Schneier on Security

Skeptical • July 5, 2015 3:51 PM

@Jacob: It goes without say that since then the NSA capabilities have advanced quite a bit, and a lot of automation and analytics have been added to the program. The enormous data storage facilities being built, the reported joint programs with domestic LEA, the expansion of the NSA mission to also support Administration’s economic policies, to spy on friendly head of states – all these activities indicate that the NSA manages its time very well and has plenty left for other nefarious activities.

I’m sure that their capabilities have advanced considerably in 5 or 6 years, as have the various fields relevant to those capabilities.

However, I don’t think that changes the final analysis, especially as adversaries and targets adapt and grow more sophisticated, or as new adversaries and targets develop. Obviously I can’t be certain, and that conclusion would depend on a lot of details, but that’s my overall impression.

We should remember that much of the research being done into the use of new methods and analysis will be done under the uncertain and unforgiving deadlines of war. And while it’s a war in which most of Western society has, fortunately, little contact, it is a war in which much of the NSA is deeply engaged – and it’s a war that must be fought while NSA’s more traditional tasking and missions are worked and accomplished against increasingly capable targets. It’s not a theoretical or merely rhetorical war for those engaged in it.

So I don’t think that advances in capabilities would enable any human beings to slow their tempo – quite the contrary. And I’d expect to see various types of compromises between short and medium term goals and long term goals. I’d expect to see existing tools leveraged to the maximum extent possible, especially during some of the time-period in question. For instance, it may be very nice that someone has a great idea about using a different type of database that is better suited for data that may be in many instances sparsely populated in an analytic space of an increasing number of dimensions, or about how machine learning can be better leveraged – and those ideas may be developed and eventually instituted. But some operational demands probably won’t be able to wait while those things are developed and then deployed.

I’d add that, to the extent automated analytics enables more irrelevant information to be screened before reaching an analyst, this would reduce the degree to which an analyst would intrude into the privacy of the ordinary citizen. Indeed, one of the projects pushed by Binney seems to have had, in my memory of his public description at any rate, precisely this strength.

Finally, as to surveillance of targets like Petrobras, or ministers of finance, these are absolutely legitimate targets for foreign intelligence gathering. One would have to have been completely ignorant of domestic affairs in Brazil for the last few years to suppose that knowledge of Petrobras were not especially relevant to a political analysis of Brazil’s government. And one would have to be remarkably ignorant of economics and finance to think that insight into the position of the German or French governments vis-a-vis Greece, especially in 2011, were not of vital concern to the United States, the UK, and other nations around the world.

These are traditional foreign intelligence targets. There is nothing the least bit controversial among anyone who knows anything about foreign policy in such targeting. The press releases that Wikileaks issues with some of these leaks seem to have been written in some alternate universe, by someone with an extremely weak grasp of the eurozone crisis in 2011.

Nothing brought home to me the fundamental ignorance of some of those at Wikileaks, and elsewhere, who are reading and reporting this leaked material as did a press release a friend showed me yesterday describing a surveillance report on the German preferences for a BRIC infused, all-IMF bailout for Greece in 2011. The release, as I recall, declared that the US would have been “horrified” at the geopolitical implications of this, and asked “what might have been” had the US not had this surveillance report.

What the writer of that press release appears not to realize is that the idea of BRIC nations contributing more to the IMF, and enabling an IMF bailout of Greece that did not require modifications to the operations of the ECB, was old news by the time of that surveillance report (October 2011). The suggestion had been widely reported, as had various other permutations involving funding from China, Russia, and elsewhere. Not only was it old news, it was widely viewed as not feasible given that the actual threat to eurozone in 2011, which was not the possible exit of Greece per se but rather that of Greece’s default undermining confidence in Italy and Spain, rendering it impossible for those nations to continue to finance themselves – THAT would have been disastrous for the eurozone, and indeed the world.

The only real guard against that possibility was to expand the operations of the ECB, or via a very well-funded (beyond the capabilities of the BRIC countries) EFSF, something (in the case of the ECB) opposed by the Germans, and something viewed by France, the UK, the US, and frankly the rest of the world (excepting a handful of other northern European countries) as absolutely necessary.

At this point the more obvious political purpose of some of the reporting of these leaks leaves me with more of a sense of disgust than outrage. No kidding around – it’s saddening to see leaks of such highly, properly, classified material used so – forgive me – stupidly by people who seem dismally ill-informed about international politics. Those people may mean well, and may have the courage of their convictions, but noble intentions don’t magically convey knowledge nor magically endow one’s acts with the desired effects.