Author Archives: Cyrus Farivar

FTC to award $25,000 for the best honeypot design to trap robocalls

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced another contest to design a system to “identify unwanted robocalls received on landlines or mobile phones, and block and forward those calls to a honeypot.”

The agency will select “up to five contestants” as part of what it’s calling “Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back.”

The first qualifying phase launches Wednesday and runs through June 15, 2015 at 10:00pm Eastern Time, while the final phase concludes at DEF CON 23 on August 9, 2015.

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Gun firm offers $15,000 for Mark One carbon fiber 3-D printer

The company that pioneered 3-D printed firearms wants to pay $15,000 for a carbon fiber 3-D printer so it can make guns.

In an e-mail to supporters sent Tuesday morning, Cody Wilson, the founder of Defense Distributed, said that he will pay the sum to anyone who can get him the printer. MarkForged, the company behind the Mark One carbon fiber printer, says on its website that its printed parts “are up to 20 times stiffer and 5 times stronger than similar parts 3-D printed using ABS plastic.” The product normally retails for $5,500.

The firm’s offer comes a week after it lambasted FedEx and UPS for refusing to ship its computer numerical controlled mill.

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To locate bank robber, FBI unusually asked for warrant to use stingray

Newly uncovered court documents in a federal armed New Jersey bank robbery case that went to trial in late February 2015 reveal an unusual back-and-forth between authorities and judges—ultimately resulting in the FBI seeking and getting a warrant to use a stingray. The move illustrates a rare known instance where authorities met the probable cause hurdle need for a warrant in a stingray deployment.

In 2012, federal prosecutors went to a judge to ask for a “pen/trap order,” a lower type of permission than a warrant. Such an order would have effectively authorized the use of a stingray. But the judge pushed back and imposed usage restrictions “in a private place.” In January 2015, two United States senators made public the FBI’s position that the agency could use stingrays in public places without a warrant.

Seemingly dissatisfied with this restriction, an FBI agent then took an unusual step—he swore in a new affidavit as part of a warrant application to a different judge for permission to deploy “mobile equipment.” Such gear would enable the FBI “to monitor the dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information of the Target Facility in order to determine its general location for a period of 30 days beginning within 14 days of the date of the warrant.” The second judge, United States Magistrate Judge Mark Falk, signed off on the search warrant absent other limits.

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CoinTerra, Yet Another Troubled Bitcoin Miner Startup, Goes Bust

The venture-backed Bitcoin startup CoinTerra has filed for bankruptcy, making it the second major miner manufacturer to do so in recent months.

The Chapter 7 filing, which begins the process of liquidating company assets, was submitted on Saturday and comes just weeks after a Utah-based data center sued CoinTerra over a contract dispute.

In June 2014, CoinTerra was sued by a California man for failing to deliver his miner on time. According to court filings, CoinTerra has $10 million to $50 million in combined estimated assets and liabilities and around 400 creditors spread out worldwide from Canada to Russia to Hong Kong.

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US Expands Spy Program on American Drivers Beyond Border Region

Since at least 2010, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has been expanding a regional license plate reader (LPR) program to the entire United States. Previously the program was only known to be concentrated in the border region of the American Southwest.

The revelation comes from new documents obtained and published late Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents also show the DEA captured over 793 million license plates from May 2009 through May 2013 with the stated goal of drug-related asset forfeiture.

“The government has essentially created a program of mass tracking,” Catherine Crump, a former ACLU lawyer who now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, told Ars. “The US has created a system where the government can track you and the American public simply has to accept it as a fait accompli.”

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British Spy Agency Captured Journalists’ Messages Amongst 70,000 E-mails

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British sister agency of the National Security Agency, captured e-mails of some journalists out of 70,000 message intercepted in 10 minutes during a November 2008 test.

According to The Guardian, which on Monday cited some of its Snowden documents as its source (but did not publish them), the e-mails were scooped up as part of the intelligence agency’s direct fiber taps.

Journalists from the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Sun, NBC, and The Washington Post were apparently targeted.

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After Charlie Hebdo Killings, EU Floats Terrorism Site Reporting (Again)

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a number of European Union ministers have called for a new online tool that would enable “swift reporting of material that aims to incite hatred and terror and the condition of its removing, where appropriate/possible.”

How exactly would this reporting take place? European officials don’t explain in their three-page Sunday statement, but one of the signatories was Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator.

The Belgian official endorsed a 2013 quixotic EU-funded plan called CleanIT, which spent €400,000 ($473,000) to hold a bunch of meetings and produce a final report without creating anything concrete. And while CleanIT is not mentioned by name in the new statement, the reporting description sounds very much like it.

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Feds Find Border Drones Don’t Actually Make Border More Secure

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) own watchdog says that drones deployed at the United States-Mexico border do not achieve their objective of protecting the country.

In a 37-page report issued on December 24, 2014 but published for the first time on Tuesday, DHS’ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) concluded that “after 8 years, [Customs and Border Protection, or CBP] cannot prove that the program is effective because it has not developed performance measures.”

In a statement, the agency had a damning conclusion for the CBP drone program, which anticipates spending an additional $443 million to acquire and operate 14 more drones.

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Feds Want Apple’s Help to Defeat Encrypted Phones, New Legal Case Shows

OAKLAND, CA—Newly discovered court documents from two federal criminal cases in New York and California that remain otherwise sealed suggest that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is pursuing an unusual legal strategy to compel cellphone makers to assist investigations.

In both cases, the seized phones—one of which is an iPhone 5S—are encrypted and cannot be cracked by federal authorities. Prosecutors have now invoked the All Writs Act, an 18th-century federal law that simply allows courts to issue a writ, or order, which compels a person or company to do something.

Some legal experts are concerned that these rarely made public examples of the lengths the government is willing to go in defeating encrypted phones raise new questions as to how far the government can compel a private company to aid a criminal investigation.

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In Wake of Uber Privacy Scandal, Lyft Announces Data Restrictions

Days after a BuzzFeed journalist revealed that an Uber executive floated the idea of using its “God mode” ability to snoop on journalists who write about the ridesharing service, rival firm Lyft has changed its policy to prevent most employees from doing something similar.

Erin Simpson, a Lyft spokeswoman, told Ars in a statement by e-mail that the company’s “longstanding policy prohibits employees or contractors from accessing any user personal information except to the extent such use is necessary to do their job.”

As of Thursday, the company has “proactively made additional updates to further safeguard our community members’ privacy, including the development of tiered access controls that further limit access to user data to a smaller subset of employees and contractors. Ride location data is restricted to an even smaller subset of people.”

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Local Judge Unseals Hundreds of Highly Secret Cell Tracking Court Records

A judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, has unsealed a set of 529 court documents in hundreds of criminal cases detailing the use of a stingray, or cell-site simulator, by local police. This move, which took place earlier this week, marks a rare example of a court opening up a vast trove of applications made by police to a judge, who authorized each use of the powerful and potentially invasive device.

According to the Charlotte Observer, the records seem to suggest that judges likely did not fully understand what they were authorizing. Law enforcement agencies nationwide have taken extraordinary steps to preserve stingray secrecy. As recently as this week, prosecutors in a Baltimore robbery case dropped key evidence that stemmed from stingray use rather than fully disclose how the device was used.

The newspaper also reported on Friday that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s office, which astonishingly had also never previously seen the applications filed by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD), will now review them and determine which records also need to be shared with defense attorneys. Criminals could potentially file new claims challenging their convictions on the grounds that not all evidence was disclosed to them at the time.

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Feds Proposed the Secret Phone Database Used by Local Virginia Cops

A Virginia-based law enforcement data sharing ring, which allows signatory police agencies to share and analyze seized “telephone intelligence information,” was first proposed by federal prosecutors, according to new documents obtained by Ars. Federal involvement suggests that there could be more such databases in other parts of the country.

“It’s unsurprising to see the feds encouraging local law enforcement agencies to create these localized databases,” Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. “In fact, there’s a whole division within the Department of Justice that focuses on educating and advancing local law enforcement interests, the National Institute of Justice. And so I would imagine there are others.”

As Ars reported last month, according to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) first published by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the police departments from Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Chesapeake, and Suffolk all participate in something called the “Hampton Roads Telephone Analysis Sharing Network,” or HRTASN.

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Gov’t Board: Like A Drone, Your RC Aircraft is Regulated by Law, so Pay up

Raphael Pirker’s unmanned aircraft was very similar to these RiteWings planes.

A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) panel has reversed a decision made earlier this year by an NTSB law judge, finding that a man’s remote-controlled model plane was indeed an aircraft. Raphael Pirker must pay the $10,000 fine that was originally ordered for violating the provision that prohibits commercial use of an unmanned aircraft.

As we reported in March 2014, Pirker used a RiteWing Zephyr II remote-controlled flying wing to record aerial video of a hospital campus for use in a television advertisement back in 2011. The year before, he posted a video filmed from a drone flying over New York City—including a close shot of the Statue of Liberty. Law enforcement did not interfere with Pirker, and he even gave the New York Police Department and the National Park Service a shout-out for “staying friendly, professional, and positive.” But the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wasn’t amused and brought the civil case against Pirker.

Writing for the board in the judicial order, Acting Chairman Christopher Hart states:

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Silk Road 2.0 Suspect’s Twitter Account Hijacked, Lawyer Says

The attorney representing Blake Benthall, whom prosecutors claim was the head of the Silk Road 2.0 website, told Ars on Monday that his client’s Twitter account has been hacked.

“He remains in custody and thus, of course, is not tweeting,” Jean-Jacques Cabou said by e-mail. “Blake’s Twitter account was compromised by unauthorized users, who posted the tweet regarding bitcoin donations. Neither Blake nor any member of Blake’s family authorized the tweet or its request. Beginning days ago, we took proper measures to report to Twitter that the account was compromised and the tweet was unauthorized. We have no idea who holds the private key(s) associated with the bitcoin address posted in the tweet.”

Last Tuesday, Benthall’s account simply stated:

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14 Years After Bush v. Gore, We Still Can’t Get Voting Tech Right

A handful of jurisdictions nationwide reported various computer-related problems that hampered some voters as Americans went to the polls on Tuesday.

As Ars has noted over the last two years, electronic voting (much less Internet voting) is on the decline in the United States as voters and voting officials have placed less and less confidence in machines that were designed to replace confusing paper ballots in the controversial 2000 presidential election and the resulting Help America Vote Act.

On Tuesday, the problems included 11 voting machines in Virginia Beach and Newport News, Virginia that were “knocked out of calibration.” In a statement, the Virginia Department of Elections said that some AccuVote TSX Touch Screen voting machines changed votes to something other than what the voter intended.

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Last Pirate Bay Co-Founder Arrested after Living on the Lam in Laos

Fredrik “tiamo” Neij (left) continued to live in Laos, unabashedly defying a Swedish arrest warrant until November 2014.

Thai authorities announced Tuesday that they arrested Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (aka “Tiamo”) at the northern border with Laos.

Neij famously flaunted a Swedish arrest warrant while publicly living in Laos (although his Facebook profile states he lives in Bangkok) following his conviction for aiding copyright infringement. In 2013, he famously told a Swedish filmmaker: “I can sit here and jerk off for five years. And I will.”

Neij’s arrest marks the third and final member of the remaining Swedish defendants who were originally convicted in 2009 for aiding copyright infringement. All members have lost all their appeals since. The men claim to no longer own The Pirate Bay, and it has continued to remain functional over the years.

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A Top Appeals Court to Hear Why NSA Metadata Spying Should Stay or Go

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On Tuesday, three judges at one of the nation’s most powerful appellate courts will hear oral arguments in the only legal challenge to result in a judicial order against the National Security Agency’s (NSA) vast telephone metadata collection program. That order was put on hold pending the government’s appeal in this case.

The District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals could overturn last year’s unusual lower court ruling that ordered an end to the program, or the court could confirm it.

The lawsuit, known as Klayman et al v. Obama et al, pits a longstanding conservative lawyer, Larry Klayman, against the American government and its intelligence apparatus. If Klayman wins, the suit is likely to be eventually appealed further to the Supreme Court.

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Pennsylvania State Cops Borrow, then Return, Spy Blimp to Aid Manhunt

The Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) just returned an aerial surveillance balloon that it borrowed for two days in an effort to capture a man wanted for the murder of a trooper last month. Thomas Kelly, a PSP spokesman, told Ars on Wednesday that the “Blimp in a Box” was returned because it was ineffective.

“Due to the tree canopy and rugged terrain of our search area, the balloon was not as helpful as everyone hoped it would be,” he said by e-mail. “The tree canopy is too thick, we couldn’t see through it. It’s that simple. The balloon was offered to us as an alternative technique. We tried it and just didn’t work. It’s best suited for open spaces, not heavily wooded forests.”

The manhunt is focused on finding Eric Frein, a suspected murderer now on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Six weeks ago, Frein allegedly shot and killed a Pennsylvania trooper while wounding another outside the Blooming Grove Barracks in Pike County. After the incident, local and federal authorities named Frein, a local survivalist and amateur military historian, as the prime suspect.

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Florida Court: Come Back with a Warrant to Track Suspects Via Mobile Phone

In a rare decision, the Florida Supreme Court ruled last Friday that law enforcement must get a warrant in order to track a suspect’s location via his or her mobile phone.

Many legal experts applauded the decision as a step in the right direction for privacy.

“[The] opinion is a resounding defense of our right to privacy in the digital age,” Nate Freed Wessler, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Following people’s movements by secretly turning their cell phones into tracking devices can reveal extremely sensitive details of our lives, like where we go to the doctor or psychiatrist, where we spend the night, and who our friends are. Police are now on notice that they need to get a warrant from a judge before tracking cell phones, whether using information from the service provider or their own ‘stingray’ cell phone tracking equipment.”

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DC Police’s “Stingray” Trackers Sat in a Vault, Unused for 6 years

Newly released documents definitively show that local law enforcement in Washington, DC, possessed a cellular surveillance system—commonly known as a “stingray”—since 2003. However, these stingrays literally sat unused in a police vault for six years until officers were trained on the devices in early 2009.

“It’s life imitating The Wire,” Chris Soghoian, a staff technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Ars. “There’s an episode in Season 3 where [Detective Jimmy] McNulty finds a [stingray] that has been sitting on the shelf for a while.”

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request sent to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPDC), Ars received dozens of documents pertaining to the acquisition and training of stingrays and related upgrades. Vice News received the same documents, reporting on them last Friday.

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