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Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

cracked.com

71–80 of 88 posts

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#71

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).

Even those parts of the story leave much to guessing and theorizing. I believe wholeheartedly that the government at many levels is spying on these folks, probably using illegal techniques. I just don't know that the explanations given in this article are right.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Oil industry has no future, and anyone who continues to invest in it or further the goals of that industry isn't a very good investor and is prioritizing short term profits over long term investments. One of the largest drains on the US economy is the fossil fuels industry. There is no future for them. We, as a society, need to admit this, and move on. How do we appologize to future generations, "Sorry, we raped…

Do the math. It's going to take time to switch off of petroleum. Even if Teslas were free, it'd take decades to replace all the existing cars with Teslas. You want us to do nothing in the interim? We're in the process of moving on, but we can't stop everything while it's happening. The fact that you think people in North Dakota should be driving Teslas... it's pretty shitty uneducated thing to say. Compassion, right?…

Refusing to authorize the construction of more petroleum-extraction infrastructure is a great way to spur market-based activity toward switching away from petroleum. If fossil fuels are cheap, people will keep using them. When fossil fuels become more expensive than the alternatives, people will switch. We do not have very much time left - we've been hanging out in the "interim" you propose for at least thirty years now, which is as long as I've been aware of the issue - so we really do need to push on both ends of this equation.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#73

There are a few comments questioning the journalistic abilities of the article and despite that they did mention that someone else with more resources ought to take over, they could have done a bit more. A few days ago I came across a youtube video regarding this protest. It showed Peaceful protestors getting shot by rubber bullets, attacked by dogs and I don't remember what else against a heavy militarized police fo…

> should never happen, anywhere, no matter the reason Okay. But to make it concrete, what alternative are you proposing?

Ship in the water in big tankers. Like they do in the Middle East. In any case heavy handed military sort of dealing with people can massively backfire. Right now it's American Indians with small numbers in the future it might be alt-right conservatives with millions of supporters and lots of guns. It's a two way street with violence, you could start an insurgency if the other side had enough numbers and felt that you were acting out a war scenario. This is not good for any sense of democracy or civil rights to engage in this sort of behavior with locals. Which again points to a sort of racism when dealing with rights of minorities, especially economically disadvantaged minorities, compared to advantaged minorities like Corporations.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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).

Even those parts of the story leave much to guessing and theorizing. I believe wholeheartedly that the government at many levels is spying on these folks, probably using illegal techniques. I just don't know that the explanations given in this article are right.

Whilst it's healthy to have some cynicism about news stories (and the reasons they're spread), I wonder what level of proof you'd be looking for before you were convinced. Aside from finding equipment involved in the alleged signal jamming, what sort of information is likely to convince you? If someone took the time to triangulate the source of these attacks and could link those locations to government officials, would that suffice?

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#75

Relevant part of the Constitution, the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging [...] the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Full first amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the…

> "The real problem is, when all you need to justify a crackdown is to make a peaceable assembly unpeaceful, it's relatively trivial to insert agent provocateurs to instigate violence and fade into the background or through the police lines as they push."

It has been suggested that this tactic has already been tried in the DAPL protest, with an DAPL-linked employee called Kyle Thompson:

http://thedailyhaze.com/kyle-thompson-knightsbridge/

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#76

Relevant: Lack of a Cipher Status Indicator on Android has been an open issue since 2009 ( https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5353 ) There is also an open-source android app to detect fake base-stations: https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Dete...

Just to expand, lack of cipher status is a massive problem on every phone produced in the last decade. I've not had a warning on any smartphone I've used (Apple, HTC, Samsung, Microsoft etc) or for that matter on any feature phone I've used, including going back to things as old as the Nokia 3310, 6310, 8100 or as new as things like the Nokia 105 or E51.

Even on a handset that supports the indicator (the spec says all should) the spec also says this can be overridden by the SIM card and apparently most sim producers and macro operators disable the warning by default anyway.

It's also worth pointing out that I'm only aware of this being part of the GSM spec. I don't know what happens with CDMA (which I believe is prevalent in the USA) and 3G and 4G _can't_ run without encryption so it should (theoretically) be a non-issue there too.

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#77

Relevant part of the Constitution, the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging [...] the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Full first amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the…

There's even a name for it: "Police Riot"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot

No need for agent provocateurs; most crowds react poorly when riot police start pushing them around. For example, to enforce a curfew against a peaceful crowd => riot => see, the curfew was justified! They were rioting!

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#78
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should never happen, anywhere, no matter the reason Okay. But to make it concrete, what alternative are you proposing?

Ship in the water in big tankers. Like they do in the Middle East. In any case heavy handed military sort of dealing with people can massively backfire. Right now it's American Indians with small numbers in the future it might be alt-right conservatives with millions of supporters and lots of guns. It's a two way street with violence, you could start an insurgency if the other side had enough numbers and felt that yo…

> compared to advantaged minorities like Corporations

Do you have particular protests by corporations in mind?

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#79

There are a few comments questioning the journalistic abilities of the article and despite that they did mention that someone else with more resources ought to take over, they could have done a bit more. A few days ago I came across a youtube video regarding this protest. It showed Peaceful protestors getting shot by rubber bullets, attacked by dogs and I don't remember what else against a heavy militarized police fo…

> should never happen, anywhere, no matter the reason Okay. But to make it concrete, what alternative are you proposing?

For now, it seems they've reached a temporary solution.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201...

Re: Signs of a Creepy Government Conspiracy at Standing Rock

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even those parts of the story leave much to guessing and theorizing. I believe wholeheartedly that the government at many levels is spying on these folks, probably using illegal techniques. I just don't know that the explanations given in this article are right.

Whilst it's healthy to have some cynicism about news stories (and the reasons they're spread), I wonder what level of proof you'd be looking for before you were convinced. Aside from finding equipment involved in the alleged signal jamming, what sort of information is likely to convince you? If someone took the time to triangulate the source of these attacks and could link those locations to government officials, wou…

Oh, I think you're assuming I'm more skeptical than I am. I believe they have one or more Stingrays on site. It would be silly to assume they don't, given the history of use of Stringrays at protests.

I also suspect the number of active cell phones on the networks in that area is probably a hundred times higher than usual; there's probably enough cell traffic happening there to saturate the current capacity many times over. This can lead to cell phones dying faster than usual (searching for signal), cell phones coming online and off, failing to send large files, etc. It can look like "jamming", even when there is no nefarious activity actually happening.

So, I'm not trying to argue nefarious shit isn't going down. I have absolute confidence it is; I know too much about our nation's history with protestors to think otherwise. I don't know that airplanes are carrying the Stingrays (or other cell phone hacking devices) or WiFi honeypots. I don't know that all of the unsecured networks are honeypots put up by law enforcement. etc. I'm saying the specifics of their assessment may be wrong, not that the hacking and spying isn't happening. It's picking nits, in some regards.

But, the motivations of law enforcement are sometimes misinterpreted by protestors, and the capabilities of law enforcement are sometimes over-estimated, even by people that understand the technical side of things. Law enforcement does shady stuff all the time, particularly in dealing with protestors, but, local police also don't have particularly strong technical teams. If the FBI is involved, then things get murkier. They have the resources and the expertise to do probably more than the worst thing we can imagine them doing (and possibly the will, as well).

But, to be clear: I support the protestors, and think that the abuses they've endured in all of this have been criminal. Indigenous peoples in the US have been treated like garbage from the very beginning, and it continues today; this very reservation has been shrunk and unilaterally "renegotiated" (sometimes with guns) multiple times due to profit motives. The reservation has been shrunk on behalf of gold miners, and for major river re-routing, flooding, and damming projects. Even if these folks were making huge and unreasonable demands (which they aren't) I would still support them.

I'd like to see a more thorough investigation of what's actually happening, by someone with a bit more expertise than Cracked. Wireshark dumps are great, but that's just the beginning of an exploit post-mortem.

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