Margot Cleveland: Let’s Hope The Special Counsel (And Others) Are Investigating The People Who Watch You Online
A revelation buried in a cache of documents opens a new and potentially important investigative corridor for Special Counsel John Durham. The shady tech executive who featured prominently in the federal indictment of Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was also communicating with a covert group of computer scientists skilled in mining internet data. This revelation raises concerns that the man referred to in special counsel documents as Tech Executive-1, Rodney Joffe, may have shared sensitive government and private internet data more broadly than previously thought.
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So where did Joffe’s group get access to the data it had reviewed? And what was the community this group was part of that has “unusual access” to the D.N.S. lookup data of “private companies, public institutions, and universities”? A random email, forwarded by Joffe to Georgia Tech’s Antonakakis, provides a possible answer: Ops-Trust.
Ops-Trust is a self-described “highly vetted community of security professionals focused on the operational robustness, integrity, and security of the Internet,” that “promotes responsible action against malicious behavior beyond just observation, analysis and research.”
According to the scant public portion of its webpage, “the community’s members, span the breadth of the industry including service providers, equipment vendors, financial institutions, mail admins, DNS admins, DNS registrars, content hosting providers, law enforcement” and other third-party security-related organizations. Membership in Ops-Trust is extremely limited with new candidates accepted only if nominated and vouched for by their peers.
Read the rest here.
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