I mean, you only need to read their repeated admissions that without MINERVA their intelligence recovery would've dropped from ~80% to ~10% to see why they're trying to play the same game plan again and again. Whether that's through puppetmastering encryption companies like in this article, sneaking it in via bribes (RSA's Dual_EC_DRBG), or most recently trying to legislate it through (FB, Whatsapp, etc. E2E encryption), it's all essentially the same play.
As a corollary to all this, it's another point of evidence that strong encryption really is beyond the reach of even the biggest three-letter-acronyms, and that there's no secret sauce technology out there letting them mass-decrypt everything. If there was, then perhaps there wouldn't be such a strong push to rig the deck in the first place. At least that's heartening.
I think most of us would be fine with the NSA doing what they do if it was targeted, like the police getting warrants to break privacy only in important cases for public safety.
The problem will always be mass interception. Not only domestically either, as there is nothing protecting any foreign communications being intercepted in the US (and I'm sure Five eyes+ bypasses these legal roadblocks whenever needed). Which is why the push for encrypt-everything is so important. But as we've seen repeatedly, even when investigating the president and his people, even the allegedly "significant domestic protections" offered by FISA are a joke and basically rubber-stamp.
WhatsApp and iMessage and other non-SMS communication as well as email providers finally adopting proper transit encryption probably has reduced the amount of this sort of unfiltered "intelligence" gathering by 90%+. But I'm sure there's still tons of mobile apps and websites which aren't doing things properly and are filling up their databases.
> WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues
The fact that they use awkward wording that contains words whose first letters that start with NSA (not secure as) is pretty suggestive that you are right.
Even just reading this article should show you that they kill you with kindness when they want to keep things hush-hush. If someone is developing a free tool, and are offered a retirement-tier payoff to stop, they're going to stop.
Does that mean they are only available because the 3 letter agencies can hack them?
This is absolutely true and nowhere was it more evident than the Speck fiasco. Watching the old guard of the NSA show up and hammer a crypto forum with stonewalling and smug G-Man hand-waving would have been acceptable in 1995, but watching it take place after the snowden revelations was just cringe-worthy. The answer from the community wasnt just no, but hell no.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nsa-speck-removed-linux-4-...
I suspect things like ED25519 and LetsEncrypt were probably a much more damning blow to the day-to-day business of warrantless telecom spying than we're led to believe, and its only going to get closer to that 10% pre-MINERVA figure as time rolls on. the Signal protocol has gained massive traction, and things like Tails are easy enough for a power user. Once someone rolls out a slick CSS frontend for wireguard its back to greasing the palms of guys like RSA in the hopes snooping corporate networks is just as fruitful as snooping the public internet.
CryptoAG tips the governments hand on exactly why it disfavors crypto now. its not terrorists or posthumous parallel construction of $latest_shooter. its about control.
"Don't roll your own encryption."
I've always understood the arguments for it but that the advice is so widespread seemed a little counter intuitive. It always seemed, to me at least, that having millions of encryption algorithms out there would be inherently more secure than a lot of people standardized on one because the risk to any one would be so compartmentalized by comparison.
Enclosing letters in paper the thickness of which has a million variations doesn't mean one of them is magically more secure than one made from two inch thick steel. The point of encryption is it's a standard that needs to be interoperable. Also, NSAs of this world aren't breaking modern ciphers. They're circumventing encryption by going for the keys: There's three choices
1) If communication system uses TLS-encryption (e.g. Telegram cloud messages), there's no need to break encryption, just hack server and read messages from there.
2) If the system uses E2EE where user has no way to verify fingerprints (e.g. iMessage, Confide), compromise the server legally or by hacking it, and perform undetectable MITM attacks.
3) If the system uses E2EE where fingerprints can be verified, hack the user's endpoint to steal their private keys and perform undetectable MITM attack (or just steal their chat logs or take screenshots).
So, to sum it up, the game when modern ciphers are used, is not with cipher security, but everything else around it.
For the easiest, you can just apply multiple encryption algorithms in succession (of course with different keys). Although the algorithm of AES is considered safe, it can be broken through a side-channel such as a backdoor, which secretly stores keys used somewhere. But if you apply another algorithm after AES, be it ChaCha20 or Blowfish, it can only gets reinforced.
Another trivial way to safely roll out your own encryption is to increase the number of rounds in ciphers that are considered safe. The increased number of rounds only strengthen the algorithm. And it's just changing a few magic numbers in the source code - you can get extra security for little expense of time.
Both methods provide esay-to-implement ways to safely 'invent' a new encryption algorithm without a proper knowledge of cryptography. If people start doing any of the above regularly, it would be a headache for those enjoying to exploit vulnerabilities in common crypto implementations.
Let that sink in a bit.
Intelligence isn't about truth and transparency. It's about deception. They're not going to run a Super Bowl advert saying they can crack anything. That's not how it works.
> Le Temps has argued that Crypto AG had been actively working with the British, US and West German secret services since 1956, going as far as to rig manuals after the wishes of the NSA. These claims were vindicated by US government documents declassified in 2015.
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-9088423.html (1996) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG#Compromised_machines
I'm quite curious about this. As you said it's been known for a long time that, without knowing the full extent of the ties, there was ties between Crypto-AG and US agencies (at least). I find hard to believe the candor that this M. Linde displays here...
> But the true extent of the company’s relationship with the CIA and its German counterpart was until now never revealed.
The new fact is that the company was co-owned, then fully owned by the CIA.
Along the way, I wouldn't blame any reader for assuming that this is entirely new information.
And as a U.S. resident, even as I acknowledge and deplore what the U.S. intelligence services have done to others, I still don't want China to do that to me. This is not an area where equitable (but bad) treatment makes things right IMO.
History shows that government isn't your friend at all. The US might be a rare exception from time to time. But even that would be very, very limited.
Doesn't mean I wouldn't mind 5G spyware from another country.
Other countries programs aren't good or anything, but anyone who's deluded themselves into thinking the US is some kind of clean actor, not participating in this sort of stuff, or only using it for good is more optimistic than I could ever manage being.
It’s clear that the CCP is assembling a database of information on everyone in the developed world, not just in China, and that they intend to use it as part of their soft power arsenal (along everything else from economic incentives to Confucious Institutes).
The CCP is much more frightening and less accountable than the US Govt, especially as they reach parity in soft and hard power.
That really depends on the government, and how heavily they rely on domestic surveillance as an instrument of political control. It also depends on the geopolitical and diplomatic situation, and the risks that stem from that.
In China for instance, domestic surveillance is a clear threat any of its citizens that choose to be dissidents and advocate for change. For instance, I have friends there who are very angry about the coronavirus situation, but have to be careful about what they say and how they say it to avoid risking government attention. Even with an extremely dark and cynical view of the US government, that kind of threat is far less for US citizens.
Foreign spying can be dangerous to you, personally, but usually in a more indirect and collective way [1]. The most obvious example of this is war. If your country loses one to a more brutal and oppressive adversary, you'll likely find yourself is a worse, if not outright bad, position. On a smaller and more mundane scale, foreign industrial espionage could put you out of a job.
[1] You may be a target of foreign direct spying if you're friend of a dissident, a government employee, a government official, or have access to valuable technology or trade secrets, etc.
This is an incredibly foolish line of reasoning. Compromising the trust and sovereignty of individuals in the U.S. is an extreme risk, and it can come for anyone. The U.S. government at least will tend not to try undermining the U.S. economy except through specific policy initiatives; the Chinese government has a permanent interest in controlling the U.S. economy, and holding the threat of compromise over our heads.
No government is your friend, but there's really no comparing the abusiveness of the CCP, both at home and abroad, to the U.S. equivalent, and I'm honestly shocked that I ever have to remind people in the west of this.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-ana...
Exactly. Huawei even kinda smells the same. From the OP:
> As Widman settled in, the secret partners adopted a set of principles for rigged algorithms, according to the BND history. They had to be “undetectable by usual statistical tests” and, if discovered, be “easily masked as implementation or human errors.”
> In other words, when cornered, Crypto executives would blame sloppy employees or clueless users.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversi...:
> Huawei savaged by Brit code review board over pisspoor dev practices
> "The work of HCSEC [Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre]… reveals serious and systematic defects in Huawei's software engineering and cyber security competence," said the HCSEC oversight board in its annual report, published this morning.
Makes me wonder what we've done using the fact US companies (ex: Cisco) control large swathes of the internet's infrastructure.
Wouldn't China/Russia make some noise if they had proof the Cisco was hiding something in their infra?
Why should Cisco/Juniper/Ericsson/etc compete with Huawei when they can more easily use political pressure to exclude them from the market?
Guess they would also be able to do location tracking though and that's not so easily solved.
[0] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...
Also, I think quite a bit of telecomm traffic is encrypted by the telecomm carrier itself. For example I don't think my iPhone, by default, encrypts/decrypts SMS or voice calls on the device. To the extent text messages and mobile phone calls are resistant to dumb eavesdropping, that's provided by the mobile carrier. So having access into all the equipment at the carrier would be a nice centralized place to sit and observe/record.
A nation-state type actor can hoover up everything and retroactively decrypt.
Where is the self-interest in the US pressuring European (mostly EU) countries to use EU competitors?
And the 'coup of the century' is far from clickbait, it's definitionally warranted for what the CIA and BND did here.
It's a little ironic as well, especially since the US is so keen on blocking Huawei over espionage concerns.
There have been detailed leaks since 1995 on cryptome.org and crypto mailing lists about CryptoAG, including details about the message format and the bits used to leak parts of the key (16 bit leak, IIRC).
The CryptoAG story has tainted all Swiss-based crypto/security firms since 1994.
[1] https://www.cryptomuseum.com/people/hans_buehler.htm
[2] Verschlüsselt, Der Fall Hans Bühler, ISBN 3-85932-141-2. 1994 - Book written by former CryptoAG employee Hans Buehler (1994).
The story was handed to him by the Agency, or agents of. The only "research" seems to be calling the names in the story for fact checking, and wapo couldn't even determine if some of them were alive or dead.
This story is dangerously close to being nothing but a CIA press release.
It's not ironic to play a game to win. Saying this is ironic is like saying it was ironic for the US to try to keep the North Koreans/Chinese from winning the Korean War because the US had just won WWII.
> In 1977, Heinz Wagner, the chief executive at Crypto who knew the true role of the CIA and BND, abruptly fired a wayward engineer after the NSA complained that diplomatic traffic coming out of Syria had suddenly became unreadable. The engineer, Peter Frutiger, had long suspected Crypto was collaborating with German intelligence. He had made multiple trips to Damascus to address complaints about their Crypto products and apparently, without authority from headquarters, had fixed their vulnerabilities.
> Frutiger “had figured out the Minerva secret and it was not safe with him,” according to the CIA history. Even so, the agency was livid with Wagner for firing Frutiger rather than finding a way to keep him quiet on the company payroll. Frutiger declined to comment for this story.
> The overlapping accounts expose frictions between the two partners over money, control and ethical limits, with the West Germans frequently aghast at the enthusiasm with which U.S. spies often targeted allies.
> Hagelin had once hoped to turn control over to his son, Bo. But U.S. intelligence officials regarded him as a “wild card” and worked to conceal the partnership from him. Bo Hagelin was killed in a car crash on Washington’s Beltway in 1970. There were no indications of foul play.
Wow, those are words to aspire to
Amazing. The only explanation I can think of is that CovertAction had much worse reputation and could be easily dismissed as conspiracy theory.
[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/30/cyberbunker_cb3rob_...
I've seen some deep integrations that have made me despair of any organization being free from the overweening influence of the "security services." I'm talking about groups as large as multi-billion dollar public US technology infrastructure companies and as small as anarchist cells planning to attend a political convention.
Sometimes it seems that internal turf battles, budget disputes, careerism, and rank incompetence are our only protections against the machinations of the National Security State.
For what it's worth I fully expect a great percentage of any anarchist cell to actually be double agents/"agents provocateurs", in the end I think that's why the Okhrana [1] was so good at its job (relatively speaking, of course).
As a matter of fact I think that the "Western" three-letter agencies are at a disadvantage because they're focusing too much on data collection and interception, they're too technical, so to speak, this is still a "humans-heavy industry" (for lack of a better phrase) and without controlling and understanding said humans all the information in the world will do almost nothing to further said secret agencies' goals.
Even though the knowledge of that is/was public, it wasn't widely know until the Edward Snowden revelations - largely due to the relative disinterest of US news orgs (even when faced with clear evidence of US's ethical lapses -- eg: Mark Klein whistleblows AT&T's NSA taps on the internet backbone).
Most of the US Press still behaves as if USIC's primary goal was safeguarding the public instead of furthering the interests of US Gov & political financiers.
The same is still going on in spades.
Thank-you editors for our chronically uninformed electorate.
Of course, knowing the contents of diplomatic messages isn't always enough. A good example is described in Peter Wright's Spycatcher: the Brits were breaking the French diplomatic cipher, using an ingenuous attack on the electromagnetic noise of the cipher machine in the embassy. But all this intelligence was unable to stop De Gaulle thwarting their entering the European Common Market.
eg XXX in 21Land is a WW
I may not like our current US president, but it doesn't mean he can't use truths as political instruments.
Due to China's and Russia's human rights abuses, they are who I dislike the most. It might be by a small margin, but I would feel more comfortable having the CIA and NSA spy on me any day, than China or Russia.
What's wild is that I know many in China would feel the same way - but in the reverse.
Fascinating use of 'negative space' in intelligence. Also appreciated the dig at Reagan, apparently gross intelligence breaches at the highest levels aren't anything novel.
True. Same portrayals too. If breacher is an R they're incompetent, it's a D they're a traitor.
Much of their communication probably isn’t that sensitive though.
Also, everyone wants to eventually end their shift and go home. That means just doing what you're told & screw the damage done.
Post wikileaks Diplomatic cable leaks - I think they assume their comms may eventually be compromised, but I don't think they assume their comms can decrypted in a matter of seconds.
Though to be fair, I'm not sure if there are copyright issues involved, which might make such a guideline difficult.
> At times, including in the 1980s, Crypto accounted for roughly 40 percent of the diplomatic cables and other transmissions by foreign governments that cryptanalysts at the NSA decoded and mined for intelligence, according to the documents.
Proton Mail would be a great honey pot for the CIA.
For funding, please visit https://CE.YA/
See chapter 26, https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
https://www.rts.ch/dossiers/la-suisse-sous-couverture/
It's in French and may not be accessible outside Switzerland but I highly recommend it.
The Allies were reading a good deal of both Japanese and German encrypted communications. This saved the lives of many Allied solders and, perhaps, tipped the balance of the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(cryptography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra
David Kahn's book, the Codebreakers, is a good introduction to cryptography and has a lot of this history in it.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2016/10/05/polish-ciphers/
To put it bluntly, the equivalent would have to be, say, informing Stalin about Barbarossa, or cracking Purple before Pearl Harbor.
What the article describes, is the most thorough and long-running (known) intelligence operation in modern history. It is simply unparalleled in strategic depth and tactical implications, not to mention how it must have shaped global politics, economics & social development.
