7 ms·

I find it interesting that this ex-NSA operative casually explains her job was probing China computer systems and then assessing what data can be stolen from Ch

by mtw 8y ago

I find it interesting that this ex-NSA operative casually explains her job was probing China computer systems and then assessing what data can be stolen from China. But then publicly the USA point fingers at Huawei or Chinese government from doing the same. Same also UAE vs the USA. If the NSA is doing it, why wouldn't any Middle East country be able to hack other citizens/companies/governments? Sounds like a band of thieves bad-mouthing other thieves

dragonwriter 8y ago
> I find it interesting that this ex-NSA operative casually explains her job was probing China computer systems and then assessing what data can be stolen from China Yes, that's literally what a signals intelligence service is about. > But then publicly the USA point fingers at Huawei or Chinese government from doing the same. Uh, yeah, countries have always done espionage and punished espionage committed against them, and, particularly, vilified entities that are overtly something other than an intelligence service that are caught acting as an agent of hostile intelligence services. > If the NSA is doing it, why wouldn't any Middle East country be able to hack other citizens/companies/governments? They are clearly able to do it.
- tareqak 8y ago
  An honest question: if a foreign country had sufficient evidence that U.S. intelligence services committed signals espionage against them / stole state secrets / stole IP, then would U.S. media (mainstream or alternative) be allowed to report on the incident? Would U.S. media report on incident even if they are allowed?
  - roywiggins 8y ago
    The US media reported on Snowden extensively, so: probably?
  - SubiculumCode 8y ago
    Yes. The media could report on that.The U.S. reports on all sorts of things that the elite or intelligence services would rather not have revealed.
  - golem14 8y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=belgacom+hacking https://www.google.com/search?q=belgacom+hacking True, it was GCHQ not NSA, but it's similar enough.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    " be allowed to report on the incident?" Yes. Other nations would be reporting it generally, so it'd be absurd to suppress public information. Now, it might be 'spun' in the national interest, in a time of war or something like that. But if the US Government stile IP from Didi, handed it over to Apple execs, then blocked Didi from doing business in the US thus giving Apple a monopoly there ... it would be news. The US gov. plays geopolitical games, and maybe does some political interference 'for business' - but is not stealing trade secrets to hand over to arbitrary US businesses. I think the US would steal the plans for a new 'jet engine' or weapon system however. Also consider that for really valuable stuff, the US pays a lot of money in the private sector. US companies pay top dollar for 'top talent' which is a lot easier than stealing.
- dillondoyle 8y ago
  I think a clear difference is the US generally does not spy with the purpose of giving US corporations insider secrets to enable US corps to copy directly their foreign competitors.
  - throwaway232343 8y ago
    Uh, they totally did. To French companies, to Brazilian companies, and passed it on for advantage in negotiations and contract bidding: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-brazil-oil-petrobras https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra... https://sputniknews.com/politics/201506301024010800/ https://sputniknews.com/politics/201506301024010800/
    - rndmize 8y ago
      Nothing in either article you linked says anything about passing information to US companies.
      - monocasa 8y ago
        Those are bad examples they gave, but the point is still valid. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/29/wikileaks_docs_show_nsa_vs_france/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/29/wikileaks_docs_show... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-snowden-germany/snowden-says-nsa-engages-in-industrial-espionage-tv-idUSBREA0P0DE20140126 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-snowden-germany/...
        nyolfen 8y ago
        neither of these suggest they passed information to US companies
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        AsyncAwait 8y ago
diminoten 8y ago
I think the big/only difference between us and China in this regard is that the US government don't do this to Chinese companies and then take those secrets and give them to American companies. We have a set of rules we follow and China has different rules, rules that violate ours, so we point fingers.
- vkou 8y ago
  > I think the big/only difference between us and China in this regard is that the US government don't do this to Chinese companies and then take those secrets and give them to American companies. How do you know this does not happen in defense-related industries?
  - stone-monkey 8y ago
    Not OP. Also not saying it doesn't happen, but the incentive structures are different in both countries. A lot of private industry in China is defacto government owned due how business works there - You can't build a business there to scale without having ingratiated yourself to some higher ups of the party at some level. While the same thing may or may not happen in the US, we also have the option of being able to grow obscenely large without being tight knit with the government - See Facebook and a large chunk of Silicon Valley. It's commonly touted that the purpose of forcing foreign companies to submit their IP to a Chinese owned branch as a prerequisite to conducting business in China is so the government can exfiltrate foreign IP back to China. The government isn't in the business of building out all these industries themselves - they anoint some select chosen in their cabal who profits enormously from getting the blessing of their local party members, while sending generous kickbacks their way. There's some Chinese billionaire who talks about it on YouTube - I can't recall his name off the top of my head.
    - hindsightbias 8y ago
      Assessment of foreign military equipment/tech bought (or stolen) by the US is highly dependent on defense contractors. There is less of an incentive for the US to steal commercial tech, but that would probably change if "our tech" fell behind "their tech."
sonnyblarney 8y ago
" But then publicly the USA point fingers at Huawei or Chinese government from doing the same." Security related espionage and industrial espionage are entirely different things. They overlap a little bit when it relates to 'defence industry' - but the US is not actively stealing stuff from DiDi and handing it off to Apple whereas the inverse is true.
ngcc_hk 8y ago
Another angle is whether you want the backdoor in your core infrastructure. So far other than the fbi cases and the trade issues, the concentration is on the 5g backend. It is not bad mouthing. It is a real worry. Not just American. The Microsoft has to show source code I read in news has to demo it to china. But china has no choice here. But when it happens to America, natural course of action I think.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
Contrary to whatever politicians publicly say, nation-state corporate espionage isn't a moral problem, it's a realpolitik trade problem. The only reason the world respects our IP system is because we signed onto a shitton of trade agreements, otherwise no one, not the Chinese, the US, or the Soviets, has any obligation not to sneak into the other country and steal everything not nailed down. In that case, might as well root for whoever the home team is
cronix 8y ago
That's the age old game though. We all know everybody is hacking and spying on everybody else. We only get mad about it when they get caught. Until then, game on. I find it laughable when the US "attributes" an attack to a foreign power, and the media just laps it up and preaches it as gospel. In the vault-7 release on wikileaks, the NSA has a pretty nifty tool to....manipulate packets to make them look like they are coming from a different source, and insert comments in 4 foreign languages. We are asked to believe that Russias most talented hackers, somehow are stupid enough to leave comments in Acrylic that mentions the head of the GRU. Yes, I'm sure they did that. Just like our payloads have comments attributing our code to Obama or Trump. The "stolen" emails were "downloaded" at 3x the rate of the internet connection going to the email server. It happens to match the rate of USB2, and most likely a USB stick was used to copy the emails directly from the server. Here's a talk by Ray McGovern (ex cia), which lays the case out. Don't take his word for it. Research the facts he claims. I kind of poo-poo'd him at first. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngIKjpucQh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngIKjpucQh8 Here's an article describing the NSA's "Marble Framework". Go to the vault and look at their own words from the NSA's docs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/wikileaks-latest-release-of-cia-cyber-tools-could-blow-the-cover-on-agency-hacking-operations/2017/03/31/63fc3616-1636-11e7-833c-503e1f6394c9_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/wikil... Vault-7 NSA's "Marble Framework": https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_14588467.html https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_14588467.html
- sayno3 8y ago
  I don't see why anyone would even need to research this. How could someone be so stupid to believe all the "hacking code" made direct cultural references to the source?
- lawnchair_larry 8y ago
  Vault 7 had nothing to do with NSA.
- wp381640 8y ago
  > somehow are stupid enough to leave comments in Acrylic compilation artifacts and strings in malware - very common method of researching attribution and most tools pull them as IoCs even if you write tools to strip or null them out all it takes is a single OPSEC failure and you've leaked this info, and we see those all the time should also be noted that the build paths was not the only attribution indicator in that case
aedron 8y ago
> But then publicly the USA point fingers at Huawei or Chinese government from doing the same. The only thing remarkable about this is the mechanism: Mainstream media mouthpiecing these viewpoints. Surely, they know better. But they are obviously willing tools.
AshwinDurairaj 8y ago
Aw

by mtw 8y ago

dragonwriter 8y ago

> I find it interesting that this ex-NSA operative casually explains her job was probing China computer systems and then assessing what data can be stolen from China Yes, that's literally what a signals intelligence service is about. > But then publicly the USA point fingers at Huawei or Chinese government from doing the same. Uh, yeah, countries have always done espionage and punished espionage committed against them, and, particularly, vilified entities that are overtly something other than an intelligence service that are caught acting as an agent of hostile intelligence services. > If the NSA is doing it, why wouldn't any Middle East country be able to hack other citizens/companies/governments? They are clearly able to do it.

tareqak 8y ago
An honest question: if a foreign country had sufficient evidence that U.S. intelligence services committed signals espionage against them / stole state secrets / stole IP, then would U.S. media (mainstream or alternative) be allowed to report on the incident? Would U.S. media report on incident even if they are allowed?
- roywiggins 8y ago
  The US media reported on Snowden extensively, so: probably?
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  Yes. The media could report on that.The U.S. reports on all sorts of things that the elite or intelligence services would rather not have revealed.
- golem14 8y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=belgacom+hacking https://www.google.com/search?q=belgacom+hacking True, it was GCHQ not NSA, but it's similar enough.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  " be allowed to report on the incident?" Yes. Other nations would be reporting it generally, so it'd be absurd to suppress public information. Now, it might be 'spun' in the national interest, in a time of war or something like that. But if the US Government stile IP from Didi, handed it over to Apple execs, then blocked Didi from doing business in the US thus giving Apple a monopoly there ... it would be news. The US gov. plays geopolitical games, and maybe does some political interference 'for business' - but is not stealing trade secrets to hand over to arbitrary US businesses. I think the US would steal the plans for a new 'jet engine' or weapon system however. Also consider that for really valuable stuff, the US pays a lot of money in the private sector. US companies pay top dollar for 'top talent' which is a lot easier than stealing.
dillondoyle 8y ago
I think a clear difference is the US generally does not spy with the purpose of giving US corporations insider secrets to enable US corps to copy directly their foreign competitors.
- throwaway232343 8y ago
  Uh, they totally did. To French companies, to Brazilian companies, and passed it on for advantage in negotiations and contract bidding: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-brazil-oil-petrobras https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra... https://sputniknews.com/politics/201506301024010800/ https://sputniknews.com/politics/201506301024010800/
  - rndmize 8y ago
    Nothing in either article you linked says anything about passing information to US companies.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      Those are bad examples they gave, but the point is still valid. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/29/wikileaks_docs_show_nsa_vs_france/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/29/wikileaks_docs_show... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-snowden-germany/snowden-says-nsa-engages-in-industrial-espionage-tv-idUSBREA0P0DE20140126 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-snowden-germany/...
      - nyolfen 8y ago
        neither of these suggest they passed information to US companies
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        AsyncAwait 8y ago

diminoten 8y ago

I think the big/only difference between us and China in this regard is that the US government don't do this to Chinese companies and then take those secrets and give them to American companies. We have a set of rules we follow and China has different rules, rules that violate ours, so we point fingers.

vkou 8y ago
> I think the big/only difference between us and China in this regard is that the US government don't do this to Chinese companies and then take those secrets and give them to American companies. How do you know this does not happen in defense-related industries?
- stone-monkey 8y ago
  Not OP. Also not saying it doesn't happen, but the incentive structures are different in both countries. A lot of private industry in China is defacto government owned due how business works there - You can't build a business there to scale without having ingratiated yourself to some higher ups of the party at some level. While the same thing may or may not happen in the US, we also have the option of being able to grow obscenely large without being tight knit with the government - See Facebook and a large chunk of Silicon Valley. It's commonly touted that the purpose of forcing foreign companies to submit their IP to a Chinese owned branch as a prerequisite to conducting business in China is so the government can exfiltrate foreign IP back to China. The government isn't in the business of building out all these industries themselves - they anoint some select chosen in their cabal who profits enormously from getting the blessing of their local party members, while sending generous kickbacks their way. There's some Chinese billionaire who talks about it on YouTube - I can't recall his name off the top of my head.
  - hindsightbias 8y ago
    Assessment of foreign military equipment/tech bought (or stolen) by the US is highly dependent on defense contractors. There is less of an incentive for the US to steal commercial tech, but that would probably change if "our tech" fell behind "their tech."

sonnyblarney 8y ago

" But then publicly the USA point fingers at Huawei or Chinese government from doing the same." Security related espionage and industrial espionage are entirely different things. They overlap a little bit when it relates to 'defence industry' - but the US is not actively stealing stuff from DiDi and handing it off to Apple whereas the inverse is true.

ngcc_hk 8y ago

Another angle is whether you want the backdoor in your core infrastructure. So far other than the fbi cases and the trade issues, the concentration is on the 5g backend. It is not bad mouthing. It is a real worry. Not just American. The Microsoft has to show source code I read in news has to demo it to china. But china has no choice here. But when it happens to America, natural course of action I think.

tomatotomato37 8y ago

Contrary to whatever politicians publicly say, nation-state corporate espionage isn't a moral problem, it's a realpolitik trade problem. The only reason the world respects our IP system is because we signed onto a shitton of trade agreements, otherwise no one, not the Chinese, the US, or the Soviets, has any obligation not to sneak into the other country and steal everything not nailed down. In that case, might as well root for whoever the home team is

cronix 8y ago

That's the age old game though. We all know everybody is hacking and spying on everybody else. We only get mad about it when they get caught. Until then, game on. I find it laughable when the US "attributes" an attack to a foreign power, and the media just laps it up and preaches it as gospel. In the vault-7 release on wikileaks, the NSA has a pretty nifty tool to....manipulate packets to make them look like they are coming from a different source, and insert comments in 4 foreign languages. We are asked to believe that Russias most talented hackers, somehow are stupid enough to leave comments in Acrylic that mentions the head of the GRU. Yes, I'm sure they did that. Just like our payloads have comments attributing our code to Obama or Trump. The "stolen" emails were "downloaded" at 3x the rate of the internet connection going to the email server. It happens to match the rate of USB2, and most likely a USB stick was used to copy the emails directly from the server. Here's a talk by Ray McGovern (ex cia), which lays the case out. Don't take his word for it. Research the facts he claims. I kind of poo-poo'd him at first. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngIKjpucQh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngIKjpucQh8 Here's an article describing the NSA's "Marble Framework". Go to the vault and look at their own words from the NSA's docs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/wikileaks-latest-release-of-cia-cyber-tools-could-blow-the-cover-on-agency-hacking-operations/2017/03/31/63fc3616-1636-11e7-833c-503e1f6394c9_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/wikil... Vault-7 NSA's "Marble Framework": https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_14588467.html https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_14588467.html

sayno3 8y ago
I don't see why anyone would even need to research this. How could someone be so stupid to believe all the "hacking code" made direct cultural references to the source?
lawnchair_larry 8y ago
Vault 7 had nothing to do with NSA.
wp381640 8y ago
> somehow are stupid enough to leave comments in Acrylic compilation artifacts and strings in malware - very common method of researching attribution and most tools pull them as IoCs even if you write tools to strip or null them out all it takes is a single OPSEC failure and you've leaked this info, and we see those all the time should also be noted that the build paths was not the only attribution indicator in that case

aedron 8y ago

> But then publicly the USA point fingers at Huawei or Chinese government from doing the same. The only thing remarkable about this is the mechanism: Mainstream media mouthpiecing these viewpoints. Surely, they know better. But they are obviously willing tools.

AshwinDurairaj 8y ago