[HN Gopher] Former NSA Employee Arrested on Espionage-Related Ch...
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Former NSA Employee Arrested on Espionage-Related Charges
Author : jc_811
Score : 73 points
Date : 2022-09-29 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.justice.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.justice.gov)
| starik36 wrote:
| Does FBI catch actual criminals anymore? It seems that every
| success of theirs consists of finding a weak minded individual,
| talking him into doing something illegal, maybe even supplying
| him with weapons or some other incriminating evidence, then
| arresting him a couple of weeks later.
|
| Do they have some sort of quota of how many terrorist they need
| to catch a year in order to get a bonus?
| wil421 wrote:
| Has there ever been a case where two undercover agents are trying
| to play the other one? Not knowing each other are agents.
|
| Or a situation where the guy who an undercover agent approaches
| tells his superiors? Who then want him to go undercover to find
| out who the suspected foreign agent works for.
|
| I'm sure this can happen in government.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > Has there ever been a case where two undercover agents are
| trying to play the other one? Not knowing each other are
| agents.
|
| It has happened several times with cops.
|
| Feds are a bit more professional I believe.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Probably no upper bound on IQ for FBI agents
| wil421 wrote:
| Yea I was specifically thinking the feds due to them being a
| large bureaucracy. No doubt the local cops have done it.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There was an Air Force counterintelligence agent who was caught
| spying for Iran.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Witt
| frogblast wrote:
| I recall a news story from a few years ago (can't find it
| now)...
|
| There was once a bank that looked the other way when lots of
| shady cash came in, allowed transfers of those amounts to to
| foreign banks, basically ignored KYC rules, etc. Word got
| around, and lots of criminals all over started using this bank
| for all of their money laundering purposes.
|
| Some banking authority started noticing a lot of suspicious
| transactions, and was preparing to shut the whole thing down,
| disconnect the bank from all transfers, raid offices, arrest
| employees, trumpet press releases about how they're protecting
| the American financial system, etc... (ie, exactly what they
| are supposed to do).
|
| The bank was, of course, a honeypot run by some other 3-letter
| agency, who was actively facilitating money laundering in order
| to collect enormous amounts of info about who was involved.
|
| (basically the banking version of that 'encrypted phone'
| scheme).
|
| The raids were mere hours away when someone put two and two
| together, and managed to get it called off.
| dkokelley wrote:
| I want to see a movie where a major criminal organization is
| completely overrun by undercover agents of various
| governments/agencies, but none of them know it so they keep the
| organization running for fear of being found out. The true
| criminals have long since retired.
| gumby wrote:
| It's a bit of a spoiler but you may like the film "The
| Accountant" starring Ben Affleck.
|
| Also the Book "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K Dick which (no
| spoiler) explores the consequences of deep undercover.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| While we're here, why not also the excellent Deep Cover [0]
| with Larry Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum.
|
| [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104073/
| d0mine wrote:
| There is a real example when a government spy actually led a
| terrorist organization: "Azef, a double-agent in the employ
| of the Tsarist secret police Okhrana, changed the Terrorist
| Brigade's mode of attack from firearms to dynamite"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR_Combat_Organization
| jerrysievert wrote:
| not a movie but there's a classic get smart episode where all
| of the kaos agents captured turn out to be government agents.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| See "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G. K. Chesterton.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| This happened on the Silk Road case.
|
| Part of the reason they never tried Ross Ulbricht for the hit
| jobs is because a rogue FBI office in Baltimore was staging the
| hits in a studio (the evidence to show Ross, to get the rest of
| the payment), and the FBI office in Chicago also investigating
| Silk Road was like "why are you guys roleplaying, this can't be
| as cringy as it looks, what is going on in Maryland", and the
| Secret Service and DEA agents were roleplaying as moderators on
| Silk Road and creating fake controversy to both Ross Ulbricht
| and the FBI offices investigating, just so the Secret Service
| and DEA could extort Ross (for the fake hits) and ride off into
| the sunset with the money, landing a movie deal with Fox.
| They're in jail now. And the hitman stuff was dropped under
| equally fake pretexts just to save face.
|
| The Secret Service and DEA agent were being tried at the same
| time as Ross Ulbricht was, this information and evidence was
| kept from Ross and his trial and only came to light afterwards.
| Wasn't accepted in the appeal. Sentencing didn't factor any of
| this in either. Embarrassing case.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/8q845p/dea-agent-who-faked-a...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I find it hilarious that he got hired to a security oversight
| position, started trying to sell his employers' property off the
| back of a truck, and became the target of a FBI sting operation
| all in the space of 3 weeks. How naive do you have to be to think
| that you're not being closely scrutinized, both because it's the
| freaking NSA and because you're within the normal probation
| period for a new job?
|
| Perhaps a worse punishment than the inevitable long prison term
| is the fact that this guys entire trip through the alimentary
| canal of our criminal justice system is going to have a
| continuous laugh track.
| ikiris wrote:
| The part that amazes me is someone this _stupid_ made it
| through the hiring process.
| aliqot wrote:
| Underachieving stoners with IT degrees just laughing all the
| way to the bank... and then the dispensary.
| koolba wrote:
| They used to drug test but I think that was too restrictive
| to their inbound funnel.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| NSA probably wishes they could hire stoners.
| [deleted]
| adolph wrote:
| Clearly should have been hired as a pen tester, not security
| oversight
| superkuh wrote:
| Now we wait for the FBI to get involved, take custody of the
| evidence, and for one of them to start stealing They do it far
| more often, or at least get caught more often, than the NSA.
|
| FBI/NSA/etc are just government backed criminals.
| MarchKilroy89 wrote:
| This affidavit is a laugh riot so far. Guy has a background in
| infosec, an holds a CISSP cert, among others. The FBI sends him
| crypto and what does he do?!
|
| (1) immediately opens a KYC custodial account (2) xfers the
| crypto there (3) converts it to USD and sends it to his KYC bank
| in Colorado.
|
| You can't make this stuff up. Also I love how (ostensibly either
| proton or tutanota) is referred to "Foreign Email Provider". They
| should buy ForeignEmailProvider.com and make it another email
| domain for their users. I would love
| hackerman69420@foreignemailprovider.com
| vdfs wrote:
| 4 minutes later, someone registered that domain
| wswope wrote:
| Don't mind me; just checking for any automated scripts that
| are watching for unregistered domains mentioned on here:
|
| SmallPPDomainRegisterBot.com
| runnerup wrote:
| how would you differentiate a script from a troll?
| MarchKilroy89 wrote:
| Wasn't me! But I expect my hackerman handle when you get your
| infra set up, anonymous registrant! :p
| arthurcolle wrote:
| They should just redirect ForeignEmailDomain to whatever
| the real foreign email domain was lmao. What is it,
| Tutanota? ProtonMail? FastMail? Lmao
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You should grab Hackerman31337 first. That will be worth
| something.
| mzs wrote:
| And he worked at NSA for under a month.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Brilliant! Also try "ShadyForeignEmailProvider.com"
| jrockway wrote:
| One of my deep background worries is how many criminals aren't
| caught because they don't make amateur mistakes. You always
| read these indictments and the perpetrator served themselves up
| on a silver platter. But what about all of those unsolved
| crimes that might simply be unsolvable!
| bombcar wrote:
| Some of them go for awhile, but the criminal has to not slip
| up every single time.
|
| But if you are going to do a crime do it once and done and
| you may very well get away with it.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Interesting to think that, with a little information, you could
| pull up the cryptocurrency transaction (assuming it's not a
| secret ledger like zcash) and trace how the FBI funded the
| wallet.
| AustinDizzy wrote:
| I tried that exercise after reading the affidavit, and
| determined they were using Monero (XMR) which makes this task
| much more difficult if not impossible.
| thakoppno wrote:
| I too read the affidavit looking for opsec tips to commit my
| own mastermind crime.
| solveit wrote:
| Good to see they know what they're doing.
| bri3d wrote:
| The affidavit indicates that the target selected the
| cryptocurrency - presumably, he thought he knew what he was
| doing, but the amounts and times were still cross-
| correlated after the fact.
| harry8 wrote:
| What this tells us is exactly how competent the NSA are. Every
| single hostile foreign power has their secrets if this guy has
| them.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| The guy only worked there for three months, and there was an FBI
| sting operation against him. Is this something they routinely do
| to new employees, or maybe they found out something right after
| his hiring? It isn't strange that an employee was doing something
| wrong, they got wind, and set up a sting, but the timetable is
| crazy short.
| googlryas wrote:
| It sounds like the FBI has an website/email account set up like
| "I_AM_A_RUSSIAN_SPY@gmail.com".
|
| People email that account with offers of providing information
| to the russian government, and then the FBI goes and sees who
| had access to the documents which get sent over. In this case,
| only one person accessed all the documents, so even if he
| doesn't identify himself to I_AM_A_RUSSIAN_SPY@gmail.com, they
| still get him.
|
| It doesn't seem like this person was specifically targeted or
| had an operation against him. He just fell into the honey pot.
| thret wrote:
| It's strange that they would give a security clearance to
| someone in a bad financial situation. I would think it's quite
| rare for the FBI to run a sting against an NSA employee...
| perhaps he wasn't targeted at all, but went out looking for
| someone to sell information to.
| aliqot wrote:
| Agencies are well known to not pay competitively, even in IT
| roles, but when I think about the obvious solution which is
| to pay more, I immediately think of the uproar and
| accusations that would come with a government official
| getting what some might consider a 'lavish' wage even if it
| is industry standard for the skillset.
|
| I'm looking at this to be possible more like when you have
| company wide phishing tests going through the emails, and it
| catches Brenda the new person in accounting who's still on
| their probationary period.
| mhoad wrote:
| Let me put it to you another way. New guy turns up, starts
| printing off a whole bunch of highly classified docs that don't
| relate to his actual job and then suddenly has to leave due to
| a vague "family illness".
|
| He is basically a walking profile of insider threat behaviour
| modeling.
|
| I don't think it was anything other than his stupidity that put
| him on the radar so quickly. Reading the indictment it's clear
| he was a bit of an idiot.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah, but... why does a new guy even _have access_ to a bunch
| of highly classified docs that don 't relate to his actual
| job? That's an epic fail by the NSA. I mean, good job
| catching him. Now close the door that he walked through when
| he found it open.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Probably because far too many docs have a security tag on
| them just in case.
| teraflop wrote:
| The affidavit says that he had access to more documents
| than he was supposed to because of a "misconfiguration". Or
| at least, that's what he told the undercover agent.
|
| Given that his access of the documents was logged anyway,
| it wouldn't surprise me if the misconfiguration was itself
| a honeypot, using documents that are relatively low-value
| but still classified.
| thakoppno wrote:
| Wonder what the content of the documents is if they
| indeed are a honeypot? Presumably one wouldn't put any
| actual secrets but that presents the problem that one
| would need to know the real secrets to plant fake ones.
| Additionally the fake ones would implicate some real
| person, presumably which is problematic if a
| sophisticated hacker exfiltrated successfully without
| detection.
|
| I could never get anything done in espionage. I'm far too
| paranoid.
| conductr wrote:
| The files were in a folder called "NeWgUyHoNeYpOt". That's
| meant as a joke but could very well be true in this case.
| momothereal wrote:
| I'm thinking some non-targeted honeypot, given he reached out
| to the undercover agent directly...
| bl_valance wrote:
| And he also had access to classified (top)secret level
| documents, unless I misunderstood wrong, how is that possible
| in that short amount of time?
| klyrs wrote:
| A friend of mine did an internship for NSA, he needed top
| secret clearance just to get a foot in the door.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The background investigations take months to complete.
| wil421 wrote:
| Thought the same myself. There was a skunkworks documentary a
| long time ago with engineers who worked on the program. Their
| cover was TV technicians or something else bland. He said one
| time he was approached by a women at a bar who was way out of
| his league. She was pushy and questioned about his work for a
| while. The engineer always thought it was a test by the
| government.
| spookie wrote:
| I don't blame him lol
| rootos wrote:
| Why not lie to her about everything and bang her anyway?
| mhh__ wrote:
| (Risk of) Blackmail. Oldest trick in the book.
|
| It doesn't even need to be true, just needs to be
| compelling.
| [deleted]
| bsder wrote:
| If you were married, this would likely be blackmail
| material.
|
| Occasionally, though, it does work like you say. I think
| there was some Asian(?) politician that they tried to
| blackmail after something like this, and he basically said:
| "Hey, could you send me a copy of the sex tape? She was
| smokin' hot, and I'd love to have the video."
| duskwuff wrote:
| Sukarno (no last name), first president of Indonesia.
|
| https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-and-kgb-tried-
| to-bl...
| aliqot wrote:
| Didn't an agency also target Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
| this way as well, or am I thinking of someone else?
| [deleted]
| raincom wrote:
| He worked there for three WEEKS, not even a month. A weird vibe
| to this whole saga.
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| If I was going to work in that sector I would kind of assume
| that any delightful surprises or exciting new people I met
| outside of work had strings attached for _at least_ the first
| year or two.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| sounds like you would end up like George Clooney's character
| in Burn After Reading.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Such a funny movie. "THIS... IS... A... CRUCIFIXION. THIS
| IS POLITICAL." _sticks out arms in classic crucifixion
| style_
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Everyone subject to a background investigation in this sphere
| has their 4A rights suspended by executive order. They can and
| will apply all forms of domestic surveillance on such people.
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(page generated 2022-09-29 23:00 UTC)