The month after my e-mail, I received a seven-page letter from Bell, single-spaced, written on a typewriter, and virtually free of typos. The letter was focused on two points: First, that Bell had been the subject of a fraudulent show trial, and that he wanted me to request that Forbes’s internal counsel help him prove that the Ninth Circuit Court had forged records of an entire appeals case that ruled against him without his knowledge or participation.
Second, Bell wrote that while in the Special Housing Unit, also known as the “hole,” in 2009, he had made a “truly phenomenal discovery in the areas of Chemistry, Physics, and Material Science, of total value well in excess of $100 Billion.” (The underlining is his.)
Although he didn’t remember Assange’s comments on the Cypherpunk Mailing List, he expressed his admiration for WikiLeaks, and wrote that after being released from prison and becoming enormously wealthy in the following six months to one year, he planned to donate somewhere between a hundred thousand and a million dollars to the group.
In later letters he would explain that he had invented a new form of fiber-optic cable that would transmit data 33 percent faster than conventional fiber optics, and planned to obtain five thousand patents after he was released, five times more than Thomas Edison. “It will affect virtually every science, every field of engineering, thousands or even tens of thousands of products,” he wrote. “You will find this hard, even impossible to believe, yet it is quite true.”
Bell was right: I didn’t believe him. But I did approach Forbes’s counsel to ask her assistance in pursuing Bell’s legal case. She read Bell’s letter, then checked his legal file, which showed that he had fired practically every court-appointed lawyer ever assigned to him—little wonder that he had botched his appeals. It also showed he had filed fifty-one lawsuits against the government while in prison—nearly all dismissed immediately. She wanted nothing to do with it.
I wrote back to Bell apologizing that I couldn’t offer legal help, and asking whether he still planned to pursue “Assassination Politics” when he was released.
He mailed back an even longer letter, mostly chastising me for failing to help him expose the government’s fraud and accusing me of being in the pocket of the authorities. “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” he wrote. “You need to tell your editorial counsel that I have given you a very specific example of a crime the government committed against me. . . . If he isn’t fully behind assisting you in exposing this crime, then he must be part of the problem.”
And then he wrote about “Assassination Politics.”
Unfortunately, you reveal a little of your biases by saying, “Do you still hope/plan . . .” Implying I did so, etc. Nope! At the time I wrote AP, I presumed that I wouldn’t be the one to implement it, and that is, indeed, WHY I publicized the idea with my own name.
Bell went on to write, however, that he would soon be a “hero of scientific and technological progress,” and that his “inventions and technologies will usher in a boom unlike the world has ever seen. I’ve already probably solved the ‘energy crisis’ a dozen times over.” As the world realized the brilliance of his inventions, “thousands of people” would reassess his ideas, including “Assassination Politics.” If no one else were to implement the contract killer system, it would be easy enough for him to do it himself, he wrote.
It would be as simple as directing a work-group, or (more likely) forming a new division in my set of corporations. The AP system is sufficiently similar to [the] insurance or gambling industry, and a dozen lawyers or two will ensure that it stays within the laws of the region it is sited at.
. . . [T]he government (and those employed by it) should defend their continued existence (life) in the face of what they have done to America’s finances.
Interesting benchmark: The French Revolution in [1794] resulted in the guillotining of about 19,000 persons, of a total population in France of 25 million people. Adjusted for a population of America of about 300 million, that would be about 230,000 persons. Do you really believe that those in the [U.S. government] would have run up that $14 trillion debt (actually a lot more, depending on the kind of analysis) if they knew that at some point in the near future, 230,000 of their kind would be killed?
As this book went to press, Jim Bell was scheduled for release from prison on March 12, 2012.
CHAPTER 4
THE ONION ROUTERS
Jacob Appelbaum drops a black, hard plastic container the size of a small suitcase on the conference table in a sterile-chic conference room in MIT’s Media Lab, a six-story structure of sleek white walls and glass that resembles a giant iPod. Twenty or so motley hackers sitting around the table and lounging in the corners of the room suddenly look up from their laptops. Appelbaum cracks the box open to show off a large chunk of white, ruggedized hardware encased in foam. The group admires it in hushed tones, slowly drawing closer.
The twenty-seven-year-old stands in the center of the room, six feet tall, with neatly parted black hair, Italian glasses, and tattoos that run up his left arm. His T-shirt is a baseball jersey with the word KINSEY written across the back and the number three, a reference to his position on the Kinsey Institute’s sexual persuasion scale. (Zero indicates heterosexual, six homosexual.) “This,” he says, chewing a piece of raspberry chocolate with studied nonchalance, “is what I’ve been working on.”
Until that moment in the Tor Hackfest, things had been getting dangerously technical. Tor is one of the world’s most widely used and perhaps most secure anonymity programs. And Nick Mathewson, Tor’s grinning, round-faced, ponytailed chief architect and codirector, had kicked off the day by dropping the room into the deep end of the cryptographic swimming pool. The geekery had gotten so thick that even some of Tor’s modern-day cypherpunks and volunteer coders, loath as they might have been to admit it, might just have gotten lost. Within minutes, Mathewson, wearing a sport jacket over a Tor T-shirt over a dwarfish potbelly, was delving into security issues like “epistemic attacks” and “Byzantine fault tolerances.” By the time he sat down, still grinning, a growing fraction of the room seemed baffled or possibly bored.
Appelbaum’s presence, on the other hand, is as much guerrilla as geek. He’s Tor’s field researcher, unofficial revolutionary, and man on the ground in countries from Qatar to Brazil. And he knows the appeal of a sexy piece of hardware. After instantly acquiring the room’s attention, Appelbaum explains that the device his small audience is ogling is a satellite modem, one that he’s just rented with the aim of figuring out how to make Tor accessible to those in the Middle East who need to use satellite connections to access the Internet.
The project is not theoretical. For the prior three weeks, an entire civilization has been turning itself upside down. The wave of revolts that overthrew the government of Tunisia and ousted President Hosni Mubarak from Egypt has just spilled into massive protests in Morocco, Libya, and Bahrain. And while the rest of the world has been lauding the power of Twitter and Facebook to organize and catalyze those movements, the digerati in this room know that the protesters’ connection to the Internet has a more sinister side. Unless they use anonymity tools like Tor, every dissident who plugs into those online services can have his or her information perpetually monitored by governments that don’t hesitate to knock down doors and haul away political enemies on a whim. Hence Appelbaum’s latest science experiment: He aims to shield the identities of dissidents and journalists who use satellite connections to get online even when the government has locked down, throttled, and surveilled their bandwidth.
But there’s a problem, Appelbaum says. Tor hides a user’s IP address, but a satellite modem’s communication protocols reveal its location to the satellite provider. “Even if you use Tor, someone can still find all the users in a given country,” Appelbaum cautions. “That means you need to connect to the network and then drive fifty kilometers, or you get the cruise missile.”
> “If you need GPS spoofing, my people in Zurich can help with that,” offers one clean-cut researcher with expertise in hacking pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators.
“OK,” Appelbaum says in an unimpressed tone that implies spoofing GPS is about as difficult as microwaving a burrito.
The gaggle of hackers pepper him with questions about the modem’s specs and the company he rented it from. “I gave them your information, Mike,” he says, turning to another Tor programmer with a mock-sheepish smile. “Sorry.”
No one needs to ask why Appelbaum wouldn’t hand out his own personal data. Even among Tor’s security-conscious crowd, Appelbaum is an exemplar of privacy paranoia in its purest form. And lately, for good reason. Because aside from his day job as a programmer and evangelist for Tor, Appelbaum moonlights as a freelance Internet freedom fighter, one that many governments, including America’s, might like to see disappear.
Just the night before the MIT gathering, for instance, the young hacker was probing the digital infrastructure of Libya, where the military was busy firing live ammunition at defenseless crowds that included women and children. Muammar Qaddafi’s dictatorship had shut down most of the Internet, leaving only its military and government connections online. So Appelbaum used a tool he created called BlockFinder to list which branches of the country’s networks remained online and broadcast their IP addresses to any and all hacker allies. “Systems that are online in Libya are probably worth scanning; those are the systems required or used by the current government oppressors,” he wrote on Twitter. He suggested digging into one connection in Palermo, Italy, that connected North Africa with the Internet at large, what he identified as “the Arab dictator’s favorite uplink.”
“Now is the time for all good black hats to come to the aid of humanity,” he added, throwing in a riff off a line from the film Full Metal Jacket: “I wanted to visit exotic Libya . . . I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture . . . and own them.”
“Black hats,” of course, are hackers who engage in usually illegal tactics of intrusive or destructive hacking. And to “own” a target is hacker jargon for penetrating or taking control of its systems. As in a message Appelbaum had posted just a few hours earlier: “Shooting unarmed protesters in the head? Bahrain’s government has demonstrated that they are over the line. It’s ethical to own them.”
During the protests in Egypt a few weeks earlier, Appelbaum had put out another call for help in tracking down President Hosni Mubarak to prevent him from fleeing the country in the midst of the revolution there. “I’m looking for Mubarak or his handlers’ cell phone numbers—if you’ve got them, I’ll track them,” he wrote.
“Mubarak is trying really hard to not end up like Nicolae Ceausescu,” he added, referencing the Romanian dictator who was executed by a firing squad after a two-hour trial during the country’s 1989 revolution. “Good luck with that, you son of a bitch!”
Appelbaum later explains to me that a technique known as an HLR query can approximate a user’s location on a carrier’s network. Did he ever successfully use that trick to pin down Mubarak’s location? The young hacker smiles and changes the subject.
But organizing penetrations of Libyan Internet infrastructure and tracking dictators’ cell phones, as legally questionable as those feats may be, aren’t the most pressing reason for the young hacktivist’s privacy obsession. Appelbaum has ties to WikiLeaks. Not simply as a nameless volunteer, but as one of its most die-hard supporters and its most prominent American face. In late 2010, Julian Assange told Rolling Stone that “Tor’s importance to WikiLeaks cannot be understated” and that “Jake has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes of our cause.” In late 2010, when Assange seemed to be on the brink of long-term jail awaiting questioning for alleged sex crimes, one WikiLeaks staffer told me he hoped Appelbaum might even be the favored successor to Assange in WikiLeaks’ hierarchy.
None of which is news to the U.S. government. Several months earlier, Twitter revealed that the company had been directed by the Department of Justice to hand over Appelbaum’s data, along with that of two others associated with Julian Assange’s secret-spilling group, likely part of a larger dragnet to build a conspiracy charge against WikiLeaks staffers. Since then, the threat of an indictment that could put Appelbaum in prison for a significant portion of the rest of his life has been hanging just a few inches above his neck.
Even here at the MIT Hackfest, that threat makes its presence felt rather awkwardly when, as Appelbaum tells it, he runs into a State Department official later in the day, a clean-shaven man dressed in a gray fleece. Appelbaum greets him politely. “You probably want to shoot me in the head,” he says with a wary grin.
“We have other people who do that,” the official says, also smiling.
Neither of them seems quite sure whether this is a joke.
At least twice now in the evolution of leaking, it was the U.S. government, specifically the U.S. military, and even more specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, that built the machine that would ultimately hemorrhage the government’s secrets.
DARPA, after all, created the prototype for the Internet, that massive secret-siphoning neural network. And along with the State Department and the Naval Research Laboratory, DARPA would also build and fund Tor, the tool that WikiLeaks would use to effect the largest-ever public data breaches against the military and the State Department, exactly the institutions that created it.
Stranger yet is that even after Tor was allegedly used by Bradley Manning and potentially many others to anonymously leak massive troves of highly secret U.S. government documents, government agencies haven’t withdrawn their support for the tool any more than they’ve withdrawn from the Internet. Because just as government agents can’t survive without the Internet’s information-sharing powers, they also sometimes need the ability to be completely anonymous online. Not simply private, but strongly, cryptographically anonymous.
Tor offers that cryptographic anonymity to its users with the same principles as David Chaum’s Mix Network, but stripped down and built to function at Web speed. Like a Mix, the software doesn’t necessarily prevent anyone from seeing what a Web user is writing or reading. Instead, it’s designed to prevent anyone from knowing who is doing the writing or the reading. That’s because if a CIA informant in Iran is visiting the agency’s website to drop a tip, the government spying on the informant’s connection doesn’t need to know what information he’s passing on: Even if the data he shares is encrypted, just the knowledge that he was talking to American spooks is likely to earn him a knock on the door from the country’s secret police.
The State Department funds Tor to communicate with political dissidents from Iran to Myanmar and to help them access the unfettered Web, a key element in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mission of so-called “Internet Freedom.” The U.S. military uses Tor for open-source intelligence, gleaning foreign policy or military strategy from other countries’ websites without tipping them off to a spook’s presence. Corporations use Tor to facilitate industrial espionage or, in some cases, prevent it. One example offered by Tor’s executive director Andrew Lewman: IBM hosts a copy of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. If someone at Hewlett-Packard wants to browse sensor designs in that database without tipping off its biggest competitor, it had better use a thick cloak of anonymity.
But Tor can also work in reverse: A website implementing a Tor feature called a Hidden Service can mask its location and allow users to find it in the Web’s ether without anyone knowing where the site is physically hosted. To access a Tor Hidden Service, the user has to run Tor, too, so both the visitor’s physical location and that of the site are completely masked. Neither reveals anything other than the information they’re sharing, like two trench-coated men handing off a briefcase in a dark parking structure.
And lik
e any setting where packages are exchanged in the shadows, crime has found its way in too. It’s no secret that Tor is used by child pornographers and black hat hackers. Seconds after installing the program a user can untraceably access sites like Silk Road, an online bazaar for hard drugs and weapons, or one of several sites that claim to offer untraceable contract killings. But Tor is also used by the FBI to infiltrate those lawbreakers’ ranks without being detected, and for cybersecurity researchers to test websites without tipping them off that they’re being patrolled by McAfee or Symantec. “When I’m speaking to a law enforcement crowd and someone complains that Tor is used for crime, I find an agent who uses Tor every day for fighting crime, and I try to get those two to talk to each other,” says Tor’s director, Roger Dingledine.
Technically, Tor faces the same tricky paradox Chaum aimed to solve in 1981: Location equals identity. If someone can locate your computer, they know where you live or work, which is a trivial step from knowing who you are. So Tor needs to accomplish the Internet’s main task—mapping out connections between people so that data can travel to and fro as quickly as possible—without letting anyone in the system know where those two ends lie.
Like its users, Tor operates in a state of functional paranoia. It assumes that its network of messengers is littered with traitorous spies, and no single node can be trusted. So taking a cue from Chaum’s original Mix idea, the data is triple-encrypted. No one node can figure out the entire route. Each node unscrambles one of those three layers, as if each of the series of messengers removes one opaque skin from an onion to find the address of their next contact written on the surface underneath. Hence Tor’s name, an abbreviation for “The Onion Router.”
This Machine Kills Secrets Page 16
