Meet Telecomix, The Hackers Bent On Exposing Those Who Censor And Surveil
The Internet
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/12/26/meet-telecomix-the-hack
ers-bent-on-exposing-those-who-censor-and-surveil-the-internet/2/
Hack the planet: Once focused on Sweden, Telecomix's hacktivists have been
expanding their international membership-and their targets. (credit: Nicky
Bonne for Forbes.)
One morning in mid-August, seven months into the Arab Spring protests and
government crackdowns in which thousands have been killed, something strange
happened on Syria's Internet. As users aimed their Web browsers at Google
and Facebook, they instead saw a page of white Arabic script scrawled across
a black background.
"This is a deliberate, temporary Internet breakdown. Please read carefully
and spread the following message," it read. "Your Internet activity is
monitored."
Then the page switched to a white screen filled with instructions on using
free encryption and anonymity software like Tor and TrueCrypt to evade
surveillance and censorship. Emblazoned above the text was a round,
mysterious symbol: a star inside an omega, hovering over a pyramid
surrounded by lightning bolts. Below it were written the words: "This is
Telecomix. We come in peace."
Telecomix, a loose-knit team of international hacktivists, had been scanning
the Syrian Internet in a massive sweep, dividing 700,000 target connections
among its members in Germany, France and the U.S., probing for hackable
devices with software tools like Nmap and Shodan. They compromised
vulnerable Cisco Systems-produced network switches to find other devices'
passwords, snooped on open cameras revealing street scenes and even
officials' desks, and at one point retrieved the log-in credentials for
5,000 unsecured home routers, which they used to insert the surveillance
warning (shown below) into browsers across the country.
As the globally-distributed hackers combed Syria's networks and posted their
findings in a crowd-sourced document, one American member of the group, who
uses the handle Punkbob, spotted a Windows FTP server filled with data he
recognized: logs from a Proxy SG 9000 appliance built by the Sunnyvale,
Calif.-based company Blue Coat Systems. In Punkbob's day job at a Pentagon
contractor, he says, the same equipment had been used to intercept traffic
to filter and track staff behavior. The Syrian machine's logs showed the
Internet activity of thousands of users, connecting the sites they attempted
to visit and every word of their communications with the IP addresses that
pointed directly to their homes. In short, he had discovered American
technology being used to help a brutal dictatorship spy on its citizens.
"At first we were just poking around, but when I saw that, I had this
feeling of dread," says Punkbob, who requested that Forbes not use his real
name. "To see exactly what Syria was tracking and who was providing the
technology to do it..That was when it felt real."
Since Telecomix published 54 gigabytes of those logs, the resulting
attention has forced Blue Coat to admit that its gear had been used by
Syria, a potential violation of international sanctions against that
country. The company didn't respond to Forbes' request for an interview,
citing an ongoing internal review and a related Commerce Department probe.
(Note that the investigation didn't deter private equity firm Thoma Bravo
and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan from a recent deal to take Blue Coat
private for $1.3 billion.) The disclosure of Blue Coat's gear in Syria has
touched off revelations that hardware from other U.S. firms, including
NetApp and HP, was also used by blacklisted regimes. The industry now faces
tough new questions about tech firms' responsibility for how their products
are deployed-and by whom.
Telecomix sees its Blue Coat discovery as a turning point in the group's
mission: Founded to fight for free speech, it now aims to also expose those
who fight against that ideal, including any Western tech firm aiding the
wrong side. "I hope that the Blue Coat thing was the start of something much
bigger," says Chris Kullenberg, a lean and lip-pierced Swedish political
science grad student at the University of Gothenburg and a Telecomix
founder. "The goal is to put political pressure on these companies. It
started with rage and frustration. What can we do? Well, we can hack a few
boxes and expose this to the world. That's the motivation that drives
hackers deeper and deeper into the networks."
Telecomix's hackers broke into 5,000 Syrian home routers and set them to
show users this warning Web page about government surveillance. (Click to
enlarge.)
Telecomix likely broke Syrian law. But some more traditional activists
appreciate their work. "It crosses a line we wouldn't be comfortable
crossing," says Brett Solomon, president of the digital human rights group
Access Now. "But sometimes it takes someone like Telecomix to put a spanner
in the works."
Actively hacking networks is a new game for Telecomix's Web revolutionaries.
But unlike the hacker group Anonymous, which began with juvenile pranks
before attacking Scientologists, opponents of WikiLeaks and defense
contractors, Telecomix was born political. The group was created at a
Gothenburg conference in 2009 to oppose the European Union's so-called
Telecoms Package, industry-influenced laws that would have cut Internet
access for anyone repeatedly downloading copyrighted files. "In a sense,
corporations have always been the enemy," says Kullenberg.
The hackers dug up and published the phone numbers of every EU Parliament
member, then convinced the copyright-flouting Swedish download site the
Pirate Bay to post a link on its home page. At the time, the site received
20 million monthly visitors. The Parliament's phones were jammed for days,
and the statute was eventually dropped.
After that initial victory, the group's pseudonymous chatrooms slowly filled
with likeminded hacktivists, and a strange, Internet meme-laden culture
developed around them: Telecomix members call each other "agents" or
"Internauts." Its symbols, like the one shown on the Syrian warning message,
integrate obscure socialist, technological and pirate icons. Ask them to
identify the group's leader, and they'll name Cameron, an interactive
artificial intelligence bot that they've designed to read and learn from
their chatroom conversations and respond to questions. ("His commands are
fuzzy," admits Icelandic Telecomix agent Smari McCarthy. When I type a
question to Cameron asking it to tell me Telecomix's mission, for instance,
it responds, "The mission is Christmas?")
Bizarre sense of humor aside, the group remains serious about its work; The
populist uprisings of the Arab Spring have only brought its goals-and its
enemies-into sharper focus. A few days into the January 25 protests in Egypt
Hosni Mubarak shut down all but one of his country's Internet service
providers. "Telecomix members consider themselves citizens of the Internet,"
says one American Telecomixhacker who goes by the nickname the Doctor. "So
we took that as a personal affront."
Agents arranged with the hacker-friendly Internet provider French Data
Network to fire up modem banks and give users free dial-up connections. Then
the group faxed thousands of leaflets to Egyptian universities, offices and
cybercafes, explaining how to skirt the blackout.
Hacktivist gear: a one-handed keyboard, mini-PC and Linux phone with a
Telecomix decal. (credit: Nicky Bonne for Forbes.)
Soon Telecomix' chatrooms became a kind of dissident IT support helpline,
with Middle Eastern activists appearing on its IRC channels to ask for
advice about securing their connections or avoiding surveillance.
Increasingly, they came from Syria, many bringing graphic videos and
pictures of police violence they wanted Telecomix's agents to help them
distribute.
Telecomix's scanning of the Syrian Net began as reconnaissance to prepare
for an Egypt-style Internet shutdown. Stumbling onto the Blue Coat logs was
a fateful fluke. When the hackers realized what they'd found, they
downloaded close to 100 gigabytes of data, using the Tor anonymization
network to cover their tracks, a process that took weeks over Syria's thin
bandwidth.
In October Telecomix released hundreds of millions of lines of text listing
hundreds of sites the Syrian government was blocking, from porn to Facebook
to Chatroulette, along with enough users' communication logs to show that
the regime was using their Blue Coat gear to not only filter but also
monitor dissidents' activities. Blue Coat's scandal demonstrates the
complexity of regulating surveillance technology. The firm claims it hadn't
known about its devices in Syria, arguing they must have found their way
into the country through a reseller in the United Arab Emirates.
"Blue Coat is mindful of the violence in Syria and is saddened by the human
suffering and loss of human life that may be the result of actions by a
repressive regime," it wrote in a statement. "We don't want our productsto
be used by the government of Syria or any other country embargoed by the
United States." But critics like cryptography guru Bruce Schneier and Tor
developer Jacob Appelbaum point out that Blue Coat devices link back to its
servers for licensing and updates, implying the company may have turned a
blind eye to its Syrian users.
Some Telecomix agents say they've also spotted equipment sold by Fortinet in
Syria. Fortinet responds that it "has in place a policy prohibiting shipping
its product to countries where shipment is embargoed." And what about
resellers who pass it on to those countries? "At that point it's out of our
hands," a spokesperson says.
In some cases, companies have argued that the line between ethical and
unethical use of their products is simply too blurry to distinguish. Cisco,
whose network switches Telecomix identified in Syria, was previously hauled
before Congress in 2008 after a leaked PowerPoint suggested it pitched
Chinese police on using its equipment to track members of the banned Falun
Gong regime."Cisco's routers and switches include basic features that are
essential to the fundamental operation of the Internet by blocking hackers
from interrupting Internet services and protecting users from viruses,"
Cisco's General Counsel told a Senate Subcommittee on human rights in 2008.
He denied the PowerPoint represented company policy, but conceded that
"those same basic features - without which the Internet could not function
effectively-can unfortunately be used by network administrators for
censorship purposes.
Hazy as the line may be, it's clear some companies have crossed it.
Marketing documents published by WikiLeaks show 160 firms advertising
surveillance gear, often in Arabic as well as English. British firm Gamma
International brags that it can spy on users of Gmail, Skype and iTunes; its
sales pitch was found in the files of the Egyptian government after Mubarak
fled.
Telecomix is determined to remain a watchdog against Western firms aiding
foreign Big Brothers. Two Swedish members, Chris Kullenberg and Jonatan
Walck, have registered a site called Internaut.cat where they plan to
publish future disclosures of the group's findings, using Sweden's strong
media laws to shield their sources." We're at a point now where Internet
users are becoming aware of what's being done to them," says the Doctor.
"Companies that sell gear designed to track people should expect to be
outed."
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