After a 14-year legal battle, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked out of the United Kingdom’s Belmarsh prison Monday morning, where he agreed to a plea deal with the United States. According to court documents, Assange agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, which violates espionage law in the United States. The sole charge carries a sentence of 62 months in prison, but under the plea deal the time he has already served in the UK prison — a little over 62 months — will be counted as time served. Thus, Assange will not be required to spend any more time behind bars in the U.S., the UK or anywhere else.

WikiLeaks and Human Rights Groups Celebrate Assange's Release

In a statement on platform X, WikiLeaks wrote, “Julian Assange is free.”

“He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.” – WikiLeaks

Assange is being flown to Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands and a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific Ocean. The formal hearing and sentencing is set to take place in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands at 9 a.m. local time Wednesday. Assange was reluctant to fly to the mainland U.S., his prosecutors said, and thus Saipan was decided as an alternative due to its proximity with Australia. If the guilty plea is approved by the judge – as is expected – the WikiLeaks founder will head to Australia after the sentencing. Human rights organization Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard welcomed the “positive news.”

“We firmly believe that Julian Assange should never have been imprisoned in the first place and have continuously called for charges to be dropped.” - Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard 

“The years-long global spectacle of the US authorities hell-bent on violating press freedom and freedom of expression by making an example of Assange for exposing alleged war crimes committed by the USA has undoubtedly done historic damage,” Callamard said. “Amnesty International salutes the work of Julian Assange’s family, campaigners, lawyers, press freedom organizations and many within the media community and beyond who have stood by him and the fundamental principles that should govern society’s right and access to information and justice.” The Mexican President Andrés Manuel, sounded a similar sentiment and said:

“I celebrate the release of Julian Assange from prison. At least in this case, the Statue of Liberty did not remain an empty symbol; She is alive and happy like millions in the world.”

Brief Timeline of Julian Assange Espionage Case

Julian Assange, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, gained prominence after the site published more than 90,000 classified U.S. military documents on the Afghanistan war and about 400,000 classified U.S. documents on the Iraq war. After the release of these documents via WikiLeaks, Assange was indicted by the U.S. on 18 counts, including 17 espionage charges under the 1917 Espionage Act and one for computer misuse, where he allegedly gained unauthorized access to a government computer system of a NATO country. In 2012, Assange communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack, the indictment said. With respect to one target, Assange asked the LulzSec leader to look for (and provide to WikiLeaks) mail and documents, databases and PDFs. In another communication, Assange told the LulzSec leader that the most impactful release of hacked materials would be from the CIA, NSA, or the New York Times. WikiLeaks obtained and published emails from a data breach committed against an American intelligence consulting company by an “Anonymous” and LulzSec-affiliated hacker. According to that hacker, Assange indirectly asked him to spam that victim company again. An August 2010 arrest warrant for sexual assault allegations in Sweden was initially dropped but later reopened, leading to an international arrest warrant against him. Assange then sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In 2019, Ecuador revoked his asylum, and he was arrested by London police and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching bail conditions. Swedish prosecutors dropped their case in 2019 because the passage of time had weakened evidence, but they said they retained confidence in the complainant.

Assange’s Freedom Starts ‘a New Chapter’

Stella Assange, the WikiLeaks founder’s wife, was elated and thanked everyone who stood by her husband. “Throughout the years of Julian’s imprisonment and persecution, an incredible movement has been formed. People from all walks of life from around the world who support not just Julian ... but what Julian stands for: truth and justice,” Stella Assange said. “What starts now with Julian’s freedom is a new chapter.” It will be interesting to see if Assange will be back at the helm of WikiLeaks and if he will keep his fight on against human right exploitations but for now it seems like he would be eager to reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and his children, “who have only known their father from behind bars.” Update* (June 25 1:30 p.m. ET): Added comments from Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard and President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel.

It's getting dangerously, fatally, hotter. In Bamako, Athens, Santiago, Mexico City, Podgorica, Mecca, Rio de Janeiro, Paraburdoo, Delhi, Toronto, San Salvador, Beijing, Dubrovnik, Skikda, Rome, Cairo, Trenton, and many other places, 2024 temperatures are deadly and breaking records. What are your techniques, strategies, methods, neat tricks for dealing with the heat? Or just write about whatever is on your mind, in your heart, or on your plate, because this is your weekly free thread, fellow MeFites.

'Tis the week of midsummer and the solstice, when people gather for early sunrises, and late sunsets (northern hemisphere edition) impress. Bonfires are lit, and rituals to cleanse abound, in many places (anywhere you want) and not just overcrowded Stonehenge. But what was your "longest day" (and interpret that in any you see fit)? Happy, sad, epic, life-changing, life-affirming? On your own, with a loved one, a friend, or a crowd? Or just write about whatever is on your mind, in your heart, or on your plate, because this is your weekly free thread. Happy midsummer, MeFites!

Dire Straits were a massively successful band; they have sold more than 100 million records worldwide, each of their albums was top-5 in the US, their hallmark record Brothers in Arms was #1 in 18 countries, and they are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Mark Knopfler is so admired by (at least some) paleontologists that he is the namesake of a dinosaur species discovered in 2001. (Ed. note: it turns out that a whole bunch of rockers are real-life dinosaurs.) With all that success, the pedestrian inspirations behind two of their biggest hit songs are a fun bit of trivia.

The band's first single "Sultans of Swing" was released in 1978. It was originally recorded a year before as a demo, and a cassette with the resulting track made its way to Charlie Gillett (RIP), a legendary DJ at BBC Radio in London. Gillett played the demo in heavy rotation, and shortly after the band had several major label offers. The song lyrics tell the story of a jazz band playing uninspired music on a rainy night in a mostly-empty South London pub to an indifferent audience. And Mark Knopfler says that's basically just how it happened, including the band's real-life name. Talking to AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson for his "A Life on the Road" music series, Knopfler explained: ====================== And 'Sultans of Swing' was actually in a little pub. And there's a dusty little dixieland jazz band playing down in Deptford or Greenwich and almost nobody in but some young lads were in the end of the pub playing pool in their baggies and their platform soles and all of that. I was just there to have a couple of pints. At the end of the night the trumpet player or whoever does the announcements says 'well..um...right, that's it, time to go,' [and] he says, 'we are the Sultans of Swing.' And you couldn't be less a sultan of anything, you know, if you were in that band on that night in that pub. ====================== "Sultans of Swing" (re-recorded in 1978 for Dire Straits' debut album) was the band's first big hit, reaching the top-10 in six countries and selling multi-platinum in four. Somewhere out there are (or were) the members of the real-life Sultans of Swing, who must have felt both honored and a little bit insulted that Dire Straits's first #1 song was basically a narration of their underwhelming gig. Several years later, when he was preparing material for Brothers in Arms, Knopfler was in a New York City appliance store when real-life inspiration struck again. In an interview with the late British rock journalist Robert Sandall, Knopfler told the story of how overhearing an appliance deliveryman watching MTV inspired "Money for Nothing": ====================== Robert Sandall : "Money For Nothing" was reputedly based on an overheard conversation. Mark Knopfler: Yeah, I was in New York in one of the big appliance shops. Basically, the layout was quite simple, the kitchen display unit in the front, the table and chairs and drawers and everything were all there in the shop window. Then you go inside and they had rows of microwaves and all the rest of it and at the back there were big walls of TVs all turned to MTV. It was like a stage set because there was this big Joe Six Pack figure with his checked shirt and he had a barrel of some sort - he had been pulling boxes of something through the back door and he was holding forth to an audience of one or two about the performances on MTV. But the kind of stuff he was saying was so classic that I just managed to eavesdrop for a couple of minutes and then I went and got this piece of paper and started writing down the lines of things he was saying. Lines like, "That ain't working" and all that, and "Maybe get a blister on your finger", made me laugh. He said all that stuff and "What's that, Hawaiian noises?", so in a sense it was just a piece of reporting. But again, it's one of those things when you are aware that the situation has possibilities to create something. ====================== "Money for Nothing" became the band's signature song - it was one of the two songs they played at Live Aid (the other being "Sultans of Swing") - and the accompanying video was groundbreaking for its use of 3D animation. Reflective of its inspiration, the video features a blue collar, hardhat-type guy watching and commenting on music videos that are playing on a wall of TVs behind him, which it turns out was pretty much how it went down. [On an unrelated note that is a piece of good trivia, the songwriting credits for "Money for Nothing" belong to both Mark Knopfler and Sting. Knopfler wrote the song himself, but he borrowed Sting's rhythm and melody of "don't stand, don't stand so, don't stand so close to me" and added it to the song as "I want my, I want my, I want my MTV." He asked Sting to sing the part, and he happily obliged. Sting said in a 1987 interview that "I did it, and thought nothing of it, until my publishers, Virgin -who I've been at war with for years and who I have no respect for - decided that was a song they owned, 'Don't Stand So Close to Me'. They said that they wanted a percentage of the song, much to my embarrassment. So they took it."] Dire Straits previously ("Walk of Life" as perfect film exit music), and previously (Brothers in Arms written up by hippybear, of course), and previously (Brothers in Arms as the First Big CD). (And a deleted previously: this post was inspired by me accidentally posting an intended AskMe question on the main page earlier this week. Oops.)

It’s not unusual for the data brokers behind people-search websites to use pseudonyms in their day-to-day lives (you would, too). Some of these personal data purveyors even try to reinvent their online identities in a bid to hide their conflicts of interest. But it’s not every day you run across a US-focused people-search network based in China whose principal owners all appear to be completely fabricated identities.

Responding to a reader inquiry concerning the trustworthiness of a site called TruePeopleSearch[.]net, KrebsOnSecurity began poking around. The site offers to sell reports containing photos, police records, background checks, civil judgments, contact information “and much more!” According to LinkedIn and numerous profiles on websites that accept paid article submissions, the founder of TruePeopleSearch is Marilyn Gaskell from Phoenix, Ariz.

Ms. Gaskell has been quoted in multiple “articles” about random subjects, such as this article at HRDailyAdvisor about the pros and cons of joining a company-led fantasy football team.

“Marilyn Gaskell, founder of TruePeopleSearch, agrees that not everyone in the office is likely to be a football fan and might feel intimidated by joining a company league or left out if they don’t join; however, her company looked for ways to make the activity more inclusive,” this paid story notes.

Also quoted in this article is Sally Stevens, who is cited as HR Manager at FastPeopleSearch[.]io.

“Fantasy football provides one way for employees to set aside work matters for some time and have fun,” Stevens contributed. “Employees can set a special league for themselves and regularly check and compare their scores against one another.”

Imagine that: Two different people-search companies mentioned in the same story about fantasy football. What are the odds?

Both TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch allow users to search for reports by first and last name, but proceeding to order a report prompts the visitor to purchase the file from one of several established people-finder services, including BeenVerified, Intelius, and Spokeo.

DomainTools.com shows that both TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch appeared around 2020 and were registered through Alibaba Cloud, in Beijing, China. No other information is available about these domains in their registration records, although both domains appear to use email servers based in China.

Sally Stevens’ LinkedIn profile photo is identical to a stock image titled “beautiful girl” from Adobe.com. Ms. Stevens is also quoted in a paid blog post at ecogreenequipment.com, as is Alina Clark, co-founder and marketing director of CocoDoc, an online service for editing and managing PDF documents.

Scouring multiple image search sites reveals Ms. Clark’s profile photo on LinkedIn is another stock image that is currently on more than 100 different websites, including Adobe.com. Cocodoc[.]com was registered in June 2020 via Alibaba Cloud Beijing in China.

The same Alina Clark and photo materialized in a paid article at the website Ceoblognation, which in 2021 included her at #11 in a piece called “30 Entrepreneurs Describe The Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) for Their Business.” It’s also worth noting that Ms. Clark is currently listed as a “former Forbes Council member” at the media outlet Forbes.com.

Entrepreneur #6 is Stephen Curry, who is quoted as CEO of CocoSign[.]com, a website that claims to offer an “easier, quicker, safer eSignature solution for small and medium-sized businesses.” Incidentally, the same photo for Stephen Curry #6 is also used in this “article” for #22 Jake Smith, who is named as the owner of a different company.

Mr. Curry’s LinkedIn profile shows a young man seated at a table in front of a laptop, but an online image search shows this is another stock photo. Cocosign[.]com was registered in June 2020 via Alibaba Cloud Beijing. No ownership details are available in the domain registration records.

Listed at #13 in that 30 Entrepreneurs article is Eden Cheng, who is cited as co-founder of PeopleFinderFree[.]com. KrebsOnSecurity could not find a LinkedIn profile for Ms. Cheng, but a search on her profile image from that Entrepreneurs article shows the same photo for sale at Shutterstock and other stock photo sites.

DomainTools says PeopleFinderFree was registered through Alibaba Cloud, Beijing. Attempts to purchase reports through PeopleFinderFree produce a notice saying the full report is only available via Spokeo.com.

Lynda Fairly is Entrepreneur #24, and she is quoted as co-founder of Numlooker[.]com, a domain registered in April 2021 through Alibaba in China. Searches for people on Numlooker forward visitors to Spokeo.

The photo next to Ms. Fairly’s quote in Entrepreneurs matches that of a LinkedIn profile for Lynda Fairly. But a search on that photo shows this same portrait has been used by many other identities and names, including a woman from the United Kingdom who’s a cancer survivor and mother of five; a licensed marriage and family therapist in Canada; a software security engineer at Quora; a journalist on Twitter/X; and a marketing expert in Canada.

Cocofinder[.]com is a people-search service that launched in Sept. 2019, through Alibaba in China. Cocofinder lists its market officer as Harriet Chan, but Ms. Chan’s LinkedIn profile is just as sparse on work history as the other people-search owners mentioned already. An image search online shows that outside of LinkedIn, the profile photo for Ms. Chan has only ever appeared in articles at pay-to-play media sites, like this one from outbackteambuilding.com.

Perhaps because Cocodoc and Cocosign both sell software services, they are actually tied to a physical presence in the real world — in Singapore (15 Scotts Rd. #03-12 15, Singapore). But it’s difficult to discern much from this address alone.

Who’s behind all this people-search chicanery? A January 2024 review of various people-search services at the website techjury.com states that Cocofinder is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Chinese company called Shenzhen Duiyun Technology Co.

“Though it only finds results from the United States, users can choose between four main search methods,” Techjury explains. Those include people search, phone, address and email lookup. This claim is supported by a Reddit post from three years ago, wherein the Reddit user “ProtectionAdvanced” named the same Chinese company.

Is Shenzhen Duiyun Technology Co. responsible for all these phony profiles? How many more fake companies and profiles are connected to this scheme? KrebsOnSecurity found other examples that didn’t appear directly tied to other fake executives listed here, but which nevertheless are registered through Alibaba and seek to drive traffic to Spokeo and other data brokers. For example, there’s the winsome Daniela Sawyer, founder of FindPeopleFast[.]net, whose profile is flogged in paid stories at entrepreneur.org.

Google currently turns up nothing else for in a search for Shenzhen Duiyun Technology Co. Please feel free to sound off in the comments if you have any more information about this entity, such as how to contact it. Or reach out directly at krebsonsecurity @ gmail.com.

ANALYSIS

It appears the purpose of this network is to conceal the location of people in China who are seeking to generate affiliate commissions when someone visits one of their sites and purchases a people-search report at Spokeo, for example. And it is clear that Spokeo and others have created incentives wherein anyone can effectively white-label their reports, and thereby make money brokering access to peoples’ personal information.

Spokeo’s Wikipedia page says the company was founded in 2006 by four graduates from Stanford University. Spokeo co-founder and current CEO Harrison Tang has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Intelius is owned by San Diego based PeopleConnect Inc., which also owns Classmates.com, USSearch, TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate. PeopleConnect Inc. in turn is owned by H.I.G. Capital, a $60 billion private equity firm. Requests for comment were sent to H.I.G. Capital. This story will be updated if they respond.

BeenVerified is owned by a New York City based holding company called The Lifetime Value Co., a marketing and advertising firm whose brands include PeopleLooker, NeighborWho, Ownerly, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper, a car history site.

Ross Cohen, chief operating officer at The Lifetime Value Co., said it’s likely the network of suspicious people-finder sites was set up by an affiliate. Cohen said Lifetime Value would investigate to determine if this particular affiliate was driving them any sign-ups.

All of the above people-search services operate similarly. When you find the person you’re looking for, you are put through a lengthy (often 10-20 minute) series of splash screens that require you to agree that these reports won’t be used for employment screening or in evaluating new tenant applications. Still more prompts ask if you are okay with seeing “potentially shocking” details about the subject of the report, including arrest histories and photos.

Only at the end of this process does the site disclose that viewing the report in question requires signing up for a monthly subscription, which is typically priced around $35. Exactly how and from where these major people-search websites are getting their consumer data — and customers — will be the subject of further reporting here.

The main reason these various people-search sites require you to affirm that you won’t use their reports for hiring or vetting potential tenants is that selling reports for those purposes would classify these firms as consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) and expose them to regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

These data brokers do not want to be treated as CRAs, and for this reason their people search reports typically don’t include detailed credit histories, financial information, or full Social Security Numbers (Radaris reports include the first six digits of one’s SSN).

But in September 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate were trying to have it both ways. The FTC levied a $5.8 million penalty against the companies for allegedly acting as CRAs because they assembled and compiled information on consumers into background reports that were marketed and sold for employment and tenant screening purposes.

The FTC also found TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate deceived users about background report accuracy. The FTC alleges these companies made millions from their monthly subscriptions using push notifications and marketing emails that claimed that the subject of a background report had a criminal or arrest record, when the record was merely a traffic ticket.

The FTC said both companies deceived customers by providing “Remove” and “Flag as Inaccurate” buttons that did not work as advertised. Rather, the “Remove” button removed the disputed information only from the report as displayed to that customer; however, the same item of information remained visible to other customers who searched for the same person.

The FTC also said that when a customer flagged an item in the background report as inaccurate, the companies never took any steps to investigate those claims, to modify the reports, or to flag to other customers that the information had been disputed.

There are a growing number of online reputation management companies that offer to help customers remove their personal information from people-search sites and data broker databases. There are, no doubt, plenty of honest and well-meaning companies operating in this space, but it has been my experience that a great many people involved in that industry have a background in marketing or advertising — not privacy.

Also, some so-called data privacy companies may be wolves in sheep’s clothing. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published an abundance of evidence indicating that the CEO and founder of the data privacy company OneRep.com was responsible for launching dozens of people-search services over the years.

Finally, some of the more popular people-search websites are notorious for ignoring requests from consumers seeking to remove their information, regardless of which reputation or removal service you use. Some force you to create an account and provide more information before you can remove your data. Even then, the information you worked hard to remove may simply reappear a few months later.

This aptly describes countless complaints lodged against the data broker and people search giant Radaris. On March 8, KrebsOnSecurity profiled the co-founders of Radaris, two Russian brothers in Massachusetts who also operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs.

The truth is that these people-search companies will continue to thrive unless and until Congress begins to realize it’s time for some consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century. Duke University adjunct professor Justin Sherman says virtually all state privacy laws exempt records that might be considered “public” or “government” documents, including voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

“Consumer privacy laws in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia all contain highly similar or completely identical carve-outs for ‘publicly available information’ or government records,” Sherman said.