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WikiLeaks has organized the trove of documents about corporations aiding government surveillance around the world. It’s worth wandering around through all this material.
EDITED TO ADD (9/12): I made a mistake. WikiLeaksdidn’t do the organizing; Silk did.
Here are all the NSA’s patents, in one searchable database.
If you find something good, tell us all in the comments.
The article says they were Chinese but offers no evidence:
The intrusion at the Office of Personnel Management was particularly disturbing because it oversees a system called e-QIP, in which federal employees applying for security clearances enter their most personal information, including financial data. Federal employees who have had security clearances for some time are often required to update their personal information through the website.
This is a big deal. If I were a government, trying to figure out who to target for blackmail, bribery, and other coercive tactics, this would be a nice database to have.
Two new stories: one from Der Spiegel in Germany (also reported in the Intercept) and the other from Dagbladet Information in Denmark (again, also reported in the Intercept). Lots of good information in both stories.
EDITED TO ADD (6/20): Der Spiegel has two other stories, as well as a large trove of source documents. The Dagbladet Information source documents are here.
And in related news, the US House of Representatives voted to ban NSA backdoor searches, as well as it weakening commercial products and protocols. There’s no chance it’ll become a law, but the 293-123 vote is a big deal nonetheless.
The current authority for the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata expires today. A bunch of organizations have tried to urge the president not to renew it. I don’t think that’ll happen, either.
It’s a measure of the popular interest in this issue that the German/Danish story isn’t being reported by the US press, and I had to search to find the Congressional vote on the New York Times and Washington Post sites. Only the Guardian had it as a home page headline. No one is reporting today’s renewal of the telephone metadata program.
EDITED TO ADD (6/21): The bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone call records program has been renewed. And Der Spiegel published an editorial explaining why it broke the story and released the secret NSA documents.
EDITED TO ADD (6/23): Marcy Wheeler noticed at the FISC order renewing the bulk surveillance order came with some sort of memorandum opinion.
EDITED TO ADD (7/14): Good commentary from the comments.
Last week, IBM published an “open letter” about “government access to data,” where it tried to assure its customers that it’s not handing everything over to the NSA. Unfortunately, the letter (quoted in part below) leaves open more questions than it answers.
At the outset, we think it is important for IBM to clearly state some simple facts:
- IBM has not provided client data to the National Security Agency (NSA) or any other government agency under the program known as PRISM.
- IBM has not provided client data to the NSA or any other government agency under any surveillance program involving the bulk collection of content or metadata.
- IBM has not provided client data stored outside the United States to the U.S. government under a national security order, such as a FISA order or a National Security Letter.
- IBM does not put “backdoors” in its products for the NSA or any other government agency, nor does IBM provide software source code or encryption keys to the NSA or any other government agency for the purpose of accessing client data.
- IBM has and will continue to comply with the local laws, including data privacy laws, in all countries in which it operates.
To which I ask:
EDITED TO ADD (3/25): One more thing. This article says that you are “spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government.” Do you not know that National Security Letters require you to turn over requested data, regardless of where in the world it is stored? Or do you just hope that your customers don’t realize that?
The Washington Post is reporting on an NSA program called MYSTIC, which collects all—that’s 100%—of a country’s telephone calls. Those calls are stored in a database codenamed NUCLEON, and can be retrieved at a later date using a tool codenamed RETRO. This is voice, not metadata.
What’s interesting here is not the particular country whose data is being collected; that information was withheld from the article. It’s not even that the voice data is stored for a month, and then deleted. All of that can change, either at the whim of the NSA or as storage capabilities get larger. What’s interesting is that the capability exists to collect 100% of a country’s telephone calls, and the analysis tools are in place to search them.
The most recent story from the Snowden documents is from Canada: it claims the CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada) used airport Wi-Fi information to track travelers. That’s not really true. What the top-secret presentation shows is a proof-of-concept project to identify different IP networks, using a database of user IDs found on those networks over time, and then potentially using that data to identify individual users. This is actually far more interesting than simply eavesdropping on airport Wi-Fi sessions. Between Boingo and the cell phone carriers, that’s pretty easy.
The researcher, with the cool-sounding job-title of “tradecraft developer,” started with two weeks’ worth of ID data from a redacted “Canadian Special Source.” (The presentation doesn’t say if they compelled some Internet company to give them the data, or if they eavesdropped on some Internet service and got it surreptitiously.) This was a list of userids seen on those networks at particular times, presumably things like Facebook logins. (Facebook, Google, Yahoo and many others are finally using SSL by default, so this data is now harder to come by.) They also had a database of geographic locations for IP addresses from Quova (now Neustar). The basic question is whether they could determine what sorts of wireless hotspots the IP addresses were.
You’d expect airports to look different from hotels, and those to look different from offices. And, in fact, that’s what the data showed. At an airport network, individual IDs are seen once, and briefly. At hotels, individual IDs are seen over a few days. At an office, IDs are generally seen from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday. And so on.
Pretty basic so far. Where it gets interesting his how this kind of dataset can be used. The presentation suggests two applications. The first is the obvious one. If you know the ID of some surveillance target, you can set an alarm when that target visits an airport or a hotel. The presentation points out that “targets/enemies still target air travel and hotels”; but more realistically, this can be used to know when a target is traveling.
The second application suggested is to identify a particular person whom you know visited a particular geographical area on a series of dates/times. The example in the presentation is a kidnapper. He is based in a rural area, so he can’t risk making his ransom calls from that area. Instead, he drives to an urban area to make those calls. He either uses a burner phone or a pay phone, so he can’t be identified that way. But if you assume that he has some sort of smart phone in his pocket that identifies itself over the Internet, you might be able to find him in that dataset. That is, he might be the only ID that appears in that geographical location around the same time as the ransom calls and at no other times.
The results from testing that second application were successful, but slow. The presentation sounds encouraging, stating that something called Collaborative Analysis Research Environment (CARE) is being trialed “with NSA launch assist”: presumably technology, money, or both. CARE reduces the run-time “from 2+ hours to several seconds.” This was in May 2012, so it’s probably all up and running by now. We don’t know if this particular research project was ever turned into an operational program, but the CSEC, the NSA, and the rest of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies have a lot of interesting uses for this kind of data.
Since the Snowden documents have been reported on last June, the primary focus of the stories has been the collection of data. There has been very little reporting about how this data is analyzed and used. The exception is the story on the cell phone location database, which has some pretty fascinating analytical programs attached to it. I think the types of analysis done on this data are at least as important as its collection, and likely more disturbing to the average person. These sorts of analysis are being done with all of the data collected. Different databases are being correlated for all sorts of purposes. When I get back to the source documents, these are exactly the sorts of things I will be looking for. And when we think of the harms to society of ubiquitous surveillance, this is what we should be thinking about.
EDITED TO ADD (2/3): Microsoft has done the same research.
EDITED TO ADD (2/4): And Microsoft patented it.
This talk by Dan Geer explains the NSA mindset of “collect everything”:
I previously worked for a data protection company. Our product was, and I believe still is, the most thorough on the market. By “thorough” I mean the dictionary definition, “careful about doing something in an accurate and exact way.” To this end, installing our product instrumented every system call on the target machine. Data did not and could not move in any sense of the word “move” without detection. Every data operation was caught and monitored. It was total surveillance data protection. Its customers were companies that don’t accept half-measures. What made this product stick out was that very thoroughness, but here is the point: Unless you fully instrument your data handling, it is not possible for you to say what did not happen. With total surveillance, and total surveillance alone, it is possible to treat the absence of evidence as the evidence of absence. Only when you know everything that *did* happen with your data can you say what did *not* happen with your data.
The alternative to total surveillance of data handling is to answer more narrow questions, questions like “Can the user steal data with a USB stick?” or “Does this outbound e-mail have a Social Security Number in it?” Answering direct questions is exactly what a defensive mindset says you must do, and that is “never make the same mistake twice.” In other words, if someone has lost data because of misuse of some facility on the computer, then you either disable that facility or you wrap it in some kind of perimeter. Lather, rinse, and repeat. This extends all the way to such trivial matters as timer-based screen locking.
The difficulty with the defensive mindset is that it leaves in place the fundamental strategic asymmetry of cybersecurity, namely that while the workfactor for the offender is the price of finding a new method of attack, the workfactor for the defender is the cumulative cost of forever defending against all attack methods yet discovered. Over time, the curve for the cost of finding a new attack and the curve for the cost of defending against all attacks to date cross. Once those curves cross, the offender never has to worry about being out of the money. I believe that that crossing occurred some time ago.
The total surveillance strategy is, to my mind, an offensive strategy used for defensive purposes. It says “I don’t know what the opposition is going to try, so everything is forbidden unless we know it is good.” In that sense, it is like whitelisting applications. Taking either the application whitelisting or the total data surveillance approach is saying “That which is not permitted is forbidden.”
[…]
We all know the truism, that knowledge is power. We all know that there is a subtle yet important distinction between information and knowledge. We all know that a negative declaration like “X did not happen” can only proven true if you have the enumeration of *everything* that did happen and can show that X is not in it. We all know that when a President says “Never again” he is asking for the kind of outcome for which proving a negative, lots of negatives, is categorically essential. Proving a negative requires omniscience. Omniscience requires god-like powers.
The whole essay is well worth reading.
This New York Times story on the NSA is very good, and contains lots of little tidbits of new information gleaned from the Snowden documents.
The agency’s Dishfire database—nothing happens without a code word at the N.S.A.—stores years of text messages from around the world, just in case. Its Tracfin collection accumulates gigabytes of credit card purchases. The fellow pretending to send a text message at an Internet cafe in Jordan may be using an N.S.A. technique code-named Polarbreeze to tap into nearby computers. The Russian businessman who is socially active on the web might just become food for Snacks, the acronym-mad agency’s Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, which figures out the personnel hierarchies of organizations from texts.
EDITED TO ADD (11/5): This Guardian story is related. It looks like both the New York Times and the Guardian wrote separate stories about the same source material.
EDITED TO ADD (11/5): New York Times reporter Scott Shane gave a 20-minute interview on Democracy Now on the NSA and his reporting.
In one of the documents recently released by the NSA as a result of an EFF lawsuit, there’s discussion of a specific capability of a call records database to identify disposable “burner” phones.
Let’s consider, then, the very specific data this query tool was designed to return: The times and dates of the first and last call events, but apparently not the times and dates of calls between those endpoints. In other words, this tool is supporting analytic software that only cares when a phone went online, and when it stopped being used. It also gets the total number of calls, and the ratio of unique contacts to calls, but not the specific numbers contacted. Why, exactly, would this limited set of information be useful? And why, in particular, might you want to compare that information across a large number of phones there’s not yet any particular reason to suspect?
One possibility that jumps out at me—and perhaps anyone else who’s a fan of The Wire—is that this is the kind of information you would want if you were trying to identify disposable prepaid “burner” phones being used by a target who routinely cycles through cell phones as a countersurveillance tactic. The number of unique contacts and call/contact ratio would act as a kind of rough fingerprint—you’d assume a phone being used for dedicated clandestine purposes to be fairly consistent on that score—while the first/last call dates help build a timeline: You’re looking for a series of phones that are used for a standard amount of time, and then go dead just as the next phone goes online.
Consider this another illustration of the value of metadata.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.