Whomever wrote that headline missed a much more significant, and painfully biting, point:
"Jiang, a former contractor at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, had recently been let go by his employer because of pressure from Republican congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia. Wolf had claimed Jiang and other Chinese engineers employed by NASA contractors were a security risk."
"But it quickly became apparent that Jiang was at worst guilty of violating NASA policies. [...] Jiang had not had clearance to such projects at Langley as an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace"
"A press release issued by Wolf after the arrest and copy of Jiang's arrest warrant have since disappeared off the the congressman's website. In the release (cached by Google here), Wolf had said, 'I am particularly concerned that (the) information (on Jiang's laptop) may pertain to the source code for high-tech imaging technology that Jiang has been working on with NASA. This information could have significant military applications for the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army.'"
Confirmed, the USA has entered back into full McCarthyism. Request title change to 'Chinese contractor fired on suspicion by Republican senator'.
Political pressure from ignorant Republican congressmen not only resulted in Jiang being fired over this non-incident, but something even more serious for science in general: the entire NASA technical-report archive [1], with documents dating back decades, has been forced offline indefinitely [2]. Frank Wolf and his ilk are worried [3] that the Red Chinese might be reading some 1970s document in a way that compromises American national security. Never mind that the Chinese likely have copied a mirror of any documents they find interesting already. So now it's only American researchers who can't access it: there are no complete mirrors of which I'm aware, because U.S. libraries and archives naively assumed that NASA was a reliable long-term host for the documents, meaning there were no serious mirroring efforts. Maybe we can ask China to take pity on us and make a mirror available, since ntrs.nasa.gov being down breaks thousands of references in papers and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, this is also the case for the majority of commercially-published science. And no, JSTOR is not a good response because JSTOR doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of science. Science is one of the most important efforts in human history, and we don't have backups, or even mirrors. Great.
Edit: does anyone know some orgs with deep pockets that would be willing to accept and host 30-50 terabytes of papers? I can't seem to find anyone that doesn't wuss out. I know it's risky, but it's also critically important.
I believe some one already tried something similar, it unfortunately didn't end well[0]. If some one does throw up such a torrent though I'd be glad to help seed.
Had Aaron successfully seeded it a few times (if indeed that was even his intention in the first place), not really much would have changed for him. However I am certain that we would have the entirety of what he seeded.
> However I am certain that we would have the entirety of what he seeded.
You guys are all crazy.. torrents consisting of this type of content already exist, and they have only one seeder. For example, the excellent Library Genesis collection. Why should I believe you when you tell me countless people will come to the rescue this time? Your average seeder doesn't have piles of terabytes, and evidently doesn't care to seed one or two parts out of thousands.
People hoard all sorts of data, if they are made aware of it and want it. I for one certainly would have seeded the dump Aaron made, had he seeded it himself first. And who doesn't have piles of terabytes these days?
What is your objective, give it to people that don't want it, or make it available to people that do? The later is not rocket science, the former impossible and pointless. If you are telling me that nobody is interested in your content then I am not going to argue with you... If people are interested in having your content then the only thing standing in their way is your weird objection to attempting to distribute it.
If I am so wrong, so what? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
> the only thing standing in their way is your weird objection
> to attempting to distribute it.
My point was that people are already trying to host this sort of science content over torrents and it's not working. Nobody seeds it. I gave a very specific example to confirm this observation. I would love to hear about possible alternatives.
libgen has many journals and compilations of papers, how is that not exactly what you're talking about?
Also, if the collection was only 95%, 98%, 99%, or 99.5% complete, would you mirror it? Keep in mind that you would also have to purchase/acquire about $500-$1500 of storage space.
does anyone know some orgs with deep pockets that would be willing to accept and host 30-50 terabytes of papers? I can't seem to find anyone that doesn't wuss out. I know it's risky, but it's also critically important.
It'll be extra funny when we lose the docs because budget cuts cancel the proper storage of backups and then we have to go steal them back from the Chinese.
Reminds me tangentially of this story about a company misplacing petrochemical-plant documentation and having to get copies from ex-employees who weren't supposed to actually have copies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3390719
The fact is that calling the U.S. McCarthyist is a wild exaggeration, but calling China a repressive communist regime is totally accurate. Perspective... do you have any?
If the US and Europe pretend, as we should, to be shining lighthouses for the cause of freedom and democracy, then for the sake of congruence and principle we should hold ourselves to higher standards than more oppressive regimes.
As for the accusation of "wild" exaggeration; granted, it's an exaggeration, and I should probably stop rabble-rousing someday. Still, nationalistic prejudice? Check. Paranoiac delusions of espionage/propaganda? Check. Lack of any reasonable oversight such as, you know, asking NASA by the phone? Check. Harassment of foreign nationals? Check. If anything is lacking, is scale.
My problem is less the high standards for the U.S. and Europe than it is the low standard for China. I'm quite sick of all the China apologists crawling out of the woodwork rationalizing its repressive communist government (mostly because it's a good place to invest right now). China is too developed to play the "poor third world nation" card anymore. It's playing with the big kids now and should be held to the same standards.
If he wanted data transferred to China, why on earth would he bring a complete laptop?
The whole thing is so retarded. If he actually wanted to get data to china, he would have already done so, using the internet. Stopping him on a plane for a suspicion like that is just absurd.
The "at worst guilty of violating NASA policies" is complete nonsense.
Theft of items exceeding $200 in value is a Grand Theft and is a felony in Virginia. This person committed a felony which in Virginia has a minimum one year prison sentence and up to twenty years. He should have been arrested and it is completely absurd that he wasn't. It's bizarre that the author of the article believes that a person can just steal a computer and it's not a crime.
I'd guess the legal difference could be between taking something you have no right to (theft) and keeping hold of something you had a right to but should have given back (he could argue he forgot, or hadn't yet sent it back).
But from a cultural point of view it's obviously completely different. Anyone sane who let an employee go and realised he hadn't given back his laptop would tell them to give it back, not scream for jail team.
The last two sentences of the article imply that it might not have been theft after all:
A charge of lying to the FBI about the laptop has been "resolved," according to the filings. There is no mention of charges regarding theft of government property.
Ouch for the taxpayers who pay for the prison places. According to a freedom of information request in 2008, it costs just over £200 per day per prisoner in the UK. About £60 per day is direct costs and the rest is amortisation of buildings &c.
Made me think... weekend prison like in Scandanavia, alternatives to prison &c
Virginia lawmakers have tried to change the felony threshold to $500, but the law-and-order crowd in the state prefers the older $200 limit which has been there for decades and was more reasonable when originally set up.
Even with a $500 limit though, most likely the cost to NASA of replacing a laptop meets that limit.
Steganography + Porn, that's a really neat idea.. You wouldn't easily get officials to analyze those files together with a forensics team. That scenario is awkward.
An error the official did was making his company a public target, by revealing that they might have sensitive data, without being prepared to an attack. Not so clever move, sorry.
Surely the NSA has hashes of nearly everything on the internet (bloom filters, perhaps?). Finding images that didn't match would be a simple and automated task. There isn't even a need for the person doing the scan to know that it's porn -- from the point of view of the hash database, porn, system files, and ripped DVDs all fall into the category of "seen before, not interesting."
After the forensics team found files that didn't match the DB, they would have a good reason to investigate further and officials / the media wouldn't let nekked bodies stop them from commenting.
Porn would make a poor choice of background media because reverse image search is ubiquitous. Finding the originals would be easy, and showing that the differences between the stego'd images and the originals didn't happen via compression would probably not be too hard either.
If the encryption is good they probably wouldn't get any further than that. Still, any significant quantity of hidden files would generate a large body of evidence that would be very difficult to explain away.
Why go to the trouble of hiding info on the hard drive of a guy who was already under suspicion when a prerecorded skype call or controlled packet latency system would make for a stego medium that was much harder to detect and easier to plausibly deny?
The covert channel discussed in the paper doesn't control network traffic directly but if you were maximizing bandwidth and didn't have to hide from an intrusion detection system you would almost certainly want to do so.
You're correct and personally I would never underestimate the NSA/FBI or any other organization.
Remember Aaron Schwartz.
But there is too much evidence that they might be much less professional and less equipped with such high-quality hash-databases.
I don't believe that they could allocate enough professional resources (in such a "low priority" target) to actually give clearance of the case and green lights to the officers with certainty. If the porn movies are avis and 700mb, but with SD-quality, then you couldn't notice the difference.
Take 20 porn files porn-a.avi (500MB original or 600MB with hidden data) There are so many rips or rips of rips that you cannot have a complete porn-database. And phew 2GB of compressed and hidden Data. Even if he didn't have used Steganography, he could easily use imageshack.us, imgur.com and other file-hosting sites, heck even upload to porn-sites to hide the data. Additionally you could get bad hashes into your database, when they upload the porn movies themself.
How do you figure this is a low priority target? This certainly falls within their mandate and the guy might have been trying to steal legitimately sensitive information!
> Take 20 porn files porn-a.avi (500MB original or 600MB with hidden data) There are so many rips or rips of rips that you cannot have a complete porn-database. And phew 2GB of compressed and hidden Data.
The smallest SSD I own could handily fit that data whole and the bloom filter would fit in an arduino a thousand times over. The NSA's shiny new Utah datacenter had a $2B budget for construction alone, do you really think "rips of rips" are going to be a problem? These guys scrape web traffic by putting a T on major junctions of the internet and duplicating everything that comes down the pipes. You could set all of 4chan to making rips with permuted settings and not begin to stress infrastructure of that capacity.
I don't want to be rude, but you seem to be in denial.
You are clearly mistaken. I recently read a paper about people who's jobs involve sitting down and looking at child abuse photos, and then trekking off to the councillor. A few blurry porn videos are nothing compared with that.
It still takes an exceptionally rugged individual to be able to sift through that much of that sort of thing and not want a different line of work.
Though, perhaps like some people that work to clean up extremely gory crime or accident scenes and aren't bothered by it at all, there may be a few that can maintain some kind of separation.
whoa... ok, I didn't know that I'm that naive. Thanks for opening my eyes. Yes now I remember that there are people, behind the cameras that monitor how people are getting tortured.. someone is always doing the dirty job, even when nobody wants to know it.
There are people out there in law enforcement who's job it is to collect child pornography, categorizing and filing it in the hope of identifying the victim and the perpetrator.
When there is a breakthrough and the child gets saved, these people are the heroes that make it happen. However I imagine that for every perp caught there are a dozen more that escape justice... personally I can't imagine doing such a job - it'd tear me up inside to know these people are out there. But someone's got to do it.
eww, you got me in a moment where I was almost thinking of them in a too romantic way. I've fallen down to reality and can imagine now how their forensic team could possibly enjoy those movies on a (4k/HD Laser) Projector..
After porn was found in the Abbottabad compound and everyone had a good laugh at the hypocrisy of Osama Bin Laden, wasn't there talk that the porn there might have hidden messages enclosed? Could be the same case here, it's just a decoy.
2) Even an innocent man would likely have a very difficult time actually doing that. In many cases it could be straight up impossible; websites go out of business, torrents go unseeded, image boards 404 in a matter of hours, reddit has a search system that makes me look back on old card catalogs fondly...
...now they'll assume all the top secret data is stenoed in his porn collection, so they'll keep him in jail for a long long time until they prove it isn't ...or was that brit law?
"Jiang, a former contractor at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, had recently been let go by his employer because of pressure from Republican congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia. Wolf had claimed Jiang and other Chinese engineers employed by NASA contractors were a security risk."
"But it quickly became apparent that Jiang was at worst guilty of violating NASA policies. [...] Jiang had not had clearance to such projects at Langley as an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace"
"A press release issued by Wolf after the arrest and copy of Jiang's arrest warrant have since disappeared off the the congressman's website. In the release (cached by Google here), Wolf had said, 'I am particularly concerned that (the) information (on Jiang's laptop) may pertain to the source code for high-tech imaging technology that Jiang has been working on with NASA. This information could have significant military applications for the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army.'"
Confirmed, the USA has entered back into full McCarthyism. Request title change to 'Chinese contractor fired on suspicion by Republican senator'.