A.L.F. Snitch Resurfaces In Video: The FBI-Mozilla Connection
Justin Samuel turns up as programmer for new Firefox internet browser
Where is former Animal Liberation Front prisoner and FBI informant Justin Samuel now? Designing the internet browser you may be using to read this.
This week I was shown a video advertising the new Firefox 4 browser, and asked if the “Justin Samuel” in the new Mozilla Firefox promotional video is the Justin Samuel who entered a grand jury in 2000 and implicated me in six fur farm raids.
It was.
Watch the video at this link (click “watch video”). Justin Samuel is the second person speaking. The man who verifiably worked (or works) with the FBI is now ensuring the new Firefox browser “is the most secure browser out there”. Raising the question: how secure can a browser be when the man assigned to make it secure has a working relationship with the FBI?
Justin Samuel’s grand jury testimony
In 1997, myself and Justin Samuel orchestrated a series of mink releases across South Dakota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. After our indictment, Justin Samuel was the first to be arrested and offered his testimony against me in exchange for a reduced sentence.
You can read 86-page Justin Samuel’s grand jury transcript at this link. His testimony and promise to testify at trial was a major factor in my eventual prison sentence.
A.L.F. snitches: where they are now
While “where are they now” rumors of Animal Liberation Front / Earth Liberation Front informants abound, ranging from former straight edge mink feed cooperative bombers gone 7-11 employee drug addicts to SUV-firebombers gone SUV-drivers, the resurfacing of Justin Samuel is among the more timely and confirmed updates on just where A.L.F. informants end up when they betray their friends, their movement, and the animals.
In August I wrote about the curious micro-trend of Animal Liberation Front informants going into the computer security field. Darren Thurston, who implicated several people in Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front arsons, is now a computer security consultant. Justin Samuel, on his UC-Berkeley graduate student profile, posts several articles he authored on computer security before surfacing on the Mozilla Firefox 4 team.
It is not unreasonable to speculate this may be more than a coincidence. The FBI would have an interest in placing its prized “ecoterrorist” assets in privileged positions of root-level access into our digital lives – after they’ve burned all bridges in our real ones.
Animal Liberation Front informants in the computer security field: Coincidence, or strategically placed “men on the inside”?
Open letter to Mozilla Firefox
A few questions that might be posed to Justin Samuel’s current employers at Mozilla (these are really three ways of asking the same thing):
*Do you feel employing Justin Samuel, someone who has has worked with the FBI as an informant, to be a credibility-compromising to your product, and trust-eroding among its users?
*Can you brand Firefox a “safe and secure” browser with someone who signed a plea agreement obligating him to provide information directly to the FBI?
*Can anyone feel comfortable using Mozilla Firefox 4 knowing a person responsible for making it “secure” has a working relationship with a federal law enforcement agency?
‘
While I don’t believe in “internet security”, I’m still going with another browser… starting now.
– Peter Young
Justin Samuel links:
http://www.justinsamuel.com
and
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/user/2044723/
Wow – How crazy is that to stumble upon him in the video…what are the chances?!? You know seeing this along with last weeks news/rumors of the FBI working with programmers to create backdoors in OpenBSD crypto, it should really come as no surprise to us of what these agencies are capable of. Great find…I’ll be using Opera (for now) and will be sure to let Mozilla know my thoughts.
Is Justin confirmed to still be working with FBI or is that speculation? Did he work on FF 3.6 or started with 4? Is Tor browser safe (FF based)?
…that company is headquartered on Castro Street in Mountain View. I often hit the three book stores on Castro–I will visit the office in person and tell them why I would be nervous using Firefox considering the background of one of their employees. (I assume Firefox is an alternate to Google?)
Why not try the web browser known as Opera? http://www.opera.com/
It was developed in Norway and I’m sure the Norvegans use it…
if your concerned about privacy, it might be a good idea to block all ports on your firewall, except for the ones tor uses (9001 and 9030), and only allow connections to websites you trust using the trust list in privoxy
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/controlling-web-access-with-privoxy-part-one/
I’m inclined to stop using all Mozilla products including Thunderbird. Suggestion for a good alternative?
Chrome? Can you send a link, please? I have Opera on my computer,,, guess I’ll start using it. This is disgusting.
I think it’s naive to assume that Justin worked *only* on Firefox 4 and hasn’t been with working with Mozilla for awhile on other projects. The truth is that he could have had his hands in previous versions of Firefox or the Thunderbird email client.
I hope Justin gets his just desserts!!!
@Matt and Carol.
Use Chrome. You can download it here: http://www.google.com/chrome?hl=en-GB
@Anon >implying google works less with governments… LOL
“While I don’t believe in “internet security”, I’m still going with another browser… starting now.”
Which means what? You miscredit your own post? What about “internet security” do you not believe? And why hold that as the main argument if you don’t believe in it?
Anyway, I can understand that it feels wrong but still… I spontaneously can’t see the equal sign between testifying against someone to get a reduced sentence and whatever he could do with Firefox developement. But then again, I lack knowledge about what plea agreements do. Will he for all eternal time be forced to reveal whatever to FBI, whenever? And thereby leaking information in… I dunno, crash reports that you send to Mozilla? I’m trying to figure out what you are saying. Maybe I’m just a bit too tired to think about it right now.
As for security in the browser itself… He is not the sole programmer on the project. For example, coding a back door or including spyware would be detected since the code is open. Well, not entirely, the code for checking for malicious sites I think is closed, but surely not checked by one person alone. There are safe guards in place. That is one of the key elements with open source versus closed source.
While the guy might not be a police informant now, the fact that he has been in the past, tells you a lot about people’s personality.
Is this the kind of people you want in charge of your browser security? The people willing to sell others in exchange for personal allowances? I think not.
Now its the most important to mail the FireFox-Team and get a statement …
The following is from Mozilla’s public relations department, dated December 29th 2010:
“Justin Samuel was a summer intern but is not currently employed by Mozilla or working on the Firefox team.
Thanks,
Sian”
Hey, but why would they put a simple summer intern in one of their promotional videos? What a piece of crap! Do they think we’re that naive to believe in that bullshit?
Hi Peter,
Thanks for telling us this, but, as someone mentioned, Firefox continues to be an open-source project. For those comfortable with the programming language it has been coded in, the source code can be inspected, therefore allowing potentially privacy-invasive and otherwise malicious code to be rooted out. It is advisable for people concerned about their privacy to use Firefox or another open source browser with easily customizable features similar to Firefox, due to its add-on packages that allow the end user to block JavaScript, LSO’s, regular cookies et cetera.
@Anonymous – Never use Chrome. Ever. If you prefer Chrome over other browsers then go for a browser named Iron, it’s essentially Chrome with nasty privacy-invasive code gone.
Peter,
Although I often read your posts and respect what you do, I do have to call this post mostly off base, and it shows a thorough lack of understanding for this field of technology. I understand your past history with this person, and your suspicion that he’s likely up to no good, but even with all the FBI backing in the world, he’s incapable of doing much if anything in his position.
Open source software, like Firefox, can have contributors from anywhere. However, there are administrators that maintain the code repositories for these software systems, and these are the only people with write access to the normal Firefox you would download from Mozilla (now spin-offs are a different story). As an intern, you can be sure Justin does not hold the keys to any such repository, and thus any code he contributed to the project would be tested and scrutinized by others employed by the company before anything was added. Mozilla has no financial incentive to let the FBI track you with their browser, it would only lose them users, and there would be no legal way to strongarm them into doing so.
It’s misleading to see people in the comments thread encourage a switch to a browser like Chrome (a Google product). Google tracks absolutely everything they can, to map out your internet behavior and create profiles for you as a user, which they then sell to others, it’s part of their business plan. As a browser, Chrome is also open source, and you can still use it along with add ons that block trackers (including those from Google itself, although Facebook is another notorious one). In the end, you can be the arbiter of what bits and bytes get transmitted on the internet from your computer.
http://donttrack.us/ This is a great source of information for people who may not have a fundamental understanding of how you can be tracked on the web, and what you can do about it. The site was put up by DuckDuckGo http://duckduckgo.com/ , which is a project that provides a search engine (which may not be as great as Google’s, but is still plenty good and has some nice features) that doesn’t store data on you. If law enforcement agencies legally demand data from Google or Facebook, they will hand it over, but with something like DuckDuckGo, there is nothing to hand over, as they don’t store your queries anywhere. http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html (an example of this)
And I do think that the fact that you call something a “micro-trend” really denotes that it isn’t a trend at all, and although it is important to be wary, I think it can be hurtful to cause a fuss where none needs to be. In the end, I’m sure no one wants to be acquainted with a known FBI informant for any reason, but even if he was still working with the FBI, there’s little (I would honestly say no) reason to believe he could do anything to Firefox, Thunderbird, or any other Mozilla product as an intern.
I hope that the other readers here will visit the site I linked and learn of some ways to better protect their privacy while on the web.
From Brian, a member of the Post Punk Kitchen Forum:
“This Justin Samuels may be a “snitch” and FBI informant, but Firefox is a free, open source project. You’re free to download the source code and review it yourself. People not employed by The Mozilla Foundation do this every day. Any backdoor or FBI bug would be noticed.”
I don’t know if the fact that Mozilla is open source is enough that we can all be sure it’s not being used to invade our privacy, but it seems likely to be more safe than Chrome or anything else that isn’t open source, no?
@Matt “I’m inclined to stop using all Mozilla products including Thunderbird. Suggestion for a good alternative?”
– Opera. Yes, is a browser AND email client. (and is faster as chrome)
@Peter “For example, coding a back door or including spyware would be detected since the code is open.
There are safe guards in place. That is one of the key elements with open source versus closed source.”
– False. That’s not real, that’s just FUD against the closed source.
That is open source is no guarantee of safety.
Can go years without an error is detected and corrected, and more when a person involved in the project can be compromised.
That’s with the bugs, now imagine the backdoors that are deliberately included to pass unnoticed.
—————
“Justin Samuel was a summer intern but is not currently employed by Mozilla or working on the Firefox team.
Thanks,
Sian”
– Of course (sarcasm).
And if is true, How will be the name of the new employee FBI? I guess now will be careful not to put it on video.
The government doesn’t need a Web browser to spy on you. It can be done from a unsanctioned virus on your computer. What’s more, using a different browser such as Google Chrome in “Incognito” mode still doesn’t mean your online activities can’t be tracked. Google will offer up private info if they have to. Even with proxies, I’m not sure that you can 100% cover your tracks.
say your opinion: http://firefox.uservoice.com/forums/57440-firefox-4-beta/suggestions/1380137-stop-working-with-fbi-informant-justin-samuel
I’m certainly convinced there is cause for concern since he wasn’t a computer scientist before he cooperated with the FBI, and says has specialized in privacy and security from the get go. He’s now doing a PhD on the subject, which unfortunately suggests that open source or not, he will be reaching a level of skill that will likely greatly exceed that of most programmers. (https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jsamuel/) How many PhD level security experts are reviewing Mozilla’s code? Besides, his contributions may be related to implementing methods that are convenient for spying rather than spying-related code that can be easily identified as such.
Unfortunately Mr. Samuel is contributing methodology papers to computing science conferences related to none other than software update security, so he’s becoming pretty skilled (and conceivably influential) in an area that can be used to open doors we’d all rather remained closed (since during software updates we all authorize the installation of new files, right?) Pretty convenient to be able to push the adoption of methods that could make a spying agenda easier to implement.
I’d have to agree with Raj that it’s safest to assume you’re being spied on while on the net, and not just while browsing either. Since I’ve recently become involved in animal rights issues I’ve been alarmed to see how quickly google has been popping up related material while using gmail. So I highly doubt Chrome (or any other browser) will be any safer.
I started using Chrome because of this.
Fuck the snitches.