A Convicted Hacker and an Internet Icon Join Forces to Thwart NSA Spying

http://www.wired.com/2014/07/dark-mail-hides-metadata-from-nsa

by sinak • 12 years ago

48 25 12 years ago

wired.com

saraid2163• 12 years ago

I feel like we need to start a new meme of "they thwart spies!" along the lines of "they fight crime!"

hackuser2• 12 years ago

Dark Mail is written by someone who was convicted of helping to steal credit card information?!

rakoo2• 12 years ago

Who cares ? If the protocol is open and good, and we can build open source implementations, no one cares about the life of the creator.

icantthinkofone2• 12 years ago

The question is, can you trust someone who has broken trust in the past and in a major way?

nezza-_-• 12 years ago

Has nothing to do with the Dark Mail Alliance, right? http://darkmail.info/

01Michael10• 12 years ago

It is the one and same if you had read the link you provided... The Dark Mail Alliance lists Ladar Levison as part of the team who is one of the people mentioned in the article. The same name thing may be a giveaway also...

GrinningFool• 12 years ago

    Watt once had a lucrative Wall Street career coding software 
    for real-time stock-trading systems until he wrote a packet-
    sniffing program for a long-time friend and found himself  
    embroiled in a multi-million-dollar bank card heist that 
    netted him a two-year prison term.

I love how puff-pieces always trivialize the things that would run counter to their narrative. He didn't really do anything wrong - he was just helping his friend[0][1].

People do what they do, and that's cool - but let's not pretend he just accidentally found himself tripped up in some fraud situation, oops don't know how that happened hey look an awesome product in which trust is essential!

0. There's a slightly more complete look here, though not focused on Watt: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sex-drugs-and-the-b...

1. Wired did a similar sympathetic piece last year in which they made Watt's past seem like a minor misdeed (some wording is essentially identical to what I quoted above): http://www.wired.com/2013/04/stephen-watt-stalked-by-past/

Mandatum4• 12 years ago

In response to the Rolling Stone article:

    Patrick's job was to probe corporate networks for vulnerabilities to a malware attack known as a "sequel injection," which overwhelms the victim's system with meaningless commands until the system gives up and defaults to using the malicious code.

Sequel injection, huh? :P

girvo• 12 years ago

That... wow. That's exactly what "Sequel injection" is, basically, you overwhelm the target with "v2.0", or the "sequel", if you will, and it just gives up and runs that code, thus "injecting" the "sequel".

Holy crap.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

Assuming they mean SQL injection... well, "sequel" is at least recognized as one of two mainstream pronunciations. My mom once pronounced that initialism as "squirrel".

sarciszewski3• 12 years ago

According to Watt, he was convicted for fixing compiler flags for a general purpose tcpdump-esque sniffer program because the TJ Maxx fraudsters (Albert Gonzalez, et al.) were too incompetent to figure it out themselves. This is the sort of innocuous request you might get from someone on a forum "because you look like you know C."

http://infiltratecon.com/watt.html

tptacek• 12 years ago

In this case, it wasn't some person on a forum asking him just because he knew C.

bsimpson• 12 years ago

That Rolling Stone article was both an interesting read and good contrast to the OP re: Watt's character. Thanks for sharing.

eliteraspberrie• 12 years ago

Watt wasn't convicted for fraud, he was convicted for not snitching. I, for one, trust the man's integrity, and I'll judge his code when I see it.

Mandatum4• 12 years ago

    Stephen Watt pleaded guilty to writing the sniffer code that proved key to Albert's operation but continues to insist that he never knew it was being used for illegal purposes, noting that he made no money from Albert's crimes.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sex-drugs-and-the-b...

A Convicted Hacker and an Internet Icon Join Forces to Thwart NSA Spying

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