omnibus PRISM/NSA/free Edward Snowden/encryption tutorial thread

i

what

Nixon: "I am not suggesting Johnson is anything other than a patriot..."

The U.S. National Security Agency has bugged the United Nations' New York headquarters, Germany's Der Spiegel weekly said on Sunday in a report on U.S. spying that could further strain relations between Washington and its allies. 'The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!)', Der Spiegel quoted one document as saying, adding that within three weeks the number of decoded communications rose to 458 from 12.

naive question: who "orders" this kind of thing at NSA? "Hack into the UN and spy on other countries!" - who tells someone to do that? is it some evil guy in shades in the upper echelons at the NSA who is somehow never forced to disclose this kind of thing except in confidential briefings to members of the senate committee on the path to dystopia or something?

not the NSA per se, but this was a 2010 WikiLeaks revelation : http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/28/clinton-ordered-diplomats-spy-un/

The politics of bugging the UN (and potential fallout from discovery of this) would make this a very high level decision. My guess would be that the idea could have originated at almost any level, but the decision to go ahead was approved by the national security council and particularly with the approval of whoever was president at the time.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/obama-surveillance-and-the-legacy-of-the-march-on-washington.html

haven't been the biggest fan of cobb at the NYer but this was good

Was waiting for someone to address that.

That figures whose dissent consisted of a demand that the United States abide by its own Constitution could be vacuumed into a system meant to trace foreign threats raises the question of what other democratic demand, what present moral inconvenience, is being similarly thwarted.

it's a poignant irony but that's a weak article imo, it starts by ironically framing obama's own words to distance him from the civil rights movement, then lands on the above sudden and unsupported quote for its conclusion. there are many, MANY people with closer ties to the civil rights movement (if that's our standard) who are opposing these invasions than a solitary dude atop the pyramid.

mural altered

http://i.imgur.com/DVGxjhy.jpg

Barack Obama is, as he pointed out in Selma, an heir to the civil-rights movement. What he decides to do with that legacy is another matter

oh, he's decided.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-spied-on-al-jazeera-communications-snowden-document-a-919681.html

I watched Sneakers last night (don't ask) and it was kind of a hoot. Love the parts discussing how the NSA doesn't have the authority to spy domestically. Oh the 90s

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html

So Snowden gave Gellman of the W. Post the Spy agencies budgets

sneakers is great. Lawrence Lasker is like one of the only h-wood guys capable of not being excruciatingly dumb about computers onscreen. that 'can you guarantee my safety' bit is still loads of fun, along with a few other moments.

I always have a hard time remembering which one is Sneakers and which one is Hackers.

When spies are denied authority to eavesdrop, then only unauthorized eavesdroppers will spy on us.

the DEA: underrated!

AT&T, in return for payment by the government, has employees sit with government drug units and sift through company (not government) stored data reaching as far back as 1987....

Unlike controversial NSA programs like PRISM, Hemisphere does not see the DEA itself hoarding communications data; AT&T stores the data. Nonetheless, with only an administrative subpoena (not a warrant) drug agents can hone in on an individual’s communications data within an hour. As such Hempisphere is yet another example of how government agencies and corporations work in tandem to create and uphold the surveillance dragnets from which almost no communications within or going out of the U.S. escape....

“I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts,” said the ACLU’s Jamil Jaffer.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/03/dea_can_access_all_att_records/

Small lol at 'hempisphere'

Some good news today

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/09/hundreds-pages-nsa-spying-documents-be-released-result-eff-lawsuit

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

As long as they haven't cracked rot13 I'm still nfsr.

fnsr! Duh. :-(

Dubious headline, there. The article makes clear that the NSA hasn't broken RSA or anything.

Independent security experts have long suspected that the NSA has been introducing weaknesses into security standards, a fact confirmed for the first time by another secret document. It shows the agency worked covertly to get its own version of a draft security standard issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved for worldwide use in 2006.

SSH 2.0?

The NSA has worked closely with its British counterpart, the GCHQ, in the effort to break or get around the codes that protect the data that billions of people send across the Internet each day — including e-mails, bank transactions, Web searches, phone calls and chats, the newspapers reported on their Web sites Thursday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-has-made-strides-in-thwarting-encryption-used-to-protect-internet-communication/2013/09/05/0ec08efc-1669-11e3-a2ec-b47e45e6f8ef_story.html

Phil Zimmermann is founder of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and battled the U.S. government in the 1990s over his effort to establish strong Internet encryption for consumers. He said he is confident that the NSA has not cracked PGP encryption, which is now owned by Symantec. “The fact that they use PGP for government users indicates that they haven’t broken it,” he said. “Otherwise they’d have stopped using it.”

Still hoping for some opinions on this thread: VPN providers S/D

(obv. VPN isn't NSA-proof, but am interested in slowing things down at least)

― Elvis Telecom, Friday, August 23, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess it's still in the works and they'll be publishing the source code soon.

http://www.popehat.com/2013/09/06/nsa-codebreaking-i-am-the-other/

The is the one thing i recall related to potential NSA backdoors in encryption standards: http://www.schneier.com/essay-198.html

I'm sure there's other stuff too that we don't even know about.

this article is vaguely relevant to the thread too: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/barrett-brown-faces-105-years-in-jail-20130905?print=true

I watched Sneakers last night (don't ask) and it was kind of a hoot. Love the parts discussing how the NSA doesn't have the authority to spy domestically. Oh the 90s

― Z S, Monday, September 2, 2013 8:42 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

watched an episode of bored to death made in 2008 or 2009 that was all about surveillance and how stuff on email could never been found etc. and it was really disorienting.

excellent article on what likely is and isn't secure: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance

The crazy thing is that this program's budget is about 800 million, while the PRISM budget was a mere 40 million.

Bruce Schneier is the security expert and his recommendations are likely right on. I'm personally not interested in Tor, since I worry it'll leak stuff to people even less scrupulous than the NSA, but I could revisit that issue. I wish PGP were actually easy to use so I could start rejecting unencrypted email, but that's not gonna work out.

everybody should revert back to one-time pads for the next few months

We need to start encrypting ILX.

Who knows who can read what we write here!!!

I'm gonna use the freedom of information act to get all the 77 info I can. Finally I will know what you monsters are up to back there!

Request Access to 77 Borad

another good article on the crypto topic: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1517

p=1517, okay. Then what?

into BlackBerrys

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-smartphones-including-the-blackberry-a-921161.html

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-data-israel-documents

whoa

i love how this neverending series of revelations is prompting swift and robust action on the part of legislators

...they're pretty much just going to avoid talking about it and hope it goes away, right? what's sad is that that's probably a pretty good strategy for them, it'll probably work.

The National Security Agency for almost three years searched a massive database of Americans’ phone call records attempting to identify potential terrorists in violation of court-approved privacy rules, and the problem went unfixed because no one at the agency had a full technical understanding of how its system worked, according to new documents and senior government officials.

Moreover, it was Justice Department officials who discovered the problem and reported it to the court that oversees surveillance programs, the documents show, undermining assertions by the NSA that self-reporting is part of its culture.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/declassified-court-documents-highlight-nsa-violations/2013/09/10/60b5822c-1a4b-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/09/fisa-judge-reggie-walton-skeptical-nsa-phone-record

NSA chief may be an insane Trekkie!

"When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a 'whoosh' sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather 'captain's chair' in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.

'Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,' says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits."

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/09/nsa-director-modeled-war-room-after-star-treks-enterprise.html

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mind-keith-alexander-star-trek

Wow.

In more mundane news:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/13/the-fisa-court-will-release-more-opinions-because-of-snowden/

How airline reservations are used to target illegal searches

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/09/27/the-other-questions-senator-ron-wyden-wants-answered-on-nsa-surveillance/

Dianne Feinstein had other ideas though