I think most of us would be fine with the NSA doing what they do if it was targeted, like the police getting warrants to break privacy only in important cases for public safety.

The problem will always be mass interception. Not only domestically either, as there is nothing protecting any foreign communications being intercepted in the US (and I'm sure Five eyes+ bypasses these legal roadblocks whenever needed). Which is why the push for encrypt-everything is so important. But as we've seen repeatedly, even when investigating the president and his people, even the allegedly "significant domestic protections" offered by FISA are a joke and basically rubber-stamp.

WhatsApp and iMessage and other non-SMS communication as well as email providers finally adopting proper transit encryption probably has reduced the amount of this sort of unfiltered "intelligence" gathering by 90%+. But I'm sure there's still tons of mobile apps and websites which aren't doing things properly and are filling up their databases.

You think wrong. That fact that there are opposing world states engaging in this nefarious, oppressive, terrible acts and they're not all aligned doesn't legitimize any of these states' activities.

The NSA should essentially be shut down, or cut down to a small agency operating in public with a much more limited mandate. And no secret FISA courts all of that spy-movie crap. That should just stop, period.

But relative to the risk of global nuclear war, and the certainty of global climate disruption, I couldn't care less about the NSA and its adversaries.

And hey, maybe all that spying reduces the risk of overt war.

Also, it's not that we "love privacy", it's that we dislike oppression. And believe you me - most people in my part of the world know very well how the US is oppressing them through military and intelligence means. We don't want to live under the US' boot, and the NSA is part of that boot.

And about nuclear war. Although I'm not expert, it seems pretty obvious that uncertainty increases the risk of war.

Sure, I hate oppression. And I'm not into oppressing others.

But the problem is all the assholes who are driven to oppress others. If I could snap my fingers, and have them all die instantly, I would. But that just ain't gonna happen.

And indeed, it's arguable that they've been selected for, since the development of agriculture and animal husbandry. I got that from Morgan's Black Man.

So anyway, I just do what I can for myself and those close to me, and what I can to help others. I don't focus so much on changing the system. Given how people are, it seems kinda pointless.

MAD doctrine is based on both sides being reasonably sure neither can get away with a first strike. There is interest in having that fact independently verifiable; spying is both providing that verification and serving as an incentive against overstating your actual capabilities.

Same reason you want layers of government with progression at a small scale available to many. So all the people with political ambitions aren't all trying to start their own governments and revolutions.

Busy is stability.

The rubber meets the road, and real names are drawn from a hat somewhere along the line. After we shoo away that pesky threat of hypersonic implosion triggered plutonium cores raining down upon our heads, the sun rises on a new day, and we have to put on coffee and make breakfast.

And some people ride in limousines from hotels for brunch, and some people ride the bus to a fast food job at the ass crack of dawn.

And you can bet that whomsoever holds the keys to these cryptosystems that serve as nuclear-proof umbrellas keeping our heads dry from the oh-so-inevitable megatons of explosive fire, they'll never drive a garbage truck, they're kids won't have to worry about flunking out of college, and none of them will ever get cold in the winter, unless they want to on their holiday ski trip.

And it's no accident, the way such things work.

So, maybe this whole nuclear war thing? Maybe it's always been a big shakedown.

Maybe, sometimes you buy a gun with the full knowledge that keeping it clean, safe and ready for reliable use is going to book your Sundays solid from now on, and whoops, the cost of gun ownership, it just so happens, is never attending Sunday mass again.

And yes, humanity is highly stratified. Socially, economically, whatever. But that just reflects what we are. Hate on it all you want, it's not gonna change.

Except, of course, that there's no body with the requisite authority or power. But maybe someday there will be.

0) https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/reckless-enda...

This way of things is giving birth to idealism and naivete. Just like people living in cities are idealistic and naive about life of cattle and poultry.

You don't want innocent chicken to be killed, but it is tasty. You don't want innocent person to be kept in hidden prison, but you feel safer.

They all would like to close down the farms or agencies that deal with bad stuff, but once they will be hungry enough that they will have to kill an animal or will be faced with actual violence, they will change their mind right away. (I bet they will want someone else to deal with such things)

If someone lives comfy life he can be oblivious. But on the other hand that is also beneficial for society because people in first world countries can focus on growing their interests and don't mind that bad stuff.

In the end if I would have to kill chickens for food every day I could not learn software development. So I am grateful I don't have to. I am also grateful that I don't have to deal with criminal people every day, because also I probably would not have time to do software development (most likely I would be dead before my 20th birthday).

On a personal note: I' been arrested, I've been beaten, I've been in court and I've been in prison (*) to uphold and promote my beliefs and principles. And I do software development too... it's possible :-)

Umm, no. That this happens makes me feel less safe. If it can happen to anyone, after all, it can happen to me or the people I hold dear.

The CIA is a disaster that needs to be dismantled.

In fact, with deepening global threats like climate change and nuclear war (), it is becoming clear just how mortally dangerous such perceptions are. So: Stop supporting "competition on the world stage".

---

Yes, that is still a thing and making quite the comeback; see:

https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-new-nuclear-weapons-782...

and

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/28/us-nuclear-wea...

for example.

Working for the CIA is like being a sysadmin. The world only knows you exist when you fuck up.

There was a great CCC talk recently that showed how one of the Vault 7 tools wasn't a remote assassination boogieman drone tool like Wikileaks framed it, but actually a control the CIA developed that allowed them to give anti-air weapons to friendlies in Syria and Ukraine with positive access control and strong time/geo scoping to prevent them from being used nefariously.

While there's some truth to that, this way of thinking entirely ignores the opportunity cost that all those agencies have. With those insane budgets, you could do so much good in the world that one wouldn't have to fear the problems those agencies try to solve, because a lot of them wouldn't exist in the first place.

Sorry but when you talk of those two in particular, the US is the obvious good guy. Regardless of the terrible shit Trump has done, we would never accept him murdering journalists or critics. That shit happens regularly in Russia and China

There is strong evidence that Turkish intelligence intercepted the telephone call between Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Bin Salman green-lighting the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and used it as leverage to force the US drawdown in Syria. Turkish state media was the source of the audio recording of the murder inside the embassy, so it is not unreasonable to believe they have sufficient espionage capabilities against the Saudis to have phone recordings as well.

Of course you don't mean that. What you mean is that the US didn't intervene.

Yes, I am certain the world that hates the US would have loved the US intervening in Saudi Arabia's affairs.

Whether the US gov't knew Saudi was going to do it or not is different than the US gov't pulling the trigger.

Can you name the Trump, Obama, or Bush vocal american citizen critics that have been killed by the government? Because it sure is easy to find the ones Putin has murdered

I'm pretty sure there more deaths like this but I don't collect this data and US is the country with most efficient propaganda and brainwashing. It's extremely effective at hiding unpleasant facts and dissemination of fake news.

Feel free to down vote me.

I can only guess but I would not be surprised if your very life was saved. Or even if we just look at money, you may have lost a significant amount of what you have in a scam that was avoided.

We do not know what we do not know. But there must be more good than bad in what they do.

The world is a lot more boring than films and far more complicated and difficult to pull off serious operations. The serious operations often merely being inside information about other nation states. Not saving the world from bad guys.

It's mostly just a long series of super paranoid people chasing each other in circles. And in between plenty of useful information being given to leaders, ie before big events to give them an edge or whatnot.

The cold war was the heyday of the outside-the-office spycraft stuff. Today I'm sure it's mostly just countering massive digital campaigns hitting gov agencies, critical infrastructure, and megacorps. Plus the old school agents working within each of those agencies feeding information back to their motherlands.

I would expect that people that speak up are mostly dissatisfied and frustrated people.

And for opacity, one part of the org will likely not know about what is going on on the other side.

A big selection bias.

But who knows...

If you want insight as to why heroic interventions are a sign of failure, talk to your IT department and then scale that up to nation states.

At the same time, other heroic efforts may also require hard work to keep up with the competition or to clean up someone's mess.

That seems one of the reason they monitor what is going on and are vigilant: so they are more likely successful at preventing problems before they araise or become too big. Are not those the problems that require superheroic measures?

I am not naive, there are problems in big organizations.

To keep the movies methaphor, the biggest fears I have come from movie like Star Wars in which the empire turns to the dark side.

I have no idea what systems are in place to prevent things like this to happen. I hope they are VERY good.

My experience as software engineer teaches me that as things become more and more complex in a system the risk of a bug increase. And opacity is a double edge sword.

Even if you have a buggy system, you do not say "Let get rid of it" without talking about the alternatives. Other thing to consider is: "full rewrites are generally a bad idea".

I would like to open this to constructive suggestions but I am afraid that without an inside view we are just shouting the breeze.

>"Feel free to down vote me".

Also, both iMessage and WhatsApp are proprietary, thus it's almost impossible to verify the code you're running is safe. You're right in that E2EE has become more common, but seeing how the intelligence agencies have targeted major vendors like Crypto AG and RSA, we should be extra careful with popular, proprietary systems.

But thats just a partisan political beliefs, right?

Except it's not getting a warrant, but simply deciding whether to spend resources. Which is not something that, like a warrant, I would be fine with.

Also there's another difference, technically it'll never really be on a case-by-case basis, because they can store all the encrypted communication (text chats, just store everything, easily). And they can in hindsight decide to decrypt any of that history (depending on ample metadata).

Or maybe they have a tiered system, a first-pass filter that detects a very vague definition of "possibly maybe interesting" (again, metadata) that would never ever pass a warrant request. Then just store everything that passes the filter, forever, and decrypt when needed.

Don't both of these have default/recommended configurations that back up your chats to cloud services?

I know WhatsApp nags to turn on chat backup to the cloud.

I think it's really difficult to come to any kind of firm conclusion about what NSA can and can't break, even with a background in the material. I tend to doubt NSA has a world-beating RSA class break locked away. But I don't think people should be making decisions based on Snowden's personal technical opinions.

No, I don't think that's how it works. A class break in a core cryptography primitive or even a major break in a particular crypto format would be one of the most closely protected SIGINT secrets in the country; the number of people who would be exposed to even knowledge of its existence would be very low.

Agee was higher up in the intelligence hierarchy than Snowden and the MINERVA secret, while a fairly big deal, is not nearly as big of a deal as 'NSA can break some kinds of modern crypto' would be.

More importantly, I think you're misreading what the new writeups on this story say about Agee's knowledge. He doesn't mention MINERVA and didn't know anything about the BND-CIA joint infiltration of the company. Here's what he writes in Inside the Company:

The National Security Agency cannot break this code system mathematically but they can do so if sensitive recordings can be obtained of the vibrations of the encrypting machine when the discs clack to a stop. The recordings are processed through an oscilloscope and other machines which reveal the disc settings. Knowing the settings, NSA can put the encoded messages, which are intercepted through the commercial companies, into their own identical machines with identical settings, and the clear text message comes out. Although the Swiss manufacturer when selling the machine emphasizes the need to use it inside a sound-proof room on a table isolated by foam rubber, we hope this particular code clerk is careless. If we can discover the settings on this machine in Montevideo, NSA will be able to read the encrypted UAR messages on the entire circuit to which their Montevideo Embassy pertains.

(The speculation is, of course, with reasonable circumstantial support, is that it is a ~$1B program that has brute-forced the most common 1024 DH group in use.)

We simply don’t have the hard data, it is (educated) speculation based on what information we do have.

Even the existence of the program is TS. Its capabilities remain secret, due to the exact system you describe.

"No decrypt available for _this_ PGP encrypted message."

You don't write an error message that way unless the code has a success case as well.

(Unrelated: As well as TLS long term keys, passwords, hashes, usernames, and any other kind of metadata or secrets that may be useful one day in the future, if nothing more than for dictionary attack prefix/suffix fodder.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if they have some more creative secret key sources too: stolen and glitched smart cards, laptops that disappeared out of targets’ cars, tossed offices via evil maid, dumpster diving, all of it, including some I probably haven’t thought of because I’m a computer nerd and not a military intelligence cloak-and-dagger type.

Put all the recovered secrets into a big ol’ database, because disk is cheap and keys are small. Keep it for all time, Just In Case.

Of course, there is a request system frontending this capability.

There are many PGP messages they can decrypt, simply because they slurped up the specific private keys for those messages at some point, and simply saved every secret key, hash, or password that they ever saw, as a general organizational policy.

That doesn’t mean they have broken PGP.

I'm sure he said "to my knowledge" or something to that effect. That is, at least for at least relatively far into the circles of confidence, people did not know about encryption being broken algorithmicly or PGP broken in practice.

Russia has world class cryptographers too, and may have beaten the NSA to the punch. Snowden is after all currently living under FSB protection, which I doubt came for free. Someone willing to sell out their country would likely sell out its people too.

To be sure, that's an important fact. And it does mean that PGP (and for that matter, similar cryptosystems with robust implementations) create a palpable and useful protection against this kind of analysis.

But in the event that the NSA (or other agencies engaged in signals intelligence) have an attack wholly unknown to the literature, it's unlikely that it will be provided in the same toolchain as hunky-dory man-in-the-middle style attacks, such as those disclosed in Snowden's famous slides.

I'm not saying NSA can break PGP - I think they almost certainly can't. But Snowden's revelation on this point shows only that the analysts he was supporting don't have access to novel attacks, not that novel attacks don't exist.

PGP uses RSA which means it's not forward secret. That means, when the agencies hack endpoints to steal PGP keys, they can use them to retrospectively decrypt all PGP-encrypted emails that user has received from their contacts, even if the user has deleted the original message long since.

So no, NSA can't break RSA (assuming it's at least 2048 bits) or AES, but they can bypass the encryption by hacking endpoints. PGP's algorithms are not weak, the key management is extremely weak.