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NSA is monitoring key Internet routers (1996)
- rdtsc 12y agoI do remember laughing at such claims back then.
- nerdy 12y agoIt sounds nuts at the time, now we just think "of course." +1 "told ya so" point for Mr Assange. Gotta love the PCMCIA mentions; brings back memories.
- MichaelGG 12y agoWasn't Carnivore revealed around this time? Is it such s huge leap to go from that to monitoring all traffic?
- nerdy 12y agoThey probably just couldn't go as deep on as many targets but were able to watch a lot from a relatively high level. Back then there was a lot less noise to filter through, too. Mobile devices weren't ubiquitous... traffic was mostly e-mail. When the FBI was using Carnivore, Jaz drives were still a thing. If you had a 56k modem you the lucky guy on your local bulletin board. So in retrospect tools like Carnivore sound primitive... at the time it was a pretty sharp scalpel. Room 641A and MySpace both launched in 2003. Facebook became popular between 2004 and 2008. There were a few others in there; but in general the government programs scale relative to the amount of data made available through the Internet. In 1996 there just wasn't that much.
- soup10 12y agoIt was clear it was technologically possible to do mass electronic dragnet surveillance for a long time, but NSA officials have lied thousands of times about the breadth and extent of their collection activities and people that like to trust the government(and authorities in general) gave them the benefit of the doubt. Now it's out of the bag though and the public is apathetic so it's likely to continue.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- acqq 12y agoRaising awareness was OK goal, but he also links to the text "NSA Can Break PGP Encryption" which deadlinks today but a copy of it is preserved on another site, and there we read "it's a joke:" http://www.austinlinks.com/Crypto/break-pgp.html http://www.austinlinks.com/Crypto/break-pgp.html EDIT: see dchest's comment, it's seems it's a repost from the NorthStar's newsletter, so then it has sense to link even to the "joke" stuff just tho give the readers an overview. If you look how it lo
- nerdy 12y agoYeah the NSA would never try to break crypto anyhow coughDual_EC_DRBGcough
- icebraining 12y agoThere had been articles for a decade about the NSA and ECHELON, like [1]. I remember reading about the system in '99, in an (independent) Spanish hacking magazine. I'm frankly still amazed at how many people here were just so flabbergasted. I thought it was public knowledge in this community. It wasn't even an underground thing: the European Parliament had a report on it published in June 2001 [2]. [1] http://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/journalism/newstatesman/newstatesman-1988/They%27ve%20got%20it%20taped.pdf http://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/journalism/newstatesman/n... [2] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...
- DonHopkins 12y agoRemember the Clipper chip? It was announced in 1993 and by 1996 was entirely defunct. EFF and Wired Magazine published a lot of anti-clipper backlash during that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cyberright.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cyberright.png https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Graphics/ https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Graphics/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip >Backlash >Organizations such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenged the Clipper chip proposal, saying that it would have the effect not only of subjecting citizens to increased and possibly illegal government surveillance, but that the strength of the Clipper chip's encryption could not be evaluated by the public, as its design was classified secret, and that therefore individuals and businesses might be hobbled with an insecure communications system. Further, it was pointed out that while American companies could be forced to use the Clipper chip in their encryption products, foreign companies could not, and presumably phones with strong data encryption would be manufactured abroad and spread throughout the world and into the United States, negating the point of the whole exercise, and, of course, materially damaging U.S. manufacturers en route. Then-Senators John Ashcroft and John Kerry were opponents of the Clipper chip proposal, arguing in favor of the individual's right to encrypt messages and export encryption software. >The release and development of several strong cryptographic software packages such as Nautilus, PGP and PGPfone was in response to the government push for the Clipper chip. The thinking was that if strong cryptography was freely available on the internet as an alternative, the government would be unable to stop its use. Here's a photo that Tom Jennings took of some graffiti I left in South Park (next to Wired's office) in San Francisco around 1994: http://worldpowersystems.com/projects/wps.com.21Oct1996/anti-clipper-graffiti.gif http://worldpowersystems.com/projects/wps.com.21Oct1996/anti...
- elchief 12y agoPCMCIA = People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
- Intermernet 12y agoPerhaps Computer Mechanisms Can't Inspire Acronyms?
- madaxe_again 12y agoTWAIN = Toolkit Without an Important Name Always my favourite.
- caf 12y agoI heard it as Thing Without An Interesting Name
- agumonkey 12y agoAnything with `association` in it is a disgrace to my ears.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- aburan28 12y agoAssange is a very intelligent individual. In fact the people posting that Assange's pgp related post warrants laughter now won't get the last laugh (in due time).
- andreyf 12y agoAre you suggesting someone can break PGP encryption? What evidence is there of this claim?
- xnull2guest 12y agoNSA is known for breaking cryptosystems with implementation flaws, side channels, the bleeding edge of cryptanalysis (which in cases of things like padding oracles and chaining modes make practical differences), and by brute force (when key sizes are within their top notch cracking capability). Furthermore they are known to have sabotaged software to insert exploitable flaws and the CIA today will compromise compilers of specific individuals so that they compile backdoored binaries. Unlikely then, but replacing a popular hosted binary wouldn't have been beyond their capability. It's not that unlikely they could crack some instances of PGP some of the time. Today the NSA docs reference being able to crack things like OTR sometimes, though unlikely.
- aburan28 12y agoDo you have any evidence that PGP cannot be broken? After reading through almost all of the snowden docs and 90's crypto wars and looking at the actions undertaken by the govt, how can the government possibly permit encryption that they can not break. Think about it in the lense of the post 9/11 hysteria. I understand the discrete logarithm problem and all the other important parts to show rsa is safe but computers do not produce truly random numbers and with that deterministic environment generating the critical primes for pgp I simple cannot believe that the NSA has not already enumerated a few trillion/++ factors.
- Arnt 12y agoPGP has 50,000 users counting by the keyservers, Tor has two million daily users. I don't think that's reasonable that 97.5% of the people who care enough to use Tor haven't used PGP in years. (Yes, that's a back-of-the-envelope calculation.) My conclusion from that disparity is that PGP is broken by a flank attack: Its usability is so bad that the encryption goes unused.
- andreyf 12y agoThe NSA today certainly has great power, but what evidence do we have that they are abusing it a way comparable to McCarthyism or the CIA in the 60's [1]? 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...
- scrollaway 12y ago... are you serious? Did you not read the news at any point between 2013 and 2015?
- andreyf 12y agoYes, I follow the news. Do you have something specific in mind?
- scrollaway 12y agoThere's one of three worlds, here. * Either you do follow the news, but you are trolling out the actual issues at hand that have been raised, making which is very unproductive * OR you do follow the news, and you purposefully blind yourself to the stories about the NSA for whatever reason (maybe you think everybody's a conspiratard, or you think all this stuff is fine, or...). * OR you are blatantly lying to me here and don't actually follow the news. I don't deal with liars. In none of those worlds is it worth replying to the question you just asked. I'll be happy to take a correction, though. So go ahead.
- andreyf 12y agoI'm saying that, as far as I know after watching the news, the NSA has done nothing that's comparable to the historic examples of "secret lists of enemies of the state that public sector employers agree to not hire" or "attempting to drive a political figure to suicide". The most egregious offense I've heard of (and this is not the NSA) is the harassment of Applebaum and the like at US borders. Based on Laura Poitras' public statements, this has stopped for her. I hope it has for Jacob as well, as I think that's a really obvious move in the right direction. The rest of the news I don't find to be especially egregious violations. Perhaps we differ in world view w.r.t. the NSA and the role that it serves in our society - what do you see that role as being?
- gadgetcopter 12y agoActually, Assange was wrong. A leaked NSA Inspector General's report provides specifics about historical NSA surveillance programs. It's apparent that the agency only scaled up its domestic Internet presence after 9/11. https://www.aclu.org/files/natsec/nsa/20130816/NSA%20IG%20Report.pdf https://www.aclu.org/files/natsec/nsa/20130816/NSA%20IG%20Re... Pages 29-34 provide detail on when the agency gained access to Internet content and metadata.
- peterwwillis 12y agoYa know, if the NSA did have a presence in NAPs and other backbones in the 90s, the employees there would know. You can't take over an entire floor or wing of a building and make it restricted to people with clearance without anyone noticing.
- vidarh 12y agoDid you read the linked message? Assange is citing claims from a number of other sources. He made very few claims of his own. The messages ends with: > Is the NSA really snooping on the Net? If they are, would that violate the agency's charter, which specifically prohibits it from spying within the US? "Well, Net traffic is routed from God knows where to God knows where around the world," says George Washington University Professor Lance Hoffman, a professor of Communications and Telecommunications Systems Policy at George Washington University. "So if the NSA is doing this, they could say they are not violating their charter not to spy in the US. That's the thing. Intelligent routers send stuff any which way." Which claim is wrong? In terms of your claim, it's worth looking at page 28, where it specifically states that "two of the most productive SIGINT collection partnerships that NSA has with the private sector are with COMPANY A and COMPANY B. These two relationships enable NSA to access large volumes of foreign-to-foreign communications transiting the United States through fiber-optic cables, gateway switches, and data networks. They also provide foreign intelligence authorized under the FISA. " It is clear on page 29 that "COMPANY A and COMPANY B" approached the NSA after 9/11 to offer further assistance, but this contact was, according to the report, made via an existing NSA contact, and the new approach was regarding call records, not internet traffic. It is not at all clear what portion of the interception described on page 28 and top of page 29 started before 9/11, but it is worth noting that this interception specifically occurs in the section about "history of NSA Partnerships with the Private Sector" and not under the subsequent "Partnerships after 11 September 2001" section. You are right that the report appears to support your claim that the NSA scaled up after 9/11, but it in no way makes clear from what foundation the scaled up.
- higherpurpose 12y ago> "A knowledgeable government source claims that the NSA has concluded agreements with Microsoft, Lotus and Netscape to permit the introduction of the means to prevent the anonymity of Internet electronic mail, the use of cryptographic key-escrow, as well as software industry acceptance of the NSA-developed Digital Signature Standard (DSS)." Nice. Microsoft has been collaborating with the NSA to make their spying easier for its own products and services for at least two decades now, something the Snowden docs confirmed in 2013 [1], but we didn't know it went back that far then. But that was the old Microsoft (up until 1-2 years ago). The new Microsoft could never possibly. [1] - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...
- acqq 12y ago> we didn't know it went back that far then. Who "we?" There was this export control back then, mandatory weak crypto, the Clipper chip initiative etc. If you wanted to say "a lot of people didn't care" well they don't care now too. Snowden raised the level of awareness for a moment, that's true... Here's one article from 1995 about the process against Phil Zimmerman, the original author of PGP: http://virtualschool.edu/mon/Crypto/LostInKafkaTerritory http://virtualschool.edu/mon/Crypto/LostInKafkaTerritory Edit: The Clipper Chip, 1993: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
- dchest 12y agoLooks like it's a repost of an article from NorthStar newsletter: http://iahushua.com/WOI/nsanet.html http://iahushua.com/WOI/nsanet.html It doesn't list Assange as the author, he only sent it to the newsgroup.
- acqq 12y agoThat makes much more sense then. At that moment the newsletters were a good way to distribute the links even if the author of the newsletter didn't necessarily agree with everything behind every link (like the PGP claim). To get the better idea of the time, remember that Google didn't exist then.
- simula67 12y ago> Americans would not have any privacy left > I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America Isn't he Australian ? I can understand if he was opposed to being spied on by US but if the democratically elected government of US chooses to spy on its own people, isn't it morally presumptuous for Assange to intervene ?
- dlss 12y agoMoral truths don't change just because an election was held / that new laws are passed is evidence that current laws aren't always what's moral. Democracies have a better track record than most governments with respect to human rights, but they are not perfect. For the obvious example in the US, slavery was always immoral, and didn't suddenly become so when an elected official decided to outlaw it.
- simula67 12y agoAs I understand it, there are some things called natural and legal rights. Rights such as 'Right to life', 'Right to liberty' etc are natural. While 'Right to Privacy', 'Right to Freedom or Religion' etc are legal. One set is inalienable and the other the society can decide for themselves to forfeit. This arrangement is there so as to appeal to cultures and societies with different inclinations.
- fit2rule 12y agoAustralia has been an even more oppressive regime than America over the history of its existence. That you would assume that Australians don't care about how government oppression can have negative impact on culture belies your ignorance of the Australian governments' heinous actions against its own people over the course of centuries ..
- Intermernet 12y agoDue to long standing agreements [1] (in place before ECHELON, five eyes etc.) Australia and the US share a huge amount of intelligence. Being from Australia, Assange is aware of the influence that NSA data collection will have on areas outside of the US. Appealing to Americans is the best chance he has of informing the population who can make a difference. EDIT: Add link EDIT 2: from link, because I didn't know this and I thought it was interesting: > Due to its status as a secret treaty, its existence was not known to the Prime Minister of Australia until 1973, and it was not disclosed to the public until 2005. On 25 June 2010, for the first time in history, the full text of the agreement was publicly released by Britain and the United States, and can now be viewed online. Shortly after its release, the seven-page UKUSA Agreement was recognized by Time magazine as one of the Cold War's most important documents, with immense historical significance. Link to original treaty text [2]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement [2]: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukusa/ http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukusa/
- yzh 12y agoAs a Chinese, I really wonder whether the Chinese government is doing the same thing (or maybe several countries' governments are doing this?) I did have a friend who received immediate warning phone call from Ministry of State Security just a few minutes after he posted something controversial about government's ethnic policy. It was 2009 and he was using a campus computer. That's why I never put personal data on campus computers back in China.
- gadders 12y agoI would imagine that all governments that have the technical capability would be attempting to do it.
- diminoten 12y agoYou wonder if the Chinese government is doing the same thing? I guess the answer is technically 'no', insofar that the NSA isn't doing anything like what the Chinese government is doing. I feel weird giving you these links, because frankly you should know more about this than I, but here you go anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/04/the-grass-mud-horse-dictionary-how-chinese-bloggers-evade-censorship/
- madaxe_again 12y agoIf he's in China, he likely won't be able to read either of those, and if he does... he won't be posting here any more.
- diminoten 12y agoI honestly hadn't even thought of the fact that he might not be aware of his government's spying program.
- madaxe_again 12y agoThis is how indoctrination works. You aren't aware of what you're not aware of. You see the world through a glass, darkly.
- golergka 12y agoStarting the first paragraph with a 1984 reference and the second one with McCarthy is a great way to look like a boy crying wolf. Even if there is really a wolf. Especially if there's really a wolf — you don't want people to immediately write you off as a conspiracy theorist and alarmist. Even if you believe that you live in a true dystopian society, if your goal is to persuade people, you should try not to sound or look like character from The Lone Gunmen. Sometimes I wonder how many conspiracy theorists are actually right, but when I begin to stuff like this, I can't bring myself to take it seriously, just because of pompous, self-righteous, anti-establishment way it is written.
- lemming 12y agoFortunately, in this case you no longer have to wonder if he was right or not. The Orwell and McCarthy references seem pretty accurate to me - one neatly encapsulates the degree of surveillance we now know is happening, and the other clearly indicates the dangers of it.
- golergka 12y agoHim being right in the end is exactly why I wish he wouldn't look as a typical conspiracy theorist in the first place.
- jules 12y agoHave you considered that the problem may be on your end? I also don't understand why this was so unbelievable. I had this discussion many years ago with friends in high school. They also thought I was paranoid for saying that this kind of spying was obviously already happening or would happen soon. I thought it was rather obvious given the incentives, secrecy, technical means, and changes in society that would soon make online life very important.
- golergka 12y agoOf course it's on my end. But "my end" is shared with millions of other people; and if you want to persuade them, you have to account for problems on their end, not vice versa.
- some1else 12y agoEchelon-like capture of unencrypted information was widely accepted as reality during my time on IRC (2000-2007). The Slovenian Government was actually sloppy enough to let the knowledge out in public [1]. We were provided the technology by the Germans, but it's possible USA just wanted to stay out of he way. [1] https://www.dnevnik.si/249095/slovenija/249095 https://www.dnevnik.si/249095/slovenija/249095
- rilita 12y agoKey portion from the article: "Puzzle Palace co-author Wayne Madsen, in an article written for the June 1995 issue of Computer Fraud & Security Bulletin (Elsevier Advanced Technology Publications), wrote that "according to well-placed sources within the Federal Government and the Internet service provider industry, the National Security Agency (NSA) is actively sniffing several key Internet router and gateway hosts." edit: Title is better now; thanks.
- runjake 12y agoTossing aside that Assange didn't actually make this statement: In 1996, the possibility that the NSA was sniffing the Internet was largely considered "tinfoil" even by most tech experts. But anyone who read Bamford knew there was good circumstantial evidence that mass surveillance was occurring -- except back then, the bad word was "ECHELON", not "PRISM". It's important to remember that while Snowden brought this to the masses (and to that we owe him a great debt), long before Snowden, we had Mark Klein, Binney, Cryptome, and James Bamford. The NSA has been under strong suspicions for decades at this point. Back in the 80s, the exposes were about their mass surveillance of telephone calls. This was even in the popular press. There was a particular 60 Minutes episode that described a post worker shocked that she was intercepting a mom talking about her kid's soccer game in English. Having lived through multiple very public NSA scandals over the decades, I think the only effective change will come from the grassroots: strong crypto, secure software, privacy focused. It sure as hell won't come from our lawmakers.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- samstave 12y ago>Tossing aside that Assange didn't actually make this statement: In 1996, the possibility that the NSA was sniffing the Internet was largely considered "tinfoil" even by most tech experts. In 1997 I was working at a company where we built and delivered all software by SUn and many other companies. We had a Cisco 3640 that I inherited when I got there and I needed to recover the password. I hired a CCIE to come in and walk me through the recovery and rebuild of this and the other Cisco gear I had at the time. During the hours that we spent rebuilding the network, we talked a lot about security in general, cisco in specific, and I recall him telling me then "Cisco is required by the NSA to provide them a backdoor into all our routers".
- runjake 12y agoThis is not a myth. He was probably referring to the CALEA backdoors. You can Google for "cisco calea 6500" and obtain some public documentation. It's more likely the FBI would actually interface to it and give said data to the NSA. But your point stands. The NSA doesn't seem to like to directly interact with ISPs and corporations, so they have the FBI act as their public face, so to speak.
- yuhong 12y agoI wonder how often they actually brute forced 40-bit and 56-bit encryption back then (which NSA pushed for in the first place).