Summary: Even the best journalists and national security experts have difficulty with technical stories like the recent NSA revelations. Today Marcus Ranum (bio) cuts through the government’s lies, explaining the truth behind the NSA’s tapping vital telephone and email communication systems.
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Article deleted at author’s request.
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Background:
- An archive of articles about the government’s increasing surveillance of Americans, at ProPublica
- A summary of the many different means by which the government spies upon us at Washington’s Blog, 6 June 2013
- “Fair Warning: Julian Assange’s Cypherpunks“, Adam Morris, Los Angeles Review of Books, 28 April 2013 — Assange warned us
- “The NSA Doppelganger“, Rick Perlstein, The Nation, 7 June 7, 2013
The revelations:
- “The National Security Agency: surveillance giant with eyes on America“, Glenn Greenwald, Guardian, 6 June 2013 — “The NSA is the best hidden of all the US intelligence services – and its secrecy has deepened as its reach has expanded”
- “NSA taps in to internet giants’ systems to mine user data, secret files reveal“, Glenn Greenwald, Guardian, 7 June 2013 — “Secret PRISM program gives intelligence agency access to web and email of Google, Facebook and Apple customers”
- “U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge“, Washington Post, 6 June 2013
- “Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data“, Glenn Greenwald, Guardian, 9 June 2013 — “Revealed: The NSA’s powerful tool for cataloguing data – including figures on US collection”
- “Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations“, Glenn Greenwald, Guardian, 9 June 2013 — “The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows”
- Important: The NSA Files at The Guardian — archive of the leaked documents and news articles
Analysis:
- Priorities of Justice in New America: “Judge behind phone records threw out Obamacare“, AP, 6 June 2013
- “Could There (Finally) Be a Backlash Against Domestic Surveillance?“, John Sides (Prof, Political Science, George Washington U), The Monkey Cage, 6 June 2013 — The answer is no.
- “The Perils of (Vague Delegations of) Power“, Andrew Rudalevige (Professor of government, Bowdoin), The Monkey Cage, 6 June 2013 — Why could the government collect data on pretty much every phone call you make? The answer gives a lesson in legislative drafting
- Section 215: The White House’s Bullshit Talking Points, Marcey Wheeler, 6 June 2013
- “What’s the Matter with Metadata?“, Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 6 June 2013
- “Public Documents Contradict Claim Email Spying Foiled Terror Plot“, BuzzFeed, 7 June 2013 — “Defenders of “PRISM” say it stopped subway bombings. But British and American court documents suggest old-fashioned police work nabbed Zazi.”
- “The tangled web of empire“, Stephen M. Walt (Prof of International Affairs, Harvard), Foreign Policy, 7 June 2013 — The government’s growing power is an inevitable result of the Long War.
- “Security-State Creep: The Real NSA Scandal Is What’s Legal“, Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic, 7 June 2013 — “The Court has failed to develop a robust system for applying the Fourth Amendment meaningfully to the questions of the 21st century”
Consequences: the US government has just trashed the overseas reputation of our tech & telecom industries
- “How PRISM could ruin Apple, Google, and every other big tech company“, Farhad Manjoo, Slate, 7 June 2013
- “NSA Surveillance Threatens US Competitiveness“, Richard Stiennon, Forbes, 7 June 2013
Posts about these revelations, and what they show about America:
- Attention fellow sheep: let’s open our eyes and see the walls of our pen, 2009 — Five years ago these programs, and their growth, were easily visible. We just didn’t want to see.
- The NSA news might be a birthday for the New America!, 7 June 2013
- The US government spys on us because America is a democracy, 8 June 2013
- Our opinion leaders defend the government’s surveillance programs, 10 June 2013
We must conquer the future, or it will conquer us
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It’s simply disgusting. Do we have a Constitution, or don’t we? Do we have a Rule of Law, or not? Are all people created equal, or are there only prisoners and wardens? One thing is certain, the lunatics ARE running the asylum now.
All good questions. To which I have a simple answer.
These are not things given by God, or Nature’s God. They are things we make so by our will, acting together, and pass on to our children so they can do the same. Should we find the burden of doing so too great, than others will govern.
Because the nation will be governed. We will be governed, by ourselves or by others.
None of this implies or requires lunatics, nor makes America an asylum.
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A small comment on the last section, about the impact all of this will have on tech companies over seas:
Most folks in the U.S. are not aware, but the Chinese government has launched a sustained media campaign against Apple since April. There were four or five weeks in a row where a week did not go by without a prime-time special report on Apple’s corruption, an announcement from officials that Apple had broken law x or law z, or a special editorial in the People’s Daily slamming Apple for distributing pornography or something else. It is all very reminiscent of the attacks that landed on Google before Google was kicked out of the country.
With Google it seemed fairly obvious why – just a few months before Google disclosed that China had hacked its servers in order to access e-mails accounts of dissidents. With Apple things are a lot harder to read. There really isn’t a reason for this new found hostility, save a realization on China’s part that Apple is too entwined with the U.S. government or just too independent to further China’s national interest.
A few weeks ago that might have seemed kind of silly. Not so now! These PRISM revelations justify that reasoning, don’t they? It makes one wonder what the Chinese know that we do not.
How my Chinese friends have crooned. Just chatted with one yesterday – she was quite blunt. “Everybody gets upset when China spies on people, but we are not the only ones who do it. America is just as bad. We have always known that. Now you do too.”
I guess the only source of comfort is that the speech-to-text algorithms probably work about as well as this speech-to-text transcription of president Obama’s inaugural address:
A little more fine-parsing of the descriptions of these systems makes me inclined to project another piece of their architecture: I’ve heard it described as the system collecting metadata and then an analyst can “task” it for more detailed collection. So here’s a hypothetical that’s in line with Drake’s disclosures of the “thin thread” system: the sniffer/sensor collects everything it can, then generates metadata from it. So, for example, an email message going past might be collected and the From:/To:/Subject:/Message-ID/IP source/IP destination/PGP key fingerprint (if any) are recorded. That information is compressed and sent “upstream” to additional analysis engines. The message itself is saved on the sensor in a round-robin database – depending on the amount of storage in the sensor, it might last weeks or months. If an analyst on the back-end decides to examine data in more detail, he “tasks” the system to retrieve the actual message, which triggers a query to the sensor to submit the entire message into the data stream.
Drake described ‘thin thread’ as protecting citizens’ data by not collecting everything – in this case we define “collecting” as “keeping and bringing to someone’s attention.” The data is simply kept around long enough for the rest of the system to decide whether or not it matters.
I am willing to bet a stack of donuts that’s how it works. And I’ll go a step further and point out that architecture lends itself to abuse (in spite of what Drake says) because there’s no way to tell a “tasking” operation from an “archiving” operation. Someone with, say, a great big data center in Utah, might extend that idea to the point of retrieving nearly everything and storing it then classifying the complete retrievals. The left hand has no need to know that the right hand is collecting everything – the system is designed to obscure that fact even from itself.
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One thing that no one seems to have picked up is that these programs are a massive threat to US (and associated countries such as Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) national security themselves. When you have such far reaching systems and so many people having access to it (estimates vary between 500,000 to a million) then they offer very easy access by other parties to use these systems against themselves.
For example, if I wanted to spy on the US I wouldn’t waste time setting up spy network or bugging people, I’d just simply corrupt (or blackmail, whatever) one of that million and use the US’s own systems to spy on the people, organisations, etc that I am interested in.
I will guarantee out of that 500,000 to a milllion crowd there are many that have already been bought off (etc) by Russia, China, Israel, India, et al. Thereby turning the whole system against itself. It is also wide open to be abused by criminal elements. For example, there must be some of those people corrupted (etc) by various drug lords. There will almost certainly be some of those people, with all that access, selling information on people and organisations on the black markets right now.
If the system is not already corrupt it will soon be. Politicians will use it to get access to information against other ones, corporations using to gain advantage over others, drug lords finding out about actions against them, blackmailers finding out things to make money from, et al. As well, what about when it is (and it will be) hacked, then all that information will be available everywhere….
Human nature, taking a simple example, you are a low level person, making say 70,000 a year, then you find you can track (say) a politician who is a into kinky sex or cheating or their wife, well easy way to make some money isn’t it? Or if someone comes up to you and offers you (say) half a million for all the phone records of a particular person what do you think will happen? And organised crime, if it hasn’t already, will latch onto to this and use it.
This is a system designed for total corruption.
Unfortunately your forecasts about America have proven correct so far. And these warnings certainly appear correct.
But I fear these are the almost-trivial aspects, in one sense. These things were kept secret, I suspect, because of fear. What might happen if the public learns about them? Now the public has learned about them. What if there is no reaction? I have seen nothing substantial so far. Our ruling elites will be emboldened, quite rightly, by our apathy and disinterest.
If so, then we will be moving to the 2nd part of the downward “S” curve. The steep part.
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