| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago |
| NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now. NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption. |
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| ▲ | notepad0x90 a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| 1) They don't necessarily need to break all encryption, just knowing who is talking to who and then delivering a tailored payload is their M.O.; The Tailored Access Operations division exists just for this. 2) They didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason 3) They have the capability to compromise certificate authorities. Pinned certs aren't universal. 4) Speculation, but, Snowden's revelations probably set off an "arms race" of sorts for developing this capability. Lots more people started using Tor, VPNs, and more, so it would almost be dereliction of duty on their part if they didn't dramatically increase their capability, because the threats they are there to stop didn't disappear. 5) ML/LLM/AI has been around for a while, machine learning analysis has been mainstream for over a decade now. All that immense data a human can never wade through can be processed by ML. I would be surprised if they aren't using an LLM to answer questions and query real-time and historical internet data. 6) You know all the concerns regarding Huawei and Tiktok being backdoored by the Chinese government? That's because we're doing it ourselves already. 7) I hope you don't think TAO is less capable than well known notorious spyware companies like the NSO group? dragnet collection is used to find patterns for follow-up tailored access. |
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| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | None of your proposed solutions are stealthy enough to enable bulk collection at a pre-Snowden scale. Yeah, they can still collect lots of useful metadata. | | |
| ▲ | notepad0x90 a day ago | parent [-] | | I don't understand, all they have to do is tap submarine cables, why is that infeasible now? What specific thing do you think they were collecting before that they can't now? Metadata is extremely valuable!! lots of things can be inferred from it. In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example. They can take any packet and trace it back to a specific individual, even if you're on Tor, chaining VPNs,etc.. without decrypting it. They can see what destinations you're visiting. they can build a pattern of life profile you and mine that. The ad industry does much of this without access to global internet traffic captures already lol. | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | That's perfectly feasible. It is not feasible to do the same kind of captures as NSA was doing pre-Snowden, when most of that traffic wasn't encrypted. > In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example That's still just as encrypted as the email body itself. | | |
| ▲ | notepad0x90 a day ago | parent [-] | | I think the disconnect is that you think all they do is passive listening and after the fact decryption. | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | Active listening is very noisy, we can be very confident they're not doing that at scale. My whole point is that they're no longer able to do passive listening of unencrypted content and massive scale, but instead are forced to rely on much smaller scale active attacks. | | |
| ▲ | notepad0x90 a day ago | parent [-] | | You're making assumptions that are not taking into account all the other capabilities revealed in the Snowden leak and several other prior leaks. The name "Tailored Access Operations" alone should tell you something. They still have presence in all the large tech company's networks (with cooperation from them of course), and they are able to access critical servers like MTA's. The shadowbroker leaks are also another glimpse into their historical capabilities. You're assuming that despite their budget not having changed meaningfully, no repercussions against anyone from the historical leaks, the continued renewal of the patriot act and unchanged mission of the intelligence community orgs that somehow they've wound down. That they've stopped R&D and tailored access ops. You're also assuming that tailored access is not used to facilitate, correlate and enrich traffic decryption. You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that? If you hoard 0 days and sophisticated implants what's the advantage? I mean half the time comms alone aren't enough, you want access to internal networks, documents that will never get transmitted over the network,etc.. smartphone telemetry data from a large group of targets. They're not interested in decrypting traffic to grandma visiting facebook, they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp. Once targets are identified they can be implanted, or have their traffic selected for decryption. But I think i get what you're saying, that most of the traffic they capture is encrypted. That much I agree, that has changed. But whether they can decrypt it on-demand, that is tough to speculate, whether they need to? That's what I'm disagreeing with. If their goal was that one-time traffic decryption, perhaps that has been curtailed with the prevalence of TLS and CT logging. But metadata alone is sufficient to select a target, and all the evidence suggests that even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups. | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | >You're assuming that despite their budget not having changed meaningfully, no repercussions against anyone from the historical leaks, the continued renewal of the patriot act and unchanged mission of the intelligence community orgs that somehow they've wound down. That they've stopped R&D and tailored access ops. That's not at all what I'm assuming. I'm stating that the environment has become much more hostile to them, reducing their capabilities because all the super low hanging fruit is gone. The part where they're able to hack almost anyone they want hasn't changed. >You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that? Metadata lets you select a target sure. Having full content takes as they used to allows you to easily find new targets by simply matching keywords, that particularly cool capability has practically disappeared post-Snowden. >they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp I don't think this really reflects what the previously leaked files suggest their main interests to be. >what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp Whereas before they'd have been able to get that information off the wire together with the message content (for all messages, in real time!). Now? They actually have to actively compromise Facebook to get that for a single user. It's also worth noting that the previously leaked NSA documents seem to suggest that the NSA was not particularly busy breaking the law by hacking American companies. > even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups. Because of CT, such MITM attacks will not work without creating noise that's visible to the whole world. | | |
| ▲ | notepad0x90 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | You've made really good points, I get what you're saying now. They can't do simple keyword searches over unencrypted traffic anymore. But even in 2010 lots of important traffic was over https, and anyone worth their salt used https for important things. I don't think even back then they were hoping for incidental intercept of unencrypted traffic. That was just icing on the cake, the main purpose as I understood was metadata mining, and not just the internet but phone calls and sms as well. As far as tailored access, there is lots of speculation there, and they're well within their rights to hack servers outside of the US. I don't think any information as to what organizations they compromised has ever been revealed, but they certainly had the capability and it is only reasonable to presume they improved upon that capability. But they can have the capability and not choose to wield it, but really doesn't sound like their M.O. > I don't think this really reflects what the previously leaked files suggest their main interests to be. I strongly disagree. I wish i had the time to compile evidence to back that up but plenty exists if you look it up. Matter of fact, I recall some of NSA's leadership oppose things like backdooring encryption or apps because they don't need it, and it only hurts the nation's security. | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > But even in 2010 lots of important traffic was over https, and anyone worth their salt used https for important things. In 2010 almost all messaging traffic on the internet was plaintext (or using badly broken encryption). Telephony? Hah. These days nobody even uses regular phone calls or SMS, except US-based android users. > That was just icing on the cake, the main purpose as I understood was metadata mining, and not just the internet but phone calls and sms as well Metadata mining was just the fallback when they absolutely couldn't legally capture the content, or were not able to do so for logistical reasons. If you hack China Mobile and get access to all the call content, you'll still have a hard time sending that to the US. Metadata? Much easier. These days even metadata collection has been gimped, most of the interesting metadata is encrypted. When I text someone, the NSA can see an encrypted connection from my phone to Apple. They can not feasibly see who that message goes to. They might not even be able to tell that I sent a message at all. > I don't think any information as to what organizations they compromised has ever been revealed, but they certainly had the capability and it is only reasonable to presume they improved upon that capability TSB leaks include tons of such information. Snowden leaks include some specific cases too, like Gemalto. Although just for the sake of accuracy I'm not sure which of these are actually TAO and which are other similar teams inside the NSA, but as I recall at least the TSB stuff seems to primarily originate from TAO. There have also been a bunch of public and non-public incidents attributed to the Equation group (almost certainly NSA TAO) by the private sector. I think these capabilities were already so good a decade ago that it would be hard to significantly improve upon them, you just slap in new exploits and keep doing what you're doing. >I strongly disagree. I wish i had the time to compile evidence to back that up but plenty exists if you look it up. Matter of fact, I recall some of NSA's leadership oppose things like backdooring encryption or apps because they don't need it, and it only hurts the nation's security. I was trying to suggest that the NSA is mostly interested in spying on foreign governments and maybe sometimes catching terrorists, not exactly "they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who the source of some journalist is". | | |
| ▲ | notepad0x90 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Alright, well in the interest of a conclusion, I'll say that you made really good points, I've changed my opinion on some but not all of the topics. > "they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who the source of some journalist is" They don't care about random people doing those things, but if someone with a known terrorist cell association is in the US talking over signal. Or if someone is visiting extremist sites using tails, they'd want to know (and they can using metadata available today). They're not interested in home-grown terrorism or law enforcement, but all other matters of national security don't neatly fall into "foreign vs domestic" buckets. Even if it is all happening outside of the US, the servers Signal uses might be in the US for example. | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, the specific capabilities and operations of intelligence agencies like the NSA are a topic I’ve spent far too much of my life obsessing about. Fortunately, mostly because I’ve been paid to do so, but I should really find better things to do with my free time than rehashing work stuff in HN comments. I think we broadly agree on the details, and whatever differences remain are probably mostly attributable to us looking at the topic from slightly different angles. There's probably not much more we could usefully address on this topic via HN comments, so it is probably a good time to conclude :) If the story behind the shadow brokers leaks is of interest to you, I dumped some details in a reply to a now-flagged thread. It's quite the rabbit hole if you want to dig into it, especially with the whole Hal Martin situation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46186975 |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They don't break encryption, they circumvent it. They get into people's computers and access the stored data after it's been decrypted. They stockpile zero day vulnerabilities and use them against their targets in order to install persistent malware. They intercept equipment and literally implant hardware onto the PCBs that let them access the networks. They have access to hordes of government CCTVs. They have real time satellite imaging. They have cellphone tower data. |
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| ▲ | cperciva a day ago | parent | next [-] | | They don't break encryption, they circumvent it. To quote a former Chief Scientist of the NSA, Rule #1 of cryptanalysis is "look for plaintext". Implementation flaws are very common. | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is all in line with significantly degraded collection capabilities. They can easily go after specific targets, but bulk collection is no longer viable in the same way it was pre-Snowden. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira a day ago | parent [-] | | Yes but I wouldn't say their capabilities have been "greatly" degraded. It's still very much in the "push a button and have someone's entire life history up on the screen" territory. Degraded would be "it is impossible for them to know anything about people unless they send dozens of human agents to stalk them". | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | I think going from "lol we can read and store all the emails sent by everybody" to "lol we can hack any specific person and then read their emails" indicates a massive loss of capability. The first approach enabled them to find targets that were not on their radar based on message contents, they can no longer do that. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira a day ago | parent [-] | | They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know. No doubt they still read texts. I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot. They no doubt have access to the data big tech's mined out of the entire world's population. That capability alone puts them into "bring everything about this guy up on the screen" territory. | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | >They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know. I don't doubt for a second that they can read specific emails, but to suggest that they have bulk collection capabilities within Google or Microsoft is a stretch. NSA lacks the legal authority to compel that, NSA lacks the money to bribe Google or Microsoft and NSA likely lacks the political backing to put the biggest US companies in such a compromised position. >I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot. Sure, but that's increasingly iMessage. | | |
| ▲ | cool_dude85 a day ago | parent [-] | | The NSA lacked legal authority to do this bulk collection prior to the Snowden leaks, and yet that didn't stop them from collecting. Why would I believe that their lack of legal authority today would stop them? | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | Because it's not possible for them to get the same easy access anymore? It was certainly easy in a world where everything wasn't encrypted, that's not the case anymore. |
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| ▲ | yupyupyups a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption. They don't. But they have other options. For example, Cloudflare is an American company that has plaintext access to the traffic of many sites. Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want. |
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| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent | next [-] | | >Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want. This is true given some possible interpretations, false given other possible interpretations. Cloudflare can be secretly compelled to share specific things, there's no legal mechanism to compel Cloudflare to share everything. | | |
| ▲ | morkalork a day ago | parent [-] | | Wasn't the whole thing that the secret courts were too liberal in access they were granting? | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | Not in the sense that they were ordering companies to facilitate full take collection of content by the NSA, no. Hence the famous "SSL added and removed here ;-)" slide | | |
| ▲ | doobiedowner a day ago | parent [-] | | Wasn’t room 641A just the NSA strong arming At&T to facilitate full take collection? | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | Getting AT&T to do that is not the same as getting Google to do that. AT&T does not have much to lose by doing that, Google does. | | |
| ▲ | doobiedowner a day ago | parent [-] | | How do they not have much to lose? They are the ones that have their users on a subscription basis. | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | AT&T customers will not (and did not!) leave because of NSA surveillance, and generally don't have that many options anyway. | | |
| ▲ | morkalork a day ago | parent [-] | | Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like. And speaking of, whatever happened to those? | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | > Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like. Well, no. But Google does significant business in foreign countries and doesn't really want to give an excuse for foreign governments to start aggressively pursuing their own alternatives. > And speaking of, whatever happened to those? Cloudflare still has a warrant canary on their transparency report page, Reddit deleted theirs in 2016. They were never very common. |
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| ▲ | xboxnolifes a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Even if they aren't compelled, if that unencrypted traffic ever moves over a wire that the NSA could tap into... | |
| ▲ | tehjoker a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or if they have a deal or double agent working for them, there is a possibility for "full take" just like at AT&T. Seems pretty likely to me. Allegedly there are tens of thousands of undercover employees stationed throughout the economy in the "signature reduction" program. National security programs don't respect laws when there is something considered "important" if they can get away with it. https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-secret-u... | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | A double agent would not get you "full take", it'd be impossible to hide the traffic. A double agent could maybe feasibly steal keys from Google, but they'd have to do that all the time because the keys are constantly rotated. And even then, stealing keys does not give you passive decryption and active decryption would be incredibly noisy. NSA does not have enough money to spend to be able to incentivize Google to give them full take intercepts either. | | |
| ▲ | tehjoker a day ago | parent [-] | | I think you are not being creative enough with how one might attempt this. For example, splice the cables leading to the datacenter, put an inconspicuous chip in the servers that intercepts the keys and feeds them via wireless signals to a collection point. Perhaps you could even do something clever like put very short range EMF into a metal co-location rack and collect the signals almost totally invisibly using a mesh network of devices built into the metal. There's lots of fun tricks you can think of when you have national resources at your disposal. However, you are forgetting that NSA works for Google. It works to support the promotion of American companies worldwide. They're on the same team, and Google knows that. They even have the same mission: To usefully organize the world's information! Now that Google is openly a military contractor, it's even easier to make this click. Back in the day, you had to read things like this Julian Assuage piece to understand this: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | If we were to accept that the NSA works for Google, there's even less reason to believe that Google would grant NSA full take access to plaintext content. Google has a lot to lose by doing so, and not all that much to gain. Google has also been a leading force in pushing for broader use of encryption on the internet, making the NSAs work significantly more difficult even in a hypothetical scenario where Google is happy to give them anything they want. |
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| ▲ | themafia a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever. The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption. |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Brief list of NSA backdoors: https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever. Even if true, significantly degraded. Probably not true though, NSA has been very leaky and such a story would be kind of devastating for Google. NSA lacks the legal capability to force Google to do so, the money to bribe Google to do so and also almost certainly lacks the political backing to put one of the biggest US companies in such a position. I don't doubt for a second that NSA could hack Google (or just bribe employees with appropriate access) and break into specific Gmail accounts if they wanted to. Bulk collection would be far more difficult to implement. >The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption. They do try, they just haven't been very successful at it. | | |
| ▲ | themafia a day ago | parent [-] | | Google, along with all other major service providers, has a legal portal so law enforcement can process warrant orders. I think all you have to do is hack that portal or process. | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | Sure, and you could also just submit fake warrants as many criminals have successfully done. Neither of these approaches would enable bulk collection. I'm sure the NSA can read essentially any specific emails they're interested in, they just can't do so at anywhere near the scale they used to pre-Snowden. Not only that, these days almost all chats have moved to E2EE platforms. Reading that traffic in a stealthy manner requires compromising endpoints, bulk collection simply isn't possible. |
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| ▲ | ls612 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s not Google room whatever, it’s Cloudflare room whatever. That’s why you don’t hear much about undermining encryption standards anymore, who needs that when you have SSL termination for 40% of the internet? |
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| ▲ | ch2026 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You should read about Project Cloudflare |
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| ▲ | hollow-moe a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They surely don't have any kind of access to letsencrypt root certs whatsoever |
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| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | You can't decrypt anything with letsencrypt root certs, you can issue your own certificates but it would be impossible to use those at any significant scale. It's also worth considering that CT makes it extremely noisy to use such certificates to attack web browsers. | | |
| ▲ | hollow-moe a day ago | parent [-] | | I'd bet they could absolutely proxy large parts of people and make use of these certs. I wonder how much are CT logs scrutinized, would these "rogue" certs be found easily because we can't find traces of them being generated by letsencrypt ? Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ? | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | They couldn't do that at scale without being detected, no. There are various people actively looking for this, and the existing tooling makes it easy to detect. >Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ? Yes, all modern browsers require certificates to be in the CT logs in order for them to be accepted. For example, we can easily pull up logs for gmail.com and see which certificates browsers would accept. https://api.certspotter.com/v1/issuances?domain=gmail.com&ex... |
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| ▲ | cannabis_sam a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is naive to the point where it is indistinguishable from disinformation. Aside from a tiny minority of people applying their own encryption (with offline confirmed public keys) at end points with securely stored air gapped private keys, this information is available to the US government, it’s the god damn job of the NSA. |
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| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | The NSA can hack pretty much anybody, yes. The NSA can no longer collect everything as they were doing pre-Snowden. The crucial difference is that it is no longer nearly as easy for the NSA to identify new targets as it used to be, because they don't have full take access to the vast amounts of content they used to. |
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| ▲ | globalnode a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Dont need to break encryption if you read data from the source -- O/S vendors will do it for you. |
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| ▲ | snorbleck a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| store now... decrypt later... |
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| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | Sure, why not. If quantum computers capable of factoring sufficiently large numbers ever arrive, we'll be living in a very different world anyway. |
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| ▲ | tehjoker a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Israel produced Pegasus for hacking smartphones and taking them over. You don't think NSA can do that? They control all the endpoints they want. |
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| ▲ | monerozcash a day ago | parent [-] | | So what? They can't do that at scale without making a ton of noise. That's a very boring capability compared to what they were able to do pre-Snowden. That's also not a new capability, they were able to do that pre-Snowden too. |
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