Area 51 hackers dig up trouble
From
Slashdot comes this story in
Security Focus about two Nevada hackers who stumble on something they should have in the (in)famous Area 51...
bq. But this self-appointed military watchdog is harder to find these days: messages left for him at the Inn go unreturned, and his media appearances have dried up like Groom Lake itself. "I think he's really not as motivated to talk to the media anymore as he used to be," says friend and fellow base-watcher Joerg Arnu. The reason: it turns out the truth really was out there, and the government didn't appreciate Clark digging it up.
So what did they find:
bq.
Sniffing Out Surveillance
Arnu, a Las Vegas software engineer, has shared Clark's preoccupation with the Groom Lake base since 1999, when he made a trip to the area to see what all the fuss was about. "I thought, okay, I'll give it a try, see what's out there... A couple of days turned into a couple of weeks and before I knew it I started developing a website about Area 51," says Arnu.
bq. So when Clark found the
new generation of road sensor, Arnu drove out to help investigate further. The pair found that, at close range, they could use a handheld frequency counter to pick up the wireless signals given off by the devices as a car passes. Over the following month and half, Clark and Arnu engaged in a kind of geocaching game with the Men in Black, systematically sniffing out the road sensors with the frequency counter, exhuming them, and opening them up. They discovered that each device was coded with three-digit identifier that could be read off an internal dial, allowing Arnu to make a list that correlated each unit's I.D. number with its GPS coordinates, creating a virtual map of a portion of the surveillance network surrounding the Groom Lake facility. Some of the sensors were miles away from the base.
bq. "We dug up about 30 or 40 of them on various access roads leading to the base on public land," Arnu says, insisting that he and Clark always carefully reburied each unit after logging it, and even tested it with the frequency counter to make sure it was still working before moving on to the next one.
They put this info on their website and...
bq. ...in June of last year Clark led a news crew from Las Vegas' KLAS television station into the desert and showed them some of the road sensors.
bq. The following week, according to the station's report, FBI and Air Force agents raided Clark's trailer home in Rachel, and carted off his computer, photographs and records.
Their primary gripe is that these sensors were placed on public land - park areas and public highways leading to vantage points overlooking Groom Lake and Area 51. Invasion of privacy?
And why is it that no one talks about Area 52??? Hmmm??? This is where the food technology recovered from the crashed spaceship is investigated. Where do you think CheezeWhiz and Pop Rocks came from...
Posted by DaveH at May 26, 2004 2:16 PM