Related question: do modern diplomats/negotiators automatically assume their comms are compromised? Are their "secure" lines ever truly secure? Surely they know the NSA/CIA would be listening.
How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
11–20 of 353 posts
Re: How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
#12The same report by the ZDF (second german television): https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/cryptoleaks-bnd-cia-o...
Re: How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
#13It certainly does make one wonder who else in the worlds of high technology (and journalism!) May be – wittingly or unwittingly – working for Uncle Sam. I've seen some deep integrations that have made me despair of any organization being free from the overweening influence of the "security services." I'm talking about groups as large as multi-billion dollar public US technology infrastructure companies and as small a…
Look up Operation Mockingbird on wikipedia.
The same is still going on in spades.
Re: How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
#14Being able to read diplomatic messages is a definite gold-mine. Of course, knowing the contents of diplomatic messages isn't always enough. A good example is described in Peter Wright's Spycatcher: the Brits were breaking the French diplomatic cipher, using an ingenuous attack on the electromagnetic noise of the cipher machine in the embassy. But all this intelligence was unable to stop De Gaulle thwarting their ente…
Assuming they aren't coded as well or double enciphered
eg XXX in 21Land is a WW
Re: How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
#15https://outline.com/tTTmh6 And http://archive.is/1w61P
Thanks, it gets irksome at some points that a large number of submitted content on HN is paywalled. I can't subscribe to all of these, just to read a couple of articles a month per publication.
Re: How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
#16And that's why we can't trust Uncle Sam with backdoors. You bet your ass they'll be reading everything and we won't find out for decades, if ever.
Re: How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
#17Reading between the lines on this, it's plainly apparent why there's been repeated attacks on encrpytion by the US government. From this, through RSA's Dual_EC_DRBG, to the present day, it's obvious that the US highly values rigging the deck to aid their decryption, and that the current democratisation of encrpytion protocols is a threat to them. I mean, you only need to read their repeated admissions that without MI…
I'm pretty sure the US government is why the TrueCrypt devs stopped all work. They got hit with a national security letter (NSL) or heavily leaned on and pressured to stop making their product so awesome and un-breakable.
Re: How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
#18A slightly related article is this [1].
Re: How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
#19Gives you a sense of why the U.S. intelligence community is so nervous about having Huawei at the core of the domestic 5G network. Would not be fun for the U.S. to have done to them what they've done to others.
And as a U.S. resident, even as I acknowledge and deplore what the U.S. intelligence services have done to others, I still don't want China to do that to me. This is not an area where equitable (but bad) treatment makes things right IMO.
Re: How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades
#20It certainly does make one wonder who else in the worlds of high technology (and journalism!) May be – wittingly or unwittingly – working for Uncle Sam. I've seen some deep integrations that have made me despair of any organization being free from the overweening influence of the "security services." I'm talking about groups as large as multi-billion dollar public US technology infrastructure companies and as small a…
> as small as anarchist cells planning to attend a political convention
For what it's worth I fully expect a great percentage of any anarchist cell to actually be double agents/"agents provocateurs", in the end I think that's why the Okhrana [1] was so good at its job (relatively speaking, of course).
As a matter of fact I think that the "Western" three-letter agencies are at a disadvantage because they're focusing too much on data collection and interception, they're too technical, so to speak, this is still a "humans-heavy industry" (for lack of a better phrase) and without controlling and understanding said humans all the information in the world will do almost nothing to further said secret agencies' goals.