25% of US Hackers Are FBI/CIA Informers 185
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian reports that the FBI and CIA have 'persuaded' up to 25% of US hackers to 'work' for them. 'In some cases, popular illegal forums used by cyber criminals as marketplaces for stolen identities and credit card numbers have been run by hacker turncoats acting as FBI moles. In others, undercover FBI agents posing as "carders" – hackers specialising in ID theft – have themselves taken over the management of crime forums, using the intelligence gathered to put dozens of people behind bars. ... The best-known example of the phenomenon is Adrian Lamo, a convicted hacker who turned informant on Bradley Manning, who is suspected of passing secret documents to WikiLeaks.' What implications does this hold for privacy? Or is it just good work by the authorities?"
As you may have guessed, the estimate appears to be based only on the number of black hats, rather than all hackers.
Big surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a natural by-product of the of a national gestapo using "useful idiots" as proxies for doing their dirty work. Federal informants are often permitted to break the law and are paid very handsomely, often with provided housing and up to hundreds of thousand dollars a year, for their work.
Since these informants work for money(what "hacker" works for the fame of being a snitch?!) , they are more likely to embellish or even fabricate evidence to back up their claims. The FBI don't care about that, because if charges are bogus they will entrap of go fishing to find another charge to justify the time and cost.
The real question is, how much money is being spent on informants("cyber" or otherwise)? Could that money be better spend on schools or infrastructure? Why is it that scumbags with questionable pasts are being paid forty-thousand dollars(or more) a year while we and our families are eating ramen noodles for dinner and wondering how we're gonna pay next month's rent?
The answer is part of the government's broader plan to turn half the population against the other half. The ones who drink the kool-aid get to feed their families. The rest are radicals and terrorist pedophiles who deserve to be jailed and even used as near-slave labor. The big security complex is the only future in an America with large numbers of returning warriors and no economy other than the unsustainable one of making and busting criminals. Greed eats itself.
Yes, all of those things are true. No, I will not look them up for you, use your Google Fu - start with "lodi ice cream man terrorist, " level/tier 1 informant," "FBI infiltrate environmental groups," "prison labor builds patriot missiles," and go from there.
Why are people wasting time whining about exposing foreign informants? What concerns us is the network of domestic informants, aka Stasi 2.0. McGruff the crime dog says - "If you snitch, you get a bullet in your dome for being a coward."
-- Ethanol-fueled
that THAT, FUCKERS! (Score:5, Interesting)
what's good for the goose is good for the gander...
Re:Isn't it similar with pedos? (Score:4, Interesting)
Both the "dirty old man" and the "innocent pubescent girl" of urban lore are likely to be law enforcement officers, and possibly even colleagues at neighboring desks.
For some reason, this scenario brought to mind the occasions on which, as Dungeon Master, I've caught myself roleplaying both sides of an exchange between two NPCs. I try to avoid that whenever possible because it's seldom entertaining for the players, usually pointless, and more than a little bit disturbing...
Hm. That's analogy actually holds up.
I have similar concerns (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PsyOps (Score:4, Interesting)
Luring ... (Score:4, Interesting)
My biggest problem with this sort of scheme is that they are facilitating the very thing that they are claiming to combat.
Are they luring people into committing crimes that they would not have committed otherwise? I'm guessing that the answer is yes, even if it is unintentional. After all, a lot of wrong-doings wouldn't be done if there wasn't a social framework (e.g. forums) to reinforce the behaviour.
Air America... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how much of illicit credit card money finds its way back into FBI budgets. To fight crime, you know.
They tried this on me a few times... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had my run-in with this before. I'm just a generic every day sysadmin and have no real involvement with the security community, short of idling on IRC with a bunch of more active people. Here are my experiences:
In 1997 or '98 I was the sysadmin for a mom 'n pop local ISP. We got hit by a massive DOS attack - keep in mind this was in the pre-smurf/DDOS era, so it really did warrant the attention of the feds. The owner contacted them, and they talked to me about getting any logs we might have (which of course I was ready to provide). I asked them where they wanted me to send them, and... "No, why don't you meet us out somewhere? We'll buy you lunch.". Despite the offer of free food, the alarm bells were going off by this point. So, I met them at a local coffee shop, and out of the 30 or so minutes I was there, they spent maybe two minutes discussing the DDOS with me, and the rest of the time attempting to get me to inform on the local 2600 group. I declined repeatedly, and they continued to make more forceful and threatening requests. Every time I disagreed with them, they looked at each other - and this was the creepiest (and obviously rehearsed) behavior I've ever seen. They never did get those logs from me.
After that I didn't hear anything until around 2005 or so when one of my ex-coworkers from another company called to tell me two men came by looking for me, and that they had government plates on their car. They left a card, but since I'm not under any obligation to call them, I never did. As the years went by, I received more calls from different people with a similar story.
And my last run-in with them was only a year or two ago - someone called me from a cell phone claiming he was with the FBI, and he had my computer and I needed to come to the local field office to pick it up. I found that to be rather unlikely since I tend to hang onto them until they're dead, I certainly wasn't missing one, and then they (minus the drives - I still have those) go into the bin. After a week of ignoring his calls he stopped bothering me.
To this day I have no idea what they wanted, but the entire thing reeked of ill-spent tax dollars.
I really don't care anymore, so the hell with posting as AC...