A short synopsis of recent press articles on the NSA.
The National Security Archive, not to be confused with the National Security Agency, has posted a list of 125 documents related to the Snowden releases.
Bruce Schneier, The Atlantic:
It's time to start cleaning up this mess. We need a special prosecutor, one not tied to the military, the corporations complicit in these programs, or the current political leadership, whether Democrat or Republican. This prosecutor needs free rein to go through the NSA's files and discover the full extent of what the agency is doing, as well as enough technical staff who have the capability to understand it. He needs the power to subpoena government officials and take their sworn testimony. He needs the ability to bring criminal indictments where appropriate. And, of course, he needs the requisite security clearance to see it all.
We also need something like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where both government and corporate employees can come forward and tell their stories about NSA eavesdropping without fear of reprisal.
The Mexican president
Enrique Pena Nieto, has labeled NSA spying illegal.
Kim Zetter, Wired, parses a recent WaPo article:
The NSA runs a massive, full-time hacking operation targeting foreign systems, the latest leaks from Edward Snowden show. But unlike conventional cybercriminals, the agency is less interested in hacking PCs and Macs. Instead, America’s spooks have their eyes on the internet routers and switches that form the basic infrastructure of the net, and are largely overlooked as security vulnerabilities.
Under a $652-million program codenamed “Genie,” U.S. intel agencies have hacked into foreign computers and networks to monitor communications crossing them and to establish control over them...
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Hijacking routers and switches could allow the NSA to do more than just eavesdrop on all the communications crossing that equipment. It would also let them bring down networks or prevent certain communication, such as military orders, from getting through...
David Auerbach, Slate:
The NSA has always been on the cutting edge of encryption, designing the widespread Secure Hash Algorithms and driving standardization of Suite B. I entirely believe that they may have made a cryptographic breakthrough allowing them to crack most encryption in use today.
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What the NSA appears to be, then, is a sclerotic organization with individual pockets of brilliance. Agencywide infrastructure appears to be the agency’s most difficult challenge, which would account for its admitted inability to process the dragnet of data it sweeps up.
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The best indicators we have as to the state of data management in the NSA is from its IT departments, and not just because that was where Snowden worked. The NSA spends nearly half its budget on operational IT, more than any other security agency.
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hese budget numbers signal that the NSA is throwing more and more money at problems while failing to solve them.
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Many IT positions tend to be contractor jobs with high turnover—hardly the place for dedicated civil servants with years of experience in the NSA. Yet they literally control the ability of everyone to get their jobs done, and the NSA gave some of these contractors the keys to the kingdom.
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Snowden didn’t hack the NSA because there was no security to be hacked. That he and thousands of other low-level contractors had unfettered, untraceable access to the entirety of NSA systems is a security hole that makes Windows look like Fort Knox.
The group of insiders reviewing the NSA
will talk to unnamed privacy advocates (and tech company people). I wonder if the names will remain classified.
The NSA gets prank called. The WaPo's Brian Fung interviews the caller.
The press is making much of a comment Obama made in a press conference with the Swedish PM. I don't see much there. From Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian:
"Obama said there were 'legitimate questions' about the NSA. He said existing laws may not be sufficient to deal with advances in technology that have allowed the NSA to gather much more data than before."
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