> Why is an informant going around throwing out a location to a claimed cache of classified documents concerning SCADA systems? So this is like a textbook attempt at entrapment, its akin to giving someone a key to a door but telling them its legal to open it with, someone being an informant, to take them down after. It also does not appear the FBI gives not one fuck about the security of critical infrastructure as long as it entraps another kid. Nothing at all wrong here is there? Full transcript: http://cryptome.org/2014/05/sabu-m45t3rs4d0w8-2012-0330-0524...
Perfect example of the FBI looking for easy arrests using morally-vague methods of entrapment, instead of doing the hard work and stopping real criminal conspiracies. This is a technique they perfected in domestic terrorism cases where they find dumb criminals with no skill, financing, or strong motivation, then give them all of the resources and information they need to do conduct a real scheme. While holding their hand along the way.
Makes great headlines when they arrest someone "domestic terrorist caught by FBI!" but hardly a good use of resources when they keep missing real terrorist attacks.
Bruce Schneier nailed it in 2007: https://www.schneier.com/essay-174.html. None of the 'foiled plots' were ever a real threat until the FBI showed up. People could argue these people should be in jail anyway but they are hardly worth the skill and resources of the most advanced investigators in the country.
This whole series is pretty great. The cheat sheet here:
Entrapment requires:
(1) a causal relationship between police action and the accused's commission of a crime, and
(2) the police overcoming some demonstrable resistance to the commission of that crime, or the accused otherwise demonstrating that the police somehow corrupted them into committing a crime they would not have been predisposed to commit otherwise.
The "entrapment myths" in the comic:
1. That the police have to tell you that they're cops, or are somehow not allowed to deceive you into committing a crime. (No).
2. That the police cannot ask you to commit a crime. (No).
3. That the police cannot break the law themselves to get themselves into a position to see you commit a crime. (No).
4. That the police cannot help you commit a crime. (No).
5. That the police cannot allow you to commit a crime or somehow give you the impression that your actions are lawful and then arrest you. (No).
The law expects you to actively resist an entreaty from anyone --- undercover cop, uniformed cop, friend, family member --- to knowingly break the law.
The example the comic gives of an unreasonable effort to break through resistance: appealing to a friend to aid in the commission of a crime because your life depends on it, putting the accused in a position where a reasonable ordinary person might choose to participate in the crime as the lesser of two evils. That's entrapment.
Furthermore, as I understand it, and this may be state-by-state, but entrapment is doubly difficult to employ in a defense because it's an affirmative defense: to raise "entrapment", you must first acknowledge that you committed the crime in all its particulars, and then claim that your excuse was that you were entrapped.
Yes that's the definition of entrapment as interpreted by American courts. Very challenging for lawyers to use as a defense. Which is exactly why law enforcement loves using informants and undercover agents for everything these days. In heavily bureaucratic agencies like the FBI, the only thing that matters is looking good to management by getting arrests and 'foiling plots'. So why not go for some easy prosecutions? You'll be upper management in no time.
Plus there are a ton of dumb people and nearly everything is a crime these days, so all you have to do his handout a crime on a platter and fill prisons with the incompetent criminals who take the bait.
Why hunt down criminals when you can fish for dumb ones.
The crimes we're talking about here aren't "the crimes every American commits while squeezing orange juice in the morning" crimes.
Meanwhile, it is extraordinarily difficult to catch people in the act of committing computer crimes; the most effective investigative approach to enforcing computer crime laws probably is to find people who are predisposed to commit them, stage an opportunity to commit a specific instance of it, and then apprehend them. So, yes, computer crime enforcement does have a "fishing for dumb people" element to it.
What would be really interesting in a thread like this is, after pointing out how US criminal law makes it hard to raise an entrapment defense, providing specific examples of how some other country's criminal law handles the same circumstances.
Whatever crime you commit while squeezing orange juice will be accidental, and something you had no inkling was a crime. That's the gist of Silverglate's _Three Felonies A Day_, which is I think the origin of the "everything Americans do is somehow a crime" meme.
(I edited the comment you responded to, to add the "what's it like in other countries" question, after you wrote your response).
France temporarily made undercover police work illegal until the mid 2000s. That would be an interesting study.
But either way, there are obvious risks in this type of law enforcement. The vast, vast majority of humans are capable of committing crimes. This is why thought-crimes are so dangerous when they start being enforced because everyone is guilty. People flirt with the idea of crime but that capability is rarely utilized. The line one has to cross to commit a crime is high for most people, but there is a significant portion of the population where it is much smaller (poor people or people with lesser intelligence).
LE is overly consumed with making their careers on the back of latter portion of the population to the point where they covertly push them hard to commit crimes. While the intelligent criminals conducting sophisticated plots usually get away with it because noone wants to do the legwork involved.
(deleted my other comment which was not-HN quality).
In the US, if I pick up your property and walk away, I need to have an intent to permanently deprive you of it for it to be theft. (Obviously state law has particulars here.)
Strict liability -- where it's illegal for me to do X no matter what I was thinking -- is the exception. It's a growing exception, and that is unfortunate, but that speaks to the opposite of your narrative.
The fact that the prosecution has to show state of mind, rather than that some serious of actions happened, is a good thing, not a bad thing.
EDIT I changed the example in the second graf away from talking about car theft to avoid weird exceptions
There is a difference between the prosecution having to prove intent as an element of the crime and having the totality of the offense be intent on its own, or the offense being some collection of innocuous actions that cause no harm to anyone on their own but happen to be correlated with undesired activity.
There was a BBC program a couple of years back on secret services MI5/6 and they contrasted how we do it in the UK and The USA.
One example was an IRA arms dealer caught bang to rights actually at the buying point he got off on a tiny technicality - whereas the amount of stuff that the FBI where allowed to do was interesting and slightly disturbing.
It might have been on PBS or BBC America at some point
Which is to say that almost nothing that most people would recognize as entrapment is actually prohibited by the current legal understanding of entrapment, right?...
... Yeah
Edit: Down votes - with no comments? I'm pretty sure the other responses actually agree with my claim.
Please follow the site guidelines and don't complain about downvotes—all it does is lower the signal/noise ratio. Everyone gets downvoted. It doesn't matter.
He's bringing down the number of needless complaints over the long run. If he has to complain a bit in the short term to make it happen, well, that's worth it!
As it is, the fact that we're having this "conversation" at all mostly shows HN is declining in quality. I seldom complain about downvotes but when there's no comments and no obvious justification, it seems reasonably warranted.
How about this then: complaining about downvotes will invariably get you even more downvotes, and this time they'll actually be justified due to your attitude and tone.
The article tries to frame him like a noble hacker who turned to the good side but in fact he remains a backstabbing snitch. Does anyone here have respect for what he did?
His last few months as a snitch he changed his twitter pic to an islamic black standard militant flag and was openly calling for violence and 'cyber-terrorism'. Ridiculous
I'd have him continue his previous activities in a similar fashion to avoid the chance that his current actions are a message to important actors that he has been poisoned or is being watched in some way.
everyone knows he's an actor for the state anyway, but a quick temperance change online would be a pretty big red flag for many.
It was a red flag. One day he is lulzsec doing lulzy mischief, disappears and comes back inciting terrorism and giving big ups to reactionary militant islam.
I doubt it. He will probably never be able to find work in the tech industry again. If I were an employer, and searched his name, I would toss his resume.
It's likely he still works for the FBI and had a hand in taking down DPR. His FBI handler was in charge of that investigation, an anonymous 'agent #2' is referenced all through the complaint.
The "snitch" concept is not just adolescent, but harmful. There's nothing morally wrong with trying to atone for past bad actions by exposing other criminals.
That's the point. The idea is that one should 'fall on the grenade' to protect his criminal comrades. When he instead throws them to the wolves to save himself, people get up-in-arms about it.
Though it's not all that surprising. It's sort of like whole 'honor among thieves' ideal. When you throw in with a bunch of people that are willing to 'colour outside the lines,' sometimes the lines that they cross will not just be the lines drawn in the sand by the law, but the lines that you yourself draw in the sand.
The idea is that one should 'fall on the grenade' to protect his criminal comrades. When he instead throws them to the wolves to save himself, people get up-in-arms about it.
I guess I'm missing some context. Whose idea was the first sentence?
If you are part of a group engaging in illegal activity, and you (specifically you, not the whole group) are caught by the authorities, you are considered a 'snitch' if you rat out your associates rather than refusing to give the authorities any information and just 'doing your time.'
@codesuela called him a "snitch," which has a negative connotation (e.g. phrases like "snitches get stitches"[1][2]).
No, PD is that if both cooperate, the result is negative. That's what makes it a problem. But in the case of Monsegur, if any of the others would cooperate with the FBI too, it wouldn't do much difference for him, as he already did his job in catching them, so there's no downside in cooperating.
Well, PD is also that if both refuse to cooperate, the result is also negative. It just turns out that there were different penalties for the same crimes.
You mean like Snowden is "saving his own skin" by fleeing to that notable bastion of human rights that is Putin's Russia? I mean, that's the defense of his actions consistently offered up right here on HN, after all. "Well what did you expect him to do, come back for his Constitutional trial by a jury of his peers??"
There's a few hundred thousand still in uniform. After all, it's not like he only leaked things he subjectively felt were instances of "domestic surveillance", in which case we might be able to have a different conversation about his actions.
Failing that, there's the people in a certain country whom Greenwald himself claimed would be put directly at risk if that country name were to be revealed. But WikiLeaks leaked it anyways.... which is directly attributable to Snowden.
But that's the beautiful things about things like what he does. It's like coal polluting the air... we know it kills people in the abstract, but you can't point to a slouched-over body directly attributable to any given lump of coal.
Source? All I have ever read states that he gave it a group of journalists, but I have never heard it claimed that he gave anything to Wikileaks. If he did, why have they not released any of it?
Sabu was caught and played ball, Snowden acted on moral grounds. Russia is simply the only nation willing to anger the US and deter "payback", hence his only choice.
1) he got stuck in Russia, he didn't flee to it. When you say things like that you appear pretty uninformed about the situation to anyone that cares.
2) In this scenario, the American People would be the FBI, and the criminal conspirators would be the NSA and Snowden is Sabu. I can think of very few more noble activities than exposing the fraud of a working government to the very people who have a chance at changing it via the power of a democratic society.
It's ridiculous to even compare the scenarios, as the motives between the two are so different, and I hope anyone can see that. Look at the audiences at least. Sabu has gained personally from every single decision he has made; whether it was for his own agenda or for the FBI's after he was caught. What has Snowden achieved for himself?
> The "snitch" concept is not just adolescent, but harmful. There's nothing morally wrong with trying to atone for past bad actions by exposing other criminals.
The culture comes from the consequences. People would be substantially more willing to inform the police of criminal activity if the penalty for e.g. drug possession was mandatory rehab and probation, or the penalty for modest computer crimes was community service, rather than felony charges and prison time. Nobody wants to send their friends to prison. So instead of the slap on the wrist they deserve, they either get no punishment at all and carry on committing crimes or they get caught by the police and forfeit their lives to the prison system.
Unless the laws are batshit crazy and you are fighting a noble battle to change society for the better. Of course that kind of subversive thinking is exactly what the FBI considers domestic terrorism and will go to all lengths to stop. The "electronic frontier" is the civil rights issue of our times, but any kind of civil disobedience is punishable by decades in prison, a la any authoritarian regime.
I think authoritarian-types consider snitching "adolescent" because they have lost all sense of idealism and justice that they once might have had as a youth. The only way to change society with that type of mindset is for millions of dollars to be spent on lobbying by corporations or benevolent millionaires.
What kind of noble ideals are any of these crackers fighting for? They're just bullies of the electronic era--using their skills to assert power over others.
Re: the FBI. Their job is to maintain law and order. The burden of this is that even though 99% of the time you'll be fighting malevolent destabilization, you're likely to be in the wrong side of history that 1% of the time, and history will pillory you for it. That's OK and it's inevitable. It's intrinsic to the social function of such organizations. Because for every MLK there are a hundred David Koresh's.
Sure, it is possible not to see anything admirable in Monsegur's actions even if you think that the prosecution of the "militant" faction of Anonymous served the public interest.
Becoming an informant against Anonymous might be admirable if the informant did so because their conscience required it, and the informant undertook risks in doing so; the act of conscience and cost of that action would outweigh the betrayal of friends and peers. So, for instance, someone who had participated in a group who planned to bomb abortion clinics might be admirable if they had a change of heart about killing innocent people and risked their life to break up the plot.
It does not seem like either of those two factors are at play in Monsegur's case.
There is, of course, a difference between finding Monsegur admirable and determining for oneself that the prosecution was or wasn't in the public interest.
Given that the choice is between 10 years inside (Jeremy Hammond) or more, or 7 months and going free and working with the FBI, I don't think this is much of a choice at all. Would you throw your life away for the sake of a bunch of anonymous people whose only connection to you is a common interest in breaking things?
I don't know about respect, but I certainly can understand the choice.
Remember guys... this ("rolling" captured suspects to unwind a large criminal network) is the "good old-fashioned police work" you all say that the NSA should be doing instead of using surveillance.
I think HNs idea of old fashioned police work is a Victorian Bobby interrupting a back alley mugging by saying "wots all this then", and anything else is Stalinist
Given the conversations here[1][2] on how PR firms plant articles all the time, I've been thinking a lot about who benefits from each article I read in the NYT.
This one seems like a very obvious benefit for the FBI. The government wants it well known that "look, if you really cooperate we'll totally definitely let you go later." Of course, all the cases where the defendant cooperated and still went to jail don't make the media.
66 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadhttp://cryptome.org/2012/09/sanguinarious-sabu.htm
> Why is an informant going around throwing out a location to a claimed cache of classified documents concerning SCADA systems? So this is like a textbook attempt at entrapment, its akin to giving someone a key to a door but telling them its legal to open it with, someone being an informant, to take them down after. It also does not appear the FBI gives not one fuck about the security of critical infrastructure as long as it entraps another kid. Nothing at all wrong here is there? Full transcript: http://cryptome.org/2014/05/sabu-m45t3rs4d0w8-2012-0330-0524...
Perfect example of the FBI looking for easy arrests using morally-vague methods of entrapment, instead of doing the hard work and stopping real criminal conspiracies. This is a technique they perfected in domestic terrorism cases where they find dumb criminals with no skill, financing, or strong motivation, then give them all of the resources and information they need to do conduct a real scheme. While holding their hand along the way.
Makes great headlines when they arrest someone "domestic terrorist caught by FBI!" but hardly a good use of resources when they keep missing real terrorist attacks.
Bruce Schneier nailed it in 2007: https://www.schneier.com/essay-174.html. None of the 'foiled plots' were ever a real threat until the FBI showed up. People could argue these people should be in jail anyway but they are hardly worth the skill and resources of the most advanced investigators in the country.
By a former New York prosecutor.
Entrapment requires:
(1) a causal relationship between police action and the accused's commission of a crime, and
(2) the police overcoming some demonstrable resistance to the commission of that crime, or the accused otherwise demonstrating that the police somehow corrupted them into committing a crime they would not have been predisposed to commit otherwise.
The "entrapment myths" in the comic:
1. That the police have to tell you that they're cops, or are somehow not allowed to deceive you into committing a crime. (No).
2. That the police cannot ask you to commit a crime. (No).
3. That the police cannot break the law themselves to get themselves into a position to see you commit a crime. (No).
4. That the police cannot help you commit a crime. (No).
5. That the police cannot allow you to commit a crime or somehow give you the impression that your actions are lawful and then arrest you. (No).
The law expects you to actively resist an entreaty from anyone --- undercover cop, uniformed cop, friend, family member --- to knowingly break the law.
The example the comic gives of an unreasonable effort to break through resistance: appealing to a friend to aid in the commission of a crime because your life depends on it, putting the accused in a position where a reasonable ordinary person might choose to participate in the crime as the lesser of two evils. That's entrapment.
Furthermore, as I understand it, and this may be state-by-state, but entrapment is doubly difficult to employ in a defense because it's an affirmative defense: to raise "entrapment", you must first acknowledge that you committed the crime in all its particulars, and then claim that your excuse was that you were entrapped.
Plus there are a ton of dumb people and nearly everything is a crime these days, so all you have to do his handout a crime on a platter and fill prisons with the incompetent criminals who take the bait.
Why hunt down criminals when you can fish for dumb ones.
Meanwhile, it is extraordinarily difficult to catch people in the act of committing computer crimes; the most effective investigative approach to enforcing computer crime laws probably is to find people who are predisposed to commit them, stage an opportunity to commit a specific instance of it, and then apprehend them. So, yes, computer crime enforcement does have a "fishing for dumb people" element to it.
What would be really interesting in a thread like this is, after pointing out how US criminal law makes it hard to raise an entrapment defense, providing specific examples of how some other country's criminal law handles the same circumstances.
(I edited the comment you responded to, to add the "what's it like in other countries" question, after you wrote your response).
But either way, there are obvious risks in this type of law enforcement. The vast, vast majority of humans are capable of committing crimes. This is why thought-crimes are so dangerous when they start being enforced because everyone is guilty. People flirt with the idea of crime but that capability is rarely utilized. The line one has to cross to commit a crime is high for most people, but there is a significant portion of the population where it is much smaller (poor people or people with lesser intelligence).
LE is overly consumed with making their careers on the back of latter portion of the population to the point where they covertly push them hard to commit crimes. While the intelligent criminals conducting sophisticated plots usually get away with it because noone wants to do the legwork involved.
(deleted my other comment which was not-HN quality).
In the US, if I pick up your property and walk away, I need to have an intent to permanently deprive you of it for it to be theft. (Obviously state law has particulars here.)
Strict liability -- where it's illegal for me to do X no matter what I was thinking -- is the exception. It's a growing exception, and that is unfortunate, but that speaks to the opposite of your narrative.
The fact that the prosecution has to show state of mind, rather than that some serious of actions happened, is a good thing, not a bad thing.
EDIT I changed the example in the second graf away from talking about car theft to avoid weird exceptions
One example was an IRA arms dealer caught bang to rights actually at the buying point he got off on a tiny technicality - whereas the amount of stuff that the FBI where allowed to do was interesting and slightly disturbing.
It might have been on PBS or BBC America at some point
... Yeah
Edit: Down votes - with no comments? I'm pretty sure the other responses actually agree with my claim.
What is the problem here, cowards?
As it is, the fact that we're having this "conversation" at all mostly shows HN is declining in quality. I seldom complain about downvotes but when there's no comments and no obvious justification, it seems reasonably warranted.
Anyone else having this issue? I am no expert in with gpg so it could be on my end.
everyone knows he's an actor for the state anyway, but a quick temperance change online would be a pretty big red flag for many.
That's the point. The idea is that one should 'fall on the grenade' to protect his criminal comrades. When he instead throws them to the wolves to save himself, people get up-in-arms about it.
Though it's not all that surprising. It's sort of like whole 'honor among thieves' ideal. When you throw in with a bunch of people that are willing to 'colour outside the lines,' sometimes the lines that they cross will not just be the lines drawn in the sand by the law, but the lines that you yourself draw in the sand.
I guess I'm missing some context. Whose idea was the first sentence?
@codesuela called him a "snitch," which has a negative connotation (e.g. phrases like "snitches get stitches"[1][2]).
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snitches+get+...!
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Snitchin%27
Well, there's a reason why it's called "defection" in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Failing that, there's the people in a certain country whom Greenwald himself claimed would be put directly at risk if that country name were to be revealed. But WikiLeaks leaked it anyways.... which is directly attributable to Snowden.
But that's the beautiful things about things like what he does. It's like coal polluting the air... we know it kills people in the abstract, but you can't point to a slouched-over body directly attributable to any given lump of coal.
Sabu was caught and played ball, Snowden acted on moral grounds. Russia is simply the only nation willing to anger the US and deter "payback", hence his only choice.
2) In this scenario, the American People would be the FBI, and the criminal conspirators would be the NSA and Snowden is Sabu. I can think of very few more noble activities than exposing the fraud of a working government to the very people who have a chance at changing it via the power of a democratic society.
It's ridiculous to even compare the scenarios, as the motives between the two are so different, and I hope anyone can see that. Look at the audiences at least. Sabu has gained personally from every single decision he has made; whether it was for his own agenda or for the FBI's after he was caught. What has Snowden achieved for himself?
The culture comes from the consequences. People would be substantially more willing to inform the police of criminal activity if the penalty for e.g. drug possession was mandatory rehab and probation, or the penalty for modest computer crimes was community service, rather than felony charges and prison time. Nobody wants to send their friends to prison. So instead of the slap on the wrist they deserve, they either get no punishment at all and carry on committing crimes or they get caught by the police and forfeit their lives to the prison system.
I think authoritarian-types consider snitching "adolescent" because they have lost all sense of idealism and justice that they once might have had as a youth. The only way to change society with that type of mindset is for millions of dollars to be spent on lobbying by corporations or benevolent millionaires.
Re: the FBI. Their job is to maintain law and order. The burden of this is that even though 99% of the time you'll be fighting malevolent destabilization, you're likely to be in the wrong side of history that 1% of the time, and history will pillory you for it. That's OK and it's inevitable. It's intrinsic to the social function of such organizations. Because for every MLK there are a hundred David Koresh's.
Is there no duty from a promise of secrecy? Is morality tied to certain organizations?
What if the motivation isn't atonement but self-interest?
Becoming an informant against Anonymous might be admirable if the informant did so because their conscience required it, and the informant undertook risks in doing so; the act of conscience and cost of that action would outweigh the betrayal of friends and peers. So, for instance, someone who had participated in a group who planned to bomb abortion clinics might be admirable if they had a change of heart about killing innocent people and risked their life to break up the plot.
It does not seem like either of those two factors are at play in Monsegur's case.
There is, of course, a difference between finding Monsegur admirable and determining for oneself that the prosecution was or wasn't in the public interest.
This one seems like a very obvious benefit for the FBI. The government wants it well known that "look, if you really cooperate we'll totally definitely let you go later." Of course, all the cases where the defendant cooperated and still went to jail don't make the media.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2532759#up_2532885 [3] There are others, too lazy to list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Birkenfeld
Pg even notes this outright in his essay:
> Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.