Entries Tagged "Edward Snowden"

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Canada Spies on Internet Downloads

Another story from the Snowden documents:

According to the documents, the LEVITATION program can monitor downloads in several countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. It is led by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the NSA. (The Canadian agency was formerly known as “CSEC” until a recent name change.)

[…]

CSE finds some 350 “interesting” downloads each month, the presentation notes, a number that amounts to less than 0.0001 per cent of the total collected data.

The agency stores details about downloads and uploads to and from 102 different popular file-sharing websites, according to the 2012 document, which describes the collected records as “free file upload,” or FFU, “events.”

EDITED TO ADD (1/30): News article.

EDITED TO ADD (2/1): More news articles.

Posted on January 29, 2015 at 6:26 AM • View Comments

New NSA Documents on Offensive Cyberoperations

Appelbaum, Poitras, and others have another NSA article with an enormous Snowden document dump on Der Spiegel, giving details on a variety of offensive NSA cyberoperations to infiltrate and exploit networks around the world. There’s a lot here: 199 pages. (Here they are in one compressed archive.)

Paired with the 666 pages released in conjunction with the December 28 Spiegel article (compressed archive here) on NSA cryptanalytic capabilities, we’ve seen a huge amount of Snowden documents in the past few weeks. According to one tally, it runs 3,560 pages in all.

Hacker News thread. Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (1/19): In related news, the New York Times is reporting that the NSA has infiltrated North Korea’s networks, and provided evidence to blame the country for the Sony hacks.

EDITED TO ADD (1/19): Also related, the Guardian has an article based on the Snowden documents that GCHQ has been spying on journalists. Another article.

Posted on January 18, 2015 at 7:34 AM • View Comments

New Documents on NSA's Cryptanalysis Capabilities

Der Spiegel published a long article today on the NSA’s analysis capabilities against encrypted systems, with a lot of new documents from the Snowden archive.

I’m not going to have time to look at this for a few days. Describe anything interesting you find—with links to the documents—in the comments.

EDITED TO ADD (10/28): This is in conjunction with a presentation by Laura Poitras and Jake Appelbaum at the Chaos Communication Congress.

EDITED TO ADD (1/14): Matthew Green’s comments on the documents. And the Poitras/Appelbaum talk is on YouTube.

Posted on December 28, 2014 at 5:06 PM • View Comments

Merry Christmas from the NSA

On Christmas Eve, the NSA released a bunch of audit reports on illegal spying using EO 12333 from 2001 to 2013.

Bloomberg article.

The heavily-redacted reports include examples of data on Americans being e-mailed to unauthorized recipients, stored in unsecured computers and retained after it was supposed to be destroyed, according to the documents. They were posted on the NSA’s website at around 1:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

In a 2012 case, for example, an NSA analyst “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting,” according to one report. The analyst “has been advised to cease her activities,” it said.

The documents were released in response to an ACLU lawsuit.

Another article.

EDITED TO ADD (12/27): Remember Edward Snowden’s comment that he could eavesdrop on anybody? “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email.” Lots of people have accused him of lying. Here’s former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker: “All that makes Snowden’s claim about being able to wiretap anyone extremely unlikely—and certainly not demonstrated by the latest disclosures, despite Glenn Greenwald’s claims to the contrary.”

These documents demonstrate that Snowden is probably correct. In these documents, NSA agents target all sorts of random Americans.

Posted on December 26, 2014 at 6:29 AM • View Comments

Over 700 Million People Taking Steps to Avoid NSA Surveillance

There’s a new international survey on Internet security and trust, of “23,376 Internet users in 24 countries,” including “Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey and the United States.” Amongst the findings, 60% of Internet users have heard of Edward Snowden, and 39% of those “have taken steps to protect their online privacy and security as a result of his revelations.”

The press is mostly spinning this as evidence that Snowden has not had an effect: “merely 39%,” “only 39%,” and so on. (Note that these articles are completely misunderstanding the data. It’s not 39% of people who are taking steps to protect their privacy post-Snowden, it’s 39% of the 60% of Internet users—which is not everybody—who have heard of him. So it’s much less than 39%.)

Even so, I disagree with the “Edward Snowden Revelations Not Having Much Impact on Internet Users” headline. He’s having an enormous impact. I ran the actual numbers country by country, combining data on Internet penetration with data from this survey. Multiplying everything out, I calculate that 706 million people have changed their behavior on the Internet because of what the NSA and GCHQ are doing. (For example, 17% of Indonesians use the Internet, 64% of them have heard of Snowden and 62% of them have taken steps to protect their privacy, which equals 17 million people out of its total 250-million population.)

Note that the countries in this survey only cover 4.7 billion out of a total 7 billion world population. Taking the conservative estimates that 20% of the remaining population uses the Internet, 40% of them have heard of Snowden, and 25% of those have done something about it, that’s an additional 46 million people around the world.

It’s probably true that most of those people took steps that didn’t make any appreciable difference against an NSA level of surveillance, and probably not even against the even more pervasive corporate variety of surveillance. It’s probably even true that some of those people didn’t take steps at all, and just wish they did or wish they knew what to do. But it is absolutely extraordinary that 750 million people are disturbed enough about their online privacy that they will represent to a survey taker that they did something about it.

Name another news story that has caused over ten percent of the world’s population to change their behavior in the past year? Cory Doctorow is right: we have reached “peak indifference to surveillance.” From now on, this issue is going to matter more and more, and policymakers around the world need to start paying attention.

Related: a recent Pew Research Internet Project survey on Americans’ perceptions of privacy, commented on by Ben Wittes.

This essay previously appeared on Lawfare.

EDITED TO ADD (12/15): Reddit thread.

EDITED TO ADD (12/16): Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (1/23): This essay has been translated into German.

Posted on December 15, 2014 at 6:07 AM • View Comments

FOXACID Operations Manual

A few days ago, I saw this tweet: “Just a reminder that it is now *a full year* since Schneier cited it, and the FOXACID ops manual remains unpublished.” It’s true.

The citation is this:

According to a top-secret operational procedures manual provided by Edward Snowden, an exploit named Validator might be the default, but the NSA has a variety of options. The documentation mentions United Rake, Peddle Cheap, Packet Wrench, and Beach Head-­all delivered from a FOXACID subsystem called Ferret Cannon.

Back when I broke the QUANTUM and FOXACID programs, I talked with the Guardian editors about publishing the manual. In the end, we decided not to, because the information in it wasn’t useful to understanding the story. It’s been a year since I’ve seen it, but I remember it being just what I called it: an operation procedures manual. It talked about what to type into which screens, and how to deal with error conditions. It didn’t talk about capabilities, either technical or operational. I found it interesting, but it was hard to argue that it was necessary in order to understand the story.

It will probably never be published. I lost access to the Snowden documents soon after writing that essay—Greenwald broke with the Guardian, and I have never been invited back by the Intercept—and there’s no one looking at the documents with an eye to writing about the NSA’s technical capabilities and how to securely design systems to protect against government surveillance. Even though we now know that the same capabilities are being used by other governments and cyber criminals, there’s much more interest in stories with political ramifications.

Posted on October 15, 2014 at 6:29 AM • View Comments

NSA Has Undercover Operatives in Foreign Companies

The latest Intercept article on the Snowden documents talks about the NSA’s undercover operatives working in foreign companies. There are no specifics, although the countries China, Germany, and South Korea are mentioned. It’s also hard to tell if the NSA has undercover operatives working in companies in those countries, or has undercover contractors visiting those companies. The document is dated 2004, although there’s no reason to believe that the NSA has changed its behavior since then.

The most controversial revelation in Sentry Eagle might be a fleeting reference to the NSA infiltrating clandestine agents into “commercial entities.” The briefing document states that among Sentry Eagle’s most closely guarded components are “facts related to NSA personnel (under cover), operational meetings, specific operations, specific technology, specific locations and covert communications related to SIGINT enabling with specific commercial entities (A/B/C)””

It is not clear whether these “commercial entities” are American or foreign or both. Generally the placeholder “(A/B/C)” is used in the briefing document to refer to American companies, though on one occasion it refers to both American and foreign companies. Foreign companies are referred to with the placeholder “(M/N/O).” The NSA refused to provide any clarification to The Intercept.

That program is SENTRY OSPREY, which is a program under SENTRY EAGLE.

The document makes no other reference to NSA agents working under cover. It is not clear whether they might be working as full-time employees at the “commercial entities,” or whether they are visiting commercial facilities under false pretenses.

Least fun job right now: being the NSA person who fielded the telephone call from the Intercept to clarify that (A/B/C)/(M/N/O) thing. “Hi. We’re going public with SENTRY EAGLE next week. There’s one thing in the document we don’t understand, and we wonder if you could help us….” Actually, that’s wrong. The person who fielded the phone call had no idea what SENTRY EAGLE was. The least fun job belongs to the person up the command chain who did.

Wired article. Slashdot and Hacker News threads.

Posted on October 11, 2014 at 2:54 PM • View Comments

William Binney Explains NSA Surveillance Using Snowden's Documents

Former NSA employee—not technical director, as the link says—explains how NSA bulk surveillance works, using some of the Snowden documents. Very interesting.

EDITED TO ADD (10/4): Apologies to Binney for downgrading his role at the NSA. He was not the technical director of the NSA, which is what I was thinking of, but he was a technical director at the NSA:

“In ’97, I became the technical director of the geopolitical—military
geopolitical analysis and reporting shop for the world, which was about
6,000 people,” Binney told Frontline.

Whatever the case, he does know what he’s talking about when he talks about NSA surveillance.

Posted on October 3, 2014 at 6:59 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.