Reporting Wrongdoing

Protect WhistleBlowers!

Whistleblowers, activists and dissidents are regularly tracked, hacked, harassed and silenced. Ever wonder why we didn't hear more from bank and mortgage company whistleblowers after the 2008 economic crash?  See:  Stop Silencing WhistleBlowers!/History pdf 

Banks, wealthy individuals and businesses can hire private intelligence companies to spy on, harass and discredit their enemies. The intelligence operatives' work for the government protects them from investigation and prosecution. The arrangements are covert and rarely get much media coverage.

Jane Mayer is a well-known investigative reporter who works for The New Yorker and is highly regarded for exposing wrongdoing and miscreant behavior. Her most recent target was the Koch brothers, only this time the target fought back. In a counterattack as sophisticated as their political finance operation, the Kochs hired Vigilant Resources International, a firm run by the former commissioner of the New York Police Department [Howard Safir 1996-2000], to dig up dirt on Mayer.

“ ‘Dirt, dirt, dirt’ is what the source later told me they were digging for in my life. If they couldn’t find it, they’d create it,” Mayer wrote in her new book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Radical Right. And create it they did, in the form of plagiarism allegations that were shopped around to news outlets, but with so little evidence that even conservative publications turned them down. 

From: The shadowy war on the press: How the rich silence journalists - Columbia Journalism Review - 6/16/2016

Leaked PowerPoint presentations describe how U.S. intelligence contractors  HBGary, Palentir and Berico planned to try to intimidate Pulitzer prize winner Glenn Greenwald, Wikileaks contributors and critics of the Bank of America and Chamber of Commerce. Google: HBGary Hack for fascinating reading.

Jeff Stein's The Greatest Vendetta On Earth  describes how the CEO of Ringling Brothers Circus hired former CIA number 3 man Clair George to surveil and play dirty tricks on Janice Pottker, an innocent soccer mom freelance writer. PETA, PAWS and other animal rights organizations were also targeted. 

Janice Pottker’s experiences bear a chilling similarity to my own.

Shorter follow up stories about this include:
CBS 60 Minutes:  Send In The Spies  –  May 1, 2003
Washington Post:  Send In The Clowns – November 20, 2005

Both of these incidents of intelligence contractors acting as a secret police for private interests were revealed by accident, they were covered up and were not widely reported in the press.

The surveillance tools used by the NSA, FBI, DEA, CIA, etc. are also in the hands of the private intelligence contractors who build and support those systems.  How would you feel if your boss, your worst enemy or fiercest rival could spy on you like the NSA, CIA or FBI?  If they hire the "right" private investigators, for a price THEY CAN!

Google: Cellphone Spying to see how easily YOU can spy on someone's cellphone. It makes stalking and harassing innocent people much too easy.  Understand how it works and protect yourself.

Help stop this before you or someone you love is hurt.

Wanted: Cell Phone Spyware Detection & Protection Advice

Suppose you suspect spyware has been installed on your cell phone, what do you do?

You want to prove spyware is on your phone and you also want to identify what kind of spyware was used because that will help you identify who is responsible:

• Is it common, readily available spyware sold on the Internet?

• Is your cellphone infected with a sophisticated program used by government agencies?

(This means you CANNOT just wipe the infected cellphone and install a mobile antivirus program.)

What do you do?  Where do you go for help?

We searched our favorite technical publications and found that NONE of THEM had dealt with this question:

The Intercept - NO

Wired - NO

Forbes.com - NO

TheDailyDot.com - NO

Mobile spyware is ubiquitous, who is up to the challenge to explain how to best deal with mobile spyware?

Cellphone Malware / Hacking?

My Symptoms: Consistent through time unless otherwise noted, across Blackberry models (8830 and 9930) and among multiple devices of the same model which indicates it's not a hardware problem. pdf

Cellphone:  Verizon Blackberry 8830 and 9930 (vanilla), Google Maps is the only ap installed. Few photos and notes - little other data stored. Very conventional, low activity use.  The cellphone provides tethered Internet access for my laptop.

• Extremely short cellphone battery life, even for new phones with brand new batteries.

• Cellphone locks up very frequently and has to be reset, often at least 3 - 4 times a day.  If I don't use the cellphone for an extended period of time, 12 hours or overnight, it usually has to be reset.

• The reset time is unusually long (alt -right shift-  del).  When I get a brand new Blackberry, the reset time is normal.  Something happens and the reset time suddenly increases dramatically.

• The cellphone often resets for no reason, even when it's sitting unattended. When the cellphone automatically resets this way, it sometimes recovers with the ringer set to silent.

• The cellphone ring volume is often changed to silent and/or Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and/or NFC are turned on as if the cellphone is under someone else's control.

• The Internet browser often closes* and has to be reopened when I'm reading web pages on line.
  

• When strangers call my cellphone for the first time, my cellphone often does not ring. They hear my phone ringing and my voice mail message.  There is no indication of an inbound call or a cellphone message on my phone. Regular callers are usually connected without a delay or problems.

• I tried to install SMobile Systems Cellphone Spyware Protection, a U.S. Government favorite, on my Blackberry 8830 in 2009 but it would NOT install. SMobile systems said they had 10,000 Blackberrys 8830s like mine running their software.  They said "it must be something in the network." The software would NOT install on a brand new Blackberry I bought trying to evade any existing malware.
  

• My cellphone Voice Mail messages often appear many hours or even days late without any indication of an inbound call on my cellphone.  Voice mail messages from regular callers usually appear promptly. Voice mail messages I deleted many weeks and sometimes months ago sometimes reappear in my Voice Mail Box for no reason. Someone is trying to Gaslight me.
  

• I often watched calls come into my cellphone and saw both the calling number and the voice mail message indicator disappear before I could pick up the phone - this has NOT happened recently.

• When I called companies with large customer service groups I often got the same customer service agent over and over again. This is a statistical impossibility. Incoming calls are routed the next available customer service agent. On repeated calls I should be connected to many different agents.

• People often complain that I did not return their calls when I did not receive their Voice Mail message and I did not have an inbound call indication on my cellphone.

• I was blocked from viewing Marcy Wheeler's EmptyWheel.net site with a "This connection has been disallowed by your Administrator."  It now reads "Unable to connect using the current security settings. Please contact your service provider." I now get the same message for TheIntercept.com *

• Google was coming up in foreign languages.  I use http://Google.com/ncr for No Country Redirect.*

• Verizon claimed they could find nothing wrong with my cellphone or their service when I complained to them and the FTC in the 2008 - 2009 time frame.

• The cellphone often lit up for no reason when left unattended. This has not happened recently.
  

* May be due to an outdated browser/cellphone - I use the default vanilla Blackberry browser (IE  icon) 

 

Confirming & Identifying Cell Phone Spyware

The short answer I keep hearing is:  You Can't! 

Even though your cell phone shows all the classic signs of spyware, NYC forensic experts say they may NOT be able to positively confirm the presence of spyware on your cell phone or provide ANY details about the type of spyware being used.   

Identifying the type of spyware is important because it reveals the sophistication of your adversaries.  Did they buy a cheap parental monitoring program on the Internet or are they using NSA grade spyware?

I'm a whistleblower who is also engaged in a contentious family estate legal dispute against a brother who spent 20 years in Army intelligence and retains a top level security clearance.  For me, determining the type of spyware being used is important.

Here's My Experience:

NYC Tech Lawyer - who assisted the defense in an Internet case.  He said I might not find anything despite the symptoms and told me his brother had just gotten a Cellibrite system that could recover everything off my cell phone for $1,000.  He couldn't describe the malware module and was not familiar with the recent Hacking Team breach.

Googling:  NYC forensics cell phone

Large Manhattan Investigation Service Close to City Hall - I met with a senior manager who said his cell phone techs were out of the office.  He sent me a proposal for $5,500 which he later WITHDREW saying it's very uncommon to find snooping malware on devices.  He also said it is often impossible to determine how it was installed, much less whom may have done it.

Rockefeller Center Address (Long Island Office) - In an email the COO says:  "It looks like the chances of finding the spyware are pretty slim because if there is anything there then it is probably in the code/programming of the phone but there is still a chance that Cellebrite and the others might find it, but then I’d have to know exactly what line or lines of code to look for."

"For the Blackberry we use Cellebrite, Oxygen Forensics Suite, Lantern Forensics, and Mobile Phone Examiner. We are using the latest release versions of all the software. As far as the procedure goes, we log in the evidence, then run it through each program one by one and search for what is requested. The end product that you will receive is the reports from each program either confirming or denying the existence of spyware/malware and our report."

The cost (verbal) is $900 with an additional $3,000 if JTAG is used.

NYC Virtual Forensics & E-Discovery - Talked to the head of forensics twice on the telephone who said the cost was $525 for a Cellibrite scan.  I'm waiting for his SOW, Statement of Work proposal to hit my gmail describing what what they will do.

Large NYC Investigation Firm close to Grand Central - Waiting to meet with the principal who has been out on vacation.

Michele Moore in Citizen Four

Michele looking grim after calling out Jacob Appelbaum for putting people at risk by misrepresenting the safety of TOR during an April 2012 Occupy Wall Street surveillance program filmed by Oscar winner Laura Poitras. The clip appears about 16:30 depending on which cut of Citizen Four you view.

If there is a keylogger on your device, TOR ALONE does NOT protect you.  Targeted surveillance systems often implant keylogging malware on their victims' devices, frequently in their browser. If you have a keylogger, Encryption ALONE does NOT protect you either.

Keyloggers record every keystroke and movement you make on your device, including passwords.  The Internet supervisory programs some parents put on their children's PCs are keyloggers.

TOR, The Onion Router, sends Internet communications through multiple geographic nodes, concealing the sender's location. TOR is often used by journalists, activists and dissidents in oppressive countries.

EFF's Surveillance Self Defense is a great place to start learning about digital security!  Also explore:

Freedom of the Press Foundation:    Encryption Works    Email Hygiene    Email Self Defense  

Citizen Four tells the story of Edward Snowden's disclosure of NSA's intrusive, world wide surveillance. It won the Academy Award for best Documentary Film in 2015. Citizen Four was filmed and produced by Laura Poitras.