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posted by martyb on Thursday March 23 2017, @11:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the worse-than-HACF dept.

Previously: Alleged Epilepsy-Triggering Troll Arrested by the FBI.

The man accused of triggering an epileptic seizure by tweeting was caught when authorities obtained phone records and access to an iCloud account:

Court documents show that a search warrant to Twitter concerning the @jew_goldstein handle provided the authorities with information that the account was created on December 11 with a "PhoneDevice." Twitter also divulged the device's phone number and said that the carrier was AT&T. Some of the direct messages to other Twitter users on the account, according to the documents, said, "I know he has epilepsy," "I hope this sends him into a seizure," and "...let's see if he dies." The Dallas authorities next obtained information from AT&T that the telephone number used to start the Twitter account was a burner SIM card with a Tracfone prepaid account "with no subscriber information." "However, a review of the AT&T toll records showed an associated Apple iPhone 6A Model 1586 (Apple iPhone)," Nathan Hopp, an FBI agent in Dallas, wrote in the criminal complaint (PDF).

The police then sent a search warrant to Apple "for the iCloud account associated to the telephone number" used to open the Twitter account. Apple provided a wealth of information that ultimately doomed Rivello. Cupertino gave the Dallas Police Department his Apple ID e-mail address, his name, home address, and registration IP address when the account was created in 2012.

John Rayne Rivello has been charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon "enhanced as a hate crime". One of the images obtained from the iCloud account included an image of Rivello posing with his driver's license. The animated GIF that Rivello allegedly tweeted was a generic one that had already been posted on places such as 4chan for years.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday March 24 2017, @02:36AM (6 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday March 24 2017, @02:36AM (#483478)

    The first one we should be observing is the InfoSec angle. Guy used a burner phone. Didn't help. Keep that in mind next article extolling BitCoin, Tor, VPNs, SSL everything, blah blah. You have to have iron discipline and if the Feds want you even that probably ain't saving you. There is a world of difference between secure enough to keep your boss/spouse/local LEOs, etc. off of your trail and the infosec tools and tradecraft required to stop the Feds. And the game jumps up several more levels if you want to act online and stop the spooks from knowing who did it.

    Another lesson is when two people who are total dicks meet on social media, there are no winners.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @03:29AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @03:29AM (#483488)

    He used his real name and address for itunes. And WTF was that driver license picture idiocy?

    • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday March 24 2017, @03:55AM (4 children)

      by jmorris (4844) on Friday March 24 2017, @03:55AM (#483491)

      For obvious reasons they aren't giving details. Like how an iPhone got into the picture. Did he think he just needed the burner to sign up for Twitter initially and then did his day to day activity on the iPhone? If so that was major league dumb. But we just don't know. He could have only signed into his iCloud account to get the image and they tracked back through that to the iPhone. Either way, normals shouldn't be encouraged to think they can evade the system, period.

      I wouldn't even try unless I was willing to invest the time to build up an entirely new identity with zero possibility to interact with anyone from this reality. Meaning a VM that had safety features to prevent it ever connecting to anything but the VPN leading to a second VPN, both in different countries outside the reach of both the U.S. and Echelon. Twitter and Facebook would both be problems, a burner bought and used for initial account creation in a far away city, then all future use through the VM + VPN might get Twitter safely but I'd have to dig more. A fake/stolen identity from the dark parts of the net might get into facebook. What I still haven't figured out is paying for things as a ghost. Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is the answer hasn't looked at how it actually works. This is why I just use my real name, so I will always be reminded that the account IS traceable; all that crap is just too damned much work.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @05:47AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @05:47AM (#483529)

        Bitcoin should actually work, so long as you mine it on your ghost VM, and you accept that multiple expenditures by your ghost identity can be linked to each other. Mining bitcoin on CPU (VM or not) is hardly profitable, but it's not unreasonable as a way to convert dollars (spent on electric bill) to bitcoins, with good secrecy but lousy exchange ratio.

        • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday March 24 2017, @04:30PM (2 children)

          by jmorris (4844) on Friday March 24 2017, @04:30PM (#483732)

          Math. BTC is currently over $1000 and is 'uneconomical' to mine on standard Intel/AMD devices. Do you know how long it would take a single CPU to consume $1000USD of electricity at the $0.11 rate I pay? And finding a coin is a binary thing, you throw the electricity at it and maybe you find one and maybe you don't, it is only when you mine vast tracts of the problem space that the statistical probabilities assure you of a return on your investment. So add in a computing cluster and an upgrade to commercial power service to the cost of going ghost. And again, this is to raise funds that must always be spent online in ways with zero connection back to meat space. Impractical unless you have something to hide. The PC wars were getting hot enough I was worrying about being the target of a twitter rage mob but that problem should be abating soon, at least for a few years.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @12:19AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @12:19AM (#483944)

            Math. BTC is currently over $1000 and is 'uneconomical' to mine on standard Intel/AMD devices. Do you know how long it would take a single CPU to consume $1000USD of electricity at the $0.11 rate I pay? And finding a coin is a binary thing, you throw the electricity at it and maybe you find one and maybe you don't, it is only when you mine vast tracts of the problem space that the statistical probabilities assure you of a return on your investment.

            Yeah, but mining pools exist to solve exactly that problem, in exchange for skimming their percentage off the top.

            It's still a pretty ridiculous effort unless you have something serious to hide, but it's not completely impractical with a single powerful PC. And it still beats any other option I can think of for getting untraceable funds in the hands of a ghost identity.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @06:06AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @06:06AM (#484040)

              If custom ASICs beat out GPUs at mining in gigahashes/$, then the home users in the pool lose out even if they have good price-performance GPUs.