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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   6132 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What specifically is the case against Bellingcat?

I've seen a lot of nonspecific innuendo about them especially since Elon Musk's "psyop" accusations, but then what seems like one of their main guys volunteers this apparently unprompted (which is the first I've heard about it despite following the Belgorod raid all day, including through pro-Russian sources), which seems at odds with the idea that they're so tied up with western intelligence agencies.

It’s just a private organisation working at an arms length from the actual intelligence agencies. I am sure they are intelligent people who compile decent info most of the time. But they will also lie when really needed and act as a front for laundering spook sourced intelligence as if it’s a civil society effort to western media.

It’s not surprising that they would acknowledge the neo-nazi nature of some foreign volunteers of AFU (especially the Slavic ones). This has been obvious to anyone following the conflict and able to take a hint.

I think it's just authentic OSINT, and is mostly US-aligned. If you don't like popular US foreign policy ideas, you might dislike them! Musk's accusations are entirely baseless ('Psyop' is rarely in the same sentence as a meaningful claim in casual conversation / on social media), and he's probably repeating vague nonsense that morphed from the aforementioned disagreements.

'authentic OSINT'.

Yeah, it's very normal OSINT procedure to write long investigations of Russian spook units based on Russian phone metadata, which is very open source information, really it is. Procuring restricted data in bulk from a hostile foreign country, it's just as 'open' as reading newspapers or looking up things on commercial satelite maps.

Maybe. And maybe horses sing when you're not around.

Since they're US aligned, they never talk about the really interesting stuff. Such as that first aid to the Novichok guy was rendered by.. wait for it..this person..

The 16 year old, from Larkhill, was the first to spot two people collapsed on a bench in the Maltings on March 4th and didn't hesitate to help. Abigail quickly alerted her mum, a qualified nurse, who was nearby and together they gave first aid to the victims until paramedics arrived.

It soon became clear this was no ordinary medical incident, but the poisoning of a former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, with Novichok.

...

Immediately following the incident and with the world's media focused on Salisbury, the pair didn't want any want press attention and kept their involvement quiet.

But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the "incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that Abigail was a very worthy winner.

/images/16855288214042914.webp

Yeah, it's very normal OSINT procedure to write long investigations of Russian spook units based on Russian phone metadata, which is very open source information, really it is. Procuring restricted data in bulk from a hostile foreign country, it's just as 'open' as reading newspapers or looking up things on commercial satelite maps.

This is how Bellingcat describe their methods and sources:

https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-methodology/

Russia’s Data Market

Much of the information we used for our investigations could never be found in most Western countries, but in Russia, is readily available either for free or a fairly modest fee. Additionally, Russian email providers, such as Mail.ru and Rambler, and social networks, such as Vkontakte, are far less secure and privacy-focused than their Western equivalents, leading to frequent data leaks and robust search functions.

Due to porous data protection measures in Russia, it only takes some creative Googling (or Yandexing) and a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency to be fed through an automated payment platform, not much different than Amazon or Lexis Nexis, to acquire telephone records with geolocation data, passenger manifests, and residential data. For the records contained within multi-gigabyte database files that are not already floating around the internet via torrent networks, there is a thriving black market to buy and sell data. The humans who manually fetch this data are often low-level employees at banks, telephone companies, and police departments. Often, these data merchants providing data to resellers or direct to customers are caught and face criminal charges. For other batches of records, there are automated services either within websites or through bots on the Telegram messaging service that entirely circumvent the necessity of a human conduit to provide sensitive personal data.

For example, to find a huge collection of personal information for Anatoliy Chepiga — one of the two GRU officers involved in the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter — we only need to use a Telegram bot and about 10 euros. Within 2-3 minutes of entering Chepiga’s full name and providing a credit card via Google Pay or a payment service like Yandex Money, a popular Telegram bot will provide us with Chepiga’s date of birth, passport number, court records, license plate number, VIN number, previous vehicle ownership history, traffic violations, and frequent parking locations in Moscow. A sample of the baseline information provided can be seen below, with key personal details censored.

It might be hard to believe at first, but after observing some recent events, it is not so hard anymore to believe that Russia is really so incompetent and corrupt to the very core.

Well, maybe. (I'm giving it a maybe bc Russians are kind of special)

It's also hard to believe that anyone believes the official Skripal narrative when the fact that makes the mainstream narrative an obvious red herring is on the bloody wikpedia page.

How many paramedics, nurses and doctors are there in the United Kingdom ? 50,000? 100,000 ?

And it just so happens that the he gets poisoned by the Russian so fortuitously so that when he passes out he is found by probably the most politically reliable nurse in the entire country.

/images/16856176137822983.webp

It's also hard to believe that anyone believes the official Skripal narrative when the fact that makes the mainstream narrative an obvious red herring is on the bloody wikpedia page.

Yes, this whole story was sus when it happened, and hadn't improved with age.

The Skripal Case 5 Years On summarized

but the investigation in Russian sources in not the most implausible part.

Can confirm, got such a database on one New Year as a high schooler, from my dad. This is very normal.

Yeah, it's very normal OSINT procedure to write long investigations of Russian spook units based on Russian phone metadata, which is very open source information, really it is.

Iirc russian telecom providers are either corrupt or got hacked, and the metadata is available for sale on online 'black markets' the same way hacked US corporation data is.

Unlike intelligence agencies which often rely on anonymous sources for sensitive investigations, Bellingcat and their Russian partners The Insider base their work on cell-phone metadata and flight records which are readily available in Russia’s thriving black market of stolen data.

And unlike most major media organizations that are willing to accept leaked data but draw the line at buying information, Bellingcat and their partners have proven willing to go a step further and pay for information from data merchants which often originates from low-level employees in banks, telecoms companies, and government agencies looking to make a quick buck.

I don't think they're just getting the data from the CIA.

Iirc russian telecom providers are either corrupt or got hacked, and the metadata is available for sale on online 'black markets' the same way hacked US corporation data is.

And you know that because Bellingcat said so.

I've not seen anyone else make such claim.

And if Bellingcat was an outfit that evolved to launder intelligence agencies output, then they'd of course say so.

How are you going to verify whether it's true ? If you're into infosec and speak Russian yeah, maybe you can with a few days of work.

I have seen several other people make that claim because I looked for it

Who is that and why is it remarkable?

There are two links "this person" shows background.

Do you think it's not remarkably interesting that first aid in such a politically sensitive case was rendered by the Chief Nurse (Army) who had been appointed to her position about a month before the event?

It's also interesting that given how deadly novichok is and that nerve agents can be dangerous on contact and that almost certainly CNO (Army) would recognize the symptoms of nerve agent poisoning she let her daughter be involved in this.

How is creating stories about actual events with the aim of distracting the public from the truth not a psyop?

They really say this person was there, totally at random, to give first aid to Skripal.

Making up fake stories to bury the truth is doing psy-ops.

A lot of it's just politics, but Bellingcat's actions related to the whole leak thing has been pretty overt, and that story in particular smelled a bit too much of parallel construction (yes, there are auties who can identify people from their kitchen counter; there are even ones who would make that argument to NYT; there aren't ones who'd do that and get a sympathetic or trusting view from the NYT)

I don't know that this points to 'spooks' themselves rather than merely just being bog-standard progressives being fed info, or even necessarily what extent that difference matters. If they are, Toler's tweet is some evidence against an incredibly strong editorial commitment to the party line... but in turn I don't think that's too unusual, either.

I don't know, by definition. The boring-and-probable explanation is that it's just excusing a leak from the active investigation using traditional methods (eg printer tracking and checking access logs a la Reality Winner, some 'confidential human source' that just so happened to be logged into that tiny room, so on), most likely as a political tactic to get ahead of any story framing him as a 'whistleblower'. Yes, the FBI isn't supposed to leak like a sieve, yes it could technically screw up the investigation or drive a target to do something drastic, but it's not the sort of problem that should surprise anybody or actually has ramifications for the feds.

((I mean, I'd like if someone though about overlap with rules against tag-along-journos during searches, but that'd probably take legislation and it's not gonna happen.))

The paranoid conspiracy one's that the information was found in non-traditional methods, and Bellingcat et NYT effort was built to launder that. At the less scuzzy level, some merely technical problem like they got a rubber-stamped warrant/subpeona to Discord and thirty other social media companies, wanted them to search for people posting the images, but weren't supposed to provide the images to search for given classification status. At the moderate one, Discord went out and gave the info to the feds, either of its own accord or after being 'politely requested': possibly not entirely kosher depending on exactly how hard that 'request' went, but no one can actually challenge it, and the big advantage to concealment is that everyone will Keep Using Discord.

At the more morbid one, they only had to ask their own techs, or the techs of another federal agency. Which would be bad at the technical level that it would require breaking SSL or having taps on major servers, but worse in the political sense that they're also not supposed to do that. But if the DHS or NSA does an upgraded log-them-all, they very much don't want that to become public, or show up in a court case, or whatever.

it's just excusing a leak from the active investigation using traditional methods (eg printer tracking and checking access logs a la Reality Winner, some 'confidential human source' that just so happened to be logged into that tiny room, so on)

What would be the point of that? These approaches aren't secret and are totally above board.

At the moderate one, Discord went out and gave the info to the feds, either of its own accord or after being 'politely requested': possibly not entirely kosher depending on exactly how hard that 'request' went, but no one can actually challenge it, and the big advantage to concealment is that everyone will Keep Using Discord.

Why would the feds care if people keep using discord or not? Why would people stop using discord just because they gave info about this guy who shared classified information? Are they worried about scaring away all the other zoomers sharing classified documents on zoomer irc?

What would be the point of that? These approaches aren't secret and are totally above board.

In the case of well-known and above-board approaches, the point is less disguising how he was caught, and more hiding who told the NYT about him, especially if the official use of those approaches was known to a relatively small number of people. There have at least been some infrastructural efforts to try to prevent tactical leaking by the FBI, and they're absolutely useless, but they're absolutely useless because of this style of 'hint' being possible.

Why would the feds care if people keep using discord or not? Why would people stop using discord just because they gave info about this guy who shared classified information? Are they worried about scaring away all the other zoomers sharing classified documents on zoomer irc?

If people believed that Discord (or some set of social media 'private' closed-group comms, or some subset of encryption, or whatever) are broken, they will stop using them for far broader realms that just being a dumbass zoomer trying to impress kids with classified info. I mean, they won't, in practice, but if you had a pretty serious investment giving very deep insight you wouldn't want to risk even a fairly small chance of losing it.

Do people really believe that discord will put up any resistance to a federal inquiry? This isn't even "broken", it's a fact of life.

You're overestimating online hard righties.

Groups like the Aryan Brotherhood are mostly just prison / drug gangs. That's why you get otherwise confusing gangs like the Nazi Lowriders who are neo-nazis plus hispanics. They do commit hate crimes but they also filter out anyone too obviously crazy or incompetent to join their criminal organization.

A lot of the neo nazi stuff is there to make sure that the gang members are permanently excluded from lawful society and thus fully committed. A guy with a faded "Arizona Meth Dealers" tattoo could probably still get construction jobs if he just shrugged it off as "I was an idiot when I was younger". A swastika? Not so much.

So Discord neo-nazis are really scrapping the bottom of the barrel. There was one Atomwaffen cell that was made up of a man in his mid 30s and a 15 yr old high school student. You're probably assuming the man in his 30s was running the cell. You'd be wrong.

So based on their behavior and proven competence I'm confident in saying that a lot of them don't realize that their Discord conversations aren't actually private.

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