Snowden leak: GCHQ DDoSed Anonymous & LulzSec's chatrooms British intelligence ran denial-of-service attacks against chatrooms used by Anonymous and LulzSec, according to an investigation by NBC News involving Snowden confidante Glenn Greenwald. Documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower record how a GCHQ unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, used a …
Anonymous uses DDoS as a form of protest. There's no lasting damage, it's just disruptive. A common comparison is the sit-in protest in the real world: Get in the way and refuse to move. At worst, it can disrupt business operations and cause serious lost profits, which is why it's rather illegal just about everywhere. Just like DDoSing.
GCHQ's actions could be compared to figuring out where the protestors are going to rally before the event and arranging a 'coincidential' road closure.
"There's no lasting damage, it's just disruptive. A common comparison is the sit-in protest in the real world:"
If we accepted that reasoning we'd have to accept that government employees could do it too without needing a court order or warrant.
They would not even need the agreement of senior managers, they could just do it on their own.
I reject that reasoning.
1. DoS attacks do cause lasting damage. They cause great expense in preventing them happening again.
2. Sit-ins done for *some* reasons are not peaceful political protests, but rather are a form of extortion. As with most criminality, it comes down to intent. Is the intent legal.
Is the intent to force someone change how they do business -- illegal?
Is the intent to force someone to spend money -- illegal?
Or is the intent to make someone consider something -- legal, provided it doesn't cause harm. Harm includes paying service providers for protection against future attacks.
"Or is this just the cyber* equivalent of roughing up a suspect?"
QFT. I can just imagine the conversation now:
"No, Sarge. I never touched that channel. It fell down the stairs, that's all."
Also, the more I see of our glorious state in action, the more I feel like throwing up. Disgusting.
... our glorious state in action, the more I feel like throwing up. Disgusting.
I just can't understand your nausea as in this instance the state took action to disrupt the activities of a group known for it's illegal activities.
Or are you really saying that you want to live in a place where any group is allowed to steal your credit card details, suppress the right to free speech, and so on?
There are lots of things that are "illegal".
Driving a motor vehicle above the posted speed limit in the UK has been one of them for many years, yet our emergency services (until the recent addition of explicit exemptions) have "broken the law" many time a day.
It is for a court to decide if the illegal activity is justified, and it is for the Crown Prosecution Service to decide if prosecution is in the public interest.
So to say that GCHQ are "acting with impunity" is wrong. It's about whether someone can find sufficient evidence to prove guilt, and whether a prosecution is in the public interest.
Somehow I suspect the vast majority of the public will consider it "just" for hackers to be targeted by the authorities.
Quote: "Except this is more like allowing the police to go around crashing the cars"
And your point is? This used to be standard practice in ex-USSR. Not just that, taxi drivers used to cooperate with Милиция and ram cars upon request. I have seen it done right in front of me on at least one occasion.
So let's look into at this from the appropriate perspective. We have a government which officially moans that the European Convention of Human Rights is a load of tripe. Almost like Suslov used to do. We have the security services striving to achieve total, unconditional and pervasive surveilance over everybody and everything. Exactly like КГБ. We have 99% of the country towns and cities covered by CCTV and everyone movement recorded and classified. Same as the Czech and Eastern Germans we used to laugh at (actually less). We have the momevement of every car on a major road in the country tracked and recorded - something none of these has even contemplated.
We used to laugh at "them". We have becomed them.
So the laughter you here now is the giggles from under Suslov, Brezhnev, Cheushesko, Kadar, Zhivkov and other gerontocrats' tumbstones. That is them giggling madly in whatever circle of hell they have been sent to.
Quote: "Except this is more like allowing the police to go around crashing the cars"
Standard practice in the USA and Canada too.
It is taught in most state's and province's police schools.
But you can't just do it whenever you want. There are certain criterion (low levels of criterion in many states, high levels of criterion almost never met in Canada).
The criterion for permitting attacks, military, cyber or otherwise, by government workers and troops need to be high, the supervision needs to be close, and the laws of parliament should be followed.
I am fairly libertarian by inclination, but the paranoid strain gets a bit tiresome after a while. Please provide the locations of your UK gulags as evidence of parity between the old USSR and the UK. As far as I am aware you are under far more surveillance in the UK than we in the US, but have not heard where you store your zeks.
Quote: "I am fairly libertarian by inclination" - Good for you. It would be good if you knew history as well.
Quote: "Please provide the locations of your UK gulags".
Re-read the GP. Suslov, Brezhnev, Kadar - that is the gerontocracy of the 70-es and 80-es. _THAT_ was the one that moaned about the Helsinki declaration of Human Rights (which is the founding basis of the European convention) being a load of tripe. Same as Cameron and co are doing now. The one that installed a CCTV camera on every Prague and Berlin corner. Same as you know what. That was tjhe one that rebuilt KGB from an enforcement apparatus (as under Stalin) into a pervasive surveilance apparatus. They did not GULAG "dissidents". Instead of that they were kept under house surveilance and curfew (Saharov) or disowned them from cittizenship instead while they were abroad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Galich_%28writer%29). Galich is just one example of someone who was made stateless by revoking his cittizenship while abroad, same as our dear home secretary wants to do now.
The historical period you are referring to when Главное Управление Лагерей aka GULAG existed is 1937-1956 - Stalin and friends. It was closed by Hrushov with the other Soviet states closing theirs shortly thereafter. They did not moan about human rights, they did not give a f*** about them. So putting things into perspective, we should probably ignore the fact that we have become a late USSR look-alike and celebrate the fact that we are not an early USSR look alike. After all, being a Brezhenv state look-alike down to the actual phrases used by the ones in power is so lovely, right?
If you are a really successful state then you don't need the gulags to keep the people doing what you want - advertising and a "free press" keeps most of them thinking along the right lines, so you only need army/special branch/MI5/SAS to shoot an occasional civil rigths march that doesn't subscribe
As far as I am aware you are under far more surveillance in the UK than we in the US, but have not heard where you store your zeks.
Oh we've outsourced that to your fellow countrymen, they fly over here in private unmarked jets, land at our military air bases snatch our 'zeks' off of the streets, and fly them out to your 'zek storage facility' in Cuba. I believe you call it extraordinary-rendition.
Agents of a government have remit/authority to monitor, deceive, seduce, and otherwise confound or thwart or attack attackers of the State -- especially since the USA and UK are at war on terrorists, even if the Allies/Coalition forces don't rah-rah so actively.
OTOH, hackers, crackers, activists, hactivist, or the like do not generally have remit to reverse-assault or thwart Law Enforcement unless there is a VERY good, clear, and necessary reason. And, how often will a court accept that u nless it is clear the Police are abusing the public. Even then, just to use LAPD as an example (the head-against-hood slamming of a mentally-retarted/slow individual because he refused (was unable to process and comply with) following commands being barked at him. Even though (the gas station's security camera) FILMED (them) in violation of civil rights of the victim, sometimes, the police will prevail for any number of Bullwinkle pulling a rabbit out of his hat with "PRESTO". I cannot recall what - -if anything -- happened to those police involved.
But, imagine a civilian refusing to submit his/her vehicle to being commandeered. It could be that the person is on the last "no-more-lates/tardies-to-work, or has been carjacked before and has seen too many movies involving perps wearing fake uniforms, or it could be someone who holds police in contempt, or whatever. Such as person would likely face charges of obstructing justice, failure to follow legally issued commands, contributing to mayhem/imperilment of the public, or whatever some crafty, never-loses-cases DA can list on a charge sheet.
So, whether or not the PUBLIC can actively or passively attack, hinder, or confuse bodies of law and get away with it will, well, DEPEND... Depends on the context, political climate, character of the top authority, and so many other things.
Driving a motor vehicle above the posted speed limit in the UK has been one of them for many years, yet our emergency services (until the recent addition of explicit exemptions) have "broken the law" many time a day.
Except there are strict rules in force about when an emergency vehicle is allowed to drive above the stated speed limit, and all such vehicle drivers pass an advanced driving test. It's quite tightly regulated. Despite the common joke, a police officer is not allowed to just burn through red lights because the doughnut shop is about to close.
What's the betting that the attacks on the Anon IRC servers were performed with nowhere near the same level of oversight? Even if there was, exactly what was the point? As I mentioned, I call bullshit on "scaring 80% of people away". The people on those chat networks are quite used to netsplits, hack attacks, and yo-yoing servers by now.
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That could also apply to the police tearing down an expressway at high speed with no lights or sirens and no cues to the public to move aside.
I happened to be at a read light, oh, back around 1990 or so, and behind 3 or 4 in-line/abreast police vehicles one night. Their windows were down, and they waved at each other, and it seemed to be a signal to go into a race. Two peeled out, hauling ass. The third joined in. IIRC, a 4th, appearing from my left rear, was already boring in on them, not to be left out.
Not to be left out of a party to which I was not invited, I, too, joined in. Tho, my puny little 4-cyl, 108max or so 89 Integra could not hope to keep up. I wonder whether they even notice the "fifth-wheel" of headlights joining in on their race. It was exhilirating, and, as fast as they were going, they would not be able to find me if they realized I wasn't one of them. If you do it right, an automatic, 4-cyl can peel rubber quite nicely. I once did it, and the police tailed a souped-up Ford Mustang because they must have -- like others who did not belive I could make my front-wheeler, auto-trans peel out -- felt it could not possibly nor likely have been my diminuitively-engine car....
Now, assuming they abolish the statute of limitation, or concoct some unsolved crash, they could come after me with a piece of paper. However, it'd have to be a death or serious property damage involved, and that would mean substantial damage to my vehicle -- damage which would have prevented re-registration, sale, or change of the ownership title, and certainly would have prevented me from obtaining loans against the value of my car.
"....Which is why you're here....." I'm here because it's a technical site, not because it's one for sad little sheeple to have a whining bleat about how they got outsmarted by the authorities yet again. You sheeple just provide a little additional entertainment. TBH, if you whining losers took yourselves back to Indymedia you would not be missed and the rest of us could get back to enjoying a technical site.
This is a joke. Seems there is one rule for some and none for others. If governments are so quick to condemn then they must be treated equally when carrying out the same acts. Almost becoming funny, that an organisation can continue to persecute and cover up, and expect people to overlook the fact that they have been committing cyber crimes all these years.
All the assets of a nation state intelligence agency and the best they could do was a SYN flood!!!
What the bloody hell have my taxes being paying for? At the very least I would have expected them to have taken control of the IRC server by exploiting the IPMI implementation and formatted its drives.
Or perhaps reflashed its bios with one with a rootkit embedded in its SMM handlers, even if they couldnt write it they could have bought it from the NSA's toy catalogue.
Bunch of useless chair warming muppets.
They didn't want to tip their hand, or by way of attack reveal technical abilities or likely unit ID.
By doing a typical DDOS, they can avoid rapid ID of themselves, muck about in the board, sew confusion, suspicion, wariness, and jitters. Maybe even prompt a few to expose their own skills while attempting to unmask the DDOS source.
I know DDoS attacks against IRC servers aren't uncommon...
But we're talking about an IRC server being DDoS'd by a security agency.
A place where people go to talk (regardless of how affiliated they are with Anonymous or not.)
So I'm guessing this means that Freedom of Speech no longer means shit the fascists in charge.
While LulzSec and Anonymous are not physically violent groups, they are not law-abiding political organizations either.
DoS attacks on peaceful mainstream or even peaceful fringe political groups would be outrageous.
But these two specific groups are not groups set up merely to exchange and develop political viewpoints or engage in peaceful lobbying. They do advocate law breaking and denying the civil rights of other citizens.
There may be other issues I have not thought of, but only issue I currently see is why wasn't the DoS done openly under a court order. Police and security agencies must not be allowed to become an all-in-one legislative, policing, judicial and punishment system.
Police and security agencies must remain under democratic control of our parliaments and our judges -- otherwise it means the Soviets and Maoists won the Cold War.
To me this is far far less disturbing than spy agencies gathering material on regular peaceful citizens of long-time allied countries and their current and future political, business, academic, technological and religious leaders.
No offence, but yes, there are clearly many issues you've not thought of. I hope you never become a statesman, if you approve of courts making one law for us and one law for them.
If DDoS is a criminal/legal matter, rather than a military one, the correct circumstances in which a DDoS attack would be a permissible action for a security agency/LEO to take is precisely never, not ever. As a rationale it's a bit like government saying "They disrupted our service, or perhaps those of our friends, so we feel perfectly justified in disrupting services for potentially thousands of people who have absolutely nothing to do with them, on the basis that we just might inconvenience the bastards we're after in the process."
"Police and security agencies must remain under democratic control of our parliaments and our judges -- otherwise it means the Soviets and Maoists won the Cold War."
If you seriously believe the intelligence agencies are under democratic oversight and control, you appear to be experiencing about a year of missing time... last year to be precise. There are other kinds of undemocratic realities to be experienced than life under Maoism or Marxism–Leninism, not least our own special national Road to Hell, the tyranny of the zealously well-meaning and morally blinkered.
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