6 ms·

How relevant is this (and the NSA's general spying capability) in 2025? We hear a lot about local agencies perusing the services of private companies to collec

by apt-get 10mo ago

How relevant is this (and the NSA's general spying capability) in 2025? We hear a lot about local agencies perusing the services of private companies to collect citizens' data in the US, whether that's traffic information, IoT recordings, buying information from FAANG, etc. What's the NSA's position in the current administration? (e.g. we've heard a lot of noise in the past about the FBI and CIA getting the cold shoulder internally. I wonder how this applies to the NSA.)

monerozcash 10mo ago
NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now. NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
- themafia 10mo ago
  So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever. The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
  - monerozcash 10mo ago
    >So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever. Even if true, significantly degraded. Probably not true though, NSA has been very leaky and such a story would be kind of devastating for Google. NSA lacks the legal capability to force Google to do so, the money to bribe Google to do so and also almost certainly lacks the political backing to put one of the biggest US companies in such a position. I don't doubt for a second that NSA could hack Google (or just bribe employees with appropriate access) and break into specific Gmail accounts if they wanted to. Bulk collection would be far more difficult to implement. >The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption. They do try, they just haven't been very successful at it.
    - themafia 10mo ago
      Google, along with all other major service providers, has a legal portal so law enforcement can process warrant orders. I think all you have to do is hack that portal or process.
      - monerozcash 10mo ago
        Sure, and you could also just submit fake warrants as many criminals have successfully done. Neither of these approaches would enable bulk collection. I'm sure the NSA can read essentially any specific emails they're interested in, they just can't do so at anywhere near the scale they used to pre-Snowden. Not only that, these days almost all chats have moved to E2EE platforms. Reading that traffic in a stealthy manner requires compromising endpoints, bulk collection simply isn't possible.
  - ls612 10mo ago
    It’s not Google room whatever, it’s Cloudflare room whatever. That’s why you don’t hear much about undermining encryption standards anymore, who needs that when you have SSL termination for 40% of the internet?
  - matheusmoreira 10mo ago
    Brief list of NSA backdoors: https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html
- hollow-moe 10mo ago
  They surely don't have any kind of access to letsencrypt root certs whatsoever
  - monerozcash 10mo ago
    You can't decrypt anything with letsencrypt root certs, you can issue your own certificates but it would be impossible to use those at any significant scale. It's also worth considering that CT makes it extremely noisy to use such certificates to attack web browsers.
    - hollow-moe 10mo ago
      I'd bet they could absolutely proxy large parts of people and make use of these certs. I wonder how much are CT logs scrutinized, would these "rogue" certs be found easily because we can't find traces of them being generated by letsencrypt ? Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ?
      - monerozcash 10mo ago
        They couldn't do that at scale without being detected, no. There are various people actively looking for this, and the existing tooling makes it easy to detect. >Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ? Yes, all modern browsers require certificates to be in the CT logs in order for them to be accepted. For example, we can easily pull up logs for gmail.com and see which certificates browsers would accept. https://api.certspotter.com/v1/issuances?domain=gmail.com&expand=dns_names&expand=issuer&expand=revocation&expand=problem_reporting&expand=cert_der https://api.certspotter.com/v1/issuances?domain=gmail.com&ex...
- notepad0x90 10mo ago
  1) They don't necessarily need to break all encryption, just knowing who is talking to who and then delivering a tailored payload is their M.O.; The Tailored Access Operations division exists just for this. 2) They didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason 3) They have the capability to compromise certificate authorities. Pinned certs aren't universal. 4) Speculation, but, Snowden's revelations probably set off an "arms race" of sorts for developing this capability. Lots more people started using Tor, VPNs, and more, so it would almost be dereliction of duty on their part if they didn't dramatically increase their capability, because the threats they are there to stop didn't disappear. 5) ML/LLM/AI has been around for a while, machine learning analysis has been mainstream for over a decade now. All that immense data a human can never wade through can be processed by ML. I would be surprised if they aren't using an LLM to answer questions and query real-time and historical internet data. 6) You know all the concerns regarding Huawei and Tiktok being backdoored by the Chinese government? That's because we're doing it ourselves already. 7) I hope you don't think TAO is less capable than well known notorious spyware companies like the NSO group? dragnet collection is used to find patterns for follow-up tailored access.
  - monerozcash 10mo ago
    None of your proposed solutions are stealthy enough to enable bulk collection at a pre-Snowden scale. Yeah, they can still collect lots of useful metadata.
    - notepad0x90 10mo ago
      I don't understand, all they have to do is tap submarine cables, why is that infeasible now? What specific thing do you think they were collecting before that they can't now? Metadata is extremely valuable!! lots of things can be inferred from it. In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example. They can take any packet and trace it back to a specific individual, even if you're on Tor, chaining VPNs,etc.. without decrypting it. They can see what destinations you're visiting. they can build a pattern of life profile you and mine that. The ad industry does much of this without access to global internet traffic captures already lol.
- matheusmoreira 10mo ago
  They don't break encryption, they circumvent it. They get into people's computers and access the stored data after it's been decrypted. They stockpile zero day vulnerabilities and use them against their targets in order to install persistent malware. They intercept equipment and literally implant hardware onto the PCBs that let them access the networks. They have access to hordes of government CCTVs. They have real time satellite imaging. They have cellphone tower data.
  - monerozcash 10mo ago
    This is all in line with significantly degraded collection capabilities. They can easily go after specific targets, but bulk collection is no longer viable in the same way it was pre-Snowden.
    - matheusmoreira 10mo ago
      Yes but I wouldn't say their capabilities have been "greatly" degraded. It's still very much in the "push a button and have someone's entire life history up on the screen" territory. Degraded would be "it is impossible for them to know anything about people unless they send dozens of human agents to stalk them".
      - monerozcash 10mo ago
        I think going from "lol we can read and store all the emails sent by everybody" to "lol we can hack any specific person and then read their emails" indicates a massive loss of capability. The first approach enabled them to find targets that were not on their radar based on message contents, they can no longer do that.
        matheusmoreira 10mo ago
        They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know. No doubt they still read texts. I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot. They no doubt have access to the data big tech's mined out of the entire world's population. That capability alone puts them into "bring everything about this guy up on the screen" territory.
- yupyupyups 10mo ago
  >NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption. They don't. But they have other options. For example, Cloudflare is an American company that has plaintext access to the traffic of many sites. Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
  - monerozcash 10mo ago
    >Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want. This is true given some possible interpretations, false given other possible interpretations. Cloudflare can be secretly compelled to share specific things, there's no legal mechanism to compel Cloudflare to share everything.
    - morkalork 10mo ago
      Wasn't the whole thing that the secret courts were too liberal in access they were granting?
      - monerozcash 10mo ago
        Not in the sense that they were ordering companies to facilitate full take collection of content by the NSA, no. Hence the famous "SSL added and removed here ;-)" slide
        doobiedowner 10mo ago
        Wasn’t room 641A just the NSA strong arming At&T to facilitate full take collection?
        monerozcash 10mo ago
        Getting AT&T to do that is not the same as getting Google to do that. AT&T does not have much to lose by doing that, Google does.
- snorbleck 10mo ago
  store now... decrypt later...
  - monerozcash 10mo ago
    Sure, why not. If quantum computers capable of factoring sufficiently large numbers ever arrive, we'll be living in a very different world anyway.
- ch2026 10mo ago
  You should read about Project Cloudflare
- tehjoker 10mo ago
  Israel produced Pegasus for hacking smartphones and taking them over. You don't think NSA can do that? They control all the endpoints they want.
  - monerozcash 10mo ago
    So what? They can't do that at scale without making a ton of noise. That's a very boring capability compared to what they were able to do pre-Snowden. That's also not a new capability, they were able to do that pre-Snowden too.
- globalnode 10mo ago
  Dont need to break encryption if you read data from the source -- O/S vendors will do it for you.
- cannabis_sam 10mo ago
  This is naive to the point where it is indistinguishable from disinformation. Aside from a tiny minority of people applying their own encryption (with offline confirmed public keys) at end points with securely stored air gapped private keys, this information is available to the US government, it’s the god damn job of the NSA.
  - monerozcash 10mo ago
    The NSA can hack pretty much anybody, yes. The NSA can no longer collect everything as they were doing pre-Snowden. The crucial difference is that it is no longer nearly as easy for the NSA to identify new targets as it used to be, because they don't have full take access to the vast amounts of content they used to.
themafia 10mo ago
You only need to look at a few headline "true crime" cases to see the obvious parallel construction that is being done.
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  Could you be more specific? It's really hard to have an useful conversation based on a comment like this, but really easy to have one based on a comment which links to specific cases and perhaps even explains how the obvious parallel construction appears.
  - themafia 10mo ago
    It's a common "conspiracy theory" that this happened in the Luigi Mangione case even thought I don't agree he's "probably innocent": https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1hlmq3f/from_what_ive_read_about_it_luigi_mangione_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1hlmq3... The FBI apparently attempted to use this in the Bryan Kohberger case: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/us/idaho-murders-bryan-kohberger-dna.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/us/idaho-murders-bryan-ko... It's hard to find solid coverage of this because obviously the methods are often hidden and rarely leak out to the press at large. The press also gets confused and thinks that defending our constitutional rights will lead to criminals being acquitted. If you spend a lot of time watching and studying these cases and how they evolve throughout the courts it becomes obvious that this is likely occurring more than most people realize.
    - monerozcash 10mo ago
      I don't think the Mangione case is a particularly good example, you wouldn't use a 911 call by a random McDonald's manager to disguise parallel construction. The caller is easy to identify, how could the government ever trust this person to not reveal their parallel construction? If they were planted by the government, that'd be extremely difficult to hide. The government also likely wouldn't be able to compensate them in any meaningful way for telling such a lie. The Kohlberger case also does not suggest parallel construction, the DOJ policy isn't binding and the DOJ can in fact legally violate that whenever they want.
dialup_sounds 10mo ago
NSA is under Pete Hegseth's Department of War [sic] if that is any indication of their position and priorities.

by apt-get 10mo ago

monerozcash 10mo ago

NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now. NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.

themafia 10mo ago
So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever. The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  >So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever. Even if true, significantly degraded. Probably not true though, NSA has been very leaky and such a story would be kind of devastating for Google. NSA lacks the legal capability to force Google to do so, the money to bribe Google to do so and also almost certainly lacks the political backing to put one of the biggest US companies in such a position. I don't doubt for a second that NSA could hack Google (or just bribe employees with appropriate access) and break into specific Gmail accounts if they wanted to. Bulk collection would be far more difficult to implement. >The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption. They do try, they just haven't been very successful at it.
  - themafia 10mo ago
    Google, along with all other major service providers, has a legal portal so law enforcement can process warrant orders. I think all you have to do is hack that portal or process.
    - monerozcash 10mo ago
      Sure, and you could also just submit fake warrants as many criminals have successfully done. Neither of these approaches would enable bulk collection. I'm sure the NSA can read essentially any specific emails they're interested in, they just can't do so at anywhere near the scale they used to pre-Snowden. Not only that, these days almost all chats have moved to E2EE platforms. Reading that traffic in a stealthy manner requires compromising endpoints, bulk collection simply isn't possible.
- ls612 10mo ago
  It’s not Google room whatever, it’s Cloudflare room whatever. That’s why you don’t hear much about undermining encryption standards anymore, who needs that when you have SSL termination for 40% of the internet?
- matheusmoreira 10mo ago
  Brief list of NSA backdoors: https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html
hollow-moe 10mo ago
They surely don't have any kind of access to letsencrypt root certs whatsoever
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  You can't decrypt anything with letsencrypt root certs, you can issue your own certificates but it would be impossible to use those at any significant scale. It's also worth considering that CT makes it extremely noisy to use such certificates to attack web browsers.
  - hollow-moe 10mo ago
    I'd bet they could absolutely proxy large parts of people and make use of these certs. I wonder how much are CT logs scrutinized, would these "rogue" certs be found easily because we can't find traces of them being generated by letsencrypt ? Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ?
    - monerozcash 10mo ago
      They couldn't do that at scale without being detected, no. There are various people actively looking for this, and the existing tooling makes it easy to detect. >Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ? Yes, all modern browsers require certificates to be in the CT logs in order for them to be accepted. For example, we can easily pull up logs for gmail.com and see which certificates browsers would accept. https://api.certspotter.com/v1/issuances?domain=gmail.com&expand=dns_names&expand=issuer&expand=revocation&expand=problem_reporting&expand=cert_der https://api.certspotter.com/v1/issuances?domain=gmail.com&ex...
notepad0x90 10mo ago
1) They don't necessarily need to break all encryption, just knowing who is talking to who and then delivering a tailored payload is their M.O.; The Tailored Access Operations division exists just for this. 2) They didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason 3) They have the capability to compromise certificate authorities. Pinned certs aren't universal. 4) Speculation, but, Snowden's revelations probably set off an "arms race" of sorts for developing this capability. Lots more people started using Tor, VPNs, and more, so it would almost be dereliction of duty on their part if they didn't dramatically increase their capability, because the threats they are there to stop didn't disappear. 5) ML/LLM/AI has been around for a while, machine learning analysis has been mainstream for over a decade now. All that immense data a human can never wade through can be processed by ML. I would be surprised if they aren't using an LLM to answer questions and query real-time and historical internet data. 6) You know all the concerns regarding Huawei and Tiktok being backdoored by the Chinese government? That's because we're doing it ourselves already. 7) I hope you don't think TAO is less capable than well known notorious spyware companies like the NSO group? dragnet collection is used to find patterns for follow-up tailored access.
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  None of your proposed solutions are stealthy enough to enable bulk collection at a pre-Snowden scale. Yeah, they can still collect lots of useful metadata.
  - notepad0x90 10mo ago
    I don't understand, all they have to do is tap submarine cables, why is that infeasible now? What specific thing do you think they were collecting before that they can't now? Metadata is extremely valuable!! lots of things can be inferred from it. In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example. They can take any packet and trace it back to a specific individual, even if you're on Tor, chaining VPNs,etc.. without decrypting it. They can see what destinations you're visiting. they can build a pattern of life profile you and mine that. The ad industry does much of this without access to global internet traffic captures already lol.
matheusmoreira 10mo ago
They don't break encryption, they circumvent it. They get into people's computers and access the stored data after it's been decrypted. They stockpile zero day vulnerabilities and use them against their targets in order to install persistent malware. They intercept equipment and literally implant hardware onto the PCBs that let them access the networks. They have access to hordes of government CCTVs. They have real time satellite imaging. They have cellphone tower data.
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  This is all in line with significantly degraded collection capabilities. They can easily go after specific targets, but bulk collection is no longer viable in the same way it was pre-Snowden.
  - matheusmoreira 10mo ago
    Yes but I wouldn't say their capabilities have been "greatly" degraded. It's still very much in the "push a button and have someone's entire life history up on the screen" territory. Degraded would be "it is impossible for them to know anything about people unless they send dozens of human agents to stalk them".
    - monerozcash 10mo ago
      I think going from "lol we can read and store all the emails sent by everybody" to "lol we can hack any specific person and then read their emails" indicates a massive loss of capability. The first approach enabled them to find targets that were not on their radar based on message contents, they can no longer do that.
      - matheusmoreira 10mo ago
        They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know. No doubt they still read texts. I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot. They no doubt have access to the data big tech's mined out of the entire world's population. That capability alone puts them into "bring everything about this guy up on the screen" territory.
yupyupyups 10mo ago
>NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption. They don't. But they have other options. For example, Cloudflare is an American company that has plaintext access to the traffic of many sites. Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  >Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want. This is true given some possible interpretations, false given other possible interpretations. Cloudflare can be secretly compelled to share specific things, there's no legal mechanism to compel Cloudflare to share everything.
  - morkalork 10mo ago
    Wasn't the whole thing that the secret courts were too liberal in access they were granting?
    - monerozcash 10mo ago
      Not in the sense that they were ordering companies to facilitate full take collection of content by the NSA, no. Hence the famous "SSL added and removed here ;-)" slide
      - doobiedowner 10mo ago
        Wasn’t room 641A just the NSA strong arming At&T to facilitate full take collection?
        monerozcash 10mo ago
        Getting AT&T to do that is not the same as getting Google to do that. AT&T does not have much to lose by doing that, Google does.
snorbleck 10mo ago
store now... decrypt later...
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  Sure, why not. If quantum computers capable of factoring sufficiently large numbers ever arrive, we'll be living in a very different world anyway.
ch2026 10mo ago
You should read about Project Cloudflare
tehjoker 10mo ago
Israel produced Pegasus for hacking smartphones and taking them over. You don't think NSA can do that? They control all the endpoints they want.
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  So what? They can't do that at scale without making a ton of noise. That's a very boring capability compared to what they were able to do pre-Snowden. That's also not a new capability, they were able to do that pre-Snowden too.
globalnode 10mo ago
Dont need to break encryption if you read data from the source -- O/S vendors will do it for you.
cannabis_sam 10mo ago
This is naive to the point where it is indistinguishable from disinformation. Aside from a tiny minority of people applying their own encryption (with offline confirmed public keys) at end points with securely stored air gapped private keys, this information is available to the US government, it’s the god damn job of the NSA.
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  The NSA can hack pretty much anybody, yes. The NSA can no longer collect everything as they were doing pre-Snowden. The crucial difference is that it is no longer nearly as easy for the NSA to identify new targets as it used to be, because they don't have full take access to the vast amounts of content they used to.

themafia 10mo ago

You only need to look at a few headline "true crime" cases to see the obvious parallel construction that is being done.

monerozcash 10mo ago
Could you be more specific? It's really hard to have an useful conversation based on a comment like this, but really easy to have one based on a comment which links to specific cases and perhaps even explains how the obvious parallel construction appears.
- themafia 10mo ago
  It's a common "conspiracy theory" that this happened in the Luigi Mangione case even thought I don't agree he's "probably innocent": https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1hlmq3f/from_what_ive_read_about_it_luigi_mangione_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1hlmq3... The FBI apparently attempted to use this in the Bryan Kohberger case: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/us/idaho-murders-bryan-kohberger-dna.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/us/idaho-murders-bryan-ko... It's hard to find solid coverage of this because obviously the methods are often hidden and rarely leak out to the press at large. The press also gets confused and thinks that defending our constitutional rights will lead to criminals being acquitted. If you spend a lot of time watching and studying these cases and how they evolve throughout the courts it becomes obvious that this is likely occurring more than most people realize.
  - monerozcash 10mo ago
    I don't think the Mangione case is a particularly good example, you wouldn't use a 911 call by a random McDonald's manager to disguise parallel construction. The caller is easy to identify, how could the government ever trust this person to not reveal their parallel construction? If they were planted by the government, that'd be extremely difficult to hide. The government also likely wouldn't be able to compensate them in any meaningful way for telling such a lie. The Kohlberger case also does not suggest parallel construction, the DOJ policy isn't binding and the DOJ can in fact legally violate that whenever they want.

dialup_sounds 10mo ago

NSA is under Pete Hegseth's Department of War [sic] if that is any indication of their position and priorities.