Much like the physical world reached MAD, the digital world is well on its path too. Except this MAD is of a softer kind, where the destruction can be perpetuated over and over. I cannot decide whether this brings more power into the fold of citizens or governments however.
It is undoubtedly possible to secure systems to the degree hacks are impossible, but it requires effectively banishing any degree of convenience which computers bring. True security requires years long development and testing efforts, and no lock is secure to someone smarter or more determined than the people who made it. This allows governments to effectively deploy surveillance on their entire populations, and allows populations to hack their governments if they wish so and are willing be to bear the risks. The same system that holds power over people also has a gun pointed at the same people holding power.
Good job to the Belarusian hackers, they have done what was needed of them to preserve their freedom. If recent history has taught us anything, it's that there's no way to win in a direct stick contest with a greater enemy. The only way is to use subterfuge to hit the enemy where it hurts until they are no longer willing to fight. Threatening the people who are continuing the cycles of suppression and their families is the only way forward, a government whose supporters are afraid for their lives cannot last long. Furthermore, this is proof that such a thing can and will continue to happen.
This era may seems dystopian, but it seems information is a double-edged sword, there is no way to grasp it without hurting oneself too.
I feel like MAD comparison is interesting, but not accurate. The whole point of MAD is that there is nothing left afterwards. That is not what I see happening. For example a lot of terrible things that country leaders did hit the news and ... nothing happened for the most part.
If we are doing analogies, allow me to compare modern digital world to a feudal age. The companies wage war to capture land, prestige, and peasants^w users. Users are then exploited for their data so the companies can sell it and use the monies to wage advertisement wars to capture more users... Alas, the analogy is not perfect for it does not account for hackers stealing the data or peasants revolting and overthrowing the kingdom.
A “softer kind of MAD” isn’t MAD. The whole point is that there’s mutual destruction, and that it be assured and devastating. Just the fact that these attacks happen shows that it doesn’t follow the logic of MAD.
Considering the are attacks from Russian state-sponsored/run/tolerated groups against important US targets makes it more sensible to note how unlike MAD this battlefield is, even in contrast to, for example, conventional warfare, which isn’t core to the mechanism of MAD but has, in the past, been subject to the restrictions that follow from it.
I still think it’s a kind of MAD. Maybe not at a global / national level. But if you are someone who hurts / torture people for a regime, you and your family is normally protected by being anonymous. So releasing their info gives the people the power to hunt down the state actor and not let them hide.
It's not MAD at all. It's akin to perpetual proxy war, which has rarely stopped between all the various powers.
It's Iran killing US soldiers in Iraq. It's the US killing Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan. It's China or the USSR killing US soldiers in Vietnam. And so on.
Terabytes of tapped phone call records, according to the twitter. If assume mp3, that's of order of millions of minutes.
The whole republic population is 10 million. There is a suspicion all phone calls are recorded. Did the hackers got access to phone call records of every citizen?
Update: commenters below point out that phone codecs have much lower bandwidth than mp3. So it becomes even more likely the hackers have phone records of every resident.
I don't recall the source rght now, but I once saw it calculated that recording every phone call in the US would cost the NSA about 20M$/yr in terms of datacenter storage. This means any government not absolutely destitute is able to afford to record all domestic phone calls.
Good quality for a phone call is 2 * 64 kbps, but you can go down significantly (probably around 2 * 8 kbps; that's more than GSM half-rate, with modern codecs it could actually sound acceptable). [edit: added spaces to avoid multiplication being misinterpreted as formatting]
More importantly, in order to effectively exploit these phone calls, they'll want to transcribe them. Transcription AI is getting better and cheaper every year, especially when you can use custom hardware. Then, you can store the full voice recording for "interesting" calls (e.g. activists, their contacts, people with "suspicious" patterns etc. - it doesn't have to be accurate, storage is cheap) for a few years, and transcripts for everyone basically forever.
> around 2 * 8 kbps; that's more than GSM half-rate, with modern codecs it could actually sound acceptable
It’s not only acceptable, it’s widely used. I.e. lots of companies use g711 codec with 64kbps for internal intra-office communication and g729 with 8kbps voice bitrate for inter-office communication (with transcoders on the perimeters). It has been quite a standard approach to corporate voip design for years (decades).
That said there is currently a shift to modern high- and adaptive-bitrate codecs, but it’s not instant.
> and g729 with 8kbps voice bitrate for inter-office communication
Why do they do that?
Even if 1000 people are making a phone call at the same time, that's just 64 Mbps each way if go for the full bandwidth, and an office this size surely must have a beefier Internet connection than that. Why skimp on something so cheap?
With a more modern audio codec like Opus, which does better at low bitrates, a minute at phone-line quality would take around 80-120 kB, one third of MP3. Which makes it even cheaper.
This of course doesn't include the cost of intercepting at all relevant points, or the ability to ingest it in real time, or the ability to do any reads on the data (which Glacier doesn't provide real-time).
It is probably still a drop in the federal bucket.
The NSA is said to have 5 zettabytes at their data center in Utah[1]. It’s been rumored they could take a snapshot (I’ve heard 30 days) of the internet and process it there. Not sure if they meant the US internet or everything they consumed combined. All rumors except my one link.
Of course a big part of what the NSA does is manage the scale. To do that they need metadata both collected with the calls (e.g. what numbers the call was from and to, if available who or what that number belonged to at the time) and assembled by analysing the audio ("male speaker", "Russian language", phrases or words maybe phonetically)
After all it's all very well having every phone call, but you can't possibly listen to them all, so you need a way to find those that you do want to listen to.
"Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack" is current policy of the IETF and accordingly new protocols are intended to combat such monitoring, but there is a lot of metadata revealed by your activities and masking it takes considerable effort, while outfits like the NSA are very enthusiastic about gathering whatever metadata they can find and discovering new ways to collect more.
Some inside information - the recordings are stored in WAV files, and here's the size of a few samples -
- 4.2 MB for 8:38 min
- 3.4 MB for 6:49 min
- 0.93 KB for 1:57 min
From what we found only a small fraction of the population's recordings are stored on the Militsiya servers. This does not rule out the possibility that all phone calls are recorded and only some are being transferred to the servers of the Militsiya when requested.
What is the exact size of the archive? How many phone numbers does it include?
Also, please respect privacy of citizens, even those you dislike, including the emergency service callers.
First, user data is user data, no matter if it's stored by a lawbreaking, in your opinion, organization.
(Consider: google was fined for fiscal fraud - does it entitle anyone to steal google user's data?).
People complained about car signals were in their right - traffic rules forbid signalling in the city,
except to prevent accidents. And similarly for most of the cases, I think.
And your access to their data will never be rightful.
Second, exposing the people can fuel the division in the society and alienate the sides.
What was done in a moment of annoyance, after being exposed, and possibly followed in bullying or
hate campaigns, can make those exposed people scrupulously report all opposition supporters.
Neighbor against neighbor, colleague against colleague, etc.
There are a few different archive. There's mobile phone recordings and there's MIA's (MVD) internal telephony calls recordings.
Both of them together are around 1TB.
We protect the data of ordinary citizens.
"user data is user data, no matter if it's stored by a lawbreaking, in your opinion" - we never claimed it is.
We leak only personal data of people that committed crimes or assisted the fascist regime in Belarus in committing crimes.
We won't leak anymore data of people that just reported car signals and alike (even though they knew what would be the consequences of making such reports). We're focused on more high profile crimes.
Devision in the society already exists. We influence the "game theory" equations, deter people from being violent towards others in the future.
1 k bytes per second. You can [1] squish it down to 1 kbit/s but it will become hard to understand accurately at that point, even under good conditions, and hopeless if there is noise. Opus simply doesn't support bitrates below 6 kbps.
That's exactly the codec that I had in mind when I wrote that. Regardless, MP3 is overkill, and 10Kbps is still a small fraction of what MP3 would use (the lowest MP3 bitrate iirc is 32kbps, which is still more than three times as large). Besides that, MP3 just isn't tuned for voice applications.
Mixed feelings about it. One one hand, this is brilliant, because the worst nightmare for oppressive government officials is to bring to light all their criminal activities and personal details.
On the other hand, it's a glimpse into the future and it's scary. Apparently, the Belarus government collected a centralized database of all citizens' communications. And it was hacked and leaked. I think it's reasonable to assume that any centralized database of extreme value will be hacked and leaked one day, and it's just a matter of time. Any backdoor demanded by government will at some point be exploited by a rogue actor.
They got a big haul, but they need to really think about how to use it best - with the largest possible impact and as little collateral (to civilians) as possible.
Expose all officials complicit in government abuses. Let them know that, when the country eventually finds its way back to democracy, the evidence against the, has already been collected.
Then, find a way to assure amnesty for the first 5,000 defectors.
Essentially they are planning safari on protesters. Plan is something like following: women will be a bait who will lure protesters out of their homes by vandalizing symbols of Belarusian protest and militia will cover the bait by violently detaining those who will come out to protect the symbols.
Woman is Lukashenka's press-secretary and man is a commander of Belarusian Militia Special Purpose Squad(that's responsible for the most horrible acts of violence in Belarus since 9th Aug 2020 presidential election day).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTyFi4GEv-Q - this one is interesting cause they are talking with the same woman and Dmitry Shakuta(former or present MMA fighter I suppose) who's related to Roman Bondarenko's murder(exact evidence is hard to acquire as Belarus is judicial grey zone currently).
As another commenter writes below they are agreeing to be in contact directly and the commander of militia basically recites his mobile number.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbHVt8-4dE4 - last part is just a confirmation and further details being discussed at a later time. But it's also nastiest one cause woman is using a phrase "We don't need stripes, we need heads". For extra context protesters were marking fences in their districts with stripes with national symbols on them. So the phrase means that we don't care about the symbols, it's just a way to lure protesters out of their homes. Also she's literaly using word hunting and jokes that protesters are in red list like animals. Such attitude shows her cruel and inhuman personality in its best.
I did not catch anything about election in 3 parts. Part 2 and 3 they are basically agreeing on times and places and discussing methods of their agents provocateurs
The whole thing is an aftermath of political crysis started after completely falsified election. They are working to strike terror(also they're definitely having fun doing so) into residents of a certain neighbourhood that's especially active protesting against Lukashenka's regime by detaining and repressing whoever expresses any opinion against such practices.
Well, a press secretary is a big figure in an informational autocracy so the militia commander makes a favor to press-secretary to prove his loyalty to Lukashenka. She in turn has some fun and also proves her loyalty to him.
YouTube autotranslate is doing a passable job to English on that one.Hit the CC button and select AutoTranslate option English on the gear box to the right of the CC icon.
Nation state actors perpetrate these kinds of hacks to hide their identities as nation state actors.
When a new hacker group says its a-political and it's toppling a regime or weakening a government of a nation significantly you have to ask yourself if they really are.
Doesn't apply in our case. We're only interested in freeing the belarusian people, our friends and family from the grips of this maniac Lukashenko. We don't even have any professional hackers (refused to work against the regime), we had to learn by a lot of trial and error.
Exactly this! One needs to understand the geopolitics of the region to understand that there’s a high chance of “meddling” and nefarious activity with anything that involves Belarus at the moment. It’s at the crosshairs of the world power interests.
Russia wants to retain influence and de facto unity. Basically maintain status quo.
China is threading belt road via Belarus. Massive economic interests and consequences for failure to achieve this.
US wants to reduce influence of both of the above and pull Belarus into its own sphere of influence.
You're stretching the argument. Even if Cyber-Partisans COULD hide their identites as a nation state actor doesn't mean that the ARE doing so. As for right now the group is exactly a-political and works to overturn Lukashenka's regime with any actors who also aims for this goal.
That's just a pedantic word discussion in my option, "political" can mean so many different things. This is clearly political in a way, yet the hacker group can also not be supporting any other politician directly.
No, I think your definition of politics is too restricted. There's no need to support opposition of any politician to be political. If it were, anarchists wouldn't be classified as political, which is absurd.
That's true of all words, so why not just stop talking. No, because there is an average meaning which most people will agree with, something to do with making decisions that effect groups of people. See a dictionary or an encyclopedia.
Really hope US and EU start arresting family members ASAP of everyone from this leak. This is a treasure for all sort of sanctions.
Edit: just noticed their logo is Lithuanian has coat of arms (vytis). Kinda weird to disclose your ethnicity, but Lithuania is doing a lot to support Belarus, especially amid Belarus weaponising migrants. Hope details of that going to be public soon.
You can arrest their bank accounts, and have their children living in the West left penniless on the streets.
This is my biggest outrage with Western demeanor.
They will sanction a country to the neck, babble strong, and mighty on TV about commitment to anti-corruption, and then...... they invite all these rotten part-time billionaire government employees, and their spawn to hide their stolen money, and live happy, and merrily in their Mayfairs, and Rivieras, spending their honestly stolen billions.
But doing anything else might result in damage to businesses, to the economy and to growth. Morals and ethics can be damned if they result in monetary loss.
This is might be too cynical, but it characterises my country’s relationships with totalitarianism.
It's indeed a very undue process. The West had 30 years since the end of the cold war to "process," these criminals and roll them into cans.
Instead not only there is not only no action, but the Cleptoville in London gets bigger with each year, and soon London will straight become a district of Moscow.
It's actually a Pahonia coat of arms, traditional national emblem of Belarus, and it's officially established by the Third Statute of Lithuania in 1588. All the laws and statutes of the Great Duchy of Lithuania are written using the Old Belarusian language and this language is claimed by a statute to be the language of a titular nation. In a present day Belarus we do not consider Lithuania to be a successor of the Great Duchy, neither culturally, nor ethnically.
> “At a minimum, they’ll all have to change their transportation,” commented the anonymous hacker, who used the name Cyber-Partisan. “But more important is that the operatives will know that such a leak can totally be repeated.”
Is that really the case? Wouldn't this kind of breach be best used silently. They could have used this access to alert those targeted by the regime ahead of raids etc..
This just seems like letting the regime their front door is entirely unlocked.
If the goal is deterrence - as the attackers seem to be claiming - quiet use is counterproductive.
The proposed use is doxxing of police and intelligence employees who are involved in political repression, including revealing the apartments and cars they use when on the job.
> including revealing the apartments and cars they use when on the job.
If the population is fed up enough to be willing to resort to violence, simply releasing this list with no prior warning would likely cripple the security apparatus, and make everyone think twice about participating in it in the future.
> Wouldn't this kind of breach be best used silently.
If the parties involved had similar powers possibly yes, but their government is already a lot more powerful compared to the people, so they need to act quick in order to disrupt the status quo, possibly also gaining some time.
It is also safe to assume that if the hackers have access to the conversations of all people, then also the government does, so it's entirely possible that the police already have their targets set and could soon escalate this to arresting everyone not explicitly pro-government, hence the need to disseminate the information to create some panic in the high ranks while buying some time.
Some IT personel had clearly been running the system for years, and if they weren't bribed enough to lose their conscience, it's very likely that someone decided to fight the tyrants with the access they had instead. Sort of like Snowden.
No inside help from the IT personnel of the hacked network. Though we mentioned in our first post https://t.me/cpartisans/235 that the hack included an infiltration to some gov facilities and opening a few entry points through which the cyber-operation is being performed.
> “Will many KGB agents be ready to operate abroad, knowing that data about them has already leaked?” one of the hackers asked rhetorically in a bot-assisted Telegram chat with Current Time.
This is a treason act by definition, not sure how actions like these are meant to help them overthrowing Lukashenka.
A treason act is what the regime did by falsifying the elections and the illegally staying in power. The KGB is not acting legally anymore, and therefor lost any legitimacy as a government agency. KGB also performs terrorist acts like participation in hijacking the Ryanair flight and killing an activist in Ukraine last week.
Leaking and destroying their network abroad wouldn't jeopardize the safety and wellbeing of the belarusian people in any way, on the contrary it would protect the from the criminal activity of the KGB inside Belarus and abroad.
This is pure conjecture, but I'd bet at least that the Russian ethnic group in Belarus (7.5%) would be more likely to do so than ethnic Belarussians.
Not to mention all the people well served by the dictatorship. Dictators can't stay long in power without plenty of allies. The Al-Bu Nasir tribe was just around 35000 people, yet practically ran Iraq for decades.
Ethnic question is not really a thing in Belarus. There is no obsession with race/nationality like it is in a lot of places.
Opposition loves to shout 3%, but really it looks like there is around 15% of real support. Mostly aging population, military and state workers.
This will probably cause the country to shutdown external internet.
So that the citizens will have no access to these revelations.
Basically the recordings are revealing , among many things, the tactics and fed's personnel the state uses to 'bite' anti-government protesters and then arrest them.
Certainly, similar tactics were used by USA Feds to lure in Jan 6 protesters inside the Capitol building, in USA.
Names of fed agents, NSA-like IT personnel, are also appear to be revealed.
As western countries loose the moral authority to judge other dictatorships, the suppressed populous will have to rely on themselves to bring on the changes they want.
Perhaps their closest neighbors (Poland, former Baltic republics, Ukraine), and ... Russia, of course, will play the deciding role in this struggle.
It will not be countries like USA -- these have lost all the moral authority to judge others. Engaged in bloody coops through out the world, throwing their reserve-currency status to dictate policies for other nations, suppressing/spying/imprisoning opposition at home, politicians taking bribes all over (via book deals, insider stock tips, real estate), etc), protecting sexual predators -- these fake 'leaders' of freedom lost all the credibility.
I hope Belorussian people (who never won a revolt, who were murdered by millions in WW2 (20% of the population), who suffered the most from Chernobyl disaster), will finally find help and direction from their neighbors...
If Belorussians reading this -- do not trust USA, Germany, UK, France..
Look for support, carefully, in your neighbors.
I hope countries like Poland, Lithuania will offer automatic citizenship to Belorussians who held Bel. passport for 4 years or longer, or who is under 16, and who does not have connections to the revealed names.
This way the saboteurs, that the regime will likely to implant into the emigration waves -- will have harder time doing that.
> 2. Get at least a single regiment on their side, and raid stockpiles, which I bet are still full of union's surplus hardware enough to arm the entire population few times over.
This is a very, very bad idea, and I say this as a former reader of /r/syriancivilwar/ in its "heydays" (~2014-2016). Afaik by 2016-2017 many of the Syrian simple citizens just wanted peace, they were tired of the war, they were tired of politics. What you suggest is equivalent to civil war.
No, the People want the downfall of the criminal regime, no food, no life, no salvation, but justice, justice above this all.
By telling that you throw a gravest insult to every Syrian man, and woman who did the sacrifice on a plainly unthinkable scale for liberty, and justice — virtues you usually expect to hear more from an American, than anybody else.
We have a saying in my language (Romanian): "The operation was successful, the patient is dead". Unfortunately (for those who had opposed him) in Syria's case even the operation was unsuccessful, as Assad is still in power, but the patient (Syria) is most certainly dead, or as close to death as one country can be.
Again, I don't know of any civil war "success story" in Europe and its surroundings from the last 100 years or so: the Spanish Civil War came with huge losses for both sides and led to a fractured society that is still there if you know where to look, similar thing happened to Greece (maybe in their case the fracture is smaller nowadays? can't tell as I don't know Greek and as such I can't read their media), the post-WW1 Civil War in present-day Ukraine was also not something to be proud of, to say nothing of the Yugoslav wars from the 1990s.
Most revolutions involve some violence, yes. Would you prefer that people permanently submit to tyranny? In the American Revolution our founding fathers were certainly glad to receive arms from their foreign allies in order to fight the British.
Haven't they very blatantly been making that decision in Belarus, in favor of changing the status quo? What were the protests about, why did so many put their necks on the line? The question is whether the West should help them or not, how and to what degree. The decision to go against the regime has clearly already been made by large numbers of people in Belarus.
How do you know how deep the support for regime change is in Minsk? I mean, using primary sources.
It's easy to fill a plaza with people. And Minsk's regime is terrible. But I was duped into supporting the Iraq war in '03. with the promise that we'd be greeted as liberators. I remember the young men shaving their beards in Kandahar. Look how those turned out.
In Belarus, it wouldn't be a revolution - it would be civil war. Lukashenko is certainly a dictator, but he still commands support of a significant part of the population. And Russia would be all too happy to assist them. Think the Donbass conflict in Ukraine, but larger scale.
> And Russia would be all too happy to assist them. Think the Donbass conflict in Ukraine, but larger scale.
Don't you think this way it's an even bigger reason for an rapid, overwhelming action to stem any chance of it.
Russia will not be happy at all to start losing more than disposable mercenaries for the first time.
It's by far the surest way to regime change Russia, without an open, direct conflict — to make Putin commit to a big war which he can't win, nor retreat from.
It's very important to make him to activate Russian standing military, so the people can't be made to "unsee" the fact of Russian state involvement.
The easier the victory will look for them, the more they will commit, the harder it will be for them to pull out.
> It's by far the surest way to regime change Russia
Ah, Ok. Another country to bring democracy and freedom to. I really thought that by this time we have learned our lesson - but I guess not - God help us.
I'd rather you not give westerners any ideas. It already seems like the united states is ever increasingly on the brink with the rhetoric of 'tyranny' we hear from both sides of the spectrum.
i would prefer you start a revolution in the US and the UK. the world will be infinitely grateful to all of you when endless wars, aggressions, support for dictatorships and colour revolutions come to an end.
Co-incidentally, lately we're getting lots of anti-Lukashenka stories. Is Uncle Sam planning a little regime change in Belarus. That would knock Belarus out of the Russian orbit. And transfer control of the Russian oil and gas pipelines to Washington. And remind the EU as to the true nature of the special relationship.
> Can you share any positive stories about a US-led outrage about human rights, followed by regime change, followed by prosperity?
Japan would be the closest I can think of. The motivations don’t align but the occupation and nation building effort of the Marshal Plan is in stark contrast to what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The people who propose this kind of regime change should be honest about it. They should come outright with "first we'll kill a couple of atom bomb's worth of you, and the rest will live happily ever after". The human rights marketing is disingenuous.
"Your narrative would involve such a plan spanning both Trump and Biden administrations, which seems unlikely."
The administration changed, the people in DC, largely, did not. When presidents change only the political upper echelon changes. The ppl who do all the planning and all the work stay.
Yes. It's not a coincidence that John Bolton, David Hale, and Pompeo each visited Belarus separately in the year before COVID-19. And then during the protests last year, Pompeo made all these statements about how they will deliver "freedom" to Belarus.
It is undoubtedly possible to secure systems to the degree hacks are impossible, but it requires effectively banishing any degree of convenience which computers bring. True security requires years long development and testing efforts, and no lock is secure to someone smarter or more determined than the people who made it. This allows governments to effectively deploy surveillance on their entire populations, and allows populations to hack their governments if they wish so and are willing be to bear the risks. The same system that holds power over people also has a gun pointed at the same people holding power.
Good job to the Belarusian hackers, they have done what was needed of them to preserve their freedom. If recent history has taught us anything, it's that there's no way to win in a direct stick contest with a greater enemy. The only way is to use subterfuge to hit the enemy where it hurts until they are no longer willing to fight. Threatening the people who are continuing the cycles of suppression and their families is the only way forward, a government whose supporters are afraid for their lives cannot last long. Furthermore, this is proof that such a thing can and will continue to happen.
This era may seems dystopian, but it seems information is a double-edged sword, there is no way to grasp it without hurting oneself too.