[liberationtech] Comments from Chile

Tue Jul 31 16:22:20 PDT 2012

To the security community focused on helping social strugglers all over
the world.

First, thanks for all your efforts on building tools for human and social
liberation, this is a feedback from Chile written as suggestion from some
of you and we hope you enjoy. Several parts from this material wasn't
taken in a legal way, I'm not going to offer any proofs about this as that
can means tracking the people who helped to get this information, making
them face jail charges and torture on interrogations. If you want to check
if this statements are true, check the provided links and ask about this
to people in Chile.

Note: Even if we know your work is mostly focused on the middle east,
several tools you have made had helped on simple daily stuff like privacy.
We are not facing the same conditions or circunstances as some comrades in
the middle east are. We are trying to created a new world away from
capitalism values and with the total erradication of heriarchy. We assume
an offensive step for this in everywhere, and you can judge as much as you
want for this.

On Agust 14th of 2010 several squats were raided. 14 comrades were put in
prison for beeing anarchists and squatters, but facing charges of
terrorism association. The police had been investigating for 4 years a
serie of bomb explosions in Santiago, and decided that those 14 comrades
were responsibles for that. When i said decided it's because several
proofs were lies, some whitness were paid, but we only knew this in 2012,
when the 14 were set free without charges. The man in charge of this
operation is now a high range person in government, as a price for what hi
did, but the State didn't thought every "proof" they had were going to
fall after the truth about them were found.

That was the context

Some people (can be one, can be two, can be three, should be infinte)
decided to check the facts of this. They got a copy of several
investigation books and a list of more than 200 people beeing
investigated. That list was published on Hommodolars website on May 2011
(http://www.hommodolars.org/web/spip.php?article4031). The list included
several anarchists, native people supportes and media activists as people
suspected for the explosions. All this people had their phones tapped for
years, without any resistance for a telephone company, but all of them
with a justice call. None of the phones were tapped on al illegal way for
Chilean law, but the privacy of this 200 people was breached and none of
them related to the explosions.

The investigation books had inside several interesting stuff about the
local police behavoir, but for you this in what you need to know:

First ship of books (to 2010):

- There were pretty close photographs of every investigated person. The
books had more than 200 suspects.
- There were transcripts of several phone conversations, also hotmail's
menssenger chat.
- There were screenshots taken from hotmail.com accounts from files
obtained using Forensic Toolkit software, the bottom line of the files
reveals those were temporary files. At least one person got this.
- There were screenshots taken from hacked passwords from gmail.com
accounts. At least 4 people got this.
- There were several supperficial analysis of webservices and webpages:
flickr.com, blogspot.com, entodaspartes.org, santiago.indymedia.org,
valparaiso.indymedia.org, nodo50.org wordpress.com, indymedia.org,
riseup.net. The data included physical location to html tags used, related
names, and that kind of stuff.
- There were examples of transcribed chats using OTR, and mails using PGP
in ascii. They were not cracked.

As the case was going to nowhere, the investigation continued. There are
more than 400 persons in the investigation list. This is what was found.

Current ship of books (to 2012):

What is inside:

- At least 4 crypto.cat chats were intercepted and transcribed. (Feb 2012)
- More than 20 gmail.com accounts accessed. (2010-2012)
- Several facebook.com account accesed, but most of the data transcribed.
(2010-2012)
- Several complaints against OTR and PGP on internal memos. They asked for
help to FBI to break them, no more data about this.
- Deeper investigation of websites, including visits by police to some
people who work on alternative media projects. There is a strong analysis
for riseup.net... from software used, location, email contacts, source
code and groups that use them.

What is not inside:

- No mentions for tor, i2p or freenet.
- No mentions for riseup.net hacked accounts.
- No mentions how they got that data.

But we can always ask the affected ones. The most interesting here for you
is how they got access to crypto.cat chatlogs. That chats were taken from
7pm to 11pm on 4 different days. We don't know how they got them but we
reducted the possibilities to two scenarios.

The first one that a chilean computer got infected by some spyware, as
they got confiscated (the raids continued until now, not yet to somebody
related to the bombs case) we can no be sure about this.

The second one is one that happened to a friendly italian project to
chileans named Inventati in 2005. Chilean an Italian polices are working
together on this and several cases, so that's a possibility, also we know
that this web service is hosted in the US and the FBI is currently helping
chile on investigation of activists and media projects online. That case
is documented here http://www.inventati.org/ai/crackdown/

One of the clients of this chatlogs was an ubuntu 11.10, no issues on
accepting a weird cert or notifications. The main browser was mozilla
firefox, not using tor. The transcribed chat was recognized and didn't had
any important information but organizing some activity to get funds for
supporting political prisoners. This computer was part of only one of the
chats.

The other interesting stuff is, that even is very popular in activists
circles (more than pgp, probably the same as otr), TOR is not mentioned at
all. We don't know what this means, probably is just too new technology
for here, but it noticeable.

But i was not asked to write this just to let you notice what's wrong with
gmail, hotmail and facebook, what's failing with crypto.cat and why is
your work important for people in the south fighting for social justice.
Yes, we can face defeats, but it really demoralizing to see 30 police
officers breaking your home and exposing all your life just because your
political and life position... all broadcasted by television. None of them
was related to the bombs, none of us is related to the bombs, that's just
an excuse to fuck our lives. We need you to keep working on this, and
educate people everywhere. Our dictatorship ended in 1990, but before that
the only way to survive as resistence was to share knowledge and
practices, we need to keep that today.

Thanks for your efforts, and sorry for my engrish.

ps. I attached a official request of info from Chile to microsoft as a old
non problematic (for any of us) proof.
_______________________________________________
liberationtech mailing list
liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu

Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to:

https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech

If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?"

You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. You may ask for a reminder here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech

Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator.

Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE