Entries Tagged "NSA"

Page 23 of 57

NSA Classification ECI = Exceptionally Controlled Information

ECI is a classification above Top Secret. It’s for things that are so sensitive they’re basically not written down, like the names of companies whose cryptography has been deliberately weakened by the NSA, or the names of agents who have infiltrated foreign IT companies.

As part of the Intercept story on the NSA’s using agents to infiltrate foreign companies and networks, it published a list of ECI compartments. It’s just a list of code names and three-letter abbreviations, along with the group inside the NSA that is responsible for them. The descriptions of what they all mean would never be in a computer file, so it’s only of value to those of us who like code names.

This designation is why there have been no documents in the Snowden archive listing specific company names. They’re all referred to by these ECI code names.

EDITED TO ADD (11/10): Another compilation of NSA’s organizational structure.

Posted on October 16, 2014 at 6:22 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this tweet: “Just a reminder that it is now *a full year* since Schneier cited it, and the FOXACID ops manual remains unpublished.”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

The NSA's Private Cloud

The NSA is building a private cloud with its own security features:

As a result, the agency can now track every instance of every individual accessing what is in some cases a single word or name in a file. This includes when it arrived, who can access it, who did access it, downloaded it, copied it, printed it, forwarded it, modified it, or deleted it.

[…]

“All of this I can do in the cloud but—in many cases—it cannot be done in the legacy systems, many of which were created before such advanced data provenance technology existed.” Had this ability all been available at the time, it is unlikely that U.S. soldier Bradley Manning would have succeeded in obtaining classified documents in 2010.

Maybe.

Posted on October 2, 2014 at 6:58 AM • View Comments

1 … 21 22 23 24 25 … 57

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.