June 2013

There were 30 posts published in June 2013 (this is page 2 of 3).

Everybody’s in

One of my shipmates, an engineer who served with me on the Elliot, posted a comment to one of my NSA Facebook posts that made me think. Referencing my cryptologic technician past, he said.

You should have been an engineer. No one would care what you say or think.

This implies that I have something worth listening to – which as anyone who’s ever read this blog knows is patently ridiculous. Tales of my past as a crypto tech are about as far removed from James Bond as possible. It would bore anyone to tears.
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Mystery web traffic from DoD contractors identified?

A few years ago I noted very strange web requests coming from military bases and large defense contractors. Several of these sites were requesting a specific URL in my collection of over a decade of posts. That struck me as something highly unlikely for a casual web visitor to do, so I became alarmed at the possibility that these defense contractors and military units were compromised by a malware agent, perhaps planted by a foreign government. I emailed one of these groups, doing my patriotic duty by alerting them to this possiblity. Ususally when I point out potential hacking to a fellow sysadmin I receive some sort of thank you email in return. In this case I received no response (I’ll dig up my email and post it here if I can find it). I found the lack of reply unusual (and, well … rude), but kept open the possibility that I’d reached the wrong person.

Today, Techdirt had a story describing how a simple search through LinkedIn turns up a vast trove of resumes containing secret codeword programs. There’s obviously money to be made in surveillance – Edward Snowden made upwards of $200k per year – so analysts advertise the programs for which they have training. The corollary to this is that there are companies willing to pay for this experience – perhaps companies on the list I noticed knocking on my website door.

I can’t help but wonder if the unusual web traffic I noted might be part of one of these secret programs. Whatever it is (or was), it was obviously coordinated, so the only question is whether it was the bad guys or the good guys (i.e. Americans). Viewed through Occam’s razor, it’s more likely that these highly-secure defense contractors aren’t compromised (or at least they have some clue about network security), which leaves the possibility that the traffic came from some as-yet-unknown system. At least I hope our side’s responsible for it – we’re in a world of hurt if it’s not.

So, do I breathe easier knowing these massive defense contractors are not likely compromised as I once thought, or do I lie awake at night scared shitless that they appear to be spying on anyone and everyone?

Discovering Names Of Secret NSA Surveillance Programs Via LinkedIn | Techdirt

While the NSA can use the Internet for spying on law-abiding citizens, the same citizens can use it for spying on the NSA. One Internet sleuth searched LinkedIn for a few of these codeword programs and turned up several resumes full of programs:

So, over the weekend, the Washington Post revealed some of the code names for various NSA surveillance programs, including NUCLEON, MARINA and MAINWAY. Chris Soghoian has pointed out that a quick LinkedIn search for profiles of people in Maryland with codenames like MARINA and NUCLEON happen to turn up profiles like this one which appear to reveal more codenames:

+Skilled in the use of several Intelligence tools and resources: ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV, COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE, PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION, MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN, MARINA

TRAFFICTHIEF, eh? WEBCANDID? Hmm… Apparently, NSA employees don’t realize that information they post online can be revealed.

via Discovering Names Of Secret NSA Surveillance Programs Via LinkedIn | Techdirt.

Moral Mondays and angry voters

I’ve been watching the foolishness taking place in the General Assembly building. No, not the Moral Monday protests, I’m talking about the damage Republican legislators are doing to the state. Yet, for every outrageous far-right bill telling folks how to live and every cut to vital safety-net programs in a down economy, there are legions of Democrats who become rightfully outraged and motivated.
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Cheney Says Leaks Were Traitorous – NYTimes.com

The New York Times decided to report on this appearance by Dick Cheney on Fox News Sunday:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney defended on Sunday the newly disclosed electronic surveillance programs operated by the government and called the former National Security Agency contract worker who disclosed them a criminal and a traitor.

“I think it’s one of the worst occasions in my memory of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States,” said Mr. Cheney, a forceful advocate for the classified programs when he was in office.

There’s no polite way to put this but you’ve got to be fucking shitting me.

Hey, Dick, does the name Valerie Plame mean anything to you? You remember her, the career CIA agent you outed when she and her husband proved your case for war with Iraq was built on a pack of lies? You destroyed her career not for any greater good, but simply as revenge for proving to the world that you’re a bully as well as a pathological liar?

Yeah, Dick Cheney was a “forceful advocate for classified programs” except for those times he betrayed them himself. Dick Cheney recklessly ended the career of a CIA agent. The only career that Edward Snowden ended is his own.

Dick Cheney makes my blood boil. He’s got zero credibility. Zero. He doesn’t belong on TV, he belongs in prison. And shame on Times reporter John Broder for writing this tripe.

via Cheney Defends Surveillance and Says Leaks Were Traitorous – NYTimes.com.

Edward Snowden and NSA spying

I haven’t known what to make of Edward Snowden, the well-paid contractor who revealed the extent of the NSA’s spying on Americans. Is he a civilian version of Cpl. Bradley Manning, the Army analyst whose release of thousands of secret documents put Wikileaks in the news? I don’t think so. Manning isn’t a whistleblower; he didn’t seem to know or care what he was releasing, he just wanted to release it. There was no greater good he was serving other than himself. I still think Manning should be punished for his deeds.

Where does that leave Snowden? After all, he also broke his oath to keep secrets, too, and unlike Manning he was getting paid handsomely to keep those secrets. Also, the type of NSA collection he exposed first appeared in the press way back in 2006 (or perhaps even a year earlier). Is one guilty of revealing a secret if what one reveals isn’t a secret anymore?
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NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls

Remember how Glenn Greenwald speculated that the NSA was capable of listening to the contents of phone calls? It turns out to be true.

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

I had heard rumors of an AT&T facility in Kansas that transcribed millions of phone calls. Supposedly AT&T’s voice recognition software was highly developed for this purpose. Can’t find anything about it online, though, and not sure where I learned of it.

Also, read the Washington Post’s story on the NUCLEON program.

via NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls | Politics and Law – CNET News.

The Idea Factory

theideafactory
I’m reading a fascinating book about the legendary Bell Labs, called “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner. I knew Bell Labs was responsible for many of the innovations we take for granted now, but seeing them all in print was amazing.

It is simply astonishing to consider how this research lab changed our world. For instance, Bell Labs invented the transistor, semiconductors, and photolithography, all of which are absolutely crucial for modern electronics. Scientists at Bell built the world’s first communications satellite after serendipitously inventing the major technologies needed for it. Perhaps the most important technology that came from Bell Labs was information theory, which sprang from a brilliant Bell Labs scientist named Claude Shannon. Wikipedia explains its impact:

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics, electrical engineering, bioinformatics, and computer science involving the quantification of information. Information theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and communicating data. Since its inception it has broadened to find applications in many other areas, including statistical inference, natural language processing, cryptography, neurobiology,[1] the evolution[2] and function[3] of molecular codes, model selection[4] in ecology, thermal physics,[5] quantum computing, plagiarism detection[6] and other forms of data analysis.[7]

Applications of fundamental topics of information theory include lossless data compression (e.g. ZIP files), lossy data compression (e.g. MP3s and JPGs), and channel coding (e.g. for Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)). The field is at the intersection of mathematics, statistics, computer science, physics, neurobiology, and electrical engineering. Its impact has been crucial to the success of the Voyager missions to deep space, the invention of the compact disc, the feasibility of mobile phones, the development of the Internet, the study of linguistics and of human perception, the understanding of black holes, and numerous other fields. Important sub-fields of information theory are source coding, channel coding, algorithmic complexity theory, algorithmic information theory, information-theoretic security, and measures of information.

Shannon did work on cryptography during World War II; his paper A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography was so groundbreaking that it remains classified to this day.

Without Bell Labs, we’d have no home computers, no smartphones (actually no cellphones of any kind), no solar panels, no communications satellites, no lasers, no UNIX, no Internet, no C or C++ computer languages, and no Silicon Valley, for starters. Scientists and researchers at Bell Labs literally invented the future.

The Idea Factory is a fascinating look at how so many world-changing technologies could’ve come from one place. Those who walked the halls of Bell Labs were truly giants.

Here are a few other reviews of the book, from BusinessWeek and the New York Times.

Tanning no more

Once upon a time in my foolish youth I thought it was cool to get a suntan. There were many summers during my teens where I would “sunbathe” with almost nothing protecting my skin. Several times I got a crispy result.

The turning point for me was a visit to Hong Kong with the Navy back in 1991. Many of the crew and I visited a water theme park in the hills above the city. It was blazing hot so I removed my shirt, I had no sunscreen, and I was on a mountain in the tropics for several hours. I had huge blisters on my back for the rest of the week and came very close to requesting a light duty chit to recover from that foolhardy damage. Never again would I take that for granted, I vowed.
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