Spying and Technology: Robert Philip Hanssen 192
spludge writes: "The affidavit for the arrest of Robert Philip Hanssen, an FBI agent that spied for Russia for 15 years, makes fascinating reading. It reads like a spy novel with some neat technology references! In the affidavit Hanssen (aka "B") is portrayed as a computer expert with programming knowledge. The affidavit includes mentions of: the use of Palm VII's for communication, encryption techniques, track 40 floppy writing (?), a new NSA technique for surveillance (we aren't told what it is) and programs to automatically destroy computer data when it is compromised."
Track 40 floppy writing is... (Score:3)
Re:CBM disk format (Score:1)
Re:Amiga&Floppy (Score:1)
I can't -stand- to use the Amiga in Black/White mode, which is what happens if I hook up it's composite a/v outs
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
Re:double standards (Score:1)
Knowing the blured morality an espy has to deal with lineancy will be fairer and more useful: an spy that fooled people, specialy one without principles (that is what the evidence is implying this guy to be) can be locked for the rest of his/her life and could earn an early release teaching other spies how he managed to fool them.
Re:$1.3 mil (Score:1)
Actualy, it is relisticly more that that, I assume he didn't fill out a 1099 MISC and then reported it as incom on form 1040 line 21. So even tho he gets paid 110k he really on gets to keep around 79k. I've been trying to find a link on NPR about what they said about the amount, but paraphraseing what they said : the amount paid is about twice the disposable income.
Re:$1.3 mil (Score:1)
as far as i am concerned everyone ends up dead
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
Re:HVA? (Score:1)
The inner sections were very effective, too. But they had completely different working agendas, though sometimes equivalent methods.
Re:CBM disk format - CBM 8050 Drives (Score:1)
They were FAST (IEEE-488 interface does that. It was the SCSI of its day), and kept most of the CBM directory structure.
They were supposed to use DS/QD disks. However, those 360K disks from the local store were able to format out to 1 MB.
However, to clarify. The 1541, 4040, and 1571 drives can write out to track 44 if you play some tricks with CBM DOS. I had code that would do that from one of my old cracker books.
The other interesting trick that was played was actually thought of by SubLogic. On Flight Simulator for the c64, the main loader program and a large amount of code was written to Track 18 (directory), and was only available via direct access.
However, the tracks 35-44 trick was quite good, and could be used to hide a lot more data than track 40
Re:I wonder why this is so public (Score:1)
Re:$1.3 mil (Score:1)
Acutally, in fiction "recruiting for espionage (whether corporate or national) is usually rooted in finding some personal problem and exploiting it with the proper carrot", but in recent interviews on NPR, they stress that spies in real life are motivated by money and ego.
Joe
Re:double standards (Score:1)
That's exactly why USA is more dangerous than Russia: it hasn't got any experience of Stalinism. So nothing can prevent it from becoming a totalitarian society over time. Russia has got its antidote - basically, Russians don't believe what they are told in the media. Since totalitarism is about brain-washing much more than about guns and concentration camps, the States have a far and interesting way to go. Scary.
==================
By the time you have reached perfection, there's nobody around you to share it with.
Dear USA: (Score:1)
Re:For 15 years?!? (Score:1)
Re:double standards (Score:1)
I think you found the operative word.... scum. Let's face it, these are not the people you take home to visit the folks or to meet your sister. We have to deal with their (and every other country's) scum and they find ours in the woodwork. And whether it's allies or not (like pollard spying for isreal or when the french intelligence bugged air france planes years ago), they're all scum, and I wish they'd be treated appropriately when caught..and that doesn't me released.
Unreadable document (Score:2)
Tips for future spies (Score:5)
2) Do not use real bridges and lamp-posts as drop-off points. Instead, join the blue team on a Team Fortress server and arrange to meet a red team dude on the bridge in 2fort5. Just nod (nobody pays that much attention) and drop off your backpack on the bridge. Watch out for the enemy snipers on the tower! They could be real intelligence agents...
Other options include spraying a wall with bullets in counterstrike or q3. The marks wear off pretty quickly and are impossible to log. No chance of detection there.
3) Use Windows for all your "work". You are guaranteed to lose your files, even the ones you want to keep.
4) Can't think of any more. oh well, add to the list...
w/m
Re:CBM disk format (Score:2)
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
Yes but if this were a religious war, would you feel justified in your actions because the other side feels the same?
My argument is that we should analyze Espionage for what it really is. It is the opening of a chess game that always costs lives. Spies are the first pawns out; and whether or not they exist - lives are still lost because of the military, and the militaristic views of the US government.
We can not argue that this spy is costing us lives, or them lives -- if America had nothing to hide, then people would not have to die. I feel I have a right and need to know exactly what these spies are after; does the US have a much larger arsenol than we expected, paid for by taxpayers.... do they take taxpayers money and spend it on huge espionage activities themselves; only to condemn double agents performing the same duty to a different country?
Or does the US just happen to serve better martini's at their political functions? Obviously these spies are after critical information that makes up a much, much larger picture. To condemn the spy is ludicrous, why don't we find out what information he had, and see who the most villinous entity is.. the spy, or the activities which attracted him?
ps. Moderating down my messages because they are "un-american" isn't exactly American.
Re:Palm Pilot: Guilty (Score:2)
Sic transit gloria slashdot
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
My comments about Evil America were actually meant to be more of a reflection of the people who can overlook their own countries massive Espionage efforts and spending to focus on a single individual who supposidly hurt their precious governments Militarily controlled world-monopoly.
Gas prices high? Start a war, and hey, while you're doing it - claim it's about babies being slaughtered, and make sure the newspapers do next to nothing save for advertising your weapons so other countries will want to buy from you.
I've got a million common-sense examples of attrocities caused and controlled by the American government. I'm not attacking the USA as a country because of them. I am attacking the USA as a country because so many of it's own citizens are ademently doing their governments cover-up jobs for them;
"Russia does it too"
"The detonation of Two nuclear bombs saved lives"
(Yet if the American government were to execute a single individual in the street for political reasons; we would all be in an uproar... until someone justified it publicly).
"Saddham Hussein was on the warpath
(and besides, gas was gonna get expensive)"
The moniker, "Amerikkka" represents more than just the globally excepted view of America as a generally racist, militaristic, and Fascist-News controlled country...
It also represents the history of America as an openly racist country which made all of its wealth and established living conditions off of the lives of slaves and natives.
Now that Americas population is so high; the standard of living close to what it originally was and Slavery has been abolished; who does Amerikkka turn to for it's wealth and labour?
Foreign 'enemies'. Crazy people like Saddham who was ripe for a nationlist moral boosting war. Sure, Saddham might be crazy; and the thing that makes us not feel guilty for our actions against him is that his military actually believed and followed his fascist orders. Our military bombed hospitals and schools by accident, and we believed for a very long time that they didn't.
Moderating my messages down for being "un-american" is as "un-american" as the American Press.
Re:Tips for future spies (Score:2)
Let's see, signal to noise ratio found browsing Slashdot at -1 over last 2.5 years declines steadily and "experts" say Osama Ben Laden and other terrorists increasingly using internet for secure secret communications. Co-incidence?
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
They also save lives. Remember that the FBI was tipped off to Hanssen's activities by a spy inside the Russian intelligence community. To the Russians, that person is a criminal who'll probably be executed if he's caught. To us, he's a hero. It's all a matter of perspective.
Re:Tips for future spies (Score:2)
Footbridges (Score:2)
For 15 years?!? (Score:2)
Re:And he's a Linux user! (Score:2)
Regards,
In Real Life... (Score:5)
... there's a (convicted) serial murderer named Robert Hansen, who was born and raised in Iowa.
... and an FBI agent named John Douglas was instrumental in the capture of Robert Hansen.
... and there's a Slashdotter (me) named Robert Hansen.
... whose best friend in high school was named John Douglas.
I'm telling you, I think I'm going to have to go commit a crime against humanity or something in order to live up to the high standards my other namesakes have left for me.
Polygraph (Score:2)
Re:$1.3 mil (Score:3)
What happened is far from amusing (Score:5)
Palm Pilot: Guilty (Score:2)
One of the commercial products currently available is the Palm VII organizer. I have a Palm III, which is actually a fairly capable computer. The VII version comes with wireless internet capability built in. It can allow the rapid transmission of encrypted messages, which if used on an infrequent basis, could be quite effective in preventing confusions if the existance [sic] of the accounts could be appropriately hidden as well as the existance [sic] of the devices themselves. Such a device might even serve for rapid transmittal of substantial material in digital form.
This is...
1) Ingenious product placement in a Palm-Hansenn deal;
2) Asking them to call him "Hanssen. Philip Hanssen. Robert Philip Hanssen.";
3) An excuse to try 2-player PocketChess;
4) About to see Microsoft blame Palm for all espionage;
5) All of the above.
I for one can't wait to read whether they installed Time Traveler for him...
--------------------------------
A True American... (Score:2)
Re:Amiga&Floppy (Score:2)
It's probably cheaper to find a used Amiga on ebay. Last time I checked, the going price for an A500 was around $20 + shipping. An Amiga is capable of reading & writing to 720K MS-DOS floppies - you can copy your amiga software over to 720k floppies and sneakernet it over to your PC. Another approach is to build yourself a null modem cable to connect your Amiga and PC via SLIP, PPP, or PLIP (if you want to use the parallel port). You will have to make the cable yourself - the Amiga uses a non-standard pinout on it's serial and parallel ports (Don't forget to hook up the ground!). I used a null-modem SLIP connection to copy floppy images over to my PC and burn them to a CD-ROM; it took a while but I only had to spend about $15 on the parts to make the cable.
For amiga emulation under Linux (and BSD, and BeOs, etc.), use UAE [linux.de] or WinUAE [codepoet.com] if you are running Windows. If you want legal Amiga ROM images (and a lot more), get Amiga Forever [cloanto.com] from Cloanto. Illegal (or at least questionable) ROM images can be found easily enough with a Google search. (The proof is left as an exersize for the student.)
Re:Freedom of Information? (Score:2)
Re:Freedom of Information? (Score:2)
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
American spies get killed in other countries for what they do, and we don't raise a diplomatic stink about it. The risks and rewards are well known on either side of the equation. It's not like those other countries don't believe the exact same way about their own country and their own way of life.
Re:Palm Pilot: Guilty (Score:2)
Also, when they knew who he was, it took about 4 or 5 months to stake him out and catch him. This guy is a felon, but a genius felon. Smart people are pretty hard to nail.
Why Revealed? (Score:2)
Is the FBI experiencing a period of being more open and honest?
Or is Hanssen being used as another example of why encryption is bad, carnivore is good, the FBI needs more powers to peep?
ColdCuts
CBM disk format (Score:4)
The disk format used on the 1541 and its predecessors (1540, 4040, etc.) was a technological marvel of it's day. Only thirty-five tracks, single sided, variable number of sectors per track, and the directory in the middle on track 18. Each sector was written in GCR format, allowing far higher data density than acheived on the IBM 9-sector format.
If they developed it further, we'd have had 82-track, double sided, double density floppies, holding more than a megabyte, and the 3.5" floppy might not be here today.
The wonderful thing about GCR as opposed to MFM encoding is that MFM wastes an awful lot of space with phase changes. GCR records more actual data, but each group code (the five bits that translate to four bits of actual data) is designed such that you never get more than eight 1-bits in a row, or more than two 0-bits in a row. This way you are guaranteed a phase change within a certain period, so the signal from the read head is kept 'moving'. The practical upshot of all this is that you can crank the GCR encoded data out onto the diskette at a faster rate than plain old MFM.
Putting the directory in the middle of the disk, along with the block allocation bitmap, lowered the average seek time, as the head a less distance to travel. The Amiga continued this, putting the disk home block, from which everything grew outwards, onto track 40.
Variable sectors per track (ranging from 21 on tracks 01-17, 19 on tracks 18-24, 17 on tracks 25-30, and 16 on tracks 31-35 (I'm guessing a little here)) allowed for greater data density without compromising data integrity on the inner tracks by exceeding the amount that could be reliably stored there. Hard disks today use a similar method, which is why the number of blocks on a disk might not equal the multiplied up values of cylinders, heads, and sectors. (LBA mode vs. CHS mode).
Of course, the thing about the CBM drives that made them the most fun drives to play with was the onboard 6502 processor with its 2k of memory, allowing you to download and execute code in the drive, speeding it up, flashing error messages in morse code on the LED, or even playing music using the stepper motor. (Actually, we used to do that with RL02's too, but it's equally unrecommended
By 'eck. Them were t' days.
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
1. No he hasn't
2. No they don't
3. Along with all of Europe
Re:Freedom of Information? (Score:2)
Re:$1.3 mil (Score:2)
Just remember... (Score:2)
palm (Score:2)
10.00am - drop off kids at school
12.00pm - lunch at TGIF
4.00pm - hand off documents to KGB agents
What's on your Palm?
Microsoft is right! (Score:2)
The man program is actually an interface to Mao's Little Red Book.
Re:Freedom of Information? (Score:2)
Re:CBM disk format (Score:2)
Never heard the musical disk drives, but I once saw somebody who wrote some code to simulate a dimmer on the floppy drive lights. It'd just slowly get brighter, then fade again. Very nifty :)
Re:double standards (Score:2)
Bullshit. (Score:2)
be low overhead. Not only that, but doing those
captures would be impossible on many CPUs.
We should get M$'s Allchin to comment (Score:5)
I certainly hope all of the other agents are using taxpayer-supported, Microsoft owned, C2 Secure (cough) copies of Windows.
A thought: maybe we should start infiltrating M$ with free-software double-agents that sneak around and plant bug-fixes everywhere. . .
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
affidavit - a sworn statement in writing made especially under oath or on affirmation before an authorized magistrate or officer
aka - (abbreviation) also known as
surveillance - close watch kept over someone or something (as by a detective)
Glad that I could help out.
Re:Tips for future spies (Score:2)
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
TMD would probably be a system which could cover a battlefield (eg, europe in WWII).
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Re:Why NOT use PGP?!? (Score:2)
All your events [openschedule.org] are belong to us.
FBI's counterintelligence program (Score:2)
It compares U.S. spying/counterspying efforts to soviet efforts(it was written in 1988, when the Soviet Union still existed). According to Kessler, to discourage double agents, soviet intelligence officers are shown a video of a KGB double agent being repeatedly raised and lowered into a blast furnace. The worst that Hanssen will get is some time in jail. Which side would you feel more comfortable betraying?
Re:double standards (Score:4)
"Bad" is defined in this context as representing another nation's interests over our own, especially when that nation is considered a risk to our nation. That is basically the limit of moral considerations in espionage. Remember the goal here - to make sure that a nation that will use its power to do less evil unto the world than others maintains its edge. That, my friends, is the USA despite all the tripe you hear on Slashdot. As bad as some things the US Government does are, we are still a liberal democracy, and as such are far, far more beholden to the common interest than a converted Communist/Stalinist superpower like Russia with a chip on its shoulder about becoming a dominant player so it can help its buddies, like the Serbs, and sell arms to terrorists and rogue nations. Sounds great, huh?
So before you start blabbing about double standards understand the moral and ethical framework these people MUST operate in and realize that your life may depend on it (whether or not you are yourself an American citizen).
Re:Unreadable document (Score:2)
All your events [openschedule.org] are belong to us.
Re:Tips for future spies (Score:2)
Open blank Word doc
Type in name
Type in "spy station names"
See if they showed up on the screen
What a wonderful marvel MS Word is to be able do these things.
--
Re:track 40 (Score:2)
This still works today, with 3 1/2 floppies. Normally floppies are formatted to 80 tracks (numbered 0 to 79). However, on most drives you can seek to tracks 80, 81 and 82, allowing you to hide data there. In linux, it's just a matter of typing setfdprm /dev/fd0 cyl=83 to have access to the full number of 83 tracks...
Re:Track 40 floppy writing is... cont. (Score:5)
Another way of floppy copy protection was to make half-written tracks, when yielded a random different result each time they were read. The software would read this a couple of times, and bomb out if it got a consistent result. This was pretty hard to duplicate with a nibble-copy, and could only be done by damaging that part of the floppy
What motivates spies (Score:5)
I find it easier to understand why one would spy for the US than the USSR. The US _loves_ spies -- maybe it's too many Bond films, but there's a cultural perception that spies are secretly heroic and motivated by a sense of higher moral purpose. After they finally escape and defect, they're feted as either heroes or merely fascinating and rewarded with well-paid lecture tours. In England, they even sprung the clearly guilty George Blake from prison, because some Guardian-reading liberals felt sorry for him.
In the East, spying is evil disloyalty whoever does it, and a "loyal" spy is regarded as barely any better than an enemy agent. There's a Russian phrase for it that translates as "Not Quite Dead Yet", meaning that even the most loyal and decorated of their own agents is only one step away from political disfavour, imprisonment and purging. Any sensible Worker would merely keep their head down and ignore the whole immoral process.
Of course, my own loyalty to the Communist International and the impending Dictatorship of the Proleteriat would outweigh any mere capitalist greed. We of Geeknatz have already destroyed faith in your stock market system with our hugely inflated boo.com's and lastminute.com's. Importing real Budweiser beer; beer that tastes of beer, not just malted rice, will destroy faith in your military-brewski complex. When your Mickey Mouse is out of copyright in 2004, we shall destroy your capitalist marketing system entirely.
All your brand belong to us !
Track 40 floppy writing and Wozniak (Score:5)
Steve Wozniak was apparently extremely annoyed that people were perverting his lovely computer by writing funny disk formats that simple file copying wouldn't work on.
So he goes away and builds a little bit of extra gubbins on to the disk controller and writes a few extra bits of code to get a nibble copier working. Viola! He can copy disks in any format, because he can read the individual bits from each track.
But... how can Woz protect his own disks, he wonders? He sits and scratches his head for a few days, then writes some more code, this time to alter the burst timing used to write bits. a zero is something like a 4(some unit of time) burst and a 1 is an 8(unit) burst.
The Mac filesystem can detect simple bit errors and will retry a few times, so Steve decides to write a few 6(unit) bursts at tactical places - 50% of the time, they'll get read incorrectly and the Mac will retry and 50% it'll read correctly and everything will be fine. When it has to retry, it's a 50% chance it'll get it right the second time and so on...
When you nibble copy them however, the copier will read the disk once, and won't understand the bits and so won't notice the errors and retry, so where there was a "wobbly" bit, there's now a bit fixed in the wrong position.
Hurrah! Woz had uncopyable disks.
But how could he copy them for his own use..?
Well, he realises that if you heat the material enough, you get electromagnetic(?) transference between one of his special-format disks and a fresh disk. (This is apparently some property of magnets in general).
For about a week, Woz is hardly seen - he's sitting in his office with a hair-dryer trying to heat the disks up enough to transfer the data. He has a big pile of molten floppies next to him...
Apologies to Steve Wozniak and anyone who attended at O'Reilly OpenSource 2000 for the hideously innaccurate transcription of the tale...
Also a programmer (Score:2)
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
We know what is going on: friends of GB v.1.0 & v2.0 in the arms industry need boost, GB v.2.0 pushes for it, friends in arms industry get richer.
Surely the US needs to defend themselves against "rogue" states (ahem, like who? Irak that stalmated against that military power known as Iran? Cuba where the few cars around are from the 50s? North Korea that is dying of starvation? China or India? How many bombs do you need to destroy China or India without harming yourself in the process).
So basicaly it is a pointless excercise. The worst atack against US interests had come from run of the mill terrorists with just normal bombs. If those guys arm an atomic bomb they will not deliver it with a misile, they will build it in downtown NY or Washingnton and will deliver it in a Domino's Pizza van...... in less than 30 minutes...
As someone who has attended a KGB presentation... (Score:2)
The thing is, the Russian companies who would get this secret technical information belong effectively still to the state and are not run well. They couldn't use the information if they tried.
The smaller Russian companies with owner-managers who are quite efficient would never, ever see this information. The good technical people wouldn't work for the FSB, because the pay is etrrible and they can make 10 times as much working externally.
Incidentally, the FSB presentation the worst I have ever attended. These are people trained to keep secrets, not to present information. No visual aids, no handouts, just a monotonous monologue as the presenter read from a prepared script. The other funny thing was that it appears that the Russians have perfected cloning as the three FSB persons and the former FSB person who looked and acted similar!
Hanssen (Score:5)
Re:Freedom of Information? (Score:2)
i agree with your points, but that's not the issue i'm driving at. it's not like this sensitive weaponry stuff is really kept to just one or two superpowers in the world anymore. i'm sure the spying was much more mundane than that, concerning things which, in my opinion, are accredited National Secret status simply for the country's self-interest.
Fross
Re:The best part (Score:2)
Who the FUCK do you think you are to exlaim moral outrage?
Plus, whoever moderated the parent as "offtopic" should be rounded up and shot along with this spy...
Track 40 Floppy (Score:2)
- Steeltoe
Re:Amiga&Floppy (Score:2)
I had an Amiga 1000 (with an second external hard drive) and that thing was nice.
Of course I eventually had my modem and then its Printer, and motherboard all fry (long set of stories).
I ended up using the monitor as a TV screen hooked into my cable box when I finally got my own apartment until the picture tube burnt out.
Now all I have left is a big stack of floppies and the external drive. I've heard that IBM drives can't read Amiga drives (don't want to test that). I'd love to transfer stuff off of them (early writings, games, etc). So I can use them in an emulator or something. Anyone know if I can get a converter to hook up the amiga drive to an IBM? Or some other way to pull off the data?
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
All your events [openschedule.org] are belong to us.
Re:track 40 (Score:3)
I'm sure most people, pheds or otherwise, would have a hard time comprehending the idea of storing data outside of the high-level-formatted area of a disk drive, much less the idea of using strange formatting to hide things in the gap spaces of a track, and have an otherwise apparently empty disk. I can even think of a couple of easy tricks you could do with CD-R disks to hide data, without going into the steganographic possibilities of what appears to be a disc full of pr0n.
Aha! So its an M$ Conspiracy! (Score:2)
Re:For 15 years?!? (Score:3)
Blackadder (Score:3)
Melchett: Filthy Hun weasels, fighting their dirty, underhand war!
Darling: And fortunately, one of our spies...
Melchett: Splendid fellows, brave heores risking life and limb for Blighty...
TWW
Freedom of Information? (Score:2)
(not to be taken _too_ seriously)
Fross
And he's a Linux user! (Score:3)
Re:We should get M$'s Allchin to comment (Score:2)
Wired [wired.com], the affidavit [fas.org], and World Net Daily [worldnetdaily.com] indicate that he was using Linux and Palms.
Re:forgetting about "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:2)
If you waited for a court case to reach completion (as well as optional appeals) before you formed an opinion on anything, you couldn't function. You use your judgement every day, why not here?
True, if the guy is acquitted, he could sue those who said (or wrote) he was a spy. But he could be acquitted even if he was a spy.
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
i agree with you on the target, but i dont think they will use atomic bombs. a more likely device woule be biological weapons. they are alot cheaper, easier to conceal, and delivery is also alot easier.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
Re:FUD (Score:3)
Government contests they had proof which dates far back, so why wasn't anything done?
Having proof which dates back 10 years is not necessarily the same thing as knowing about it for 10 years.
The amount of detail in the affadavit makes it look like the investigators have got hold of the Russian file on "B". It appears that Hanssen was only under FBI surveillance since 2000.
Re:For 15 years?!? (Score:2)
more documents (Score:2)
All your events [openschedule.org] are belong to us.
40 track mode not as complicated as it may seem? (Score:3)
You know what, guys? It may be simpler than everyone thinks. He specifically said "use 40 track mode", not "look on track 40" or some other phrase. I have to wonder if these were 360K disks written with a 1.2M drive, that had been previously formatted/written in a 360K drive (different track widths), and the Russians had a problem trying to read it on a 360K drive?
I mean, I just don't see him going to that much trouble to stick the data on a single out-of-range track when there's not much you can put there anyhow, and then not tell the Russians until after they had trouble with it. And it was dead-dropped, not mailed, so there wasn't much chance of interception.
Even if he did use some paranoid trick, in the end it didn't matter. After a little research (CNN.com) I found out that he was discovered when the pheds got a copy of some KGB files about his case. The KGB didn't know who he was (probably not until this week!), but the pheds were able to correlate the information rather easily.
It seems his main failing was insisting on dead-drops within walking distance of his home, in spite of the Russians wanting them much farther away. He had been trying to restore communications with the Russians, and was noticed driving by and pausing at the dead-drop area many times, and even waving a flashlight up and down a wooden post. He was arrested at the location, known as "ELLIS".
Re:$1.3 mil (Score:2)
It's Money, Ideology, Compromise and Extortion.
Compromise: You're asked to do various things you think are innocent. (e.g. You're asked for a copy of the internal phonebook, or org chart.) The requests get ratcheted up, until you get to the point where the agents can threaten to expose you as a spy, unless you do whatever they ask.
Extortion: Should be obvious. (e.g. Do what they ask or they'll hurt your faimily. )
Technological whiz (Score:4)
track 40 (Score:5)
Guess you weren't around in the 80's... 5 1/4" diskettes are usually formatted to have 40 tracks, numbered 0-39. But the disk drives can usually seek to track 40 or 41 without a problem. This lets you hide secret shit that DISKCOPY.EXE and so on won't pick up.
AFAIK it was first used as a rather weak copy protection scheme (you saw this a lot on the C64, at least...) and later on as a way to transmit viruses between floppies.
(Disk-based copy protection got more sophisticated, and used deliberately written errors, misalignment of the head, etc. in a vain attempt to confound the "pirate" copying programs.)
Interesting to see this used with some success against the feds... maybe they could have learnt a bit more from the phreaks after all. *grin*
forgetting about "innocent until proven guilty"? (Score:4)
> that spied for Russia for 15 years,...
Uhm. There's a certain principle in western law, commonly known as "innocent until proven guilty." Making implicit assumptions as to the otherwise on front page
Another Secret Stolen!! (Score:2)
Ever see the FBI? They've had this technology for a long time. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if either one side stole it from the other, they both bought it from a third party, or else it demonstrates the idea of parallel development
Re:How convenient for GB v2.0 (Score:2)
Not that I think the current missile defense system is particularly deployable. And it would certainly be expensive. But, it might provide a deterrent to someone attacking us with nukes. Nukes don't worry me as much as bio-weapons.
Re:CBM disk format (Score:2)
The Apple II also used GCR. The Macintosh and Apple IIgs 3.5" disk added variable numbers of sectors. I think the Amiga also had a variable-speed format. And TRSDOS was probably the only other 8-bit DOS to keep the directory in the middle of the disk (track 17 on a 35-sector disk).
And I think that the Dreamcast's GD-ROMs probably use some sort of GCR to achieve higher density. What does the G stand for?
But where Commodore failed was in the crappy interface, which was a serial version of the IEEE-488 parallel interface, and it couldn't even run at a decent speed because of a bug in one of the chips (VIA?) in the C64.
No, the 3.5" floppy won out for two reasons: size and durability. It certainly had nothing to do with the lack of a GCR format, as Apple was one of the first to use the 3.5" format.
Whereas us TRS-80 users had full direct control of the disk controller chip, instead of having copy-protection built into the drive [slashdot.org] like the C-64 and Atari did.
Hanssen a spy? (Score:2)
Hanssen is l337! [ridiculopathy.com]
Spam Encryptor (Score:2)
Re:HVA? (Score:2)
Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
"Many more than we have, because like nearly all complex devices atomic warheads and vehicles become unreliable with age. We have also not been building ANY recently."
He's done this already... (Score:4)
- Somone set up us the bomb
- We get signal
- Main screen turn on
- How are you gentlemen !!
- All your base are belong to us
Go and read the correspondence between Hanssen and his KGB controllers and note how these phrases convey the exact meaning of what correspondence passed between them.The last phrase is definitely the most disturbing. Was it sent before he was caught or after? I think we should be told.
Re:The best part (Score:2)
In formulating an ethical rule, you cannot refer to particulars. Either spying for a country other than one's own is wrong or it is not. If you maintain that this guy did wrong, then you have to claim that those double agents in the KGB did wrong too.
Punishing this guy because he broke US laws is easy; arguing that he did morally the wrong thing is a lot harder if not impossible.
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Re:What happened is far from amusing (Score:2)
Actually, it does.
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Re:track 40 (Score:2)
So THAT'S how they did it...seriously, I was always curious about that. Of course, there always was that PC program that could get past that, I forget what it was called though (something really generic, like PC Copy or something).
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