Government waging warrantless Cyber-Warfare against Standing Rock protesters

[DetlefK]

http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2418-the-standing-rock-hacks-cracked-unravels-real-conspiracy.html

Two Cracked-writers went to the Standing Rock camp.

TL;DR
The FBI is using undercover-planes with electronic warfare equipment to:
- jam cellphone-signals
- hack into Smartphones of protesters and turn all their Apps on until the battery dies
- hack into email-accounts of protesters and change their password to lock them out
- launch DDoS-attacks on the WiFi in the Standing Rock camp while simultaneously offering an unprotected WiFi-network that will get you hacked if you access it

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We first encountered the idea through hearsay, via a man we met at the big camp, in a large tent filled with U.S. military veterans. He'd been a 25 Bravo in the Army -- an information technology specialist. He was the first to allege that the planes flying over were equipped with what he called "scramblers," which "fed white noise into the cell signals" to interfere with internet access at Standing Rock and "keep information from getting out."

...

"The moment you hit this camp from the highway, the signal goes to nothing." He added that, "People are reporting their cellphones are turning on, their apps are turning on, their battery is draining."

...

We ran into similar strange rumors across camp for the next couple of days. People from every corner, whether they had been on site for days or for months, would talk about their cellphone signals cutting out just as drones circled above. Mobiles would switch themselves off and on again -- not in pocket but in hand. Camera apps were opened out of nowhere, and batteries would drain by enormous percentages, killing the phones in minutes, rather than the steady decline of any device pinging back and forth searching for a signal. There were even reports of people's Gmail accounts being hacked.

...

We brought all this -- the cell-blocking and reports of weird phone activity -- up to Marc Rogers, a security expert and white-hat hacker who, among other things, advises the show Mr. Robot. He wasn't sure what was going on at Standing Rock, but noted a device called a "Stingray" might be the culprit.

...

"Blocking data is easy. Most of the time, it happens by accident. All they have to do is broadcast a cell tower with a stronger signal than the legitimate towers. At that point, your device will connect to it rather than legitimate ones." (This is why it's important to turn off your data before attending anti-government demonstrations, and in airplanes.) Once connected, it's easy to carry out a man in the middle attack, which "allows them to eavesdrop on calls and potentially mess with data connections."

...

In 2014, The Wall Street Journal broke the story that the U.S. Marshals Service had commissioned a fleet of fixed-wing aircraft with dirtboxes. And last year, we learned that the FBI also has their own fleet of dirtbox-equipped planes, mostly Cessnas, registered to a series of dummy corporations with names like "KQM Aviation." And no, this information isn't from some website with an Illuminati pyramid worked into the logo; the AP figured this out, and they've provided so much documentation that anyone who reads it will literally shit credibility.

...

"There are a number of unsecured WiFi networks within an eighth of a mile" of the camp. Those who connected would discover that their email passwords had been changed and they were temporarily locked out of their accounts. Michael also reported that the WiFi at the press tent "gets DDoS'd every couple of hours."

...

This is a Wireshark simulation of what he observed in the midst of one such attack, based on the data he gathered at the time. It suggests that something funky is happening and that digital war zone photography probably won't ever win a Pulitzer. Chuck noted that an open hot spot appeared as soon as the attack commenced. "Because the network was slow due to this DDoS, people would be tempted to join an insecure network." The other expert, Ted, joined this network, and while he was performing a network diagnostic, "someone accessed his Gmail."

...

Chuck also noted that while this attack was underway, a plane "was circling low" in the sky. He used a special kind of radio, an RTL-SDR, "to pick up transponder transmissions," which include "location and altitude hex codes and etc" from the plane. A lookup of the plane's registration data shows it belonging to the Nebraska Highway Patrol. But when we tried to look into that flight history, it was mysteriously absent.

...

Now, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota are NOT known to employ Stingray-style technology. Most of these planes may just be for visual surveillance. It's worth noting, though, that all these out-of-state planes are Cessna T206H's, the same model the FBI prefers to load up with Dirtboxes. That, plus the fact that one of these planes was in the air over Standing Rock at the same time as a DDoS attack on the press tent's WiFi and the appearance of a mysterious "open" hot spot acting as a honeypot all seems like more than coincidence.

[Equinox Moon]

1. Thank you for posting this!

This violates the right to free speech. This is HUGE that the government is blocking free speech!
And BTW, this is during an Obama administration.

[2naSalit]

2. K&R