Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/21/digitalrevolution.html
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Massive trove of Russian spy-agency docs hacked from private sector contractor and passed onto media
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US: Hold my beer!
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I always would get blank looks when I would bring that possibility up.
I like Tor but it isn’t all the fanboys say it is.
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Didn’t it make news a few years back that the FBI was running exit nodes or something? I forget exactly what the story was (not having much use for Tor).
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This reads more like 7.5 TB of data the FSB tossed in the dustbin to free up server space.
Email monitoring? Scraping data from social media sites? Quelle surprise.
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unless its implicating trump in a black and white manner, … meh
Leaked NSA docs show it’s pretty difficult to mess with.
Misbehaving nodes are much more quickly found and removed than back when SEI was screwing with the network.
It’s definitely not perfect, but sometimes it’s better to be on the large list “Tor users” than the much smaller list of “people doing X”, where X is whistleblowing, evading censorship, shitposting etc
It’s my understanding they stood up a large number of nodes, then ddosed to drive traffic to those nodes.
It’s my understanding they were researching ways to de-anon Tor users, and the FBI subpoenaed the records.
In academic research circles, there has been a big push since to make sure research data is not useful to the authorities.
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Exactly. Like this isn’t news because it doesn’t, yet, have any information re: Russiagate.
That’s a terrible position to take.
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This is awesome. This needs to happen to every government, all the time. If you see people on your nation’s news, complaining about it happening to your government, they are no less dishonest and authoritarian than the Russian propaganda talking heads that will soon be decrying this, and you should view everything else they say through that lens. Yes, even if they’re on the network that is the propaganda arm of your favored party.
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Wait, I thought that FSB was more like FBI, and the spy-agency was GRU. Looking at the list in the post, that stuff sounds more domestic security and less international espionage (althought there’s just one internet, so anything internet-related is international by default). Or am I wrong?
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FSB: internal investigations, like the FBI
SVR: foreign intelligence, like the CIA
GRU: military intelligence, like the DIA
…though I suspect there’s more overlap between the Russian agencies; the KGB was split into SVR and FSB.
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why isn’t this on a single english major newsmedia site yet?
it’s not even on bbc co.uk ? what is going on?
tell them it’s got hillary’s emails in it or something so they pay attention
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Fake news tovarisch! It never happened!
Russian servers cannot be hacked.
Ask your president. He will assure you of this.
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It’s worth your time to read the research on the subject, then.
It’s one of the reasons Boing Boing runs an Exit node that happens to also be a Fallback Directory mirror.
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Seems like the kind of story more likely to pique the interest of an IT Major than an English Major.
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As a non-tech savvy person, my eyes started to blur reading this post. I’m sure it’s important but I have no idea what it means.
(Edit: I just saw your joke. Ha)
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This may not be the largest trove. Vasily Mitrokhin was a senior archivist for the KGB through the 1970s and 80s. He saw the KGB destroying their records of their deeds and misdeeds, and decided to start making copies of them. When the wall fell ending the Cold War, he delivered his trove to the Brits. He published two books, The Sword and the Shield (focused on Russia-US relations), and The World Was Going Our Way (about Russia and the rest of the world).
His documents describe, in the KGB’s own words, hundreds of dirty operations, spy activities, propaganda campaigns, murders, booby-trapped weapons caches planted within the US, and other activities, legitimate and otherwise. If you watched the FX series The Americans, you saw dramatized versions of many of their operations.
So yes, this was a huge leak, maybe even along the lines of the Snowden leak, but it’s hard to draw comparisons of size.
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We might have thought we could communicate securely via Tor? Well, it turns out we Kvant. 
I wonder if the counter-intelligence aspect of the FBI’s/Mueller’s investigation know about this. Oh, wait, none of those guys have been fired, have they?
