» Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows 29/10/15 10:31 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks

October 29, 2015

» Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows
29/10/15 10:31 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . PHILADELPHIA — The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching. So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televi...

» How an FBI Informant Ordered the Hack of British Tabloid 'The Sun'
29/10/15 10:29 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Motherboard RSS Feed. In July of 2011, the website for the British tabloid The Sun announced that media mogul Rupert Murdoch had been found "dead in his garden." It was a lie, of course; a fake article pla...

» Scathing indictment of FBI incompetence: History of agency reveals trail of backbiting, ineptitude | Books and Literature
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mikenova shared this story . Each week, the FBI sends reporters an email of “top 10 news stories” that it hopes will hit the headlines. The news releases usually highlight crooks nabbed, terrorism plots foiled and convictions...

» Is The FBI Dumb, Evil, Or Just Incompetent?
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mikenova shared this story from TechCrunch. Your government is worried. The world is “going dark.” Once upon a time, telephones were the only way to talk to someone far away, and the authorities could wiretap any phone they w...

» FBI Transparency - The Federal Bureau Of Incompetence
29/10/15 10:19 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe , who is the best cityside columnist in American newspapers, pretty much has had it with the FBI. Actually, he pretty much had it with the FBI while covering how the Boston of...

» Former FBI Agent Robert Lustyik Sentenced in Bribery Case
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mikenova shared this story from Patch. Sleepy Hollow resident, and former FBI agent, Robert Lustyik was sentenced Monday to five years in prison on bribery charges, according to federal prosecutors. Lustyik pleaded guilty in December, 20...

» Robert Lustyik - Google Search
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mikenova shared this story . Robert Lustyik, Sleepy Hollow 'spy hunter,' sentenced in ... <a href="http://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/.../72242916/" rel="nofollow">www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/.../72242916/</a> Cached Th...

» Retired FBI Agent Accused Of Lying In Whitey Bulger Trial
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mikenova shared this story from Crime - The Huffington Post. BOSTON -- From the time he found the rifle used to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. to the time he personally cuffed the underboss of the Boston Mafia, it sounded like Bob Fi...

» fbi persecutes its whistleblowers - Google Search
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mikenova shared this story . FBI's Culture of Hostility Toward Whistleblowers—And How ... <a href="https://shadowproof.com/.../the-" rel="nofollow">https://shadowproof.com/.../the-</a> fbis -culture-of-hostility-toward-...

» Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers | The Nation
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mikenova shared this story from The Nation. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) In the annals of national security, the Obama administration will long be remembered for its unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has em...

» FBI's Culture of Hostility Toward Whistleblowers—And How Justice Department Permits Policy of Retaliation
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mikenova shared this story from Shadowproof. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on FBI retaliation against whistleblowers, FBI associate deputy director Kevin Perkins declared, “We will not and do not tolerate retaliation ...

» FBI Revamping Whistleblower Rules - WSJ
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mikenova shared this story . WASHINGTON—The Federal Bureau of Investigation is revamping its whistleblower rules to make it easier—and potentially lucrative—for agents and employees to report misconduct within the agenc...

» dr steven j hatfill - Google Search
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mikenova shared this story . Scientist Is Paid Millions by U.S. in Anthrax Suit - NYTimes ... <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/.../28" rel="nofollow">www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/.../28</a> hatfill .html Similar The N...

» HEAD of the FBI's Anthrax Investigation Says the Whole Thing Was a SHAM Washington's Blog
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mikenova shared this story from Washington's Blog. Agent In Charge of Amerithrax Investigation Blows the Whistle The FBI head agent in charge of the anthrax investigation – Richard Lambert – has just filed a federal ...

» fbi anthrax investigation - Google Search
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mikenova shared this story . FBI — Amerithrax Investigation <a href="https://www" rel="nofollow">https://www</a>. fbi .gov/.../ anthrax -amerithra... Cached Federal Bureau of Investigation Loading... On February 19, 201...

» fbi cointelpro program - Google Search
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mikenova shared this story . FBI — COINTELPRO <a href="https://vault" rel="nofollow">https://vault</a>. fbi .gov/cointel-pro Cached Federal Bureau of Investigation Loading... COINTELPRO The FBI began COINTELPRO —s...

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mikenova shared this story . COINTELPRO - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/</a> COINTELPRO Cached Wikipedia Loading... FBI records show tha...

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mikenova shared this story . Informant in terror case paid $41000 by FBI - Star Tribune <a href="http://www.startribune.com/" rel="nofollow">www.startribune.com/</a> informant -in...41... fbi /320929811/ Cached Star Tribune L...

» The Murky World Of FBI Informants | On Point with Tom Ashbrook
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mikenova shared this story from On Point with Tom Ashbrook. New Yorker : Assets and Liabilities – “Nobody knows how many confidential informants are working for the F.B.I. at any time, but in a 2008 budget request the bu...

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mikenova shared this story . Exclusive: FBI allowed informants to commit 5,600 crimes <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/.../" rel="nofollow">www.usatoday.com/story/news/.../</a> fbi - informant .../2613305/ Cached S...

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mikenova shared this story . Special Report: A Review of the FBI's Handling of ... <a href="https://oig.justice.gov/special/s0606/chapter4.htm" rel="nofollow">https://oig.justice.gov/special/s0606/chapter4.htm</a> Cached The ...

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» fbi is incompetent - Google Search
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mikenova shared this story . FBI Transparency - The Federal Bureau Of Incompetence <a href="http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/.../" rel="nofollow">www.esquire.com/news-politics/.../</a> fbi -transparency-041114/ Cached Sim...

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Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows
Thursday October 29th, 2015 at 10:31 AM

PHILADELPHIA — The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching.

So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.

They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.

The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as director.

“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”

Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a bookwritten by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence.

Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed. Some remained committed to antiwar causes, while others, like John and Bonnie Raines, decided that the risky burglary would be their final act of protest against the Vietnam War and other government actions before they moved on with their lives.

“We didn’t need attention, because we had done what needed to be done,” said Mr. Raines, 80, who had, with his wife, arranged for family members to raise the couple’s three children if they were sent to prison. “The ’60s were over. We didn’t have to hold on to what we did back then.”

A Meticulous Plan

The burglary was the idea of William C. Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College and a fixture of antiwar protests in Philadelphia, a city that by the early 1970s had become a white-hot center of the peace movement. Mr. Davidon was frustrated that years of organized demonstrations seemed to have had little impact.

In the summer of 1970, months after President Richard M. Nixon announced the United States’ invasion of Cambodia, Mr. Davidon began assembling a team from a group of activists whose commitment and discretion he had come to trust.

The group — originally nine, before one member dropped out — concluded that it would be too risky to try to break into the F.B.I. office in downtown Philadelphia, where security was tight. They soon settled on the bureau’s satellite office in Media, in an apartment building across the street from the county courthouse.

That decision carried its own risks: Nobody could be certain whether the satellite office would have any documents about the F.B.I.’s surveillance of war protesters, or whether a security alarm would trip as soon as the burglars opened the door.

The group spent months casing the building, driving past it at all times of the night and memorizing the routines of its residents.

“We knew when people came home from work, when their lights went out, when they went to bed, when they woke up in the morning,” said Mr. Raines, who was a professor of religion at Temple University at the time. “We were quite certain that we understood the nightly activities in and around that building.”

But it wasn’t until Ms. Raines got inside the office that the group grew confident that it did not have a security system. Weeks before the burglary, she visited the office posing as a Swarthmore College student researching job opportunities for women at the F.B.I.

The burglary itself went off largely without a hitch, except for when Mr. Forsyth, the designated lock-picker, had to break into a different entrance than planned when he discovered that the F.B.I. had installed a lock on the main door that he could not pick. He used a crowbar to break the second lock, a deadbolt above the doorknob.

After packing the documents into suitcases, the burglars piled into getaway cars and rendezvoused at a farmhouse to sort through what they had stolen. To their relief, they soon discovered that the bulk of it was hard evidence of the F.B.I.’s spying on political groups. Identifying themselves as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the F.B.I., the burglars sent select documents to several newspaper reporters. Two weeks after the burglary, Ms. Medsger wrote the first article based on the files, after the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to get The Post to return the documents.

Other news organizations that had received the documents, including The New York Times, followed with their own reports.

Ms. Medsger’s article cited what was perhaps the most damning document from the cache, a 1970 memorandum that offered a glimpse into Hoover’s obsession with snuffing out dissent. The document urged agents to step up their interviews of antiwar activists and members of dissident student groups.

“It will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox,” the message from F.B.I. headquarters said. Another document, signed by Hoover himself, revealed widespread F.B.I. surveillance of black student groups on college campuses.

But the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro.

Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters who received the documents understood the meaning of the term, and it was not until several years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl Stern obtained more files from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro — shorthand for Counterintelligence Program — were revealed.

Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.

“It wasn’t just spying on Americans,” said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. “The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.”

Senator Church’s investigation in the mid-1970s revealed still more about the extent of decades of F.B.I. abuses, and led to greater congressional oversight of the F.B.I. and other American intelligence agencies. The Church Committee’s final report about the domestic surveillance was blunt. “Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected,” it read.

By the time the committee released its report, Hoover was dead and the empire he had built at the F.B.I. was being steadily dismantled. The roughly 200 agents he had assigned to investigate the Media burglary came back empty-handed, and the F.B.I. closed the case on March 11, 1976 — three days after the statute of limitations for burglary charges had expired.

Michael P. Kortan, a spokesman for the F.B.I., said that “a number of events during that era, including the Media burglary, contributed to changes to how the F.B.I. identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the F.B.I.’s intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.”

According to Ms. Medsger’s book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.,” only one of the burglars was on the F.B.I.’s final list of possible suspects before the case was closed.

A Retreat Into Silence

The eight burglars rarely spoke to one another while the F.B.I. investigation was proceeding and never again met as a group.

Mr. Davidon died late last year from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He had planned to speak publicly about his role in the break-in, but three of the burglars have chosen to remain anonymous.

Among those who have come forward — Mr. Forsyth, the Raineses and a man named Bob Williamson — there is some wariness of how their decision will be viewed.

The passage of years has worn some of the edges off the once radical political views of John and Bonnie Raines. But they said they felt a kinship toward Mr. Snowden, whose revelations about N.S.A. spying they see as a bookend to their own disclosures so long ago.

They know some people will criticize them for having taken part in something that, if they had been caught and convicted, might have separated them from their children for years. But they insist they would never have joined the team of burglars had they not been convinced they would get away with it.

“It looks like we’re terribly reckless people,” Mr. Raines said. “But there was absolutely no one in Washington — senators, congressmen, even the president — who dared hold J. Edgar Hoover to accountability.”

“It became pretty obvious to us,” he said, “that if we don’t do it, nobody will.”

Read the whole story

· · · · · · ·

How an FBI Informant Ordered the Hack of British Tabloid 'The Sun'
Thursday October 29th, 2015 at 10:29 AM

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In July of 2011, the website for the British tabloid The Sun announced that media mogul Rupert Murdoch had been found "dead in his garden."

It was a lie, of course; a fake article planted by hackers who spent a week flitting in and out of the newspaper's servers. The cyberattack was part of a campaign against Rupert Murdoch's British media empire in the midst of the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

It was perpetrated, like so many of these things, by a group of anonymous online hackers. Except one of their leaders was an FBI informant.

*****

Hector Xavier Monsegur, also known online as "Sabu," was caught by the FBI in June of 2011 for a litany of hacking-related offenses and, within hours, began cooperating with authorities in hopes of receiving a lenient sentence.

Now, never-before-published FBI records and exclusive interviews detail how the informant rallied other hackers to attack various News Corp. interests, including The Sun, at a time that the FBI has said it was tracking all of Monsegur's online activity.

A 12-count indictment charged against Monsegur carried with it a maximum sentence of 124 years in prison, but he promptly pleaded guilty and began assisting the feds. US District Court Judge Loretta Preska credited the informant's "extraordinary cooperation" when she let him walk out of a Manhattan courtroom a free man at his sentencing hearing in late May.

Monsegur's assistance was beneficial to the DOJ closing a handful of cyber cases. However, while working with the FBI, Monsegur dove back into his circle of Anonymous members to begin plotting attacks against a wide range of global targets.

Sealed documents from the government's case against Jeremy Hammond that were leaked to journalists at Motherboard and the Daily Dot earlier this year detail how Monsegur spearheaded cyberattacks against FBI contractors and computer servers in dozens of foreign countries, includingBrazilian government websites, all while under the constant supervision of law enforcement handlers.

And for a week shortly after his arrest, he was privy to the anti-Murdoch campaign waged by Anonymous, according to the documents obtained by Motherboard.

The successful attack involved LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous led by Monsegur, gaining access to the tabloid’s website, publishing a fake obituary announcing the death of Murdoch, and subsequently redirecting the site to LulzSec’s Twitter profile.

Screenshot from the FBI documents obtained by Motherboard.

Software placed on Monsegur's computer gave the FBI real-time access to chat rooms where the attack against The Sun and others were hatched. It's unclear if the plot was a sting gone too far, or if the FBI was even aware that one of its informants had organized an attack on a foreign newspaper.

While the FBI has declined repeated requests for comment on the specifics of this case, the Department of Justice and US attorneys asserted at Monsegur’s sentencing that the informant’s online activities were constantly monitored, and that FBI agents were fully debriefed after each of his marathon chat sessions. Both the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and an assistant speaking on Rupert Murdoch's behalf also declined to comment on this story.

A representative for The Sun who is familiar with the attack said the paper was never warned by American authorities that its website was under attack for a week, nor that an individual under FBI supervision had orchestrated the attacks. “It was not the FBI who tipped us off about the hack,” a spokesperson for The Sun told Motherboard in a phone conversation.

“In 2011, the online team wasn’t very big,” the spokesperson explained, adding that the tabloid’s IT department had learned of the defacement through its own monitoring, and due to the false obituary’s rapid spread through social media. The Sun declined to comment any further with regards to damages, security audits, or expense figures it ostensibly incurred as a result of LulzSec’s attack.

"What’s most interesting to me is how the FBI, DOJ, and perhaps others used Monsegur, or ‘Sabu,’ to catch other hackers,” said Michael Ratner, an attorney for WikiLeaks who is familiar with the case, in a phone interview with Motherboard. “Who should be on trial here isn’t Hammond, and isn’t Sabu, but the federal government which used this group of hackers to penetrate other websites as well as foreign countries.”

*****

Former members of Anonymous corroborated to Motherboard that a lone hacktivist discovered an exploit on The Sun's network in early July 2011 and soon after sought out other Anons to see if the group should collectively take charge.

In an Internet Relay Chat channel aptly named #!sunnydays, logs saved by Monsegur's FBI-provided computer show the informant intended to maximize the impact of the hack: Not only did he express his intentions to embarrass Murdoch, but to peripherally sabotage the credibility of various outlets by spreading misinformation to a handful of eager journalists.

Hacktivists first began plotting in #!sunnydays on July 12, 2011, and were in and out of The Sun's server for nearly a week before the operation pinnacled with the group publishing Murdoch's fake obituary on July 18. Only a few Anons were in #!sunnydays that evening, and the hack might never had occurred if one of them hadn't decided on his or her own to publish the death notice before the group lost access to the site.

“The Sun is setting UK now. So wat do?” one Anon asked at 8:08 that evening, according to the timestamp on Monsegur's detailed chat logs.

The group had yet to prepare any sort of statement about the hack, and had already botched the operation earlier by getting themselves temporarily locked out of The Sun's servers in the midst of what was now a six-day-old ordeal.

A half-hour later, Monsegur began participating in the conversation and suggested that the group “fuck murdoch up.” Within minutes, the most-followed Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous had announced the defacement.

Image: Twitter

"We have joy we have fun we will mess up Murdoch's Sun," @AnonymousIRC tweeted. "Hi Rupert! Have fun tomorrow at the Parliament! AntiSec."

"Not so fun to get hacked Mr. Murdoch, is it? u MAD?" another account tweeted. "Also, why'd you use #palladium?"

Logs from #!sunnydays suggest Monsegur was upset at first that the hack had been so hastily revealed to the public with an impromptu tweet, but soon started taking control of the operation. (Note: Users' handles have been redacted from chat logs to protect the identify of sources who corroborated the substance of the chats to Motherboard and who fear legal action.)

Instantly the obit made its ways across the web, and soon was featured on a live CNN newscast. As Monsegur considered his next move, the obit was read the world over.

"Murdoch, aged 80, has said to have ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night, passing out in the early hours of the morning," read a portion ofthe phony report. “Officers on the scene report a broken glass, a box of vintage wine, and what seems to be a family album strewn across the floor, containing images from days gone by; some containing hand-painted portraits of Murdoch in his early days, donning a top hat and monocle.”

Image: The Register

The over-the-top obituary was as believable as it was subtle, and the inclusion of handles used by two members of LulzSec—"topiary", aka Jake Davis, and "palladium," aka Donncha O'Cearbhaill, according to criminal indictments—led most anyone following the hijinks of LulzSec to conclude that the Anonymous offshoot had been resurrected just weeks after rebranding as AntiSec.

Monsegur and his comrades couldn't have picked a better time to embarrass the publisher: Murdoch was coincidentally scheduled to appear before British parliament only hours later to testify with regards to the phone-hacking scandal that led to the shuttering of NOTW after 168 years of publishing.

“It's the right timing,” one Anon wrote in #!sunnydays. “Media will know of this tomorrow when they report about the hearing. it’s perfect imo [in my opinion].”

Additionally, a crudely drawn comic strip circulated by LulzSec also acknowledged rather openly the group's latest attack.

Nevertheless, Monsegur attempted to elevate the group's efforts beyond what they actually had accomplished.

Soon, the informant began to make grandiose claims on Twitter, announcing that Anonymous had pilfered a trove of correspondence from the shuttering News of the World and suggesting that no one at News Corp. was safe from the wrath of the hacktivists.

Days earlier, an Anon inside of The Sun's servers found the encrypted password for a user of the site that turned out to be embattled and outgoing News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks. Although the credentials hadn't been cracked, and were thus unusable, Monsegur wanted to make the potential damage from the anti-Murdoch op seem more colossal. After the defacement went live on a moment's notice, Monsegur tweeted her login info.

"Sun/ News of the World OWNED. We're sitting on their emails. Press release tomorrow," Monsegurtweeted from his Sabu account. "In the meantime check: new-times.co.uk/sun/ #antisec."

As his Twitter account blew up with activity, the informant plotted in #!sunnydays about what to do next, and privately approached a variety of journalists to push them towards coverage.

"Here goes the shit storm," Monsegur typed in #!sunnydays after posting Brooke's encrypted credentials on Twitter. "Lets fucking terrify them."

Although Monsegur doesn't appear to have performed any actual hacking himself during this operation, interviews and chat logs show he offered technical assistance and largely orchestrated the PR of the prank.

But in addition to announcing the defacement to his Twitter followers, Monsegur continued to claim that his hacking crew had taken ownership of a trove of Murdoch-related emails.

For days Monsegur teased journalists with the promise of handing over News of the World’s compromised emails. Really, though, he was wrestling with the idea of sabotaging reporters by presenting them with phony evidence: NATO-related emails the crew had garnered previously in a hack against FBI security contractor ManTech.

In one exchange, Monsegur specifically mentioned targeting a journalist who'd reported on the group's release of Rebekah Brooks's hashed credentials, Kevin Rawlinson of The Independent, with a disinformation campaign.

“I, like just about everyone else, didn't know at the time that Sabu was working for the FBI,” Rawlinson told Motherboard in an email. “He was evidently quite effective. I’m not sure I’d agree that he set out to make a fool of me or damage my career."

"Like most journalists, I’m passed information by people all the time, much of which turns out not to be all it seems," he added. "If he’d tried to pass off falsified emails, I would’ve checked them out and, most likely, quite quickly identified them as fakes. To be honest, one phone call would usually expose a fabricated email.”

*****

As intricate as Anonymous' plans were, gaining access to The Sun's servers didn't require much effort aside from taking advantage of a well-known exploit available in practically any amateur hacker's toolkit.

The conspirators used a tactic called a Local File Inclusion, or LFI, to exploit a glitch in PHP, the programming language used by more than three-quarters of online applications, according to a 2012 report by security firm Imperva, making it, in their words, “a favorite choice for hackers.”

Novice penetration testers can determine with free software if a website uses any vulnerable versions of PHP and then can attempt to trick the targeted network into executing malicious code by sending its servers instructions that exploit the glitch.

"LFI is a gaping hole in the security of a webserver, caused by the programmer being a fucking massive retard," one of the Anonymous hackers that exploited The Sun’s LFI vulnerability told Motherboard. The hacker also produced a GIF, in which an LFI hack is simulated, and explained the procedure:

"First, the hacker identifies the vulnerability (shown by requesting the /etc/passwd file in the browser), then gives the vulnerable page and parameter to the automated script which tests a number of methods to get the hacker a shell on the server," the source said. “Once a shell on the server is obtained, the hacker can execute commands, elevate privileges to root (super user/admin account), steal or modify data on the server, etc."

Anonymous executed an LFI hack that allowed them access to The Sun's web server. From there, the group uploaded a number of PHP scripts that, if exploited, could give them access to the tabloid's publishing system.

“Multiple shells were uploaded,” the Anon told Motherboard, “as is normal.” According to the hacker, who asked to remain nameless over fear of prosecution, Anons uploaded several PHP scripts to the server in hopes that, should an administrator spot one, others might go unnoticed. “It's a standard enough trick,” the hacker said. “Backdoor different things, put backdoors everywhere.”

At one point in the campaign, however, Anonymous almost lost its chance at hacking The Sun. According to the leaked chat logs, an attempt to root The Sun's servers ended with Anonymous being indefinitely locked out.

"It'll come back," an optimistic Monsegur typed in IRC on July 13. "lets just assess what we got. lets imagine we cant root it. what do we have access to? any dbs [databases]? intranet? defacement?"

After hours of panic, the breached networks appeared to have been reset with the group's backdoors still intact. Several days later, Murdoch's phony obituary went live.

*****

The hack was one of the first successful operations carried out by AntiSec in which Monsegur acted as an informant. For days he dragged the project on, insisting on attempting to humiliate other members of the media once Murdoch had had his time in the collective's crosshairs.

Having aided in the FBI’s purposes to arrest members of LulzSec and convict its most wanted cybercriminal, Jeremy Hammond, Monsegur was highly praised by federal prosecutors and Judge Loretta Preska for his swift decision to become an informant, for providing “unprecedented access to LulzSec,” and for having helped prevent at least 300 other cyberattacks aimed at both domestic and foreign targets.

Despite using the #!sunnydays chatlogs to identify suspects in an international string of LulzSec arrests, the FBI does not appear to have taken action to prevent the actual hack itself, along with a host of other cyberattacks organized by its informant.

Without a doubt, Monsegur's grudge with Murdoch didn't end with the campaign against The Sun: Nearly a year later, in March 2012, Fox News would be the first outlet to report that Jeremy Hammond and others had been arrested with the help of Monsegur, putting a name and face on the "Sabu" alias for the first time.

Correction 10/14: This story initially identified the hacker "palladium," also known as Donnacha O'Cearbhaill, as another person who was indicted with O'Cearbhaill in 2013. We regret the error.

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Scathing indictment of FBI incompetence: History of agency reveals trail of backbiting, ineptitude | Books and Literature
Thursday October 29th, 2015 at 10:23 AM

Each week, the FBI sends reporters an email of “top 10 news stories” that it hopes will hit the headlines. The news releases usually highlight crooks nabbed, terrorism plots foiled and convictions notched up by the straight-shooting, gang-busting agents from the world’s most famous law enforcement agency.

It’s doubtful any of the cases the FBI likes to publicize made it into Tim Weiner’s absorbing “Enemies: A History of the FBI.” It is a scathing indictment of the FBI as a secret intelligence service that has bent and broken the law for decades in the pursuit of communists, terrorists and spies. Worse, in his view, the bureau is often grossly inept. As Thomas Kean, Republican chair of the 9/11 Commission, declared in 2004: “You have a record of an agency that’s failed, and it’s failed again and again and again.”

Weiner eviscerates the FBI in a sweeping narrative that is all the more entertaining because it is so redolent with screw-ups and scandals. Like his best-selling last book, “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA,” which documented misdeeds at the CIA, this is a mordant counter-history. It is a compendium of illegal arrests and detentions, break-ins and burglaries, wiretapping and surveillance. Weiner calls it a chronicle of “the tug-of-war between national security and civil liberties,” but it’s clear to him which side won. The CIA denounced his last book. The FBI won’t give him any medals either.

Weiner’s genius is finding recurring threads that weave through the decades. Here he sees the FBI employ the same illegal tactics, and often the same hysterical rhetoric, against everyone from 1920s anarchists to al-Qaida. Much of the story is familiar, but Weiner has mined recently released oral histories and declassified documents, and gleaned grime-encrusted nuggets by the cartload. Presumably the FBI has done some useful things over the years, but they get short shrift here. The Hollywood-beloved takedowns of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde, for example, merit one sentence in this 500-plus-page tome. That is one sentence total, not one sentence each.

The sordid story starts in 1908, when the Justice Department set up an investigative unit to help track suspected subversives. New laws banned anarchists from living in the United States. By 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson warned that terrorists and anarchists were the “gravest threats against our national peace and safety,” the bureau had begun rounding up radicals, wiretapping conversations and opening mail.

Enter J. Edgar Hoover, who would serve as the FBI’s imperious director for nearly five decades. Inevitably, Weiner weaves his tale around Hoover’s endless obsessions and hates, and his disdain for the Bill of Rights. Early on, in 1920, determined to crush a “Communist conspiracy,” Hoover presided over the so-called Palmer Raids that netted up to 10,000 people without warrants or due process, the biggest mass arrests in U.S. history. Most suspects ultimately were released.

But the pattern was set. The bureau began spying on thousands of suspected radicals, burgling their offices and homes, intercepting their mail and tapping their phones at Hoover’s whim. No one was immune, including members of Congress. By the 1930s, bugging, blackmail and break-ins were mainstays of FBI investigations. The bureau tripled in size during World War II, when it began operating overseas for the first time to collect intelligence.

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Hoover was determined to turn the FBI into a global espionage organization after the war. But President Harry Truman warned aides that Hoover was “building up a Gestapo.” Furious when Truman authorized creation of the CIA in 1947 – one of the few times Hoover lost an internecine battle – he barred anyone who had ever worked for the FBI from joining the new spy service. He spread rumors that William J. Donovan, a key rival, was a Communist sympathizer, while Donovan whispered that Hoover – who had led a malicious crusade to expel gays from government – was a secret homosexual.

Weiner doesn’t buy the Hoover rumors. Americans know Hoover, he writes, “only as a caricature: a tyrant in a tutu, a cross-dressing crank. None of that is true.” He argues that Hoover had a sexless relationship with his constant companion, Clyde Tolson, mostly because no one can prove otherwise. Overall, he offers grudging respect for the astute cunning and iron will of a man he calls “an American Machiavelli.”

Hoover became his most paranoid, and most dangerous, during the early Cold War. Soviet spy rings were real enough. But Hoover fueled the nation’s anti-Communist frenzy, warning that millions of Russian children were training as “suicide paratroopers,” and that a secret army of domestic Communists secretly plotted to use “weapons of mass destruction,” then a new concept, to destroy America. His solution? He proposed detaining 25,000 political suspects in military stockades, setting up secret prisons for U.S. citizens, suspending the writ of habeas corpus, and so on.

During the 1960s, the FBI illegally wiretapped and spied relentlessly on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, convinced they were under Moscow’s direction, but ignored the predatory Ku Klux Klan, the most violent U.S. terrorist group of the century. Hoover balked at investigating the Mafia, but happily built voluminous files on the sex lives of John F. Kennedy and others.

Hoover died in his bed in 1972, and Congress belatedly imposed oversight and reforms on the FBI. Yet the bureau barely changed. Scores of Soviet spies were unmasked in the mid-1980s, including a senior FBI agent, Robert Hanssen, and Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA officer. They had sold Moscow a catastrophic collection of national security secrets. Weiner’s assessment of the breach is perhaps his most pitiless.

The traitors thrived for so long because U.S. counterintelligence “had become a shambles,” he writes. “The FBI and the CIA had not been on speaking terms for most of the past 40 years. The sniping and the silences between them did more harm to American national security than the Soviets.”

The last few decades largely follow the headlines, including FBI errors prior to the 1993 World Trade Tower attack, the Oklahoma City bombing, and other fiascoes. When al-Qaida emerges in force, Weiner finds senior FBI and CIA counterterrorism specialists “too busy making war on one another” to focus on Osama bin Laden until it is too late. Sadly, one is given little reason to assume the FBI will do better in the future.

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Is The FBI Dumb, Evil, Or Just Incompetent?
Thursday October 29th, 2015 at 10:21 AM

TechCrunch

Your government is worried. The world is “going dark.” Once upon a time, telephones were the only way to talk to someone far away, and the authorities could wiretap any phone they wanted. Nowadays, though, suspects might be communicating via Facebook, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Skype, Viber. And so, inevitably: “Today, if you’re a tech company that’s created a new and popular way to communicate, it’s only a matter of time before the FBI shows up with a court order to read or hear some conversation.”

But some of those providers have no interest in spying on their users. The FBI is not amused. “A government task force is preparing legislation that would pressure companies such as Facebook and Google to enable law enforcement officials to intercept online communications as they occur,”according to the Washington Post, by fining them increasing sums until they build government-accessible back doors into their systems.

Which invites the titular question of this post.

The FBI may be looking back with dewy-eyed nostalgia on the phone wiretaps of yore, but I think we can all agree that those would have been ridiculously ineffective if anyone with anything to hide had been able to easily acquire and attach tiny devices that made wiretapping impossible. That’s exactly the case today: anyone even remotely au fait with technology can securely encrypt their digital communications themselves, via eg RedPhone.

So the FBI would only be able to wiretap suspects who are either too dumb to use encryption — in which case they ought to be easy enough to catch without wiretaps — or who think they have nothing to hide. Meanwhile, they’d be setting a terrible precedent for other, more draconian governments.Critics say “We’ll look a lot more like China than America after this” … but the Obama administration, which not coincidentally appears to hate whistleblowers above all else, still seems poised to support this initiative.

But wait, it gets worse. In order to claim this empty chalice, the powers that be will require a surveillance system that could be abused by the very kind of people it’s supposed to be used against. Could, and almost certainly would: if you build a tool that can be used malevolently, then inevitably it one day will be. Consider how Google was hacked in 2010 by adversaries who used the intercept facilities built into GMail – at the government’s insistence – to access the private email of Chinese dissidents, and:

Put another way:

Is the FBI actually too stupid to realize that this is a terrible, horrible, very bad, no good idea? Or — get your tinfoil hats on — is the pretext of hunting criminals and terrorists merely a smokescreen for requiring what in effect will be a gargantuan cross-platform surveillance system that will let them spy on anyone’s conversation at any time for their own ulterior motives?

Probably not. (At least, he said paranoiacally, not yet.) But that is exactly what’s happening in other countries. Witness this post by legendary security guru Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of RedPhone among other tools, who was approached by the Saudi Arabian government to help monitor and block tools like Twitter, Viber, Line and WhatsApp. When he declined, they suggested:

If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.

That’s right, folks: if you’re not helping the government of Saudi Arabia secretly spy on all of its residents, then you’re on the side of the terrorists! Good to know. I vastly prefer Moxie’s take:

While this email is obviously absurd, it’s the same general logic that we will be confronted with over and over again: choose your team. Which would you prefer? Bombs or exploits. Terrorism or security. Us or them. As transparent as this logic might be, sometimes it doesn’t take much when confirming to oneself that the profitable choice is also the right choice.

If I absolutely have to frame my choices as an either-or, I’ll choose power vs. people.

Similarly, a recent Citizen Lab report indicates that the FinFisher surveillance software is now being used in 36 countries, including those well-known pillars of enlightened human rights Bahrain, Ethiopia, and Turkmenistan, and the Syrian government has an entire electronic army targeting dissidents (who, unfortunately, continue to use Skype even though it’s not secure and Microsoft can and does tap into Skype chats.)

So we’re left with the last option: the FBI is simply technically incompetent. Unable to come to terms with the new world of technology, and take advantage of the many ways in which new technology can aid their investigations in new ways without turning America into a panopticon, they’re instead still thinking inside the box of 20th-century wiretapping, and insisting that tech companies implement a counterproductive, expensive, and ultimately pointless toolkit…purely to satisfy their own blinkered lack of imagination.

It’s sad, depressing, and dangerous. Let’s hope clearer heads and more farsighted visions prevail before this pathetically bad and dumb idea is actually implemented — but alas, I see no reason to believe that we can expect anything but more of the same high-level cluelessness for the foreseeable future.

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FBI Transparency - The Federal Bureau Of Incompetence
Thursday October 29th, 2015 at 10:19 AM

Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe, who is the best cityside columnist in American newspapers, pretty much has had it with the FBI. Actually, he pretty much had it with the FBI while covering how the Boston office of the Feebs ran camouflage for the murderous Whitey Bulger for couple of decades. But he further has had it because, as was revealed during the congressional hearings into the Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent firefight and search, the FBI may have had information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev that it declined to share with local authorities, and that it has been banging its own drum on television about how the FBI cracked the case.

Unfortunately, neither DesLauriers nor Douglas was able to shed any light on what the FBI did when it came to the advance warning they had from Russian authorities about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. A "60 Minutes" spokesman said correspondent Scott Pelley asked the question but producers decided the FBI's answers were, as he put it, "not newsworthy." Nothing the FBI has said about this is newsworthy, because they haven't said anything. It's standard operating procedure at the FBI. Wednesday's hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security in Washington raised more questions than answers because the FBI won't give answers. "Why would they be accountable to '60 Minutes' or the Globe or whoever when they aren't even accountable to Congress?" asks Bill Keating, the Massachusetts congressman who sits on that committee. Keating watched the "60 Minutes" episode, too, and almost fell off his chair because the FBI had been ducking Congress by suggesting they didn't want to compromise the investigation into the bombing or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's upcoming trial. "We asked the FBI to come before our committee three times, and they refused," Keating told me. "And then I see them on TV pointing at one of the Tsarnaev brothers in a surveillance photo . . . So they can go on TV, but they can't go before Congress?"

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Why did the FBI slow-play the local cops on what the Russians told them about the elder Tsarnaev? They're not talking, not even to Congress, which really ought not to be optional at this point. In fact, the whole thing stinks of bureaucratic empire building and ass-covering. The New York Times ran a Bureau-centric piece in which the FBI's inspector general blamed the Russians, not for refusing to share information on Tsarnaev, but refusing to share enough information about him. (God, it must be nice to have the Russians to blame for things again.) From the Times:

Russian officials had told the F.B.I. in 2011 that the suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, "was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer" and that Mr. Tsarnaev "had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country's region to join unspecified underground groups." But after an initial investigation by the F.B.I., the Russians declined several requests for additional information about Mr. Tsarnaev, according to the report, a review of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies could have thwarted the bombing.

Now, even assuming the Russians were negligent in turning over all that they had concerning Tsarvaev's slide into improvised jihadism, I am sure that the police in Boston, Cambridge, or Watertown would have liked to know what the Russians did tell the FBI in 2011. Alas, the FBI does not work or play well with others. Cullen, again:

Right after 9/11, three very fine police leaders - Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans, Lowell Police Chief Ed Davis, and John Timoney, of the New York, Philadelphia, and Miami police - went to Washington to see FBI Director Bob Mueller. They knew that everything had changed when those planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania. They wanted assurances that the FBI would change, too, and begin sharing information with local police. But nothing changed. The FBI doesn't share information with other agencies. It never did. I've talked to Cambridge police officers who would have been all over Tamerlan Tsarnaev if they had known Russian authorities told the FBI he had extremist leanings. They never got that intelligence because the FBI couldn't be bothered sharing with local cops.

We have not been able to get this case right for a year. (Hanging over all of this is the fact that one of the primary witnesses against Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Ibragim Todashev, was shot to death in Florida while he was being interrogated by the FBI.) Dzokhar Tsarnaev is going to get hammered at his trial, and everybody will cheer, and the fact that we have not been able to get this case right for a year will be forgotten.

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Former FBI Agent Robert Lustyik Sentenced in Bribery Case
Thursday October 29th, 2015 at 10:12 AM

Patch

Sleepy Hollow resident, and former FBI agent, Robert Lustyik was sentenced Monday to five years in prison on bribery charges, according to federal prosecutors.

Lustyik pleaded guilty in December, 2014, to several charges related to bribery in connection with selling classified documents while he was a member of a counterintelligence squad out of the FBI’s White Plains office.

“Robert Lustyik today admitted to conducting a bribery scheme in which, for his own personal gain, he secretly sold information and documents to which he had access as an FBI agent,” said United States Attorney Preet Bharara in a statement in December. “Lustyik betrayed our system of justice: he breached not only the law, but also his sworn oath, and the great trust and confidence placed in him by citizens and colleagues. For his criminal conduct he now faces, as he must, serious, commensurate penalties.”

According to federal prosecutors, Lustyik sold information about a “prominent citizen of Bangladesh” to this individual’s political rival.

In addition to Lustyik, two other men, Tarrytown native Johannes Thaler and Danbury, Conn. resident Rizve Ahmed, also were embroiled in the scheme and were sentenced separately to less time.

Lustyik is a former star football player from Sleepy Hollow High School, reports The Journal News.

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Robert Lustyik - Google Search
Thursday October 29th, 2015 at 10:09 AM

Robert Lustyik, Sleepy Hollow 'spy hunter,' sentenced in ...

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Sep 14, 2015 - Robert Lustyik, a former FBI 'spy hunter' from Sleepy Hollow, was sentenced Monday to five years in prison in a federal bribery case.

Lawyers: No jail for former FBI 'spy hunter' - The Journal News

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Mar 25, 2015 - Lawyers for former FBI agent Robert Lustyik said he should get probation, not jail, in his federal corruption case in Utah - one of two against the ...

Former FBI Special Agent Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison ...

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Mar 30, 2015 - Robert G. Lustyik Jr., 52, of Sleepy Hollow, New York, a 24-year veteran of the FBI, pleaded guilty to all charges in an 11-count indictment on ...

Retired FBI Agent Accused Of Lying In Whitey Bulger Trial
Thursday October 29th, 2015 at 9:52 AM

Crime - The Huffington Post

BOSTON -- From the time he found the rifle used to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. to the time he personally cuffed the underboss of the Boston Mafia, it sounded like Bob Fitzpatrick had a storied career with the FBI.

The only problem is that many of those stories were lies, according to a federal indictment announced after the retired agent surrendered to the U.S. Marshals Service on Thursday.

Fitzpatrick, 75 and now living in Rhode Island, told many of his whoppers while under oath as a witness testifying for the defense in the trial of notorious mobster James "Whitey" Bulger in 2013, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts alleged. The indictment accused him of six counts of perjury and six counts of obstruction of justice in connection with that testimony. Fitzpatrickpleaded not guilty during a brief hearing on Thursday afternoon.

Two years ago Bulger was convicted on murder and other organized-crime charges. But as a powerful underworld figure from the 1970s until he went on the lam in 1995, he had benefited from information gleaned from corrupt FBI agents even as he was supposedly giving them tips about other criminals.

In Fitzpatrick's book about Bulger, the embattled former agent claimed that he was a whistleblower in the FBI's Boston office who wanted to cut the bureau's ties to Bulger partly because the mobster failed to meet expectations as an upper-echelon informant. Betrayal, Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down also claimed that Fitzpatrick retrieved the rifle that James Earl Ray used to kill King on the balcony of a Memphis hotel in 1968 and that he personally arrested New England mafia underboss Gennaro Angiulo at a restaurant in 1983.

Lawyers for Bulger put Fitzpatrick on the stand because he bolstered their argument that their client wasn't a snitch.

During the trial, federal prosecutor Brian Kelly raised doubts about many of Fitzpatrick's claims. He cited reports that said Memphis police found the gun and that other agents arrested Angiulo, theAssociated Press reported.

"Sir, it’s fair to say, isn’t it, you’re a man who likes to make up stories?” Kelly asked Fitzpatrick, according to the Boston Herald.

The former G-man insisted on the stand that he'd told the truth about everything. Those assertions now form the backbone of the indictment against him.

He "made false material declarations to enhance his own credibility as a former FBI official by making false claims about his professional accomplishments as an FBI agent," the indictment states.

Fitzpatrick's career in the FBI lasted from 1965 to 1986, according to the indictment. In 1980, he was assigned as assistant special agent in charge in the Boston office and supervised the organized crime squad. He resigned shortly after being demoted in '86.

The U.S. Attorney's Office alleges that he lied during the Bulger trial about his rise and fall through the ranks. Fitzpatrick testified back then that he had been assigned to Boston by an assistant director of the FBI on a mission to root out "major problems" in the office. The indictment says his reassignment was "routine" and included no special objectives.

Fitzpatrick was demoted and sent to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1986 because he'd falsified reports about a shooting, according to the indictment. But during the Bulger trial, he denied that and claimed he retired because of corruption in the bureau.

A staffer for Fitzpatrick's attorney Robert Goldstein told HuffPost that he was unavailable to talk.

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