Could "Vcards" be a method of communication for child trafficking/pedophilia rings? ( pizzagate )

submitted by Commoner

In following up on a recent Voater post about James Comey’s ties to the Clinton foundation, I researched the law firm, DLP Piper, for which his brother, Peter Comey, works.

“DLA Piper is the firm that performed the independent audit of the Clinton Foundation in November during Clinton-World’s first big push to put the email scandal behind them. DLA Piper’s employees taken as a whole represent a major Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign donation bloc and Clinton Foundation donation base. DLA Piper ranks #5 on Hillary Clinton’s all-time career Top Contributors list, just ahead of Goldman Sachs.”

http://yournewswire.com/james-comeys-ties-to-clinton-foundation-is-a-conflict-of-interest/

Searching the DLA Piper website, I found this page listing their associates with the following type of information, including a link for a vcard, next to the pic. For example:

Louise Horn Aagesen Associate

Copenhagen T: +45 33 34 04 92

[email protected]

VCard

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/people/

I could not open the link to her vcard , because I don't have the software, but I was curious as to what it was.

So what is a vcard?

From Wikipedia “A vCard is a file format standard for electronic business cards. vCards are often attached to e-mail messages, but can be exchanged in other ways, such as on the World Wide Web or instant messaging. They can contain name and address information, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, URLs, logos, photographs, and audio clips.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard

Searching further, I found this website which lets you create a vcard for yourself. There is a video which explains all the information you can include in a vcard and how it can be used for correspondence with your business partners and clients.

http://www.vcardglobal.com/index.html

I can see vcards used by the pedo networks to communicate most anything they would need to in a very private way.

ArtificalDuality

Ok guys.. I think we have signal here.

Isn't vcard a term sluts use for their former virginities?

Yes, I've heard teenagers use the term, "V Card," to refer to virginity, as in: "Has her V card been swiped yet?"

This is a very convincing reference. After looking at the protocol (see bottom post) I've established that the protocol allows for transmission of any type of (encrypted) data as well as contain many URI references that can potentially lead to unsafe websites.

However, the primary feature used are the ability to add custom property definitions to a vCard, as well as like I said before, encode binary encrypted data into XML and attach it.

When persuing the document to get an impression of the protocol, I noted something interesting in their data examples: 

 BEGIN:VCARD
 VERSION:4.0
 UID:urn:uuid:4fbe8971-0bc3-424c-9c26-36c3e1eff6b1
 FN;PID=1.1:J. Doe
 N:Doe;J.;;;
 EMAIL;PID=1.1:[email protected]
 EMAIL;PID=2.1:[email protected]
 TEL;PID=1.1;VALUE=uri:tel:+1- **555-555-5555**
 TEL;PID=2.1;VALUE=uri:tel:+1- **666-666-6666**
 CLIENTPIDMAP:1;urn:uuid:53e374d9-337e-4727-8803-a1e9c14e0556
 END:VCARD

A lot of 6's there!, Grouped per 3. And 5's as well. They could have used any other number but they chose 6'es for their test data. It's Them saying 'hi'.

What needs to be done is to build a piece of software that reads the custom fields, reads the XML and make these accessible in a UI for further dissection. I have a hunch that there'll be plenty custom data to be faound in their vCards. Anyone who can get me a bunch?

I can make a viewer / scanner for exported vCards but I'd like anyone else with coding skills to also make an app. The more working on it the better. The goal is to make the custom content accessible for those with expertise in cracking the cyphers that may be contained within, but not so much in the ability to build a full protocol implementation.

Going open-source so people can scrutinize the code, download the source (with the free Visual Studio Community edition) and compile it will avoid any trust hassle with precompiled EXE files.

Let's build some nice vCard viewers / scanners that could possibly batch-read whole directories of them and output the custom (XML) data.

Judgejewdy

Vcards aren't private and are pretty common. Unless they have some kind of special "version" that contains secret data, don't think there's anything here. But I'm not an IT guy so maybe someone who is can chime in.

ArtificalDuality

I looked at the vCard specification protocol:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6350

Yes, the format allows any kind of data. There are pre-defined fields. But it also allows an XML field which allows for arbitrary data to be tagged on. Through Base64 encoding any type of binary encrypted data can be tagged along with the vCard.

So yes, the protocol allows for communication of encrypted data. The XML field is not shown in most apps and would require a specialized app that will offer access to the XML fields. Simple address book apps will likely not do anything with the XML field.

P.S. I can make an app that will read the XML sections from exported vCards and save them to actual XML files for further processing. Cryptographers can then have at it if there's any encoded data found in them.

lemon11

Look at the wikipedia page you linked. It's just text. Open it in a text editor.

Celticgirlonamission

I think google has a VCard reader...might want to see what's on a few in the emails

turn-down-for-what

vCards aren't used much anymore, but they're not that mysterious. The contacts apps for both iPhone and Android support them, as does Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.

Edit: here's the vCard contents: https://imgoat.com/v/22926

Uncle420

They're still in use. When people send a contact via SMS it's vCard. When you export your contacts from phone or cloud contact storage it's vCard.

I use vCard to back up my contacts from my private cloud.

vCards may be used to transfer contact information or personal information regarding "products", but considering they're a known format with no encryption it would be rather stupid - espesially when we look at the theories of steganographically encrypting info pictures.

Damnpasswords

Isn't vcard a term sluts use for their former virginities?

Mammy

Yes, I've heard teenagers use the term, "V Card," to refer to virginity, as in: "Has her V card been swiped yet?"