Unraveling NSA's TURBULENCE Programs

The sad part is the mass surveillance done by the NSA, by and large, isn't even that. Maybe it's effective for economic spying, or spying on political leaders, or hacking into other countries infrastructures, or even helping to assassinate random people in Middle East who happen to be in the area of "terrorists", who may or may not be guilty of terrorism. But it's so easy to just press that drone's button, especially when it happens so far away from home and with nobody to hold them accountable...so who cares, I guess? It's easier and cheaper to kill someone with perhaps 20 percent chance of being a terrorist, than not doing that (I think that's their attitude towards this). Autonomous killer drones will only make this problem 10 times worse, as they can kill many more such people, faster. And with every innocent life taken this way, 10 more people ending up hating America (but not for its freedoms).

But so far there's no evidence that this mass spying would actually help with its promoted and intended goal - "stopping the next 9/11". If anything, there's probably evidence against it. A bigger haystack is just that - a bigger haystack in which to find the needle, and way more false leads, with biased algorithms that lead to the harassment of tens of thousands, if not millions, and without them ever knowing why they are even harassed in such a way.

I did wonder about that, but no "common" internet encryption protocols use pairing-friendly (in the open source cryptographic community sense) primitives. I think you're about right and it probably refers to matching public and private keys for CAs in SSL/TLS, looking up suitable intermediate CAs, for which they may have a few keys stashed away. They don't seem enthusiastic to wave them around much, however.

I believe they probably have long-term cryptologic cracking capability (HPC) including 1024-bit RSA, but probably not 2048-bit. Maybe MD5? Maybe SHA1?

Look at the long list of trusted CAs in a browser, and try to map all the intermediates they've ever signed. You may find a few likely candidates.

> In the case of VPN traffic, a system called HAMMERSTEIN identifies the traffic and sends the metadata to a database called TOYGRIPPE. The TOYGRIPPE database is a “repository of VPN endpoints”14 that is used by targeting officers to determine if that computer should be a target for further exploitation 13. The TURMOIL VPN module also looks up the IP information in a database called KEYCARD to determine if the target should be tasked for targeted SIGINT collection or to recover the VPN key. Of special note is that this VPN traffic passes through a system called “TE-VPN PIQ Blade.” PIQ refers to the PICARESQUE ECI marking 38, which is associated with BULLRUN 16. The BULLRUN program is NSA’s effort to weaken and exploit encryption that protects digial SIGINT, whether by finding bugs in cryptographic algorithms or by manipulating standards bodies or companies into weakening encryption tools. It is safe to assume that PIQ is a compartment that contains the details of a cryptologic attack against a specific VPN technology (or technologies), which the NSA/GCHQ either found or paid for.

In practice, every choice as to how to care and organize society become a question of what to control and what not to control. Who can be trusted, and who can't trusted. Then it just seems to go in a circle. Regulation on top of regulation. People make judgments and claim they are assertions rather than assumptions, based on correlative and observationally biased inferences. The system becomes deterministic based on individual impulse, rather than caution, patience, and 'opened' trust.

With individual impulse, it becomes a question of who decides to shape society, rather than how society is shaped. Whoever makes a move first has an advantage in the short term. But this has the potential to be twisted by greed, selfish desire, and delusions of grandeur, or the idea that "what works for me will work for you". Then things get directed towards tipping points. People start believing in power hierarchies, groups, differing orders and levels of intelligence and ability as intrinsic and permanent properties of their existence. And so the pendulum keeps swinging.