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NSA Intercepts Used to Convict Liquid Bombers

Three of the UK liquid bombers were convicted Monday. NSA-intercepted e-mail was introduced as evidence in the trial:

The e-mails, several of which have been reprinted by the BBC and other publications, contained coded messages, according to prosecutors. They were intercepted by the NSA in 2006 but were not included in evidence introduced in a first trial against the three last year.

That trial resulted in the men being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder; but a jury was not convinced that they had planned to use soft drink bottles filled with liquid explosives to blow up seven trans-Atlantic planes—the charge for which they were convicted this week in a second trial.

According to Channel 4, the NSA had previously shown the e-mails to their British counterparts, but refused to let prosecutors use the evidence in the first trial, because the agency didn’t want to tip off an alleged accomplice in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf that his e-mail was being monitored. U.S. intelligence agents said Rauf was al Qaeda’s director of European operations at the time and that the bomb plot was being directed by Rauf and others in Pakistan.

The NSA later changed its mind and allowed the evidence to be introduced in the second trial, which was crucial to getting the jury conviction. Channel 4 suggests the NSA’s change of mind occurred after Rauf, a Briton born of Pakistani parents, was reportedly killed last year by a U.S. drone missile that struck a house where he was staying in northern Pakistan.

Although British prosecutors were eager to use the e-mails in their second trial against the three plotters, British courts prohibit the use of evidence obtained through interception. So last January, a U.S. court issued warrants directly to Yahoo to hand over the same correspondence.

It’s unclear if the NSA intercepted the messages as they passed through internet nodes based in the U.S. or intercepted them overseas.

EDITED TO ADD (9/9): Just to be sure, this has nothing to do with any illegal warrantless wiretapping the NSA has done over the years; the wiretap used to intercept these e-mails was obtained with a FISA warrant.

Posted on September 9, 2009 at 10:10 AM • View Comments

On London's Surveillance Cameras

A recent report has concluded that the London’s surveillance cameras have solved one crime per thousand cameras per year.

David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: “It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.”

He added: “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness.

“It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.

Also:

Earlier this year separate research commissioned by the Home Office suggested that the cameras had done virtually nothing to cut crime, but were most effective in preventing vehicle crimes in car parks.

A report by a House of Lords committee also said that £500 million was spent on new cameras in the 10 years to 2006, money which could have been spent on street lighting or neighbourhood crime prevention initiatives.

A large proportion of the cash has been In London, where an estimated £200 million so far has been spent on the cameras. This suggests that each crime has cost £20,000 to detect.

I haven’t seen the report, but I know it’s hard to figure out when a crime has been “solved” by a surveillance camera. To me, the crime has to have been unsolvable without the cameras. Repeatedly I see pro-camera lobbyists pointing to the surveillance-camera images that identified the 7/7 London Transport bombers, but it is obvious that they would have been identified even without the cameras.

And it would really help my understanding of that £20,000 figure (I assume it is calculated from £200 million for the cameras times 1 in 1000 cameras used to solve a crime per year divided by ten years) if I knew what sorts of crimes the cameras “solved.” If the £200 million solved 10,000 murders, it might very well be a good security trade-off. But my guess is that most of the crimes were of a much lower level.

Cameras are largely security theater:

A Home Office spokeswoman said CCTVs “help communities feel safer”.

Posted on August 31, 2009 at 5:59 AM • View Comments

EFF on Locational Privacy

Excellent paper: “On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever.”

Some threats to locational privacy are overt: it’s evident how cameras backed by face-recognition software could be misused to track people and record their movements. In this document, we’re primarily concerned with threats to locational privacy that arise as a hidden side-effect of clearly useful location-based services.

We can’t stop the cascade of new location-based digital services. Nor would we want to—the benefits they offer are impressive. What urgently needs to change is that these systems need to be built with privacy as part of their original design. We can’t afford to have pervasive surveillance technology built into our electronic civic infrastructure by accident. We have the opportunity now to ensure that these dangers are averted.

Our contention is that the easiest and best solution to the locational privacy problem is to build systems which don’t collect the data in the first place. This sounds like an impossible requirement (how do we tell you when your friends are nearby without knowing where you and your friends are?) but in fact as we discuss below it is a reasonable objective that can be achieved with modern cryptographic techniques.

Modern cryptography actually allows civic data processing systems to be designed with a whole spectrum of privacy policies: ranging from complete anonymity to limited anonymity to support law enforcement. But we need to ensure that systems aren’t being built right at the zero-privacy, everything-is-recorded end of that spectrum, simply because that’s the path of easiest implementation.

I’ve already written about wholesale surveillance.

Posted on August 14, 2009 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

An Ethical Code for Intelligence Officers

August’s Communications of the ACM has an interesting article: “An Ethics Code for U.S. Intelligence Officers,” by former NSAers Brian Snow and Clint Brooks. The article is behind a paywall, but here’s the code:

Draft Statement of Ethics for the Intelligence Community

Preamble: Intelligence work may present exceptional or unusual ethical dilemmas beyond those of ordinary life. Ethical thinking and review should be a part of our day to day efforts; it can protect our nation’s and our agency’s integrity, improve the chances of mission success, protect us from the consequences of bad choices, and preserve our alliances. Therefore, we adhere to the following standards of professional ethics and behavior:

First, do no harm to U.S. citizens or their rights under the Constitution.
We uphold the Constitution and the Rule of Law; we are constrained by both the spirit and the letter of the laws of the United States.
We will comply with all international human rights agreements that our nation has ratified.
We will insist on clarification of ambiguities that arise between directives or law and the principles of this code. We will protect those within our institutions who call reasonable attention to wrongdoing.
Expediency is not an excuse for misconduct.
We are accountable for our decisions and actions. We support timely, rigorous processes that fix accountability to the responsible person.
Statements we make to our clients, colleagues, overseers and the U.S. public will be true, and structured not to unnecessarily mislead or conceal.
We will resolve difficult ethical choices in favor of constitutional requirements, the truth, and our fellow citizens.
We will address the potential consequences of our actions in advance, especially the consequences of failure, discovery, and unintended or collateral consequences of success.
We will not impose unnecessary risk on innocents.
Although we may work in secrecy, we will work so that when our efforts become known, our fellow citizens will be proud of us and of our efforts.

It’s supposed to be for U.S. intelligence officers, but with one inconsequential modification it could be made international.

Posted on August 11, 2009 at 12:29 PM • View Comments

Building in Surveillance

China is the world’s most successful Internet censor. While the Great Firewall of China isn’t perfect, it effectively limits information flowing in and out of the country. But now the Chinese government is taking things one step further.

Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to contain the Green Dam Youth Escort software package. Ostensibly a pornography filter, it is government spyware that will watch every citizen on the Internet.

Green Dam has many uses. It can police a list of forbidden Web sites. It can monitor a user’s reading habits. It can even enlist the computer in some massive botnet attack, as part of a hypothetical future cyberwar.

China’s actions may be extreme, but they’re not unique. Democratic governments around the world—Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom, for example—are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

Many are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to keep information on their customers. Just recently, the German government proposed giving itself the power to censor the Internet.

The United States is no exception. The 1994 CALEA law required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the NSA has built substantial eavesdropping systems in the United States. The government has repeatedly proposed Internet data retention laws, allowing surveillance into past activities as well as present.

Systems like this invite criminal appropriation and government abuse. New police powers, enacted to fight terrorism, are already used in situations of normal crime. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.

Official misuses are bad enough, but the unofficial uses worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don’t.

China’s government designed Green Dam for its own use, but it’s been subverted. Why does anyone think that criminals won’t be able to use it to steal bank account and credit card information, use it to launch other attacks, or turn it into a massive spam-sending botnet?

Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement will mine collected Internet data or eavesdrop on phone and IM conversations?

These risks are not theoretical. After 9/11, the National Security Agency built a surveillance infrastructure to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mails within the United States.

Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn’t always match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to, and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends, and famous people such as President Clinton.

But that’s not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government—the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice.

Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone’s products, and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn’t one of those governments, but someone still unknown—a rival political party? organized crime?—figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.

Researchers have already found security flaws in Green Dam that would allow hackers to take over the computers. Of course there are additional flaws, and criminals are looking for them.

Surveillance infrastructure can be exported, which also aids totalitarianism around the world. Western companies like Siemens, Nokia, and Secure Computing built Iran’s surveillance infrastructure. U.S. companies helped build China’s electronic police state. Twitter’s anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents—anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.

Every year brings more Internet censorship and control—not just in countries like China and Iran, but in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and other free countries.

The control movement is egged on by both law enforcement, trying to catch terrorists, child pornographers and other criminals, and by media companies, trying to stop file sharers.

It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers and censors say, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.

This essay previously appeared—albeit with fewer links—on the Minnesota Public Radio website.

Posted on August 3, 2009 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

Mapping Drug Use by Testing Sewer Water

I wrote about this in 2007, but there’s new research:

Scientists from Oregon State University, the University of Washington and McGill University partnered with city workers in 96 communities, including Pendleton, Hermiston and Umatilla, to gather samples on one day, March 4, 2008. The scientists then tested the samples for evidence of methamphetamine, cocaine and ecstasy, or MDMA.

Addiction specialists were not surprised by the researchers’ central discovery, that every one of the 96 cities—representing 65 percent of Oregon’s population—had a quantifiable level of methamphetamine in its wastewater.

“This validates what we suspected about methamphetamine use in Oregon,” said Geralyn Brennan, addiction prevention epidemiologist for the Department of Human Services.

Drug researchers previously determined the extent of illicit drug use through mortality records and random surveys, which are not considered entirely reliable. Survey respondents may not accurately recall how much or how often they use illicit drugs and they may not be willing to tell the truth. Surveys also gathered information about large regions of the state, not individual cities.

The data gathered from municipal wastewater, however, are concrete and reveal a detailed snapshot of drug use for that day. Researchers placed cities into ranks based on a drug’s “index load” – average milligrams per person per day.

These techniques can detect drug usage at individual houses. It’s just a matter of where you take your samples.

Posted on July 23, 2009 at 6:09 AM • View Comments

NSA Building Massive Data Center in Utah

They’re expanding:

The years-in-the-making project, which may cost billions over time, got a $181 million start last week when President Obama signed a war spending bill in which Congress agreed to pay for primary construction, power access and security infrastructure. The enormous building, which will have a footprint about three times the size of the Utah State Capitol building, will be constructed on a 200-acre site near the Utah National Guard facility’s runway.

Congressional records show that initial construction—which may begin this year—will include tens of millions in electrical work and utility construction, a $9.3 million vehicle inspection facility, and $6.8 million in perimeter security fencing. The budget also allots $6.5 million for the relocation of an existing access road, communications building and training area.

Officials familiar with the project say it may bring as many as 1,200 high-tech jobs….

It will also require at least 65 megawatts of power….

Another article.

Posted on July 10, 2009 at 5:52 AM • View Comments

Spanish Police Foil Remote-Controlled Zeppelin Jailbreak

Sometimes movie plots actually happen:

…three people have been arrested after police discovered their plan to free a drug trafficker from an island prison using a 13-foot airship carrying night goggles, climbing gear and camouflage paint.

[…]

The arrested men had setup an elaborate surveillance operation of the prison that involved a camouflaged tent, powerful binoculars, telephoto lenses, and motion detection sensors. But authorities caught wind of the plan when they intercepted the inflatable zeppelin as it arrived from the Italian town of Bergamo.

EDITED TO ADD (7/14): Another story, with more detail.

Posted on July 8, 2009 at 1:54 PM • View Comments

Eavesdropping on Dot-Matrix Printers by Listening to Them

Interesting research.

First, we develop a novel feature design that borrows from commonly used techniques for feature extraction in speech recognition and music processing. These techniques are geared towards the human ear, which is limited to approx. 20 kHz and whose sensitivity is logarithmic in the frequency; for printers, our experiments show that most interesting features occur above 20 kHz, and a logarithmic scale cannot be assumed. Our feature design reflects these observations by employing a sub-band decomposition that places emphasis on the high frequencies, and spreading filter frequencies linearly over the frequency range. We further add suitable smoothing to make the recognition robust against measurement variations and environmental noise.

Second, we deal with the decay time and the induced blurring by resorting to a word-based approach instead of decoding individual letters. A word-based approach requires additional upfront effort such as an extended training phase as the dictionary grows larger, and it does not permit us to increase recognition rates by using, e.g., spell-checking. Recognition of words based on training the sound of individual letters (or pairs/triples of letters), however, is infeasible because the sound emitted by printers blurs so strongly over adjacent letters.

Third, we employ speech recognition techniques to increase the recognition rate: we use Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) that rely on the statistical frequency of sequences of words in text in order to rule out incorrect word combinations. The presence of strong blurring, however, requires to use at least 3-grams on the words of the dictionary to be effective, causing existing implementations for this task to fail because of memory exhaustion. To tame memory consumption, we implemented a delayed computation of the transition matrix that underlies HMMs, and in each step of the search procedure, we adaptively removed the words with only weakly matching features from the search space.

We built a prototypical implementation that can bootstrap the recognition routine from a database of featured words that have been trained using supervised learning. Afterwards, the prototype automatically recognizes text with recognition rates of up to 72 %.

Researchers have done lots of work on eavesdropping on remote devices. (One example.) And we know the various intelligence organizations of the world have been doing this sort of thing for decades.

Posted on June 23, 2009 at 6:16 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.