11 ms·

Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads

210 points by etiam 12y ago

dmix 12y ago
Probably the closest thing to pre-crime than any other Snowden leak. Canada FTW. This is the side-effect of reaching the goal of 'collect-it-all', the next logical step would be to evolve beyond targeted surveillance, or even honey-pots, and start doing large-scale behavioral analysis of raw traffic patterns, and use those as probable-cause indicators for further surveillance. This is the ultimate promised-land of the surveillance state.
- Lawtonfogle 12y ago
  Don't forget to harvest the data for future blackmail or social discrediting use. Also allow for fake records to be added so that those in power have dirt even on the cleanest challengers.
  - thissideup 12y ago
    Planting evidence digitally seems like a particularly useful ability. If that were to prove difficult, slip a USB drive into someone's bag and tip off the authorities.
- upofadown 12y ago
  The fact that these signals intelligence entities are working so hard on the pre-crime angle causes me some optimism. Because most of the countries of the world are not actually at war and are not likely to go to war there is little value in signals intelligence. The idea that it might be possible to predict when individuals are going to do something bad can be seen as a kind of last gasp at relevance for such entities. If it turns out that such prediction is not possible then signals intelligence will simply be defunded in most of the world.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    The key is going to be figuring how to demonstrate whether it's effective. The only way to scientifically test a prediction is to do nothing and see if it happens and then publish the result either way, but the probability of the government doing that is zero. The government playbook is obvious: They're either going to arrest the person and declare victory even if the prediction would have been wrong, or send in some agitators to provoke the person into committing a crime and then declare victory if they do or pretend it never happened if they don't. One way to prove that it isn't working is if there are still terrorist attacks or high crime rates despite all the spying, but then they'll just want to use the empirical evidence that their spying is ineffective as an excuse to do more spying or some other stupid/invasive/expensive thing. Meanwhile if (as seems to be the trend) crime and terrorism remain at low levels, that proves nothing either way because it could just as easily be a result of something like the elimination of leaded gasoline[1] in most countries outside of the middle east. [1] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li... A possible solution is to require ultimate disclosure of all criminal investigations. Whenever an investigation is closed or effectively abandoned by having less than e.g. 40 hours dedicated to it in a month, require the target to be notified and provided with all of the evidence and notes the same as they would have gotten in discovery if the case had gone to trial. That way people find out about the failures and can see when their tax dollars are going to investigate innocent people.
  - xnull2guest 12y ago
    > most of the countries of the world are not actually at war It's sort of hard to reason about this. War has changed significantly in the sense that were there to be an absolute war between Great Powers the collateral damage would be wholely absolute. That doesn't mean the Great Powers haven't come close to all out armed conflict, or even that they aren't currently engaged in proxy measures to increase their spheres of influence. Take the current crisis in Ukraine. American citizens seem surprised that events are currently unfolding there, as though all of a sudden Russia decided to be a bully, and as if the events in Ukraine unfolded due to activity local to the region. This ignores the context - that NATO and the EU, under the leadership of Germany (who was hacked recently - again - by Russia) with the support of the US has for the past decade pushed hard to absorb former Warsaw Pact nations. It ignores that both Georgia and Moldova before Ukraine were geographically split into breakaway regions and saw West- and Russian- backed separatists, cluster munitions and the rest. It ignores that the West was involved in the funding and training of Euromaiden groups and the Orange Revolution, that Voice of America pushed for political changes in these Baltic states that led to their distancing with Russia. It ignores the conflict between the United States plans to deploy anti-ballistic missile shields in zones technically illegal according to Cold War deals and Russia's responses. It ignores the Russian push to expand influence in parts of Europe and its support of Eurosceptic parties. It ignores the contended areas around the world that both Russia and NATO lay claim to (including areas in the North Arctic, which are important strategic military points). It ignores the stop of disarmament, and in fact rearmament and reassessment of nuclear capability, of nuclear countries (primarily Russia and the United States). It ignores the forming of an alternate world bank between China, Russia, India, and Brazil. It ignores the that the conflict in Syria is both historically grounded as an area of Cold Proxy War and Russia's support for the Syrian Assad regime today. It ignores Russia's ambitions to build stronger ties with the Latin Americas. It ignores the development of hypersonic missile delivery systems by the nuclear proliferated nations (to which there is no known defensive answer, well besides, to small degrees formerly mentioned 'anti-ballistic shields'... say located in the Czech Republic or Poland...), and the sharing of this technology between allies. This is a long, roundabout way of saying that there is absolutely conflict that errs on the side of violent conflict today and that in fact the areas of most activity - Ukraine and other Baltic states, Syria, Venezuela - and where tensions are building like North Korea and parts of Europe are areas that are inherently and intrinsically linked to Cold War spheres of influence and the interests of Great Powers today. The nature of war has changed. It has had to. But nations are still at war. If you don't want to call it that, we don't have to call it that. We can call it state violence or something. The second point to be made here is that most of the capabilities of the intelligence agencies are geopolitical capabilities whose targets are states rather than violent individuals. From the targeting of nationals' cell phones and email records, the hacking of national oil companies and infrastructure, the sabotage of nuclear operations in Iraq and now South Korea, the exfiltration of defense data from the United States and from Israel, the hacking and grounding of the Syrian air force, the cyber attack on Georgia during military intervention - these capabilities are cybermilitary first and cyberpolice second.
xnull5guest 12y ago
Looking at the document it appears that the CSE also collects and actively trawls through web search terms and is in the process of developing the capability to associate collected data not only with IP addresses but with GPS waypoints, other devices close to the target device and associated telephony information.
wintercomes 12y ago
So basically, Canada is tapping HTTP to popular sites and logging the IPs and URLs for later searching and correlation, on undisclosed grounds. For most people that probably means in practice Canada knows who you are what you download, and has it available for searching on a whim. As disgusting as it is, I think the technical among us already assume every spy agency everywhere is doing at least this much behind closed doors, so it's not a shocking revelation. My reaction can best be summarized as sadness. I was never under the impression my home country was somehow better than the states, but it's sad to have evidence of that.
- sandworm 12y ago
  Does anyone here really believe this is limited to Canada? I think it safe to say that the NSA/GCHQ/MIB have similar/identical programs of their own.
  - a3n 12y ago
    I think it's safe to say that those agencies are their own orthogonal state by now.
- derefr 12y ago
  Eh, from the phrasing, it seems that it's entirely concerned with HTTP file-sharing sites, while completely avoiding e.g. BitTorrent search engines. Living in Vancouver BC, I've never encountered anyone using a file-sharing site for anything other than to create an ephemeral URL for oversized email attachments.
- na85 12y ago
  Canada is a member of the "5 eyes" alliance, so it's prudent to assume our government has access to just about any data the NSA/GCHQ has. It's also wise to assume CSIS and CSEC are far more competent and well-equipped than is let on.
- username223 12y ago
  > My reaction can best be summarized as sadness. I was never under the impression my home country was somehow better than the states, ... AFAICT, you're a timber-and-oil operation with a small enough population to make it profitable; Saudi Arabia with snow. If those of us in the States could still live that way, we would. That said, you seem a bit less eager to exploit your Fellow Man, so you're slightly better.
leeoniya 12y ago
HTTPS. Just Do It (R)
- tamersalama 12y ago
  I'm wondering which services hasn't changed to HTTPS by now?
  - pmalynin 12y ago
    Netflix. Do a correlation between IP and watched shows. Flag people who go for "extreme" shows such as say Frontline: United States' Secretes as "dissidents" and apply "appropriate" measures.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  HTTPS would help some, but they could probably generate a profile based on transfer size, right?
ChrisGranger 12y ago
Aren't they going to be catching only the lowest of the low-hanging fruit using a technique like this, or am I giving terrorists too much credit? Wouldn't the ones engaging in actual criminal actions be using encrypted services, encrypted files, VPNs, etc. and not just randomly uploading things in the open from their devices to mainstream websites?
- stainednapkin 12y ago
  If you think these systems are meant to catch terrorists you are truly misinformed.
- endgame 12y ago
  Replicating stainednapkin's [dead] comment: > If you think these systems are meant to catch terrorists you are truly misinformed.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    Fascist Canada? Doesn't sound right.
    - frandroid 12y ago
      Stephen Harper would love nothing better.
    - Raphmedia 12y ago
      Canadian here. Sounds about right. Hopefully some people with ethics and values are still in politics. Hopefully.
    - sitkack 12y ago
      Not fascism, a Public Private Partnership. Win-Win for everyone!
  - csandreasen 12y ago
    ... which is an interesting theory given the fact that the linked slides show them looking through information gathered from videos on bomb-making and abductions.
userbinator 12y ago
an analyst from the agency jokes about how, while hunting for extremists, the LEVITATION system gets clogged with information on innocuous downloads of the musical TV series Glee. What that seems to imply is they have no interest in piracy and that it is not considered "extremist" to be a pirate... which is an interesting position for the government to take - the * AA and various other industry associations would love to have access to this data.
- rudolf0 12y ago
  Signals intelligence agencies have to deal with enough data as it is. They don't have the resources to care about piracy or even the vast majority of drug offenses.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    What about agencies who do have the resources, and who can request that this data be shared with them? Think Parallel Construction.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    If they build some bridges to the *AA it will cost net negative resources to care about piracy.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    You know this because? Once stored it can be farmed to anyone with a mapreduce job to spare. Esp when the investigating agency can take some of the bounty, law enforcement can be a nice profit center.
    - rudolf0 12y ago
      Valid point. We don't know if they're doing that (and I suspect it's probably illegal) on a wide scale (the parallel construction cases appear to be specific help requests made by the FBI/DEA to intelligence agencies), but they certainly could in the future if they're not already.
- 12y ago
kstenerud 12y ago
This is very handy for doing an end-run around constitutional issues. If each country is not allowed to spy on its own citizens, but is free to spy with impunity on others, all you need is a strategic alliance (Canada <-> USA) where each country spies on the other's citizens and passes along information of interest.
- SeanDav 12y ago
  This is already happening, on a large scale. There are numerous posts about this if you are looking for further information.
MichaelGG 12y ago
TLS would do a good first-pass of stopping this, right? And SPDY could defeat size-based profiling by using server push to send enough data to pad things out to make transfers all look the same length. (Say round up a max of 10% to create size "bins".)
- politician 12y ago
  We were doing this 10 years ago, but we modulated the output to make file downloads look like streaming video.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
This is the kind of thing I think of every time someone suggests that there exist sites that "don't need HTTPS". All sites need HTTPS, and all protocols need TLS or equivalent; plaintext should never appear on the wire.
- peeters 12y ago
  While I agree, there's a reason that file sharing and video sites have been slow to take up HTTPS, and that's that it removes the ability for any intermediaries to cache the content. It puts more of a burden on ISPs and services to carry the extra load, whether it be through SSL-terminated peering, or more scaling at the home servers. It may be a necessary burden, but still, it's a pretty significant one. In extreme cases, think of the infrastructure cost of streaming say, a world cup final game over HTTP vs HTTPS.
  - click170 12y ago
    I see that as a good thing, it's an argument for ISPs to finally invest in upgrading their networks, though if Google Fiber wasn't already enough of a reason I doubt this would make a dent.
- politician 12y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you, but HTTPS is irrelevant if a motivated adversary can detect that you've downloaded 5GB over the past 5 minutes from https://www.example.com/disney-frozen-0day-full-length https://www.example.com/disney-frozen-0day-full-length. Without additional protocols, encrypted channels are still subject to traffic analysis.
  - paulannesley 12y ago
    They'll only see 5GB from www.example.com:443, the request path is protected by HTTPS. With some kind of DNS security they'd only see 5GB from 12.23.34.45:443.
    - 12y ago
sandworm 12y ago
After looking at the documents, they seem to be harvesting http get requests. The initial get is sent to the hosting service, which then directs the user to wherever they are keeping a copy of the wanted file. That location changes regularly. Only the initial get, the initial link, would be consistent. If I am right, spoofing the system should be easy. Sending a get doesn't mean you download anything. Sending a few thousand protest gets could mask those you actually follow through on.
- yAnonymous 12y ago
  >Sending a get doesn't mean you download anything. I don't think they care. >Sending a few thousand protest gets could mask those you actually follow through on. Will only get you on more lists. You're implying common sense, but there's very little of that.
logn 12y ago
Apparently they are using Pentaho. See screenshots starting at slide 7: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1510163-cse-presentation-on-the-levitation-project.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1510163-cse-presenta... Pentaho Data Integration Kettle: http://www.pentaho.com/product/data-integration http://www.pentaho.com/product/data-integration , https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle/ https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle/

210 points by etiam 12y ago

dmix 12y ago

Probably the closest thing to pre-crime than any other Snowden leak. Canada FTW. This is the side-effect of reaching the goal of 'collect-it-all', the next logical step would be to evolve beyond targeted surveillance, or even honey-pots, and start doing large-scale behavioral analysis of raw traffic patterns, and use those as probable-cause indicators for further surveillance. This is the ultimate promised-land of the surveillance state.

Lawtonfogle 12y ago
Don't forget to harvest the data for future blackmail or social discrediting use. Also allow for fake records to be added so that those in power have dirt even on the cleanest challengers.
- thissideup 12y ago
  Planting evidence digitally seems like a particularly useful ability. If that were to prove difficult, slip a USB drive into someone's bag and tip off the authorities.
upofadown 12y ago
The fact that these signals intelligence entities are working so hard on the pre-crime angle causes me some optimism. Because most of the countries of the world are not actually at war and are not likely to go to war there is little value in signals intelligence. The idea that it might be possible to predict when individuals are going to do something bad can be seen as a kind of last gasp at relevance for such entities. If it turns out that such prediction is not possible then signals intelligence will simply be defunded in most of the world.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  The key is going to be figuring how to demonstrate whether it's effective. The only way to scientifically test a prediction is to do nothing and see if it happens and then publish the result either way, but the probability of the government doing that is zero. The government playbook is obvious: They're either going to arrest the person and declare victory even if the prediction would have been wrong, or send in some agitators to provoke the person into committing a crime and then declare victory if they do or pretend it never happened if they don't. One way to prove that it isn't working is if there are still terrorist attacks or high crime rates despite all the spying, but then they'll just want to use the empirical evidence that their spying is ineffective as an excuse to do more spying or some other stupid/invasive/expensive thing. Meanwhile if (as seems to be the trend) crime and terrorism remain at low levels, that proves nothing either way because it could just as easily be a result of something like the elimination of leaded gasoline[1] in most countries outside of the middle east. [1] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li... A possible solution is to require ultimate disclosure of all criminal investigations. Whenever an investigation is closed or effectively abandoned by having less than e.g. 40 hours dedicated to it in a month, require the target to be notified and provided with all of the evidence and notes the same as they would have gotten in discovery if the case had gone to trial. That way people find out about the failures and can see when their tax dollars are going to investigate innocent people.
- xnull2guest 12y ago
  > most of the countries of the world are not actually at war It's sort of hard to reason about this. War has changed significantly in the sense that were there to be an absolute war between Great Powers the collateral damage would be wholely absolute. That doesn't mean the Great Powers haven't come close to all out armed conflict, or even that they aren't currently engaged in proxy measures to increase their spheres of influence. Take the current crisis in Ukraine. American citizens seem surprised that events are currently unfolding there, as though all of a sudden Russia decided to be a bully, and as if the events in Ukraine unfolded due to activity local to the region. This ignores the context - that NATO and the EU, under the leadership of Germany (who was hacked recently - again - by Russia) with the support of the US has for the past decade pushed hard to absorb former Warsaw Pact nations. It ignores that both Georgia and Moldova before Ukraine were geographically split into breakaway regions and saw West- and Russian- backed separatists, cluster munitions and the rest. It ignores that the West was involved in the funding and training of Euromaiden groups and the Orange Revolution, that Voice of America pushed for political changes in these Baltic states that led to their distancing with Russia. It ignores the conflict between the United States plans to deploy anti-ballistic missile shields in zones technically illegal according to Cold War deals and Russia's responses. It ignores the Russian push to expand influence in parts of Europe and its support of Eurosceptic parties. It ignores the contended areas around the world that both Russia and NATO lay claim to (including areas in the North Arctic, which are important strategic military points). It ignores the stop of disarmament, and in fact rearmament and reassessment of nuclear capability, of nuclear countries (primarily Russia and the United States). It ignores the forming of an alternate world bank between China, Russia, India, and Brazil. It ignores the that the conflict in Syria is both historically grounded as an area of Cold Proxy War and Russia's support for the Syrian Assad regime today. It ignores Russia's ambitions to build stronger ties with the Latin Americas. It ignores the development of hypersonic missile delivery systems by the nuclear proliferated nations (to which there is no known defensive answer, well besides, to small degrees formerly mentioned 'anti-ballistic shields'... say located in the Czech Republic or Poland...), and the sharing of this technology between allies. This is a long, roundabout way of saying that there is absolutely conflict that errs on the side of violent conflict today and that in fact the areas of most activity - Ukraine and other Baltic states, Syria, Venezuela - and where tensions are building like North Korea and parts of Europe are areas that are inherently and intrinsically linked to Cold War spheres of influence and the interests of Great Powers today. The nature of war has changed. It has had to. But nations are still at war. If you don't want to call it that, we don't have to call it that. We can call it state violence or something. The second point to be made here is that most of the capabilities of the intelligence agencies are geopolitical capabilities whose targets are states rather than violent individuals. From the targeting of nationals' cell phones and email records, the hacking of national oil companies and infrastructure, the sabotage of nuclear operations in Iraq and now South Korea, the exfiltration of defense data from the United States and from Israel, the hacking and grounding of the Syrian air force, the cyber attack on Georgia during military intervention - these capabilities are cybermilitary first and cyberpolice second.

xnull5guest 12y ago

Looking at the document it appears that the CSE also collects and actively trawls through web search terms and is in the process of developing the capability to associate collected data not only with IP addresses but with GPS waypoints, other devices close to the target device and associated telephony information.

wintercomes 12y ago

So basically, Canada is tapping HTTP to popular sites and logging the IPs and URLs for later searching and correlation, on undisclosed grounds. For most people that probably means in practice Canada knows who you are what you download, and has it available for searching on a whim. As disgusting as it is, I think the technical among us already assume every spy agency everywhere is doing at least this much behind closed doors, so it's not a shocking revelation. My reaction can best be summarized as sadness. I was never under the impression my home country was somehow better than the states, but it's sad to have evidence of that.

sandworm 12y ago
Does anyone here really believe this is limited to Canada? I think it safe to say that the NSA/GCHQ/MIB have similar/identical programs of their own.
- a3n 12y ago
  I think it's safe to say that those agencies are their own orthogonal state by now.
derefr 12y ago
Eh, from the phrasing, it seems that it's entirely concerned with HTTP file-sharing sites, while completely avoiding e.g. BitTorrent search engines. Living in Vancouver BC, I've never encountered anyone using a file-sharing site for anything other than to create an ephemeral URL for oversized email attachments.
na85 12y ago
Canada is a member of the "5 eyes" alliance, so it's prudent to assume our government has access to just about any data the NSA/GCHQ has. It's also wise to assume CSIS and CSEC are far more competent and well-equipped than is let on.
username223 12y ago
> My reaction can best be summarized as sadness. I was never under the impression my home country was somehow better than the states, ... AFAICT, you're a timber-and-oil operation with a small enough population to make it profitable; Saudi Arabia with snow. If those of us in the States could still live that way, we would. That said, you seem a bit less eager to exploit your Fellow Man, so you're slightly better.

leeoniya 12y ago

HTTPS. Just Do It (R)

tamersalama 12y ago
I'm wondering which services hasn't changed to HTTPS by now?
- pmalynin 12y ago
  Netflix. Do a correlation between IP and watched shows. Flag people who go for "extreme" shows such as say Frontline: United States' Secretes as "dissidents" and apply "appropriate" measures.
MichaelGG 12y ago
HTTPS would help some, but they could probably generate a profile based on transfer size, right?

ChrisGranger 12y ago

Aren't they going to be catching only the lowest of the low-hanging fruit using a technique like this, or am I giving terrorists too much credit? Wouldn't the ones engaging in actual criminal actions be using encrypted services, encrypted files, VPNs, etc. and not just randomly uploading things in the open from their devices to mainstream websites?

stainednapkin 12y ago
If you think these systems are meant to catch terrorists you are truly misinformed.
endgame 12y ago
Replicating stainednapkin's [dead] comment: > If you think these systems are meant to catch terrorists you are truly misinformed.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Fascist Canada? Doesn't sound right.
  - frandroid 12y ago
    Stephen Harper would love nothing better.
  - Raphmedia 12y ago
    Canadian here. Sounds about right. Hopefully some people with ethics and values are still in politics. Hopefully.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    Not fascism, a Public Private Partnership. Win-Win for everyone!
- csandreasen 12y ago
  ... which is an interesting theory given the fact that the linked slides show them looking through information gathered from videos on bomb-making and abductions.

userbinator 12y ago

an analyst from the agency jokes about how, while hunting for extremists, the LEVITATION system gets clogged with information on innocuous downloads of the musical TV series Glee. What that seems to imply is they have no interest in piracy and that it is not considered "extremist" to be a pirate... which is an interesting position for the government to take - the * AA and various other industry associations would love to have access to this data.

rudolf0 12y ago
Signals intelligence agencies have to deal with enough data as it is. They don't have the resources to care about piracy or even the vast majority of drug offenses.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  What about agencies who do have the resources, and who can request that this data be shared with them? Think Parallel Construction.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  If they build some bridges to the *AA it will cost net negative resources to care about piracy.
- sitkack 12y ago
  You know this because? Once stored it can be farmed to anyone with a mapreduce job to spare. Esp when the investigating agency can take some of the bounty, law enforcement can be a nice profit center.
  - rudolf0 12y ago
    Valid point. We don't know if they're doing that (and I suspect it's probably illegal) on a wide scale (the parallel construction cases appear to be specific help requests made by the FBI/DEA to intelligence agencies), but they certainly could in the future if they're not already.
12y ago

kstenerud 12y ago

This is very handy for doing an end-run around constitutional issues. If each country is not allowed to spy on its own citizens, but is free to spy with impunity on others, all you need is a strategic alliance (Canada <-> USA) where each country spies on the other's citizens and passes along information of interest.

SeanDav 12y ago
This is already happening, on a large scale. There are numerous posts about this if you are looking for further information.

MichaelGG 12y ago

TLS would do a good first-pass of stopping this, right? And SPDY could defeat size-based profiling by using server push to send enough data to pad things out to make transfers all look the same length. (Say round up a max of 10% to create size "bins".)

politician 12y ago
We were doing this 10 years ago, but we modulated the output to make file downloads look like streaming video.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

This is the kind of thing I think of every time someone suggests that there exist sites that "don't need HTTPS". All sites need HTTPS, and all protocols need TLS or equivalent; plaintext should never appear on the wire.

peeters 12y ago
While I agree, there's a reason that file sharing and video sites have been slow to take up HTTPS, and that's that it removes the ability for any intermediaries to cache the content. It puts more of a burden on ISPs and services to carry the extra load, whether it be through SSL-terminated peering, or more scaling at the home servers. It may be a necessary burden, but still, it's a pretty significant one. In extreme cases, think of the infrastructure cost of streaming say, a world cup final game over HTTP vs HTTPS.
- click170 12y ago
  I see that as a good thing, it's an argument for ISPs to finally invest in upgrading their networks, though if Google Fiber wasn't already enough of a reason I doubt this would make a dent.
politician 12y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you, but HTTPS is irrelevant if a motivated adversary can detect that you've downloaded 5GB over the past 5 minutes from https://www.example.com/disney-frozen-0day-full-length https://www.example.com/disney-frozen-0day-full-length. Without additional protocols, encrypted channels are still subject to traffic analysis.
- paulannesley 12y ago
  They'll only see 5GB from www.example.com:443, the request path is protected by HTTPS. With some kind of DNS security they'd only see 5GB from 12.23.34.45:443.
  - 12y ago

sandworm 12y ago

After looking at the documents, they seem to be harvesting http get requests. The initial get is sent to the hosting service, which then directs the user to wherever they are keeping a copy of the wanted file. That location changes regularly. Only the initial get, the initial link, would be consistent. If I am right, spoofing the system should be easy. Sending a get doesn't mean you download anything. Sending a few thousand protest gets could mask those you actually follow through on.

yAnonymous 12y ago
>Sending a get doesn't mean you download anything. I don't think they care. >Sending a few thousand protest gets could mask those you actually follow through on. Will only get you on more lists. You're implying common sense, but there's very little of that.

logn 12y ago

Apparently they are using Pentaho. See screenshots starting at slide 7: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1510163-cse-presentation-on-the-levitation-project.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1510163-cse-presenta... Pentaho Data Integration Kettle: http://www.pentaho.com/product/data-integration http://www.pentaho.com/product/data-integration , https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle/ https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle/