Different businesses received different fliers based on what industry they’re involved in, such as airport service providers, rental cars, and financial institutions. The fliers were released privately to the businesses but, as these things are wont to do, the fliers eventually made their way into the public.

While some businesses, such as the examples listed above, might be natural allies in the FBI’s anti-terrorism effort, some of the other businesses entreated to help the FBI are a little puzzling, to say the least. For instance, did you know that tattoo parlors and MAC makeup counters are popular watering holes for terrorists? Because they are! Well, at least according to the FBI. Check out the flier below that was issued to tattoo shops.

(As much as this sounds like a joke, I assure you this is real.)

Tattoo Shops

So remember: the next time you and three of your best buds visit your local tattoo artist to get matching tattoos of some goofy character that supposedly means “bravery,” you may be getting profiled as a suspected terrorist. And for the love of god, don’t bring any friends that are missing any digits. Everybody knows those people are nothing but bad news.

Alternately, those of you who frequently add to your makeup collection might be causing a blip on the FBI’s radar as well. Here’s the flier the FBI issued to beauty/drug distributors:

Beauty Drug Distributors

I’d just like to point out that “travels illogical distance to store” and “evasive or vague about intended use of products” perfectly describes every teenager’s first experience with buying condoms at a drug store. Might wanna consider keeping it in your pants, kiddos, or else you might be drawing some federal-level heat.

The file contains a lot of stuff that we already knew, such as Jobs experimenting with drugs during college and the lawsuits he was involved with while he was at Apple.

It does contain some interesting information such as high school GPA. It was a 2.65 if you were wondering. The FBI interviewed a lot of people with a common consensus being that Jobs could be trusted, but questioned his moral character. Some people, however, said that he couldn’t be trusted whatsoever.

Some of the more juicy comments on Jobs’ character are as follows:

[Redacted] advised that he has been acquainted with Mr. Jobs since [redacted]. He characterized Mr. Jobs as a deceptive individual who who is not completely forthright and honest.

[Redacted] advised that he is no longer friends with Mr. Jobs. He feels bitter toward and alienated by Mr. Jobs based on his association with Mr. Jobs at ACI. He characterized Mr. Jobs as an honest and trustworthy individual; however, his moral character is questionable.

They further stated that Mr. Jobs has integrity as long as he gets his way.

She stated she was somewhat reluctant to discuss the Appointee since she has questions concerning his ethics and his morality.

To read the rest of the almost 200 page file, it can be perused for your enjoyment here. There’s a lot of information that may be interesting for the Steve Jobs fan.

A Symantec representative commented on the attempt:

“In January an individual claiming to be part of the ‘Anonymous’ group attempted to extort a payment from Symantec in exchange for not publicly posting stolen Symantec source code they claimed to have in their possession. Symantec conducted an internal investigation into this incident and also contacted law enforcement given the attempted extortion and apparent theft of intellectual property. The communications with the person(s) attempting to extort the payment from Symantec were part of the law enforcement investigation. Given that the investigation is still ongoing, we are not going to disclose the law enforcement agencies involved and have no additional information to provide”.

Here are some segments from the impatient ‘Anonymous’ @YamaTough hacker as he negotiates the $50,000 demanded payment from a Symantec employee:

“If you are trying to trace with the ftp trick it’s just worthless. If we detect any malevolent tracing action we cancel the deal. Is that clear? You’ve got the doc files and pathes [sic] to the files. what’s the problem? Explain.”

“If we dont hear from you in 30m we make an official announcement and put your code on sale at auction terms. We have many people who are willing to get your code. Dont f*** with us.”

Apparently, the Hackers were on to Symantec for contacting higher authorities but never the less continued in their negotiations until they finally cut contact with the Symantec employee who claimed they needed more time:

“Since no code yet being released and our email communication wasnt also released we give you 10 minutes to decide which way you go after that two of your codes fly to the moon PCAnywhere and Norton Antivirus totaling 2350MB in size (rar) 10 minutes if no reply from you we consider it a START this time we’ve made mirrors so it will be hard for you to get rid of it.”

Symantec insists that users of their products are not under any significantly higher risk of attack due to the theft however; Symantec asked its PCAnywhere users to disable the product until the company could issue a software update. They assure clients that this will protect them against attacks resulting from the theft of the source code.

What we have is just an amazing read on how the FBI views Internet privacy-seeking individuals, especially those who frequent Internet Cafes. Thanks to the mind boggling “Communities Against Terrorism: Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activies Related to Internet Café” document, according to the FBI:

If you are overly concerned with privacy, you might be terrorist.

If you pay cash or use credit cards with different names at cyber cafés, you might be a terrorist.

If you use anonymizers, portals or any other means of IP address shielding, you might be a terrorist.

If you use “suspicious communications” via VOIP or through video game chats, you might be a terrorist.

If you use encryption software, you might be a terrorist.

If you try to shield you screen from other viewers, you might be a terrorist.

Now, the PDF does offer some information that’s actually useful, if not part of the common sense collective, when it informs people to watch out for folks downloading this kind of stuff:

- Content of extreme/radical nature with violent themes
- Anarchist Cookbook, explosives or weapons information
- Military tactics, equipment manuals, chemical or biological information
- Terrorist/revolutionary literature
- Preoccupation with press coverage of terrorist attacks
- Defensive tactics, police or government information
- Information about timers, electronics, or remote transmitters/receiver

But the rest of the document reads like a how to in relation to profiling “illicit” computer users. I highly recommend reading the FBI/Bureau of Justice Assistance document in full, just to get an idea of how many stereotypes concerning “computer geeks” both agencies are buying into.

And there’s the following disclaimer, which essentially says “sorry for all the profiling rhetoric in the above stanzas, because it is important not to profile, even though that’s exactly what the document did.” See for yourself:

It is important to remember that just because someone’s speech, actions, beliefs, appearance, or way of life is different; it does not mean that he or she is suspicious.

It feels like they left off an “even though that’s exactly what we’re doing with this warning.” One also wonders, in light of the document’s contents, if the closing statement was written with a straight face or not.

Lead image hat-tip.

UK police and the FBI held a conference call last week concerning cyber security, especially focusing on Anonymous and LulzSec members. The email planning the conference call was intercepted by Anonymous and shared on the net.

Naked Security confirms that the email titled “Anon-Lulz International Coordination Call” was sent to “over 40 law enforcement officers in the USA, UK, Ireland, Netherlands, France and Sweden.”

Anonymous used the leaked email to get into the phone conference and record the entirety of it. The entire 16 minute conversation has been uploaded to YouTube, among other places.

The conversation details the continued investigation into Anonymous and LulzSec. While most of the names of the hackers are censored, two hackers are explicitly named – Jake Davis (suspected of being the public face of Anonymous) and Ryan Clearly (who allegedly launched a DDoS attack on the Serious Organised Crime Agency’s Web site).

The FBI and UK Police did finally confirm that their call was intercepted, but the damage was already done.

Anonymous has, of course, been poking fun at the FBI since the hack was made clear:

We’ll continue to keep you up to date on the latest Anonymous escapades as they happen. They’re promising some “lulzy” stuff today.

According to internal FBI sources cited by CNET, the government obtained warrants to conduct electronic surveillance of MegaUpload. The surveillance was likely conducted using government-issued spyware, which would have been able to gain access to email data and Skype chat logs stored on MegaUpload’s computers. While Skype only maintains logs of users’ activity going back 30 days, logs can be kept on users’ hard drives indefinitely.

Some of the material intercepted by the FBI appears pretty damaging to MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom. One conversation from 2007 is particularly damning. According to the records obtained by Stuff’s New Zealand office, the head programmer and co-founder at MegaUpload were worried about a MegaUpload’s “risky” situation, and wondered whether DotCom could be trusted not to take the company’s money and run.

DotCom and the other MegaUpload employees who were arrested are currently still in New Zealand. The U.S. government has requested they be extradited to America for trial on charges that MegaUpload knowingly facilitated copyright infringement.

Data belonging to users of Megaupload could be deleted as soon as Thursday according to federal prosecutors. CBS is reporting that the company is defending itself by saying that their service was primarily used to store data like family photos and personal documents. Those users hoped they would be able to get their data back.

Megaupload hired two outside companies to store the data. As part of the investigation, the federal government froze the company’s account so they can’t pay the hosting fees.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia filed a letter in the case Friday saying that the storage companies, Carpatha Hosting and Cogent Communications Group, may begin deleting data Thursday.

The letter went on to say that the government copied some data from the servers. They have executed their search warrants so they have no right to access the data. The servers belong to the two companies so any inquiries need to be brought up with them.

Megaupload’s attorney Ira Rothken said that the company is working towards an agreement to keep the data from being erased. Not only is the data important to the 50 million customers that used the service, but it is essential for the company’s defense as well.

“We’re cautiously optimistic at this point that because the United States, as well as Megaupload, should have a common desire to protect consumers, that this type of agreement will get done,” he said.

This could complicate efforts by the Pirate Party to bring a formal complaint against the FBI for the many users who used the service for legal file storage.

We’ll keep you up to date on any developments in the Mega saga.

In a document called “Social Media Application” (pdf) released on January 19, it was revealed that the Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) at the FBI is looking for a company to provide software that can analyze any publicly available information, including tweets, Facebook statuses, notes, etc. and flag anything that the FBI wants to know about.

The plan is to use this information along with a mapping software to locate threats.

From the white paper:

This must be a secure, light weight web application portal, using mash-up technology. The application must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats. The product must have the capacity to allow the user to retain control of cached and real-time proprietary data; the ability to share it with selected partners, and ultimately enhancing coordination, synchronized-awareness and synergy at the operational level.

Notice the specific mention of “cached and real-time” data. This would enable them to build a database of information to trace patterns and compile profiles.

Among the things the FBI wishes to monitor closely are news organizations (Fox News, CNN and MSNBC were specifically mentioned), Facebook, and Twitter. They specified that they wish to keep tabs on:

1) US Domestic Terror Data
2) Worldwide Terror Data
3) US Embassies, Consulates and Military Installations
4) Weather Conditions and Forecasts
5) Traffic Video

That last item was particularly interesting because they expanded on it.

Traffic Video- Ability to display video feeds fiom traffic cameras to
monitor traffic patterns, obstructions, bottle necks, protesters, and flash
mobs.

The FBI wants to be able to have video feeds of protesters and to monitor flash mobs. With facial recognition software, license plate readers, plenty of public monitoring cameras, and a large cache of information waiting to be mined, this is a conspiracy theorists dream/nightmare come true.

Washington has released a press release today saying that they have shut down MegaUpload and Vestor Limited. They have also charged seven individuals with for “running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works.” The Justice Department and the FBI announced that they also believe the Web sites generated more than $175 million in “criminal proceeds” and more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners.

They claim that this action is among the largest “criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets misuse of a public content storage and distribute site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.”

The individuals and two companies were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on January 5. They were charged with racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.

For all the crimes listed, the individuals charged face a maximum penalty of 55 years in prison if they are found guilty of all of them.

The indictment alleges that the criminal enterprise is led by Kim Dotcom, 37, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand. He is the founder of MegaUpload and Vestor Limited.

The others charged in the case are Finn Batato, chief marketing officer; Julius Bencko, graphic designer; Sven Echternach, head of business development; Mathias Ortmann, chief technical officer and co-founder; Andrus Nomm, software programmer and head of the software development; and Bram van der Kolk, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure of the Mega Web sites.

Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann and van der Kolk were arrested today in New Zealand, under provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States. Bencko, Echternach and Nomm remain at large. Law enforcement executed 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries. They also seized $50 million in assets and targeted sites where MegaUpload had servers.

The indictment states that MegaUpload and the other Mega sites (i.e. MegaVideo) have “unlawfully” reproduced and distributed infringing copies of copyrighted works on a “massive scale.”

The indictment states that MegaUpload’s sole business model was expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works. The indictment also alleges that the site was structured to discourage its users from using MegaUpload for long-term personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded. They also allege that MegaUpload used financial incentives to encourage users to upload popular content to drive traffic to their site. More damning is that they allege MegaUpload paid users to specifically upload popular works and publicize the links around the world.

This all comes full circle with the allegation that MegaUpload didn’t allow people to search for files on their service because of their “conspiracy” to not publicize such content on their Web site.

The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, Organized Crime and Gang Section and Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section also assisted with the case.

This is being presented as one more effort being taken by the Department of Justice Task Force on Intellectual Property to stop the theft of IP.

Of course, all this comes the day after the SOPA/PIPA protest blackout. Way to stay classy, Justice Department.

Called the FBI Child ID app, its main function is a place to store vital information about your child that can aid law enforcement in the event that they go missing. With the app, parents can store multiple photos of their child along with other basic information like height and weight. This way you can quickly pull up all of this info to show anyone who is helping in the search.

Probably the most helpful function of the app is that it allows you to quickly email your child’s photos and physical description to the authorities in just a few steps.

The app also includes safety tips and guidance for what steps to take in the hours following a child disappearance.

In the future, the FBI says that the app will be updated to add more features.

The FBI Child app is free. Currently, it is only available on iOS. The FBI says that they “plan to expand this tool to other types of mobile devices in the near future.”

I can already see the question forming in your head, as it popped into mine right away – What about that information, where does it go?

Here’s what they say about that –

An important note: the FBI (and iTunes for that matter) is not collecting or storing any photos or information that you enter in the app. All data resides solely on your mobile device unless you need to send it to authorities. Please read your mobile provider’s terms of service for information about the security of applications stored on your device.

According to their blog, a child goes missing every 40 seconds in the United States. I guess it couldn’t hurt to put your child’s information down in the app on the off chance that something unexpected happens.