Offers of technical assistance on Twitter yielded this response:@CthulhuSec there is no DoS going on.
— nibbler (@nblr) September 28, 2015
The game of twenty questions continued. If it wasn't a technical outage, then what was it? A court order of some kind?@SecEvangelism there is no "crew" and the problem is not of technical nature.
— nibbler (@nblr) September 28, 2015
Not a technical issue. Not a legal issue. (Assuming there's been no gag order.) What else could it be?A quick review turns up the following tweet from less than 14 hours previous: "If you're a Russian Darkweb Money Service and you lost your password, even you won't get it back."@DaveManouchehri @SecEvangelism it is not a legal issue and if it was one, it would be communicated.
— nibbler (@nblr) September 28, 2015
Coincidence? Impossible to know, and CCC has declined to answer questions.Some unidentified party wants the CCC's jabber service offline. Not technical. Not legal. How many other options are there? So I asked:Additionally: If you're a Russian Darkweb Money Service and you lost your password, even you won't get it back.
— CCC Jabber Service (@jabbercccde) September 27, 2015
"if the problem isn't technical, what does that mean? rubber hoses, court order, blackmail?"Which Horn seemed to think fanciful.@nblr if the problem isn't technical, what does that mean? rubber hoses, court order, blackmail?
— J.M. Porup (@toholdaquill) September 28, 2015
"wow, what a colourful imagination you seem to have. none of the above. nothing even close to that. move along. no story here."More downtime. By the time of writing the server had been down for more than 24 hours, and there is no indication that it will be back up any time soon.Meanwhile, speculation has begun.Cryptography professor Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins University tweeted that it was unlikely a government takedown:@toholdaquill wow, what a colourful imagination you seem to have. none of the above. nothing even close to that. move along. no story here.
— nibbler (@nblr) September 28, 2015
"Why would a government wants to shut down jabber.ccc? It's such a useful place to grab metadata."(While OTR chat messages are encrypted, the metadata—who's talking to whom, when, from what IP addresses, and for how long—is not.)But in a Twitter DM, Green speculated, "If the CCC guys chose not to log and/or share metadata with police during an investigation, you might see a reaction like this."Why would a government wants to shut down jabber.ccc? It's such a useful place to grab metadata. https://t.co/V7s2MU12xd
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 28, 2015
Update: Within a few minutes of publishing this article, the CCC Jabber Service Twitter account announced that the server had been temporarily turned off "intentionally."The sooner we transition to server-less instant messaging that doesn't leak metadata, the better. https://t.co/lOfltDv1hV
— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) September 28, 2015
This server has been temporarily switched off intentionally. The reason is neither government interference nor legal threat (1/2)
— CCC Jabber Service (@jabbercccde) September 29, 2015
After publishing this story, a source who requested anonymity contacted us with the following new information:"As a followup on your CCC Jabber server story: In an internal CCC mailing list one of the admins said that the server was shut down due to personal threats against the people running it (the source of that threat wasn't specified). A press statement should come later today." This report is unconfirmed and Motherboard is investigating.Correction: An earlier version of this story said Michael Horn (@nblr) is the admin of the CCC's jabber server. Julius Mittenzwei, a CCC member and lawyer, has reached out to Motherboard to say that Horn is simply a member of the collective, and not an admin of jabber.ccc.Please stay calm, we won't delete your contact lists. Please use the time to setup/use new jabber servers out there. (2/2)
— CCC Jabber Service (@jabbercccde) September 29, 2015