I understand the impulse to want to know every damn thing that is going on, and I also understand the importance of having certain capabilities should unforeseen contingencies arise, but I kind of doubt that we gain more by spying on the European Union than we lose when it is divulged and our allies get angry. Spying on the United Nations has similar problems, insofar as it weakens the organization.
In the end, all this collection has to be sifted and put into the hands of policy makers and I just don’t believe that is happening. Or, rather, I believe much more collection is taking place than can possibly be useful.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) broke the encryption securing the United Nations’ internal video conferencing at its New York headquarters, German news weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday, citing secret NSA documents.
The move provided the agency with “a dramatic improvement of data from video teleconferences and the ability to decrypt this data traffic,” the magazine quoted an NSA document as saying.
It said the NSA, which for months has been at the center of revelations by intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, broke the encryption in the summer of 2012 and within nearly three weeks, had bumped up the number of decrypted communications from 12 to 458.
We might want the capability to watch UN teleconferences, but we ought to use some restraint. Doing it as a routine is corrosive to worldwide diplomatic efforts.
You do know who broke this story, right?
Other reporters have access to these documents, FYI. And for all the blubbering about Booman making the story about Greenwald, it seems the GG defenders never fail at making it about him. Exhibit Infinity, right here.
Didn’t Poitras break this one? Or was that just the part where British Telecom is doing MI6’s dirty work in the Middle East?
She wrote the article. Her name is not Glenn.
That’s my point!!! This wasn’t written by GG. So where is the invective for her? Where is Bob Cesca’s(or Twitter user JeffersonObama) smear job?
Why would we smear anyone? Why would we smear a seemingly fine piece of reporting?
Here’s what’s happening to your brain, Calvin.
You don’t believe that we are attacking Greenwald because he’s a hack, so you take evidence that supports the fact that we attacking Greenwald is a hack and you enter into what is called “cognitive dissonance.”
The next step is that you write a comment that makes no sense.
The premise of your thinking is wrong. We are not trying to undermine the revelations from the Snowden leaks. We are not running interference for the Obama administration. The way you can know this is that we are posting about those revelations and criticizing the Intelligence Community. We even post articles written by Greenwald’s partner (in getting the documents from Snowden) and we do so without criticizing her at all.
To ask “where’s the hit job?” is to publicly announce your confusion about being wrong.
I don’t know. Your insinuation led me to believe it was GG. Or rather it was more of a troll comment rather than an insinuation. “Hey look at what your favorite punching bag revealed this time!”
Whatever, let’s move on.
Seems like you missed the point. GG isn’t the only one writing about the Snowden stuff. Poitras and Barton Gellman are as well, yet I don’t see 1% of the invective directed to them as compared to Greenwald.
Perhaps because they’re not dishonest hacks. That only strengthened Booman’s point. One might wonder “hmmm why doesn’t he write about them yet writes about GG? Could it be because there’s a difference in how they report?” I can’t comment on Poitras because I haven’t read her much, although I do read Speigel sometimes.
Anyway I don’t want to argue over this crap. I’m done now. At least on this particular thread.
Poitras is apparently very good. Spencer Ackerman is certainly no hack. Though I think both have gone over the deep end in wanting this to be a bigger story than it is. GG’s documents are plainly real and there is real stuff to report. In terms of filling me with incoherent rage Cesca and Gauvin are more repellent than Greenwald. But Greenwald really is not a good reporter (as opposed to blogger, though I didn’t like reading his blog) and the politics that intrudes on his reporting is bad politics. And his hyper-aggressive self-defense really invites criticism.
If the story is published in the Spiegel it is a pretty good guess that it was writen by Laura Poitras. She has done so repeatedly.
Ooops this was for seabe. 🙂
Also, too, it’s interesting all the hate directed at Greenwald and yet none of it directed at Barton Gellman. I wonder why. Nice of you though to claim I’m a GG apologist with no proof.
The NSA and it’s Contractors probably get paid by the Hour.
Today there is a story writen by Laura Poitras and others in the Spiegel. Yesterday, my guess is, was only a rehash of an older Spiegel story from June. This one today is much more detailed.
Secret NSA Documents Show How the US Spies on Europe and the UN – SPIEGEL ONLINE
Some of how they do it:
Secret NSA Documents Show How the US Spies on Europe and the UN – SPIEGEL ONLINE
How would you like it if confidential US video conferences are being watched at the UN in Geneva?
There needs to be a basic trust, that one is not spyed on everywhere – how can good solutions to be found if people can not speak freely.
We’ll never be sure to get that needle until we have all the hay in the world! I think we need to stop focusing on how total information is wrong and start talking about how it won’t work. Practically or for that matter in terms of information theory (the more information you have the less information value for any particular piece).
“Gentlemen, we cannot allow a HAY GAP!”
–Gen. Buck Turgidson
For some that is a feature, not a bug.
The US has suffered from a cowboy approach to national security for a very long time, and it institutionalized its values in organizations and now in software.
What has changed in the current circumstances is that the cowboys have now defined the US itself as a battlefield, which means the entire world is treated as a battlefield with no exceptions. And space. And the internet. None of that was discussed with the public. It was decreed from the military industrial complex and its sycophants in Congress, like John McCain and Lindsay Graham. Between the national security organizations, including intelligence, and the homeland security organizations, there is approaching a trillion dollars a year boondoggle.
Meanwhile the public is told, “You don’t know what we know about the threat; it’s secret. Let the professionals do it. We extend our capabilities by using private contractors. We can’t discuss that. We can neither confirm nor deny. STFU.” No accountability in the courts. No accountability in Congress. The soldiers who do the fighting are the poorest paid in the entire system, come home with inadequate health care for rehabilitation from physical and psychological wounds. Their families suffered through multiple deployments during the Bush administration, often have to get public assistance of help from churches, family, and community. And are supposed to be made whole by a bunch of folks with magnetic yellow ribbons on the cars or sending endless Facebook messages to “Support the troops.”
The systems is wasteful, corrupt, benefiting only those at the top, and reducing our national security every year it continues. And in our refusal to curtail the use of land mines and anti-personnel cluster bombs, in our toleration of torture and the murder of civilians, in order dismissal of the rights of citizens of other countries, it has become more and more cruel.
And it’s considered normal.
And so is our “right to spy” on our “allies” and on the international bodies that might, if supported, actually help bring peace and prosperity to the world.
A feature, not a bug.
For those unfamiliar with my writing, that is called a rant. As opposed to analysis.
And a right fine rant at that.
Well, what this really proves is that encryption no longer provides adequate security. I think it’s fundamentally important to understand that if the NSA can break encryption, they aren’t the only ones. That doesn’t mean they should go around spying on our allies, of course, but our allies aren’t the only people using the internet.
The whole world is sloppy about encryption because it is still mostly a pain in the ass to apply. And most folks have not been trained in how to create hard-to-break long passwords that can be remembered when they are needed.
Services like Lavabit, which closed its operations after a Snowden email came through their service, had multiple layers of encryption and did not store the password in plaintext on their servers. They also destroyed records of transactions through their servers once the transaction was complete.
The Poitras article is based in part on a wiring diagram of the UN and EU offices that was part of the Snowden documents.
I’m not sure that it matters. Consider how the Brits were able to crack the Enigma code once they got their hands on an Enigma machine. It might have been impossible to crack the code without the machine, but the very fact of needing a special machine to decrypt your messages is itself a vulnerability.
Similarly, you would need some kind of Lavabit machine to decrypt your email, the only difference being that it’s a virtual machine that runs on your computer rather than a physical object with gears and levers. And for that reason a Lavabit machine would be much easier to get than an Enigma machine.
As for deleting transactions from the servers, that’s fine, but you’re only deleting the particular copies of those transactions that are on your servers. If person A sends a message to person B via server C, that’s three different copies. And of course anyone who manages to intercept the message will have their own copy.
The state of cryptography is way beyond using machines like Enigma. And so far certain software algorithms have been proven mathematically to be (for now) crackable under improbable circumstances, which is why the NSA relies so much on brute force cracking with supercomputers trying trillions of possibilities a second (if Snowden’s instructions to Poitras are to be believed). There are still keys that can beat those odds. The fact of sender and receiver copies are why the NSA bugged EU an UN communications; they likely could not easily crack the encryption; so they bypassed the part of the network that was more highly encrypted and took it from that part that was less highly encrypted.
Yes, of course the state of cryptography is way beyond Enigma, but then so is the state of code breaking. They aren’t even separate disciplines, really.
I don’t know, I’m not drawing any conclusions here, just trying to figure out where the technology stands. As far as I can tell, the cryptographers have always been a step ahead of the code breakers, at least to the extent that cryptography still provides reasonable security under most conditions, but I wonder if that will change.
We aren’t the only ones that do this, far from it. As for encryption, GPU computing has taken off recently. The things it does well, it does very well. GPU’s have hundreds to thousands of cores in them compared to the four in an average laptop or the 12 in a high end desktop.
While the cores are not as functional, they are really good at certain processes. Cracking encryption is one of them and was one of the first uses of GPU computing.
I’m inclined to say that if you know a message is encrypted, then in principle you can find a way to crack it. It’s still hard enough that encryption provides adequate security for most purposes, but that’s just a matter of time.
Encryption is not bullet proof. The idea is that proper encryption takes long enough to defeat to make it viable. So when talking about corporate data, the amount of time it takes to crack plus the amount of power needed makes it impossible for most, and takes enough time that it doesn’t matter by the time it’s exposed.
The issue has always been that processing power keeps going up. GPU brute force (look up cryptohaze) however massively cuts the time needed.
It’s still “good enough” the issue has always been about being able to crack encryption in real time. However this is more of a military concern than someone reading your email.
Surely this means that the ranks of the UN are rife with terrorists.
Both democrats and republicans have always used the UN to get what they want and assumed the rules don’t apply to them (us). Since Democrats want less insane things (as a general rule) they are more willing to play nice.
I guess it’s been decided that the UN no longer more valuable as our tool than spying on it.