Help Tor Find a New Executive Director

Two bombshell stories in The Intercept should help encourage Tor Project developers to keep up their good work, and may help Project leaders to fend of current political attacks by people like FBI Director James Comey.

One key argument used by privacy advocates and cybersecurity experts in CryptoWars II is that putting in encryption backdoors for use by the US invites other actors to exploit "lawful access" capabilities.

Now James Bamford (author of three books on NSA) reveals

* as was long suspected, NSA was responsible for the notorious cyberespionage operation in which the phones of leading Greek politicians, bankers, reporters and other "persons of interest" was tapped undetected for years; the secret surveillance was accidentally discovered in 2005
* as was immediately suspected, USIC may have been involved in the mysterious suicide of a Greek telco engineer who may apparently had knowledge of the antecedent secret NSA surveillance program, in which NSA got itself *invited* by the Greek government to snoop "temporarily" [sic] during the Athens Olympics
* NSA had told the Greek government it would pack up and go home after the Athens games, but of course it was lying
* In fact, NSA continued and expanded their spying on Vodaphone Greece customers by exploiting the fact that Greek telecoms were using commercial systems with a "lawful intercept" capability which had not been used by the Greek government: NSA intruders simply quietly turned on this capability and used it to target leading Greek politicians
* Targeted phone calls were cc'd to secret NSA burner phones and then secretly conveyed back to NSAW
* Supporting documents from the Snowden trove show that NSA and GCHQ attempt to exploit lawful access protocols mandated by CALEA (US), ETSI (EU and UK), SORM (Russia) to secretly spy on their own targets in countries which use "lawful access" systems sold by E
* To exploit "lawful access" systems, NSA intercepts satellite, microwave, and fiber optic data links; in addition SSO (Special Source Operations) provides access to cables, performs "black job" burglaries, and TAO (Tailored Access Operations) performs cyberintrusions into police agency networks
* CIA has implemented its own dragnet surveillance of GSM calls in the EU, and shares the stolen information with NSA

The principle lesson for governmental and corporate "partners" of USIC: you can't trust spooks! NSA told Google, "if you give us what we want voluntarily [PRISM], we won't break into your private networks", but that was a lie. They told Greece, "let us help you ensure nothing untoward happens during the Athens games by letting us into your telco networks, and we'll shut it down as soon as the games are over", but that was a lie. There are dozens of other equally stark examples in the Snowden leaks. Spooks lie. Constantly. It's an essential element of their evil ethos. It's simply in their nature to lie. So don't trust 'em. Ever.

See

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/death-athens-rogue-nsa-operation/
Did a Rogue NSA Operation Cause the Death of a Greek Telecom Employee?
James Bamford
29 Sep 2015

Once again, the Snowden leaks have confirmed in detail "paranoid" suspicions expressed by well-informed observers years earlier:

http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/2006/02/vodafone_greece…
> ...
> The list of 44 surveillance targets (some of whom had more than one Vodafone phone) also includes some Arabic businessmen , as well as the Government politicians, opposition politicians and military personnel. The Sunday Times also reports the suspicious timing of the suicide of a key Vodafone employee: "As part of the government’s investigation into the scandal, the suicide of Kostas Tsalikidis, 39, Vodafone Greece’s head of network design, is being re-examined by police. Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens flat on the morning of March 9, 2005, two days after the ghost program had been discovered and shut down by George Koronias, the Vodafone general manager, and a day before the prime minister’s office was informed."

The lesson for American politicians is of course that anything NSA can do to Russia, China can do to the USA. NSA exploits of SORM show that Chinese cyberspies can potentially exploit any mandatory encryption backdoor system, or mandatory real-name registry, or mandatory "suspicious activity reporting" to harm US citizens, if such systems are implemented in the US.

In a second bombshell story, Ryan Gallagher confirms what privacy advocates (and sometimes spooks!) have been warning about for years: everyone is a target, everyone is an eternal suspect of past, present or future activity possibly deleterious to the interests of the ruling elite. No child is too innocent, no grandmother's emails too boring, no electronic device is too isolated to escape the interest of the modern spook. Your education, employment records, travel records, medical records, your fingerprints, voiceprint, iris scans, vein patterns, your family history, all are stolen and mined for clues. Your tweets, instant messages, emails, private messages, search logs, websurfing logs, geolocation beacons, all are being continuously monitored by agencies such as GCHQ.

The accompanying documents show that

* By May 2011 GCHQ used 1600 10 Gps bearers (taps of fiber optic cables), more than half NOT landing in the UK, each costing about 20,000 pounds and collecting on average 200 million events per day
* BLACK HOLE is a "flat storage" buffer which holds onto unanalyzed stolen data on the assumption some of it might later be useful; about 10 billion events are added every day,
* "events" include someone logging on to an ISP, sending a text message, uploading a draft email, making a call on a smart phone, getting a webpage (about 40% of the data is BLACK HOLE is of this type), etc.,
* this adds up to a lot of data; GCHQ recorded about 10^12 events from Aug 2007 to Mar 2009; BLACK HOLE sucked up about 200 GB/day in 2011
* GCHQ relies on Apache HADOOP clusters using GoogleMaps to do initial analysis and classification
* the QFDs are Oracle databases running under RedHat Enterprise Linux
* To provide data to their army of analysts, GCHQ favors QFDs (Query Focused Databases), which are huge but simply constructed databases designed to answer a very specific question ("was Ryan Gallagher on-line at 0900 GMT on 1 April 2009?"), and to use "convergence" databases to pull data from multiple databases to provide a detailed picture of a target's "pattern of life", for example presenting not only POTS calls from an old-fashioned handset but VOIP calls made using a smart phone,
* KARMA POLICE attempts to log the websurfing of everyone using the internet
* INFINITE MONKEYS attempts to maintain a database of everyone in the world who joins any webforum in the world using VBulletin, and to track their posting history; in 2007 this database was rated as one of GCHQ's best sources of intelligence
* SOCIAL ANTHROPOID (which painfully replaced several earlier systems) attempts to track all social media activity of everyone who uses Facebook or other such sites,
* SAMUEL PEPYS attempts to provide a real time diary of what everyone on the internet is doing as they do it (the example in a secret GCHQ presentation shows someone using a computer in Sweden browsing to a cryptome.org page collecting pictures of GCHQ physical infrastructure)
* MUTANT BROTH collects TDIs (target definition identifiers), e.g. internet "e-litter" by which people such as telco engineers, journalists, national and local politicians, CEOs, police officers, and environmentalists can be identified and targeted for cyberespionage,
* GCHQ logs everyone in the UK, US and other countries who listens to internet radio
* GCHQ knows how to decode Yahoo-Y-cookies (which use ROT-13 to disguise the username; insert sarcastic smiley here), but also exploits Microsoft MSUID, Facebook, and Google SID cookies to spy on everyone who encounters Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google on line (i.e, everyone)
* TRIBAL CARNEM feasts upon Radius servers to alert analysts by email that their "target" is on-line
* MARBLED GECKO spies on everyone using Google mapping/geolocation services

It is impossible to overemphasize a key point about the latest leaked documents: these repeatedly boast about providing "population scale" access to "unselected" "content" in various types of data which an ordinary person would naturally regard as "private", such as private messages sent between users of VBulletin forums. Translation: the content of every item of data is collected and made available, regardless of whether the source or destination IP has been specifically targeted or satisfies some "selection" criterion. Everyone is a target. Everyone is continually under suspicion of possibly in future "doing something". Everyone. Your grandma, your son, teachers, academic research scientists, US federal judges. Everyone.

If the spooks get their way, in the near future your heartrate, and other personal physiological data will also be monitored in real time. Eventually, if DARPA can figure out how to remotely scan brain functioning, not even your innermost thoughts will be free from scrutiny. It is no secret that American researchers are working very hard to achieve these goals. No doubt Chinese and Russian researchers are working just as hard.

All this may seem daunting but there are reasons for optimism:

* 97% of the stolen data GCHQ passes from their buffer to long term storage is never viewed).
* Tor can help, by making the bad guys snooping more expensive, unreliable, and uncertain.
* Encryption works. (As long as you are using something substantially better than ROT13.)
* A high level GCHQ memo explains that their real fear about encryption (Google etc) is that they won't be able to spy on absolutely everyone anymore but will have to pick their targets. Reason: they can usually evade https or decrypt GSM (using stolen keys) but this is too expensive to do to absolutely everyone in the world. Currently.
* GCHQ badness follows a strict daily rhythm: analysts work during the day and batch processing is run overnight; this can be exploited.
* Another GCHQ memo states that an increasingly important goal is improving the dismal public perception of GCHQ. So they're worried.

Glenn Greenwald writes that his first shock, when he met Snowden, was how young he looked. His second was when Greenwald mentioned GCHQ and Snowden replied "Oh, they're even worse than NSA!". The GCHQ documents starkly illustrate the dangers of not having a written Constitution. In his book The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn remarks that the USSR had a very fine Constitution; the problem was that its courts were too timorous to try to enforce it. That is why, he says, so many human rights abuses occurred in the USSR. The recent history of the USA, as revealed in NSA leaks from the Snowden trove, clearly show that the USA enjoys no magical immunity from similar abuses, for the same reason.

See

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-use…
From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities
Ryan Gallagher
25 Sep 2015