- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

DarkMatter cyber mercenaries
by coderman 31 Jan '19

31 Jan '19

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-spying-raven-specialreport/special-r… January 30, 2019 / 11:23 AM / Updated 4 hours ago Special Report: Inside the UAE’s secret hacking team of U.S. mercenaries [Christopher Bing](https://www.reuters.com/journalists/christopher-bing), [Joel Schectman](https://www.reuters.com/journalists/joel-schectman) WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two weeks after leaving her position as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. National Security Agency in 2014, Lori Stroud was in the Middle East working as a hacker for an Arab monarchy. She had joined Project Raven, a clandestine team that included more than a dozen former U.S. intelligence operatives recruited to help the United Arab Emirates engage in surveillance of other governments, militants and human rights activists critical of the monarchy. Stroud and her team, working from a converted mansion in Abu Dhabi known internally as “the Villa,” would use methods learned from a decade in the U.S intelligence community to help the UAE hack into the phones and computers of its enemies. Stroud had been recruited by a Maryland cyber security contractor to help the Emiratis launch hacking operations, and for three years, she thrived in the job. But in 2016, the Emiratis moved Project Raven to a UAE cyber security firm named DarkMatter. Before long, Stroud and other Americans involved in the effort say they saw the mission cross a red line: targeting fellow Americans for surveillance. “I am working for a foreign intelligence agency who is targeting U.S. persons,” she told Reuters. “I am officially the bad kind of spy.” The story of Project Raven reveals how former U.S. government hackers have employed state-of-the-art cyber-espionage tools on behalf of a foreign intelligence service that spies on human rights activists, journalists and political rivals. Interviews with nine former Raven operatives, along with a review of thousands of pages of project documents and emails, show that surveillance techniques taught by the NSA were central to the UAE’s efforts to monitor opponents. The sources interviewed by Reuters were not Emirati citizens. The operatives utilized an arsenal of cyber tools, including a cutting-edge espionage platform known as Karma, in which Raven operatives say they hacked into the iPhones of hundreds of activists, political leaders and suspected terrorists. Details of the Karma hack were described in a separate Reuters article today. An NSA spokesman declined to comment on Raven. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment. The UAE’s Embassy in Washington and a spokesman for its National Media Council did not respond to requests for comment. The UAE has said it faces a real threat from violent extremist groups and that it is cooperating with the United States on counter-terrorism efforts. Former Raven operatives say the project helped NESA break up an ISIS network within the Emirates. When an ISIS-inspired militant stabbed to death a teacher in Abu Dhabi in 2014, the operatives say, Raven spearheaded the UAE effort to assess if other attacks were imminent. Various reports have highlighted the ongoing cyber arms race in the Middle East, as the Emirates and other nations attempt to sweep up hacking weapons and personnel faster than their rivals. The Reuters investigation is the first to reveal the existence of Project Raven, providing a rare inside account of state hacking operations usually shrouded in secrecy and denials. The Raven story also provides new insight into the role former American cyberspies play in foreign hacking operations. Within the U.S. intelligence community, leaving to work as an operative for another country is seen by some as a betrayal. “There’s a moral obligation if you’re a former intelligence officer from becoming effectively a mercenary for a foreign government,” said Bob Anderson, who served as executive assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation until 2015. While this activity raises ethical dilemmas, U.S. national security lawyers say the laws guiding what American intelligence contractors can do abroad are murky. Though it’s illegal to share classified information, there is no specific law that bars contractors from sharing more general spycraft knowhow, such as how to bait a target with a virus-laden email. The rules, however, are clear on hacking U.S. networks or stealing the communications of Americans. “It would be very illegal,” said Rhea Siers, former NSA deputy assistant director for policy. The hacking of Americans was a tightly held secret even within Raven, with those operations led by Emiratis instead. Stroud’s account of the targeting of Americans was confirmed by four other former operatives and in emails reviewed by Reuters. The FBI is now investigating whether Raven’s American staff leaked classified U.S. surveillance techniques and if they illegally targeted American computer networks, according to former Raven employees interviewed by federal law enforcement agents. Stroud said she is cooperating with that investigation. No charges have been filed and it is possible none will emerge from the inquiry. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment. PURPLE BRIEFING, BLACK BRIEFING Stroud is the only former Raven operative willing to be named in this story; eight others who described their experiences would do so only on condition of anonymity. She spent a decade at the NSA, first as a military service member from 2003 to 2009 and later as a contractor in the agency for the giant technology consultant Booz Allen Hamilton from 2009 to 2014. Her specialty was hunting for vulnerabilities in the computer systems of foreign governments, such as China, and analyzing what data should be stolen. In 2013, her world changed. While stationed at NSA Hawaii, Stroud says, she made the fateful recommendation to bring a Dell technician already working in the building onto her team. That contractor was Edward Snowden. “He’s former CIA, he’s local, he’s already cleared,” Stroud, 37, recalled. “He’s perfect!” Booz and the NSA would later approve Snowden’s transfer, providing him with even greater access to classified material. Two months after joining Stroud’s group, Snowden fled the United States and passed on thousands of pages of top secret program files to journalists, detailing the agency’s massive data collection programs. In the maelstrom that followed, Stroud said her Booz team was vilified for unwittingly enabling the largest security breach in agency history. Sponsored “Our brand was ruined,” she said of her team. In the wake of the scandal, Marc Baier, a former colleague at NSA Hawaii, offered her the chance to work for a contractor in Abu Dhabi called CyberPoint. In May 2014, Stroud jumped at the opportunity and left Booz Allen. CyberPoint, a small cyber security contractor headquartered in Baltimore, was founded by an entrepreneur named Karl Gumtow in 2009. Its clients have included the U.S. Department of Defense, and its UAE business has gained media attention. In an interview, Gumtow said his company was not involved in any improper actions. Stroud had already made the switch from government employee to Booz Allen contractor, essentially performing the same NSA job at higher pay. Taking a job with CyberPoint would fulfill a lifelong dream of deploying to the Middle East and doing so at a lucrative salary. Many analysts, like Stroud, were paid more than $200,000 a year, and some managers received salaries and compensation above $400,000. She understood her new job would involve a counterterrorism mission in cooperation with the Emiratis, a close U.S. ally in the fight against ISIS, but little else. Baier and other Raven managers assured her the project was approved by the NSA, she said. With Baier’s impressive resume, including time in an elite NSA hacking unit known as Tailored Access Operations, the pledge was convincing. Baier did not respond to multiple phone calls, text messages, emails, and messages on social media. In the highly secretive, compartmentalized world of intelligence contracting, it isn’t unusual for recruiters to keep the mission and client from potential hires until they sign non-disclosure documents and go through a briefing process. When Stroud was brought into the Villa for the first time, in May 2014, Raven management gave her two separate briefings, back-to-back. In the first, known internally as the “Purple briefing,” she said she was told Raven would pursue a purely defensive mission, protecting the government of the UAE from hackers and other threats. Right after the briefing ended, she said she was told she had just received a cover story. She then received the “Black briefing,” a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters. Raven is “the offensive, operational division of NESA and will never be acknowledged to the general public,” the Black memo says. The NESA, or National Electronic Security Authority, was the UAE’s version of the NSA. Stroud would be part of Raven’s analysis and target-development shop, tasked with helping the government profile its enemies online, hack them and collect data. Those targets were provided by the client, NESA, now called the Signals Intelligence Agency. The language and secrecy of the briefings closely mirrored her experience at the NSA, Stroud said, giving her a level of comfort. The information scooped up by Raven was feeding a security apparatus that has drawn international criticism. The Emirates, a wealthy federation of seven Arab sheikhdoms with a population of 9 million, is an ally of neighbor Saudi Arabia and rival of Iran. Like those two regional powers, the UAE has been accused of suppressing free speech, detaining dissidents and other abuses by groups such as Human Rights Watch. The UAE says it is working closely with Washington to fight extremism “beyond the battlefield” and is promoting efforts to counter the “root causes” of radical violence. Raven’s targets eventually would include militants in Yemen, foreign adversaries such as Iran, Qatar and Turkey, and individuals who criticized the monarchy, said Stroud and eight other former Raven operatives. Their accounts were confirmed by hundreds of Raven program documents reviewed by Reuters. Under orders from the UAE government, former operatives said, Raven would monitor social media and target people who security forces felt had insulted the government. “Some days it was hard to swallow, like [when you target] a 16-year-old kid on Twitter,” she said. “But it’s an intelligence mission, you are an intelligence operative. I never made it personal.” The Americans identified vulnerabilities in selected targets, developed or procured software to carry out the intrusions and assisted in monitoring them, former Raven employees said. But an Emirati operative would usually press the button on an attack. This arrangement was intended to give the Americans “plausible deniability” about the nature of the work, said former Raven members. TARGETING ‘GYRO’ AND ‘EGRET’ Stroud discovered that the program took aim not just at terrorists and foreign government agencies, but also dissidents and human rights activists. The Emiratis categorized them as national security targets. Following the Arab Spring protests and the ousting of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Emirati security forces viewed human rights advocates as a major threat to “national stability,” records and interviews show. FILE PHOTO: Edward Snowden speaks via video link during a news conference in New York , U.S., September 14, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo One of the program’s key targets in 2012 was Rori Donaghy, according to former Raven operatives and program documents. Donaghy, then 25, was a British journalist and activist who authored articles critical of the country’s human rights record. In 2012, he wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian criticizing the UAE government’s activist crackdown and warning that, if it continued, “those in power face an uncertain future.” Before 2012, the former operatives said, the nascent UAE intelligence-gathering operation largely relied on Emirati agents breaking into the homes of targets while they were away and physically placing spyware on computers. But as the Americans built up Raven, the remote hacking of Donaghy offered the contractors a tantalizing win they could present to the client. Because of sensitivity over human rights violations and press freedom in the West, the operation against a journalist-activist was a gamble. “The potential risk to the UAE Government and diplomatic relations with Western powers is great if the operation can be traced back to UAE,” 2012 program documents said. To get close to Donaghy, a Raven operative should attempt to “ingratiate himself to the target by espousing similar beliefs,” the cyber-mercenaries wrote. Donaghy would be “unable to resist an overture of this nature,” they believed. Posing as a single human rights activist, Raven operatives emailed Donaghy asking for his help to “bring hope to those who are long suffering,” the email message said. The operative convinced Donaghy to download software he claimed would make messages “difficult to trace.” In reality, the malware allowed the Emiratis to continuously monitor Donaghy’s email account and Internet browsing. The surveillance against Donaghy, who was given the codename Gyro, continued under Stroud and remained a top priority for the Emirates for years, Stroud said. Donaghy eventually became aware that his email had been hacked. In 2015, after receiving another suspicious email, he contacted a security researcher at Citizen Lab, a Canadian human rights and digital privacy group, who discovered hackers had been attempting for years to breach his computer. Reached by phone in London, Donaghy, now a graduate student pursuing Arab studies, expressed surprise he was considered a top national security target for five years. Donaghy confirmed he was targeted using the techniques described in the documents. “I’m glad my partner is sitting here as I talk on the phone because she wouldn’t believe it,” he said. Told the hackers were American mercenaries working for the UAE, Donaghy, a British citizen, expressed surprise and disgust. “It feels like a betrayal of the alliance we have,” he said. Stroud said her background as an intelligence operative made her comfortable with human rights targets as long as they weren’t Americans. “We’re working on behalf of this country’s government, and they have specific intelligence objectives which differ from the U.S., and understandably so,” Stroud said. “You live with it.” Prominent Emirati activist Ahmed Mansoor, given the code name Egret, was another target, former Raven operatives say. For years, Mansoor publicly criticized the country’s war in Yemen, treatment of migrant workers and detention of political opponents. In September 2013, Raven presented senior NESA officials with material taken from Mansoor’s computer, boasting of the successful collection of evidence against him. It contained screenshots of emails in which Mansoor discussed an upcoming demonstration in front of the UAE’s Federal Supreme Court with family members of imprisoned dissidents. Raven told UAE security forces Mansoor had photographed a prisoner he visited in jail, against prison policy, “and then attempted to destroy the evidence on his computer,” said a Powerpoint presentation reviewed by Reuters. Citizen Lab published research in 2016 showing that Mansoor and Donaghy were targeted by hackers — with researchers speculating that the UAE government was the most likely culprit. Concrete evidence of who was responsible, details on the use of American operatives, and first-hand accounts from the hacking team are reported here for the first time. Mansoor was convicted in a secret trial in 2017 of damaging the country’s unity and sentenced to 10 years in jail. He is now held in solitary confinement, his health declining, a person familiar with the matter said. Mansoor’s wife, Nadia, has lived in social isolation in Abu Dhabi. Neighbors are avoiding her out of fear security forces are watching. They are correct. By June 2017 Raven had tapped into her mobile device and given her the code name Purple Egret, program documents reviewed by Reuters show. To do so, Raven utilized a powerful new hacking tool called Karma, which allowed operatives to break into the iPhones of users around the world. Karma allowed Raven to obtain emails, location, text messages and photographs from iPhones simply by uploading lists of numbers into a preconfigured system, five former project employees said. Reuters had no contact with Mansoor’s wife. Karma was particularly potent because it did not require a target to click on any link to download malicious software. The operatives understood the hacking tool to rely on an undisclosed vulnerability in Apple’s iMessage text messaging software. In 2016 and 2017, it would be used against hundreds of targets across the Middle East and Europe, including governments of Qatar, Yemen, Iran and Turkey, documents show. Raven used Karma to hack an iPhone used by the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, as well as the phones of close associates and his brother. The embassy of Qatar in Washington did not respond to requests for comment. WHAT WASHINGTON KNEW Former Raven operatives believed they were on the right side of the law because, they said, supervisors told them the mission was blessed by the U.S. government. Although the NSA wasn’t involved in day-to-day operations, the agency approved of and was regularly briefed on Raven’s activities, they said Baier told them. CyberPoint founder Gumtow said his company was not involved in hacking operations. “We were not doing offensive operations. Period,” Gumtow said in a phone interview. “If someone was doing something rogue, then that’s painful for me to think they would do that under our banner.” Instead, he said, the company trained Emiratis to defend themselves through a program with the country’s Ministry of Interior. A review of internal Raven documents shows Gumtow’s description of the program as advising the Interior Ministry on cyber defense matches an “unclassified cover story” Raven operatives were instructed to give when asked about the project. Raven employees were told to say they worked for the Information Technology and Interoperability Office, the program document said. Providing sensitive defense technologies or services to a foreign government generally requires special licenses from the U.S. State and Commerce Departments. Both agencies declined to comment on whether they issued such licenses to CyberPoint for its operations in the UAE. They added that human rights considerations figure into any such approvals. But a 2014 State Department agreement with CyberPoint showed Washington understood the contractors were helping launch cyber surveillance operations for the UAE. The approval document explains CyberPoint’s contract is to work alongside NESA in the “protection of UAE sovereignty” through “collection of information from communications systems inside and outside the UAE” and “surveillance analysis.” One section of the State Department approval states CyberPoint must receive specific approval from the NSA before giving any presentations pertaining to “computer network exploitation or attack.” Reuters identified dozens of such presentations Raven gave to NESA describing attacks against Donaghy, Mansoor and others. It’s unclear whether the NSA approved Raven’s operations against specific targets. The agreement clearly forbade CyberPoint employees from targeting American citizens or companies. As part of the agreement, CyberPoint promised that its own staff and even Emirati personnel supporting the program “will not be used to Exploit U.S. Persons, (i.e. U.S. citizens, permanent resident aliens, or U.S. companies.)” Sharing classified U.S. information, controlled military technology, or the intelligence collection methods of U.S. agencies was also prohibited. Gumtow declined to discuss the specifics of the agreement. “To the best of my ability and to the best of my knowledge, we did everything as requested when it came to U.S. rules and regulations,” he said. “And we provided a mechanism for people to come to me if they thought that something that was done was wrong.” An NSA spokesman declined to comment on Project Raven. A State Department spokesman declined to comment on the agreement but said such licenses do not authorize people to engage in human rights abuses. By late 2015, some Raven operatives said their missions became more audacious. For instance, instead of being asked to hack into individual users of an Islamist Internet forum, as before, the American contractors were called on to create computer viruses that would infect every person visiting a flagged site. Such wholesale collection efforts risked sweeping in the communications of American citizens, stepping over a line the operators knew well from their NSA days. U.S. law generally forbids the NSA, CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies from monitoring U.S. citizens. Working together with managers, Stroud helped create a policy for what to do when Raven swept up personal data belonging to Americans. The former NSA employees were instructed to mark that material for deletion. Other Raven operatives would also be notified so the American victims could be removed from future collection. As time went on, Stroud noticed American data flagged for removal show up again and again in Raven’s NESA-controlled data stores. Still, she found the work exhilarating. “It was incredible because there weren’t these limitations like there was at the NSA. There wasn’t that bullshit red tape,” she said. “I feel like we did a lot of good work on counterterrorism.” DARKMATTER AND DEPARTURES When Raven was created in 2009, Abu Dhabi had little cyber expertise. The original idea was for Americans to develop and run the program for five to 10 years until Emirati intelligence officers were skilled enough to take over, documents show. By 2013, the American contingent at Raven numbered between a dozen and 20 members at any time, accounting for the majority of the staff. In late 2015, the power dynamic at the Villa shifted as the UAE grew more uncomfortable with a core national security program being controlled by foreigners, former staff said. Emirati defense officials told Gumtow they wanted Project Raven to be run through a domestic company, named DarkMatter. Slideshow (12 Images) Raven’s American creators were given two options: Join DarkMatter or go home. At least eight operatives left Raven during this transition period. Some said they left after feeling unsettled about the vague explanations Raven managers provided when pressed on potential surveillance against other Americans. DarkMatter was founded in 2014 by Faisal Al Bannai, who also created Axiom, one of the largest sellers of mobile devices in the region. DarkMatter markets itself as an innovative developer of defensive cyber technology. A 2016 Intercept article reported the company assisted UAE’s security forces in surveillance efforts and was attempting to recruit foreign cyber experts. The Emirati company of more than 650 employees publicly acknowledges its close business relationship to the UAE government, but denies involvement in state-backed hacking efforts. Project Raven’s true purpose was kept secret from most executives at DarkMatter, former operatives said. DarkMatter did not respond to requests for comment. Al Bannai and the company’s current chief executive, Karim Sabbagh, did not respond to interview requests. A spokeswoman for the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment. Under DarkMatter, Project Raven continued to operate in Abu Dhabi from the Villa, but pressure escalated for the program to become more aggressive. Before long, senior NESA officers were given more control over daily functions, former Raven operatives said, often leaving American managers out of the loop. By mid-2016, the Emirates had begun making an increasing number of sections of Raven hidden from the Americans still managing day-to-day operations. Soon, an “Emirate-eyes only” designation appeared for some hacking targets. FBI QUESTIONS By 2016, FBI agents began approaching DarkMatter employees reentering the United States to ask about Project Raven, three former operatives said. The FBI wanted to know: Had they been asked to spy on Americans? Did classified information on U.S. intelligence collection techniques and technologies end up in the hands of the Emiratis? Two agents approached Stroud in 2016 at Virginia’s Dulles airport as she was returning to the UAE after a trip home. Stroud, afraid she might be under surveillance by the UAE herself, said she brushed off the FBI investigators. “I’m not telling you guys jack,” she recounted. Stroud had been promoted and given even more access to internal Raven databases the previous year. A lead analyst, her job was to probe the accounts of potential Raven targets and learn what vulnerabilities could be used to penetrate their email or messaging systems. Targets were listed in various categories, by country. Yemeni targets were in the “brown category,” for example. Iran was gray. One morning in spring 2017, after she finished her own list of targets, Stroud said she began working on a backlog of other assignments intended for a NESA officer. She noticed that a passport page of an American was in the system. When Stroud emailed supervisors to complain, she was told the data had been collected by mistake and would be deleted, according to an email reviewed by Reuters. Concerned, Stroud began searching a targeting request list usually limited to Raven’s Emirati staff, which she was still able to access because of her role as lead analyst. She saw that security forces had sought surveillance against two other Americans. When she questioned the apparent targeting of Americans, she received a rebuke from an Emirati colleague for accessing the targeting list, the emails show. The target requests she viewed were to be processed by “certain people. You are not one of them,” the Emirati officer wrote. Days later, Stroud said she came upon three more American names on the hidden targeting queue. Those names were in a category she hadn’t seen before: the “white category” — for Americans. This time, she said, the occupations were listed: journalist. “I was sick to my stomach,” she said. “It kind of hit me at that macro level realizing there was a whole category for U.S. persons on this program.” Once more, she said she turned to manager Baier. He attempted to downplay the concern and asked her to drop the issue, she said. But he also indicated that any targeting of Americans was supposed to be done by Raven’s Emirate staff, said Stroud and two other people familiar with the discussion. Stroud’s account of the incidents was confirmed by four other former employees and emails reviewed by Reuters. When Stroud kept raising questions, she said, she was put on leave by superiors, her phones and passport were taken, and she was escorted from the building. Stroud said it all happened so quickly she was unable to recall the names of the three U.S. journalists or other Americans she came across in the files. “I felt like one of those national security targets,” she said. “I’m stuck in the country, I’m being surveilled, I can’t leave.” After two months, Stroud was allowed to return to America. Soon after, she fished out the business card of the FBI agents who had confronted her at the airport. “I don’t think Americans should be doing this to other Americans,” she told Reuters. “I’m a spy, I get that. I’m an intelligence officer, but I’m not a bad one.” By Christopher Bing and Joel Schectman in Washington. Editing by Ronnie Greene, Jonathan Weber and Michael Williams

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APNewsBreak: Undercover agents target cybersecurity watchdog
by Steve Kinney 30 Jan '19

30 Jan '19

APNewsBreak: Undercover agents target cybersecurity watchdog > NEW YORK (AP) — The researchers who reported that Israeli software was used to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s inner circle before his gruesome death are being targeted in turn by international undercover operatives, The Associated Press has found. > > Twice in the past two months, men masquerading as socially conscious investors have lured members of the Citizen Lab internet watchdog group to meetings at luxury hotels to quiz them for hours about their work exposing Israeli surveillance and the details of their personal lives. In both cases, the researchers believe they were secretly recorded. [...] https://www.apnews.com/9f31fa2aa72946c694555a5074fc9f42 I was happy to see that Israeli malware vendor NSO has "zero competence" in the field of human intelligence, and that their efforts to penetrate Citizen Labs harmed no one's interests but their own. The academic security researchers from Citizen Lab spotted NSO's wannabe intelligence officers as hostiles at once, which comes as no surprise: "Security is security" in any context. The Citizen Lab guise demonstrated a real understanding of their subject matter by taking effective steps to steal the initiative early, with (apparently) decisive results. https://citizenlab.ca/ :o)

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Cryptocurrency: The Gunfighters
by grarpamp 30 Jan '19

30 Jan '19

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2019/01/03/bitcoins-last-gu… "Why do we pay taxes... it’s because we’re forced to do it, and if we don’t we get thrown in a cage.” -- Erik Voorhees There's never a last gunfighter, because there's always one more gunfight worth fighting, and guns willing to fight it. -- cypherpunks Jan 3, 2019, 12:00am Bitcoin’s Last Gunslinger Michael del Castillo Forbes Staff Crypto & Blockchain I cover enterprise adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Shapeshift founder Erik Voorhees at the Rennaisance Festival in Larkspur Colorado in June 2007. When Erik Voorhees discovered bitcoin, cryptocurrency was untamed. Memories of the Great Recession, in which global economies tanked, banks were bailed out by governments, and taxpayers were left with the bill, were still thick in the air and in the headlines. Bitcoin was still largely unknown around the world, and the secret message embedded by Satoshi Nakamoto in the bitcoin genesis block ten years ago today, warning of a future bailout of banks, was considered sacred knowledge among early bitcoin initiates: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks So-called crypto-anarchists, who sought to use cryptography to ensure extreme privacy, and their more mild-mannered libertarian brethren, who wanted to build a world with less government influence, were among the first to adopt the cryptocurrency, which allowed anyone in the world to move value without the need of what they viewed as untrustworthy banks, and, some thought, to do so beyond the reach of regulators. To further those ends, just months before Voorhees, the cofounder of the cryptocurrency exchange Shapeshift, discovered bitcoin in May 2011, a 26-year-old Penn State grad named Ross William Ulbricht founded the Silk Road, an online marketplace that accepted bitcoin and was designed to operate outside the jurisdiction of any government. Shortly thereafter, aspiring entrepreneur Charlie Shrem launched the early cryptocurrency exchange BitInstant, and Voorhees became employee number three. As BitInstant’s founding chief marketing officer, one of Voorhees’ key responsibilities was to explain to the rest of the world how the nascent cryptocurrency could enable a new financial paradigm without banks. Now, on the ten year anniversary of the mining of the first bitcoin block, Voorhees has survived the imprisonment of his former BitInstant boss; the life sentence of Ulbricht, whose black market was in part propped up by back-office dealings with Shrem; an agreement with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission to settle multiple charges; and most recently, reports that another investigation is under way to see if he violated terms of an earlier agreement with the SEC. As the stock market wraps up one of its worst year's in a decade and bitcoin's potential as the foundation of an alternative financial infrastructure is increasingly doubted, Voorhees remains defiant. Through it all, he has emerged as a staunch defender of bitcoin’s earliest promises and a symbol of how compromise might still be the best way to open up global finance to the masses. “If we get shut down and are sent to jail, who did that help?” asks Voorhees. “So, ultimately, we pay taxes, but I am morally opposed to taxation. Why do we pay taxes on the business? Is it because our principles on the matter changed? No, it’s because we’re forced to do it, and if we don’t we get thrown in a cage.” The concept of freedom—and its absence—permeates Voorhees’ work, going back to before he discovered bitcoin. Born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1984, Voorhees grew up in a libertarian household set in the thick Colorado forest. His father, Jacques Voorhees, sold diamond trading platform Polygon for $8.4 million in 2004 and is recognized in the libertarian community as a leader for both his extensive writing on libertarian thought and for the way he ran his business. Jacques taught the young Erik his first lessons on economics using the very woods they lived in. When Voorhees was 4 years old he met a local boy, Justin Blincoe, and the two immediately hit it off, bonding over what Blincoe describes as a common mischievousness. Shortly after they met, perhaps taking a cue from Voorhees’ father or perhaps following an inborn entrepreneurial spirit, Voorhees and Blincoe started their first business together, selling pine cones they collected in Voorhees’ backyard. “Who wouldn’t want to buy them?” Blincoe jokingly asked, referring to the pine cones. “They were awesome!” Alas, the boys’ fellow schoolkids disagreed, and the operation failed to take off. Now the chief financial officer of ShapeShift, Blincoe describes a lecture on the economics of pine cones he and Voorhees received from Erik’s father following the failure as their first lesson in supply, demand and scarcity. The friends briefly parted after their sophomore year in high school when Voorhees was shipped off to Vail Mountain School, a private school in Vail, Colorado, and Blincoe stayed at the public Summit High School. But the two friends never lost touch. Shapeshift chief financial officer Justin Blincoe (left) and Shapeshift CEO Erik Voorhees right, circa 1996 at the Blincoe residence in Colorado. Shapeshift chief financial officer Justin Blincoe (left) and Shapeshift CEO Erik Voorhees right, circa 1996 at the Blincoe residence in Colorado.George and Kristi Blincoe In 2003 Voorhees enrolled at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where he became friends with Nic Cary, a fellow student of business leadership and political economics whom Voorhees would later, fatefully, introduce to bitcoin. After graduating, Voorhees moved to Dubai, where he worked as a communications manager for a real estate company. Blincoe joined him four months later. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, Voorhees and Blincoe were still in Dubai. They describe watching the U.S. economic collapse slowly ripple around the world as a defining moment in their lives. “The world really was bigger than the United States," Blincoe says. “It just became really obvious that government should have nothing to do with money whatsoever," Voorhees adds. "The government would never give up the control of money. So what were we going to do?" To more seriously pursue his ever-strengthening beliefs that government—and banking—power should be limited, Voorhees picked up stakes and moved to New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. There he worked with the Free State Project, a long-term effort to build a society with as little government meddling as possible, and met Keith Ammon, a rising local politician. In May 2011 Ammon introduced Voorhees to bitcoin, which unlike the pine cones of his youth was limited in supply and unlike the U.S. dollar was not minted by a government. Voorhees describes reading an article Ammon posted on Facebook and thinking cryptocurrency “was sort of weird.” Then he read further, and by the third article, he says, “It clicked.” Beyond the scarcity of bitcoin, Voorhees says, what most attracted him and what has permeated each of his businesses since was the idea that no one owned the open source blockchain technology that powered it—it couldn’t be shut down by a government—and money could be moved anywhere on earth at “basically zero cost.” If he could get enough people to use the cryptocurrency, it could weaken the influence of traditional banks. “This had to be the most obviously useful invention that I’d ever seen,” he said. “And I just totally fell in love with it.” Repurposed with a mission, Voorhees dove into Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper and quickly landed a job with BitInstant, a then-unknown New York-based cryptocurrency exchange led by Charlie Shrem and backed by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who had just received a lucrative settlement from Facebook. Voorhees made a place for himself in the high-tech startup by leveraging his communications experience to become the company’s founding chief marketing officer. This period, starting around the end of 2011, when bitcoin was worth about $2, is widely known as the Wild West of cryptocurrency. At the time, bitcoin was thought to be both unregulated and unregulatable. Among BitInstant’s many customers was a startup called the Silk Road, a digital black market for buying illicit goods, especially drugs. By 2013, BitInstant was processing a third of all bitcoin transactions, according to some accounts, and indirectly helped Silk Road users conduct some of the $200 million in estimated illicit drug sales during this period, seemingly beyond the reach of the law. Between playing hands of poker for 10 bitcoin each with his former boss, Shrem, and helping build BitInstant into one of the most popular early bitcoin exchanges, Voorhees was becoming a spokesperson not just for BitInstant but for bitcoin itself. One of Voorhees more influential moments took place in the winter of 2011, when he found himself fishing with his old college friend Nic Cary in Gardiners Bay, Long Island. As Cary describes the fateful meeting, while Voorhees fished for flounder he cracked open a “cheap Budweiser” and explained how the open-source code behind bitcoin could eventually become the future of money. “We’re all sharing a world that was structured in advance of our participation in it,” says Cary, who went on to raise $70 million for Blockchain Inc., a bitcoin wallet provider. “And if we have even a shot at building an economic frame that lets all people exchange value regardless of where they were born, that is a worth spending a career on.” Blockchain LLC founder Nic Carey and Voorhees at their college graduation in 2007. Blockchain LLC founder Nic Carey and Voorhees at their college graduation in 2007.Nic Carey Having helped inspire the creation of Blockchain Inc., the largest bitcoin wallet provider in the world, with 30 million bitcoin wallets, Voorhees, who was still living in New Hampshire, returned to his day job at BitInstant. Browsing the social media site Reddit, he discovered a few simple lines of code that mimicked the behavior of dice. It had been less than a year since he'd discovered bitcoin, and those few lines of code were about to turn him, one of the first people to earn a living in crypto, into one of its first multimillionaires. The code he was shown by the anonymous Reddit user ended up forming the building blocks of a casino dice game with bitcoin. Voorhees tested the code and says two things stood out. First, no account was necessary. Gamers could gamble from anywhere in the world without having to hand over any personal information. Second, the odds of the games were cryptographically verifiable, so gamers could rest assured that the dice weren’t rigged. Sensing this could be a game changer, Voorhees bought the code for 40 bitcoin, worth what he estimates was about $350 at the time, and launched SatoshiDice, an online casino accessible by anyone with an internet connection. Between August 2012 and February 2013, Voorhees raised 50,600 bitcoins at a price of about $14, worth approximately $722,659 at the time, according to a U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) estimate. He did this by selling 13 million unregistered shares on the now-defunct MPEX exchange. Speaking at a conference in May 2013, Voorhees estimated that SatoshiDice was at the time responsible for half of all bitcoin transactions ever conducted and more than half of all the fees paid to miners who helped audit the bitcoin blockchain. “I can’t take too much credit for it,” Voorhees says today. “What it really came down to was it’s a beautiful demonstration of how powerful bitcoin itself was.” But Voorhees had to make a choice. Online casinos are a legal gray area in the United States, and he was increasingly becoming a public figure in the rapidly growing bitcoin community. “Ultimately, I realized, I could either go underground and keep running this very lucrative casino, which was pretty compelling and interesting to me,” he says, “or I would need to sell it so I could continue being a public voice for bitcoin, but I couldn’t do both.” In early 2013 the path to becoming a more vocal public voice was partially cleared when Voorhees had what he called a “big falling out” with BitInstant investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who now run the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange. Shortly after the dispute he left BitInstant, and made his first big compromise to achieve widespread adoption of bitcoin. In July, he sold SatoshiDice to an anonymous buyer for 126,315 bitcoin, then valued at $11.5 million. At today’s bitcoin price of $3,800, SatoshiDice would be worth $479 million. In terms of the bitcoin involved, excluding the increase of the cryptocurrency’s value over the same period, that’s a 315,687% increase. “It should go down as one of the greatest investments of any person, of any time ever,” says Voorhees, who claims his shareholders profited much more than he did. Nevertheless, Voorhees had to pay the SEC $50,000 in penalties, not counting legal fees and taxes as part of a settlement for selling the unregistered securities. If Voorhees and many his fellow early bitcoin entrepreneurs were originally attracted to bitcoin because of a theoretical disgust with government regulation, being forced to pay these fines made his resentment of the government very, very personal and became a reminder of how much he personally had at stake. “It was a terrifying experience for me,” says Voorhees, who calls selling the unregistered SatoshiDice shares his biggest regret over the past ten years. “And for all that to happen after having created something that was cool and useful and revolutionary and that made investors a bunch of money seemed like such an obvious injustice to me that it was really validating.” In addition to scaring Voorhees, the SEC fines were in many ways the beginning of the end of the cryptocurrency Wild West. Not only did the fines pave the way for a spate of recent SEC actions, they forced Voorhees to make a series of compromises in order to stay on the right side of the law, he says. “That’s something that remains, in hindsight, a horrible decision,” he adds. “Not because it’s wrong to sell to people but because of all the problems it led to with the SEC and because of the decisions I made after that, which ended up being horrible financial decisions that I was forced into doing.” Further marking the decline of bitcoin’s Wild West, the same month Voorhees sold SatoshiDice, his former employer BitInstant was shut down and Shrem was accused (and later convicted) of helping launder money for Silk Road users. Though Shrem served almost two years in a federal prison, Voorhees was never accused of any wrongdoing. Then, at the end of 2013, the Silk Road itself was shut down when its founder, Ross Ulbricht, was caught in a local library and charged with narcotics trafficking and money laundering as well as a “kingpin” charge usually reserved for crime bosses. Convicted of all charges, Ulbricht is serving a life sentence in the maximum security Florence Prison in Colorado. In spite of being a symbolic end to cryptocurrency’s Wild West, Voorhees also calls the closure of the Silk Road the single most important event for bitcoin since Satoshi wrote the white paper describing it. Not because he thinks the Silk Road’s reputation was bad for bitcoin (“I think that site had every right to exist,” he says) but because before then, most people who knew what bitcoin was thought it was inextricably tied to the success of black markets. “I think that moment was really profoundly important for people to see that this was something real that did not rely on any specific service,” Voorhees says. Watching his former colleagues and friends defend themselves in court and then get hauled off to prison taught Voorhees a hard lesson. While Satoshi’s goal of creating an ecosystem that was more democratic and decentralized might still be possible to achieve, the notion that it would exist beyond the reach of regulators anytime soon was doubtful. So Voorhees hit restart and invested the SatoshiDice profits into about two dozen crypto projects, including Coinapult, a short-lived startup intended to let customers more easily send bitcoin with a mobile device, and ShapeShift, his current company, a cryptocurrency exchange that lets customers easily convert their assets into other assets without the exchange taking custody of either. >From the time Voorhees cofounded ShapeShift at the tail end of 2014, what set the company apart from most other exchanges was its login process—as with SatoshiDice, there wasn’t one. If a user had an account with bitcoin in it, he or she could use ShapeShift immediately. Voorhees was so stern about not collecting customer data that, rather than comply with New York state regulations that required ShapeShift and certain other cryptocurrency companies to collect information about their customers, he blocked New York residents from using the product. Once again Voorhees demonstrated his knack for simultaneously sticking it to the man and staying away from the long arm of the law. The controversial move to block New York users was also accompanied by a relocation of ShapeShift’s official headquarters to crypto-friendly Zug, Switzerland. In the years that followed, ShapeShift’s monthly transaction volumes grew from about $110,000 in 2014 to $30.26 million in 2017. By March 2017 Shapeshift had raised $10.2 million from mainstream investors such as Early Bird Venture Capital, and the company was on its way to becoming one of the best-known exchanges in the world. As ShapeShift grew to 125 employees today, Voorhees began to exercise his influence around the world in other ways, too. In 2017, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed in value, increasing from about $1,200 when ShapeShift raised its capital in March to $19,000 by the end of the year. In part spurred by the suddenly very large stakes, squabbles from within the global group of bitcoin users (many of whom no longer like to be called a community) threatened to destroy bitcoin. Factions had formed among bitcoin users trying to figure out how to prepare the cryptocurrency for widespread adoption. Currently, bitcoin can only handle about seven transactions per second; by comparison, Visa can handle about 24,000 transactions per second. While many of bitcoin’s early adopters joined a group that preferred a solution favorable to ordinary users, Voorhees joined a group of venture-backed startups to support a solution that many believed was better for businesses. For the first time, Voorhees found himself on the side of the establishment. Before the dust settled on the heated debate about how to scale bitcoin, an entirely new cryptocurrency had formed, called bitcoin cash, and another split was narrowly avoided when Voorhees’ group cancelled its efforts to change the bitcoin code at the last minute. “Basically, the community that was very much on the same team and very much fighting for a noble cause, instead of being beaten down by its real opponents has allowed itself to splinter internally and spend much of its time beating itself up,” Voorhees says. “This has just been a horrible thing to watch.” The price of bitcoin dropped 70% in 2018, finishing the year at $3,878. As bitcoin has gone on to become a household name and bitcoin cash was created, the industry started to change in other ways that will continue to be felt for years to come, and Voorhees was there, too. Rumors that the SEC was planning a sweeping series of actions against cryptocurrency startups and those who raised capital via an initial coin offering (ICO) materialized in September 2017 with the formation of the regulator’s Cyber Unit, which was dedicated in part to going after shady crypto startups. As a result of the formation of the Cyber Unit, entrepreneurs who had gotten into cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology that enables it in order to create a parallel financial system controlled by the people who used it started having to learn the language of the establishment. Otherwise-random strings of letters like AML and KYC started taking on ominous meanings like “anti-money-laundering” and “know-your-customer.” By December 2017 the U.S regulator’s Cyber Unit filed its first charges against a crypto startup, freezing the assets of the alleged perpetrator, based in Quebec, as part of an ongoing investigation. As a result of the ever-tightening grip and increasingly international reach of U.S. regulators, Voorhees grew concerned about his own company’s potential vulnerability. In spite of being legally based in Switzerland, he says, he dedicated “millions of dollars” to research ways to avoid having to comply with the SEC’s AML/KYC requirements. But in September 2018, after 18 months of research, Voorhees announced that ShapeShift would in fact implement customer accounts—not only as an optional way to receive membership benefits but, as he said later, just in case a government regulator requested the information. “The whole company has suffered for that on a philosophical and emotional level,” Voorhees says. “To have to do something that we think is morally and ethically wrong just because government regulators may require it is a really horrible position to be in.” The timing, however, was no coincidence. In September 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple people had used ShapeShift to launder money. Two months later the SEC formally announced its first public investigation into a cryptocurrency exchange, indicating increased involvement in Shapeshift’s industry, and at the end of that month the Journal reported that the SEC was looking into whether Voorhees himself might have violated an agreement he made with the regulator as part of the SatoshiDice settlement. Voorhees staunchly denies the allegations and calls the Journal’s data set and methodology “nonsense.” Now 34 years old, Voorhees still has his entire career to implement the tough lessons he’s learned about the price of reaching mainstream bitcoin adoption—if he can survive the transition from Wild West gunslinger to rancher. From the initial hand-slap by the SEC, which woke him up to the very personal threat regulators could pose to his vision of absolute financial freedom, to his decision to force ShapeShift’s customers to submit personally identifiable information, he has learned to make painful compromises in pursuit of what he believes is a greater good. “Back when I first got involved, crypto was a few thousand mostly radical libertarian types, and mostly hardcore engineers or cryptographers really passionate about this cool project,” Voorhees says. “It has grown, and I’m glad it has grown. There are people who use it with no ideological cares about it at all. People who simply use it because it helps them in some economic way. And that’s exactly what should happen.”

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https://wiki.zerophone.org/index.php/Main_Page
by Punk 30 Jan '19

30 Jan '19

just stumbled upon that

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Hacker Culture, Education, Empowerment/Emancipation
by Alexandre Garcia Aguado 29 Jan '19

29 Jan '19

Good Morning, I'm Alex, from São Paulo - Brazil, teacher and part of some groups and projects that aims to bring the hacker culture to the schools and connect schools with the hacker communities... Two years ago i started my phd work, trying to understand the relations between hacker culture and an education to empowerment/emancipation. Part of my efforts now is to better understand how the hacker culture have been lived (and helped people) around the world and in the different movements and communities. I really want to have a broader and heterogeneous view about this ... I know many of you have experienced in collectives and communities very strong aspects of the hacker culture, so, i would like to ask your help, if possible, sharing your experiences and opinions. We created a questionnaire to try to capture these different views. The link is http://educahacker.cc/survey/index.php/881144?lang=en ... It would be great to have your perceptions! For those who have some interest on this, ping us and let's be in touch! Thank you so much! Regards, Alex -- Alexandre Garcia Aguado Instituto Federal de São Paulo / Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

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Cryptocurrency: Energy Consumption Myth
by grarpamp 29 Jan '19

29 Jan '19

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/07/09/why-bitcoin-use… https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/new-study-quantifies-bitcoins-l… https://qz.com/1364657/bitcoins-energy-consumption-isnt-as-bad-as-you-think/ https://cointelegraph.com/news/researcher-challenges-bitcoin-mining-energy-… https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/08/28/bitcoin-drives-energy-innovation/ https://www.federalreserve.gov/foia/files/2019currency.pdf Cryptocurrency costs far less than it does for a single country to do literally nothing more than simply print and ship Fiat paper notes back and forth between 2 hubs covering 12 spokes, when including all the costs of everything else out to individual wallets and pockets. All the articles about cryptocurrency consuming more energy than Fiat, namely the entire global system of Fiat, all costs in... are complete FUD and Lies from State Agents fighting to survive. If you doubt this, try making a list of everything the global fiat system uses, needs, costs and pays to run.

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Apollo 11, Govt Drone Shaming, Censors, Bio Hacking, Energy
by grarpamp 28 Jan '19

28 Jan '19

https://www.apollo11movie.com/ http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-012519a-sundance-apollo11-documentary… http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-072518a-apollo11-audio-loop-archive.h… https://www.techspot.com/news/78405-china-creates-app-tell-you-if-you-near.… China Govt app publicly shames you for being in debt... for refusing to pay for the Govt's shaming app. The Chinese government has developed a mobile app that tells users if they are near someone who is in debt. The app, called a "map of deadbeat debtors," flashes when the user is within 500 meters of a debtor and displays that person's exact location. Once a user is alerted that they are close to a debtor, the user can then view their personal information. This will reveal their name, national ID number, and why they were added to the debtor list. The debtor can then be publicly shamed or reported to the authorities https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/Web%20site%20UAS%20Tracker.pdf https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/PDFs/FY18%20DoD%20UAS%20Domesti… Military's 2018 Drone UAS missions.. requests from the governors, also Southern Border support, and a civilian response training exercise, and for Customs and Border Patrol's counterdrug operations. https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/25/youtube-to-curb-conspiracy-theory-video-… YouTube said today that it is retooling its algorithm in order to prevent promoting conspiracies and false information, reflecting a growing willingness to quell misinformation. These often serve up unsavory content: conspiracy theories about mass-shooting events being staged (https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fe2_1519717074) that the moon landing never happened (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhxTwcslfCY) that the Earth is flat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKlIroTxxVM) YouTube promises you'll see less of those kinds of videos. "We'll continue reducing the spread of content that comes close to -- but doesn't cross the line of -- violating our Community Guidelines," YouTube said. "While this shift will apply to less than one percent of the content on YouTube, we believe that limiting these types of videos will mean a better experience for the YouTube community." https://www.geekwire.com/2019/report-bill-gates-promises-add-billions-congr… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8NYlUbs-u8 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=young+blood+transfusion https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chinese+crispr+twins

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Re: [Cryptography] Happy birthday, NIA!
by grarpamp 28 Jan '19

28 Jan '19

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Hyperspectral Imaging
by grarpamp 28 Jan '19

28 Jan '19

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging Hyperspectral imaging, like other spectral imaging, collects and processes information from across the electromagnetic spectrum. The goal of hyperspectral imaging is to obtain the spectrum for each pixel in the image of a scene, with the purpose of finding objects, identifying materials, or detecting processes. Hyperspectral sensors look at objects using a vast portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Certain objects leave unique 'fingerprints' in the electromagnetic spectrum.

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Creating your world - Italian senator cites Protocols of the Elders of Zion, demands French ambassador pay immigration reparations - [PEACE]
by Zenaan Harkness 27 Jan '19

27 Jan '19

We're in a new world folks - a world of memes, a world moulded by Gritty surfing Pepe's wake. https://dailystormer.name/stormer-volume-75-yellow-vests-week-11-a-wild-ita… Shortcut links: Italian TDS calls for campaign last August https://it.dailystormer.name/se-esiste-una-nazione-annerita-in-europa-quell… Georgia Meloni questions whether France owes Italy "immigration damage" reparations https://twitter.com/GiorgiaMeloni/status/1087274348820467712 Italian Senator cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion https://t.co/04VFugN053 Gilets Jaunes nom le Juif https://t.co/pNpMZir8wT Communists in France sent packing https://t.co/teWQ2AC2AA Paris war zone https://t.co/JEJ0wjwYXg Police getting firebombed https://t.co/8CWUxzrMcR Massive turnouts in Caen https://t.co/ScW2xf3vxC and Toulouse https://t.co/hUeE6HKOdL Macron finally gets a pro-Macron march, ~200 people even show up https://t.co/LapSIdfWAk

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