Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy

Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy.

-- Tom

 

Wow, someone had the guts to blow the lid off of Project Vigilant. Salon has guts (and especially Glenn Greenwald).

I challenge anyone here to read the story that Greenwald put together for Salon and tell me that Tom's link to this story is not the single most important thing posted here at the privacy forums at Wilders - maybe ever.

Thanks, Tom, for posting. It's incredibly important that people know what's going on with PV. It raises so many questions (and the subsequent lack of trust) that it boggles the mind.

Edit: This link tells much of the story:
http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/20...oviders-says-it-employed-wikileaks-informant/ - but read the Salon story Tom posted first.

 

Which ISPs Hand Private Surfing Info Over To Secretive Private Group Who Monitors It For The Feds?.

The article is interesting, but also are the comments, especially where the CEO of Sonic.net aka Dane Jasper chimes in, which looks to be worthwhile for anyone searching for ISP provider services that do not log user's Internet activity. Also, rsync.net looks interesting.

The question remains of whether they allow 3rd-party harvesting of information even though they may be opposed to it.

-- Tom

 

Let's hope Cryptome.org is right and Project Vigilant is a fraud. I have wondered why the mainstream media has not jumped on this story and all I can figure is it's just too hard to fact-check.
http://cryptome.org/0002/vigilant-fraud.htm

If it is just a big joke, let's breathe a sigh of relief.

 

@ Lockbox

I hadn't posted in here up until now, as i saw the original link on another www, but you've encouraged me to do so Everybody should be more than just concerned, they should be horrified to discover what is going on, and has been for years.

This latest revelation about Project Vigilant reminded me of something else i had heard of before. I found it in the PDF link.

InfraGuard -http://www.infragard.net- Don't click it directly, use a proxy



Listed in here - http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/surveillance_report.pdf - from 2004 along with a bucket load of other fascinating insights ito how you are being tracked/surveiled/recorded etc etc. Here'e just a small example.

What a coincidence, NOT

Of course, if we're not doing anything wrong, we have nothing to be concerned about, right ? Well it all depends what "They" consider wrong !

Thanks for the info/links lotuseclat79 and Lockbox

 

Good stuff, Clone. It's like pieces of a puzzle. I was talking to somebody this afternoon who definitely knows his stuff and he's up in the air about whether PV really has the reach that it claims. Some are already calling it a fraud, but I respect him (and you would too) and he thinks with some of these people, you just never know. The whole "fraud" thing could be misdirection. He made a good point about the cheap-looking websites, too. Think about it - what better way to obfuscate the real workings of a group like that than to throw up a site that looks cheap? It's what goes on behind the curtain that matters.

 

@ LockBox

Thanks

Yes misdirection is one of the games they play, but some of us are wise to it : Puzzles can be fun, like when i researched for my last post, it didn't take too long to fit the pieces together

As for cheap-looking websites, i agree, and what about ALL those "free" proxy www's out there Some do look the've been thrown together by teenagers, and may have been, but i wouldn't be surprised to learn that Many have been and are honeypots put up by you know who and/or their "friends"

Vigilant is the right word, and frame of mind to be in

 

Not so fast. Many people believe this whole story is a joke created by the DEFCON guys who are notorious for pulling pranks like this. Other people, who don't think it is a joke, think the organization is quite powerless to do much of anything. One guy, who claimed he was a member, has been posting about his experiences in it. He claimed they did nothing but sit around and chat with each other in IRC. He said they had no access whatsoever to any secret government info and basically laughed at the whole thing.

 

Yeah, I addressed that whole "fraud/prank/joke" thing in my last post. As for the denials and joking around, what would they say? The whole idea was that PV be very secretive. The only reason they cracked open the door that allowed the scrutiny is because of Adrian Lamo. Period. We can't deny Lamo didn't finger Manning (who was the one the government says gave all the info to Assange at Wikileaks). In other words, we know Lamo was the "vigilante" who took Manning down. He has also said not only two different things about PV but about three or four. Misdirection.

 

Greenwald's been doing some more digging. Maybe it's not what's claimed. Then again......

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/05/surveillance

Like many, I'm not sure what to think about all this.

 

I get the impression that this group (if not a total joke) consists of a bunch of wannabe cyber-spooks. You know, the cyber equivalent of guys who go out on the weekend and pretend they are commandos or something -- guys who couldn't make it in the real military spec ops.

Most likely the group just consists of a few snitches. But anyone can snitch, nothing special there. Remember Lamo (who is supposedly a member) is the guy who turned Bradley Manning in. He claims Manning was bragging to him on IRC about his funneling of documents to Assange. So I say big deal -- the guy listened to some dude brag on the Internet and then ran and told on him. Nothing particularly fascinating or high-tech about that.

In any case, I severely doubt that any three letter agency is giving this group any insider access. They might listen to them if they have some info, but they will listen to anyone with info, so nothing special about that.

 

This is sickening. Thanks for posting.

 

Hi chronomatic,

All impressions aside, making it in military spec ops takes a different set of skills than cyber spooking - both take dedication and none of the skills are god given, but need to be acquired and practiced to achieve near perfection.

The saner assessment of this group of respondents is that we are all concerned about privacy and how the government ignores it either on the basis of 'national security reasons' or some other affront in the name of securing the motherland and its citizens.

-- Tom

 

Yes, I am aware. I know two guys who are Green Berets (one is Delta Force and has been all over the world on secret missions. He just got back from "a jungle region" which I find interesting considering most of our efforts are in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Yeah, at the end of the day it doesn't matter who is doing the spying since we all know that our communications are being intercepted by the NSA thanks to the cooperation of AT&T and Verizon and other Tier-1 backbone providers. They give NSA a direct pipe into the backbone and NSA pipes all of that to their databases to later be iterated over by their supercomputers which look for keywords. This is well known and well documented and is why Congress passed the legislation giving telcos immunity to lawsuits over privacy.

This is why we should all be using strong encryption. Encrypt your communications and don't worry about the details of who or what is listening.

 

* Some more background *

*

Big names help run Project Vigilant
http://www.examiner.com/x-27653-SF-...2010m6d22-Big-names-help-run-Project-Vigilant

Secretive Government Contractor "Project Vigilant" Monitors U.S. Internet Traffic

http://www.skyphire.nl/phun/intel/bbhc-global.txt


Chet Uber


http://www.naymz.com/chet_uber_1672509

pro-hist

Employment:

Jan 2009-Present Volunteer Consultant at BBHC Global LLC

Jan 2000-Jun 2006 President and Co-Founder at SecurityPosture, Inc. ( Omaha )

May 1997-Dec 1999 CTO at Omaha World-Herald


Frank J. Hannaford

Associate
SecurityPosture, Inc.
www.securityposture.com
1209 Harney Street, Suite 150
Omaha, NE 68102

He's posted on several forums,

Frank J. Hannaford, SecurityPosture, Inc as, =?Utf-8?B?RnJhbmtI?= http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-2087157.php

Frank J. Hannaford, Chief Technologist, Forefront Technical Services as, Utf-8BRnJhbmsgSGFu http://www.dbforumz.com/source-text-file-multiple-record-lengths-ftopict121588.html

 

Meet Project Vigilant