Entries Tagged "intelligence"

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Office of Personnel Management Data Hack

I don’t have much to say about the recent hack of the US Office of Personnel Management, which has been attributed to China (and seems to be getting worse all the time). We know that government networks aren’t any more secure than corporate networks, and might even be less secure.

I agree with Ben Wittes here (although not the imaginary double standard he talks about in the rest of the essay):

For the record, I have no problem with the Chinese going after this kind of data. Espionage is a rough business and the Chinese owe as little to the privacy rights of our citizens as our intelligence services do to the employees of the Chinese government. It’s our government’s job to protect this material, knowing it could be used to compromise, threaten, or injure its people­—not the job of the People’s Liberation Army to forebear collection of material that may have real utility.

Former NSA Director Michael Hayden says much the same thing:

If Hayden had had the ability to get the equivalent Chinese records when running CIA or NSA, he says, “I would not have thought twice. I would not have asked permission. I’d have launched the star fleet. And we’d have brought those suckers home at the speed of light.” The episode, he says, “is not shame on China. This is shame on us for not protecting that kind of information.” The episode is “a tremendously big deal, and my deepest emotion is embarrassment.”

My question is this: Has anyone thought about the possibility of the attackers manipulating data in the database? What are the potential attacks that could stem from adding, deleting, and changing data? I don’t think they can add a person with a security clearance, but I’d like someone who knows more than I do to understand the risks.

Posted on July 1, 2015 at 6:32 AM • View Comments

Other GCHQ News from Snowden

There are two other Snowden stories this week about GCHQ: one about its hacking practices, and the other about its propaganda and psychology research. The second is particularly disturbing:

While some of the unit’s activities are focused on the claimed areas, JTRIG also appears to be intimately involved in traditional law enforcement areas and U.K.-specific activity, as previously unpublished documents demonstrate. An August 2009 JTRIG memo entitled “Operational Highlights” boasts of “GCHQ’s first serious crime effects operation” against a website that was identifying police informants and members of a witness protection program. Another operation investigated an Internet forum allegedly “used to facilitate and execute online fraud.” The document also describes GCHQ advice provided :to assist the UK negotiating team on climate change.”

Particularly revealing is a fascinating 42-page document from 2011 detailing JTRIG’s activities. It provides the most comprehensive and sweeping insight to date into the scope of this unit’s extreme methods. Entitled “Behavioral Science Support for JTRIG’s Effects and Online HUMINT [Human Intelligence] Operations,” it describes the types of targets on which the unit focuses, the psychological and behavioral research it commissions and exploits, and its future organizational aspirations. It is authored by a psychologist, Mandeep K. Dhami.

Among other things, the document lays out the tactics the agency uses to manipulate public opinion, its scientific and psychological research into how human thinking and behavior can be influenced, and the broad range of targets that are traditionally the province of law enforcement rather than intelligence agencies.

Posted on June 26, 2015 at 12:12 PM • View Comments

More on the NSA's Capabilities

Ross Anderson summarizes a meeting in Princeton where Edward Snowden was “present.”

Third, the leaks give us a clear view of an intelligence analyst’s workflow. She will mainly look in Xkeyscore which is the Google of 5eyes comint; it’s a federated system hoovering up masses of stuff not just from 5eyes own assets but from other countries where the NSA cooperates or pays for access. Data are “ingested” into a vast rolling buffer; an analyst can run a federated search, using a selector (such as an IP address) or fingerprint (something that can be matched against the traffic). There are other such systems: “Dancing oasis” is the middle eastern version. Some xkeyscore assets are actually compromised third-party systems; there are multiple cases of rooted SMS servers that are queried in place and the results exfiltrated. Others involve vast infrastructure, like Tempora. If data in Xkeyscore are marked as of interest, they’re moved to Pinwale to be memorialised for 5+ years. This is one function of the MDRs (massive data repositories, now more tactfully renamed mission data repositories) like Utah. At present storage is behind ingestion. Xkeyscore buffer times just depend on volumes and what storage they managed to install, plus what they manage to filter out.

As for crypto capabilities, a lot of stuff is decrypted automatically on ingest (e.g. using a “stolen cert,” presumably a private key obtained through hacking). Else the analyst sends the ciphertext to CES and they either decrypt it or say they can’t. There’s no evidence of a “wow” cryptanalysis; it was key theft, or an implant, or a predicted RNG or supply-chain interference. Cryptanalysis has been seen of RC4, but not of elliptic curve crypto, and there’s no sign of exploits against other commonly used algorithms. Of course, the vendors of some products have been coopted, notably skype. Homegrown crypto is routinely problematic, but properly implemented crypto keeps the agency out; gpg ciphertexts with RSA 1024 were returned as fails.

[…]

What else might we learn from the disclosures when designing and implementing crypto? Well, read the disclosures and use your brain. Why did GCHQ bother stealing all the SIM card keys for Iceland from Gemalto, unless they have access to the local GSM radio links? Just look at the roof panels on US or UK embassies, that look like concrete but are actually transparent to RF. So when designing a protocol ask yourself whether a local listener is a serious consideration.

[…]

On the policy front, one of the eye-openers was the scale of intelligence sharing—it’s not just 5 eyes, but 15 or 35 or even 65 once you count all the countries sharing stuff with the NSA. So how does governance work? Quite simply, the NSA doesn’t care about policy. Their OGC has 100 lawyers whose job is to “enable the mission”; to figure out loopholes or new interpretations of the law that let stuff get done. How do you restrain this? Could you use courts in other countries, that have stronger human-rights law? The precedents are not encouraging. New Zealand’s GCSB was sharing intel with Bangladesh agencies while the NZ government was investigating them for human-rights abuses. Ramstein in Germany is involved in all the drone killings, as fibre is needed to keep latency down low enough for remote vehicle pilots. The problem is that the intelligence agencies figure out ways to shield the authorities from culpability, and this should not happen.

[…]

The spooks’ lawyers play games saying for example that they dumped content, but if you know IP address and file size you often have it; and IP address is a good enough pseudonym for most intel / LE use. They deny that they outsource to do legal arbitrage (e.g. NSA spies on Brits and GCHQ returns the favour by spying on Americans). Are they telling the truth? In theory there will be an MOU between NSA and the partner agency stipulating respect for each others’ laws, but there can be caveats, such as a classified version which says “this is not a binding legal document.” The sad fact is that law and legislators are losing the capability to hold people in the intelligence world to account, and also losing the appetite for it.

Worth reading in full.

Posted on May 11, 2015 at 6:26 AM •

Counting the US Intelligence Community Leakers

It’s getting hard to keep track of the US intelligence community leakers without a scorecard. So here’s my attempt:

  • Leaker #1: Chelsea Manning.
  • Leaker #2: Edward Snowden.
  • Leaker #3: The person who leaked secret documents to Jake Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, and others in Germany: the Angela Merkel surveillance story, the TAO catalog, the X-KEYSCORE rules. My guess is that this is either an NSA employee or contractor working in Germany, or someone from German intelligence who has access to NSA documents. Snowden has said that he is not the source for the Merkel story, and Greenwald has confirmed that the Snowden documents are not the source for the X-KEYSCORE rules. This might be the “high-ranking NSA employee in Germany” from this story—or maybe that’s someone else entirely.
  • Leaker #4: “A source in the intelligence community,” according to the Intercept, who leaked information about the Terrorist Screening Database, the “second leaker” from the movie Citizen Four. Greenwald promises a lot from him: “Snowden, at a meeting with Greenwald in Moscow, expresses surprise at the level of information apparently coming from this new source. Greenwald, fearing he will be overheard, writes the details on scraps of paper.” We have seen nothing since, though. This is probably the leaker the FBI identified, although we have heard nothing further about that, either.
  • Leaker #5: Someone who is leaking CIA documents.
  • Leaker #6: The person who leaked secret information about WTO spying to the Intercept and the New Zealand Herald. This isn’t Snowden; the Intercept is very careful to identify him as the source when it writes about the documents he provided. Neither publication give any indication of how it was obtained. This might be Leaker #3, since it contains X-KEYSCORE rules.
  • Leaker #7: The person who just leaked secret information about the US drone program to the Intercept and Der Spiegel. This also might be Leaker #3, since there is a Germany connection. According to the Intercept: “The slides were provided by a source with knowledge of the U.S. government’s drone program who declined to be identified because of fears of retribution.” That implies someone new.

Am I missing anyone?

Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler has written an excellent law review article on the need for a whistleblower defense. And there’s this excellent article by David Pozen on why government leaks are, in general, a good thing. I wrote about the value of whistleblowers in Data and Goliath.

Way back in June 2013, Glenn Greenwald said that “courage is contagious.” He seems to be correct.

This post was originally published on the Lawfare blog.

EDITED TO ADD (4/22): News article.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have included Manning in this list. I wanted it to be a list of active leaks, not historical leaks. And while Snowden is no longer leaking information, the reporters who received his documents are still releasing bits and pieces.

Posted on April 20, 2015 at 11:18 AM • View Comments

New Zealand's XKEYSCORE Use

The Intercept and the New Zealand Herald have reported that New Zealand spied on communications about the World Trade Organization director-general candidates. I’m not sure why this is news; it seems like a perfectly reasonable national intelligence target. More interesting to me is that the Intercept published the XKEYSCORE rules. It’s interesting to see how primitive the keyword targeting is, and how broadly it collects e-mails.

The second really important point is that Edward Snowden’s name is mentioned nowhere in the stories. Given how scrupulous the Intercept is about identifying him as the source of his NSA documents, I have to conclude that this is from another leaker. For a while, I have believed that there are at least three leakers inside the Five Eyes intelligence community, plus another CIA leaker. What I have called Leaker #2 has previously revealed XKEYSCORE rules. Whether this new disclosure is from Leaker #2 or a new Leaker #5, I have no idea. I hope someone is keeping a list.

Posted on March 26, 2015 at 9:46 AM • View Comments

New Paper on Digital Intelligence

David Omand—GCHQ director from 1996-1997, and the UK’s security and intelligence coordinator from 2000-2005—has just published a new paper: “Understanding Digital Intelligence and the Norms That Might Govern It.”

Executive Summary: This paper describes the nature of digital intelligence and provides context for the material published as a result of the actions of National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Digital intelligence is presented as enabled by the opportunities of global communications and private sector innovation and as growing in response to changing demands from government and law enforcement, in part mediated through legal, parliamentary and executive regulation. A common set of organizational and ethical norms based on human rights considerations are suggested to govern such modern intelligence activity (both domestic and external) using a three-layer model of security activity on the Internet: securing the use of the Internet for everyday economic and social life; the activity of law enforcement—both nationally and through international agreements—attempting to manage criminal threats exploiting the Internet; and the work of secret intelligence and security agencies using the Internet to gain information on their targets, including in support of law enforcement.

I don’t agree with a lot of it, but it’s worth reading.

My favorite Omand quote is this, defending the close partnership between the NSA and GCHQ in 2013: “We have the brains. They have the money. It’s a collaboration that’s worked very well.”

Posted on March 20, 2015 at 1:51 PM • View Comments

Electronic Surveillance Failures Leading up to the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks

Long New York Times article based on “former American and Indian officials and classified documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden” outlining the intelligence failures leading up to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks:

Although electronic eavesdropping often yields valuable data, even tantalizing clues can be missed if the technology is not closely monitored, the intelligence gleaned from it is not linked with other information, or analysis does not sift incriminating activity from the ocean of digital data.

This seems to be the moral:

Although the United States computer arsenal plays a vital role against targets ranging from North Korea’s suspected assault on Sony to Russian cyberthieves and Chinese military hacking units, counterterrorism requires a complex mix of human and technical resources. Some former counterterrorism officials warn against promoting billion-dollar surveillance programs with the narrow argument that they stop attacks.

That monitoring collects valuable information, but large amounts of it are “never meaningfully reviewed or analyzed,” said Charles (Sam) Faddis, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief. “I cannot remember a single instance in my career when we ever stopped a plot based purely on signals intelligence.”

[…]

Intelligence officials say that terror plots are often discernible only in hindsight, when a pattern suddenly emerges from what had been just bits of information. Whatever the reason, no one fully grasped the developing Mumbai conspiracy.

“They either weren’t looking or didn’t understand what it all meant,” said one former American official who had access to the intelligence and would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “There was a lot more noise than signal. There usually is.”

Posted on February 12, 2015 at 6:57 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.