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From the source article: "Certain countries were deliberately not allowed to join because within the Maximator alliance they were considered as lacking relevan
by SiempreViernes 6y ago
From the source article:
"Certain countries were deliberately not allowed to join because within the Maximator alliance they were considered as lacking relevant (signal-/crypto-analytical) expertise and/or experience. Allegedly, these countries include Norway, Spain and Italy."
And
"Belgium is a notable exception in north-western Europe; it had not been invited to join Maximator because of its lack of SIGINT (and COMSEC) capabilities." adding in a footnote that "Belgium’s cryptographic behaviour and discipline were problematic. For instance, at least once it compromised its own communications via a basic mistake in key management;"
:D
- SiempreViernes 6y ago"The details of this algorithm were shared by the BND within Maximator with TIVC. This enabled the Dutch to read Argentinian naval and diplomatic communications before the war started. As reported by Aldrich and Wiebes, the British SIGINT organisation GCHQ had neglected Argentina. It was not able to read communications secured by Crypto AG devices. When the war started, it asked, under pressure, countries on the European continent for help. A directly involved Dutch source states that at that stage a specialist from TIVC travelled to GCHQ and explained how the HC500 Crypto AG devices for Argentinian naval and diplomatic communications worked; subsequent solution of the ciphers was left to GCHQ itself." Nice going GCHQ!
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoThis reads like GCHQ was the naughty kid, not paying attention, and they took pity on them when they asked for help ... but at least they asked. But to rub it in they did a "the solution is left as an exercise for the reader" deal. Kinda hilarious.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoThat was my read as well. That said, you could spin it another way: the UK had enough good will and political capital to lean on its European neighbors for a bare-minimum amount of help. "We can tell you how it works, but it's on you to figure the rest out". Naughty kid not paying attention is also relevant -- you've only got so many hours in the day and so many hours to map out threats. This was still the Cold War and nuclear holocaust was a bigger priority than distant Latin American dictatorship.
- tinco 6y agoI think it's about plausible deniability. If they only told gchq about the design of the algorithms, they're not saying they know how to break them or even that they're designed to be breakable.
- jack12 6y agoIt sounds like the solution was always left as an exercise for the reader in the day-to-day dealings of the group even among the members: "Each participating country was supposed to perform its own decryptions. This is common practice in the intelligence community in order to prevent being fed cooked-up information." and "The cryptanalytical part of the cooperation involved exchanges of algorithms used in various (deliberately weakened) cryptographic devices used by target countries. It was then left up to the Maximator participants themselves to find out how to exploit weaknesses in the algorithms of these devices. Such exploitations are also called ‘solutions’."
- dmurray 6y agoIt's interesting how many strings Britain was able to pull to get advantages in the Falklands War. It also was reported [0] that Thatcher convinced the French to hand over IFF codes that would effectively prevent Argentina's French-made Exocet missiles from targeting British ships. The war might have gone very differently if Argentina was the one with powerful diplomatic connections. Yes, both France and the Netherlands are broadly aligned with the UK, and would fight alongside them in the case of any existential threat. But for colonial wars one might think they'd be happy to see Britain get some egg on her face. [0] I'll just link to skeptics.se here, where the accepted answer is that the evidence does not completely support this, but there are plenty of links for more reading https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/can-exocet-missiles-be-remotely-disabled-with-secret-codes https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/can-exoce...
- barry-cotter 6y ago> Yes, both France and the Netherlands are broadly aligned with the UK, and would fight alongside them in the case of any existential threat. But for colonial wars one might think they'd be happy to see Britain get some egg on her face. Any “friend” who won’t help with small things is a lot less likely to help when it really matters. And the Dutch and French both also have possessions in the New World full of people perfectly happy with the status quo who deserve protection from would be conquerors.
- pnako 6y agoAccording to this source (perhaps not completely credible) she called then French President Mitterrand and threatened to nuke Argentina if he did not give her the codes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/22/books.france https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/22/books.france
- redis_mlc 6y agoArgentina ordered 15 Super-Etendards and AM39 Exocets from France. They received 5 of each, with 1 plane used for parts. The Sheffield was destroyed with one exocet, and 2 sank the Atlantic Conveyor (with most of the Army's supplies and helicopters.) An AM38 sank the Glamorgan. Looks like the IFF info didn't help. (Had either of the British carriers Hermes or Invincible been sunk, Britain would have retreated.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocet#Falklands_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocet#Falklands_War
- wrnr 6y agoHey maybe thats why we have this old joke is Brussels: How do you know someone is working for the Belgium secretive service? ... They tell you.
- rurban 6y agoThat's a cheap excuse. The participating countries are known to have the best ties to the CIA. The others not so. They clearly want to avoid leaks, or punish them for their critical stance towards criminal practices.
- onetimemanytime 6y agoNATO and EU headquarters are located in Belgium.... But this will not work (at least for decades.) To get favors from US many will spill the beans. And that's not as bad as doing that to Russia or China. EU is made of countries with their own national interests
- koheripbal 6y agoIt is disappointing to continue to see such rampant fragmentation within Europe. I had hoped that the EU would break down regulatory barriers and force bureaucratic consolidation, but it seems progress has stalled in the last 10 years. The EU should have one single intelligence agency - not a dysfunctional collection of fighting to be part of the "in" group.
- simonh 6y agoThat would be very premature, you’d need much stronger political union first. The risk is the joint Intelligence agency would end up as leaky and compromised as the most leaky, most compromised intelligence agency of the individual countries. That would make the sum equal to the weakest of its parts.
- dathinab 6y agoIt's still a union of separate and culture/ political diverse countries. As such it's basically guaranteed to keep country specific intelligence agencies. A EU based agency would be interesting, but given how problematic it is to oversee it probably a nightmare to. A stronger cooperation between EU agencies should be possible.
- jhelphenstine 6y agoOne single intelligence agency? And what if the Germans are interested in gaining better understanding of Viktor Orban? Or if the Italians want to know just how far Germany will really go to help them financially? An intelligence agency is a means of acquiring answers to intelligence needs - I'm not sure Europe is of one mind with regard to what questions merit answering.
- seppin 6y agoExactly. You'd need a single united economic and political union first. The EU is heading away from that, not towards it.
- normalnorm 6y ago
- supernova87a 6y agoThe reason they cannot cooperate is that the member states will always want to apply their own rules and local regulations, and allow different levels of incompetence across jurisdictions. Specifically, Belgian police and standards are a joke. Just look at the way they bungled the response to the French terrorist attack where the perpetrator(s) fled to Brussels / Molenbeek. The rest of the country might be ok, but Brussels has exposed that the Belgian government is unable to govern its own largest city. And how Belgian passports are issued locally by every town government rather than a centralized authority. A joke.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- koonsolo 6y agoBelgian here. We are one of the most highly taxed countries, so you really wonder were all that money is going. Belgium is as divided as the EU itself. We have 6 distict governments: federal, flemish, walloon, french, german and brussels. That doesn't help in any way. The things that happen here are sometimes too crazy to mention, like the time a serialkiller escaped because the 2 cops guarding him didn't do their job, and also didn't have any bullets in their guns to stop him. Surreal.
- gipsies 6y agoWhat's actually interesting is that they have some world-top cryptographers and security researchers (e.g. invented AES and SHA-3). So part of that money goes to academia, and with good results :) The government agencies are lagging behind though.
- koonsolo 6y agoWe definitely have the people. But even in academia the good ones will go to US because the budgets they get for research are way higher.