Wild, Wild Web: Policing An Early, Lawless Internet
The plan for Sealand's offshore Internet haven, known as HavenCo
"The vision was fairly grandiose. It was going to be [that] the legs of this tower were going to be filled with computer servers; they were going to be filled with an unbreathable gas, making it very difficult for saboteurs or anyone else to enter the tower. Your data would be totally safe. It was supposed to have high-speed Internet links back to the U.K. and other points on the European continent. These guys had guns; they had a security force in case anyone came knocking on the door. It was really designed as a fortress bunker out there in the sea that would simply be resistant to any attempt to take down your content."
On how law enforcement uses hacking techniques to shut down cyber crime
"When they bust somebody, they can get most of these guys to plead guilty. In [one child pornography] bust, despite how large it was, only one guy went to trial. Everyone else pled guilty. And as part of those details, often what the government requested was that they turned over their passwords in these communities and usernames, and federal agents assumed those identities. And to the outsiders, there's almost no way to tell that you're now dealing with a fed. That encouraged a lot of paranoia and suspicion within these communities, especially when somebody would be gone for a few days, or maybe their tone or choice of words change after a while. 'Well,' you think to yourself, 'is that just normal or have we been infiltrated? Am I dealing with a cop?' "
On accessing other people's files, photos and live conversations
"You do not have to be a hacker to do this anymore. In some research I did after writing the book, I spent some time in an entire web community that exists around this practice, which they call RAT-ing, Remote Administration Tool. These are basically pieces of software that once you can get them on someone else's computer provides you total access to their machine, but surreptitiously. They don't know it's there; they don't know it's running."
On how software can be installed without you knowing
"You can do it [by opening an email]; you can approach them on instant messaging pretending to be a friend of theirs; you can put fake songs out there of pop music on peer-to-peer file sharing that people download thinking they're getting a song, turns out to be one of these files. One of the things these guys do is spend a lot of time sharing their techniques for how they spread this stuff."
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