Reading between the lines on this, it's plainly apparent why there's been repeated attacks on encrpytion by the US government. From this, through RSA's Dual_EC_DRBG, to the present day, it's obvious that the US highly values rigging the deck to aid their decryption, and that the current democratisation of encrpytion protocols is a threat to them.
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.
Putting my tinfoil hat on, after reading the Snowden disclosures I'm convinced that they do have limited means of attacking encrypted communication but they would rather rely on these (expendable) means. Once they lose their crypto vulnerabilities it will force them to be even more overt.
I'm pretty sure the US government is why the TrueCrypt devs stopped all work. They got hit with a national security letter (NSL) or heavily leaned on and pressured to stop making their product so awesome and un-breakable.
>the current democratisation of encrpytion protocols is a threat to 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.
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.
That thought is one reason why I've always questioned this advice:
"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.
Given that the US has operations aiming to capture large amounts of Internet traffic, and given that most interesting Internet traffic is encrypted nowadays, doesn't it follow that they probably have a way to decrypt at least some of it? Capturing DNS queries and HTTP requests to aging websites that still haven't enabled TLS seems not worth the trouble.
> 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.
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.
It has been known for a pretty long time that the Crypto AG is affiliated with or controlled by intelligence services. It was also always firmly in the "security through obscurity of our own cipher designs" department. Their C-52 (52 as in "1952") cipher machines were designed to enable decryption by Western intelligence.
> 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.
> Andreas Linde, the chairman of the company that now holds the rights to Crypto’s international products and business, said he had no knowledge of the company’s relationship to the CIA and BND before being confronted with the facts in this story.
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...
> There were also security breaches that put Crypto under clouds of suspicion. Documents released in the 1970s showed extensive — and incriminating — correspondence between an NSA pioneer and Crypto’s founder. Foreign targets were tipped off by the careless statements of public officials including President Ronald Reagan. And the 1992 arrest of a Crypto salesman in Iran, who did not realize he was selling rigged equipment, triggered a devastating “storm of publicity,” according to the CIA history.
> But the true extent of the company’s relationship with the CIA and its German counterpart was until now never revealed.
This thread needs to be at the top of the heap. I've read the WaPo article and it would be interesting to know exactly what's newly being revealed in it.
Gives you a sense of why the U.S. intelligence community is so nervous about having Huawei at the core of the domestic 5G network. Would not be fun for the U.S. to have done to them what they've done to others.
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.
Funny, I don't really care China spying on me as much since they just don't have any handles that would be relevant. Your own government spying on you is much more dangerous. And since I don't have influence on policies of China, I can at least hold domestic politicians that strive for more surveillance accountable. At least theoretically.
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.
When this stuff is used against you, it is FAR more likely going to be from a domestic group hostile to a political opinion you might have. Imagine if an outfit like Cambridge Analytica had the resources of a nation state helping it collect and process information about who might support any given policy (and be given the carrot) and who might oppose it (and be given the stick). That's the scale of threat we face. While certain governments around the world are asking for mandatory back door access to encryption, rest assured they have a "plan B" for getting access to your information without it, and the 3 letter departments are front and center in those plans.
> Gives you a sense of why the U.S. intelligence community is so nervous about having Huawei at the core of the domestic 5G network. Would not be fun for the U.S. to have done to them what they've done to others.
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.
> 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.
It wouldn't be so bad with ubiquitous end to end encryption though right? If everything was encrypted in transit it wouldn't really matter if Huawei (and by extension the supposition goes the Chinese government) because they'd just see noise.
Guess they would also be able to do location tracking though and that's not so easily solved.
Or maybe simply because the US intelligence not having a backdoor is why the're demonizing Huawei in Europe for example. That doesn't imply that Huawei does have a backdoor, simply that they'd not be able to spy anymore...
What a treat to read a well written piece based on decent research. It's a long read but well worth your time. Kudo's to the journalists who helped uncover it.
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's nothing ironic, weird, or surprising about the US wanting to stop other countries from doing to them what they do to other countries. It's hypocritical in some sense, mostly because the US tries to project itself as the good guys, but it's just basic international relations. That's how every country has always operated and will always operate.
No, this is not original research, this isn't being uncovered now, and I'm not sure why this is being republished now in 2020.
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.
Hypocritical, not ironic. You mean to highlight that the USA does not treat other sovereign states like the USA expects to be treated. There is no ironic contrast between the USA funding Crypto AG and China funding Huawei.
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 a little ironic as well, especially since the US is so keen on blocking Huawei over espionage concerns.
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.
The popular belief is that the CIA and its intelligence colleagues will go to any lengths to protect its power and secrecy. But apparently a Crypto engineer discovered the secret conspiracy in 1977, and even fixed vulnerabilities on behalf of the Syrian state – and the CIA was content to leave him alone for the next 40 years?
> 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.
> U.S. officials were even more alarmed when Wagner hired a gifted electrical engineer in 1978 named Mengia Caflisch. ... But NSA officials immediately raised concerns that she was “too bright to remain unwitting.”
... What? This is a well written article covering essentially the same information. This is so confusing, why did nobody react back then? Why did governments continue to buy equipment from Crypto AG?
Amazing. The only explanation I can think of is that CovertAction had much worse reputation and could be easily dismissed as conspiracy theory.
It follows that private VPN firms would be a similar target for deep pocketed state intelligence agencies. What do you think the chances are that the VPN service or software you use hasn't been co-opted, compromised or is outright owned by state actors in China, Europe or the US?
It would be hopelessly naive to assume that intelligence services don't run a large number of VPN providers an tor relays, just as the used to run mix master smtp (email) relays.
You can never trust VPN but it is important to have a legal case. Let’s say VPN is in a country where mass surveillance is illegal, then at least in future you can sue the VPN company if they are found out to be breaking their contract.
It certainly does make one wonder who else in the worlds of high technology (and journalism!) May be – wittingly or unwittingly – working for Uncle Sam.
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.
> as small as anarchist cells planning to attend a political convention
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.
US Telcos have been jointed at the hip w/ the USIC for generations. AT&T's history of proactively helping the US spy on US Citizens+Everyone hints at the company's deep desire to be a spy entity in it's own right.
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.
Being able to read diplomatic messages is a definite gold-mine.
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.
This article has made me decide to never mistake Huawei's ties to Chinese government surveillance for US political nonsense ever again.
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.
>Their [Soviet Union & China] well-founded suspicions of the company’s ties to the West shielded them from exposure, although the CIA history suggests that U.S. spies learned a great deal by monitoring other countries’ interactions with Moscow and Beijing.
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.
Related question: do modern diplomats/negotiators automatically assume their comms are compromised? Are their "secure" lines ever truly secure? Surely they know the NSA/CIA would be listening.
Not all communication is compromised; for example for an embassy it could be practical to use a true one time pad which is uncrackable and attempts to intercept the key would lead to a diplomatic incident.
Much of their communication probably isn’t that sensitive though.
Somewhat surprisingly, it seems they don't. Just look at the diplomatic cables Wikileaks obtained. I mean, ok, they were leaked and not decrypted, but people were assuming that texts which can be accessed by tens of thousands of people would not leak.
> do modern diplomats/negotiators automatically assume their comms are compromised?
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.
Thanks, it gets irksome at some points that a large number of submitted content on HN is paywalled. I can't subscribe to all of these, just to read a couple of articles a month per publication.
TL;DR Swiss firm Crypto AG sold tech to governments for decades, but turns out to be owned and operated by CIA and BND who benefited from backdoors. From their POV, a wildly successful operation, beyond imagination.
> 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.
Would be cool if the Agency did relatively more of this kind of thing and relatively less of, for example, paying psychotic Afghan pedophile warlords hundreds of millions of dollars for reneged-upon power sharing agreements and HUMINT of dubious value.
It has long been known that the NSA had their hooks into Crypto AG; for example, that's how they managed to intercept Libyan communications. What's new is the report that the CIA actually partly owned the company.
My new startup focuses on human nervous system faraday cages embedded into next generation fashion technology. This tech covers your entire body, keeping you safe from remote scans, and includes realistic facial and body disguises. For your safety, our tech constantly scans your thought patterns and memories and keeps them safe with a static filled triple scrambled encryption method, and encodes them into specially placed augmented cellular technology at undisclosed locations in the body.
Can anyone here point out an actual case where the NSA was able to break or legitimately hack someone's crypto? I was under the impression that their track record was basically nil on this, and that virtually every instance of them spying on encrypted info boiled down to some sort of inside job that actually resulted in the encryption being weakened or thwarted. People speak about these guys like they have off the charts abilities, yet the available evidence is not so indicative of that. Just looks like a big government operation kinda bumbling along to me.
If they had that ability they certainly wouldn’t broadcast that capability, but I’ve seen enough crazy shit in the legal 0day market alone to think they have some insane capabilities. However, you’d never know If they could crack RSA/AES, but assuming quantum computing is on its way I’m sure it won’t be long or happened 8 years ago.
There may be some new documents available now, but the story as such seems to have been known for a while.
I first learned of it last summer while reading some of the drafts for Ross Anderson's update of his excellent Security Engineering.
It's weird this article talks like this is new information. I guess it's not probably not widely known, but this stuff was discussed in James Bamford's Puzzle Palace, published in the early 1980's (nearly 35 years ago).
I have to disagree with the headline. The "intelligence coup of the century" came much earlier, during WWII.
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.
In terms of scope & scale you may be underselling the title. Enigma, while perhaps more far-reaching in its consequences for computerization, did not have consistent application its breaking would suggest. American code-breakers had more success against the Japanese in practical terms, Midway most especially, but the imperials were a doomed effort[0]. As the cliche goes, British intelligence, American steel, and Russian blood, all of which overshadowed by the Bomb.
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.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
NamTaf|6 years ago
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.
netsec_burn|6 years ago
edm0nd|6 years ago
nimbius|6 years ago
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.
brightball|6 years ago
"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.
garbage_88224|6 years ago
Let that sink in a bit.
_-___________-_|6 years ago
chiefalchemist|6 years ago
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.
navidr|6 years ago
blattimwind|6 years ago
> 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
Ragnarork|6 years ago
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...
fanf2|6 years ago
jumelles|6 years ago
> But the true extent of the company’s relationship with the CIA and its German counterpart was until now never revealed.
eternalban|6 years ago
AndyMcConachie|6 years ago
snowwrestler|6 years ago
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.
raxxorrax|6 years ago
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.
fanatic2pope|6 years ago
Seenso|6 years ago
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.
dontbenebby|6 years ago
Makes me wonder what we've done using the fact US companies (ex: Cisco) control large swathes of the internet's infrastructure.
AndyMcConachie|6 years ago
Why should Cisco/Juniper/Ericsson/etc compete with Huawei when they can more easily use political pressure to exclude them from the market?
rtkwe|6 years ago
Guess they would also be able to do location tracking though and that's not so easily solved.
thrwowman1|6 years ago
huaweiward|6 years ago
yumcimil|6 years ago
apexalpha|6 years ago
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.
noelsusman|6 years ago
tptacek|6 years ago
navadr|6 years ago
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).
jvanderbot|6 years ago
FisDugthop|6 years ago
beerandt|6 years ago
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.
Seenso|6 years ago
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.
danso|6 years ago
> 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.
wycy|6 years ago
> 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.
johnflan|6 years ago
mxcrossb|6 years ago
Wow, those are words to aspire to
drummer|6 years ago
cameldrv|6 years ago
istinetz|6 years ago
Amazing. The only explanation I can think of is that CovertAction had much worse reputation and could be easily dismissed as conspiracy theory.
reddog|6 years ago
e12e|6 years ago
DethNinja|6 years ago
just_steve_h|6 years ago
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.
paganel|6 years ago
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana
WarOnPrivacy|6 years ago
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.
cpr|6 years ago
The same is still going on in spades.
leowinterde|6 years ago
drummer|6 years ago
willvarfar|6 years ago
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.
C1sc0cat|6 years ago
eg XXX in 21Land is a WW
mindfulhack|6 years ago
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.
Psyladine|6 years ago
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.
WarOnPrivacy|6 years ago
True. Same portrayals too. If breacher is an R they're incompetent, it's a D they're a traitor.
bobosha|6 years ago
tinus_hn|6 years ago
Much of their communication probably isn’t that sensitive though.
WarOnPrivacy|6 years ago
Also, everyone wants to eventually end their shift and go home. That means just doing what you're told & screw the damage done.
einpoklum|6 years ago
sangnoir|6 years ago
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.
adventured|6 years ago
And
http://archive.is/1w61P
Apofis|6 years ago
rjsw|6 years ago
[1] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/crypt.html
burakemir|6 years ago
> 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.
RachelF|6 years ago
Proton Mail would be a great honey pot for the CIA.
tareqak|6 years ago
leroy_masochist|6 years ago
not2b|6 years ago
dropoutcoder|6 years ago
For funding, please visit https://CE.YA/
AndyMcConachie|6 years ago
not_buying_it|6 years ago
glitchdigger|6 years ago
etiam|6 years ago
See chapter 26, https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
mpoloton|6 years ago
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.
unknown|6 years ago
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edge17|6 years ago
NN88|6 years ago
rafaelvasco|6 years ago
hownottowrite|6 years ago
anonu|6 years ago
allovernow|6 years ago
yspeak|6 years ago
[deleted]
microcolonel|6 years ago
Allower|6 years ago
[deleted]
PhantomGremlin|6 years ago
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Codebreakers
mzs|6 years ago
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2016/10/05/polish-ciphers/
Psyladine|6 years ago
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.
[0]http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm