omnibus PRISM/NSA/free Edward Snowden/encryption tutorial thread

https://alexcabal.com/creating-the-perfect-gpg-keypair/

If you're new to PGP, please don't follow that advice, stick with the defaults.

Everyone always thinks I'm joking about $10,000-a-night hookers,
incidentally. I'm not. If someone were to give me a $100,000 budget to
acquire a secret worth $1,000,000, hiring a high-class call girl for two
weeks would be a *damned* tempting attack vector. People spend so much
time obsessing over technical minutiae of crypto, and so little time
realizing the weakest part of the system is always the human being... so
why not hire an expert in manipulating human beings?

love these guys

Cyberhawk, Yellowstone, Blackfin, Maximus, Cyclone, and Spartacus!

In the catalogue, each device is listed with guidelines about how its use must be approved; the answer is usually via the “Ground Force Commander” or under one of two titles in the U.S. code governing military and intelligence operations, including covert action.

But domestically the devices have been used in a way that violates the constitutional rights of citizens, including the Fourth Amendment prohibition on illegal search and seizure, critics like Lynch say. They have regularly been used without warrants, or with warrants that critics call overly broad. Judges and civil liberties groups alike have complained that the devices are used without full disclosure of how they work, even within court proceedings.

“Every time police drive the streets with a Stingray, these dragnet devices can identify and locate dozens or hundreds of innocent bystanders’ phones,” said Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

https://theintercept.com/2015/12/17/a-secret-catalogue-of-government-gear-for-spying-on-your-cellphone/

Pretty sure those are all members of MASK
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/MASK_Logo.JPG

Chris Christie accused Cruz of opposing the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata for political, not philosophical, reasons. “He went for the easy political vote at a time when it looked like it was a popular thing to do,” the New Jersey governor said on Morning Joe. “With all those dead Parisians, it doesn’t look so popular!”

oy veh

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/consorting-with-foreign-government-a-scandal-too.html

There's a lot we don't know beneath The Wall Street Journal's report today that the National Security Agency picked up intelligence on meetings with U.S. members of Congress and domestic political groups while spying on the Israeli government after credible reports (subsequently validated by the surveillance) that the Israelis were collecting and leaking intelligence on the sensitive U.S.-Iran nuclear talks.

The story has many dimensions. But, so far, virtually all of the reaction involves two questions: (1) Should the U.S. be spying on our ally Israel? (This was raised immediately if cautiously by Marco Rubio, who's in a bit of a quandary because he's normally a fan of surveillance.) And (2) should the Executive branch be spying, even incidentally, on the Legislative branch? (Former House Intelligence Committee chairman Peter Hoekstra called for an investigation of this possibility and for indictments if it turned out to be true.) These are both important and complex issues. But there should be a third question raised as well: Should members of Congress be consorting with agents of a foreign government to thwart U.S. diplomacy?

who's zoomin' who?

eh. obv i am a biased commentator here but ultimately isn't he arguing that congress should not meet w/ foreign leaders when they disagree w/ the president's policy? that means that, eg, mccain should not have had a relationship w/ saakashvili's gov during the time that he was advising a US military response to Russia encroachment on Georgia while Bush's policy was not military? like do we really believe that there's no place for members of congress to a) 'consort' with foreign leaders and b) disagree w/ the POTUS at the same time? seems both impossible + undesirable and really only an issue here bc a) omg israel and b) don't look but the WH just spied on congress.

like do we really believe that there's no place for members of congress to a) 'consort' with foreign leaders

Dems have gotten grief for this too, from Pelosi on back through the Reagan years, on issues from Central America to Iran...

Here the Republicans were arguably trying to undermine ongoing treaty negotiations and not just disagreeing with the President, Commander in Chief...I think Kilgore is arguing that there's no place for members of Congress to do that.

i agree that both parties have done this over the years - it seems like a consequence of how we've split foreign affairs power between the executive and legislative branches and probably a bit silly to bemoan. until it's illegal for congress to try to undermine the executive branch's diplomacy this kind of thing will continue to happen - esp when the branches are split by party.

http://articles.philly.com/1987-11-13/news/26175480_1_house-speaker-jim-wright-wright-and-ortega-wright-ortega

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/nistir-8105/nistir_8105_draft.pdf

which one is you

This certainly confirms the hunches many people had about the NSA's announcement that it was abandoning ECC.

That's got to be a historically short lifespan for a technique - has anything else in the history of secret codes been brought into wide application and then rendered essentially useless within a little over a decade? I mean this is a projection, not a guarantee that quantum computing has been advanced enough to consistently and affordably crack everything, but one assumes NIST and their colleagues across the way have a pretty good handle on where stuff is going to be in the next few years.

I guess there were several systems introduced just prior to or during WW2 that became completely obsolete shortly thereafter.

Recently, some experiments using ion traps and superconducting circuits have demonstrated universal sets of quantum gates that are nominally below the highest theoretical fault-tolerance thresholds (around 1%) [9, 10]. This is a significant milestone, which has spurred increased investment from both government and industry. However, it is clear that substantial long-term efforts are needed to move from present day laboratory demonstrations involving one to ten qubits up to large-scale quantum computers involving thousands of logical qubits encoded in perhaps hundreds of thousands of physical qubits.

Note lack of even a ballpark guess as to how many years "substantial long-term efforts" will actually take. Yeesh.

When standards for quantum-resistant public key cryptography become available, NIST will reassess the imminence of the threat of quantum computers to existing standards, and may decide to deprecate or withdraw the affected standards thereafter as a result. Agencies should therefore be prepared to transition away from these algorithms as early as 10 years from now. As the replacements for currently standardized public-key algorithms are not yet ready, a focus on maintaining crypto agility is imperative.

Please be prepared to completely ditch all implementations of ECC and RSA in a hot minute. Lol, mobile.

I think a cancer therapy based on Crispr will be approved by the FDA before a high-scale quantum computer breaks an RSA key. Like that's the side of that bet I would take.

Apparently most of the world agrees with you because I haven't heard of any VC cash being thrown around at quantum-resistant crypto startups, like, at all

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2702948-Problem-Book-Redacted.html#document/p1

AUSCANNZUKUS is still my favorite all-caps word ever. I love that my phone knows it.

so there's this:

Robert Cattanach, a cybersecurity attorney and former Department of Justice special counsel to the secretary of the Navy, said the government's request leaves Apple in a difficult position as the company is now thrust into the center of the battle to balance privacy needs against counterterrorism efforts.

"The FBI's request to a U.S. Magistrate for an order requiring Apple to disable the auto-wipe feature after 10 unsuccessful attempts represents the next step in the journey to find the holy grail of back door unencryption, and the next salvo in the ever-escalating battle between law enforcement and tech companies," Cattanach said.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-apple-san-bernardino-security-20160217-story.html

@Snowden 6h6 hours ago
This is the most important tech case in a decade. Silence means @google picked a side, but it's not the public's.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

‏@ggreenwald
Claim Apple is doing this "only" for PR benefit is bizarre: PR in refusing FBI's demand to open phone of Muslim who mass-murdered Americans?

i wonder how awkward the pro-Apple chants will be here

Rally in New York, NY!
Apple is right. No government backdoor in our iPhones!
Tuesday February 23 2016 • 5:30 pm
Apple Store • 767 5th Avenue @60th Street

well, dayum, some guvmint lies don't last very long, now do they?

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/24/467943526/apple-has-gotten-federal-orders-to-unlock-at-least-13-devices

And in Noo Yawk, Cy Vance and Bill Bratton called a press conference to mention that they have 175 devices they want to unlock!

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/

I'm surprised nobody on this thread ever brought up Signal. https://whispersystems.org/

Jonathan Ździarski
‏@JZdziarski
It took just over a month after FBI testified under oath that they couldn’t access a locked iPhone… to access a locked iPhone.

Edward Snowden
@Snowden
Remember when government officials used to lose their jobs for false testimony? First Clapper, now Comey.

@markknoller
On @HillaryClinton handling of e-mail, "there's classified and there's classified," says Pres Obama.

@Snowden
If only I had known.

well well

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/30/politics/axe-files-axelrod-eric-holder/index.html

yeah that's a pretty reasonable middle-of-the-road stance that pretty much any of us would take

once we're out of the Cabinet.

There is a certain degree of self-censorship that takes place when you're working in the organs of the institution, just like any job.

Yep, that's why I hate all these people. And the employed.

http://i.imgur.com/R8FyeTU.jpg

Edward Snowden
‏@Snowden

How Washington works: The day before a movie premieres about them violating everyone's rights, they meet in secret.

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/house-intelligence-committee-to-discuss-classified-report-on-snowden-ahead-of-movie-launch/

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/op-ed-why-president-obama-wont-and-shouldnt-pardon-snowden/

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-first-paper-to-call-for-prosecution-of-its-own-source-after-accepting-pulitzer/

x-post- Jack Goldsmith, who wrote the arstechnica.com opinion piece, is at the right-wing Hoover Institute and was an assistant AG in the Bush admin.

yes, hence E.S. shouldn't "expect a pardon" from the executive opposition in a war.

gah fuck the post

The mismatch between Fred Hiatt's ed board stances and the tenor of WaPo's reporting has always been and continues to be baffling and infuriating.

Anything on the arguments in the Ars op-ed, or just "fuck that guy?"

None of you actually see the problems with the "pardon Snowden" idea, do you.

no, i do, encouraging similar thefts?

burn baby burn

also, fuck that guy

in any case, there won't be a pardon

None of you actually see the problems with the "pardon Snowden" idea, do you.

not really. feel free to make a case for there being the problems rather than just saying they are there.

This is IMHO the important part of the op-ed that I linked to:

Another reason why Snowden won’t and shouldn’t be pardoned for his actions is that doing so would have a demoralizing effect on the thousands of intelligence community personnel who devote (and in some cases risk) their lives to US national security, who follow the rules laid down by Congress and the president, whose work was diminished, and whose jobs were made much harder as a result of Snowden’s non-US related disclosures. I disagree with Tim that “a pardon sets no precedent and so creates no incentives.”

Pardoning the perpetrator of the most damaging leak by far in American history would send a clear signal of approval for what Snowden did and a clear signal about a lack of seriousness on the part of the government about its truly most important secrets. Those signals would affect the attitude of everyone in the intelligence community about the value of our most important secrets and would have a terrible impact on the government’s already-difficult ability to keep such secrets. In saying this, I do not detract from the importance of the greater transparency that Snowden brought to the intelligence community. That community was self-defeatingly secretive and insular and terrible at explaining what it was doing and why. But to say that it needed to open up a great deal, especially about the extent of and legal bases of its domestic operations, is not to say the government should countenance disclosure of details about its lawful electronic intelligence operations abroad against non-US citizens, which is what the pardon Snowden seeks would do.

And I don't really care much about "demoralizing" people in the IC, but the pardon sends a ludicrous message that all your NDAs are null and void immediately, which is a simultaneously silly and horrible stance for any state to take.

seems like it boils down to it makes the intelligence community look bad cos they failed to do their job and they are too big to fail

uh okay sure

the pardon sends a ludicrous message that all your NDAs are null and void immediately, which is a simultaneously silly and horrible stance for any state to take

Seriously? Wouldn't there be some way around this sort of thing, administratively, legally?