Comments from Chile
To the security community focused on helping social strugglers all over the world.
First, thanks for all your efforts on building tools for human and social liberation, this is a feedback from Chile written as suggestion from some of you and we hope you enjoy. Several parts from this material wasn’t taken in a legal way, I’m not going to offer any proofs about this as that can means tracking the people who helped to get this information, making them face jail charges and torture on interrogations. If you want to check if this statements are true, check the provided links and ask about this to people in Chile.
Note: Even if we know your work is mostly focused on the middle east, several tools you have made had helped on simple daily stuff like privacy. We are not facing the same conditions or circunstances as some comrades in the middle east are. We are trying to created a new world away from capitalism values and with the total erradication of heriarchy. We assume an offensive step for this in everywhere, and you can judge as much as you
want for this.
On August 14th of 2010 several squats were raided. 14 comrades were put in prison for being anarchists and squatters, but facing charges of terrorism association. The police had been investigating for 4 years a series of bomb explosions in Santiago, and decided that those 14 comrades were responsibles for that. When I said decided it’s because several proofs were lies, some whitness were paid, but we only knew this in 2012, when the 14 were set free without charges. The man in charge of this operation is now a high ranking person in government, as a price for what he did, but the State didn’t think every “proof” they had were going to fall after the truth about them were found.
That was the context.
Some people (can be one, can be two, can be three, should be infinite) decided to check the facts of this. They got a copy of several investigation books and a list of more than 200 people being investigated. That list was published on Hommodolars website on May 2011
http://www.hommodolars.org/web/spip.php?article4031
The list included several anarchists, native people supporters and media activists as people suspected for the explosions. All this people had their phones tapped for years, without any resistance from a telephone company, but all of them with a justice call. None of the phones were tapped in illegal way for Chilean law, but the privacy of this 200 people was breached and none of them related to the explosions.
The investigation books had inside several interesting stuff about the local police behavour, but for you this in what you need to know:
First ship of books (to 2010):
– There were pretty close photographs of every investigated person. The books had more than 200 suspects.
– There were transcripts of several phone conversations, also hotmail’s messenger chat.
– There were screenshots taken from hotmail.com accounts from files obtained using Forensic Toolkit software, the bottom line of the files reveals those were temporary files. At least one person got this.
– There were screenshots taken from hacked passwords from gmail.com accounts. At least 4 people got this.
– There were several supperficial analysis of webservices and webpages: flickr.com, blogspot.com, entodaspartes.org, santiago.indymedia.org, valparaiso.indymedia.org, nodo50.org wordpress.com, indymedia.org, riseup.net. The data included physical location to html tags used, related names, and that kind of stuff.
– There were examples of transcribed chats using OTR, and mails using PGP in ascii. They were not cracked.
As the case was going to nowhere, the investigation continued. There are more than 400 persons in the investigation list. This is what was found.
Current ship of books (to 2012):
What is inside:
– At least 4 crypto.cat chats were intercepted and transcribed. (Feb 2012)
– More than 20 gmail.com accounts accessed. (2010-2012)
– Several facebook.com account accesed, but most of the data transcribed. (2010-2012)
– Several complaints against OTR and PGP on internal memos. They asked for help to FBI to break them, no more data about this.
– Deeper investigation of websites, including visits by police to some people who work on alternative media projects. There is a strong analysis for riseup.net… from software used, location, email contacts, source code and groups that use them.
What is not inside:
– No mentions for tor, i2p or freenet.
– No mentions for riseup.net hacked accounts.
– No mentions how they got that data.
But we can always ask the affected ones. The most interesting here for you is how they got access to crypto.cat chatlogs. That chats were taken from 7pm to 11pm on 4 different days. We don’t know how they got them but we
reducted the possibilities to two scenarios.
The first one that a chilean computer got infected by some spyware, as they got confiscated (the raids continued until now, not yet to somebody related to the bombs case) we can no be sure about this.
The second one is one that happened to a friendly italian project to chileans named Inventati in 2005. Chilean and Italian police are working together on this and several cases, so that’s a possibility, also we know that this web service is hosted in the US and the FBI is currently helping Chile on investigation of activists and media projects online. That case is documented here
http://www.inventati.org/ai/crackdown/
One of the clients of this chatlogs was an ubuntu 11.10, no issues on accepting a weird cert or notifications. The main browser was mozilla firefox, not using tor. The transcribed chat was recognized and didn’t had any important information but organizing some activity to get funds for supporting political prisoners. This computer was part of only one of the chats.
The other interesting stuff is, that even is very popular in activists circles (more than pgp, probably the same as otr), TOR is not mentioned at all. We don’t know what this means, probably is just too new technology for here, but it noticeable.
But I was not asked to write this just to let you know what’s wrong with gmail, hotmail and facebook, what’s failing with crypto.cat and why is your work important for people in the south fighting for social justice. Yes, we can face defeats, but it really demoralizing to see 30 police officers breaking your home and exposing all your life just because your political and life position … all broadcasted by television. None of them was related to the bombs, none of us is related to the bombs, that’s just an excuse to fuck our lives. We need you to keep working on this, and educate people everywhere. Our dictatorship ended in 1990, but before that the only way to survive as resistence was to share knowledge and practices, we need to keep that today.
Thanks for your efforts, and sorry for my english.
ps. I attached a official request of info from Chile to microsoft as a old non problematic (for any of us) proof.
This account will be dropped after this email
