Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany

firstlook.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 130 posts

Re: Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany

#31

Post by xnull2guest »

[deleted] wrote: post #23
oceanstone wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and I hope nobody thinks Russia or China are saints, because they use their technical abilities to suppress dissent in frightening ways. While there's definitely a cyber war going on, you have to ask, why isn't the NSA actively disseminating knowledge to Americans on how to secure themselves? Why are they instead actively weakening encryption standards? America companies have the most to lose from weak encrypt…

[deleted]

There's a huge market with governments for selling 0day vulnerabilities.

When they can, states prefer to use public exploits, phishing emails and other leverage to break into targets - mostly because 0days are expensive.

Re: Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany

#32

Post by xnull2guest »

nintendo1889 wrote: post #27
xnull2guest wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most certainly 100% yes. Here's a pretty swell talk on some of the programs they use to do it. http://mirror.as35701.net/video.fosdem.org//2014/Janson/Sund...

Fascinating. I'm off to create a few phony shell corporations to get some free NSA money and get paid to surf the web!

Hahahha. Had the same thought.

Re: Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany

#33

Post by grey-area »

xnull2guest wrote: post #18
meowface wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually condone a lot of the NSA's activities, but I take serious issue with: -Warantless surveillance of US citizens (this is bad whether it's by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, or anyone). -Infiltration of foreign companies in allied or neutral nations purely for economic or geopolitical insight, not for military purposes (Brazil's Petrobras oil company, all sorts of spying in Germany and Norway and othe…

> Warantless surveillance of US citizens (this is bad whether it's by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, or anyone). Agreed very strongly. > Infiltration of foreign companies in allied or neutral nations purely for economic or geopolitical insight, not for military purposes (Brazil's Petrobras oil company, all sorts of spying in Germany and Norway and other places). See this is where the NSA really shines. We (T…

Having Merkle's cell phone? During the Eurozone crisis? It would have been awful (financially) for the United States not to have that information.

The cost of this sort of machiavellian policy is of course the opprobrium of former allies and friends, and a loss of moral standing.

The US loses a lot of soft power if it chooses this route, and the consequences will be felt for decades in mistrust and distance from her allies. A dangerous course both for the US and for the world.

Re: Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany

#34

Post by xnull2guest »

Zigurd wrote: post #29
xnull2guest wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying it's retribution for participating in the global cyber intelligence war? Everybody is hacking everybody. Every major country has a cyberintelligence arm. The NSA is just one actor of dozens.

No, "everybody" doesn't do it. It is on the face of it ridiculous to say "everybody has a blue-water navy." It is equally ridiculous to say "everybody runs surveillance comparable to the NSA."

Page 123 of the documents released in Glenn Greenwald's "No Place To Hide" lists at least 37 countries (that the United States has cyber partnerships with).

http://cryptome.org/2014/05/npth-docs-compare.pdf

(on page 16 of the link)

Re: Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany

#35

Post by acqq »

xnull2guest wrote: post #2

“The facts contained in this program constitute a combination of the greatest number of highly sensitive facts related to NSA/CSS’s overall cryptologic mission,” the briefing document states. “Unauthorized disclosure…will cause exceptionally grave damage to U.S. national security. The loss of this information could critically compromise highly sensitive cryptologic U.S. and foreign relationships, multi-year past and…

You summarized already in your sentences ("I'm bewildered by this article. It seems really damaging, and like it doesn't really add very much to the corpus they've already published") how you feel and why you feel that way: it appears damaging because it contains the paragraphs that explicitly contain the words "it's damaging." But it's just a general introduction to the "juicy bits" without the bits themselves.

In fact you recognized this too writing: "it doesn't really add very much to the corpus they've already published." Once you attempt to identify the new information, you can recognize that 99.5% of it appeared in some other form before.

The older published documents already were marked "top secret." This markings are given to the content that is considered "damaging" by these who write the documents. You just percieved it differently because these markings were just markings for you, not the sentences spelling out "damaging."

Still, the value to the public of this very document is that it's a single document summarizing nicely the previously disclosed ones in much less words. By its nature though it doesn't contain the details published previously. (Edit: technically, it's a set of the documents but all of them together appear to me just as a big table of contents for the disclosures already published.)

Now let's discuss the new 0.5% of information, even if it's very general.

Re: Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany

#36

Post by xnull2guest »

grey-area wrote: post #33
xnull2guest wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Warantless surveillance of US citizens (this is bad whether it's by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, or anyone). Agreed very strongly. > Infiltration of foreign companies in allied or neutral nations purely for economic or geopolitical insight, not for military purposes (Brazil's Petrobras oil company, all sorts of spying in Germany and Norway and other places). See this is where the NSA really shines. We (T…

Having Merkle's cell phone? During the Eurozone crisis? It would have been awful (financially) for the United States not to have that information. The cost of this sort of machiavellian policy is of course the opprobrium of former allies and friends, and a loss of moral standing. The US loses a lot of soft power if it chooses this route, and the consequences will be felt for decades in mistrust and distance from her…

I fluxuate with how I feel about it (it = 'machiavellian policy'). I'm not going to defend US policy in this case, nor claim to understand all of the nuances required to make global strategic geopolitical decisions.

But I will say that the NSA's perspective is that: it is only because of the Snowden leaks if we have lost face with allies. To the NSA, the secrets were kept well enough until Snowden and friends disclosed them.

This is my basic issue with this article. America and the NSA ate mud pie for the actions disclosed in the leaks. This article has the very real possibility of doing a lot more damage. One could say it is good because justice has been served, but one could also suggest that it is bad because similar disclosures of German surveillance programs (a touchy subject given the history), Chinese capabilities, Russian objectives etc haven't been disclosed by a Snowden-like actor.

Really the whole situation is bad. I don't like being at war, cyber or otherwise.

Re: Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany

#38

Post by hrjet »

xnull2guest wrote: post #16
oceanstone wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and I hope nobody thinks Russia or China are saints, because they use their technical abilities to suppress dissent in frightening ways. While there's definitely a cyber war going on, you have to ask, why isn't the NSA actively disseminating knowledge to Americans on how to secure themselves? Why are they instead actively weakening encryption standards? America companies have the most to lose from weak encrypt…

Oh nobody thinks they are saints. I hope not. > they use their technical abilities to suppress dissent in frightening ways I'm just going to mention so called "Fusion Centers", which have been used to investigate and disrupt the organization of The Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street but spare my usual rant. No it does not compare to Russia or China. Oh and I'm also going to link this: https://firstlook.org/the…

> When it comes to hacking, the attacker always wins. Just playing defense is a losing game.

Firstly, why only hacking? What is true for a cyber-attack is true for a physical attack as well. Both sides lose resources in both types of attacks.

Secondly, the reason for defending something is because something is worth defending. If it has been defended in an unsuccessful attack, that is a win.

And thirdly, the thing being defended often includes a higher-moral-ground. Resorting to attack is a definite loss for the defending party.

Re: Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany

#39

Post by xnull2guest »

acqq wrote: post #35
xnull2guest wrote: post #2

“The facts contained in this program constitute a combination of the greatest number of highly sensitive facts related to NSA/CSS’s overall cryptologic mission,” the briefing document states. “Unauthorized disclosure…will cause exceptionally grave damage to U.S. national security. The loss of this information could critically compromise highly sensitive cryptologic U.S. and foreign relationships, multi-year past and…

You summarized already in your sentences ("I'm bewildered by this article. It seems really damaging, and like it doesn't really add very much to the corpus they've already published") how you feel and why you feel that way: it appears damaging because it contains the paragraphs that explicitly contain the words "it's damaging." But it's just a general introduction to the "juicy bits" without the bits themselves. In f…

To clarify I mean that I don't believe it adds much to the corpus of information about domestic and civil rights infractions.

On the other hand it deals a pretty big blow geopolitically/internationally.

The big deal about this article is that it reveals the major tactical capabilities and efforts the NSA has invested in the intelligence war.

Edit: Right now HN is limiting the number of replies I can initiate. Will reply as I can.

Post reply on HN