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Loser Araysar

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Yeah this could be a crazy coincidence or it could be really conspiratorial.
I'm usually the kind of guy that would attribute this sort of a thing to coincidence but there are a couple of things that just make that very improbable

1. Multiple people corroborate that he advised them all to get legal counsel if FBI came to question them and that he contacted Wikileaks legal counsel - all of this happened hours prior to the accident
2. Why would he drive at 100+ MPH in a rich area of Beverly Hills?
3. Why would he as a family man be out at 4:30 AM?
4. How often does a car explode when in an accident? Especially a 2013 Mercedes which I assume has a shitload of safety features designed to prevent exactly that kind of thing?

The government already freely admits that they can remotely control cars. Is it plausible that someone within the government decided to take it upon themselves to eliminate Hastings?

 

Loser Araysar

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Why?

Because there isn't a guy coming on the stage who's wearing a jacket with giant "CIA" letters emblazoned on it and saying"Hey, we can remotely control all your cars, btw - in case you didn't get the gist of that from this DARPA lady".
 

Skanda

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Why?

Because there isn't a guy coming on the stage who's wearing a jacket with giant "CIA" letters emblazoned on it and saying"Hey, we can remotely control all your cars, btw - in case you didn't get the gist of that from this DARPA lady".
Pretty much. A DARPA project manager pointing to what some researchers have shown is possible doesn't, at least in my book, qualify as "Government freely admitting" they can do it at will. Could they do it if they wanted, sure though I'm not so sure I'm ready to think the government has slipped so far that they're now assassinating journalists. The folks at Wikilleaks would have been long dead if that were the case.
 

Loser Araysar

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Could they do it if they wanted,
thats the whole point

sure though I'm not so sure I'm ready to think the government has slipped so far that they're now assassinating journalists. The folks at Wikilleaks would have been long dead if that were the case.
you dont assassinate people after the leak, the damage is already done and it will look obvious.

you assassinate them before they leak
 

Loser Araysar

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Here's more details on how cars can be remotely controlled

http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf

Abstract-Modern automobiles are no longer mere mechanical devices; they are pervasively monitored and controlled by
dozens of digital computers coordinated via internal vehicular
networks. While this transformation has driven major advancements in ef?ciency and safety, it has also introduced a range of
new potential risks. In this paper we experimentally evaluate
these issues on a modern automobile and demonstrate the
fragility of the underlying system structure. We demonstrate
that an attacker who is able to in?ltrate virtually any Electronic
Control Unit (ECU) can leverage this ability to completely
circumvent a broad array of safety-critical systems. Over a
range of experiments, both in the lab and in road tests, we
demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range
of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input-
including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual
wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on. We ?nd
that it is possible to bypass rudimentary network security
protections within the car, such as maliciously bridging between
our car's two internal subnets. We also present composite
attacks that leverage individual weaknesses, including an attack
that embeds malicious code in a car's telematics unit and
that will completely erase any evidence of its presence after a
crash. Looking forward, we discuss the complex challenges in
addressing these vulnerabilities while considering the existing
automotive ecosystem.
 

Tuco

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I'm not saying anything that Dr. Fisher said was impossible, but the paper you cited had direct access to the CAN from the OBD.

paper_sl said:
The experimented-on car was controlled via a laptop running CARSHARK and connected to the CAN bus via the OBD-II port
If you have a study that shows researchers were able to take a production vehicle (As in, one bought at a dealership) and integrate a wireless backdoor to it via a software upgrade at a dealership/repair shop or playing a song (lol) please post it. The reason that's more difficult is because production vehicle's controller's generally have very limited write access. Making a car nonfunctional or dangerous isn't a surprise and you can do that with mechanical tampering, but there are safety systems to mitigate that. Implementing a 'kill switch' that can be activated remotely on a production vehicle with nothing foreign accessing the CAN bus is much harder.



Either way it doesn't really matter, the government doesn't need to hack a car to kill someone. A guy who busted a high ranking official was very concerned the government was onto him and died suspiciously hours later. It could be a coincidence or it could not be and I doubt we'll ever find the answer.
 

Loser Araysar

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Pretty sure the CIA/NSA could do it if they wanted to. I hear they have some minor experience in operating vehicles wirelessly.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/453771/c...-fleet-report/

453771-drones-1350635841-361-640x480.jpg

Anyways, as one Redditor said:

"[-]tiiger_style 1 day ago*
has driven for 18 years and lives.
says he thinks he's being investigated by fbi. dies hours later....driving in a residential area, at 60+mph OVER speed limit and running red light so he can hit a tree and explode into a fireball.....
nofuckingway. where's the black box for that car??"
 

Loser Araysar

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His last article, published 11 days before his death.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/wh...y-on-americans

Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans
Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they've tried to hide.
posted on June 7, 2013 at 12:10pm EDT
Michael Hastings
BuzzFeed Staff
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Image by Jeff Chiu / AP
For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind - a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop.
Glenn Greenwald's exposure of the NSA's massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security.
"Everyone should just calm down," Senator Harry Reid said yesterday, inhaling slowly.
That's right: don't panic.
The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems - including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry - have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008.
Recall what Senator Levin told CNN in 2005, demanding to "urgently hold an inquiry" into what was supposedly President Bush's domestic wiretap program.
Levin continued, at length: "It means that there's some growing concern on Capitol Hill about a program which seems to be so totally unauthorized and unexplained.The president wraps himself in the law, saying that it is totally legal, but he doesn't give what the legal basis is for this. He avoided using the law, which we provided to the president, where even when there is an emergency and there's a need for urgent action can first tap the wire and then go to a court."
There are two notable exception to this rule are Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Sen. Mark Udall from Colorado, who had seemed to be fighting a largely lonely, frustrating battle against Obama's national security state.
As Mark Udall told the Denver Post yesterday: " did everything short of leaking classified information" to stop it.
His ally in Oregon, Ron Wyden, was one of the first to seize on the Guardian's news break: "I will tell you from a policy standpoint, when a law-abiding citizen makes a call, they expect that who they call, when they call and where they call from will be kept private," Wyden said to Politico, noting "there's going to be a big debate about this." The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he'd mislead Senator Wyden at a hearing earlier this year, revising his statement yesterday to state that the NSA didn't do "voyerustic" surveillance.
The state of affairs, in other words, is so grave that two sitting Senators went as close as they could to violating their unconstitutional security oaths in order to warn the country of information that otherwise would not have been declassified until April of 2038, according to the Verizon court order obtained by Greenwald.
Now, we're about to see if the Obama administration's version of the national security state will begin to eat itself.
Unsurprisingly, the White House has dug in, calling their North Korea-esque tools "essential" to stop terrorism, and loathe to give up the political edge they've seized for Democrats on national security issues under Obama's leadership. The AP spying scandal - which the administration attempted to downplay at the time, even appointing Eric Holder to lead his own investigation into himself -was one of the unexpected consequences of one of two leak investigations that Obama ordered during the 2012 campaign.
It's unclear where a possible third leak investigation would lead. However, judging by the DOJ's and FBI's recent history, it would seem that any new leak case would involve obtaining the phone records of reporters at the Guardian, the Washington Post, employees at various agencies who would have had access to the leaked material, as well as politicians and staffers in Congress-records, we now can safely posit, they already have unchecked and full access to.
In short: any so-called credible DOJ/FBI leak investigation, by its very nature, would have to involve the Obama administration invasively using the very surveillance and data techniques it is attempting to hide in order to snoop on a few Democratic Senators and more media outlets, including one based overseas.

Outside of Washington, D.C., the frustration that Wyden and Udall have felt has been exponentially magnified. Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters, especially those writers who have aggressively pursued the connections between the corporate defense industry and federal and local authorities involved in domestic surveillance, have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ.
Jacob Appplebaum, a transparency activist and computer savant, has been repeatedly harassed at American borders, having his laptop seized. Barrett Brown, another investigative journalist who has written for Vanity Fair, among others publications, exposed the connections between the private contracting firm HB Gary (a government contracting firm that, incidentally, proposed a plan to spy on and ruin the reputation of the Guardian's Greenwald) and who is currently sitting in a Texas prison on trumped up FBI charges regarding his legitimate reportorial inquiry into the political collective known sometimes as Anonymous.
That's not to mention former NSA official Thomas Drake (the Feds tried to destroys his life because he blew the whistle ); Fox News reporter James Rosen (named a "co-conspirator" by Holder's DOJ); John Kirakou, formerly in the CIA, who raised concerns about the agency's torture program, is also in prison for leaking "harmful" (read: embarrassing) classified info; and of course Wikileaks (under U.S. financial embargo); WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (locked up in Ecuador's London embassy) and, of course, Bradley Manning, the young, idealistic, soldier who provided the public with perhaps the most critical trove of government documents ever released.
The attitude the Obama administration has toward Manning is revealing. What do they think of him? "Fuck Bradely Manning," as one White House official put it to me last year during the campaign.
Screw Manning? Lol, screw us.
Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.
 

chaos

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No they they use the Tap phone buttons on people they deem worthy of it, and thats determined by analysing the data theyre collecting, everyone gets a score and if hits a critical point your under surveilance and everyone youre calling, mailing, handholding with you. Point is noone knows its own score, ore if the analysis about yourself is nearly correct, cause you know its all secret but 100% legal, they promised after all.
Back in they day you def had a small chance to know youre under suspicion cause the trenchcoats had to head out and recruit informants, (bribing, blackmailing, promising shit etc.) and that could be refused. Today all they need to do is fill out a paper and sent it to godknowswho for approval and be good to access all your data stored.
There is no button. They have to submit their request to the organization, like Verizon or whoever, who can challenge it based on some process that none of us know anything about because the DoJ hasn't yet given these companies authority to release more specific information. None of these individuals are American citizens unless they meet the intel oversight requirements established years and years ago. The sky really isn't falling. I mean, we should be wary, of course. But blowing this up is not the answer.
 

Tuco

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Pretty sure the CIA/NSA could do it if they wanted to. I hear they have some minor experience in operating vehicles wirelessly.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/453771/c...-fleet-report/

453771-drones-1350635841-361-640x480.jpg

Anyways, as one Redditor said:

"[-]tiiger_style 1 day ago*
has driven for 18 years and lives.
says he thinks he's being investigated by fbi. dies hours later....driving in a residential area, at 60+mph OVER speed limit and running red light so he can hit a tree and explode into a fireball.....
nofuckingway. where's the black box for that car??"
I'm not saying they can't, I'm just saying that the paper you cited didn't have what they would've needed to do to enable them to control a vehicle in that way. Needless self-plug: DARPA funded one of our teleoperated vehicles.
 

Loser Araysar

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Thanks for contributing to the death of free press, Tuco.
 

ZyyzYzzy

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If the FBI/CIA can control cars remotely in 2013, then why couldn't Stringer Bell do the same with the ship Prometheus and not sacrifice the crew?
 

Loser Araysar

Chief Russia Reporter. Stock Pals CEO. Head of AI.
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If the FBI/CIA can control cars remotely in 2013, then why couldn't Stringer Bell do the same with the ship Prometheus and not sacrifice the crew?
Nice try but where he would control it remotely from?
 

chaos

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That sets up for the reveal of a second ship. Because why build one when you can build two at twice the price?