Why did this pop up on Free Republic?

I need some insight, especially from web savvy DUers.

I've been doing some research -- I was lurking on Free Republic a couple of weeks ago when this popped up.



I clicked on "Examine Certificate" and got this:



Why would the Department of Defense be tracking visitors to Free Republic? And in case you can't read it, the story in question was about suspicion that a letter purported to be from Al Qaeda had been forged by the Pentagon.

I took the screenshots when it happened (of course I didn't accept the certificate, for whatever that's worth) and with the recent stories about NSA spying and all that, I thought of it again.

What do you all make of it?

Will be interested to know what is up with that.

Office of the Secretary of Defense, maybe?

Could this be done without the consent of the website owners?

a question. And if someone doesn't knwo as much as you do, that's no reason to be sarcastic.

If you were being so.

Redstone

Not that I'm not fully capable of sarcasm, but not in this case.

Redstone

I wasn't being sarcastic.

Welcome to the Defense Environmental Network & Information ...
DENIX provides information, communication and collaboration services to US Department of Defense environmental personnel, state regulatory and educational ...
https://www.denix.osd.mil/ - 19k - Dec 28, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

Dunno what connection they could have with FR. Probably just someone linked to them.

Redstone

It could be that one of the posters in the thread linked to the DOD . . .

I would assume.

Well know hate group Free Republic gets a check from Karl Rove every month.

the paranoia is rampant--I'm sure it even extends to the freepers--gotta know how far they may be straying on one thread or another.

then they're in BIG trouble!

:rofl:

Especially this part:

"The certificate should be issued to the organization who owns the web site. Do not trust the certificate if the name on the certificate does not match the name of the organization or person you expect."

I didn't expect to see a certificate from the DOD on Free Republic!

Although . . . the name doesn't match . . . but the goals seem to . . .

That's a message for a bad PKI certificate. PKI is used by a number of corporations (and the U.S. Government) for securing e-mail, web pages, etc. My guess is that someone within DoD was reading FR and posted a message in there, and anyone who clicks on that message is getting a message about their PKI certificate not being found. I doubt that they're using it to "track" anybody. More like someone at DoD was being an idiot and reading FR from work. (Big surprise - an idiot on FR).

The only strange thing is that the screen just "popped" up, and didn't appear after a click to another site, or a click on a message.

But a lot of the messages on FR read like they were posted straight from DOD!

ha

The people from DoD are the probably ones who can spell. :D

genuine freeper.

Ain't that right, Agent Mike?

www.fbis.gov

Just what the fuck is (OSINT) Open Source Intelligence?

Why would a PKI cert issued by DoD pop up on the freeper site? Did you click on an embedded link?

Come to think of it, DoD does "sell" its PKI certs to non-DoD entities, but I thought you had to be US government.

A non-gov't site would usually get a cert from a place like Verisign.

But there might have been an image linked on that thread . . . as the poster below suggested . . .

Someone probably linked to an image on a secure server at www.denix.osd.mil. That would bring the SSL verification dialog up to anyone that looked at the page (and who had their browser set to notify them about SSL connections).

I will get popups like that sometimes when someone has linked to an offsite image.

Message 18 has a bunch of pictures of tanks and stuff.

One of them links to osd.mil with https:, which causes their certificate info to pop up.

In a mozilla-based browser, you can do a view source, press ctrl-f and search for https: to find the link.

I could post the link here and have the same warning pop up, but I'm declining the temptation.

Thanks for the research!

I do remember the images of the tanks and stuff now.