[LINK] CIA honeypot WikiLeaks mirror - retracted

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Rick Welykochy
> Sent: Sunday, 12 December 2010 11:04 AM
> To: 'The Link Institute '
> Subject: Re: [LINK] CIA honeypot WikiLeaks mirror - retracted
> 
> 
> Linkers,
> 
> I certainly jumped on the bandwagon with this one, sans any 
> further research. I guess I fail journalism 101 :(
> 
<SNIP>
Easy mistake.

However, should any US 3 digit acronym or Au 4 digit acronym
organisation want user tracking data, a much easy way would be to sniff
the Akamai servers installed at almost every exchange in the world.

How hard is that to do?

Well depending on the peering agreements one has with the various
switches in the exchanges, not very hard at all. Access to the switch
backplane is a relatively trivial exercise.

I actually think the CIA and other law enforcement agencies have a lot
more important items on their agenda's than to see who is viewing a few
non-top secret un-encoded diplomatic exchanges.

Yep, the juicy stuff is usually encoded.
And no, it's not available on a network that has 2 million users.

This entire event comes suspiciously at a time that new US legislation
permits the USA to take down any .com domain name (currently supposedly
torrent sites only) without ensuring the [US] constitution guaranteed
due process.

E.g.:
http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://RapGodfathers.com/IPRC
_Seized_2010_11.jpg

If we consider the players, [follow the money] The Guardian, The New
York Times, Der Spiegel and their controlling shareholders we might
start to understand what other motivations might be behind a pile of
documents leaked at a time that coincides exactly with the take-down of
several Torrent sites.

Who wants a walled garden ?
Who benefits financially from a walled garden outcome ?
What will they do to make it so ?

In fact a suspiciously cynical person might even go so far as to say
that leading here-to-fore respected, political figures in multiple
countries could not make so many PR gaffs unless they were centrally
orchestrated.

Jan's point from the other day, (Pocket picked) whilst the world is
distracted by the relatively insignificant cable leaks is imho quite a
credible conclusion. 

Unfortunately, regardless of the good intent of homeland security,
seizure orders, granted by the US Courts ex parte, (as per the above
example) have the ability to put legitimate business out of action, eg:

Quote/ [http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=5783]
Earlier this week, Homeland Security shut down a popular hip-hop music
site, RapGodfathers.com, which had nearly 150,000 members. The site
claims it is compliant with copyright laws, as it doesn't host
copyrighted materials. However, its users posted links to file-hosting
services such as Rapidshare and Megaupload, where copyrighted material
may have been shared.
/Quote

Users on Facebook, Myspace and several thousand other list servers,
(including link) do the same thing. Does that mean that a business is
now responsible for the actions of it's users?

If so, at what level of user editing will a site be considered a
non-target?

I think in the months ahead we will come to realise [alas in hindsight]
that Wikileaks was the trigger that allowed the renamed COICA, the
anti-counterfeiting bill to be unanimously passed globally.

Then again, as always, I could be wrong.
Earlier this year I was laughed at for suggesting that Australia needed
to run it's own Root Server.
Peter Sunde appears to be creating a P2P Root Server that will no doubt
compliment the already existing open sourced P2P DNS.

I repeat my call to the Australian Internet Community for the need to
create our own Root Server, with veto over international intereference
with Australian propogation and ultimately Australian DNS delegation.