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“The facts contained in this program constitute a combination of the greatest number of highly sensitive facts related to NSA/CSS’s overall cryptologic mission,
by xnull2guest 12y ago
“The facts contained in this program constitute a combination of the greatest number of highly sensitive facts related to NSA/CSS’s overall cryptologic mission,” the briefing document states. “Unauthorized disclosure…will cause exceptionally grave damage to U.S. national security. The loss of this information could critically compromise highly sensitive cryptologic U.S. and foreign relationships, multi-year past and future NSA investments, and the ability to exploit foreign adversary cyberspace while protecting U.S. cyberspace.”
Maybe they could have not published this one.
I'm very much interested in the Snowden Documents and am a strong advocate for civil liberties (look at some of my other posts, and the ones under the handle 'xnull').
I also repeatedly explain, on Hacker News, and other places, that there is a global cyber intelligence war and that the Snowden Leaks showed us key insights into what was going on, how it's not 'about terrorism' and a great number of other things.
But I'm bewildered by this article. It seems really damaging, and like it doesn't really add very much to the corpus they've already published.
Any ideas?
Edit: Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden, etc all decide what material to publish and what material not to publish. Greenwald, by his own admission, works with US officials to redact information and to choose which stories make it out of the gate. He's also said that he isn't revealing (paraphrasing) 'the most horrendous material in the Snowden documents, for fear of the fallout'. My question should not be thought of a challenge to revealing Snowden documents as a whole. Contrary to this I think it is of the very highest service. My question is only 'why this document'?
- rainbowvac 12y agoWhat happened to the ideals of transparency? Was that given up along the way to an enterprise sized government?
- lawnchair_larry 12y agoDid you read it all? It talks about the NSA infiltrating companies and backdooring encryption. It's important to publish this.
- xnull2guest 12y agoYup. Plenty of leaks before on infiltrating companies and backdooring encryption. Was there anything in particular? Edit: Nothing in particular then I guess... :(
- nintendo1889 12y agoI wonder if they're subverting open source encryption software.
- xnull2guest 12y agoMost certainly 100% yes. Here's a pretty swell talk on some of the programs they use to do it. http://mirror.as35701.net/video.fosdem.org//2014/Janson/Sunday/NSA_operation_ORCHESTRA_Annual_Status_Report.webm http://mirror.as35701.net/video.fosdem.org//2014/Janson/Sund...
- nintendo1889 12y agoFascinating. I'm off to create a few phony shell corporations to get some free NSA money and get paid to surf the web!
- xnull2guest 12y agoHahahha. Had the same thought.
- nyolfen 12y agothe really excellent part of this presentation is that he calls attention to the exceptionally poor nature of openssl's code months before heartbleed
- Estragon 12y agoWhat happened in the jump cut at 44m50s?
- zwegner 12y ago
- rainwolf 12y agoIt is really damaging, but that's from a perspective that, as a superpower, they were benefiting from control and domination. The same perspective implies that the target was being damaged by these actions. Targets that are not always adversaries. Targets that could contribute if not being controlled, dominated, and damaged. It's not easy to see, but damaging others denies them the contributions they could bring, ultimately damaging themselves.
- xnull2guest 12y agoAre you saying it's retribution for participating in the global cyber intelligence war? Everybody is hacking everybody. Every major country has a cyberintelligence arm. The NSA is just one actor of dozens.
- meowface 12y agoI actually condone a lot of the NSA's activities, but I take serious issue with: -Warantless surveillance of US citizens (this is bad whether it's by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, or anyone). -Infiltration of foreign companies in allied or neutral nations purely for economic or geopolitical insight, not for military purposes (Brazil's Petrobras oil company, all sorts of spying in Germany and Norway and other places). Personally I'm all for the kind of operations they're conducting in Iran and China, as these countries have been doing the same to us and to others for a long time. But they've become far too greedy in their desire for information domination and power, to the point where there is clearly no line that shouldn't be crossed. To them, if anything anywhere in the world is open for exploitation or surveillance, then they feel like they have a right to use it.
- xnull2guest 12y ago> Warantless surveillance of US citizens (this is bad whether it's by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, or anyone). Agreed very strongly. > Infiltration of foreign companies in allied or neutral nations purely for economic or geopolitical insight, not for military purposes (Brazil's Petrobras oil company, all sorts of spying in Germany and Norway and other places). See this is where the NSA really shines. We (The US) delayed Iran's nuclear program by THREE YEARS with Stuxnet! Three! And after they finally figured out it was sabotage the US and Israel had the director assassinated for further delays. Having Merkle's cell phone? During the Eurozone crisis? It would have been awful (financially) for the United States not to have that information. It's fun to look back and read the confused reports during the time "European Union suffering considerably from Eurozone crisis; America sees only limited effects." PETROBRAS? We won offshore oil drilling locations because we had that information. Energy security for the country going forward decades. Unfortunately geopolitics are important and you can't just not participate. Hacking is (one important way) that modern espionage, surveillance and sabotage are done.
- fiatmoney 12y agoBecause of this. It's likely the NSA is actively subverting American companies. "The most controversial revelation in Sentry Eagle might be a fleeting reference to the NSA infiltrating clandestine agents into “commercial entities.” The briefing document states that among Sentry Eagle’s most closely guarded components are “facts related to NSA personnel (under cover), operational meetings, specific operations, specific technology, specific locations and covert communications related to SIGINT enabling with specific commercial entities (A/B/C).” It is not clear whether these “commercial entities” are American or foreign or both. Generally the placeholder “(A/B/C)” is used in the briefing document to refer to American companies, though on one occasion it refers to both American and foreign companies. Foreign companies are referred to with the placeholder “(M/N/O).” The NSA refused to provide any clarification to The Intercept."
- xnull2guest 12y agoRight. But that's not new information. Prior Snowden leaks (and leaks by others) have showed conclusively that the NSA targets and infiltrates American corporations and also partners heavily with them.
- meowface 12y agoThis article seems a bit speculative. They don't seem to know for sure that "(A/B/C)" means American companies in this case. Everything else just seems like commentary from themselves and other security experts. As for foreign companies, it's pretty obvious that NSA and CIA have been conducting operations like these for many decades. I'm not going to argue that the NSA has not subverted American companies before (see DUAL_EC_DRBG), but this does not provide definitive proof that they're actively infiltrating homeland companies with human spies.
- xnull2guest 12y agoIt's not all that speculative - it agrees what was in prior leaks that claim that American companies are routinely infiltrated. Also remember that the authors of these articles have read huge volumes of Snowden documents have have not been publicly released and that the security experts (likely referencing Schneier here) are not just guys working in private industry. If you work in the security space you very quickly begin to interoperate with past- and current- military and government personnel. Schneier testifies as an expert witness on these things before congress and Greenwald is an ex-Constitutional lawyer. In short they have the pedigree to make these assertions. For the record I don't agree with the parent. I think the important thing about this document is that it lays out the broad tactical tools used in US cyberintelligence strategy. It's handing off some major tactical playbook material.
- acqq 12y agoYou summarized already in your sentences ("I'm bewildered by this article. It seems really damaging, and like it doesn't really add very much to the corpus they've already published") how you feel and why you feel that way: it appears damaging because it contains the paragraphs that explicitly contain the words "it's damaging." But it's just a general introduction to the "juicy bits" without the bits themselves. In fact you recognized this too writing: "it doesn't really add very much to the corpus they've already published." Once you attempt to identify the new information, you can recognize that 99.5% of it appeared in some other form before. The older published documents already were marked "top secret." This markings are given to the content that is considered "damaging" by these who write the documents. You just percieved it differently because these markings were just markings for you, not the sentences spelling out "damaging." Still, the value to the public of this very document is that it's a single document summarizing nicely the previously disclosed ones in much less words. By its nature though it doesn't contain the details published previously. (Edit: technically, it's a set of the documents but all of them together appear to me just as a big table of contents for the disclosures already published.) Now let's discuss the new 0.5% of information, even if it's very general.
- xnull2guest 12y agoTo clarify I mean that I don't believe it adds much to the corpus of information about domestic and civil rights infractions. On the other hand it deals a pretty big blow geopolitically/internationally. The big deal about this article is that it reveals the major tactical capabilities and efforts the NSA has invested in the intelligence war. Edit: Right now HN is limiting the number of replies I can initiate. Will reply as I can.
- acqq 12y ago> The big deal about this article is that it reveals the major tactical capabilities and efforts the NSA has invested in the intelligence war. It does? What is actually new and specific I fail to see. But it's a really, really nice summary.
- 12y ago
- aburan28 12y agoThere is nothing damaging in these latest documents. The documents reference programs that if revealed (which they were not) would be extremely harmful to national security.
- Perseids 12y ago> global cyber intelligence war I'm really starting to take an issue with declaring all this stuff as "cyber war" or "cyber warfare" (here and everywhere else in this thread). It's not a war if there is no intend of actually killing people. Even something as intense as the "cold war", had the qualifier cold in it, because there was no open confrontation. And what is now summarized as cyber (intelligence) warfare is orders of magnitude less deadly (though not necessarily less damaging to our civil rights). It's not a war if I steal your trade secrets and undermine your negotiation positions in international treaties. If you frame it as a "war" you get a whole different solution space. Instead of strengthening the IT security of domestic companies that build your core infrastructure you end up with "offense is the best defense" strategies and undermine the IT security of everyone. If you stop using war rhetoric this kind of statement: > If you didn't see it, there's a link on another branch of the conversation containing (at least) 37 other countries involved in cyber [espionage]. becomes far less of an existential threat.
- xnull2guest 12y ago> I'm really starting to take an issue with declaring all this stuff as "cyber war" or "cyber warfare" (here and everywhere else in this thread). It's not a war if there is no intend of actually killing people. Countries are owning each others' communications, power, transportation, energy, food production, etc infrastructure. Sabotaging these can cripple a nation, not to mention kill people (check out damage from the recent Great Northeast Blackout - note here that it is not known whether this was a cyber attack). The military and defense contractors are targets of attacks as well as industry. Titan Rain, Moonlight Maze and Operation Aurora are some well know geopolitically motivated attacks that breached defense contractors (includingLockheed Martin, Sandia), US internet infrastructure (including Rackspace, Google), aerospace (including NASA) and military (including the DoD). You may remember this year that Wall Street and JP Morgan was hacked, that the DoD was hacked, that several hundred defense contractors were hacked, and that the list of people with top secret clearance was hacked. You may remember this year that Israel's "Iron Dome" missile defense system schematics were hacked. In the eyes of the military, these things constitute an attack. They give it the name warfare. It certainly isn't classical warfare. Maybe we need a new term. I do like the "cold" term. No matter what we call it, it is serious. As a country we are invested in it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-budget/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...
- revelation 12y agoCome on, it's been 13 years now of this "grave damage to national security" talk. They claim it for everything. I'm reasonably sure every thinking person has started, in their mind, to replace any invocation of "national security" with "covering up either incompetence, negligence or breaches of law". Theres zero reasons we should be paying any attention to that label. (I like to remind people of the case of Ibrahim vs. DHS, where the government spent all its time invoking various secrets related laws and privileges, citing national security, even having Holder sign a declaration to that purpose, and what for? To cover up the clerical error of some lowly FBI agent, who checked a wrong box.)
- xnull2guest 12y agoThe "grave damage to national security" wasn't something an official said. It was a warning inside the document. Certainly there are instances where this is the case. I can think of a few others to add to your example. But there's no good reason to assume that all invocations of classified and politically or strategically sensitive material are excuses to cover up incompetence, negligence or breaches of law. And in fact in this case I'm not sure what it would be covering up. What's listed here is hardly incompetence nor negligence and the argument for breach of law, while slightly stronger, wouldn't pass a smell test.
- stfu 12y agoSomewhat sad to see the cyber security war narrative becoming the top voted comment on hackernews. Until the public realize that they are themselves the target of those cyber security war activities by their own government, those revelations can not be damaging enough. Just to support the point: Today the new Snowden movie is all over the news, while practically nobody seems to care bout those revelations you claim being really damaging.
- xnull2guest 12y ago> Until the public realize that they are themselves the target of those cyber security war activities by their own government, those revelations can not be damaging enough This is entirely true. Us plebes have been caught in the middle. And the surveillance programs are not just about cyber warfare. The NSA/DHS use them for other things as well (handing off to CIA/FBI/DEA, building profiles of people, social manipulation, etc). But this article from firstlook IS about cyber warfare. The leaked document itself says "U.S. Strategic Command - Joint Function Component Command - Network Warfare". > Today the new Snowden movie is all over the news, while practically nobody seems to care bout those revelations you claim being really damaging Isn't that argumentum ad populum? The news media coverage of the Snowden revelations has been horrendous, limited and misleading through and through. In fact the Snowden movie being in the news is a great example of how the public is disconnected with what's going on. It's not a "Snowden documentary" or a "Snowden lecture" or a "Snowden document analysis". It's a short hour and change person story with a bleached narrative devoid of the content of the actual documents.
- coldtea 12y ago>But I'm bewildered by this article. It seems really damaging, and like it doesn't really add very much to the corpus they've already published. Really damaging for whom? 99% of the worlds population are victims (them or their countries) to the stuff described in the article, not cheering for its continuation.