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Atlas of Surveillance

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Re: Atlas of Surveillance

#91

Post by adanto6840 »

rshnotsecure wrote: post #72
justanotheranon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one more thing... presumably those other 15 IPs are MSPs similar to Netsentia. maybe Phineas Phisher better target those IPs to breach and leak them too. now that i think of it, maybe every IP address appearing in any Snowden leak should be probed to see if it still leads to interesting goodies.

The NSA was something like 50 miles away from where this data was being hosted. It could have all been hosted in the much better / actually CJIS compliant Azure South at 5150 Rogers Road. That some random hosting company Netsential, not even a Microsoft Partner was chosen, makes both me and apparently the NSA suspicious. More than likely DataFoundry is a front company. DataFoundry, which definitely is a real company,…

While far less interesting, I can't help but notice this quote from your source:

"In addition to Texas.Net and Data Foundry, Ron and Carolyn established a Usenet company, Giganews, and an Internet security solutions company, Golden Frog, which provides one of the world’s leading VPN services, VyprVpn."

How extremely curious -- they are & have been a major seller of Usenet access & "privacy"/VPN services for the past few decades; hmm.

Re: Atlas of Surveillance

#92

Post by dahfizz »

peacelilly wrote: post #89
srameshc wrote: post #31

> Police Department signed an agreement with Amazon's home surveillance equipment company, Ring, in 2019 to gain special access to the company's Neighbors app this is the most scary part.

We really need these things to be Closed Circuit by law. Want the data? Get a warrant and seize the device physically. Centralized databases of surveillance information needs to be outlawed criminally.

Isn't the whole reason people buy those is because they back up to the cloud and they can view the feed from anywhere? CC security cameras are nothing new

Re: Atlas of Surveillance

#94

Post by netsentialuser »

rshnotsecure wrote: post #53

Let us not forget the Netsential leak from #BlueLeaks a few weeks ago. Netsential.com [1] was a Houston-based software dev, hosting, and cloud provider. I lived most of my life in Houston, and they are loosely connected to an old ISP called Texas.net and a more recent data center company called Data Foundry. Something like 630+ websites were hosted by Netsential. All of them DHS fusion centers, multi state intel shar…

This is a throwaway account as I will be mentioning some slightly sensitive personal details.

I do not currently work in law enforcement or intelligence, but for various reasons from some years ago to the present I have been a member of one of the fusion-center-type communities which Netsential hosts. A small amount of my personal information is included in the breach as a result, but of course, this is far from the first time that's happened to me.

I think you have somewhat of a misunderstanding about Netsential's service offerings. While they do provide physical hosting, that is not their primary product, they are not used for "managing the physical servers (think Dell blade computers for instance) that these websites ran on top of" as you say in the blog post. This is only incidental. Their primary product is the software, which is not very good from either a code quality or user experience perspective, but is reasonably unique in its capabilities. They offer a completely "turnkey" solution, including for example a telephone technical support/customer service line for users of the portals that they staff and handles routine things like password resets.

They're not a hosting company, they are primarily a SaaS operation that also does some custom software development.

So it's not at all true that there's no reason to use them over a cheaper service like Azure. These organizations would need to hire some other company to develop the software if they did that, and that would end up costing them more because they'd be looking at a semi-custom project (COTS CMS solutions would partially meet the needs) rather than "just another license" with Netsential.

Re: Atlas of Surveillance

#95

Post by tarmon »

saghm wrote: post #88
Cactus2018 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/shotspotter-de... .... Wrapped in a weatherproof container roughly the size of a watermelon, each ShotSpotter sensor combines microphones, hardware, software and a clock linked to the Global Positioning System, which uses satellites and radio navigation to pinpoint precise times and locations. In the cacophonous urban environment, sensors are calibrated to ignore all soun…

> sensors are calibrated to ignore all sounds except for those that most closely match the “impulsive” sound of an explosion > The blast of a gun is different from other explosive sounds > “It’s a very, very sharp wave,” Beldock said. “No other sound works that way.” > Other impulsive sounds — including fireworks, backfires and helicopters — can also trigger the remote sensors They're calibrated just to hear explosio…

Well technically helicopters are propelled by explosions. :)

Re: Atlas of Surveillance

#96

Post by netsentialuser »

adanto6840 wrote: post #91
rshnotsecure wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NSA was something like 50 miles away from where this data was being hosted. It could have all been hosted in the much better / actually CJIS compliant Azure South at 5150 Rogers Road. That some random hosting company Netsential, not even a Microsoft Partner was chosen, makes both me and apparently the NSA suspicious. More than likely DataFoundry is a front company. DataFoundry, which definitely is a real company,…

While far less interesting, I can't help but notice this quote from your source: "In addition to Texas.Net and Data Foundry, Ron and Carolyn established a Usenet company, Giganews, and an Internet security solutions company, Golden Frog, which provides one of the world’s leading VPN services, VyprVpn." How extremely curious -- they are & have been a major seller of Usenet access & "privacy"/VPN services for the past…

None of this is really that surprising. DataFoundry is a real company and pretty typical for the industry, I don't see any particular reason to suspect that they're a front. They're on the small side for the datacenter/colo sector but similar to something like PheonixNAP. While I can't say I know any of their customers personally I have gotten quotes from them in the past which were competitive but not quite the best available.

No particular technical expertise is involved in running these sorts of companies, those staff are hired. The top-level executive management is more reminiscent of commercial real estate than anything technical---it's buying land, building buildings, and putting tenants in them.

That the owners of the company have been involved in Usenet and VPN services is quite unsurprising---these are both industries that are technically simple, easy to get into, and can show a pretty quick profit. The up-front capital involved to get into them is having rack space and connectivity... things that, as owners of a colo outfit, they already had on hand. VPN services also have a high degree of customer overlap and can share infrastructure with usenet, so there is a VERY high degree of overlap between usenet providers and VPN providers---to the extent that it's more suspicious if a Usenet provider doesn't share owners with a VPN provider.

Re: Atlas of Surveillance

#97

Post by ssss11 »

frequentnapper wrote: post #5

Stuff like this gives me some hope. Where states like China have complete surveillance and control over their citizens, and that's where other fascist states seem to be headed, at least in western countries we are having these debates. And even though it seems like an ever-losing battle, my hope is that we can all be educated enough and band together on things that unite us to fight back against surveillance society…

Yeah but doesn’t it feel like a race to the bottom? I mean, it feels like our politicians think country X is doing it so we (western democracy) better too, or risk losing global position in military/economy/etc

Re: Atlas of Surveillance

#99

Post by throwawayway9 »

saghm wrote: post #88
Cactus2018 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/shotspotter-de... .... Wrapped in a weatherproof container roughly the size of a watermelon, each ShotSpotter sensor combines microphones, hardware, software and a clock linked to the Global Positioning System, which uses satellites and radio navigation to pinpoint precise times and locations. In the cacophonous urban environment, sensors are calibrated to ignore all soun…

> sensors are calibrated to ignore all sounds except for those that most closely match the “impulsive” sound of an explosion > The blast of a gun is different from other explosive sounds > “It’s a very, very sharp wave,” Beldock said. “No other sound works that way.” > Other impulsive sounds — including fireworks, backfires and helicopters — can also trigger the remote sensors They're calibrated just to hear explosio…

I forget where I had read it, but the spotters were also picking up and recording conversations. Inadvertently, of course.

Re: Atlas of Surveillance

#100

Post by manigandham »

peacelilly wrote: post #89
srameshc wrote: post #31

> Police Department signed an agreement with Amazon's home surveillance equipment company, Ring, in 2019 to gain special access to the company's Neighbors app this is the most scary part.

We really need these things to be Closed Circuit by law. Want the data? Get a warrant and seize the device physically. Centralized databases of surveillance information needs to be outlawed criminally.

You can buy closed circuit cameras for the past 40 years. People buy Ring to avoid the in-home infrastructure.
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