Thursday, October 27, 2016

NSA contractor who stole documents over two decades charged


CBS NEWS: 

The former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who’s been charged with stealing and keeping highly classified material over the course of two decades put U.S. intelligence officers and operations at risk by possessing their names, according to a court filing Thursday.

In the filing with a Maryland federal court, the Justice Department confirmed for the first time specific details about the type of information Harold Martin took from the NSA.

“As an example, information stolen by the Defendant includes numerous names of intelligence officers of the United States,” the filing said. “These officers operate under cover outside the United States, and putting the secrecy of their identities at risk by removing information about those identities from appropriate, secure storage not only endangers the lives and safety of those officers and the individuals with whom they work, but also risks exposure of American intelligence operations.”

The Justice Department added that if numerous intelligence sources and methods for highly sensitive intelligence operations fell into the wrong hands, they “could be rendered nearly useless.”

Prosecutors estimate that a substantial portion of the 50 terabytes of digital information found in Martin’s possession contains “highly classified information.” Authorities also found thousands of hard-copy documents containing “highly classified information” in his possession.

In the filing Thursday, the Justice Department did not say whether the names of intelligence officers were shared with U.S. adversaries and it’s still unclear whether Martin was selling this information or if he was simply hoarding the information in his home.

Regardless of his intentions, the Justice Department plans to charge Martin under the Espionage Act. He has already been charged with theft of government property and removal and retention of classified materials for stealing half a billion pages of U.S. secrets and records between 1996 and 2016.

Martin, 51, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, made his first public court appearance in a Baltimore federal courtroom on Friday and the judge ruled that he must remain detained because he poses a “serious risk to the public.”

In court documents filed last week, government lawyers said that Martin committed theft that was “breathtaking in its longevity and scale.”

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

How to build a UHF SATCOM antenna for under $20 FINAL PART

I received many e-mails about my UHF SATCOM antenna article, some of them asking nicely and some downright obscene. I have many reason whey I didn't finish the article, which run the gamut from starting a new career to getting divorced, but looking back I should have not left you hanging.

That said, if you follow the directions in the post on Radio Reference you'll find out how to build the phase harness for the radiating elements.  It's fairly simple to do and will take you less than a day to build if you have the proper tools and patience.

Use my dimensions but use the phasing instructions on THIS THREAD and you'll succeed. I built a version using a large magnet and made me a mobile SATCOM antenna and it works amazingly well, even without amplification.


I also replaced the reflector at the rear of the first antenna I built with an old parabolic dish from a discarded DISH network antenna and turned it into a permanent UHF SATCOM base antenna and can now listen to UHF SATCOM from anywhere.



Currently I am working on a small handheld version. I will post a how-to article on it as soon as I get it done.

To the many who followed this series of articles and were patiently waiting for the other shoe to drop, thanks for your missives and overwhelming patience. To the other guy who just told me to go fuck myself, fuck you too.

-Steve Douglass


PREVIOUS ARTICLES

NSA in bed with Yahoo - allowed spy software on mail servers.

REUTERS: Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. 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.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.

Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.

According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc."Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.

Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.

The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.

The demand to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified directive sent to the company's legal team, according to the three people familiar with the matter.

U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad directive for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.

"I've never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a 'selector,'" said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.

"It would be really difficult for a provider to do that," he added.

Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.

Reuters was unable to confirm whether the 2015 demand went to other companies, or if any complied.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, did not respond to requests for comment.


Monday, October 3, 2016

Shadow Brokers have no takers for stolen cyber tools...

WASHINGTON

Foreign hackers responsible for the theft of top secret cyber weapons from the National Security Agency are ranting that no one is interested in buying the stolen cyber tools.

A group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, which claimed responsibility in mid-August for penetrating the NSA and seizing prized malware, said in a profane Borat-like postingover the weekend that it has found “no interest” for its online auction of the pilfered cyber weapons.

The group originally released some teaser cyber tools for free, and analysts confirmed that they appeared to be state-of-the-art malware from the NSA’s secret hacking division.

“TheShadowBrokers is realizing peoples is not thinking auction is being real?” the hackers said in the message, in broken English, adding that the online auction for the stolen tools “is sounding crazy but is being real.”

The hackers initially demanded one million Bitcoin for the stolen malware, a pile of crypto currency worth about $611 million today. In their latest message, the group acknowledged that that price was “a ridiculous sum” and indicated it would accept far less.

The stolen malware allows perpetrators to break through security firewalls and lurk unseen, monitoring network traffic or launching a devastating cyber attack.

The Shadow Brokers’ message is vulgar and hard to read, sounding as if it is written by angry poor speakers of English. Whether it is all show is not clear as the identity of the hackers is unknown

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nation-world/national/article105708446.html#storylink=cpy

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