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Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

cracked.com

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Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#41

Post by imchillyb »

MertsA wrote: post #35
arca_vorago wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's no way they would stoop that low." I'm not sure you are familiar with the history of the police state. Just when you think they won't go below a certain bar, then do. Why do you think, when performing any other manner of illegal and unconstitutional things, they wouldn't add one more to the list, especially when there seems to be no repercussions? I'm also reminded of occupy wall street, in which is was foun…

"Why do you think, when performing any other manner of illegal and unconstitutional things, they wouldn't add one more to the list, especially when there seems to be no repercussions?" Because there's just no incentive for them to use a jammer as opposed to a cell site simulator. With all of the news of government corruption I absolutely wouldn't assume that the government isn't doing something nefarious, but with co…

I believe your analysis to be flawed.

Confusion and fear are the actual tools being utilized here.

Blocking some service, and targeting others is exactly the type of attack that foments both fear and confusion.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#42

Post by ZenoArrow »

SwellJoe wrote: post #13

The tricky thing about stuff like this is that the majority of people at protests (and in the general population) are incredibly tech illiterate. They are easily exploitable, but also prone to misunderstanding what they're seeing when things go weird with their devices. We know that hacking and spying on protestors happens, because there are FOIA (and similar state level public information act) requests that have rev…

> "So, this is probably half paranoia and half correct. It's hard to know which parts are correctly diagnosing the symptoms, however."

If you believe the story, then tech-savvy people have caught attacks whilst they were happening (the article mentions they spoke to someone that demonstrated a Wireshark re-enactment of ARP attacks performed on networking equipment at the camp).

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#43

Post by throwaway982749 »

mmastrac wrote: post #16

I've seen this particular article before and despite me being fairly liberal, seems kind of lazy for journalism. It's a bunch of heresay with no conclusion, but clearly wants to draw the reader's opinion. The author admits that they aren't a place with an investigation budget and "someone else" should look into it. This damages the story - which seems likely to be happening to some degree - to the point where it is c…

The article fails to mention that Standing Rock is currently a very cold place. From what I can tell, it's been below freezing for weeks now.

In those conditions, batteries can drain much faster, report capacity incorrectly and then fail unexpectedly. It's probably magnified by all the extra work the radio has to do to find and hold a signal from the overloaded rural cell towers.

https://www.getorchard.com/blog/iphone-battery-dies-in-cold-...

And anyone who's used a phone in extreme cold with gloves on knows that touchscreens can do a lot of weird things, including opening apps unexpectedly.

My hunch is that a large part of the reports are hearsay by visiting protestors who aren't used to the conditions.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#44

Post by ZenoArrow »

sitkack wrote: post #37

When humor sites are the best source of "the news", things are mostly likely in the shitter.

I'd suggest there has been far better coverage of the protests that can be found from non-comedic sources, but you're not going to find insightful coverage from the mainstream news.

Overall, the best coverage I've found has been from TYT Politics. Whilst I dislike the clickbaity nature of the main TYT channel, the TYT Politics channel is surprisingly decent. Here's one example of the coverage from TYT Politics, giving clear evidence that the police have been lying to the press:

http://youtu.be/TarWzK2Swxs

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#45

Post by DiabloD3 »

dbg31415 wrote: post #29
nilved wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they're going the way of Buzzfeed

It's... less good for Hacker News that click-baity article titls are getting more upvotes. This story was reported 3 times in the last 2 days... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=standing%20rock&sort=byDate&pr...

It has been reported, yet the government has still not backed down in attacking its own citizens over legal and morally correct actions.

The news should continue to be reported until it is no longer news, especially given the large scale anti-American technological effort being mounted by our own government to protect the interests of Big Oil.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#46

Post by tonyarkles »

sowbug wrote: post #31
forgotpwtomain wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Citing that the state of the art in browser technology exists does not change that point. > Do you agree it's possible the claim is true? HSTS preload lists are not new (the Mozilla blog I referenced above is dated 2012). > The article said people were reporting that Gmail accounts have been hacked in an environment where malicious Wifi APs are prevalent. Your post said that report "sounds suspiciously false." If i…

I very much doubt the claims are as narrowly scoped as that. As you say, it's either imprecise journalism or merely repeating the reports of people who are (by definition) terribly confused about what's going on. By the way, I wouldn't call these people technically illiterate. The way you're using that term sets a bar so high that it includes almost everyone. If many people were at that level of technical literacy, w…

You folks are talking about HSTS and Browsers, but with phones there's a quite simpler attack vector for grabbing email credentials: IMAP. If the FBI has a certificate for imap.gmail.com that is signed by a CA, they can MITM that route.

Even for my 2FA GMail setup (where each non-2FA enabled app gets an app-specific password), doing IMAP MITM will get the app-specific password, which would enable further IMAP access.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#48

Post by patcheudor »

SwellJoe wrote: post #13

The tricky thing about stuff like this is that the majority of people at protests (and in the general population) are incredibly tech illiterate. They are easily exploitable, but also prone to misunderstanding what they're seeing when things go weird with their devices. We know that hacking and spying on protestors happens, because there are FOIA (and similar state level public information act) requests that have rev…

"The tricky thing about stuff like this is that the majority of people at protests (and in the general population) are incredibly tech illiterate."

Combine this with the fact that even those who are tech literate are in fact illiterate in many ways. As a result, sadly exploitation becomes in many ways trivial and virtually undetectable even when targeted at the literate. This year as an example it was discovered that if you use proxies on iOS or macOS because you are trying to protect your privacy, that opened you up to having your HTTPS communication fully intercepted:

http://fusion.net/story/337861/false-connect/

This flaw dated all the way back to the earliest versions of iOS. What else is out there? Here we are in 2016 and we've not even mastered 22 year old proxy technology when it comes to secure implementations and worse, as a technical community, told people that using anonymizing proxies was a way to protect themselves. There are likely hundreds, if not thousands of ways to intercept and tamper with traffic including HTTPS what we are not aware of yet.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#49

Post by ihm »

jimrandomh wrote: post #11

If everything in this story is true (and I see no reason to doubt it), then there is a 0-day being used here in the wild to hack gmail accounts for political purposes. There really need to be some security engineers (ideally Google security engineers) on-site investigating, both to identify and fix the exploits being used, and to establish their use later for legal purposes.

I don't think so. The phones connect to a honeypot network and send over their credentials. The person who controls the honeypot now has their gmail password and so can use it to login and change their password.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#50

Post by pdkl95 »

mmastrac wrote: post #16

I've seen this particular article before and despite me being fairly liberal, seems kind of lazy for journalism. It's a bunch of heresay with no conclusion, but clearly wants to draw the reader's opinion. The author admits that they aren't a place with an investigation budget and "someone else" should look into it. This damages the story - which seems likely to be happening to some degree - to the point where it is c…

> seems kind of lazy for journalism

Note this important comment at the end of the article:

    ... we've really got to get back to writing about
    Back To The Future. Some site with an "investigation"
    budget should probably take it from here.
This is Cracked. While their writing is often a lot better than their clickbait headlines suggest, they are still primarily a comedy/culture based site. This story is way outside their usual style, and they know that.

Why isn't this story being covered by other reporters that do have experience investigating government, technology, the oil industry, etc? Cracked is reporting on this because it's important and the only coverage the larger media has given to the pipeline protests has ranged from "nothing" to "reading the police press release".

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