THE CULT OF THE DEAD COW OFFERS A HELPING HAND IN AMERICA'S TIME OF NEED
In an effort to turn the tide in the war on terrorism, a private-sector think
tank offers its expertise to the FBI.
LUBBOCK, TX, November 26 -- Never before has the United States faced a more
troublesome enemy. To meet this growing challenge, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation has announced an ongoing effort to create and deploy
best-of-breed electronic surveillance software.
In July 2000 the FBI unveiled Carnivore (now called the DCS-1000), a sniffer
capable of plucking relevant packet headers out of live data streams. To
augment the investigative value of the DCS-1000, last week the FBI announced
the development of "Magic Lantern", a rootkit for gathering information on
target computers.
According to all accounts, this represents a major leap forward in the fight
against all forms of computer crime. But we in the CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc)
believe that there are opportunities here for public/private sector synergy.
"While we applaud the innovation and drive of the federal law enforcement
agency, those of us who are U.S. citizens would be remiss if we did not offer
our expertise in this area," said Reid Fleming, a cDc member.
The CULT OF THE DEAD COW has more targeted experience than anyone else in this
field. We have repeatedly demonstrated our long-term commitment to this
technology area with the release of the original Back Orifice in 1998, and
its successor, Back Orifice 2000.
We are quite confident that the FBI's Engineering Research Facility is more
than capable of ramping up on the challenges posed by this new arena of
surveillance. But we are in a unique position to assist them in their new
mission. For our part, conceptual work has already begun on an all-new
remote administration tool focused specifically on the needs of the law
enforcement community.
So we intend to re-architect Back Orifice from the ground up. There will be
absolutely no shared code between the two projects, in order to skirt
detection by commercial antivirus packages. The code will remain totally
secret. The software will never surface publicly. And it will be far more
stealthy than anything we have ever released, demoed, or publicly discussed.
It will contain roughly the functionality of the current Back Orifice 2000
product, plus many new features. The central design principle is to create
an artificial witness which is capable of intercepting any and all relevant
activity during, after, and even leading up to the commission of a computer
crime.
The new system will be designed to guard against internet fraud, identity
theft, unauthorized system access, virus writing, industrial espionage,
child pornography, information warfare, public corruption, composing hate
speech, and other serious felonies which threaten the security of our nation
and the safety of its citizens.
To avoid becoming obsolete, the proposed system will be expandable through the
use of plug-in components. This will enable rapid development of new
operating system ports, as well as entirely new features. Several plug-ins
are already under consideration or active development:
* IMAGE ANALYZERS for recognizing certain shapes and images in digital
photos, like: flags and emblems of terror groups, blueprints and
schematics of critical national infrastructure, representations of nude
or missing children, as well as faces of known or suspected criminals.
* ELECTRONIC FIELD AGENTS leverage recent advances in fuzzy logic to
perform much of the data acquisition and analysis on the remote PC.
This enables the program to conduct wide-ranging data hunts and filter
out any materials which do not conform to federal search and seizure
law. Using the power of the suspect's own computer system, the software
can scour stored files and live traffic across the internal network for
items which conform with a high degree of probability to Title 18 legal
requirements.
* UNICODE-AWARE TEXT SEARCHES for matching live typing against a list of
trigger words in any language, including Arabic. The dictionary of
trigger words can be updated at any time over subliminal channels
without arousing suspicion of the most knowledgeable systems analyst.
The dictionary can be used to match proper names, book titles, airport
codes, and general terms like "bomb" or "virus" in any Unicode language.
* LOGIC AND GRAMMAR ENGINES will be able to detect telltale signs of
mental disturbance. In conjunction with the text search capability,
this feature will weed out the merely neurotic from the dangerously
insane.
This will be nothing less than the ultimate intelligence-gathering tool. And
we intend to construct it, at no cost, exclusively for the use of the federal
government.
"This will be better than other available tools," said Oxblood Ruffin, foreign
minister of the cDc. "We wish to provide infrastructure as part of a
successful, multi-layered, pyramidal cybercrime strategy. Our system will
provide information to help federal prosecutors determine their legal strategy
before anyone is tried or even indicted."
"We are confident that the government will limit the use of this technology
only to targets relevant to legitimate investigations," said Fleming, further
underscoring the cult's faith in federal law enforcement organizations. "The
FBI has a long history of following Title 18 to the letter."
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Press Contact:
Oxblood Ruffin
oxblood@cultdeadcow.com
About the CULT OF THE DEAD COW
Based in Lubbock, Texas, the CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc) is a leading developer
of Internet privacy and security tools. The group was founded in 1984 in
order to create and promote technologies that provide ordinary computer users
with comprehensive online privacy solutions. The cDc is dedicated to
protecting the online privacy rights of all Internet users. Its mission is to
eliminate the abuse of Internet privacy that is rampant in the United States
and throughout the world. For more information on the cDc, please visit
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/
For more information on Back Orifice 2000, please visit the website at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bo2k/