Daily Archives: December 30, 2014

CSI/NSA: Life Emulates Art
C.S.I. The N.S.A. both have ties that bind in unison, that effect our everyday lives. C.S.I. (Crime Scene Investigation), modern forensics can often be e...

By: Spoken Knight Ministries

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CSI/NSA: Life Emulates Art - Video

New material leaked by Edward Snowden shows which Internet security protocols the NSA had beaten as of 2012 and which encryption tools were still stymying cyber spies.

Digital spies in the National Security Administration cracked Skype's encryption back in 2011 and can make quick work of the VPNs many businesses believe make their communications secure.

But more robust security protocols and encryption techniques may still be secure from prying NSA eyes, according to documents revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Der Spiegel has the rundown on the NSA's battle against what its training documents described as the "threat" of secure Internet communication. Snowden's documentation is several years old now, of course. Whether or not U.S. cyber spies have managed to crack some of the toughest nuts in the intervening years, like Tor network communications, isn't known.

First, the security layers that the NSA considered to be "trivial," "minor," or "moderate" challenges to get through as of 2012. These include such tasks as simply monitoring a document as it travels across the Internet, spying on Facebook chats, and decrypting mail.ru emails, according to the Snowden documents.

But there are others that NSA cryptologists have had a much tougher time defeating, Der Spiegel noted, as documented in their sorting of threats "into five levels corresponding to the degree of the difficulty of the attack and the outcome, ranging from 'trivial' to a 'catastrophic.'"

"Things first become troublesome at the fourth level," according to Der Spiegel, which culled its report from a specific NSA presentation on Internet security.

As of 2012, the agency was having "major problems in its attempts to decrypt messages sent through heavily encrypted email service providers like Zoho or in monitoring users of the Tor network," the newspaper reported. Other "major," or fourth-level challenges included open-source protocols like Truecrypt and OTR instant-messaging encryption.

"Experts agree it is far more difficult for intelligence agencies to manipulate open source software programs than many of the closed systems developed by companies like Apple and Microsoft. Since anyone can view free and open source software, it becomes difficult to insert secret back doors without it being noticed," Der Spiegel noted.

The toughest method of Internet communication for the NSA to crack? It's not any one dark Internet tool but rather a bunch of them layered on top of each other, according to the Snowden documents.

Read more from the original source:
NSA Docs Reveal Spy-Proof Encryption Tools

BERLIN In a crescendo of anger over American espionage, Germany expelled the CIAs top operative, launched an investigation of the vast U.S. surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden and extracted an apology from President Obama for the years that U.S. spies had reportedly spent monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkels cellphone.

In an address to Parliament last year, Merkel warned that U.S.-German cooperation would be curtailed and declared that trust needs to be rebuilt.

But the cooperation never really stopped. The public backlash over Snowden often obscured a more complicated reality for Germany and other aggrieved U.S. allies. They may be dismayed by the omnivorous nature of the intelligence apparatus the United States has built since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but they are also deeply dependent on it.

Over the past year, Germany has secretly provided detailed information to U.S. spy services on hundreds of German citizens and legal residents suspected of having joined insurgent groups in Syria and Iraq, U.S. and German officials said.

Germany has done so reluctantly to enlist U.S. help in tracking departed fighters, determining whether they have joined al-Qaeda or the Islamic State and, perhaps most importantly, whether they might seek to bring those groups violent agendas back to Germany.

The stream of information includes names, cellphone numbers, e-mail addresses and other sensitive data that German security services ever mindful of the abuses by the Nazi and Stasi secret police have been reluctant even to collect, let alone turn over to a suspect ally.

A senior German intelligence official compared the U.S. relationship to a dysfunctional marriage in which trust has bottomed out but a breakup is not an option. Amid what Germans see as evidence of repeated betrayal, the question remaining is whether the husband is a notorious cheater or can be faithful again, said the official, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. Were just going to have to give it another try. There is no alternative. Divorce is out of the question.

More than 550 German citizens have gone to Syria, officials said, and at least nine have killed themselves in suicide attacks.

The exodus is part of a much broader flow of more than 15,000 foreign fighters who have entered Syria over the past four years from 80 countries. At least 3,000 of them are from Europe the largest contingent of Islamist jihadists with Western passports that counterterrorism agencies have ever faced.

As a result, nearly every country in Europe is turning over significant data on their own departed fighters to the United States. Some of these nations, including Germany, have capable security and intelligence agencies of their own. But even their combined resources probably cannot match the scope and reach of their U.S. counterparts.

The rest is here:
Backlash in Berlin over NSA spying recedes as threat from Islamic State rises