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2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments

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  2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments xyzzy <stalkers-suck@grr.la> - 2014-02-07 04:33 -0800
    Re: 2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments "Dirk T. Verbeek" <dverbeek@xs4all.nl> - 2014-02-07 18:05 +0000
      Re: 2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-07 19:33 +0000
        Re: 2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments Achsis of Elvis <q.kontinuum@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-13 10:56 +0000
          Re: 2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments cykros@devio.us - 2014-02-13 15:02 +0000
            Re: 2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments "q.kontinuum" <achsis_of_elvis@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-13 18:18 +0000
    Re: 2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-07 14:27 -0800
      Re: 2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-02-25 23:31 -0500

#78 — 2/6 - IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments

It's from earlier Thursday, but given what this may imply about government 
behavior regarding Usenet in the future, it seems worth posting as it got 
buried in the Slashdot protests.

Key quotes... full article is at
https://www.quakenet.org/articles/102-press-release-irc-networks-under-
systematic-attack-from-governments

Press Release - Thursday 06 February 2014

Yesterday we learned in the latest release of documents from Edward 
Snowden...that GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, are performing 
persistent social and technological attacks against IRC networks.  These 
attacks are performed without informing the networks and are targeted at 
users associated with politically motivated movements such as "Anonymous". 

It is apparent now that engaging in such topics with an opinion contrary to 
that of the intelligence agencies is sufficient to make people a target for 
monitoring, coercion and denial of access to communications platforms. 

The released documents depict GCHQ operatives engaging in social engineering 
of IRC users to entrap themselves by encouraging the target to leak details 
about their location as well as wholesale attacks on the IRC servers hosting 
the network. These attacks bring down the IRC network entirely affecting 
every user on the network as well as the company hosting the server. 

Many of the charges being thrown at IRC users associated with the Anonymous 
movement are now clear to be identical to the actions of the agency itself. 
People charged with organising DDoS attacks on the servers of large 
companies while in secret GCHQ are issuing DDoS attacks against IRC networks 
who may be unaware of the actions of a tiny subset of their users.

Civil actions launched by the companies affected by the government sponsored 
DDoS attacks are now probable and will waste further taxpayer funds, funds 
that should be put to far greater use than abusing law-abiding companies 
that would comply with legal requests if they were instructed to.

We urge the British government to initiate an immediate and thorough public 
investigation into the actions of GCHQ and to assure users, companies and 
communities who rely on the internet that they are safe from being 
accidentally targeted by the broad, oppressive and legally grey hammer of 
agencies under their control.

Thank you.

The QuakeNet IRC Network administrators and staff
[/end quotes]

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#82

op 07-02-14 12:33 schreef xyzzy:
> It's from earlier Thursday, but given what this may imply about government
> behavior regarding Usenet in the future, it seems worth posting as it got
> buried in the Slashdot protests.
>
> Key quotes... full article is at
> https://www.quakenet.org/articles/102-press-release-irc-networks-under-
> systematic-attack-from-governments
>
> Press Release - Thursday 06 February 2014
>
> Yesterday we learned in the latest release of documents from Edward
> Snowden...that GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, are performing
> persistent social and technological attacks against IRC networks.  These
> attacks are performed without informing the networks and are targeted at
> users associated with politically motivated movements such as "Anonymous".
>
> It is apparent now that engaging in such topics with an opinion contrary to
> that of the intelligence agencies is sufficient to make people a target for
> monitoring, coercion and denial of access to communications platforms.
>
> The released documents depict GCHQ operatives engaging in social engineering
> of IRC users to entrap themselves by encouraging the target to leak details
> about their location as well as wholesale attacks on the IRC servers hosting
> the network. These attacks bring down the IRC network entirely affecting
> every user on the network as well as the company hosting the server.
>
> Many of the charges being thrown at IRC users associated with the Anonymous
> movement are now clear to be identical to the actions of the agency itself.
> People charged with organising DDoS attacks on the servers of large
> companies while in secret GCHQ are issuing DDoS attacks against IRC networks
> who may be unaware of the actions of a tiny subset of their users.
>
> Civil actions launched by the companies affected by the government sponsored
> DDoS attacks are now probable and will waste further taxpayer funds, funds
> that should be put to far greater use than abusing law-abiding companies
> that would comply with legal requests if they were instructed to.
>
> We urge the British government to initiate an immediate and thorough public
> investigation into the actions of GCHQ and to assure users, companies and
> communities who rely on the internet that they are safe from being
> accidentally targeted by the broad, oppressive and legally grey hammer of
> agencies under their control.
>
> Thank you.
>
> The QuakeNet IRC Network administrators and staff
> [/end quotes]
>
That's how they've brought nntp or usenet to it's knees.
Just see how few postings get through!

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#84

On 2014-02-07, Dirk T. Verbeek <dverbeek@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> op 07-02-14 12:33 schreef xyzzy:
>> It's from earlier Thursday, but given what this may imply about government
>> behavior regarding Usenet in the future, it seems worth posting as it got
>> buried in the Slashdot protests.
>>
>> Key quotes... full article is at
>> Thank you.
>>
>> The QuakeNet IRC Network administrators and staff [/end quotes]
>>
> That's how they've brought nntp or usenet to it's knees.  Just see how
> few postings get through!


Isn't this a strategy that would sink any forum whatsoever, including
face-to-face stuff like groups gathering in bars to discuss the
revolution?  It's not clear to me there's an easy solution.

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#362

On 2014-02-07, RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> wrote:
> On 2014-02-07, Dirk T. Verbeek <dverbeek@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> That's how they've brought nntp or usenet to it's knees.  Just see how
>> few postings get through!
>
>
> Isn't this a strategy that would sink any forum whatsoever, including
> face-to-face stuff like groups gathering in bars to discuss the
> revolution?  It's not clear to me there's an easy solution.

I think we need a technical solution to this. Discussions do not require
a huge bandwidth, so systems using onion-routing should be a viable option.
To counter social engineering, only common sense/applied brains can help.

https://freenetproject.org/ is an interesing project, but one seriously
has to consider all consequences. If absolute anonymous communication 
is possible, combined with untracable payment by bitcoins, there will be
a market fof contract killers, child porn, snuff movies, online harassing
 and other stuff. On freenetproject I saw some disgusting stuff and 
abandoned the community.

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#380

Achsis of Elvis <q.kontinuum@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 2014-02-07, RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> wrote:
>> On 2014-02-07, Dirk T. Verbeek <dverbeek@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>> That's how they've brought nntp or usenet to it's knees.  Just see how
>>> few postings get through!
>>
>>
>> Isn't this a strategy that would sink any forum whatsoever, including
>> face-to-face stuff like groups gathering in bars to discuss the
>> revolution?  It's not clear to me there's an easy solution.
> 
> I think we need a technical solution to this. Discussions do not require
> a huge bandwidth, so systems using onion-routing should be a viable option.
> To counter social engineering, only common sense/applied brains can help.
> 
> https://freenetproject.org/ is an interesing project, but one seriously
> has to consider all consequences. If absolute anonymous communication 
> is possible, combined with untracable payment by bitcoins, there will be
> a market fof contract killers, child porn, snuff movies, online harassing
> and other stuff. On freenetproject I saw some disgusting stuff and 
> abandoned the community.
> 

Freenet is a bit out of date at this point.  Onion routing does work, though for irc, it would seem to me the ideal way to provide privacy and security would fall more to i2p, given that at its start, irc was a fairly big focus of it, and it remains very well implemented.  With no official exit nodes (or as they call them, "outproxies"), it largely reduces the attack vectors for deobfuscating tor users.  And given that irc clients in general tend to be less leaky than web browsers, well, I'm not aware of anyone being deobfuscated using i2p irc. As for the criminal element that comes with anonymity: it's expected.  Unfortunate, but expected.  On the other hand, it doesn't imply impunity, it merely means that this dragnet style of policing cannot be used, but rather, that conventional police tactics need to be employed to find someone just as if they were using burner cell phones or (lol) payphones to hide their identity.  It is fallacious to assume that if tor or i2p weren't there, these crimes wouldn't be happening, as we're all quite familiar with the existence of child porn, drug sales, and even murder for hire, even before the age of the Internet.  

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#386

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 2014-02-13, cykros@devio.us <cykros@devio.us> wrote:
> Achsis of Elvis <q.kontinuum@yahoo.com> wrote:
> but expected.  On the other hand, it doesn't imply impunity, it merely 
> means that this dragnet style of policing cannot be used, but rather, that
> conventional police tactics need to be employed to find someone just as
> if they were using burner cell phones or (lol) payphones to hide their
> identity.  It is fallacious to assume that if tor or i2p weren't there, 
> these crimes wouldn't be happening, as we're all quite familiar with
> the existence of child porn, drug sales, and even murder for hire, even
> before the age of the Internet.

I agree partially. Where there are humans, there will be crimes. But I
still think that for many, the best moral is lack of opportunity ;-)
I assume the easier accessible these kind of services are, the more 
they will be utilized. OTOH, governments are also not entirely 
trustworthy, and the less trustworthy they are the more willing I am 
to pay the price for anonymity.

PS: Still working on my slrn config; scrambled username and "real name",
so my previous post had the wrong mail address.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux)

iJwEAQECAAYFAlL9DDUACgkQ4XLZ2XZQJ8D4IAP6A8IoPU5ZyZSMuLBTXqoBo8AB
jjWTnd/L+cdc2Nwu6TbsOlgQ0qNyNgAouplUBzV01RfEbPEDF1QmJpkDaTjGyw1e
aWiLJwuKnVNB+7fjuiY1bXm6BwhyMvWwRWCvS7vViMvp/ZpAmoFRgONQO9Tvdfxe
XXNSaY8sAfpGtCiXilU=
=Pr4V
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-- 
Trolling is a art!

My public-key is available on http://tinyurl.com/ps9r99y

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#87

Attacks on Usenet and IRC are both old news, and even though some 
people have suspected governments of conducting them it hasn't become 
commonly accepted even among the healthily paranoid that they do, yet.

Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and the rest of that lot are handy for 
governments, as they can simply be served court orders and censored, 
used as malware vectors, and so on.  I do see attacks on IRC and Usenet 
becoming more prevalent, but on the other hand I also think that good 
intelligence agencies will leave these types of resources alone so as 
to better gather information.  After all, you don't want the boogeymen 
to start using some web server in China to communicate - I don't think 
they honor National Security Letters there.

Good post, thanks a lot.

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#940

On Fri, 7 Feb 2014, Oregonian Haruspex wrote:

> Attacks on Usenet and IRC are both old news, and even though some people have 
> suspected governments of conducting them it hasn't become commonly accepted 
> even among the healthily paranoid that they do, yet.
>
> Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and the rest of that lot are handy for 
> governments, as they can simply be served court orders and censored, used as 
> malware vectors, and so on.  I do see attacks on IRC and Usenet becoming more 
> prevalent, but on the other hand I also think that good intelligence agencies 
> will leave these types of resources alone so as to better gather information. 
> After all, you don't want the boogeymen to start using some web server in 
> China to communicate - I don't think they honor National Security Letters 
> there.
>
> Good post, thanks a lot.
>
>
If it doesn't have an RFC, it likely exists only to make a profit.

   Michael

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