8 ms·

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

182 points by Cieplak 15y ago

Cieplak 15y ago
> the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems What does this entail?
- drucken 15y ago
  From the article, and the premise that massive computing power is being created and required anyway, it sounds much more like a weakness at AES 128-bit that is only practical for a government agency. It also sounds that they discovered it before 2008, due to the jump in resource timing, i.e. less than 10 years after AES.
  - pm90 15y ago
    Well, at least there's no doubt that they have unimaginably large computing power... You can also hear many scientists from national labs hinting to that effect in talks that are publicly available.
    - javert 15y ago
      hinting to that effect hinting to what affect? Having a way to brute force 128-bit AES, or just having large computing power?
      - pm90 15y ago
        I meant the large computing power part
- ImprovedSilence 15y ago
  Hahaha, think they're gonna tell you? The NSA is by FAR the most secretive govt agency, more so than the NGA, CIA, or any other three letter agency. And the scale of their operations are kinda scary, and probably violate several consitunional rights... But's that's just opinion banter, will we ever really know for sure?
  - joe_the_user 15y ago
    Actually, The existence of systematic secrecy does let us "know for sure" that democracy itself is being made a mockery of, since any democracy worth its name defends itself in the open. Of course, the secrecy is fortunately not so complete that there are not numerous examples we can cite to flesh out the thesis of the decay of democracy under this regime.
    - mjwalshe 15y ago
      This is the same naive view that "gentlemen do not read each others mail" that post WW1 led to US crypto being sidelined. Maybe if the USA hand not been so isolationist and put more into crypto Perl Harbour would have been very different.
      - glesica 15y ago
        Was Pearl Harbor really that bad? I mean in the grand scheme of things. Which would be preferable, preventing another Pearl Harbor or preserving liberty? I'll take liberty every single time because otherwise there's nothing worth defending.
- dhx 15y ago
  Perhaps it could be something related to: http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-google-maps.html http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-goo... Or some other implementation flaw(s) in TLS. The point being, there are more ways to break crypto systems than attacking just the algorithm.
rdssassin 15y ago
Submitting application.
- brady747 15y ago
  ...remembering my favorite scene in Good Will Hunting... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw hold out for something better ;)
- ImprovedSilence 15y ago
  haha. I hear they pay pretty well too. edit: why the downvotes? I'm not trollin, they actually pay a percentage above the standard govt pay scale.
  - CamperBob 15y ago
    If they weren't using all that power to spy on US citizens, it might be a bit more palatable. You can make a case for being nosy when it comes to people who aren't covered by our own Constitutional guarantees, but when it comes to US citizens, due process is something I consider awfully important. (And no, "national security letters" are not what I consider due process.) Obviously not everything the NSA does is a problem from a Constitutional standpoint, but still... the odds of being ordered to do something I would find grossly unethical are too high for me to want to work there. Worse still, I could see myself modifying my own ethics over time for the sake of staying in my employer's good graces. How many people can honestly say they would never fall prey to that temptation? A shame, too, because I'll bet they still have some of the coolest toys around, even in the present age of commoditized supercomputing.
    - westicle 15y ago
      Out of interest - why do you consider it more unethical to spy on people from one arbitrary geographical area as opposed to people from another? What if they agree not to spy on anyone from Utah and only spy on those suspicious people from other states? Aren't we all people?
iterationx 15y ago
NPR said they are building it there because Utah has the most linguistically talented population in the country due to Mormon missionary work. eBay is building a call center there for the same reason.
- ImprovedSilence 15y ago
  A few years ago I remember reading about this on slashot. If I remember correctly, their electricity bill has something to do with the move as well, as I think the NSA accounts for 1/4 of the electricity supplied to Maryland. [edit] I looks like I was off, they really just maxed out BG&Es power grid. here's the slashdot article from 09: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/0333202/nsa-to-build-20-acre-data-center-in-utah http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/0333202/nsa-to...
  - sounds 15y ago
    As worrying as the NSA's antics are, I also find it alarming that the US electric grid is a limiting factor for big data. E.g. Silicon Valley's electricity prices rule out most data centers there. (Maybe it's an ironic twist that the NSA must spread out simply due to grid capacity constraints...)
    - maxerickson 15y ago
      One definition of excess capacity is waste (I'm not insisting it is always a correct definition). I imagine the regulatory environment surrounding generation in California and local opposition to big ugly infrastructure are much bigger factors in the prices than the technical capacity to actually upgrade the power grid there.
- Osiris 15y ago
  As a Mormon who attended BYU in Provo, Utah, I can attest that a very large percentage of the young male population is not only bilingual in common and uncommon languages, but there's a deep sense of patriotism. Universities in Utah are heavily recruited for law enforcement (FBI) and foreign service. I agree that most of the reason for the Utah location is probably cost, but the demographics are also very unique (and yes, fairly homogeneous as well).
cypherpunks01 15y ago
HN best practice - link to the non-paginated "View All" page if available: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...
- Cieplak 15y ago
  Thank you, I will do this in the future.
  - Joakal 15y ago
    Some websites don't offer this explicitly but they have a print button feature which does the same thing.
    - tedunangst 15y ago
      Which is annoying as fuck when you link to it, because then it causes the print dialog to pop up on my computer.
- nl 15y ago
  I strongly disagree with this. Wired's articles are reasonably paged, and the complete article is very long. On many devices (eg phones) long pages don't always render well. Additionally, a publication like Wired deserves the page views for the good article. It is different for publications that only have a paragraph per page. TL;dr: there is no HN best practice.
  - javert 15y ago
    If a site doesn't want to allow people to "view on one page," they can disable that feature. I think going through multiple pages is a huge PITA, even in the case of Wired. And I think your "many devices" point is probably too much of a corner case to matter.
    - nl 15y ago
hendrix 15y ago
Politicians can and do dictate the law these days, but they can't dictate economics. If the NSA/CIA/Government pulls too much shit the smart people and business will leave. Also, Mormonism is a cult.
- Cieplak 15y ago
  I think the govt has already broken quite a few of its own rules, yet smart people from around the world flock to Google, MIT, and the like. National security letters, the Patriot Act, illicit war. I would love to live in Berlin, but my family is here in the states, and the NSA would still intercept my communications in Germany, anyway.
  - mjwalshe 15y ago
    And your point is? anyone working in ML and AI knows where large amounts of funding comes from - this was true 30 years ago just as much so today.
moo 15y ago
I hear Yakov Smirnoff is going to return to Russia and tell jokes about how bad the police state is in the U.S.
dmfdmf 15y ago
This new site doesn't just happen to be located near a couple of internet backbones?
failure2launch 15y ago
They already have a quantum super computer, and an advanced A.I. You think Yottabytes are a'lotta bytes? Think again. ;-0
alexqgb 15y ago
All your mails are belong to us.
grandalf 15y ago
What does the NSA actually do?
- shingen 15y ago
  Tap -> Acquire -> Store -> Manipulate -> Analyze -> Supply
drivebyacct2 15y ago
This makes me sick inside. Like it is futilely depressing to my core. I've been trying to fight the government wiretapping and invading citizen privacy since I was a sophomore in highschool. By time people give a fuck, it's going to be too late.
- sneak 15y ago
  People will never give a fuck. If they were going to, it would have happened already. Stop waiting.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  I'm older than you are, evidently. Over the years, as I've read literature from various eras and traveled to various places, I've learned that people can feel under more constant surveillance, and BE under more constant surveillance, in a small, isolated town or village than as citizens of a modern high-technology state. And yet in 1989 people in several parts of central Europe rose up for freedom--courageously doing so even after the Tian'anmen Square Massacre was a worldwide news story--and defeated the secret police organizations of totalitarian dictatorships. You can still fight for freedom. That takes courage, but you'll find the courage if freedom means that much to you. I'm wondering when the tens of thousands of local uprisings that China reports each year in its official press will coalesce into a national movement for freedom.
  - Create 15y ago
    nonsense. 1989 people in several parts of central Europe rose up for freedom--courageously there was no need to rise up in central Europe: the regime collapsed by itself, primarily for financial reasons. The countries were surveyed by the West years before, and given IMF loans. The rest in 89 was literally a show, albeit not in theatres but on screens. the regimes just morphed, like now in China.
forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
This is very dangerous, we know that there are few levels of separation between people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation We also know that there is a very few people that connect people together, the social "hubs". What totalitarian regimes(Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jol Il) did was identify those hubs an exterminate them(at first they can't kill them so putting them in jail is enough), and replacing them with puppets, eventually changing society overnight. It is too risky having someone storing every single communication between people(including cell phone calls). They will understand what you say(a la Siri) and text analyze it and search display it on graphs. With facebook and cell phone connections they have everything to know more about yourself that you know thyself. When the US debt bubble explodes(that will happen in less than 5 years) and people loose a significant part of their savings and get angry about the status quo I don't know what is going to happen. The US is becoming more and more of a totalitarian state day after day.
ObnoxiousJul 15y ago
Good news. The more resource spent on electronical intelligence the less money spent on human intelligence. And since humint has proven to be far more efficient, praise the experts for taking the wrong decisions.
JonnieCache 15y ago
"According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.” What do people think this refers to? Somebody managed to compile sslsniff, or something more significant? Have they found a key weakness in RSA or similar? Are they just bruteforcing all those crappy ssl certs that are floating around? Does it refer to realtime decoding of GSM? Don't we all believe they can do that anyway? I guess we can only speculate. Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get me...
- Spearchucker 15y ago
  It refers to a number of technologies including DES, SSL and GSM. I suspect also <128bit AES. The NSA stores everything anyway, because if it can't be decrypted today, it can probably be decrypted tomorrow. On the positive side, even if the NSA could break AES 256 (or even DES) it is still a relevant and useful algorithm. It's relevant because if I, say, issue an order to storm Wimbledon Common, that order is tactically valid and useful and hence secret for maybe a day or two, after which Wimbledon Common has been taken, and the order no longer has value. Assuming the symmetric keys are solid, even weaker algorithms will do. On that basis, if AES 256 is only relevant for another 10 years then that's ok to encrypt my documents with, because when something better comes along those documents are probably no longer relevant. Of course they may still be relevant as evidence if someone wants to come after you. In closing, a lot of the Wired article is drawn from the book The Shadow Factory, which ends with the start of the construction of the Utah facility. It's interesting reading that also goes into the political side of it.
- jcfrei 15y ago
  I doubt they have the computing power or the tools to decypher more complex algorithms, the sheer amount of encrypted data seems to big. occams razor would dictate they are just storing vast amounts of data, maybe mapping communications (eg. mails from afghanistan to the us, etc) and then bruteforcing some of the really interesting stuff. it's not like a us government agency can suddenly leapfrog decades of research in encryption.
wavephorm 15y ago
Remember all those HN users that were deriding me for saying the US is becoming a fascist authoritarian regime... yeah I wasn't just making stuff up.
Estragon 15y ago
Just started reading a history of the NSA [1], and it's very interesting. E.g., the execution of the Rosenbergs was a travesty of due process, but the US had secretly decrypted a message listing them as Soviet spies. Another example, a midlevel employee of US SIGINT efforts told the KGB that the US was capturing and decrypting basically all Russian communication, and the Russian response was to harden their protocols (far less radio traffic, much greater use of one-time pads, basically.) The traitor was never prosecuted, because reporting the evidence against him would have revealed a SIGINT source. Cryptology became the poor stepchild of US SIGINT efforts after this, because it yielded so little useful intelligence regarding Russia. As a result, the North Korean invasion which started the Korean war took the US completely by surprise. The US was subsequently able to crush the invasion in part because the North Koreans transmitted all communications in the clear, so they often knew what NK military units were going to do before they knew themselves. It took the US about a month to spin this capability up, though, because non-Russian communications had been completely neglected. This neglect burned the US again when China decided to enter the war. The US could not believe this was happening, despite mounting SIGINT evidence, so China again had the advantage of surprise. China actually was encrypting its military communications in a way that the US could not decrypt (at least initially; I haven't finished reading this section of the book) which gave them a huge advantage in the initial engagements with US forces. [1] http://books.google.com/books?id=x_K2rb-OShMC&printsec=frontcover http://books.google.com/books?id=x_K2rb-OShMC&printsec=f... (Currently only $3 for the e-book!)
- pooriaazimi 15y ago
  I knew all about it, and much more. But not by reading that book - Last month I watched CNN's 1998 documentary about the Cold War. ABSOLOUTELY AMAZING. 24 episodes, each about 50 minutes. Tons of never-seen-before footage and interviews with many of the parties involved in the Cold War (Gorbachev, Castro, Kissinger, Reagan, H. W. Bush, and dozens of other well-informed ministers, ambassadors, spies, soldiers and citizens) But more importantly, it's fair. It doesn't blame Russia while praising America or vice versa. Bot powers did dreadful things during the Cold War, and this documentary shows them all. After watching it, now I have a very deep respect for CNN and Ted Turner. It's only available on VHS, and only on eBay (or used, at Amazon). If you don't have a VHS player anymore (who has?), contact me (edit: for download links, not for selling you a VHS player!). If you're interested in Cold War history and want to know more, watch this definitive series. You won't be disappointed.
drostie 15y ago
Bruce Schneier at this year's RSA conference: "I think in the coming decade, the real threats to the Internet don't come from the Bad Guys, they don't come from the criminals or the hackers, they come from politics and they come from economics, and that's really what I want to spend time talking about at RSA this year." http://365.rsaconference.com/community/connect/blog/2012/02/24/rsac2012-podcast-exp-107-new-threats-to-the-internet-infrastructure http://365.rsaconference.com/community/connect/blog/2012/02/...
- pentae 15y ago
  And spoken not 50ft from the NSA/FBI/CIA booths attending the conference ..
euroclydon 15y ago
So the quickest way to cure cancer would be to come up with a new encryption scheme, where the byproduct of brute force cracking it would be simulating the effects of genomics mutations?
DanBC 15y ago
People good at math, or data mining, or etc might enjoy working for GCHQ. I assume they'd enjoy working for NSA. There's a bunch of very smart people, with interesting tech, and, uh, low pay. I don't know about NSA but GCHQ is subject to a lot of oversight; breaking laws would be problematic. Laws get written with specific exclusions for GCHQ. And there are creative methods to evade other laws - US in theory cannot spy on its citizens so they team with UK and ask us to do it for them.
- munin 15y ago
  FYI: http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/oversight.shtml#oversight5 http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/oversight.shtml#oversight5
conover 15y ago
More pictures: http://www.cryptome.org/2012-info/nsa-utah/nsa-utah.htm http://www.cryptome.org/2012-info/nsa-utah/nsa-utah.htm
freestyler_1 15y ago
sends virus to tap just opened NSA data center Because tapping the biggest tapper is ironic. (not that I will do that/can)
pgroves 15y ago
If this will be one of the most powerful encryption-cracking facility in the world, can we just set our key strength based on it's computing power? So if they end up being able to crack 1024 bit keys, can we just set our keys to 2048 and be ok? And then when they upgrade, everyone goes to 4096? I'm not a security expert (obviously), so maybe I'm wrong, but in general I don't see how they'll be able to build new monster computing facilities as fast as consumer hardware can be upgraded to use slightly stronger encryption.
eliasmacpherson 15y ago
If they are actively logging communications for future decryption due to predicted increased computational power, and the allegations of them leaking confidential communications to US firms to gain competitive advantage are true: Then this is another argument against (foreign/multinational) businesses conducting anything sensitive in the cloud, even if it is encrypted end to end and stored encrypted. Particularly for information that the businesses want to keep indecipherable for many years.
bgilroy26 15y ago
Interesting historical comparison (865 days ago) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915971 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915971
kfcm 15y ago
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/538/ http://xkcd.com/538/

182 points by Cieplak 15y ago

> the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems What does this entail?

drucken 15y ago
From the article, and the premise that massive computing power is being created and required anyway, it sounds much more like a weakness at AES 128-bit that is only practical for a government agency. It also sounds that they discovered it before 2008, due to the jump in resource timing, i.e. less than 10 years after AES.
- pm90 15y ago
  Well, at least there's no doubt that they have unimaginably large computing power... You can also hear many scientists from national labs hinting to that effect in talks that are publicly available.
  - javert 15y ago
    hinting to that effect hinting to what affect? Having a way to brute force 128-bit AES, or just having large computing power?
    - pm90 15y ago
      I meant the large computing power part
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
Hahaha, think they're gonna tell you? The NSA is by FAR the most secretive govt agency, more so than the NGA, CIA, or any other three letter agency. And the scale of their operations are kinda scary, and probably violate several consitunional rights... But's that's just opinion banter, will we ever really know for sure?
- joe_the_user 15y ago
  Actually, The existence of systematic secrecy does let us "know for sure" that democracy itself is being made a mockery of, since any democracy worth its name defends itself in the open. Of course, the secrecy is fortunately not so complete that there are not numerous examples we can cite to flesh out the thesis of the decay of democracy under this regime.
  - mjwalshe 15y ago
    This is the same naive view that "gentlemen do not read each others mail" that post WW1 led to US crypto being sidelined. Maybe if the USA hand not been so isolationist and put more into crypto Perl Harbour would have been very different.
    - glesica 15y ago
      Was Pearl Harbor really that bad? I mean in the grand scheme of things. Which would be preferable, preventing another Pearl Harbor or preserving liberty? I'll take liberty every single time because otherwise there's nothing worth defending.
dhx 15y ago
Perhaps it could be something related to: http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-google-maps.html http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-goo... Or some other implementation flaw(s) in TLS. The point being, there are more ways to break crypto systems than attacking just the algorithm.

rdssassin 15y ago

Submitting application.

brady747 15y ago
...remembering my favorite scene in Good Will Hunting... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw hold out for something better ;)
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
haha. I hear they pay pretty well too. edit: why the downvotes? I'm not trollin, they actually pay a percentage above the standard govt pay scale.
- CamperBob 15y ago
  If they weren't using all that power to spy on US citizens, it might be a bit more palatable. You can make a case for being nosy when it comes to people who aren't covered by our own Constitutional guarantees, but when it comes to US citizens, due process is something I consider awfully important. (And no, "national security letters" are not what I consider due process.) Obviously not everything the NSA does is a problem from a Constitutional standpoint, but still... the odds of being ordered to do something I would find grossly unethical are too high for me to want to work there. Worse still, I could see myself modifying my own ethics over time for the sake of staying in my employer's good graces. How many people can honestly say they would never fall prey to that temptation? A shame, too, because I'll bet they still have some of the coolest toys around, even in the present age of commoditized supercomputing.
  - westicle 15y ago
    Out of interest - why do you consider it more unethical to spy on people from one arbitrary geographical area as opposed to people from another? What if they agree not to spy on anyone from Utah and only spy on those suspicious people from other states? Aren't we all people?

iterationx 15y ago

NPR said they are building it there because Utah has the most linguistically talented population in the country due to Mormon missionary work. eBay is building a call center there for the same reason.

ImprovedSilence 15y ago
A few years ago I remember reading about this on slashot. If I remember correctly, their electricity bill has something to do with the move as well, as I think the NSA accounts for 1/4 of the electricity supplied to Maryland. [edit] I looks like I was off, they really just maxed out BG&Es power grid. here's the slashdot article from 09: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/0333202/nsa-to-build-20-acre-data-center-in-utah http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/0333202/nsa-to...
- sounds 15y ago
  As worrying as the NSA's antics are, I also find it alarming that the US electric grid is a limiting factor for big data. E.g. Silicon Valley's electricity prices rule out most data centers there. (Maybe it's an ironic twist that the NSA must spread out simply due to grid capacity constraints...)
  - maxerickson 15y ago
    One definition of excess capacity is waste (I'm not insisting it is always a correct definition). I imagine the regulatory environment surrounding generation in California and local opposition to big ugly infrastructure are much bigger factors in the prices than the technical capacity to actually upgrade the power grid there.
Osiris 15y ago
As a Mormon who attended BYU in Provo, Utah, I can attest that a very large percentage of the young male population is not only bilingual in common and uncommon languages, but there's a deep sense of patriotism. Universities in Utah are heavily recruited for law enforcement (FBI) and foreign service. I agree that most of the reason for the Utah location is probably cost, but the demographics are also very unique (and yes, fairly homogeneous as well).

cypherpunks01 15y ago

HN best practice - link to the non-paginated "View All" page if available: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...

Cieplak 15y ago
Thank you, I will do this in the future.
- Joakal 15y ago
  Some websites don't offer this explicitly but they have a print button feature which does the same thing.
  - tedunangst 15y ago
    Which is annoying as fuck when you link to it, because then it causes the print dialog to pop up on my computer.
nl 15y ago
I strongly disagree with this. Wired's articles are reasonably paged, and the complete article is very long. On many devices (eg phones) long pages don't always render well. Additionally, a publication like Wired deserves the page views for the good article. It is different for publications that only have a paragraph per page. TL;dr: there is no HN best practice.
- javert 15y ago
  If a site doesn't want to allow people to "view on one page," they can disable that feature. I think going through multiple pages is a huge PITA, even in the case of Wired. And I think your "many devices" point is probably too much of a corner case to matter.
  - nl 15y ago

hendrix 15y ago

Politicians can and do dictate the law these days, but they can't dictate economics. If the NSA/CIA/Government pulls too much shit the smart people and business will leave. Also, Mormonism is a cult.

Cieplak 15y ago
I think the govt has already broken quite a few of its own rules, yet smart people from around the world flock to Google, MIT, and the like. National security letters, the Patriot Act, illicit war. I would love to live in Berlin, but my family is here in the states, and the NSA would still intercept my communications in Germany, anyway.
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  And your point is? anyone working in ML and AI knows where large amounts of funding comes from - this was true 30 years ago just as much so today.

moo 15y ago

I hear Yakov Smirnoff is going to return to Russia and tell jokes about how bad the police state is in the U.S.

dmfdmf 15y ago

This new site doesn't just happen to be located near a couple of internet backbones?

failure2launch 15y ago

They already have a quantum super computer, and an advanced A.I. You think Yottabytes are a'lotta bytes? Think again. ;-0

alexqgb 15y ago

All your mails are belong to us.

grandalf 15y ago

What does the NSA actually do?

shingen 15y ago
Tap -> Acquire -> Store -> Manipulate -> Analyze -> Supply

drivebyacct2 15y ago

This makes me sick inside. Like it is futilely depressing to my core. I've been trying to fight the government wiretapping and invading citizen privacy since I was a sophomore in highschool. By time people give a fuck, it's going to be too late.

sneak 15y ago
People will never give a fuck. If they were going to, it would have happened already. Stop waiting.
tokenadult 15y ago
I'm older than you are, evidently. Over the years, as I've read literature from various eras and traveled to various places, I've learned that people can feel under more constant surveillance, and BE under more constant surveillance, in a small, isolated town or village than as citizens of a modern high-technology state. And yet in 1989 people in several parts of central Europe rose up for freedom--courageously doing so even after the Tian'anmen Square Massacre was a worldwide news story--and defeated the secret police organizations of totalitarian dictatorships. You can still fight for freedom. That takes courage, but you'll find the courage if freedom means that much to you. I'm wondering when the tens of thousands of local uprisings that China reports each year in its official press will coalesce into a national movement for freedom.
- Create 15y ago
  nonsense. 1989 people in several parts of central Europe rose up for freedom--courageously there was no need to rise up in central Europe: the regime collapsed by itself, primarily for financial reasons. The countries were surveyed by the West years before, and given IMF loans. The rest in 89 was literally a show, albeit not in theatres but on screens. the regimes just morphed, like now in China.

forgottenpaswrd 15y ago

This is very dangerous, we know that there are few levels of separation between people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation We also know that there is a very few people that connect people together, the social "hubs". What totalitarian regimes(Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jol Il) did was identify those hubs an exterminate them(at first they can't kill them so putting them in jail is enough), and replacing them with puppets, eventually changing society overnight. It is too risky having someone storing every single communication between people(including cell phone calls). They will understand what you say(a la Siri) and text analyze it and search display it on graphs. With facebook and cell phone connections they have everything to know more about yourself that you know thyself. When the US debt bubble explodes(that will happen in less than 5 years) and people loose a significant part of their savings and get angry about the status quo I don't know what is going to happen. The US is becoming more and more of a totalitarian state day after day.

ObnoxiousJul 15y ago

Good news. The more resource spent on electronical intelligence the less money spent on human intelligence. And since humint has proven to be far more efficient, praise the experts for taking the wrong decisions.

JonnieCache 15y ago

"According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.” What do people think this refers to? Somebody managed to compile sslsniff, or something more significant? Have they found a key weakness in RSA or similar? Are they just bruteforcing all those crappy ssl certs that are floating around? Does it refer to realtime decoding of GSM? Don't we all believe they can do that anyway? I guess we can only speculate. Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get me...

Spearchucker 15y ago
It refers to a number of technologies including DES, SSL and GSM. I suspect also <128bit AES. The NSA stores everything anyway, because if it can't be decrypted today, it can probably be decrypted tomorrow. On the positive side, even if the NSA could break AES 256 (or even DES) it is still a relevant and useful algorithm. It's relevant because if I, say, issue an order to storm Wimbledon Common, that order is tactically valid and useful and hence secret for maybe a day or two, after which Wimbledon Common has been taken, and the order no longer has value. Assuming the symmetric keys are solid, even weaker algorithms will do. On that basis, if AES 256 is only relevant for another 10 years then that's ok to encrypt my documents with, because when something better comes along those documents are probably no longer relevant. Of course they may still be relevant as evidence if someone wants to come after you. In closing, a lot of the Wired article is drawn from the book The Shadow Factory, which ends with the start of the construction of the Utah facility. It's interesting reading that also goes into the political side of it.
jcfrei 15y ago
I doubt they have the computing power or the tools to decypher more complex algorithms, the sheer amount of encrypted data seems to big. occams razor would dictate they are just storing vast amounts of data, maybe mapping communications (eg. mails from afghanistan to the us, etc) and then bruteforcing some of the really interesting stuff. it's not like a us government agency can suddenly leapfrog decades of research in encryption.

wavephorm 15y ago

Remember all those HN users that were deriding me for saying the US is becoming a fascist authoritarian regime... yeah I wasn't just making stuff up.

Estragon 15y ago

Just started reading a history of the NSA [1], and it's very interesting. E.g., the execution of the Rosenbergs was a travesty of due process, but the US had secretly decrypted a message listing them as Soviet spies. Another example, a midlevel employee of US SIGINT efforts told the KGB that the US was capturing and decrypting basically all Russian communication, and the Russian response was to harden their protocols (far less radio traffic, much greater use of one-time pads, basically.) The traitor was never prosecuted, because reporting the evidence against him would have revealed a SIGINT source. Cryptology became the poor stepchild of US SIGINT efforts after this, because it yielded so little useful intelligence regarding Russia. As a result, the North Korean invasion which started the Korean war took the US completely by surprise. The US was subsequently able to crush the invasion in part because the North Koreans transmitted all communications in the clear, so they often knew what NK military units were going to do before they knew themselves. It took the US about a month to spin this capability up, though, because non-Russian communications had been completely neglected. This neglect burned the US again when China decided to enter the war. The US could not believe this was happening, despite mounting SIGINT evidence, so China again had the advantage of surprise. China actually was encrypting its military communications in a way that the US could not decrypt (at least initially; I haven't finished reading this section of the book) which gave them a huge advantage in the initial engagements with US forces. [1] http://books.google.com/books?id=x_K2rb-OShMC&printsec=frontcover http://books.google.com/books?id=x_K2rb-OShMC&printsec=f... (Currently only $3 for the e-book!)

pooriaazimi 15y ago
I knew all about it, and much more. But not by reading that book - Last month I watched CNN's 1998 documentary about the Cold War. ABSOLOUTELY AMAZING. 24 episodes, each about 50 minutes. Tons of never-seen-before footage and interviews with many of the parties involved in the Cold War (Gorbachev, Castro, Kissinger, Reagan, H. W. Bush, and dozens of other well-informed ministers, ambassadors, spies, soldiers and citizens) But more importantly, it's fair. It doesn't blame Russia while praising America or vice versa. Bot powers did dreadful things during the Cold War, and this documentary shows them all. After watching it, now I have a very deep respect for CNN and Ted Turner. It's only available on VHS, and only on eBay (or used, at Amazon). If you don't have a VHS player anymore (who has?), contact me (edit: for download links, not for selling you a VHS player!). If you're interested in Cold War history and want to know more, watch this definitive series. You won't be disappointed.

drostie 15y ago

Bruce Schneier at this year's RSA conference: "I think in the coming decade, the real threats to the Internet don't come from the Bad Guys, they don't come from the criminals or the hackers, they come from politics and they come from economics, and that's really what I want to spend time talking about at RSA this year." http://365.rsaconference.com/community/connect/blog/2012/02/24/rsac2012-podcast-exp-107-new-threats-to-the-internet-infrastructure http://365.rsaconference.com/community/connect/blog/2012/02/...

pentae 15y ago
And spoken not 50ft from the NSA/FBI/CIA booths attending the conference ..

euroclydon 15y ago

So the quickest way to cure cancer would be to come up with a new encryption scheme, where the byproduct of brute force cracking it would be simulating the effects of genomics mutations?

DanBC 15y ago

People good at math, or data mining, or etc might enjoy working for GCHQ. I assume they'd enjoy working for NSA. There's a bunch of very smart people, with interesting tech, and, uh, low pay. I don't know about NSA but GCHQ is subject to a lot of oversight; breaking laws would be problematic. Laws get written with specific exclusions for GCHQ. And there are creative methods to evade other laws - US in theory cannot spy on its citizens so they team with UK and ask us to do it for them.

munin 15y ago
FYI: http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/oversight.shtml#oversight5 http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/oversight.shtml#oversight5

conover 15y ago

More pictures: http://www.cryptome.org/2012-info/nsa-utah/nsa-utah.htm http://www.cryptome.org/2012-info/nsa-utah/nsa-utah.htm

freestyler_1 15y ago

sends virus to tap just opened NSA data center Because tapping the biggest tapper is ironic. (not that I will do that/can)

pgroves 15y ago

If this will be one of the most powerful encryption-cracking facility in the world, can we just set our key strength based on it's computing power? So if they end up being able to crack 1024 bit keys, can we just set our keys to 2048 and be ok? And then when they upgrade, everyone goes to 4096? I'm not a security expert (obviously), so maybe I'm wrong, but in general I don't see how they'll be able to build new monster computing facilities as fast as consumer hardware can be upgraded to use slightly stronger encryption.

eliasmacpherson 15y ago

If they are actively logging communications for future decryption due to predicted increased computational power, and the allegations of them leaking confidential communications to US firms to gain competitive advantage are true: Then this is another argument against (foreign/multinational) businesses conducting anything sensitive in the cloud, even if it is encrypted end to end and stored encrypted. Particularly for information that the businesses want to keep indecipherable for many years.

bgilroy26 15y ago

Interesting historical comparison (865 days ago) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915971 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915971

kfcm 15y ago

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/538/ http://xkcd.com/538/