GCHQ Gets Involved in Mundane Surveillance Matters
GCHQ detected a potential pre-publication leak of a Harry Potter book, and alerted the publisher.
Is this what British national intelligence is supposed to be doing?
Entries Tagged "intelligence"
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The 2016 National Threat Assessment
It’s National Threat Assessment Day. Published annually by the Director of National Intelligence, the “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community” is the US intelligence community’s one time to publicly talk about the threats in general. The document is the results of weeks of work and input from lots of people. For Clapper, it’s his chance to shape the dialog, set up priorities, and prepare Congress for budget requests. The document is an unclassified summary of a much longer classified document. And the day also includes Clapper testifying before the Senate Armed Service Committee. (You’ll remember his now-famous lie to the committee in 2013.)
The document covers a wide variety of threats, from terrorism to organized crime, from energy politics to climate change. Although the document clearly says “The order of the topics presented in this statement does not necessarily indicate the relative importance or magnitude of the threat in the view of the Intelligence Community,” it does. And like 2015 and 2014, cyber threats are #1—although this year it’s called “Cyber and Technology.”
The consequences of innovation and increased reliance on information technology in the next few years on both our society’s way of life in general and how we in the Intelligence Community specifically perform our mission will probably be far greater in scope and impact than ever. Devices, designed and fielded with minimal security requirements and testing, and an ever—increasing complexity of networks could lead to widespread vulnerabilities in civilian infrastructures and US Government systems. These developments will pose challenges to our cyber defenses and operational tradecraft but also create new opportunities for our own intelligence collectors.
Especially note that last clause. The FBI might hate encryption, but the intelligence community is not going dark.
The document then calls out a few specifics like the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence—no surprise, considering other recent statements from government officials. This is the “…and Technology” part of the category.
More specifically:
Future cyber operations will almost certainly include an increased emphasis on changing or manipulating data to compromise its integrity (i.e., accuracy and reliability) to affect decisionmaking, reduce trust in systems, or cause adverse physical effects. Broader adoption of IoT devices and AI —in settings such as public utilities and health care—will only exacerbate these potential effects. Russian cyber actors, who post disinformation on commercial websites, might seek to alter online media as a means to influence public discourse and create confusion. Chinese military doctrine outlines the use of cyber deception operations to conceal intentions, modify stored data, transmit false data, manipulate the flow of information, or influence public sentiments - all to induce errors and miscalculation in decisionmaking.
Russia is the number one threat, followed by China, Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors:
Russia is assuming a more assertive cyber posture based on its willingness to target critical infrastructure systems and conduct espionage operations even when detected and under increased public scrutiny. Russian cyber operations are likely to target US interests to support several strategic objectives: intelligence gathering to support Russian decisionmaking in the Ukraine and Syrian crises, influence operations to support military and political objectives, and continuing preparation of the cyber environment for future contingencies.
Comments on China refer to the cybersecurity agreement from last September:
China continues to have success in cyber espionage against the US Government, our allies, and US companies. Beijing also selectively uses cyberattacks against targets it believes threaten Chinese domestic stability or regime legitimacy. We will monitor compliance with China’s September 2015 commitment to refrain from conducting or knowingly supporting cyber—enabled theft of intellectual property with the intent of providing competitive advantage to companies or commercial sectors. Private—sector security experts have identified limited ongoing cyber activity from China but have not verified state sponsorship or the use of exfiltrated data for commercial gain.
Also interesting are the comments on non-state actors, which discuss both propaganda campaigns from ISIL, criminal ransomware, and hacker tools.
UK Government Promoting Backdoor-Enabled Voice Encryption Protocol
The UK government is pushing something called the MIKEY-SAKKE protocol to secure voice. Basically, it’s an identity-based system that necessarily requires a trusted key-distribution center. So key escrow is inherently built in, and there’s no perfect forward secrecy. The only reasonable explanation for designing a protocol with these properties is third-party eavesdropping.
Steven Murdoch has explained the details. The upshot:
The design of MIKEY-SAKKE is motivated by the desire to allow undetectable and unauditable mass surveillance, which may be a requirement in exceptional scenarios such as within government departments processing classified information. However, in the vast majority of cases the properties that MIKEY-SAKKE offers are actively harmful for security. It creates a vulnerable single point of failure, which would require huge effort, skill and cost to secure requiring resource beyond the capability of most companies. Better options for voice encryption exist today, though they are not perfect either. In particular, more work is needed on providing scalable and usable protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, and protection of metadata for contact discovery and calls. More broadly, designers of protocols and systems need to appreciate the ethical consequences of their actions in terms of the political and power structures which naturally follow from their use. MIKEY-SAKKE is the latest example to raise questions over the policy of many governments, including the UK, to put intelligence agencies in charge of protecting companies and individuals from spying, given the conflict of interest it creates.
And GCHQ previously rejected a more secure standard, MIKEY-IBAKE, because it didn’t allow undetectable spying.
Both the NSA and GCHQ repeatedly choose surveillance over security. We need to reject that decision.
France Rejects Backdoors in Encryption Products
For the right reasons, too:
Axelle Lemaire, the Euro nation’s digital affairs minister, shot down the amendment during the committee stage of the forthcoming omnibus digital bill, saying it would be counterproductive and would leave personal data unprotected.
“Recent events show how the fact of introducing faults deliberately at the request—sometimes even without knowing—the intelligence agencies has an effect that is harming the whole community,” she said according to Numerama.
“Even if the intention [to empower the police] is laudable, it also opens the door to the players who have less laudable intentions, not to mention the potential for economic damage to the credibility of companies planning these flaws. You are right to fuel the debate, but this is not the right solution according to the Government’s opinion.”
France joins the Netherlands on this issue.
And Apple’s Tim Cook is going after the Obama administration on the issue.
EDITED TO ADD (1/20): In related news, Congress will introduce a bill to establish a commission to study the issue. This is what kicking the can down the road looks like.
Michael Hayden and the Dutch Government Are against Crypto Backdoors
Last week, former NSA Director Michael Hayden made a very strong argument against deliberately weakening security products by adding backdoors:
Americans’ safety is best served by the highest level of technology possible, and that the country’s intelligence agencies have figured out ways to get around encryption.
“Before any civil libertarians want to come up to me afterwards and get my autograph,” he explained at a Tuesday panel on national security hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, “let me tell you how we got around it: Bulk data and metadata [collection].”
Encryption is “a law enforcement issue more than an intelligence issue,” Hayden argued, “because, frankly, intelligence gets to break all sorts of rules, to cheat, to use other paths.”
[…]
“I don’t think it’s a winning hand to attempt to legislate against technological progress,” Hayden said.
[…]
“It’s a combination of technology and business,” Hayden said. “Creating a door for the government to enter, at the technological level, creates a very bad business decision on the parts of these companies because that is by definition weaker encryption than would otherwise be available … Both of those realities are true.”
This isn’t new, and is yet another example of the split between the law-enforcement and intelligence communities on this issue. What is new is Hayden saying, effectively: Hey FBI, you guys are idiots for trying to get back doors.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Dutch government has come out against backdoors in security products, and in favor of strong encryption.
Meanwhile, I have been hearing rumors that “serious” US legislation mandating backdoors is about to be introduced. These rumors are pervasive, but without details.
Catalog of Police Surveillance Equipment
The Intercept has “a secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies.” Lot of detailed information about Stingrays and similar equipment.
NSA Lectures on Communications Security from 1973
Newly declassified: “A History of U.S. Communications Security (Volumes I and II),” the David G. Boak Lectures, National Security Agency (NSA), 1973. (The document was initially declassified in 2008. We just got a whole bunch of additional material declassified. Both versions are in the document, so you can compare and see what was kept secret seven years ago.)
"The Declining Half-Life of Secrets"
Several times I’ve mentioned Peter Swire’s concept of “the declining half-life of secrets.” He’s finally written it up:
The nature of secrets is changing. Secrets that would once have survived the 25 or 50 year test of time are more and more prone to leaks. The declining half-life of secrets has implications for the intelligence community and other secretive agencies, as they must now wrestle with new challenges posed by the transformative power of information technology innovation as well as the changing methods and targets of intelligence collection.
German BfV – NSA Cooperation
The German newspaper Zeit is reporting the BfV, Germany’s national intelligence agency, (probably) illegally traded data about Germans to the NSA in exchange for access to XKeyscore. From Ars Technica:
Unlike Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the domestic-oriented BfV does not employ bulk surveillance of the kind also deployed on a vast scale by the NSA and GCHQ. Instead, it is only allowed to monitor individual suspects in Germany and, even to do that, must obtain the approval of a special parliamentary commission. Because of this targeted approach, BfV surveillance is mainly intended to gather the content of specific conversations, whether in the form of e-mails, telephone exchanges, or even faxes, if anyone still uses them. Inevitably, though, metadata is also gathered, but as Die Zeit explains, “whether the collection of this [meta]data is consistent with the restrictions outlined in Germany’s surveillance laws is a question that divides legal experts.”
The BfV had no problems convincing itself that it was consistent with Germany’s laws to collect metadata, but rarely bothered since—remarkably—all analysis was done by hand before 2013, even though metadata by its very nature lends itself to large-scale automated processing. This explains the eagerness of the BfV to obtain the NSA’s XKeyscore software after German agents had seen its powerful metadata analysis capabilities in demonstrations.
It may also explain the massive expansion of the BfV that the leaked document published by Netzpolitik had revealed earlier this year. As Die Zeit notes, the classified budget plans “included the information that the BfV intended to create 75 new positions for the ‘mass data analysis of Internet content.’ Seventy-five new positions is a significant amount for any government agency.”
Note that the documents this story is based on seem to have not been provided by Snowden.
NSA German Intercepts
On Friday, WikiLeaks published three summaries of NSA intercepts of German government communications. To me, the most interesting thing is not the intercept analyses, but this spreadsheet of intelligence targets. Here we learn the specific telephone numbers being targeted, who owns those phone numbers, the office within the NSA that processes the raw communications received, why the target is being spied on (in this case, all are designated as “Germany: Political Affairs”), and when we started spying using this particular justification. It’s one of the few glimpses we have into the bureaucracy of surveillance.
Presumably this is from the same leaker who gave WikiLeaks the French intercepts they published a week ago. (And you can read the intelligence target spreadsheet for France, too. And another for Brazil that WikiLeaks published on Saturday; Intercept commentary here.) Now that we’ve seen a few top secret summaries of eavesdropping on German, French, and Brazilian communications, and given what I know of Julian Assange’s tactics, my guess is that there is a lot more where this came from.
Der Spiegel is all over this story.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.