A couple of years ago one acquaintance of mine, who works at a company making aviation simulators, bought some flight manual for US fighter jet on Ebay.... And when he travelled to Georgia (near the Black sea one), he was detained and deported to the US and has spent a year in prison there on espionage charges.
He was released after great efforts by many people and is forever banned entry to the US. So I wouldn't touch anything 'secret' and 'military' even with a 2 meter pole.
I think you meant extradited rather than deported, for his transfer from Georgian custody to the US. He was subsequently deported from the US after pleading guilty and being sentenced.
There are legitimate services commonly used to buy stuff from US sellers who don't want to deal with the complicated shipping to Russia and other countries. I doubt he had any intention to obscure his identity – the seller would just not sell to him directly.
It's only legitimate so long as it isn't used to circumvent ITAR. The seller would probably not sell to him directly because exporting flight manuals for military aircraft was paper work the seller didn't want to deal with. By obscuring his identity through a third party the buyer violated ITAR, the seller probably also did as well by not doing proper due diligence.
Is there any suggestion that there was anything to learn from manuals being sold in eBay that wouldn't already be well known? Did the person selling the manuals get prosecuted? Was someone court martialed for releasing them?
Illegitimately obtaining military "secrets" is a crime pretty much everywhere. Would it have been illegal for him to obtain such documents about Georgian military tech in such a way in Georgia? Then the US can ask for him to extradited for obtaining US documents - at least that's how many extradition treaties work.
The story is this, to the extent of my understanding: US citizens are free to sell such manuals within the US. The seller refused to send the manual to Oleg on his russian address, so some american guy on a game forum agreed to buy it and resend it to Russia. And in doing so the US espionage law was broken. Dura lex, etc. Had he just scanned the manual and put it anonymously online, all would be ok, I guess.
The Arms Export Control Act is a US law, and his friend was neither American nor in America. As a non-American myself, I don't like it one bit when I see US law reach into what should be sovereign countries. And then have that dismissed as "there's nothing stopping Georgia from doing a favor for the US", when that favor involves taking away the freedom of one of their citizens. A US citizen getting extradited to Russia as a favor would not be treated so casually.
I think most people are unaware of details of international law and agreements. The down voted sibling poster has a great clarifying example - if you are citizen of country A, living in A, but robbed a bank in B, which has extradition agreement and good relationships with A, do you feel you have some magic get out of jail free card? That the crime doesn't count? That you are immune because your crime was international in nature?
I'm in Canada and resenting Americans is our national past time :-), but still most comments here about evil tendrils of American empire are besides the point. Interpol, extradition, etc are a thing outside of America.
The key difference with the bank robbing example is that that is a crime in both countries A and B, and it didn't take any pressure of country B onto A to make it a crime in A as well.
Do you think/know Georgian law doesn't recognize the concept of secrecy requirements/trade-restrictions around material relating to military equipment?
Very theoretically example. Bank robberies are illegal virtually everywhere. At least that's my assumption.
But in principle you're correct.
If Bob commits a crime in country Ypso and flies home to country Zorg then Zorg will only extradite him if the crime he committed is also a crime in Zorg.
As a more practical example: Switzerland makes a distinction between tax evasion (which is not a crime, but a misdemeanor) and tax fraud, which is a crime. The difference is that when you "forget" to declare income this is tax evasion (to a degree), while if you cook the books that's tax fraud. Most countries don't make this distinction.
Switzerland got a lot of heat for neither providing information, nor extraditing people accused of tax evasion to another country. The reason being that it's not a crime in Switzerland.
Practically, that doesn't really matter much any more due to the whole information exchange on tax issues, which the country is also part of.
There are other reasons for not extraditing a person. For example if such a person is a citizen in a country that doesn't extradite its citizens then any extradition request from another country will be denied.
I don't understand where this bizarre notion comes from that if you commit a crime while not physically being in the country and not being that country's citizen, this somehow nullifies the crime and means you shouldn't be extradited.
People often have irrational emotions about teh evil Amerika, so forget them. Say you're an Argentinian in Argentina and commit a ransomware attack against an Irish bank, but somehow give yourself away. Do you not expect trouble upon landing in a country with which they have an extradition treaty, merely because your crime was committed from Buenos Aires?
> I don't understand where this bizarre notion comes from that if you commit a crime while not physically being in the country and not being that country's citizen, this somehow nullifies the crime and means you shouldn't be extradited
Well when it concerns their own citizens, this bizarre notion comes at least from the USA who even threaten judges working at the International Court of Justice, and their families... So maybe sometimes the emotions about "evil" USA are not completely irrational.
> I don't understand where this bizarre notion comes from that if you commit a crime while not physically being in the country and not being that country's citizen, this somehow nullifies the crime and means you shouldn't be extradited.
Should we extradite Americans living in America to China if they mock Xi or dishonor Chinese heroes?
Every nation decides which charges are included in the extradition treaties, and which aren't. So no, we should not.
However, in this scenario, depending on your importance/visibility, you should absolutely read up on extradition treaties when visiting China-friendly nations.
Any American who visibly supported the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests should definitely think twice about ever visiting China and (again depending on visibility/importance) any friendly nations with extradition treaties and the numerous countries around the world without rule of law.
First to correct some factual errors. The importer was a Russian citizen, who happened to be visiting Georgia. His conspirator was an American citizen living in Texas, that being a critical element to him being able to purchase the manuals and forward them to Russia.
Furthermore, it wasn’t that long ago when Russia invaded Georgia and essentially annexed portions of its territory. It’s clearly in their national interest to cooperate with laws that seek to prevent technology transfers to Russia.
However, if you defraud a little old lady living in England of her money over the internet, you may very well be extradited to the UK despite being from the US. Would that be the UK riding rough shot over US sovereignty?
The American legal system (for all its faults) is independent and has strong safe guards for the rights of defendants. The Russian legal system is not independent and routinely uses as a tool to suppress descent and prevent potential challengers from standing for election as observed in the many cases against Navalny.
So what happened to the Texan guy? Was this the outcome of some legal construction shifting all blame to the absentee, a legal construction that was entirely well-meant because on paper they'd have treat him like some cold war area spy but didn't find that appropriate wrt the documents in question? With nobody expecting that construction to affect the absentee like it eventually did?
Imagine some US citizen had bought "can't leave the country" documents about some British military things via a London middle-man (very hypothetical because I'd assume secrecy to work very differently in the UK). Would one expect the UK to skip that middle-man wrt consequences?
>The Texas man was indicted along with Tishchenko, but District Judge Dale Kimball in 2017 signed an 18-month deferral-of-prosecution agreement. Then, on Wednesday, all charges against the Texan were dismissed.
> However, if you defraud a little old lady living in England of her money over the internet, you may very well be extradited to the UK despite being from the US.
You reckon? It's only crimes that happen on the USA's side of the road that don't count?
>> I don't like it one bit when I see US law reach into what should be sovereign countries.
The US govt also does not like it when people attempt to use US arms to kill US people, military or civilian.
So, yes, your nationality or location are irrelevant. If you are actively exporting US military goods or information without a license, you should expect that the US will do whatever it can, including asking favors of other nations, to find and imprison you.
In Other Words - do not f'n do that - or get a proper license and do it right (or make sure your smuggling is sufficiently profitable and you are sufficiently clever that you can live the rest of your live always positioned out of their reach - good luck).
It is not that hard to avoid shipping US Arms information & goods without a license.
Also it’s not because there aren’t extradition treaties that one cannot be deported. A country can always ask for a one time favour, and the US usually gets most head of state’s attention.
I used "secrets" with the quotes as stand-in for "documents restricted in some way" since I didn't know the details, reading other comments I guess you should insert "export-controlled information" instead, I don't think it changes the point of the comment much. Plenty places have that concept, so plenty places will extradite over it.
AUTOVON brings back memories from the mid 1960s. I was on a US Navy Oiler which was getting some maintanance from the shipyard in Subic Bay, PI. The shipyard officer we were assigned hosted a small party at his home and learning that I had been frustrated in not been able to complete a phone call to my wife in California imitated a call for me from his phone. Amazingly the call went through almost instantly and as I heard my wife answer an operator said more or less: "Sir, are you aware that this priority is used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ... . Sir what is your name, rank, and position?" Operating under the conceit that I may be stupid but not that stupid I quickly hung up.
The handset was a 'regular' one, not the one illustrated.
And a reminder of how unsecure and unencrypted these communications channels were. That operator not only could listen in, but was certainly instructed to listen in on all such priority calls in order to police them. No encryption. No channel hopping. Anyone with a handset and a pair of alligator clips could have literally clipped into the line at any point. Anyone in the know would also be able to monitor a trunk line looking for that priority signal. So it would probably have been more secure to hide amongst the masses by not pushing the priority buttons.
Here's the earlier system mentioned, MF, shown in an operator training film.[1]
Two vertical rows of five numeric keys, plus the KP and START keys. Those tones were used within the long distance system, not out to customers.
The phone system started out entirely manual and slowly migrated to fully automatic over decades. Switching was automated before billing and routing. What you see in that video is an operator who is placing a long distance call for a customer. When this film was made, around 1949, local calls were mostly automatic dial, but long distance was only semi-automatic. The operator is doing the routing and billing. They have to find an idle outgoing trunk on their board to the next toll office along the route. Then they can use the keyboard to remote control that toll switch to connect them another step forward. When they get to the desired end office, which connects to customer lines, they can punch in the number of the final destination phone and complete the call. Lots of things can go wrong; hence all the different blinking light signals.
All this was gradually automated, before computers, using relays and special purpose hardware.
As to what the FO button does, it cuts off whatever call the number you were dialing is on and connects your call instead. So you had better be sure your call is is important enough to potentially cut off a General Officer.
At least that's how it was explained to me back in 2003. Never had occasion to use the priority modes.
It's more that on systems with a circuit switched network there are typically fewer outgoing/incoming lines at a location then there were telephones, so you can get in a situation where a choke point in circuits can mean that you can't make a call because they're all busy. FO will force hang up other calls to make sure yours can go through. That's very likely to hang up other, unrelated calls in order to get through, rather than the person you're calling (it will hang up their call too if they're currently on a call though).
In the late 90s I was with a group of people and we were trying to make a call. The line was busy, had been for an hour. We assumed it was the teenage daughter on the phone. One in the group took the phone, dialed a lot of numbers, then asked for the number we were trying to call. He punched it in and handed the phone back. The call went through and the confused teenage daughter answered - confessed because her call was interrupted. Everyone in the room was amazed and he went back to reading as if nothing happened.
I don't know what went on, but I can only imagine it was related to FO. My thought was he punched in to somewhere that would let him use a non normal button by way of numeric entry and connected the call - but I don't have a clue.
yes, it sets your priority for throwing others off of interswitch trunks and keeps others from throwing you off, as i understand.
traditional phone network would give a fast busy or an "all circuits are busy" message if all lines between two switches are busy. the special buttons let you assign priority for your use of those lines. F0 is just max priority.
...and now imagine how likely "all circuits are busy" would be in a network were half of the infrastructure was freshly nuked. A dedicated button for "give me a line, I'm the president!" doesn't seem that far fetched anymore. Who knows, if they spend enough time pondering communications availability in such dire circumstances someone might invent an internet!
Modern phones could do with an "FO" button for an entirely different purpose. Don't like the current call... hit the FO button... let them know. In particular a disturbing practice I noticed in Australia. The bank calls, I pick up and a recording: "this is XYZ bank, please hold an operator will be with you shortly". A golden opportunity for an FO button. It could work like an email spam button Enough FO's and the number gets auto blocked.
It already exists on many telephone service providers in some countries. It doesn't have a specific button, and it isn't standardized across providers. But on one provider in the United Kingdom, for example, it is 14258 then star twice to blacklist the number that last called. (On another provider, just to show the variation, it is 1572 then 1.)
The downside of a single button would be that even with the existing systems it is all too easy to accidentally blacklist the wrong people. I know someone who was accidentally blacklisted by one of xyr elderly friends. It caused all sorts of interesting fallout until the two of them had the opportunity to speak in person.
One can imagine what a single button could do in the hands of small children. And, indeed, we have known for a couple of decades what anti-spam buttons can do in the hands of people who (say) decide to "junk" every mail message after reading it.
For Australia, see rather the Do Not Call Register, which is the better option as these blacklisting systems are usually restricted to a couple of handfuls of numbers.
<shameless plug> I love this stuff. So much so that I spent years researching and writing a book about it: "Exploding the Phone", a history of phone phreaking and the telephone systems the phreaks hacked on, from 1950-1980. http://explodingthephone.com/ </shameless plug>
Regarding MF being an informal or loose standard, it was described in detail in the the 1955 AT&T publication "Notes on Nationwide Dialing" (http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nond1955.pdf, pdf page 95) and the 11956 AT&T subsequent technical publication "Notes on Distance Dialing" (http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nodd1956.pdf, starting pdf page 82) and then in subsequent editions of "Notes on Distance Dialing" (1968, 1975) and then in "Notes on the Network" 1980. It was also specified in several international standards (CCITT, now ITU). For those interested in this kind of stuff, this page will be of interest: http://explodingthephone.com/docs.php
It's also interesting that the precedence concept was in the original IP header RFC 791. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc791#page-12 Probably a good thing it was dropped along the way or I can only imagine what Comcast would have done with that.
> Probably a good thing it was dropped along the way or I can only imagine what Comcast would have done with that.
You think you're joking.
ToS morphed into DSCP [1], which is sometimes used in residential networks to prioritize VoIP. (I can't speak to business or industrial networks; presumably it finds use there as well.) WLAN networks can be configured to heed this priority, more aggressively grabbing airtime for high-priority packets. I configure my home network that way.
DSCP does not generally cross the home network<->Internet boundary, but there is one major exception I know of: Comcast. They tag all non-CATV traffic as the lowest priority (DSCP 8), resulting in terrible performance of any home network configured to heed DSCP values. (You can avoid this by stripping DSCP values from inbound packets.)
Hah, I wish I'd remembered that when I wrote this post. There's a whole story about IP having borrowed concepts from AUTODIN and AUTOVON as well as computer precedents like NCP. Of course the idea that DoD would move their networks over to IP was actually surprisingly unsuccessful and to this day a lot of the originally envisioned concepts like multilevel security on IP networks are no closer to happening.
In parallel, most modern military/IC telephone systems are commodity Cisco with specialty features added somewhat awkwardly. Not nearly as exciting as it once was.
The precedence system is added to some VoIP networks as a line appearance feature although I suspect that's just being implemented by adding the prefixes to the dial plan, so it's the same as most of the other post-DTMF networks. You could do the same on your own system if you wanted, most IP PBXs support the actual underlying trunk preemption features but they just aren't typically configured to be accessible to users (more for things like allowing trunk preemption for emergency calls).
The bigger issue is TEMPEST and other COMSEC concerns, which lead the government to pay companies like CIS to perform an authorized aftermarket modification of off-the-shelf IP phones.
A major issue is that NSA guidance requires that all telephone instruments in a secure area have a feature usually called "on hook protection" or "on hook security," where the phone physically being on the hook switch electromechanically ensures that microphones are disabled. This was easy with many earlier phones because they were often physically wired this way (hook switch connected the voice circuit). For modern IP phones this is all software controlled, so for secure variants like those made by CIS some dedicated electronics have been added that disconnect the microphones until the user presses a physical button to enable them. This is outside of software control to prevent a network intrusion being able to use the phone as a listening device. The modification is usually somewhat clunky and you can regularly recognize it in photos from military, white house, etc environments due to the Cisco phone's awkward looking and unusually large rear enclosure (added RF shielding against emissions) and a small red button added via a hole drilled in the faceplate, once again awkwardly.
I bring this up in detail because I find it very interesting that the government has chosen to pay a third party to modify a COTS product in this way when they used to just have the phones custom made. I'm sure it's more cost effective but seems like a surprising failure by e.g. Raytheon, who used to make several secure phones, to win the contract. It's probably also a factor that there are nowadays a surprisingly large number of independent secure telephone systems operated by different agencies, which has diluted the buying power somewhat. The days when it was DoD making central purchasing decisions are gone, these days much of secure telephony is in the intelligence community where despite efforts of the ODNI the level of standardization on secure networks is rather poor. There are some good reasons for this but there's also a lot of plain bureaucratic lockup.
electrospaces.net is the blog of a person interested in secure telephony who knows more about the actual instruments than I do. If you look through the archive he has photos of many current and historic models. I believe I have more information about the cryptographic and switching systems, which I do plan to write about, but there's only so much to know since the details of these things often start out classified and thus end up obscure. The historic military systems are much better documented than the IC systems, mostly because DoD and AT&T produced a lot more documentation on them that gets declassified as they go out of use. The IC likes to use a lot more suite A crypto (classified algorithms) and systems tend to be smaller and have shorter lifespans, which all leads to less stuff preserved for history.
The topic is interesting in general though, and I will probably write a future post about exotic government telephone technology like the STUs with Fortezza cards and the earlier Crypto Ignition Keys. These are honestly rather smart designs that never really made it to private industry.
Secret? Okay, maybe not common knowledge vs. the # of people that use "normal" touch tone telephones (or used now, now that hardly anyone does!). But A/B/C/D are not a secret by any stretch. This stuff has been well documented for a few decades.
Back in the 90s when I first learned about this, and had a modem that would dial these additional digits just fine, I used to see how various PSTN LECs would handle them. Mostly ignored, but some results were interesting.
Also, back then I was living in the Greater Houston (Texas) area, and had to have a "metro" phone line to be able to get local calling to various NXXs outside of the core Houston (some even still came with a toll charge!). Often when dialing between these zones, the in-band MF tones used by the switching systems were audible to the caller.
A lot of this stuff really interested me, and I really got into phreaking and such as a teenager. See also red box, blue box, and all the other colors.
Anyone else remember their local phone company charging than extra $10/month for the privilege of using DF? This is why my family stuck to pulse dialing for a long time.
After 9/11 the company I worked for then (a quasi-government non-profit company) ramped up their security and disaster planning a bit. The whole department I was in had to get national security clearances, and they also issued cards for the GETS system. On 9/11 I remember it was very hard to get any call through.
Some of the largest and most hardened at&t long lines sites around the 48 states, most of which are still in existent, carried AUTOVON traffic. Some of them are literally massive concrete bunkers built on top of mountains, with roads bulldozed to the top, that if you tried to duplicate today would probably cost $75 million per site.
Significantly less useful in an era when inter city phone and data traffic goes by fiber optic cable and not 6GHz microwave on horn antennas. Some have found re-use for cellular purposes and vhf/uhf radio repeater, public safety, etc.
Some of the key long lines and AUTOVON sites out there also carried data circuits linking the SAGE network together.
What's secret here? Fourth-row buttons and prioritization on the Autovon (and other systems) is public knowledge. Sounds cool, but nothing to see here.
A few years ago I read a story online which may or may not be true but that went something like this: the poster worked in a call center that would auto dial random numbers to do whatever telemarketers do. One day he got a high level official at a three letter agency who was quite upset at being called because “you shouldn’t have been able to dial this number”. The agency allegedly sent agents to the call center to investigate how that was possible.
For a long time I’ve been wondering exactly what the mechanism of this kind of phone call would have been and I wonder if it was one of these priority keys that was used.
Incidentally, now whenever I get a call from my pal Scam Likely I answer it with “FBI Fraud Prevention Division, this is Brennan” or “911, what’s the location of your emergency?” or “is he dead? I told you not to call me unless he is dead!” I’ve had a bit of good fun with these.
He was released after great efforts by many people and is forever banned entry to the US. So I wouldn't touch anything 'secret' and 'military' even with a 2 meter pole.