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Hey, it was all a practical joke. So serious, you people. No humor at all, not even a bit.
Requiem For Project Vigilant |
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| By: strandedwind Sunday January 2, 2011 7:10 am | |
Hey, it was all a practical joke. So serious, you people. No humor at all, not even a bit.
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87 Comments
Interesting – very different angle from what sounds like a credible well placed source.
“When not framing harmless, gender puzzled young soldiers as part of our nefarious support for the New World Order we occasionally engaged in socially redeeming activities. The first thing that ever happened beyond the connected digital realm were child endangerment cases.”
Would like to know more on all issues, but especially the NWO stuff.
Except for proof of the so called torture or water-boarding in Iran comes from Andrew Sullivan. I’d like to see him write about CIA/USAID/NED’s involvement in the Green Movement in Iran. Neda’s murder looked remarkably similar to the executions that took place in Venezuela, which were found out later to have been US connected/funded/trained opposition paramilitary attempting to overthrow Chavez. The cameras were remarkable trained in all the right places then, too. Gonna have to do better than Sully, sorry.
It’s also very suspicious that he’s rehabilitating Chet Uber and Project Vigilant [or is it Vigilante?] while declaring it’s death– at this site in particular considering Jane’s Timeline Project for Bradley Manning.
Perhaps Mr. Strandedwind can tell us about the funding sources of Project Vigilant, and Chet Uber’s connections to characters at Wired Magazine?
I wouldn’t visit the sites he has listed unless you are running tor or some such prophylactic program.
Here’s my accounting of NWO news for this week:
The oligarchs and bankers are running the show, and Putin is the hero that played an inside game and then threw the bastards out. They bled Russia and now we’re whats for dinner.
Remember last week when the White House came out blasting the second trial of Yokos CEO and Bank Menatep owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, claiming it’s a witch hunt by putin. Contrary to U.S. press reports, Khodorkovsky and Yukos were not singled out by Putin.
Alison Weir writes:
Skip to 2005 Prayer Breakfast Includes Russian Fugitives
In 2009, but who should appear at as honored Guest of the Obama White House? Leonid Nevzlin, convicted murderer, money launderer, mafioso and one of Khodorkovsky’s associates. He was attending the 2009 General Assembly in DC and got an on stage handshake by none other than Netanyahu. Israel gave him citizenship and refused repeated attempts to extradite him back to Russia, later they held their own little monkey trial and completely exonerated him. Russian courts have now convicted Nevzlin in absentia and sentenced him to life in prison. Repeated ad-nauseum by the US and Europe for all of them, this is what “justice” means in our country now.
I don’t mean to pick on just Israeli-Russian Oligarchs. Our own Bankers are eating us alive too but we’re more aware of them. It’s our Leaders that are protecting these parasites, and have even joined the feast. Unfortunately, we don’t have a leader like Putin.
Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me. Exactly what you would expect from a group supposedly associated with Adrian Lamo.
“A 2,000 customer rural ISP can pretty much guess which customer is misbehaving when troubles arise in a certain area”
Who gets to decide what “misbehaving” is, and what “troubles” are?
I want to get on that team. Because we all know that “music/movie traders” are the biggest problem on the intenet and we all should be bowing down to our media overlords and their ever vigilant protectors.
Thanks very much for the information. A few questions for you if I may:
Has Steven Ruhe been the main source of the Project Vigilant’s funding? If so, why did he choose to invest in it and what’s his BBHC Global in business to do? Has BBHC also died with Chet Uber?
A final question to try your patience, at https://www.bbhc-global.com/drupal/node/1, a posting from bbhcglobal on Sun, 08/08/2010 states:
“Further, to be clear Chet Uber is not BBHC or Project VIGILANT (VIGILANT), and VIGILANT or BBHC are not Chet Uber.”
It would seem that someone expects the project to outlast Chet Uber. Would that be Ruhe or is there someone else who might be trying to carry the project forward that I should touch base with to learn more?
Thanks again.
Thanks very much. I’ll check back tomorrow for your next post.
Vigilantes tend to crow about the smattering of bad guys they hang, but leave out that the “justice” they seek has only their definition, their rules, their execution, and their self-election to this power.
As far as I can tell, none of these folks had the courage (nor apparently the integrity) to apply for legal official law enforcement jobs, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand why not.
Impressed? Not hardly!
This techie of over 30 years (and a military veteran) has seen oodles and oodles of tech weenies who fantasize about their wet dream of being Neo of The Matrix with the skewed variation that they work hand in hand with the government instead of with the public.
The things that I found that most of them had in common were an emotional and intellectual maturity scarcely above infancy. Also common were self-fed paranoia and an almost total lack of a social life and skills (i.e. no friends).
In fact, it fits the theory quite well that those who wave their Facebook, Twitter, and IRC banners the highest, are those least likely to ever venture out of their basement bunkers to live in the real world as most humans do.
hackers like to think of themselves as dangerous forces of nature that have allowed thier awsome power to be harnessed for good, so yeah its a lot of self serving bullshit. alowing yourself to be used by oppresive state police agecies ist using your powers for goodness.
ive read her post twice and i could find no reference to you at all. no really, its not about you, believe it or not.
lame-o is dickhead, and a craven self serving goverment informant, and your facebook pal.
AND you’re not getting paid by Soros? Dood, you need an agent.
Wait – you’re the double rec-lister from dKos, right? Hi! I got hooked on your diaries over there a couple of years ago. So glad you pulled through.
T
LOL! Your opinion of my familiarity impresses me not at all. As for those links, old fookin’ news. And bad news at that! Again, not impressed!
That Mark Rasch worked at the DOJ does the opposite of impressing me.
You know, that DOJ that signed off on warrantless driftnet surveillance, that signed off on torture not being torture, that signed off and continues to sign off on State Secrets Privilege to hide government crimes. That fookin’ DOJ.
That Mark Rashch worked at SAIC also does the opposite of impressing me.
You know that SAIC that is in bed with every fookin’ intelligence agency in the US government and has been for years. Need to hide the crimes, bury the bodies, con Congress? Call fookin’ SAIC!
Impressed? Appalled is more correct!
National Security State wannabees impress me even less.
This is bizarre. Who were you working for in Omaha? Who are your lawyers that have reviewed this statement? Can you make Chet Uber available to talk to us? Those are just the first questions that come to mind.
Mods, you should frontpage this so that Marcy and Jane can respond.
Does not compute.
… reading a second time …
Nope. Still does not compute.
Is there a key for deciphering this?
My guess is the battery of attorneys he claims do not really exist. Same as Lamo’s supposed business enterprise “Reality Planning LLC” does not exist anywhere but in his mind.
Youa re biting off on one pile of the stinkiest bullshit imaginable; you sure that is what you want to do?
Stranded Wind? Sounds like Breaking Wind. Let’s see what shows up tomorrow and can be verified.
Agreed with the suggestion to promote to the front page.
Another question: Did you resign from Project Vigilant, knowing its operations were ceasing in only 3 weeks’ time? (And that “ceasing operations” introduces a whole pile of other questions.)
And that cryptic last paragraph cries out for clarification. Using code-speak like that out in plain view is just annoying.
And more about that “craptastic puffery”:
Project Vigilant Is a Fraud
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand the point of this diary
If your point is minimize this … Project Vigilant(?), it’s not working. All this diary is doing with me is making me very skeptical of your group and the reason for this diary. See: Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, line 230
After further thought, I’m starting to think it’s a lame attempt at disinformation and propaganda
Pffffft. This *I’ll reveal everything tomorrow* crap damages your credibility.
I think you struck the bullseye (pun intended *g*).
His Twitter link of StrandedWind***Edit in Moderation***
Social Media Strategist translation: “Fook with folks on blogs and stuff.”
Same hit here.
A lot of chaff being thrown up.
Who you worked for is relevant in order to evaluate the credibility of this story. Did you and Chet Uber work at thee same place?
Do you know the names of any individuals who were members of Project Vigilant at the same time they worked for the government?
***Mod Note:
It is FireDogLake’s policy to prohibit the transmission of personal information about commenters/diarists within these pages, unless expressly proffered by the commenter.***
First link in mine should be:
Introducing Progressive PST
Chet Uber: 50 things about me Link to cached version- original apparently deleted on advise of someone to be revealed by someone important sometime and somewhere.
“…(35) formed a C-Corporation with the father of the computer virus, (37) found a mentor that approved all funding for computer security in the U.S. for a dozen years, (38) got to work on a top 10 world banks network rolling out in 2017, (39) analyzed the full-spectrum security of an entire state including over 30 agencies,…”
Do you know Tim Webster? What is his connection to Project Vigilant?
Some of this I can confirm…
A week ago, on reading the stuff about Project Vigilant here and in greenwald’s pieces, I flashed on straded Wind’s oblique references in dailykos comments threads about working with folks with law enforcement connections to identify violent rightwing types before they acted. (I think the first were in context of the Pittsburg guy who’d shot 3 cops.)
Googling “Stranded Wind” and “Chet Uber” brought this
(Strangely, that “Late Night Open Thread’ is no longer available at kos’ place, but there’s a google cache at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VP5qUMPf97sJ:www.dailykos.com/story/2010/11/29/923837/-Open-thread-for-night-owls:-Wikileaks-reveals-spying+%22Stranded+Wind%22+and+%22Chet+Uber%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)
At 5:01 PM Dec 27th I tweeted
@… Are you directly associated with Project Vigilant, or merely an old friend of Chet Uber?’
This led to a phone call. SW offered that Huber was there in his living room, would i like to talk to him? Taken by surprise, with no line of questioning in my head, I passed.
SW asserted his prior resignation from project Vigilant on our call, for the reasons he cites here. I advised, as a friend, full disclosure. This MAY have instigated this post.
Our friendship dates from sharing a sleeper car and long conversation on Amtrak’s Capitol Limited on the way to Netroots Nation in Pittsburg a couple summers ago.
_______
So it appears the diarist did work for Chet Uber in Omaha. Why could he reveal this before but not now?
And why can’t Chet anwer some questions for us, since he was apparently willing to talk to benmasel on the phone just a few days ago?
And again I ask was there anyone who was a member of PV while they were working for the government (other than as a contractor)?
And finally can you show me how to make a few mouse clicks and see what people are doing on the internet in other states?
Speaking as an IT professional, can you explain what Adrian Lamo is looking at on his computer at 03:06 in this video?
http://univisionsacramento.univision.com/noticias/video/2010-12-17/ciberpirata-hispano-hablo-de-sus
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nealrauhauser
You’d learn a lot more in the dailykos archive. SW’s pretty wide open.
ModNote:
Respectfully, FireDogLake has and will protect identities and information of participants to the extent possible.
We would similarly ask that disclosure of information from other sites be respected, as their participation, in the case of your comment, is involuntary.
Thank you.
Except when he’s not. See his comment above:
As I wrote over at EW’s place:
And this is the crux of my antipathy. I find it more than naive that someone who claims to be a “Progressive” somehow can associate his “Progressivism” with partnering with the very same DOJ, NSA, CIA, etc. organizations that have willfully and deliberately violated US law in massive warrantless driftnet surveillance for years.
And to top that, a purported “Progressive” who somehows thinks that the self-appointed vigilanteism embodied in Project Vigilant is itself “Progressive”.
I can hear it now:
I’m new – it’s all good, except that I see someone named ‘andy’ using the system? Just trying to understand the policy. This is nothing that another observer would not have learned by viewing the video.
I used to work for an ISP, and generally they don’t act as the internet police. General guidelines about what characterizes misbehaviors are spelled out under the law.
An ISP or host is protected under safe harbor, and they shouldn’t take an active role in enforcing copyright infringement. They can take down content if they receive a DMCA takedown notice. Bandwidth is bandwidth, and if you think you get to decide how to qualify traffic as retail or wholesale, I’d think you have control issues.
Am I to understand Project Vigilant had people working inside ISPs?
I don’t know what your politics are other than what you’ve said: partisan, but it looks like you are a provocateur, or perhaps you just need attention. Most of us here lean towards civil libertarian and non-partisan or what is called the “far-left.” Labeling yourself as progressive while you engage in this behavior gives us a bad name. Wanna collect dirt? Do it to government actors, their cronies, and criminal conspirators; not to your fellow americans.
The New World Order is just another name for The Great Game. It doesn’t have anything to do with illuminati, and every conspiracy begins as a theory, until we prove it’s true. Part of that is separating the wheat from the chaff. .or the bullshit … [cough]
For this level of discussion -the law, and civil liberties- of putting on the garments of internet panty police and lording over what your customers upload or download, keep on their websites, reading their mail, chats is violating their privacy and their civil liberties.
Voluntary DMCA enforcement is as bad as the banks shutting off Wikileaks account, or Amazon taking down their servers.
Technical minutia or what tools used to achieve it isn’t important.
“Chet slipped away December 28th, going on a pilgrimage of sorts. It’s been years since we could actually pass through the doorway of doors, but some vestiges of this place still remain, for those who know where to seek them. I hope he finds what he is seeking on the other side.”
Could you please clarify what you mean?
I don’t care who it is. Address the information contained in it.
Well, you said above that a person could see network traffic remotely if he got himself appointed “plant engineer” and made the appropiate hardware and software changes.
Was anyone at Project Vigilant in a position to do that?
If you were an early member then why aren’t you listed on the org statement on cryptome?
Would you be willing to sign a stipulation to the effect that Project Viglant was “framing harmless, gender puzzled young soldiers as part of our nefarious support for the New World Order?”
Would you agree with the sentiment that, for lack of a better way to say it, Adrian Lamo fucked up huge?
If FDL were to round up sufficient volunteers, could Project Vigilant be resurrected, and if so what do you think our next mission should be?
Oh. Okay. an ad-hominem attack on the person that made the claims, and an an appeal to authority (SPLC); it’s a diversionary tactic so you don’t have to answer the real question.
I can use the same method on you. He obviously has discredited you, so anything you write from her to eternity is worthless.
Obviously it has some merit.
He’s shifting around playing games, waiting for you to “excite” him. If we were all males I guess we could say it has been one big circle jerk. He’s a master Troll.
Not surprised.
A cached version of this page, with 53 comments, is (still) available here (at least for the moment):
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fmy.firedoglake.com%2Fstrandedwind%2F2011%2F01%2F02%2Frequiem-for-project-vigilant%2F&btnG=Rechercher&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
Is it really possible for the diary to be removed by the O.P. in this way? That should not be possible- for obvious reasons.
And the comments the Op made are gone too.
Bmaz called it right.
A cached version of this page, with 53 comments, is (still) available here (at least for the moment):
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fmy.firedoglake.com%2Fstrandedwind%2F2011%2F01%2F02%2Frequiem-for-project-vigilant%2F
right, and “strandedwind” seems to have disappeared… however, from http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/08/06/bbhc-global-and-project-vigilant-wheres-the-money-2/ I find:
“Who owns BBHC Global?
Steven Ruhe shows as the registrant for the domain name but the email address he provides is chet.uber@mac.com. Ruhe’s LinkedIn profile says his present job from 2004 to the present is as the owner of T.G.B.S. Construction in Lincoln, NE however aYellowPages.com search under that name turns up nothing. I checked 411.com. Nothing. Then I found a copy of the Lincoln Business Builder from April, 2007 with a photo of Steven Ruhe and his partner Brett Reifschnider of R&R Drywall. Is there another Steven Ruhe in Lincoln, NE? Not that I can find.
In fact, Chet Uber seems to have more connections to BBHC Global than Ruhe does. BBHC’s CCR listing, an official registry whose information has to be vetted through Dun & Bradstreet, only shows the name Chet Uber who resides at an address in Florida. An online AT&T directory shows a Barbara Uber living at that same address. Spouse? Mother?
On Chet’s Nyamz page he lists his position with the company as “volunteer consultant”. Since when does a volunteer consultant register a company with Dun & Bradstreet and the CCR? In fact, everything about Chet just feels wrong. Check out his Nyamz bio and see what I mean. Or you can click on his LinkedIn profile and discover that he is no longer just a volunteer consultant but has staked out a new title: Director Project Vigilant at BBHC Global.
BBHC Global, however, is not in Florida according to its Duns and CCR records. They list the address as 12105 William Plaza, apt 336, Omaha, NE 68144-1416. That same address shows up for a marketing company Double W Marketing and a one-on-one wellness consulting company called Innovations in Health. Both of those domains are registered to someone named Wayne Wilson. So why is Chet Uber of Fort Pierce, FL the registered principle point of contact for a company in Omaha? It’s registered as a partnership. It’s also registered as an A5 (Veteran-owned business).”
=========================================
Drywallers masquerading as “computer security consultants”, blow tons of drywall dust, and then disappear. Bwahahahahaha. I’d slap the lot of them with subpoenas, and ask lots of pointed questions… not really, it’s a waste of time and it would give them far more credibility than they deserve, which is *absolutely none*.
Thanks. What an idiot, he got busted here and deleted his diaries.
If he’s so savvy, he should know nothing ever goes away once it’s on the intertubes.
Here’s one of his paragraphs:
I looked up the who is:
Domain Name: VILETWEETS.COM
Created on: 27-Nov-10
Expires on: 27-Nov-11
Last Updated on: 14-Dec-10
It’s been operational now for a month, they started posting on Dec 3.
There’s no personal identification on the site at all. The who is registration is anonymous.
And the site is lame. I seriously doubt the government would knock on the door for that those silly tweets… and if was that bad, I’m sure Chet Uber would just call the cops. (that is if he didn’t just create them himself)
On his other diary I posted a link to TaoSecurity where they discuss Project Vigilant, and the Anderson letters.
Looks like he was trying to capitalize on the Manning/Wikileaks story to generate some business/attention, but he has to try to make it look like they actually have an infrastructure.
Admins should be able to restore, or paste them back in, right?
Since you’ve provided the link I’ll repost the diary that standedwind labeled as a joke after he apparently deleted it.
Less the images it was:
User Picture
Requiem For Project Vigilant
By: strandedwind Sunday January 2, 2011 7:10 am
Fourteen years ago we sat around a table at an Omaha cybercafe and the debate was on. “Who attacked our system?” “How do we find them?” “If we do find them, will anyone actually do anything about it?”
Project Vigilant has been misreported and reviled in the media since my old friend, Chet Uber, spoke up at DefCon last year, revealing, among other things, that he and Adrian Lamo were involved in the capture of Bradley Manning.
I wasn’t there the day it all started, but I arrived before the first year was up, and until my recent resignation I was the oldest surviving member of the original group still involved.
As the only wordsmith who remembers the pre-professional beginnings and who stuck around long enough to see the organization trusted with matters of national security, it is my sad duty to serve as the Speaker For The Dead.
This is, like everything else associated with it, not confirmed, but I believe Project Vigilant operations ceased at midnight, 12/31/2010.
Ten thousand eyeballs are going to land here looking just for Wikileaks. Here is precisely what I know.
I received advanced notice of a military intel leak in the form of a call from Chet several days before there was any public mention. I didn’t hear anything terribly specific, just that something had happened in Iraq and that it was “massive”.
Some time later I received copies of the affidavits on the case and a lengthy email that may be simply summarized: “Do not talk to the press.” I did read the affidavits and they were nothing remarkable – time lines written by Lamo describing his interactions with Manning. The famous chat logs were referenced but were not included.
Much later I was interviewed by Mark Albertson for the pair of articles he wrote but my name never appeared so I remained quiet.
My increasingly partisan work the last two years caused friction in a couple of different ways. I resigned from Vigilant on December 6th, 2010, calling tech support to disable my logins and then cleansing my mailbox and computers of any trace of the project’s property. If I didn’t say it here, don’t bother asking any more about it – more than one lawyer read this before it was released and it’s my definitive statement.
I don’t think anyone has ever talked in public about the beginnings. We all congregated in an IRC channel on Undernet – #hack. I try not to let more than five or six hundred days pass between return visits, but the word now is that it’s a.) idle and b.) lame. This wasn’t the case in the late 1990s, when security people from First Data (then the nation’s largest credit card processor), Amgen, Earthlink, and ISS X-Force mingled with a truly global mixture of shady characters.
Chet, I, and a few of the others were in Omaha, along with First Data, so there were some unusually strong ties for a city of such size. It was nice to see the occasional ‘0 day exploit’ and get ahead of the game.
When not framing harmless, gender puzzled young soldiers as part of our nefarious support for the New World Order we occasionally engaged in socially redeeming activities. The first thing that ever happened beyond the connected digital realm were child endangerment cases. Law enforcement does a good job on children “of tender years” – those twelve and under. Once children enter their teen years it’s pretty difficult to get attention unless the circumstances surrounding their disappearance is extraordinary. Panicked parents would call, unable to figure out what networks their missing child had been using, let alone how to find them, then the hunt was on.
We got kids back … some times. It’s absolutely wrenching work and I’m glad that law enforcement’s coverage of this issue has dramatically improved since those years.
After Wikileaks the next most visible (and annoying) piece of media coverage is the game played with reporting from DefCon.
Project Vigilant monitors 250 million IP addresses continuously and it builds dossiers on every user, which it then gives to the government.
Uhh, not really. That’s two separate ideas, stuck together by someone who didn’t understand the implications, then overstated to sell copy.
Most every router out there produces netflow, s-flow, or some other detailed traffic accounting output. ISPs collect this data, establishing norms so they can engage in capacity planning and spot abnormal traffic. Right now I can make a few mouse clicks and see what thousands of people are ‘doing’ on the internet in a couple of different states – each of the four service providers that together make up my day job are running such tools.
Take that idea a step further. A 2,000 customer rural ISP can pretty much guess which customer is misbehaving when troubles arise in a certain area, but they stop being people and start being just IP addresses around the 10,000 subscriber mark. There are tools that start with netflow accounting and build from there, automatically homing in on systems that are problematic. Zombie windows boxes with various viruses and music/movie traders are the ones who end up in the hot seat, and rightly so, as each can spoil the usage of the network for many others.
So … it’s not too hard to envision some smart guys building tools to do a little bit better job of what every ISP must do to keep a lid on the chaos when customers have Microsoft Windows on their computers, and then going out and selling that to a dozen of the biggest service providers. And that’s the end of that conspiracy theory …
Building dossiers? Most of what Project Vigilant did was really unsexy science type stuff. You guys see me fooling around with social media metrics? There is a lot of that sort of thing that goes on, and Project Vigilant has a computational linguistics fetish that I never personally assimilated. Basically there are tools out there like LingPipe and a bunch of people apply this to both Islamist and American right wing rhetoric, trying to spot the next Timothy McVeigh, Mohamed Atta, or Byron Williams … before they act.
And when they find something that they think is about to blow they get on the phone. I did this myself last November and the FBI’s hate crimes squad knocked on several doors in the American southeast. A week or two later I got a call from a somewhat flustered member of the VileTweets crew. Seems the Secret Service took an interest in the hate speech they’re monitoring and dropped by just to make sure he didn’t share the views that are captured and reported on their site.
Our federal law enforcement services are obviously all over both international threats and domestic extremism, but sharp eyed citizens are very often what sets investigations in motion. There is, of course, much deeper thinking behind this idea, and I may come back and expand on it, if anyone cares to hear the details.
This story wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t point out media whore figure Austin Heap, who is currently facing fraud charges for making off with a $50,000 donation meant to support the ‘development’ of his much hyped and utterly dysfunctional Haystack proxy software.
I spotted Austin during the initial disturbances after the 2009 elections, attempting to organize free proxy services for the Iranian people. I don’t think he realized he was putting himself in danger by doing this, and he ended up in protective custody about a day after we first spoke.
Showing no more sense there than he did with his Haystack fraud, he got his nerve back after a few days of laying low, and not satisfied with just returning home, he apparently reported that he’d been kidnapped. I never even got interviewed over that, but it apparently wasted some time and caused a great deal of embarrassment for Project Vigilant with some of its law enforcement contacts.
People in Iran trusted Austin Heap. Some of them are dead now, and they were tortured before they were executed. Don’t let the man’s boyish good looks fools you – he’s lower than the proverbial snake’s belly for the suffering and death visited upon Iranian protesters through his incompetence and vanity.
Let’s not end on a grim note like that.
Are you tired of the weekly scam messages from the compromised accounts of friends on Facebook? The ones that begin “I’m in London, and I was robbed at gunpoint” ?
We were, too, so when one of these characters fell into our clutches last summer we did what everyone longs to do.
Someone’s aunt had been taken in, sending $3,500 electronically. The niece who was supposedly stranded happened to work on Capitol Hill, she had some law enforcement friends, and this led to Chet’s phone ringing. Forty five minutes later half a dozen of us were on a conference call bridge. Two hours later we had the name of a cybercafe somewhere in London’s East End.
“Who has a Scotland Yard contact?” The sounds of people adjusting themselves was clearly audible – pulling out cell phones or reaching for keyboards.
“I do, hold on” was heard, then a long number was dialed, then a sleepy British accent was heard. Arrangements were made and a few hours later a west African immigrant was cuffed and stuffed by London police. It happened so quickly they even managed to get the money back, too – an astonishingly rare occurrence in such cases.
Problems like this need to be solved with education and procedures for international money transfer more than with law enforcement, but they do like to pick this sort of person up – they’ve always got their fingers into other mischief as well.
Chet and I have been reminiscing these last few weeks, a process made easier by his inhabiting our spare bedroom while he recovered from another heart surgery. He’s been dealt a string of negative health events the last five years, any one of which would have killed me, but he just keeps soldiering on.
Like the other curious characters of the Wikileaks saga, Chet is something of an enigma, even to his closest associates. He has a truly astonishing Rolodex; his iPhone is like Galadriel’s mirror, showing things that were, things that are, and things that have not yet come to pass. Even so, his health and temperament have kept him adrift the last three years, organizing things and trying to find the right combination to get himself off disability and back into the work force. That’s a tough row to hoe when you aren’t certain you’ll be able to get up in the morning and go to work that day.
Some ignorant journalists have panned the idea that a homeless person could organize a complex venture like Project Vigilant, or contribute anything meaningful to society. I’m glad that I’m just a blogger who didn’t know any better, because my adventures while homeless in 2008 included publishing research and presenting at a national conference in my chosen field, a tidy disproof of that idea. I also know, based on my experiences in 2009 and 2010 that a small group of committed people can build something innovative and useful using nothing more than a relentless focus on getting the job done.
Chet slipped away December 28th, going on a pilgrimage of sorts. It’s been years since we could actually pass through the doorway of doors, but some vestiges of this place still remain, for those who know where to seek them. I hope he finds what he is seeking on the other side.
If this should generate any interest I’ll come back later this week and explain what all of this stuff really means.
The comment originally posted by strandedwind and then deleted was:
strandedwind January 2nd, 2011 at 2:20 pm «
I will confess my nefarious role in funding things tomorrow, and I can offer no information on Wired. That isn’t due to any agreement, I am simply and completely unaware of that except for what I’ve read from Glenn Greenwald.
This is what was there before he deleted it.
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Fourteen years ago we sat around a table at an Omaha cybercafe and the debate was on. “Who attacked our system?” “How do we find them?” “If we do find them, will anyone actually do anything about it?”
Project Vigilant has been misreported and reviled in the media since my old friend, Chet Uber, spoke up at DefCon last year, revealing, among other things, that he and Adrian Lamo were involved in the capture of Bradley Manning.
I wasn’t there the day it all started, but I arrived before the first year was up, and until my recent resignation I was the oldest surviving member of the original group still involved.
As the only wordsmith who remembers the pre-professional beginnings and who stuck around long enough to see the organization trusted with matters of national security, it is my sad duty to serve as the Speaker For The Dead.
This is, like everything else associated with it, not confirmed, but I believe Project Vigilant operations ceased at midnight, 12/31/2010.
Ten thousand eyeballs are going to land here looking just for Wikileaks. Here is precisely what I know.
I received advanced notice of a military intel leak in the form of a call from Chet several days before there was any public mention. I didn’t hear anything terribly specific, just that something had happened in Iraq and that it was “massive”.
Some time later I received copies of the affidavits on the case and a lengthy email that may be simply summarized: “Do not talk to the press.” I did read the affidavits and they were nothing remarkable – time lines written by Lamo describing his interactions with Manning. The famous chat logs were referenced but were not included.
Much later I was interviewed by Mark Albertson for the pair of articles he wrote but my name never appeared so I remained quiet.
My increasingly partisan work the last two years caused friction in a couple of different ways. I resigned from Vigilant on December 6th, 2010, calling tech support to disable my logins and then cleansing my mailbox and computers of any trace of the project’s property. If I didn’t say it here, don’t bother asking any more about it – more than one lawyer read this before it was released and it’s my definitive statement.
I don’t think anyone has ever talked in public about the beginnings. We all congregated in an IRC channel on Undernet – #hack. I try not to let more than five or six hundred days pass between return visits, but the word now is that it’s a.) idle and b.) lame. This wasn’t the case in the late 1990s, when security people from First Data (then the nation’s largest credit card processor), Amgen, Earthlink, and ISS X-Force mingled with a truly global mixture of shady characters.
Chet, I, and a few of the others were in Omaha, along with First Data, so there were some unusually strong ties for a city of such size. It was nice to see the occasional ‘0 day exploit’ and get ahead of the game.
When not framing harmless, gender puzzled young soldiers as part of our nefarious support for the New World Order we occasionally engaged in socially redeeming activities. The first thing that ever happened beyond the connected digital realm were child endangerment cases. Law enforcement does a good job on children “of tender years” – those twelve and under. Once children enter their teen years it’s pretty difficult to get attention unless the circumstances surrounding their disappearance is extraordinary. Panicked parents would call, unable to figure out what networks their missing child had been using, let alone how to find them, then the hunt was on.
We got kids back … some times. It’s absolutely wrenching work and I’m glad that law enforcement’s coverage of this issue has dramatically improved since those years.
After Wikileaks the next most visible (and annoying) piece of media coverage is the game played with reporting from DefCon.
Project Vigilant monitors 250 million IP addresses continuously and it builds dossiers on every user, which it then gives to the government.
Uhh, not really. That’s two separate ideas, stuck together by someone who didn’t understand the implications, then overstated to sell copy.
Most every router out there produces netflow, s-flow, or some other detailed traffic accounting output. ISPs collect this data, establishing norms so they can engage in capacity planning and spot abnormal traffic. Right now I can make a few mouse clicks and see what thousands of people are ‘doing’ on the internet in a couple of different states – each of the four service providers that together make up my day job are running such tools.
Take that idea a step further. A 2,000 customer rural ISP can pretty much guess which customer is misbehaving when troubles arise in a certain area, but they stop being people and start being just IP addresses around the 10,000 subscriber mark. There are tools that start with netflow accounting and build from there, automatically homing in on systems that are problematic. Zombie windows boxes with various viruses and music/movie traders are the ones who end up in the hot seat, and rightly so, as each can spoil the usage of the network for many others.
So … it’s not too hard to envision some smart guys building tools to do a little bit better job of what every ISP must do to keep a lid on the chaos when customers have Microsoft Windows on their computers, and then going out and selling that to a dozen of the biggest service providers. And that’s the end of that conspiracy theory …
Building dossiers? Most of what Project Vigilant did was really unsexy science type stuff. You guys see me fooling around with social media metrics? There is a lot of that sort of thing that goes on, and Project Vigilant has a computational linguistics fetish that I never personally assimilated. Basically there are tools out there like LingPipe and a bunch of people apply this to both Islamist and American right wing rhetoric, trying to spot the next Timothy McVeigh, Mohamed Atta, or Byron Williams … before they act.
And when they find something that they think is about to blow they get on the phone. I did this myself last November and the FBI’s hate crimes squad knocked on several doors in the American southeast. A week or two later I got a call from a somewhat flustered member of the VileTweets crew. Seems the Secret Service took an interest in the hate speech they’re monitoring and dropped by just to make sure he didn’t share the views that are captured and reported on their site.
Our federal law enforcement services are obviously all over both international threats and domestic extremism, but sharp eyed citizens are very often what sets investigations in motion. There is, of course, much deeper thinking behind this idea, and I may come back and expand on it, if anyone cares to hear the details.
This story wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t point out media whore figure Austin Heap, who is currently facing fraud charges for making off with a $50,000 donation meant to support the ‘development’ of his much hyped and utterly dysfunctional Haystack proxy software.
I spotted Austin during the initial disturbances after the 2009 elections, attempting to organize free proxy services for the Iranian people. I don’t think he realized he was putting himself in danger by doing this, and he ended up in protective custody about a day after we first spoke.
Showing no more sense there than he did with his Haystack fraud, he got his nerve back after a few days of laying low, and not satisfied with just returning home, he apparently reported that he’d been kidnapped. I never even got interviewed over that, but it apparently wasted some time and caused a great deal of embarrassment for Project Vigilant with some of its law enforcement contacts.
People in Iran trusted Austin Heap. Some of them are dead now, and they were tortured before they were executed. Don’t let the man’s boyish good looks fools you – he’s lower than the proverbial snake’s belly for the suffering and death visited upon Iranian protesters through his incompetence and vanity.
Let’s not end on a grim note like that.
Are you tired of the weekly scam messages from the compromised accounts of friends on Facebook? The ones that begin “I’m in London, and I was robbed at gunpoint” ?
We were, too, so when one of these characters fell into our clutches last summer we did what everyone longs to do.
Someone’s aunt had been taken in, sending $3,500 electronically. The niece who was supposedly stranded happened to work on Capitol Hill, she had some law enforcement friends, and this led to Chet’s phone ringing. Forty five minutes later half a dozen of us were on a conference call bridge. Two hours later we had the name of a cybercafe somewhere in London’s East End.
“Who has a Scotland Yard contact?” The sounds of people adjusting themselves was clearly audible – pulling out cell phones or reaching for keyboards.
“I do, hold on” was heard, then a long number was dialed, then a sleepy British accent was heard. Arrangements were made and a few hours later a west African immigrant was cuffed and stuffed by London police. It happened so quickly they even managed to get the money back, too – an astonishingly rare occurrence in such cases.
Problems like this need to be solved with education and procedures for international money transfer more than with law enforcement, but they do like to pick this sort of person up – they’ve always got their fingers into other mischief as well.
Chet and I have been reminiscing these last few weeks, a process made easier by his inhabiting our spare bedroom while he recovered from another heart surgery. He’s been dealt a string of negative health events the last five years, any one of which would have killed me, but he just keeps soldiering on.
Like the other curious characters of the Wikileaks saga, Chet is something of an enigma, even to his closest associates. He has a truly astonishing Rolodex; his iPhone is like Galadriel’s mirror, showing things that were, things that are, and things that have not yet come to pass. Even so, his health and temperament have kept him adrift the last three years, organizing things and trying to find the right combination to get himself off disability and back into the work force. That’s a tough row to hoe when you aren’t certain you’ll be able to get up in the morning and go to work that day.
Some ignorant journalists have panned the idea that a homeless person could organize a complex venture like Project Vigilant, or contribute anything meaningful to society. I’m glad that I’m just a blogger who didn’t know any better, because my adventures while homeless in 2008 included publishing research and presenting at a national conference in my chosen field, a tidy disproof of that idea. I also know, based on my experiences in 2009 and 2010 that a small group of committed people can build something innovative and useful using nothing more than a relentless focus on getting the job done.
Chet slipped away December 28th, going on a pilgrimage of sorts. It’s been years since we could actually pass through the doorway of doors, but some vestiges of this place still remain, for those who know where to seek them. I hope he finds what he is seeking on the other side.
[Two pictures of a doorway from either side. I have them if anyone's interested.]
If this should generate any interest I’ll come back later this week and explain what all of this stuff really means.
Not funny, Neil. All most of us know about you is what we see on Facebook or Twitter so you shouldn’t be surprised if people are skeptical of your disavowal & claim that it was a joke. I’d suggest you come clean.
Uh-oh. Didn’t read this ’til I told some other people and sent Barbara a wreath. On the card I told her you’d told me – your IRL name, I mean. I think some other people have sent condolence cards explaining about you. I hope it doesn’t shake her up or anything. She’ll probably think you’re just a really funny guy!