- cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

Yahoo covertly built a program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information
by Greg Newby 04 Oct '16

04 Oct '16

Spotted in Ars: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/report-fbi-andor-nsa-ordered-yah… Yahooâs CISO resigned in 2015 over secret e-mail search tool ordered by feds Reuters: Yahoo "complied with a classified US government directive." Cyrus Farivar - 10/4/2016, 1:59 PM According to a new report by Reuters citing anonymous intelligence officials, in 2015, Yahoo covertly built a secret âcustom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information.â Reuters noted that Yahoo âcomplied with a classified US government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.â It is not clear what data, if any, was handed over. Further Reading Yahoo exec goes mano a mano with NSA director over crypto backdoors Presuming that the report is correct, it would represent essentially the digital equivalent of a general warrantâwhich is forbidden by the Fourth Amendment, as Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Andrew Crocker noted on Twitter. The Fourth Amendment implications are staggering. Yahoo as agent of government scans all email, devoid of probable cause, particularity, etc pic.twitter.com/kx510PHH9n â Andrew Crocker (@agcrocker) October 4, 2016 This seems to be the first known case of an American Internet company acting on behalf of the government to search messages in near real timeâprevious operations captured stored data or intercepted only a handful of target accounts. As Reuters also reported, Yahoo's then-Chief Information Security Officer, Alex Stamos, resigned in protest once he found out about the secret program. Stamos now works at Facebook. Yahoo did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment.

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"Tor is dead technology"
by Razer 04 Oct '16

04 Oct '16

The poster of that tweet, @thegrugq, 'security researcher', also said: "the government doesn’t use Tor." https://twitter.com/attractr/status/783014723226861568 Comments?

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DefecTor ... meet DetecTor
by Razer 04 Oct '16

04 Oct '16

"DetecTor is an open source project to implement client side SSL/TLS MITM detection, compromised CA detection and server impersonation detection, by making use of the Tor network." http://detector.io/

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[WAR] Leaked recording proves John Kerry pushed for massive war in Syria, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey funded Al Qaeda
by justa 04 Oct '16

04 Oct '16

The indictment of the USA continues... ** Leaked recording proves John Kerry pushed for massive war in Syria, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey funded Al Qaeda (http://theduran.com/leaked-recording-proves-john-kerry-pushed-for-massive-w…) ------------------------------------------------------------ Closed-door comments by US Secretary of State John Kerry reveal the US's deep involvement in the Syrian crisis. The post Leaked recording proves John Kerry pushed for massive war in Syria, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey funded Al Qaeda (http://theduran.com/leaked-recording-proves-john-kerry-pushed-for-massive-w…) In related news: ** Russia warns US, an attack “against Syrian Army will lead to terrible, tectonic consequences” (http://theduran.com/russia-warns-us-attack-against-syrian-army-lead-terribl…) ------------------------------------------------------------ Syrian troops pushed ahead in their liberation of Aleppo on Saturday, capturing the strategic Um al-Shuqeef hill. The post Russia warns US, an attack “against Syrian Army will lead to terrible, tectonic consequences” (http://theduran.com/russia-warns-us-attack-against-syrian-army-lead-terribl…)

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email catch all domains - was Re: [WAR] Leaked recording proves John Kerry pushed for massive war in Syria, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey funded Al Qaeda
by zen＠freedbms.net 03 Oct '16

03 Oct '16

For those not yet familiar with the convenience and utility of email catch-all domains, they provides very convenient "canary" flagging of who sold your email address to a third party marketer. I.e., when you make a purchase at ebaysmells.com, and your email address is for example ebaysmells.com(a)myfunkydomain.me, then when, some months later you receive an email from Zhing Wha Good Electronics $2 sale, and that email is sent to ebaysmells.com(a)myfunkydomain.me, you can have a fair idea that either ebaysmells.com, or the shop/person you made your original purchase from, is attempting to make opportunistic use of your email address. There are a couple issues with this feature however, which are mostly evident to anyone who uses them: - When you are legimitely emailed from the web shop, news media provider or other, then one wants or often enough actually needs, to reply to the sender using as a From address, the To address they used to email you. Not doing so can easily mean no response as your normal email address gets completely lost and not tracked in their CRM system. - As one solution, some email clients can be configured to always reply From the same address To which the email was sent. - This gives rise to the next problem which I keep slipping up on since I changed my MUA config, that my canary email addresses are being used as the From address when I forward emaisl, rather than just when I reply which is what I thought I'd configured. This may not be configurable, which would mean remembering to manually change the From address every time I forward an email. I send this in the expectation that some may like to be aware of this feature of domain management, when you own/ control your own domain. Being able to rattle off a random (to the other person) but traceable (by you) email address at conferences, to business people etc, is quite a handy thing to be able to do. Enjoy, Zenaan On Mon, Oct 03, 2016 at 10:31:10AM -0700, Sean Lynch wrote: > I see Zenaan has dropped the pretense of not working for Russia Insider! > > On Sun, Oct 2, 2016 at 5:55 PM, justa <russia-insider.com(a)freedbms.net> > wrote:

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This REALLY stinks! Agreement to destroy laptops of Hillary staff given immunity.
by jim bell 03 Oct '16

03 Oct '16

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/03/fbi-agreed-to-destroy-laptops-cl… l [partial quote follows] Immunity deals for two top Hillary Clinton aides included a side arrangement obliging the FBI to destroy their laptops after reviewing the devices, House Judiciary Committee sources told Fox News on Monday. Sources said the arrangement with former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson also limited the search to no later than Jan. 31, 2015. This meant investigators could not review documents for the period after the email server became public -- in turn preventing the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice, sources said. The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee fired off a letter Monday to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking why the DOJ and FBI agreed to the restrictive terms, including that the FBI would destroy the laptops after finishing the search. “Like many things about this case, these new materials raise more questions than answers,” Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., wrote in the letter obtained by Fox News. “Doesn’t the willingness of Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson to have their laptops destroyed by the FBI contradict their claim that the laptops could have been withheld because they contained non-relevant, privileged information? If so, doesn’t that undermine the claim that the side agreements were necessary?” Goodlatte asks. The immunity deals for Mills and Samuelson, made as part of the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state, apparently included a series of “side agreements” that were negotiated by Samuelson and Mills’ attorney Beth Wilkinson. The side deals were agreed to on June 10, less than a month before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency would recommend no charges be brought against Clinton or her staff. Judiciary Committee aides told FoxNews.com that the destruction of the laptops is particularly troubling as it means that the computers could not be used as evidence in future legal proceedings, should new information or circumstances arise. [end of partial quote] ==================== Jim Bell's comments follow ============= WHAAAAAAT?!?!?!? Just after somebody claimed, more or less, 'Well, Hillary may be bad, but Trump is worse!', I get greeted by the news item above. This is ASTONISHINGLY CORRUPT! First, they give immunity to people, for no obvious reason (they could get the laptops by subpoena anyway), and they fail to go after the most obvious target, Hillary Clinton. NOW, we hear of a secret side-deal to ensure that the laptops of these co-conspirators are destroyed, and are not even searched after a given, specific date. Imagine how much we owe to people, private citizens and organizations, that have chosen to go after (by lawsuit, etc) these government crooks. They use FOIA requests, lawsuits, and subpoenas. Anything the Hillary-cronies had in their laptops needs to be exposed, and used to sue them. Effectively, however, they are trying to use the FBI to carry out ("officially") the kind of large-scale evidence-destruction that previously, Hillary only attempted to do with the assistance of her lawyers, deletion of those 33.000 million emails. Now that she has been raked over the coals for that, her minions try to further insulate themselves by getting the FBI to agree to take a hammer to them. Look, guys, how much more obvious does it have to get? Hillary's staff is thoroughly, completely corrupt. And now, seemingly shamelessly so. And government organizations are being brought into play solely to assist them. Prosecute ALL of them. Convict ALL of them. Jail ALL of them for the rest of their worthless lives. Jim Bell

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Re: You could (will be) replaced by a robot coder
by xorcist＠sigaint.org 02 Oct '16

02 Oct '16

> > My opinion of people like Musk and the rest of the technocrats is they > ARE Darwin's finest example ... of "Marauders and Pillagers". > > Any service to society is coincidental and unintentional and solely > related to 'wealth accumulation'. Philanthropics too... It's for the > writedown. Not because they really care. > > Rr I certainly won't argue with that. I would point out, however, that these sorts of ulterior motives are essentially always present in any group purportedly trying to "help humanity." Your observations about mega-rich philanthropists is well-noted. But for example, among the religious there are those that say "our way is the only real truth." These groups then go on to try to convert others, ostensibly for their own good, but really because "winning souls" becomes a competitive game. Then you have the religious that say "Oh, we believe there are many paths to God" .. they are playing a game too, this game simply being "I'm more tolerant than you are" and this allows them to believe that they are more loving than their intolerant opposites. Likewise, amongst the political activist community, one sees the same holier-than-thou mentality. So-and-so is *REALLY* committed, because they will live in a squat, or will intentionally get arrested, or whatever. All of this is an expression of the effects of simple human ego. Certainly, we can agree that some of these are less problematic than others, but I think that they all share the same difficulty at scale, and so we see all types of oppression by oligarchs, theocrats, and political purges whenever one of these groups gets any real control, or power. I would say that any system or ideology which contains some type of metric for measuring one person better than another will always suffer from these types of problems in some way or another. Which is a very thorny problem, it seems, because it is very natural to look at a rapist and say "Yes, well OBVIOUSLY, I - who would never rape - am BETTER than this bastard." My personal solution, which I will admit I often fail at, is to try to see such people not as lessers that I am superior too, but rather as sick people whom I am healthier than. This helps in the way of compassion, but may not - in the end, really even solve the problem. As one can see the egoist perspective at work in the "healthy living" fad popular these days already.

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You could (will be) replaced by a robot coder
by Razer 02 Oct '16

02 Oct '16

Don't forget to hate on automation engineers as the unemployment rate reaches 45% and the gubmint still hasn't figured out what to do with all those idled people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Source: http://www.ninaillingworth.com/2016/09/30/tales-from-the-american-dmz-its-a…

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[WAR] What the CIA Does When The Other Side Won't Fight - YouTube
by Zen H. 02 Oct '16

02 Oct '16

----- Forwarded message from Jim ----- What the CIA Does When The Other Side Won't Fight Former CIA Deputy Director, Michael Morell, in an amazingly frank TV interview, explains how the CIA assassinates people close to the world leaders that they want to topple. Rather than killing the leaders, themselves, they kill their closest associates to let the leaders know they can be knocked off any time the CIA wants. The goal is to create enough fear and anger to cause the leaders to retaliate in some way that then can be used as proof of their evil nature and as an excuse to wage all-out war against them. The killing of Putin’s favorite chauffeur is a dramatic example that Morell’s plan is a reality. Truthstream Media. 21 September 2016 (Story) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IiS6Fehd44

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Attempt to re-create and test Hillary's email server for security?
by jim bell 01 Oct '16

01 Oct '16

I wonder if somebody has attempted to re-create the software suite used to make Hillary Clinton's email server, fill it with dummy (test) data, and place it online, and challenge the world to try to crack it. Too often I've heard the comment out of Hillary's camp, 'There is no evidence anybody hacked the server', more or less. Such a claim seems obviously questionable to me. They are already admitted that various somebodies TRIED to hack the server, and that those running that server were aware of these attempts, and then shut the server down for a few minutes as a consequence. But whether anybody succeeded, I don't know. It would be useful to actually show that such a server could be successfully hacked. Jim Bell Here's an example of discussion of study of her server, mostly in order to retrieve or re-create the seemingly lost emails. What they are not describing is what I advocate: Implement a recreation suitable to expose it to the world, challenging the world to crack it. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/hillary-clinton-emails-server-f… ×

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