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Stewart Nozette (pictured left, from nasa.gov), a former NASA, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and U.S. Naval Research scientist, was arrested Monday for allegedly trying to sell national secrets to FBI agents posing as Israeli government agents for $11,000. This is not the first time Nozette has been under investigation. He was investigated in 2006 for allegedly submitting false expense forms to NASA.
Nozette was arrested on Monday, and indicted Wednesday afternoon. He is scheduled for a detention hearing on October 29, 2009. He is likely being charged under 18 U.S.C. § 793 (d).
Nozette had been involved in 1994 in developing special satellite based radar that was used to detect water on the moon. Officials claim that he held top secret security clearances as recently as 2006, likely related to his work with the Navy or DARPA. Nozette also had engaged in consulting work for an Israeli government contractor. His work for the Israeli government may be used as evidence to support the attempted espionage charge.
The USDOJ's press release may be found here.
3 comments:
Ah, the hazards of a face-to-face meeting and a post office drop box. Mr. Nozette was careless.
Thus, my interest in the HP technology we discussed below, which allows enterprising criminals, aspiring "information brokers" and political dissident alike access to anonymous and secure communication. I bet Mr. Raj wished he had it.
As Kelly Higgins writes:
"Veiled is basically a "zero footprint" network, in which groups can rapidly form and disappear without a trace. It connects the user's HTML 5-based browser to a single PHP file, which downloads some JavaScript code into the browser. Pieces of the file are spread among the members of the Veiled darknet. It's not peer-to-peer, but rather a chain of "repeaters" of the PHP file, the researchers say.
"It's a file on a Web server, but I can also host one on my Website, for example, and we can join those two files together," Wood says. "It's very distributed."
The researchers are building encryption into the file distribution network as a way for users to remain anonymous and communicate securely."
http://www.darkreading.com/security/encryption/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217801293
This answers the question you posed below, Mr. Campbell, about anonymity.
First Amendement issues will abound, of course.
See the cite I provide above, in a comment to your Chinese cyber warfare post, for a taste of how the Feds might counteract naughty cyberspace behavior, both foreign and domestic.
Cordially yours,
Ms. N
I did a little bit of looking, and it appears the HP technology is not quite as ground breaking as it might appear. Certainly it may be a bit more polished than some prior technologies, but there are some similar ones out there.
Check out, for example:
freenet
Tor
I2P
It appears that the HP solution might be even more light weight than the above mentioned. Remember that to communicate in a network, you have to be able to at some point "see" another computer to communicate with another. Various techniques are employed with each of these technologies (distributing files among multiple hosts, encryption, proxy bounces, limiting storage to memory to avoid hard drive traces...etc), and if each node is set up correctly, theoretically none should retain any traces of communication. However, hostile or sloppy parties may not set things up correctly. Furthermore, another computer on a network that may have damaging information regarding communications you made through it could be seized and used against you (assuming that it wasn't set up correctly and stored damaging info) because the Fourth Amendment is a personal right, and you would not have standing to challenge the seizure of another person's computer, even if it contained information that was damaging to you, Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128 (1978).
Surely, these new technologies make investigating these crimes much more difficult, and often effectively impossible. Though theoretically there would be ways to track the illegal communications and activity, it is often so costly, or time consuming, as to be outside of a prosecutor's ability, budget, or desire.
As you rightly point out, Rajaratnam and Nozette likely would not have been caught if they had used one of these technologies, but as a cop friend of mine once said, "we don't catch the smart ones." That's not totally fair, because obviously Rajaratnam and Nozette were geniuses, but even geniuses get sloppy or even cocky.
The darknet and the implications for content distribution are nicely laid out in a Biddle, et. al MIT paper a few yers back, here:
http://msl1.mit.edu/ESD10/docs/darknet5.pdf
Hoffman and Wood have shown, however, that you can take advantage of the security and anonymity of a darknet on a browser platform. That is indeed ground-breaking.
The darknet until now has been somewhat inaccessible even to sophisticated criminals, unless their particular area of interest was the hack or illegal internet file distribution.
Tor and Freenet, the origin and scope of which are beyond this comment, each have their own drawbacks, though they are fine pieces of work that their creators generously shared with the rest of us. We couldn't have this discussion without that acknowledgment.
HP's idea was offered at Dark Hat simply to illustrate that we could have a darknet experience without relying on a Tor or a Freenet (among others). I trust the audience to whom they presented will work out the technological kinks, given time.
Frankly, I'm amazed HP even presented it, given their own obvious proprietary interests. And it is amusing they did so, given their own internal skullduggery problems in the recent past.
You are correct that the Fourth Amendment won't protect a person in the event a criminal investigation uncovers another party's sloppy or hostile machine. But as a criminal, I would take my chances with that possibility over a face-to-face meeting and a drop box any day of the week.
And as a criminal defense lawyer, outrunning the prosecutor's ability, budget and desire means I have won my case. And that is precisely my goal.
Nice work, Mr. Campbell. You put alot of thought into your posts and comments and your reference materials are first-rate.
Best,
Ms. N
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