Fascinating.

I had long been aware that it was possible to monitor unencrypted feeds, primarily NASA, but I had no idea so many transmissions were relatively open.

"I can't unsee what I'm not supposed to have seen."

True, but if you're concerned you might be breaking the law you can stop looking you numpty.

I'm starting with the man in the mirror

"Looking at a cake is like looking at the future. Until you've tasted it, what do you really know? And then, of course, it's too late."

A resident in the UK, Laurie says he's careful to obey the country's privacy laws.

While he is able to identify certain traffic as email, for instance, he doesn't actually read the contents of the message. Still, he says it isn't always easy to follow the letter of such laws because they prohibit people from receiving a message if they aren't the intended recipient.

"It's a bit of a quandary," Laurie says. "You can't tell you're not supposed to see that data until after you see it. I can't unsee what I'm not supposed to have seen."

...well as for the privacy laws, I don't think anyone really cares about them anymore, I think its more of a case of "make hay whilst everyone's sat in the dark"

and as for the quandary, that would be the pandoras box that is privacy!

goes to show the utter lack of responsibility involved with corporates and personally sensitive information though doesn't it.

Keep up the good work Laurie!

Illegal to receive a message if you're not the recipient

On a broadcast-from-space signal that covers the whole UK? How does that work? Surely everyone can get the message?

Also, I was under the impression that Sky didn't do emails using the dish as you suggest in the article... or was that just "satellite ISPs" in general?

And why do you need a motorised dish? Couldn't you- if you were a bit cheap- get one of those charts of where to point the dish and point it manually? Which would drop the price to well under £100 with the possibility of upgrading to a motorised solution later.

Can anyone else see the Gov't cracking down on motorised dishes now? Or anything not very clearly Sky TV branded (anything else is potentially terroristical)?

It goes without saying

This is of course just another reason to switch all sensible transmissions to Skype.

Hardly new

Roger Bunny has a column in What Satellite magazine for almost 20 years scanning the sky, looking at news feeds and TV links.

Bit of a quandry?

Hmmm, I'd say that as rough rule of thumb; if the email is in your inbox, it's meant for you; if you're assembling custom equipment to hack into a satellite feed and monitor packets then the chance that those emails are meant for you can be safely rounded down to NONE.

Oh, I didn't know that torrent film wasn't meant for me until AFTER I downloaded it! Yeah, I'm sure THAT would work.

So he spent all that time and effort hacking satellites to NOT snoop/steal that content which breaks privacy/copyright laws? Would the "intellectual excercise" excuse work for anything else? I'm just testing out the state of national security/ bank alarm system/ police response time/ to see what would happen if some bad guy wanted to do XYZ...

Yes, such a staunch defender of the above, there's a website showing ANYONE who wants to know how to do the same thing!

Better to stay an annoymous enigma, rather than go public and be forced to make BS excuses.

OMG! SHOCK! HORROR!

Protip: Satellite feeds of journo's gossiping, picking their nose and much worse have been broadcast in the clear since telstar first bleeped it's first bleep. Unfiltered, unedited news footage is neither rare or difficult to find, and does not require any special hardware or software.

There are oodles of websites dedicated to this kind of stuff, and you don't have to be a boffin to understand or exploit it...

Careful Laurie

unauthorised use of a computer network? you'll be following McKinnon shortley.

in the middle?

I don't really see how you could successfully perform a "man in the middle" attack unless you could actually place your equipment in between the satellite and the victim's dish. Perhaps inside a black helicopter?

White hatted self publicist more like

Is this the new bluesnarfing?

Paris. because she knows all about publicity

@Ashley

I name that film in one - Excalibur.

Mine's the one with the armour plating and thermal lance in the pocket.

Ho Hum

It's been done before, yawn, yawn, nothing new to see here ... misses the point; that it is happening now with a lot more personal data being passed around for those who care to see it.

The police have been beating and fitting up suspects for years, corruption has always existed, so that's a reason not to mention it when it remains a problem ? Old news, not interested ? Maybe some people didn't get the news first time round ?

PS : El Reg, please never report on starving third worlders or their plight. We know they are starving, old news ( remember Live Aid ? ), not interested, it's not worth mentioning.

feeds are good

intercepting the feeds from football stadiums before they are rebroadcast by the satellite provider. Free football from across Europe :)

Media Whoring

As others have said, this is old news - and is only being brought up because of someone who appears to crave fame and attention for things a high school pupil could devise needs more stroking.

People have been feed-hunting since satellite receiving equipment has been available, and then when the Linux-based receivers came out it made things a lot cheaper and easier to do - especially when it comes to actual data streams rather than just DVB-S AV streams.

@Jake

"They can probably decrypt anything, and in near real time ... "

Do you have *any* evidence to back up that ridiculous assertion?

Quandry? No.

It is a civic duty for private individuals in the UK to actively monitor and seek information from the communications of the state and individuals in government and immediately make public any information found. Stalinists like Whaqui and her friends deserve no less. Until their lives are laid bare like yours are, there will be no privacy.

@Jake

"They can probably decrypt anything, and in near real time ... "

Wow...

Lets see, where to start.

Every mathematician and cryptographer across the face of the planet who understands AES, the SHA family of algorithms, RSA, and his good friend ElGamal (son of Diffie-Hellman) at all tell us exactly how these algorithms are safe, what their weaknesses are, and even their theoretical ones.

They all tell us they are safe to use, and the latest encryption technology was developed outside the US, in countries that are neutral in the world's stage.

If you think that it only takes acres of computers to break high order encryption/signature schemes then you have no sense of the scale involved here. A computer needed to *count* from 0 to 2^256-1 would require more energy than the output of the sun for the rest of its life. That is just to count that high, not to try every decryption key in that range and test the result for a valid decryption.

Humanity as a whole could never hope to accomplish this, let alone a few acres of computers. Try some research before you spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. Not doing so is a rather harsh insult to anyone who has and a disservice to those that cannot do so and choose to believe you.

There is no spoon.

---Laurie has also developed software that analyzes hundreds of channels to pinpoint certain types of content, including traffic based on TCP, UDP, or SMTP. The program offers a 3D interface that allows the user to quickly isolate email transmissions, web surfing sessions, or television feeds that have recently been set up.

There's too much information to view it decoded. After awhile, you don't even see the code, all you see is Blonde, Brunette, Redhead...

Feeds for free

My oh my ... is this article for those born after 1990? Satellite dishes were very very common back in the 80's, and the first half of the 90's over here in Mexico. Most of them had motorized solutions, and were programmed with the preset coords for the good satellites. It was only a matter of having two remotes; but then again, SKY subscribers these days have the same problem.

@AC 14:10 - Hmm... I see you read your Bruce Schneier well. ;)

Mine's the one with the geostationary orbit satellite coords in the pocket...

@ Boltar

(Different AC here)...

I think that the first AC was arguing that raw computing power, even "acres" of computers, are insufficient to brute force decode something like AES. Jake's claim seemed to be that the NSA has enough raw computing power to get the job done.

True, a previously unknown flaw can lead to a crack (or at least a markedly decreased code space in which to search), and if anyone is going to find it, the NSA has to be among the most likely candidates.

The same would be said for an intentional, but unrevealed weakness (clipper chip anyone?), hence the black choppers.

@ jake

I did the math and here are my results. According to my calculator 2^256 is ~ 1.15 * 10^77 and according to this graph ( http://tiny.cc/8cf5b ), the output of the Sun since formation is of the order of 10^45 joules, so let's call it 10^46 joules during its lifetime to be generous. By dividing the 10^46 joules by the more than 10^77 digits previously calculated, I get an "energy budget" of 8.6 *10 ^ -32 joules per digit or more than 10 orders of magnitude less than the ~kT limit on irreversible computing for erasing a single bit. So it looks to me as if AC had it right, even counting up through *each* of the 2^256 digits is a task of surpassing difficulty.

Confidential... yeah, right

At a conference a few years back, there was a talk by an engineer from CESG (the InfoSec part of GCHQ). Somebody asked him for more technical details of the bit of kit he was demonstrating. He said "No problem, just send me a fax with the details you are after and I'll get back to you". "What's your fax number?" asked the guy in the crowd. "Any number will do." replied the engineer...

@ first AC (3rd post)

"True, but if you're concerned you might be breaking the law you can stop looking you numpty."

Yeah, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

@jake & others

I see Jake has backed down now but I'm going to observe that this is fuel on the fire of "teachers are pretty crap today" as I appear to have a better grasp of the maths and technical details and I *don't* attempt to teach others about the topic.

As for the NSA, they can trivially crack some of the piss poor 'encryption' systems but they are stuck, like everyone else, when it comes to brute-force attacks on truly secure systems.

The GCHQ bloke was making a (quite old) joke, they don't monitor every phone line, etc, to do so is unfeasible anyway. GCHQ really does monitor the entire RF spectrum, however and I have one of the pieces of kit they used to use, sitting in the room where the rest of my radio equipment is. Needless to say they haven't stopped listening, just updated the kit.

This 'white hat' crap gets up my nose, though, it has to be said and playing with satellite dishes is really, really old hat.