .p12-13] seems to say that the bridging exploits [1 .p5] are dependent on re-flashing. Perhaps the 2011 Bluetooth overflow is injecting 2010 re-flash equivalent code? 0: http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf "We were able to successfully reprogram our car’s telematics unit from a device connected to the car’s low-speed bus (in our experiments, a laptop running CARSHARK). Once reprogrammed, our telematics unit acts as a bridge, relaying packets from the lowspeed bus onto the high-speed bus." 1: http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf "Note, such interbus bridging is critical to many of the attacks we explore since it exposes the attack surface of one set of components to components on a separate bus; we explain brieﬂy here."
mehmehshoe 13y ago
I've heard about bugs in the throttle position channel from a few coworkers that worked for several different manufacturers. This was awhile ago though and most bugs have been sorted. Creating a car crash through brake or steering manipulation sounds a bit far fetched. Throttle position on the other hand does not have any type of redundancy in most modern cars (no mechanical means of restoring control). If you have access to change TP, either by GPS coordinates or remote, you could cause a crash pretty easily by sticking the throttle body WFO. The driver always has options to stop the car, but in panic mode...who knows. I am still withholding judgement and will watch the investigation with interest.
- foobarqux 13y ago
  You can put the car in neutral or turn off the ignition.
  - lawnchair_larry 13y ago
    If you do that, your steering wheel will lock, perhaps sending you into a tree or something.
    - mehmehshoe 13y ago
      Throwing your Mercedes transmission into neutral should not lock your steering wheel...hopefully.
    - Jam0864 13y ago
      not in neutral
      - mehmehshoe 13y ago
        "not in neutral" Damn....Damn it all to hell.
    - foobarqux 13y ago
      If you kill the ignition you lose power steering and possibly power brakes but wheel doesn't lock for good reason.

kenjackson 13y ago

Have they confirmed the body in the car is his?

mikeyouse 13y ago
According to the AP, yes they have. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/la-coroner-ids-body-journalist-michael-hastings http://bigstory.ap.org/article/la-coroner-ids-body-journalis...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

corresation 13y ago

Another possibility is that he had a nervous breakdown or substance abuse episode, leading to both the paranoid emails and the irrational vehicle operations. Obviously I'm not saying that's the case, but the extremely irrational driving goes fits a theory of paranoid delusions (brought on by any number of mechanisms), just as the hacked car system goes with about to uncover something big.

sage_joch 13y ago
Yeah, we really don't know. But I'm extremely uncomfortable by the fact that foul play is a real possibility. We already know that the federal government is operating largely in secret and without regard to the law (their insistence that are indeed following their own secret set of laws doesn't provide me much solace). We already know that various press organizations have been wiretapped. I feel like I've woken up into a country I no longer recognize. How long will it be before people no longer feel safe expressing opinions online?
- ForrestN 13y ago
  I definitely already feel some sense of pause. I remember reading this article when it came out; does anyone know if there have been any further developments in the case?
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  Foul play is always a possibility, but it takes evidence to make it real. All we have now is a car crash, a reporter working on a story, and an email. There are lots of car crashes, and lots of reporters working on big stories--many on the same stories Hastings was pursuing. We can't rule out foul play but I'm not ready, personally, to rule it in either. There's just not enough there.
  - TechNewb 13y ago
    Is it known what story he was pursuing?

meepmorp 13y ago

So.... what? Is the implication here that he was assassinated? The email doesn't really seem all that panicked to me - I didn't know the guy, so maybe is he being panicked, but it just sounds like a guy who's writing to let people he works with know about possible legal problems.

darkchasma 13y ago

I used to say that people were paranoid who thought the government was spying on them. So I'm not quite ready to dismiss this as a crazy conspiracy just yet.

ImprovedSilence 13y ago
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
maaku 13y ago
I thought stealthy black helicopters was the ultimate ridiculous conspiracy theory.. until they crashed one in Pakistan. I knew the NSA could listen in wherever they wanted, but I thought mass surveillance and storage of all communications was outlandish 1984-like paranoia.. until Edward Snowden. Now I don't know what to think.
- derleth 13y ago
  The helicopter in Pakistan was hardly stealthy. Someone tweeted about it as it was flying overhead.
  - flyinRyan 13y ago
    Twitter should run this ad: "Osama Bin Laden died because he wasn't on Twitter! Sign up today!"

fixxer 13y ago

Any idea what the big story was?

mrschwabe 13y ago
According to this article, "Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith has said that Hastings was working on a story on Barrett Brown." http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Palantir-Prism-Facebook-The-Industrial-Surveillance-Complex# http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Pal...
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
Maybe it was related to TrapWire, a cloud service that has facial, emotional, and behavioral recognition. It would tie in well with the upstream fibertap, and PRISM programs.
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago
  Doubtful, trapwire is entirely public if you do research on it. Also, emotion and behavioral recognition is pretty far fetched.
  - ChrisAntaki 13y ago
    Behavioral recognition is pretty much TrapWire's value proposition.

DigitalSea 13y ago

How does a 2013 model Mercedes Benz with a five star ANCAP safety rating (the highest rating you can get) scoring 35.51 points scored out of 37 (an Australian car safety rating for reference) with more airbags than wheels (8 airbags for those of you playing at home including a curtain airbag that drops in-front of the passenger and driver protecting the head and upper-body from impacting anything) crash into a tree without there even being another vehicle involved? The car has stability control, traction control, ABS, EBD, brake assist and three-point pre-tensioning seatbelts. If you've ever driven a modern BMW, Mercedes or any other premium European vehicle than you'd know it's impossible to crash these things unless you honestly wanted to crash them. I am pretty sure it has been standard on most cars in this price bracket for a while now to respond to impacts by shutting off fuel, disconnecting battery terminals and unlocking doors. It varies from model to model, but most premium cars react to emergencies by cutting off as many points of danger as possible. Something doesn't add up here. Was he drunk? Was he poisoned with a cocktail of drugs that perhaps made him lose concentration and crash into a tree? A new 2013 Mercedes don't just malfunction and crash killing its occupants so easily. They build these cars to withstand a lot of impact, this isn't the movies, new cars don't just crash and explode on impact. You hear of gruesome accidents everyday in vehicles, but you rarely hear of them exploding, mangling in a ball of metal and plastic yes, but rarely exploding. Is there CCTV footage of the minutes before he crashed showing perhaps what happened? Perhaps a recreation of the accident might help shed some light on what really happened. A computer simulation I am sure would be more than enough, coupled with CCTV footage and you should have a pretty close to accurate simulation of how it all went down and how the car would fare. If the FBI were interviewing close friends and family, someone needs to come out at least dispelling the suggestion he went crazy or was suffering from paranoia. Because at present, there's nothing to suggest foul play other than speculation. And as usual, we all point fingers and call someone crazy when they claim the FBI is watching them and after all of this PRISM controversy, claims like that don't sound as crazy as they once did...

snowwrestler 13y ago
This is how conspiracy theories are promulgated: propose an preposterous alternate reality and then find real facts wanting in comparison. In this case the alternate reality is that it is "impossible" to crash recent model year Mercedes unless you intend to. This is obviously preposterous since it's not hard to find reports of such crashes with 5 minutes on Google.

glasz 13y ago

while this story is about a week old and got lost in all this nsa nonsense, listen to what mr. hastings said before his death. even on tv. i am german and i can tell you that a mercedes benz DOES NOT just blow up and spit its engine 100yd down the street. the car wasn't even really against the tree... sometimes you just need to apply a little grain of common sense, ppl.

eridius 13y ago
I never even heard of Michael Hasting's death before today, so I don't have an opinion yet, but I find it hilarious that someone who is implying that a conspiracy is at work here is telling everyone to "apply a little grain of common sense". Conspiracy theories are not common sense.
- beedogs 13y ago
  ... says who?
- jamieb 13y ago
  Watergate "Scandal". From wikipedia: "On September 15, a grand jury indicted them, as well as Hunt and Liddy,[9] for conspiracy, burglary, and violation of federal wiretapping laws." I find it interesting that when the Watergate "Conspiracy Theory" was proven, two things happened: 1. The perpetrators were charged with conspiracy (proving it was a conspiracy), and yet: 2. The Watergate Conspiracy was henceforth known as the Watergate Scandal. In the Iran-Contra "Affair", "Fawn Hall, Oliver North's secretary was given immunity from prosecution on charges of conspiracy and destroying documents in exchange for her testimony." Again: 1. Perpetrators charged with conspiracy. 2. The conspiracy is henceforth known as The Iran-Contra Affair. Rinse, repeat.
  - derleth 13y ago
    You're being dishonest. That isn't what 'conspiracy theory' means and you know it. Noun phrases aren't defined by taking their words one by one; they have to be understood as a unit.

kailuowang 13y ago

I thought the best way to murder a person is to make him disappear and that should be pretty easy for an assassinate from the most powerful government. "Off the radar" would be convenient.

lesslaw 13y ago

Or, his murderers sent it as a smoke screen. It doesn't say "an electronically signed email" using Hastings' PGP key, it doesn't say it was DKIM signed. telnet hotmail.com 25 MAIL FROM: micheal.hastings@domain.com RCPT TO: wikileakseditor@hotmail.com Subject: I'm going out for a walk I might be some time. Don't come looking for me. . ^D

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ForrestN 13y ago

At the time it was widely reported that the story he was working on was related to a socialite from Florida named Jill Kelley, but it looks like that isn't true: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-jill-kelley-reporting_n_3502003.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/michael-hastings-ji... I won't pretend I read all of his work, but whenever I saw his name attached to something I was impressed. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3eKaXVe-7A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3eKaXVe-7A

kposehn 13y ago

This email has already been in circulation for quite some time - nothing new here by the look of it.

quackerhacker 13y ago

A more thorough article with pictures: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/email-sent-by-michael-hastings-hours-before-his-death-mentions-a-big-story-and-a-need-to-go-off-the-radar/ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/email-sent-by-mic... Wanted to share this since there was alot of great opinions about what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5943251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5943251

mrschwabe 13y ago

This Hastings incident has interesting parallels to Andrew Breitbart's death. http://rt.com/usa/coroner-arsenic-death-breitbart-456/ http://rt.com/usa/coroner-arsenic-death-breitbart-456/ Namely the fact that both of these men were prominent journalists, living in the US, each with 'big stories' they were working on that have not seen the light of day due to their untimely death shortly after proclaiming they were working on said stories. To compound the dire possibilities, in February the US Justice Department confirmed the existence of legal justification for the assassination of American citizens: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/politics/obama-orders-release-of-drone-memos-to-lawmakers.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/politics/obama-orders-r... Not drawing conclusions here, but I think it's important in this day and age to be diligent in connecting dots and evaluating ALL possibilities.

res0nat0r 13y ago
Meh. Breitbart died of an enlarged heart and also had a major heart attack a few months prior.
groby_b 13y ago
Uh, no. Breitbart was a lot of things, but certainly not a journalist of nearly the same caliber. And given that he claimed to work on "big stories" pretty much all the time, we can take that out of the equation, too. And your disingenuous argument trying to tie drone attacks into that is an utter disservice to truth. To quote from the fine article: "could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible." Whatever your position on this is, you need to stretch mightily to make this into "the government is indiscriminately killing people it doesn't like". So please remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And try to bring at least the tiniest bit of evidence to a post that's rather light on them.
- mrschwabe 13y ago
  So please remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Thank-you, I will remember that. I will also remember that, on occasion, extraordinary crimes happen in secret. And that there exist criminals in this world who have successfully suppressed, destroyed, or hidden evidence of their crimes; and as a result have not - and may not ever be - brought to justice. Note that I wasn't making any claims - just pointing out some relevant information to consider.

ChrisAntaki 13y ago

He really should have sent the story, in the email.

dano416 13y ago

As a mechanic, I have never seen any vechicle burn like that vechicle. I know it has a high pressure EFI system, but it has one way valves and other safety features. It looked like someone poured lighter fluid throughout the car. I imagine the Government has access to odorless flamable fluid? As the my own paranoia, I am not thrilled about even talking about this incident. I'm definetly more concerned about privacy since the NSA reporting. I am also using DuckDuckGo, but it's horrid right now.

JshWright 13y ago
As a firefighter, I've seen many cars burn like that. That's what vehicle fires look like. Car interiors are _full_ of flammable stuff. Seat cushions, plastics, rubber... etc... The energy output of a burning car is really incredible.
- derleth 13y ago
  As an experienced Internet denizen who has seen dozens of conspiracy theories play out, the person I'm responding to is playing a fool's game and will be shouted down and ignored by everyone who wants a neat little conspiratorial story to go with their morning breakfast. Clear, simple explanations are death to conspiracy theories, so they are ignored and the people who make them are vilified at every turn.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    The 'utterly dismissive of the possibility' people are also all over discussions like these, dismissing speculation with arguments that tend to amount to "oh, please!" and "oh, come on!" In fact, these discussions usually amount to amateur physicists insisting that somewhat unusual phenomena are physically impossible (usually citing retired fire chiefs, their uncle who is a mechanic, and 'common sense'), and a bunch of authoritarians replying with "Oh, please - tinfoil hat!" I'm surprised that people don't know how eager cars are to burn esp in light of this recent fire: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-06/news/chi-california-limo-fire-20130506_1_town-car-partition-five-women http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-06/news/chi-calif... There wasn't even a crash and five women burned to death during the time it took to notice the fire, communicate that to the driver, pull over, and open the back door.

NatW 13y ago

(pure speculation) I wonder if he might have signed the email, "...hope to see you all soon" to indicate to others that he was not suicidal.

Angostura 13y ago

I hate to say it, but really if you read the e-mail it does not really appear to be panicked in any way, to me.