Monthly Archives: March 2017

White House

The NSA's onetime top hacker is going to work in the White House.

Rob Joyce, who once ran the National Security Agency's office of Tailored Access Operations -- the hacking division -- is taking on the role of White House cybersecurity coordinator.

Tom Bossert, President Trump's homeland security advisor, told the audience at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event on March 15 that Joyce is officially taking the position last held by Michael Daniel during the Obama administration.

Daniel praised Joyce and the Trump administration for selecting him, saying he is a strong pick and that Joyce will make an excellent cybersecurity coordinator.

"He has long experience in the cyber realm, knows the interagency process very well, and has proven himself as a leader at NSA," Daniel told FCW.

Daniel stressed that Joyce is well versed in both offensive and defensive cyber, having worked both in the TAO as well as the former Information Assurance Directorate, which was focused on protecting U.S. systems and networks from cyberthreats.

Joyce worked with Curt Dukes, who is former head of the now defunct Information Assurance Directorate.

"He brings instant credibility to the position," said Dukes who also stressed Joyce's knowledge of cyber offense and defense.

"Two things I think he should prioritize out of the gate," Dukes added, "review of the administration's insider threat program and review of the vulnerability equity process."

Both of those topics came into the spotlight with the WikiLeaks Vault 7 release of CIA hacking data. It is believed that the information was provided to WikiLeaks by an insider, and the release exposed the extent to which the CIA has hoarded zero-day vulnerabilities, which many believe should be disclosed to vendors and the public to increase cybersecurity.

Daniel said that Joyce should focus on "raising the level of cybersecurity across the entire ecosystem, better integrating cyber capabilities into our foreign policy [and] national security tool set, and improving incident response capabilities will be necessities."

Daniel said that on the defensive side Joyce should focus on boosting the security of federal civilian networks.

While Joyce is receiving high praise from current and former government officials, the question is whether the tech sector will warm to a former NSA hacking chief as the new White House cybersecurity advisor.

In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks about NSA surveillance programs, many in industry became more wary about the NSA and even questioned the information assurance mission and guidance.

Amit Yoran, CEO of Tenable said in a press statement that he feels Joyce has the respect of the security industry. "I'm confident in his ability to work both within the government and with the private sector to improve national cybersecurity," he said.

About the Author

Sean Carberry is an FCW staff writer covering defense, cybersecurity and intelligence. Prior to joining FCW, he was Kabul Correspondent for NPR, and also served as an international producer for NPR covering the war in Libya and the Arab Spring. He has reported from more than two-dozen countries including Iraq, Yemen, DRC, and South Sudan. In addition to numerous public radio programs, he has reported for Reuters, PBS NewsHour, The Diplomat, and The Atlantic.

Carberry earned a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, and has a B.A. in Urban Studies from Lehigh University.

Continue reading here:
NSA vet Rob Joyce to lead cyber at White House - FCW.com

A German court has overturned a decision that would have required Berlin to transport whistleblower Edward Snowden to Germany and shield him from the U.S. government. Germany's Federal Court of Justice published a rulingWednesday in favor of the German government's position that Snowden didn't need to travel to Berlin for questioning from an ongoing investigation into U.S. surveillance.

German officials suggestedSnowden, a former National Security Agency employee who lives in Russia, be questioned via a video link instead. But Snowdenhas refused to cooperate with the investigation unless he is granted immunity and is allowed to travel to Berlin, according to local media reports.

German lawmakers launched theinvestigation into U.S. spyingin March 2014 after Snowden shared documents detailing Washington's mass surveillance of its allies and enemies across the globe, as well as U.S. citizens. After twolawmakers overseeing thegovernment committee's probedemanded that Snowden be calledin as a witness,the federal court ruled in February that the former NSA security contractor should travel to Berlin with the guarantee that he wouldn't be extradited to the U.S.

Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week

Lawmakers from theChristian Democratic Union and Social Democratic Party appealed the ruling. The court's decision made public Wednesday backed up their stance that Snowden wasn't crucial to the investigation. Germany also argued it could not guarantee Snowden's protection because he is wanted in the U.S. on espionage charges.

The Snowden leaks disclosed that Washington spied onChancellor Angela Merkel's phone, among otherrevelations.Lawmakers from the opposition Greenand Left parties had requested that Snowden be allowed into Berlin.

My standard was that spying among friends is not acceptable, and if it happens we have to intervene, Merkel toldlawmakers in February as part of the investigation. She notedthe importance and difficulty of finding the right balance between freedom and security.

ButMartina Renner of the Left Party said the Germangovernmentfears [Snowdens] testimony.

When the leaks were first revealed in 2013, dozens of German political leaders called on Berlin to offer Snowdenasylum.Heiner Geissler, the former general secretary of Merkel's Christian Democrats, said at the time: "Snowden has done the Western world a great service. It is now up to us to help him."

The rest is here:
Edward Snowden Latest: NSA Leaker Won't Leave Russia for Germany Anytime Soon Despite German Investigation - Newsweek

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

The demand comes as the committee is trying to figure out who revealed Flynns identity during his phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December and who illegally leaked the classified contents of those calls to the news media.

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

Masking refers to the protection of identities of Americans who are inadvertently caught up in surveillance for example, of foreign individuals in the U.S. and is referred to as a minimization procedure.

Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-WA) made the request in a letter dated Mar. 15 addressed to Director of the National Security Agency Adm. Michael Rogers, FBI Director James Comey, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

As you know, the Committee has been very concerned regarding the purported unauthorized disclosures of classified information, particularly when they pertain to intelligence collection on, or related to, U.S. persons (USP). To take a prominent example, a January 12, 2017 article in a major newspaper was the first to claim that Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, [then President-Elect] Trumps choice for national security adviser . phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29.

Such stories would appear to contain the unauthorized disclosure of USP identities. This potential misuse is a key reason why the Intelligence Community (IC) has developed robust minimization procedures for the protection of USP information, including requiring the masking of USP identities in most circumstances, they wrote.

However, as recent news stories seem to illustrate, individuals talking to the media would appear to have wantonly disregarded these procedures, they added.

Thus, the leaders have requested all policies and/or procedures each agency uses to determine when to unmask and disseminate the identity of an American and the number of individuals who can approve an unmasking.

They are also asking for the total number of times any unmasked American identity was disseminated between June 2016 and January 2017. They are also asking for the names of those unmasked Americans who had their identities disseminated in response to requests from intelligence community agencies, law enforcement, or any senior Executive Branch officials during that timeframe, in relation to either Trump or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

They also want to know who requested any unmasking and dissemination of individuals related to Trump or Clinton and why.

If those answers are not produced by Friday, Nunes and Schiff will issue a subpoena for them, they said.

The committee is scheduled to question Rogers and Comey at a public hearing on Monday.

Follow this link:
House Intel Leaders Ask FBI, CIA, NSA How Many Americans They 'Unmasked' - Breitbart News

On Sundays Face the Nation, Sen. Rand Paul was asked about President Trumps accusation that President Obama ordered the NSA to wiretap his calls. The Kentucky senator expressed skepticism about the mechanics of Trumps specific charge, saying: I doubt that Trump was a target directly of any kind of eavesdropping. But he thenmade a broader and more crucialpoint about how the U.S. government spies on Americans communications a pointthat is deliberately obscured and concealed by U.S.government defenders.

Paul explained how the NSA routinely and deliberately spies on Americans communications listens to their calls and reads their emails without a judicial warrant of any kind:

The way it works is, the FISA court, through Section 702, wiretaps foreigners and then [NSA] listens to Americans. It is a backdoor search of Americans. And because they have so much data, they can tap type Donald Trump into their vast resources of people they are tapping overseas, and they get all of his phone calls.

And so they did this to President Obama. They 1,227 times eavesdrops on President Obamas phone calls. Then they mask him. But here is the problem. And General Hayden said this the other day. He said even low-level employees can unmask the caller. That is probably what happened to Flynn.

They are not targeting Americans. They are targeting foreigners. But they are doing it purposefully to get to Americans.

Pauls explanationis absolutely correct. That the NSA is empowered to spy on Americans communications without a warrant in direct contravention of the core Fourth Amendment guarantee that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause is the dirty little secret of the U.S. Surveillance State.

As I documented at the height of the controversy over the Snowden reporting, top government officials including President Obama constantly deceived (and still deceive) the public by falsely telling them that their communications cannot be monitored without a warrant. Responding to the furor created over the first set of Snowden reports about domestic spying, Obama sought to reassure Americans by tellingCharlie Rose: What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls by law and by rule, and unless they go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause.

Theright-wing chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, echoed Obama, telling CNNthe NSA is not listening to Americans phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law.

Those statements arecategoricallyfalse. A key purpose of the new 2008 FISA law which then-Senator Obama voted for during the 2008 general election after breaking his primary-race promise to filibuster it was to legalize the once-controversial Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program, which the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing in 2005. The crux of the Bush/Cheney controversywas that they ordered NSA tolisten toAmericans international telephone callswithout warrants which was illegal at the time and the 2008 lawpurported to make that type of domestic warrantless spying legal.

Because warrantless spying on Americans is so anathema to how citizens are taught to think about their government thats what Obama was invoking when he falsely told Rose thatits the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause the U.S. government has long been desperate to hide from Americans the truth about NSAs warrantless powers. U.S. officials and their media spokespeople reflexively misleadthe U.S. public on this critical point.

Its no surprise, then, that as soon as Rand Paul was done uttering the unpleasant, usually hidden truth aboutNSAs domestic warrantless eavesdropping, the cavalcade of ex-intelligence-community officials who are now heavily embedded in American punditry rushed forward to attack him. One former NSA lawyer, who now writes for the ICsmost loyal online platform, Lawfare, expressed grave offense at what she claimed was Sen. Pauls false and irresponsible claim.

The only thinghere thats false and irresponsible is Hennesseys attempt to deceive the public about the domestic spying powers of her former employer. And many other people beyondRand Paul have long made clear just how misleadingHennesseys claim is.

Ted Lieu, the liberal congressman from California, has made it one of his priorities to stop the very power Hennessey and her IC colleagues pretend does not exist: warrantless spying on Americans. The 2008 FISA law that authorized it is set to expire this year, and this is what Lieu tweeted last week about his efforts to repeal that portion of it:

And in response to the IC attacks on Paul on Sunday, Lieu explained:

As Lieu says, the 2008 FISA law explicitly allows NSA without a warrant to listen to Americans calls or read their emails with foreign nationals as long as their intent is to target the foreigner, not the American. Hennesseys defense istrue only in the narrowest and emptiest theoretical sense: that the statutebars the practice of reverse targeting, where the real intent of targeting a foreign national is to monitor what Americans are saying. But the law was designed, and is now routinely used, forexactly that outcome.

How do we know that a key purpose of the 2008 law is to allow the NSA to purposelymonitor Americans communications without a warrant? Because NSA and other national security officials said so explicitly. This is how Jameel Jaffer, then of the ACLU, put it in 2013:

On its face, the 2008 law gives the government authority to engage in surveillance directed at people outside the United States. In the course of conducting that surveillance, though, the government inevitably sweeps up the communications of many Americans. The government often says that this surveillance of Americans communications is incidental, which makes it sound like the NSAs surveillance of Americans phone calls and emails is inadvertent and, even from the governments perspective, regrettable.

But when Bush administration officials asked Congress for this new surveillance power, they said quite explicitly that Americans communications were the communications of most interest to them. See, for example, FISAfor the 21st Century, Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. (2006) (statement of Michael Hayden) (stating, in debate preceding passage of FAAs predecessor statute, that certain communications with one end in the United States are the ones that are most important to us).

The principal purpose of the 2008 law was to make it possible for the government to collect Americans international communications and to collect those communications without reference to whether any party to those communications was doing anything illegal. And a lot of the governments advocacy is meant to obscure this fact, but its a crucial one: The government doesnt need to target Americans in order to collect huge volumes of their communications.

During debate over that 2008 law, the White House repeatedly issued veto threats over proposed amendments from then-Sen. Russ Feingold and others to weaken NSAs ability to use the law to monitor Americans communications without warrants because enabling such warrantless eavesdropping powers was, as they themselves said,a prime objective of the new law.

When the ACLUs Jaffer appeared in 2014 before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to argue that the 2008 FISA law was unconstitutional in terms of how it was written and how NSA exploits it, he made clear exactly how NSA conducts backdoor warrantless searches of Americans communications despite the bar on reverse targeting:

Those who actually work to protect Americans privacy rights and other civil liberties have been warning for years that NSA is able to purposely monitor Americans communications without warrants. Human Rights Watch has warnedthat in reality the law allows the agency to capture potentially vast numbers of Americans communications with people overseas and thus currently underpins some of the most sweeping warrantless NSA surveillance programs that affect Americans and people across the globe. And Marcy Wheeler, in response to Hennesseys misleading claim on Sunday, correctly said: I can point to court docs and congressional claims that entire point of 702 [of the 2008 FISA law] is to ID convos involving Americans.

Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, warned in the Boston Reviewthat the ban on reverse targeting was a farce. In fact, the program tolerates and even contemplates a massive amount of collection of Americans telephone calls, emails, and other electronic communications. Thus, she explains, it is likely that Americans communications comprise a significant portion of the 250 million internet transactions (and undisclosed number of telephone conversations) intercepted each year without a warrant or showing of probable cause.

Even more alarming is the power NSA now has to search the immense amount of Americans communications data it routinely collects without a warrant. As Goitein explained: The government may intentionally search for this information even though it would have been illegal, under section 702s reverse targeting prohibition, for the government to have such intent at the time of collection.

In the wake of the controversy triggered by Trumps accusations about Obamas tapping his phones, Goitein wrote a new article explaining that there are numerous ways the government could have spied on the communications of Trump (or any American) without a warrant. She emphasized that there have long been concerns, on both the right and left, that the legal constraints on foreign intelligence surveillance contain too many loopholes that can be exploited to access information about Americans without judicial oversight or evidence of wrongdoing.

This is what Rand Paul meant when he said on Sunday that because [NSA analysts]have so much data, they can tap type Donald Trump into their vast resources of people they are tapping overseas, and they get all of his phone calls. And while as Ive argued previously anyleaks that reveal lying by officials are criminal yet justified even if they come from the CIA or NSA, Paul is also correct that these domestic warrantless eavesdropping powers vestthe Deep State or, if you navely prefer, our noble civil servants with menacing powers against even the highest elected officials.

The warrantless gathering and searching of vast amounts of communications dataessentially becomes a dossier that can be used even against domestic opponents. This is what Snowden meant in his much-maligned but absolutely true statement in his first interview with us back in 2013 that I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email. As Paul put it on Face the Nation: It is very dangerous, because they are revealing that now to the public. Thats a serious concern no matter how happy one might beto see Donald Trump damaged or how much one now adores the intelligence agencies.

Congress has now begun debating whether to allow these provisions of the 2008 law to expire at the end of the year, whether to meaningfully reform them, or whether to let them be renewed again. The post-9/11 history has been that once even temporary measures (such as the Patriot Act) are enacted, they become permanent fixtures of our political landscape.

Perhaps the growing recognition that nobody is immune from such abusive powers will finally reverse that tide. Those eager to preserve these domestic surveillance powers in their maximalist state rely on the same tactic that has worked so well for them for 15 years now: rank disinformation.

If nothing else, this debate ought to finally obliterate that pleasing though utterly false myth that the U.S. government does not and cannot spy on Americans communications without warrants. It does so constantly, easily, deliberately, and by design.

Go here to see the original:
Rand Paul Is Right: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans ... - The Intercept

A contentious piece of U.S. law giving the National Security Agency broad authority to spy on people overseas expires at the end of the year. Expect heated debate about the scope of U.S. surveillance law leading up to Dec. 31.

One major issue to watch involves the way the surveillance treats communications from U.S. residents. Critics say U.S. emails, texts, and chat logs -- potentially millions of them -- are caught up in surveillance authorized bySection 702of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

U.S. residents who communicate with foreign targets of the NSA surveillance have their data swept up in what the NSA calls "incidental" collection. The FBI can then search those communications, but it's unclear how often that happens.

A primer on Section 702:

Section 702 of FISA is the authorization the NSA needs to run programs like Prism and Upstream, revealed in 2013 by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. The U.S. intelligence community has called Section 702 surveillance its "most important tool" in its fight against terrorism, noted Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, during a March 1 congressional hearing.

Section 702 surveillance is "critical" in the U.S. governments fight against terrorism, added April Doss, a lawyer at the NSA for 13 years.

At the agency, "I had the opportunity to witness firsthand the critical importance of robust intelligence information in supporting U.S. troops and in detecting terrorist plans and intentions that threatened the safety of the U.S. and its allies," she said in testimony March 1.

In the Prism program, the NSA and FBI allegedly gained access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other internet companies as a way to collect audio, video, emails, and other content.

Upstream collectionallegedly involved the NSA intercepting telephone and internet traffic by tapping internet cables and switches.

Under 702, FISA allows the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence to authorize "the targeting of persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information." The U.S.Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reviews the targeting and minimization procedures adopted by the government and determines whether they comport with the statutory restrictions and the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says it conducts its surveillance with the "knowledge of the service provider," although several internet companies have denied cooperating with the NSA.

Doss and other defenders of Section 702 surveillance say that it's targeted, not so-called "bulk" surveillance. But the descriptions of both Prism and Upstream from the Snowden leaks and subsequent government descriptions suggest the surveillance is widespread. The intelligence community has long arguedthe legal definition of "bulk" surveillance is very specific.

The NSA also collected U.S. telephone records for several years under a separate program. The NSA and the FBI pointed to a different provision of FISA, Section 501, as authorization for the controversial metadata collection program. Congress curtailed the phone metadata collection program in the USA Freedom Act, passed in mid-2015.

Congress is certain to extend the surveillance authority in some form, even though many tech companies and privacy groups are pushing lawmakers to rein in the NSAs surveillance programs, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Most lawmakers see value in extending Section 702, although many Democrats and some Republicans have talked about ending or limiting the ability of the FBI and other intelligence agencies to search for U.S. communications swept up in the surveillance.

Given that Section 702 is one of the main authorizations for the NSA to conduct foreign surveillance, not even the most ardent privacy advocates believe Congress will let the provision expire.

Section 702 prohibits the NSA from targeting people inside the U.S., but the agency, in "incidental" collection, gathers information from U.S. residents who are communicating with the agencys overseas targets.

The law then allows the FBI and other intelligence agencies to search those U.S. communications for evidence of crimes, including crimes not connected to terrorism. Many digital rights groups, along with some lawmakers, want to end this so-called backdoor search of Section 702 records.

This collection of U.S. communications without a warrant is, "in a word, wrong," Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, said during the March 1 hearing.

Details about the incidental collection are fuzzy. Going back to 2011, lawmakers have repeatedly asked for numbers of U.S. residents affected but have received no details from the ODNI.

In addition to the incidental collection of U.S. residents' communications, privacy advocates complain about an expansive surveillance of foreigners allowed under Section 702.

The provision allows the NSA to collect foreign intelligence information from "anyone" outside the U.S. not just suspected agents of foreign powers, said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "Intelligence information" is also defined broadly, he said.

"Once you remove that, it's open season on many foreigners who pose no threat to U.S. national security," he added.

House members, in their March 1 hearing, talked little about the impact on people outside the U.S. At this point, it seems unlikely that U.S. lawmakers will limit the provisions foreign data collection.

Privacy advocates have an ace up their sleeves, however. Several privacy groups have encouraged the European Union to get involved in the debate and threaten to revoke Privacy Shield, the cross-Atlantic agreement that allows U.S. companies to handle EU residents'data, unless significant changes are made to 702.

The European Commission "has made it clear that it takes seriously its obligations to review the Privacy Shield Agreement," said Nathan White, senior legislative manager at Access Now, a digital rights group.

EU nations understand surveillance is can be necessary, but "surveillance must respect human rights," White added. "Surveillance doesnt trump human rights responsibilities."

The U.S. intelligence communitys surveillance programs have stirred up new controversies in recent weeks. In early March, President Donald Trump, in a series of tweets, accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower in New York City during the last presidential campaign.

While Trump has provided no evidence of the bombshell charge, it appears that the NSA intercepted some of his campaign staffers' communications when they talked to foreign surveillance targets. That type of surveillance would likely be authorized by Section 702.

A few days later, WikiLeaks published more than 8,700 documents that it says came from the CIA. The documents describe the spy agency's efforts to compromise iPhone, Android devices, smart TVs, automobile software, and major operating systems.

The CIA, however, runs separate surveillance programs from the NSA. CIA surveillance is supposed to be focused on specific foreign targets, as opposed to the widespread surveillance that the NSA does under the authority of Section 702. The CIA says it is "legally prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance targeting individuals here at home, including our fellow Americans."

Go here to see the original:
The NSA's foreign surveillance: 5 things to know - ITworld

Stephanie Slade"When people in government assert that the NSA would never collect communications on an Americanany Americanthey are lying," Edward Snowden said during a taping of the Intercepted podcast with Jeremy Scahill at South by Southwest (SXSW) this morning.

The statement came in response to a question from Scahill about whether the intelligence community "would in fact collect data or communications on lawmakers or even the president." The exiled National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower proceeded to criticize the powers that be for playing "word games" to get out of admitting it's already snooping on all of us, including elected office holders.

"In the plain use of language, what collect means to you and mewhen something travels across the phone line, when something travels across the internet line, they pick it up, they save it, and they drop it in their databasethat happens to everyone right now," he said. "Does not matter whether you're the president. Doesn't matter whether you're a congressman. Doesn't matter whether you're a lawyer, an accountant. Doesn't matter if it's you sitting in the room right now. These things happen by default. That's how, of course, the system of surveillance that we have works."

Officials deny as much, according to Snowden, by quietly redefining a critical word. "What's happening is these intelligence agencies, these lawyers up at [the Department of Justice] and up with the president, are saying that, to them, collect doesn't mean that we copied your communications, that we put it in the bucket, and that we saved it in case we want to look at it," he explained. "To them, collect means that they take it out of the bucket and actually look at it and read it."

Snowden added that officials also engage in an illegal practice called reverse targeting while pretending otherwise. "If you are an American citizen and they say, 'I want to look at your communications' and 'I want to listen to this person's phone calls and everyone they contacted,' this in theory is supposed to require a warrant," he said. But they get around that, because "if you're in that bucket and you don't have a U.S. passport, you're not a U.S. citizen, no social security card, you don't have a green card so you're not legally privileged as a U.S. person," you're not protected.

"So if they look at the other side of [the American's] communication, the communication that went overseas or involved a non-U.S. person in any way"even if it was just the target of an attempted foreign cyberattack, he said"that's entirely legal so long as I'm not targeting him officially. I'm interested in this 'known system that's affiliated with Chinese espionage' or whatever. It just happens to be Obama's Blackberry."

"That happens all day long," Snowden continued. "People at NSA are doing that right now. It's legally prohibited, but when you hit certain stop points in your investigation, you're actually coached to do this kind of thing."

Read the original:
Snowden at SXSW: Don't Believe Their Word Games; The NSA Collects Data on Us All - Reason (blog)

Advanced computing experts at the National Security Agency and the Department of Energy are warning that China is "extremely likely" to take leadership in supercomputing as early as 2020, unless the U.S. acts quickly to increase spending.

China's supercomputing advances are not only putting national security at risk, but also U.S. leadership in high-tech manufacturing. If China succeeds, it may "undermine profitable parts of the U.S. economy," according to a report titled U.S. Leadership in High Performance Computing by HPC technical experts at the NSA, the DOE, the National Science Foundation and other agencies.

"To maintain U.S. leadership in HPC," the report says, "a surge" of U.S. "investment and action is needed to address HPC priorities."

Concern about China's technical advances have been raised before by U.S. scientists and industry groups, but never in such striking terms -- or by representatives of a spy agency.

The report stems from a workshop held in September that was attended by 60 people, many scientists, 40 of whom work in government, with the balance representing industry and academia. The report, which summarizes that meeting, was just posted online.

The threat from China is so acute that "absent aggressive action by the U.S. -- the U.S. will lose leadership and not control its own future in HPC," the report states.

Indeed, the report says that "assuming status quo conditions, the meeting participants believe that a change in HPC leadership was extremely likely, with only minor disagreement on the timescale; many suggested that China would be leading the U.S. as early as 2020."

China supercomputing systems have been leading the Top 500 list, the global ranking of supercomputers, for several years. But that's not a measure of supercomputing leadership alone.

One workshop attendee, Paul Messina, a computer scientist and distinguished fellow at Argonne National Labs and the head of its Exascale Computing Project, sketched out the HPC leadership criteria: It means leadership in producing and using systems, as well as "first mover advantage." It also means staying in the lead at all times. The U.S. needs to control its HPC destiny and "can't depend on other countries to sell us what we need," he said in an email.

Something to keep in mind is that this report was written at a time when many assumed that supercomputing funding was not under threat. The report calls for more spending while the Trump administration, along with the Republican-controlled Congress, is planning major cuts in the federal budget.

"National security requires the best computing available, and loss of leadership in HPC will severely compromise our national security," the report says. "Loss of leadership in HPC could significantly reduce the U.S. nuclear deterrence and the sophistication of our future weapons systems."

Among those at the meeting was Barry Bolding, a senior vice president and chief strategy officer at supercomputer company Cray. "I will say from Cray's view, [the report] accurately reflects the discussion of the workshop and mostly accurately reflects some of our primary concerns regarding HPC competitiveness."

Steve Conway, an HPC analyst and research vice president at Hyperion Research, said the meeting "and report are important for alerting the U.S. HPC community, especially government officials, to the dangers of taking U.S. HPC leadership for granted when other nations, particularly China, are intent on seizing global leadership of the market for supercomputers."

The report makes three overarching observations about China's Sunway TaihuLight system, which at 93 petaflops, is ranked first on the Top500 list of supercomputers.

The TaihuLight supercomputer is "homegrown," and includes processors that were designed and fabricated in China. The Chinese chip design "includes architectural innovations," and was designed using "a true co-design approach" where the applications are tuned to take advantage of the chip design, the report said.

The machine "is not a stunt," the report notes, meaning China didn't develop this system for bragging rights. The machine "is being used for cutting edge research," and three of the six finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize, the top research award in HPC, were the result of Chinese efforts.

The report offers something particularly insightful about China's motivations.

"Meeting participants, especially those from industry, noted that it can be easy for Americans to draw the wrong conclusions about what HPC investments by China mean without considering China's motivations," the report states.

"These participants stressed that their personal interactions with Chinese researchers and at supercomputing centers showed a mindset where computing is first and foremost a strategic capability for improving the country; for pulling a billion people out of poverty; for supporting companies that are looking to build better products, or bridges, or rail networks; for transitioning away from a role as a low-cost manufacturer for the world; for enabling the economy to move from 'Made in China' to 'Made by China,' " the report states.

But it also pointed out that the computer codes developed for industry, "are good proxies for the tools needed to design many different weapons systems."

Read more from the original source:
NSA, DOE say China's supercomputing advances put US at risk - Computerworld