Schneier on Security

JG4 • August 19, 2017 9:03 AM

Can’t recall if anyone linked one of the “news” stories about the rumor floated that Trump might pardon Assange. I’d like to see that happen and it would be a masterstroke worthy of Bannon, say cutting a departure deal. Even better if Snowden is included. I haven’t been able to evaluate Bannon’s moral compass, but I’m impressed with his political acumen. And I’m glad that he dissed the white supremacists. Violence is the opposite of civilization. I’m heartily in favor of a robust debate of many topics and national security is a worthy one. I couldn’t find any indication that I commented on this story previously. My comments should not be construed as an endorsement of any politician. If you are going to experience imperial collapse, you might as well enjoy the imperial intrigue. The scandals are right out of the Roman times. Speaking of national security, we have some barely visible apparatus.

Big Brother has a name and a house. The company name actually is Overwatch Systems Limited, but Overwatch Corporation is close enough to convey the hair-raising part, and better evoke the overlap to Umbrella Corporation. If I knew as much as they do about what is in the event pipeline, I might want a giant concrete house too. If the spooks think that they need this, then we might be in for serious trouble. James Jesus Angleton was notoriously paranoid (for good reason as it turns out), so it may go with the territory.

The [square brackets] are my comments, but you’ve been trained by now. The last time I checked, this link had not aged gracefully, say in 2014. But I was able to find plenty of corroboration and more recent articles. The security implications of a giant concrete house, staffed with mercenaries hardened in the midEast disaster, should be fairly obvious. If you had gotten a slice of the squandered $3.7 trillion, you might not see it as a disaster. That much money would have built enough solar thermal infrastructure to power the entire US from a 60 km x 60 km patch of the southwest desert. And put the same profit in the same pockets, and had an impressive effect on geopolitics, global security and climate.

Living large: Home going up in Highlandville to be one of country’s largest.
http://ccheadliner.com/news/article_fca0c66e-1db0-11e0-93d8-001cc4c03286.html

[excerpts follow; there were good pictures embedded in the web version]

The stretch of U.S. 65 between Ozark and Branson has some of the Ozarks’ most impressive scenery. There are lush, rolling hills, distant horizons and, if you look east, one of the biggest homes in the United States.

[In spook-speak this is called a “compound” It sounds rather more difficult to penetrate than bin Laden’s, although it will be much easier to get land Blackhawk inside the perimeter, with or without acoustic suppression]

A house currently under construction near Highlandville spans almost a full acre from wall to wall, on a 500-acre site. The ambitious project, nearly three years in and barely at the first floor, totals 72,000 square feet.

[“Overwatch” is a little Orwellian for my taste. There are some interesting hints in the article about their technology, including video surveillance. Apparently, he also has some money, a staggering amount of it. If you’ve seen the Resident Evil series of movies, you might catch the overlap between Umbrella Corporation, who were willing to do anything for money and power, and the Overwatch Systems Lmited name. Unfortunately, the compnay is too hidden/secretive to evaluate, except for the software, firmware and hardware stubs that they put on your computers. But you can rest easy knowing that your your government would never do anything to harm you or your family, or act against any of your interests.]

The property’s deed says the Steven T. Huff Family, LCC is located in Leesburg, VA. Available online records of political campaign contributions show a Steven T. Huff of Leesburg to be an engineer and chief technology officer of Overwatch Systems, Ltd.

According to the Overwatch website, the company “delivers multi-source intelligence (multi-INT), geospatial analysis and custom intelligence solutions to the Department of Defense, national agencies and civilian organizations. … More than 25,000 analysts in the U.S. Department of Defense and the larger intelligence community utilize Overwatch solutions.”

JG4 • August 20, 2017 9:16 AM

Can anyone comment on a way to download to a CD all of the content from this blog for the past n years? In the event that it gets taken down for any reason, up to and including an asteroid strike or EMP event? I’ve put enough time in that I wouldn’t want to lose access to these thoughts. BTW, this crowdsource effort should be abundant proof that Bruce could herd the cats to produce a wildly successful book. If they would have fed me a healthier diet in prison, I’d have been happier to stay there. I had forgotten that was a key step in my love of black people, when the biggest blackest inmates came to meet us at the entrance, hugged us and said, “We’re so glad that you’re here. We heard you were coming.” I get that could have gone in a negative direction, but it went in a very positive direction, a fantastic experience. The library included Lucifer’s Hammer. Protest is a feedback mechanism that is meant to correct the problems. Feedback is one of the most powerful phenomena ever observed on your planet. The sex and death feedback channels sculped every energy-manueverability diagram that you’ve ever seen walking on two legs, four legs, swimming or flying. I was vaguely aware of encryption technology at the time, probably because of my time in the imperial forces. PGP may have been a few years in the future. The most colorful bookie I’ve ever met explained how the cops took his $40K in cash, turned in $15K as evidence and disappeared $25K. They also broke his code and gave him hard time. It was yet another beginning of wisdom and insight into the many unseen systems in play. Troubleshooting of all types could be conceived as making the unseen readily visible. A nice overlap to dashboards and data visualization.

@Ben A. – Thanks for all you do. Ditto to all of the others acting in good faith.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/friday_squid_bl_589.html#c6758597

@Fall O’Through – Another instance of gradient descent and a great handle.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/friday_squid_bl_589.html#c6758606

It’s a short step from watermarking visibly to invisibly. And another short step to steganography, and the fundamental tradeoff between detection threshold and data rate. I’ve wondered if “they” have a per-camera watermark that survives deresolving in the jpeg scheme. “They” is secret code for the large men in dark suits wearing dark glasses who come with briefcases of cash to make deals. They often say, “We were not here and this did not happen,” but the times that you take the cash (which are the only ones that you survive) it generally is against your interests to disclose. There are two ways to get people to do what you want. Simple variations on the old theme of carrot and stick, including the thermo-rectal stick taught in various schools. The knuckledraggers can dispense various forms of pain as well as cash.

I hope that our guest Peter Smart wasn’t offended by being called Brilliant Pebble. It was meant to be in good humor. A friend of mine who had blue eyes was a Hungarian Ashkenazi and friend of Edward Teller. His son had green eyes and could damn near see in the dark. The three most metabolically active tissues in the body are the retina, the hair cells and the Islet cells. Their dance with glucose are the keys to Clive’s observation and the reason that people often lose their eyesight, hearing and become diabetic in later life. Or early, I know guy in his late 30’s or early 40’s who looks pretty healthy, and is only chubby, but already is having his foot sawed off piecewise.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/hacking_a_gene_.html#c6758387

Speaking of a guest who would enjoy topics here, some weeks or months ago, a spectroscopy company posted. I’m surprised that they weren’t drawn into the LED discussion, in the event that they’ve been lurking. I’ve already forgotten both the name of the company and the topic they discussed. They would particulary enjoy this LED exchange, as I do. That company dovetails to Clive’s handy dispersive spectrometer using a CD. A laser pointer will produce a nice series of dots with those, because of the orders. It’s a short step to putting a $5 CCD on that and quantifying the results and filtering them to correct for the transfer functions. That dances up to CRI for LEDs, which is a topic that I don’t understand well. I had a hell of a time with candelas and related topics. Someone posted how the organs of government hand out data to the press in a way that induces cognitive dissonance, during which the reporter is susceptible to accepting the government-provided analysis, which they cannot replicate with the incomplete data set. I ended up with cognitive dissonance in trying to compare differnt light sources. We quickly realized that you could color code maps to reveal only certain features with each switch setting via the LED color combination, but inkjet printers were roughly a decade in the future, at least as a common consumer item. I ended up with cognitive dissonance on the candela, millicandle, lumen road. Now I might be able to put it in a spreadsheet, and the data sheet are a lot easier to read.

@Curious Qubes – VMs are part of the solution, but the hardware and firmware from the modem through the router to the computer all should be locked down (no flash updates = toggling of undocumented features). The next best thing is filtering at each step in the progression in a way that insures undocumented “features” do not come into play. That requires a deep understanding of the threat model, or massive statistical data to infer the undocmented features that are used against the spectrum from high-value to low-value targets. To keep the datasets from toggling undocment features, homomorphic techniques could be used to implement a type of code polymorphism over a set of voting processors. Thanks to Nick P and/or Wael for alerting that there is an entire body of literature. I get that there are people much smarter than me, who not entirely coincidentally have a lot more money and power, but have already ploughed a lot of this ground, much of it behind a different curtain than the Iron Curtain, but also there. Can anyone name the black-budget curtain? That might be close to optimal naming, in light of the Chinese proverb, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right name.” Can’t recall if yesterday was the first use of the term “spook-speak,” but I like it too.

@Clipper – Nice analogies across a wide swatch of activities. The best-case scenario on the old blue marble is a profoundly dynamic balance of power, where the Overlords can maintain control as long as they act in good faith, but are subject the hemp and lamp-post treatment if they coss the line into bad-faith. I always mention the due process clause, after a fair and speedy trial. For the record, they have illegally subverted due process, which is treason and requires anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution to ignore any illegal directive as null and void on the face of it. The main use of the security state at this point is not to defend against very real enemies, but to use that as an excuse preserve and enhance the wildly inequitable divsion of wealth that has built up over the past 50 years and many times prior to that. The Overlords almost always have the upper hand, but the serfs are figuring out the reality one real news headline at a time. Unfortunately, those are needles in the hay-stack of state-sponsored fake news. If you do not partake of the news, then you are uninformed. If you do, then you are disinformed or misinformed. BTw, NakedCapitalism broke down this past week over cognitive dissonance in the aftermath of the Charlottesville incident. That should be expected to increase in frequency in a non-equilbrium system during state transitions. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame published a brilliant analysis of mass hysteria. In a computing system, that might correspond to running the wrong code in response to an input.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/164297628606/how-to-know-youre-in-a-mass-hysteria-bubble

@Andrew also @Clipper and the rest of the gang – Nice work on amplifying one comment into a whole treatise on lighting. We could take as the baseline case sunlight. Equatorial people have eyes with very dark pigmentation, which presumably includes some protective effects against bright sunlight. The blue eye gene is quite recent in human history, arising perhaps 10,000 years ago in Europe or Northern Europe, where increased sensitivity to light is valuable. We could start by guessing that the tolerance to blue light will be a function of genetic heritage, including loss of tolerance by adaptation to storm clouds and subArctic winter. That loss of tolerence to blue light, includes ability to see in darker conditions where blue light is prevalant and genetic resistance to seasonal affective disorder. There may be an epigenetic control that fine tunes for variations like the little Ice Age. The first thing that sprung to mind from the BBC links was, “Have these people never heard of tinfoil?” I use the tinfoil designation for aluminum foil to evoke the connect to tinfoil hats, which are an excellent idea for blocking the thought control beams. I’m still interested in Clive’s take on how much magnetic material is required to block various frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. If you’ve got unwanted light coming in the window, you can wrap a piece of cardboard with tinfoil and press it in or hang it. The cardboard is prefitted to slip in the window, or can be hung on pegs above the window. For LED lights and even mobile device screens to be used in dark settings, you’d like to have gel filters that block UV, blue, green, yellow and orange light, if the time of day indicates susceptibility to circadian disruption. It’s a short step from there to some kind of compact goggles that have the same gel filter. In case you woke up in the middle of the night and want to go online without really screwing up your circadian rhythm. You could put those goggles on at sundown or any time after. The flipside of circadian disruption at night is seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Being under blue lights at the correct time of day can be a lifesaver for people who have it. We might again speculate that the genes for SAD are in dark-skinned populations, while they are less common in blue-eyed populations. It shouldn’t be rocket science to produce LED lighting that has a tunable spectrum tied to a clock. It’s a short step from there to tuning the color information sent to a screen. It would be bad if the default LCD lets through UV from red pixels. BTW, the whole circadian/melatonin/blue light loop is a nice example of a remarkably powerful feedback control scheme where most people are blissfully unaware that it even exists. Just like Eisenhower’s unwarranted influence or “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen” @Clive – One common term of art for welder’s eyes is flash burn, although that has other meanings. If you’ve never experienced it, it feels a lot like grinding sand against the cornea. The corneal cells die and slough off after the UV insult, exposing the nerves. I assume this also is taught at the torture schools. It may be approrpriate for us to publish the Israeli techniques for opting out of interrogation, as a counterbalance to the Overlord power. BTW, the Israelis are experts at interrogation. As always, with the correct safeguards, it is a good idea. We are light-years from the appropriate safeguards. The corneal cells have some very special genetic features, as well as being unusually transparent. A nice piece of history that is lurking here is that cataract surgery was just geting started in the US prior to WWII. In those days, they gave glasses that looked like Puritan window panes; the term of art sounds like bullseye glass. You had no lens in your eye, but you could see in the UV for the first time in human history. So the Navy, who were keenly interested in opening obscured channels, including TOR and the WindTalkers, had UV filters for the semaphore lights. I’ve forgotten the correct term of art, but the lights that they blink to do line-of-sight code transmission. Visible only to the Navy sailors who had their lenses removed. “We’ve got one who can see” BTW, all of these problems with blue and UV light from LED bulbs already existed with fluorescent lighting, but that usually was deployed at lower power per unit area. I was surprised by Clive’s term of art, striplighting. We call them fluorescent tubes on this side of the pond. If you’ve ever seen a piece of paper with the usual dyes on it (e.g., yellow pad with blue lines) exposed on a shelf near the fluorescent lights, the blue is completely gone and the yellow is faded a lot after one to three years. We are dancing around the match between photon energy and chemical energy levels. The blue light is much more energetic than the red (nearly 2x) so near-UV, mid-UV and far-UV can drive increasingly more difficult chemical reactions, including blue photoreceptors all the way up to activating oxygen to a singlet state that plays a role in sunburn. This could turn into a book, but I’ll stop with pointing out that the atmospheric window excludes a lot of those wavelengths, except when unintended consequences are in play. Midgeley is a whole treatise on his own. Life generally depends on visible wavelengths as the source of high quality Gibbs free energy (delta G) to drive substantially all of the bioenergetics we see, aka food chain and with it food security. There are a few exceptions like the crazy archea that live at hydrothermal vents. They’ll be done when the radioactive heating of the earth stops in 20 billion years, long after the sun has changed character. No living system can survive the power law-governed disruptions to that energy supply chain without energy reserves. At the low frequency end of the energy supply chain disruptions, we have asteroids and comets. You may choose to worship the vacuum-cleaner named Jupiter for you even being alive. The amount of Gibbs free energy for potentially powering the existence of intelligent life in stars is staggering. The only two or three requirements for a life form to evolve inside a star are 1) an information storage mechanism, 2) an energy storage machanism, and 3) a replication mechanism for 1). Self-emergent order from intrinsic entropy maximization is an underlying reality across many systems, so the spontaneous emergence of order from thermal motion is expected in non-equilibrium systems like the sun. Bacteriorhodpsin can be seen as a pink color on the floor of your shower. It has been used as a prototypical (early) photosynthetic system to understand biological energy transduction. I think that the substance of it is an electronic energy transfer that is prevented from reversing by a molecular vibration. A sort of photon-activated trap door that produces something very similar to a charge-carrier pair in silicon PV. Preventing charge carrier recombination must be a critical design issue in solar PV. That may be an issue in the UV degradation. There should be various vapor/plasma depositions with transition metal or rare earth ions in silica that block energy in specific wavelength ranges.

@I’m walkin’ on eggshells – Thanks for reiviving the “inaudible sound” threat model. I may have fallen short of saying this is an instance of system identification, where we (or “they”) seek to extract a transfer function from an arrangement of physical objects. An early multiparameter data extraction example is radar, where bearing, range, and various aspects of wavefront can be extracted from the return signal. The term transfer function can be read as tensor, rather than the simpler vectors that would be used in a Bode plot. I don’t think that we’ve seen a single comment from anyone on the insights that they gleaned from The Secret History of Silicon Valley and The Pentagon Wars.

The most powerful countermeasure for the audio threat model is to intercept the signals and paint a wildly different picture on them, before returning them for inspection. Speaking of which, one of my friends alerted me that he has a browser plug-in that will spawn a random search at random intervals throughout the day. The terms in it come from dictionaries and can include a cross-section of common maladies, consumer items and so on, so that your actual searches are obscured in a cloud of disinformation. “The plutonium comes in on the midnight flight from Kiev.” and “We blow the bridge at dawn.” were intentionally omitted from the dictionaries. I think that those gems showed up in the early 1990’s at various forums. The audio diode that I suggested also can be used to study the hidden paths from other people’s cell phones. We’ve touched on the hair-raising aspects where your voice prints on others phones can be used to serve adverts on your comupter at a remove. It would be good clean fun to spoof a day of social chatter into someone’s phone using an audio data diode and see what adverts come up on the owner’s screens and all of their friends’. Then add a voiceprint from someone that they don’t know and watch what happens. If that doesn’t make the hair on the back you neck stand up, you can’t fog a mirror. There are more hidden feedback channels on the old blue marble than the most fertile imaginations can conceive.

@r – Thanks for bringing the new threat models to attention.

@Clive – Thanks for all of it. I am not trying to outClive you. And I didn’t, in spite of the ideal combination of food, alcohol, magnesium and potassium.

JG4 • August 21, 2017 6:24 AM

@Clive – The first one’s a followup to our exchange.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-20/video-emerges-showing-clashes-between-indian-chinese-soldiers

It always comes back to the same question on the old blue marble of entropy maximization, “What are the highest and best uses of resources?” The usual approach to answering that question has been war (a remarkably effective method of entropy maximization, by the way), but we could hope to do better in the future, by adopting lower cost resolution mechanisms. Artificial intelligence springs to mind. We have to be careful, because the winner is the one who programs it. You want that to be managed very carefully to capture the widest cross-section of benefit. That is light-years from where we are now.

http://www.businessinsider.com/top-artificial-intelligence-companies-plead-for-a-ban-on-killer-robots-2017-8

I’d like to tie this into the free speech analysis that I didn’t link yesterday, because it goes to the heart of the projected intent issue. Don’t have time now, but the interested reader can work out the parallels. The portion of speech that is not protected could be defined as harms. It is easy to think of code as speech. If any harmful speech can be regulated, then any code that is harmful is not protected from regulation, and preferably deletion.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/debunking-myth-free-speech.html

This makes full circle to the “right to repair,” because if the code in my device is causing harm, I have a right to fix it. It also touches on the right to self defense in the ongoing surveillance assault that is largely hidden.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/links-82117.html
…
Insider trading schemes using encrypted apps alarm FBI FT. Oh come on. Insider trading?! Why not RICO?

Supreme Court asked to nullify the Google trademark Ars Technica

Are your Google search results another kind of filter bubble? The answer seems to be: Kind of Nieman Labs

How secure is your car? Unpatchable flaw lets attackers disable safety features ZDNet

…
Imperial Collapse Watch

The Neocons Are Pushing the USA and the Rest of the World Towards a Dangerous Crisis The Unz Review (CL). Fun stuff.

Senior officer on damaged ship to be relieved of command AP. The USS Fitzgerald.

10 missing after US Navy destroyer collides with merchant ship off Singapore ABC. Like the USS Fitzgerald, a destroyer, based in Yokosuka, in the 7th Fleet. “Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.”

JG4 • August 22, 2017 5:41 AM

@Clive

Not to bust your balls, and you probably know all of this, and more. The copter vs. fixed wing tradeoff is both a power and energy issue. The physics is straightforward. One conceptually elegant path to derive it by looking at the mass of air and the acceleration it receives from the wings, whether fixed or rotary. In both cases, we will balance gravity with a a force generated by accelerating air downward. In the first iteration, we ignore drag and consider only the energy used to accelerate the air. The smaller the amount of air moved, the faster it will have to be accelerated to obtain the same momentum change, which is proportional to force, which is the flipside of lift and payload. But the energy expended is proportional to the square of velocity. The copter drone acts only on a small column of air in the rotor sweep, accelerating it to quite high velocity. The resulting energy consumption is much higher for the same payload. In forward flight, the helicopter rotor blades start to act somewhat like fixed wings and the power consumption goes down. It must be impractical to have a counter-rotating dual-rotorhead system that stops spinning in forward flight, because the centrifugal force is used to keep the blades roughly level. Another approach for transitioning from helicopter physics to fixed-wing physics is the V-22 Osprey. Not sure how many bodies were buried in that project, but it’s more than a few. A fixed-wing aircraft acts on a much larger volume of air, which is proportional to the forward speed. The flipside of the Bernoulli principle, which produces lower pressure on the upper surface of the wing, including rotor blades, is that the air at the trailing edge of the wing has been accelerated downward. Continuing to ignore the drag issues, as we make the wing very long, like a U2, the volume of interested air becomes very large. Then the wing curvature can be adjusted to minimize the downward acceleration of air, and the energy consumption becomes very small. We express this in terms of glide ratio. I recall that the glide ratio of the U2 and similar wing/aircraft shapes is in the neighborhood of 40:1. Boyd called these tradespaces energy-maneuverability diagrams and the concept is widely applicable from animals to automobiles and even CPUs. The parameters shift to bioenergetics, to road forces to mathematical function spaces along that particular series. Energy-maneuverability diagrams are one of the keys to making aircraft fit for purpose. Apparently, the ability to make aircraft fit for purpose declines at the end of empire, as the perverse feedback paths sap more and more integrity out of the system.

JG4 • August 24, 2017 6:44 AM

trust has scaling problems. there was a brilliant article at nakedcapitalism recently that touched on the game theory problems of super-elite hideouts in NZ. will the loyalty of the battle-hardened bodyguards be lodged with the billionaire/owner, or with the battle-hardened pilot, whose family have to be killed when they land?

I hope that I explicitly said that rock-paper-scissors can be cast in terms of energy-maneuverability diagrams, which are just another name for transfer functions. Boyd and Sun Tzu teach the limits of winning any conflict with any tools.

my quote about the moral high ground and ashes has potential

“if you you don’t have the moral high ground, you’re fighting over the ashes of your civilization”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/links-82417.html
…[tech company tie-in]

The $199 billion problem: Ten US companies that could devastate Silicon Valley Pando. Uber isn’t the only unicorn with valuation problems.

…[this is a bit dark, but training in security is important]
Soldier Excited To Take Over Father’s Old Afghanistan Patrol Route The Onion. “Afghanistan is a permanent live fire exercise for the US Military to blood and battle harden troops” (Jehu).

…[the origins of intelligence operations]
China

“Merchants of War and Peace: British knowledge of China in the making of the Opium War” by Song-Chuan Chen Asian Review of Books

Imperial Collapse Watch

Korea, Afghanistan and the Never Ending War trap Pepe Escobar, Asia Times

Pentagon makes a 20-year plan, while Washington outsources its color revolution The Saker (MT). Interesting if true…

Three Questions Arising From Recent U.S. Navy Collisions RealClearDefense

…[surveillance can be a good thing, as noted by at least several participants. did I say advancing human rights, one viral video at a time?]
Police State Watch

Another staged body cam leads to 43 more dropped Baltimore prosecutions Ars Technica

Boston Police Protected Far-Right Rally-Goers, Clashed with Black Counterprotesters The Intercept

…[in security, we have to triage by addressing the most serious problems first]
Green finance for dirty ships The Economist. “By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more of the noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur than all the world’s cars put together.”

…[AI may be the only way out of the jam that we are in]
I was hacked TechCrunch

The Intellectual Achievement of Creating Questions Daily Nous (MT).