This week the New York Times published their online investigation into the seamy world of the professional slander industry. (Alternate URL.)
At first glance, the websites appear amateurish. They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they're intended to be read by machines, not humans. But do not underestimate their power...

One woman in Ohio was the subject of so many negative posts that Bing declared in bold at the top of her search results that she "is a liar and a cheater" — the same way it states that Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States. For roughly 500 of the 6,000 people we searched for, Google suggested adding the phrase "cheater" to a search of their names. The unverified claims are on obscure, ridiculous-looking sites, but search engines give them a veneer of credibility. Posts from Cheaterboard.com appear in Google results alongside Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles....

That would be bad enough for people whose reputations have been savaged. But the problem is all the worse because it's so hard to fix. And that is largely because of the secret, symbiotic relationship between those facilitating slander and those getting paid to remove it.
Who, exactly? The Times spoke to:

• Cyrus Sullivan, the Portland-based owner of one site who also runs a reputation-management service "to help people get 'undesirable information' about themselves removed from their search engine results. The 'gold package' cost $699.99. For those customers, Mr. Sullivan would alter the computer code underlying the offending posts, instructing search engines to ignore them...."

• 247Removal's owner Heidi Glosser, who "charges $750 or more per post removal, which adds up to thousands of dollars for most of her clients. To get posts removed, she said, she often pays an 'administrative fee' to the gripe site's webmaster. We asked her whether this was extortion. 'I can't really give you a direct answer,' she said." She appeared to have links to...

• Web developer Vikram Parmar, who seemed to be running several sites that produced slander while also simultaneously running sites that made money by removing that slander.

But finally, the Times reminded their readers that "in certain circumstances, Google will remove harmful content from individuals' search results, including links to 'sites with exploitative removal practices.' If a site charges to remove posts, you can ask Google not to list it.

"Google didn't advertise this policy widely, and few victims of online slander seem aware that it's an option. That's in part because when you Google ways to clean up your search results, Google's solution is buried under ads for reputation-management services..."

After the U.S. unveiled charges against six members of the Sandworm unit in Russia's military intelligence agency, Wired re-visited "a secret experiment in 2007 proved that hackers could devastate power grid equipment beyond repair — with a file no bigger than a gif." It's an excerpt from the new book SANDWORM: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers which also remembers the late industrial control systems security pioneer Mike Assante: Among [Sandworm's] acts of cyberwar was an unprecedented attack on Ukraine's power grid in 2016, one that appeared designed to not merely cause a blackout, but to inflict physical damage on electric equipment. And when one cybersecurity researcher named Mike Assante dug into the details of that attack, he recognized a grid-hacking idea invented not by Russian hackers, but by the United State government, and tested a decade earlier...

[S]creens showed live footage from several angles of a massive diesel generator. The machine was the size of a school bus, a mint green, gargantuan mass of steel weighing 27 tons, about as much as an M3 Bradley tank. It sat a mile away from its audience in an electrical substation, producing enough electricity to power a hospital or a navy ship and emitting a steady roar. Waves of heat coming off its surface rippled the horizon in the video feed's image. Assante and his fellow Idaho National Laboratory researchers had bought the generator for $300,000 from an oil field in Alaska. They'd shipped it thousands of miles to the Idaho test site, an 890-square-mile piece of land where the national lab maintained a sizable power grid for testing purposes, complete with 61 miles of transmission lines and seven electrical substations. Now, if Assante had done his job properly, they were going to destroy it. And the assembled researchers planned to kill that very expensive and resilient piece of machinery not with any physical tool or weapon but with about 140 kilobytes of data, a file smaller than the average cat GIF shared today on Twitter....

Protective relays are designed to function as a safety mechanism to guard against dangerous physical conditions in electric systems. If lines overheat or a generator goes out of sync, it's those protective relays that detect the anomaly and open a circuit breaker, disconnecting the trouble spot, saving precious hardware, even preventing fires... But what if that protective relay could be paralyzed — or worse, corrupted so that it became the vehicle for an attacker's payload...?

Black chunks began to fly out of an access panel on the generator, which the researchers had left open to watch its internals. Inside, the black rubber grommet that linked the two halves of the generator's shaft was tearing itself apart. A few seconds later, the machine shook again as the protective relay code repeated its sabotage cycle, disconnecting the machine and reconnecting it out of sync. This time a cloud of gray smoke began to spill out of the generator, perhaps the result of the rubber debris burning inside it... The engineers had just proven without a doubt that hackers who attacked an electric utility could go beyond a temporary disruption of the victim's operations: They could damage its most critical equipment beyond repair...

Assante also remembers feeling something weightier in the moments after the Aurora experiment. It was a sense that, like Robert Oppenheimer watching the first atomic bomb test at another U.S. national lab six decades earlier, he was witnessing the birth of something historic and immensely powerful.

"I had a very real pit in my stomach," Assante says. "It was like a glimpse of the future."

Long-time Slashdot readers 93 Escort Wagon and schwit1 both shared the news that U.S. President Trump is "considering" a pardon for Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who "leaked a trove of secret files in 2013 to news organizations that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations" carried out by the agency, according to Reuters: U.S. authorities for years have wanted Snowden returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges brought in 2013. Snowden fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia... Trump's softening stance toward Snowden represents a sharp reversal. Shortly after the leaks, Trump expressed hostility toward Snowden, calling him "a spy who should be executed..."

Some civil libertarians have praised Snowden for revealing the extraordinary scope of America's digital espionage operations including domestic spying programs that senior U.S. officials had publicly insisted did not exist. But such a move would horrify many in the U.S. intelligence community, some of whose most important secrets were exposed.
In 2015 a petition with 100,000 signatures was submitted to the U.S. government seeking a pardon. But then-president Obama's Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism responded that "Mr. Snowden's dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work day in and day out to protect it," also arguing that Mr. Snowden had failed to accept the consequences of his actions. "He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers — not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime."

In 2016, then-president Obama insisted "I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves... I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community." But the New York Times disagreed. "Snowden told The Washington Post that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the NSA, and that they took no action," the Times wrote in an editorial pushing for clemency.

Others pushing for a pardon include Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, the American Civil Liberties Union, one million people who eventually signed another petition which was submitted to the White House — and Edward Snowden.

In a press conference on Friday, US authorities announced they arrested the main suspect behind this month's major Twitter hack. From a report: The suspected hacker was identified as Graham Ivan Clark, a 17-year-old teen from Hillsborough County, Florida. According to Florida news outlet WFLA-TV, which first reported on the arrest, Clark was arrested earlier this morning, following a nationwide collaboration between the FBI, the IRS, the DOJ, and the Secret Service. Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren filed charges against Clark for being the "mastermind" behind the July 15 Twitter incident, when the teen is believed to have gained access to Twitter's backend, took over several high-profile accounts, and tweeted on their behalf to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The list of hacked accounts includes big names like Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Michael Bloomberg, and others. Further reading: Twitter Says High-Profile Hack Was the Result of a Phishing Attack.

Anthony Levandowski, former Google engineer and a pioneer of self-driving car tech, agreed to plead guilty Thursday to stealing trade secrets from the internet giant. CNET reports: Levandowski left Google in 2016 to start his own self-driving truck company, which was quickly acquired by Uber for $680 million. These actions set off a chain of events that led to Google's autonomous vehicle unit, Waymo, suing Uber over alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. That lawsuit settled in February 2018 with Uber agreeing to pay Waymo $245 million. The prosecutors indicted Levandowski in August in a suit that involves 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google. The activities allegedly took place as he prepared to leave the search giant to build out Uber's self-driving car operation.

Levandowski pleaded guilty to one count of trade secret theft in an agreement in which federal prosecutors agree to drop the remaining charges, according to a filing with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California. The plea carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. "I downloaded these files with the intent to use them for my own personal benefit, and I understand that I was not authorized to take the files for this purpose," Levandowski said in the filing. No sentencing date has yet been scheduled.

Days before Julian Assange's extradition hearings are set to continue, WikiLeaks' journalist Kristin Hrafnsson reports that the official WikiLeaks twitter account has been locked. "All attempts to get it reopened via regular channels have been unsuccessful," writes Hrafnsson in a tweet. "It has been impossible to reach a human at twitter to resolve the issue. Can someone fix this?" RT reports: The @wikileaks account's most recent posts date back to February 9 and concern the dire precedent set by extraditing a publisher to stand trial on espionage charges. Assange's extradition hearing in the UK, which a court ordered to be split into two parts, is set to begin next week, while the second half is scheduled for May. The publisher's lawyers have complained that access to their client is being restricted, and Assange was only recently moved from solitary confinement at Belmarsh prison after his fellow inmates staged a protest. The UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer has accused the UK government of contributing to Assange's "psychological torture" after examining the activist last year. ZeroHedge also points out that this isn't the first time WikiLeaks' account was locked. In 2016, "Twitter lit up in late July with allegations that it tried to suppress news that secret-leaking website Wikileaks exposed thousands of emails obtained from the servers of the Democratic National Committee," reports ZeroHeads, citing The Washington Examiner. "Friday afternoon, users noted, '#DNCLeaks' was trending, with more than 250,000 tweets about it on the platform. By Friday evening, it vanished completely from the site's 'trending' bar for at least 20 minutes. It returned as '#DNCLeak' after users erupted, though it was too late to quell their rage."

For what it's worth, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at the time denied any attempt to intentionally silence the account.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Manhattan federal prosecutors are poised to open their case Tuesday in the trial of a former software engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency who is charged with handing over a trove of classified information on the spy agency's hacking operations to WikiLeaks (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). In 2017, WikiLeaks released more than 8,000 pages of secret materials -- which the antisecrecy organization called "Vault 7" -- detailing the CIA's cyberespionage arsenal, including the agency's playbook for hacking smartphones, computer operating systems, messaging applications and internet-connected televisions. It was one of the largest breaches in the agency's history. Federal prosecutors say the defendant, Joshua Schulte, stole the documents when he worked in a CIA unit that designed the hacking tools.

Mr. Schulte, 31 years old, faces 11 criminal counts, including illegal gathering and transmission of national defense information -- charges that derive from the Espionage Act, a statute that has been applied in other WikiLeaks cases. Some of the charges relate to Mr. Schulte's alleged misconduct and obstruction following his 2017 arrest -- prosecutors say he lied to law enforcement and disobeyed court orders. Mr. Schulte and his lawyers have called the espionage charges vague and overreaching, saying they infringed on constitutional free-speech rights. They have alleged fatal errors in the government's case, objected to the secrecy shrouding the investigation and protested Mr. Schulte's isolated confinement in a Manhattan jail. Opening arguments in the trial are expected as soon as Tuesday, once jury selection is completed.

Some interesting news from Politico. America's Justice Department will still prosecute Julian Assange for allegedly assisting Chelsea Manning, and for 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act -- but "has decided not to charge Julian Assange for his role in exposing some of the CIA's most secret spying tools, according to a U.S. official and two other people familiar with the case." It's a move that has surprised national security experts and some former officials, given prosecutors' recent decision to aggressively go after the WikiLeaks founder on more controversial Espionage Act charges that some legal experts said would not hold up in court. The decision also means that Assange will not face punishment for publishing one of the CIA's most potent arsenals of digital code used to hack devices, dubbed Vault 7. The leak -- one of the most devastating in CIA history -- not only essentially rendered those tools useless for the CIA, it gave foreign spies and rogue hackers access to them...

[P]rosecutors were worried about the sensitivity of the Vault 7 materials, according to an official familiar with the deliberations over whether to charge Assange. Broaching such a classified subject in court risks exposing even more CIA secrets, legal experts said.

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: A judge in Ecuador has jailed a Swedish software developer whom authorities believe is a key member of WikiLeaks and close to Julian Assange, while prosecutors investigate charging him with hacking as part of an alleged plot to "destabilise" the country's government. Ola Bini, 36, was ordered to held in preventive detention on Saturday pending possible cyber-attack charges and his bank accounts were frozen. Prosecutors were examining dozens of hard drives and other material he had in his possession, according to local media reports...

On Thursday, Ecuador's interior minister, Maria Paula Romo, said they had identified a "key member of WikiLeaks" who was "close to Mr Julian Assange". Secret visitors' logs seen by the Guardian show that Bini was one of Assange's many visitors in Ecuador's embassy in Knightsbridge, west London.... Speaking to local media on Thursday, Romo said Ecuador was at risk of cyber attack, hinting Wikileaks could retaliate for the termination of Assange's asylum. She added the government did not want the country "to turn into an international [cyber] piracy centre"...

Last week, the government of president Lenin Moreno, 66, accused WikiLeaks of being involved in a campaign implicating Moreno and his family in corruption. Moreno, who has long expressed his unhappiness over Assange's asylum status, complained that "photos of my bedroom, what I eat and how my wife and daughters and friends dance" had been circulating on social media.

Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange has been arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder was granted refuge in 2012 while on bail in the UK over sexual assault allegations against him in Sweden. From a report: At the time, Assange claimed that if he was extradited to Sweden he might be arrested by the US and face charges relating to WikiLeaks's publication of hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables. The journalist and Assange supporter John Pilger called last week for people to "fill the street outside the embassy and protect him and show solidarity with a courageous man." US authorities have never officially confirmed that they have charged Assange, but in November 2018 a mistake in a document filed in an unrelated case hinted that criminal charges might have been prepared in secret. London's Metropolitan police released a statement which said officers had executed a warrant after the Ecuadorian government withdrew asylum.

SonicSpike shares a report from The Guardian: Julian Assange, the fugitive WikiLeaks founder whose diplomatic sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy appears increasingly precarious, is launching a legal challenge against the Trump administration. Lawyers for the Australian activist have filed an urgent application to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) aimed at forcing the hand of U.S. prosecutors, requiring them to "unseal" any secret charges against him. The legal move is an attempt to prevent Assange's extradition to the U.S. at a time that a new Ecuadorian government has been making his stay in the central London apartment increasingly inhospitable.

The 1,172-page submission by Assange's lawyers calls on the U.S. to unseal any secret charges against him and urges Ecuador to cease its "espionage activities" against him. Baltasar Garzon, the prominent Spanish judge who has pursued dictators, terrorists and drug barons, is the international coordinator of Assange's legal team. He has said the case involves "the right to access and impart information freely" that has been put in "jeopardy." The Trump administration is refusing to reveal details of charges against Assange despite the fact that sources in the U.S. Department of Justice have confirmed to the media that they exist under seal. The application alleges that U.S. prosecutors have begun approaching people in the U.S., Germany and Iceland and pressed them to testify against Assange in return for immunity from prosecution. Those approached, it is said, include people associated with WikiLeaks' joint publications with other media about U.S. diplomacy, Guantanamo Bay and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the beginning of the year, Strava released a data visualization map that showed all the activity tracked by users of its app. The map was detailed enough to potentially give away extremely sensitive information about military personnel on active service in locations across the world. After reviewing their GPS policies, the Pentagon is banning soldiers and other personnel at sensitive bases and warzone areas from using location features on fitness trackers and other devices. Engadget reports: The Department of Defense is not issuing an outright ban on GPS devices and apps, but declared that the location features must be turned off in certain areas. "These geolocation capabilities can expose personal information, locations, routines, and numbers of DOD personnel, and potentially create unintended security consequences and increased risk to the joint force and mission," a memo obtained by the Associated Press said. It's up to ranking officers in less-sensitive areas to decide whether their charges can use GPS functions, based on the threat level in that location. The Defense Department will also provide training on the risks that fitness trackers bring.

An anonymous reader shares a AP report: President Donald Trump's choice to be the first female director of the CIA is a career spymaster who once ran an agency prison in Thailand where terror suspects were subjected to a harsh interrogation technique that the president has supported. Trump tweeted Tuesday that CIA Director Mike Pompeo will replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and that he has selected Gina Haspel to replace Pompeo. Haspel, the current deputy CIA director, also helped carry out an order that the agency destroy its waterboarding videos. That order prompted a lengthy Justice Department investigation that ended without charges. Haspel, who has extensive overseas experience, briefly ran a secret CIA prison where accused terrorists Abu Zubayadah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

schwit1 shares an interesting story. Newsweek reports: A British teenager managed to obtain access to sensitive U.S. plans about intelligence operations in different Middle East countries by acting as former CIA Director John Brennan, a court heard on Friday. Kane Gamble, 18, researched Brennan and used the information he gathered to speak to an internet company and persuade call handlers to give him access to the spy chief's email inbox in 2015. He pretended to be both a Verizon employee and Brennan to access Brennan's internet account.

Astonishingly, Gamble managed to gain access to Brennan's emails and his addressbook, as well as his iCloud storage. He even managed to remotely access the iPad of Brennan's wife... Gamble, aged 15 at the time, also persuaded a helpdesk at the FBI that he was the then deputy director Mark Giuliano... In October 2017, Gamble pleaded guilty to 10 charges, including eight charges of "performing a function with intent to secure unauthorized access" to the computers and two of "unauthorized modification of computer material."

An anonymous reader writes: "Gabor Szathmari, a security researcher for CryptoAUSTRALIA, is working on a method of improving the security of leaked documents by removing hidden dots left behind by laser printers, which are usually used to watermark documents and track down leakers," reports Bleeping Computer. "Szathmari's work was inspired by the case of a 25-year-old woman, Reality Leigh Winner, who was recently charged with leaking top-secret NSA documents to a news outlet." According to several researchers, Winner might have been caught after The Intercept had shared some of the leaked documents with the NSA. These documents had the invisible markings left behind by laser printers, which included the printer's serial number and the date and time when the document was printed. This allowed the NSA to track down Winner and arrest her even before she was able to publish the leaked documents. Now, Szatmari has submitted a pull request to the PDF Redact Tools, a project for securely redacting and stripping metadata from documents before publishing. Szathmari's pull request adds a code routine to the PDF Redact Tools project that would allow app operators to convert documents to black and white before publishing. "The black and white conversion will convert colors like the faded yellow dots to white," Szathmari said in an interview. Ironically, the project is managed by First Look Media, the parent company behind The Intercept news outlet.

On Monday, news outlet The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. The documents revealed that a Russian intelligence operation sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials days before the election, which ran through a hack of a U.S. voting software supplier. Hours later, the Department of Justice charged 25-year-old government contractor Reality Leigh Winner with sharing top secret material with the media. The DoJ said it Winner had "printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information" before mailing the materials. But how could the DoJ know that it was Winner who had printed the documents, or that the documents were printed at all? ArsTechnica explains: [...] The Intercept team inadvertently exposed its source because the copy showed fold marks that indicated it had been printed -- and it included encoded watermarking that revealed exactly when it had been printed and on what printer. The watermarks in the scanned document The Intercept published yesterday -- were from a Xerox Docucolor printer. Many printers use this or similar schemes, printing faint yellow dots in a grid pattern on printed documents as a form of steganography, encoding metadata about the document into its hard-copy output. Researchers working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation have reverse-engineered the grid pattern employed by this class of printer; using the tool, Ars (and others, including security researcher Robert Graham) determined that the document passed to The Intercept was printed on May 9, 2017 at 6:20am from a printer with the serial number 535218 or 29535218. Further reading: How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner.

schwit1 quotes a report from The Hill: The Department of Justice charged 25-year-old government contractor Reality Leigh Winner with sharing top secret material with a media outlet, prosecutors announced in a press release Monday. Court documents filed by the government don't specify which media outlet received the materials allegedly leaked by Winner, but NBC News reported that the material went to the Intercept online news outlet. The Intercept published a top secret NSA report Monday that alleged Russian military intelligence launched a 2016 cyberattack on a voting software company. Details on the report published by The Intercept suggest that it was created on May 5, 2017 -- the same day prosecutors say the materials Winner is charged with sharing were created. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on whether Winner is accused of sharing the report published by the Intercept. Last month, Winner allegedly "printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information" before mailing the materials to an unnamed online news outlet a few days later, according to prosecutors.

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: A former developer for IBM pled guilty on Friday to economic espionage and to stealing trade secrets related to a type of software known as a clustered file system, which IBM sells to customers around the world. Xu Jiaqiang stole the secrets during his stint at IBM from 2010 to 2014 "to benefit the National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People's Republic of China," according to the U.S. Justice Department. In a press release describing the criminal charges, the Justice Department also stated that Xu tried to sell secret IBM source code to undercover FBI agents posing as tech investors. (The agency does not explain if Xu's scheme to sell to tech investors was to benefit China or to line his own pockets).

Part of the sting involved Xu demonstrating the stolen software, which speeds computer performance by distributing works across multiple servers, on a sample network. The former employee acknowledged that others would know the software had been taken from IBM, but said he could create extra computer scripts to help mask its origins.
At one point 31-year-old Xu even showed undercover FBI agents the part of the source code that identified it as coming from IBM "as well as the date on which it had been copyrighted."

The Justice Department is set to announce Wednesday, reports the Washington Post, the indictments of two Russian spies and two criminal hackers in connection with the heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014, marking the first U.S. criminal cyber charges ever against Russian government officials (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). From the report: The indictments target two members of the Russian intelligence agency FSB, and two hackers hired by the Russians. The charges include hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage, according to officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the charges have not yet been announced. The indictments are part of the largest hacking case brought by the United States.

In 2011 a gynecology doctor took his computer for repairs at Best Buy's Geek Squad. But the repair technician was a paid FBI informant -- one of several working at Geek Squad -- and the doctor was ultimately charged with possessing child pornography, according to OC Weekly. An anonymous reader quotes their new report: Recently unsealed records reveal a much more extensive secret relationship than previously known between the FBI and Best Buy's Geek Squad, including evidence the agency trained company technicians on law-enforcement operational tactics, shared lists of targeted citizens and, to covertly increase surveillance of the public, encouraged searches of computers even when unrelated to a customer's request for repairs. Assistant United States Attorney M. Anthony Brown last year labeled allegations of a hidden partnership as "wild speculation." But more than a dozen summaries of FBI memoranda filed inside Orange County's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse this month in USA v. Mark Rettenmaier contradict the official line...

Other records show how [Geek Squad supervisor Justin] Meade's job gave him "excellent and frequent" access for "several years" to computers belonging to unwitting Best Buy customers, though agents considered him "underutilized" and wanted him "tasked" to search devices "on a more consistent basis"... evidence demonstrates company employees routinely snooped for the agency, contemplated "writing a software program" specifically to aid the FBI in rifling through its customers' computers without probable cause for any crime that had been committed, and were "under the direction and control of the FBI." The doctor's lawyer argues Best Buy became an unofficial wing of the FBI by offering $500 for every time they found evidence leading to criminal charges.