An American Cryptographer's Worst Nightmare? How About... The NSA Deliberately Weakening Cryptographic Standards?

(This is only a parody of the NSA logo.)

This article on Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green's blog Cryptographic Engineering contains enough to make you lie awake nights. Or not, if you're a sound sleeper. The crux: While most businesses and all nations today assume that it's good — for business and for national security and for international relations — if everyone has readily available secure encryption for documents and similarly secure networks for the transmission of securely encrypted documents, the New York Times published on Thursday an article forcing everyone to consider seriously the apparent likelihood that the NSA has been waging a war against encryption, including "working with industry to weaken encryption standards, making design changes to cryptographic software, and pushing international encryption standards it knows it can break."

I am no expert. Certainly I am not qualified to comment on the technological underpinnings at risk here, and I'm not going to try to speculate on the consequences to business and diplomacy; there are plenty of qualified people engaging in just such speculation. In my case, encrypted documents have impacted me about as minimally as possible: though all my clients used what was available to them, no one spent much time thinking about it.

Now we learn that one of the ultimate US government security agencies has been secretly undermining the entire structure on which secure storage and transmission of documents is based. How does that make us all feel?

Welcome to 1984... thirty years late.

Here is Mr. Green's summary of the NSA's activity:

If you haven't read the NYT or Guardian stories, you probably should. The TL;DR is that the NSA has been doing some very bad things. At a combined cost of $250 million per year, they include:

1. Tampering with national standards (NIST is specifically mentioned) to promote weak, or otherwise vulnerable cryptography.
2. Influencing standards committees to weaken protocols.
3. Working with hardware and software vendors to weaken encryption and random number generators.
4. Attacking the encryption used by 'the next generation of 4G phones'.
5. Obtaining cleartext access to 'a major internet peer-to-peer voice and text communications system' (Skype?)
6. Identifying and cracking vulnerable keys.
7. Establishing a Human Intelligence division to infiltrate the global telecommunications industry.
8. And worst of all (to me): somehow decrypting SSL connections.

All of these programs go by different code names, but the NSA's decryption program goes by the name 'Bullrun' so that's what I'll use here.

Your government and your tax dollars at work. Have a nice day!

(H/T TarheelDem on FDL.)

Bruce Schneier's Guide To Secure Communications Despite NSA Surveillance

Schneier has been reading hundreds of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden and now has some things to say about how to keep your internet communications secure. A word to the wise...

Do We Have A 'Coalition Of The Willing' On Syria? Umm... No

Juan Cole explains the reaction Obama received from the rest of the G20 nations that met Thursday in St. Petersburg, Russia. Of the world's largest 20 nations ranked by economy, only the US and France favored military action against Syria. The big surprise, in Cole's opinion?

But the big surprise was that the European Union came out with position closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin than to Obama.

You think maybe the Europeans would like Obama to rethink the matter?

Politically Savvy Email Software

I often click through to these petitions or automated emails to my US Senators, Cornyn and Cruz. Once in a rare while I receive an email reply. This afternoon, I received a reply from Sen. Cruz... 

Mozilla Thunderbird marked his reply... SPAM.

RAND Study: Destroying Syria's Chemical Weapons Would Require Ground Troops

TPM's Sahil Kapur:

The United States would be embarking on a dangerous fool’s errand if it attempts to wipe out Syria’s chemical weapon capability, according to a new peer-reviewed study by the RAND Corporation, a respected global policy think tank.

But the study, which provided an operational overview of the situation on the ground, also concluded that U.S. air strikes have the potential to reduce the regime’s ability and its incentive to deploy such weapons in the future.

“In spite of often casual rhetoric about ‘taking out’ Syria’s chemical weapon capability, the practical options for doing so have serious limitations, and attempting it could actually make things worse,” write authors Karl P. Mueller, Jeffrey Martini, and Thomas Hamilton.

...

The study warns of “substantial” collateral damage if the U.S. attempts to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, arguing that locating and striking the relevant facilities would require “very precise and detailed intelligence.” It concludes that the prospects for scrapping Syria’s chemical weapons via air strikes alone “do not appear promising” and “would require ground forces” in order to have a realistic chance at success.

...

"When will they ever learn? When will they e...ver learn?" Learn what? That "limited interventions" almost never are? That US actions in one theater affect actions of other countries and organizations around the world?

The best course for President Obama is to ignore Sen. Get‑Off‑My‑Lawn and Sen. Graham‑Cracker and not enter another futile war. Maybe he thinks to distract people from their troubles at home, but with one in three working-age Americans out of work, doesn't he have better things to spend resources on than yet another Vietnam War? "How many times..." must we do this?

For the millions... yes, millions... of Americans who haven't a clue where Syria is, here's a clue:

Will that picture become as familiar as the map of Vietnam, or of Iraq? When the "accomplishments" of an assault on Syria are totaled up a year... five years... 20 years from now when we get our troops out of there, how many American troops will have died? how many Syrians, military and civilian? How many other international relations will the US have weakened or utterly wrecked?

This is a really, really bad idea. For Obama, it is a ploy to cover a domestic failure that is admittedly not primarily of his making, but it is still a truly terrible idea.

Spiegel: NSA Hacked Al Jazeera For Sources

How rare... the NSA spying on someone other than Americans at home! Still, via DSWright at FDL, we find that Spiegel Online International discovered among documents released by Edward Snowden a March 23, 2006 document showing that "the NSA's Network Analysis Center managed to access and read communication by "interesting targets" that was specially protected by [Al Jazeera]."

One could argue endlessly over whether this was legitimately the NSA's job. One could so argue because nobody outside the NSA and probably a few members of Congress and the president is permitted to know what is legitimately the NSA's job. This was not so much a problem until the entire federal government became a patchwork of three-letter agencies whose internal workings were, as far as the public is concerned, completely secret. Then it became a real problem: when those three-letter agencies govern the US to a point where it doesn't really matter who the American public elects to Congress or to the White House, our government is effectively totalitarian, no matter what noises are made about "freedom 'n' democracy." Have a nice day!

Joe Richard The Plumber

Based on this morning's experience, I'd hire... or vote for... Richard any day over Boastful Joe.

Richard, a very young man, hired by my landlord because his old plumber died, did efficient and excellent work replacing two faucets and a tub plug, was courteous... and to Stella's delight, he cleaned up his workspace.

He's definitely a "keeper" in my opinion. So are the faucets!

The Obama Administration's Labor Day Message

Here it is...

[crickets]

Oh, wait, here's their Labor Day message:

SYRIA syria sYrIA SYRia Syria ...

Thanks to Flood the Zone, Inc., we can now rest assured that the evildoers in Syria will be bravely confronted.*

* and the workers of America will continue to be bravely ignored. Priorities, you know!

My American And Texan Citizenship Restored

Why does the eagle so seldom face left?

Both were suspended due to my failure to drive a motor vehicle or keep one in working condition for a period of over eight months. Yesterday, I got a new battery (no loss there; the old one was already marginal before I entered the hospital in December); today, I gave my car a much-needed oil change and had a burned-out brake light replaced. I drove from the repair place directly to an utterly institutional fast-food eatery (extra credit toward restored citizenship?) and treated myself to a foot-long veggies-and-cheese sandwich (I know; I'm pushing it with that one, but Stella doesn't like the food there) as a sort of welcome-home treat.

So now I'm once again American, at least until the first time I try to vote in a general election after my voter card is stamped "Voted Democratic Primary" and I cold-cock the mofo who tries to stop me...

Nothing To Lear At — UPDATED

How sharper than a serpent's child it is to have a thankless tooth! (Or something like that.)

Having not been to the dentist in several years, I seem to have acquired a thankless tooth; please excuse one or more absences while I deal with it.

UPDATE Tues. morning: the pain diminished considerably overnight, but I'm not done with the problem yet. I'll be content if I can get through two or three busy days before I have to make the "emergency" dental run.

UPDATE Thurs. evening: the pain seems almost completely gone. There's no evidence of damage to the gums (damn, it surely felt like there was while it was going on!) and I don't think an "emergency" trip will be necessary. Now I can deal with getting my car back to running condition, without which my s.o. says she'll stop giving me rides in hers... well, no, Stella didn't actually threaten, but she persuaded me, as only she can, just how much I need to get the car working and get myself back to driving. The first task is about done... I had the battery replaced today and drove the car a few blocks, heading back home when I discovered the brake light switch wasn't working on the right rear, for brakes or for flashers. But tomorrow is another day...

GOP Vs. ObamaCare: Kill It? Greg Sargent Discusses The Bind Boehner Is In

Via Paul Krugman, The Plum Line's Greg Sargent discusses Speaker John Boehner's likelihood of success in selling a "GOP declares victory, celebrates and goes home" approach to his unruly band of thugs that make up the GOP House caucus. Hint: the chances are between that long, tall cowboy and that member of the Sisters of Perpetual Baseless Hope...

Dilemma

Browsing a bookshelf full of miscellaneous social, political and historical works, doing some reshelving as I browsed, I came across my old copy of The Right to Privacy by Caroline Kennedy and Ellen Alderman, shelved next to their companion volume, In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action.

This dilemma sprang immediately to my mind...

Should I shelve them with

• history, or
• fiction?

Obama Admin Asks Supremes To Reverse 1st Circuit, Allow Warrantless Cell Phone Searches — UPDATED

Jonathan Turley has the basics.

I feel no real need to comment on this; what Obama is asking for is so clearly a Fourth Amendment violation that any court... well, any court not having Roberts and Scalia as members... should promptly reject the request. That means we do indeed have cause for concern. 'Nuff said.

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: Fifty years after the March on Washington, fifty years after the Rev. King's most famous speech, another powerful, well‑spoken African American man, a man twice elected President of the United States, exhorted his Justice Department to approach the Supreme Court, seeking... no, not jobs, though God knows we need jobs, and no, not freedom, indeed quite the opposite... but, rather, permission to spy on every American who uses a cell phone, without obtaining even a simple warrant beforehand, because he knows that "no Warrants shall issue" in the absence of probable cause to believe those millions of individuals have committed even the most minimal crime. To this height has our African American population ascended... and to this depth has President Obama dragged them down again. Shame on you, Mr. President... shame!

UPDATE: thanks to L'Enfant de la Haute Mer, in comments to this post, please read Sarah Lazare's article on Juan Cole's Informed Comment, "Obama wants all the info in your Smart Phone without a Warrant (Lazare)." This 2007 case truly makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment. Here's what D. S. Wright of Firedoglake says, quoted in that post (link found and added manually, because Wright's article is also worth reading):

“We know the Obama Administration is spying on the American people’s phone calls and emails. Now they want some of their activity legalized,” declared D.S. Wright on FiredogLake. “It seems to be a two tracked system—if it’s illegal the government will do it in secret and if its legal they will do it openly.”

It's like the old coin-flip joke: Heads, they win; tails, you lose.

UPDATE 2, 8/24/2013: Amazing... as reported by D.S. Wright again yesterday, quoted from Bloomberg, now the NSA itself is admitting that some analysts intentionally abused their spying powers multiple times. NOW will there be better oversight? Probably not. Heads, they win; tails, we lose...

Newly Declassified: FISA Court Ruled NSA Domestic Spying Program Unconstitutional

Via FDL's DSWright, from the WaPo:

NSA gathered thousands of Americans’ e-mails before court ordered it to revise its tactics
By Ellen Nakashima, Published: August 21 [Washington Post]

For several years, the National Security Agency unlawfully gathered tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-revised collection method, according to a 2011 secret court opinion.

The redacted 85-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday, states that, based on NSA estimates, the spy agency may have been collecting as many as 56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year.

In a strongly worded opinion, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court expressed consternation at what he saw as a pattern of misleading statements by the government and hinted that the NSA possibly violated a criminal law against spying on Americans.

“For the first time, the government has now advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe,” John D. Bates, then the surveillance court’s chief judge, wrote in his Oct. 3, 2011, opinion.

...

[Note: to the best of my knowledge, Judge Bates is not related to me. - SB]

Please look at your calendar and note the difference between today's date and the date of the secret opinion. The FISA court has known about the NSA's surveillance of Americans... and known that it was probably a criminal violation... for nearly two years. Yet the court released no public statement about that probable criminality, and the spying went on. And President Obama, as recently as two days ago, in remarks to comedian Jay Leno, continues to deny that there is, in fact, spying on Americans.

What is wrong with this picture?

Baton Rouge, We Have A Problem

I'm sure the Louisiana GOP will simply blame the partisan leaning of Public Policy Polling. I'm more inclined to blame unmitigated GOPer ignorance:

Poll: Louisiana GOPers Unsure If Katrina Response Was Obama’s Fault
Tom Kludt [TPM] 10:33 AM EDT, Wednesday August 21, 2013

A significant chunk of Louisiana Republicans evidently believe that President Barack Obama is to blame for the poor response to the hurricane that ravaged their state more than three years before he took office.

...

Education dysfunction?

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.

...

[/rolls eyes]

Several decades ago, a friend of mine casually offered me a job on the staff of a major Louisiana university's computer services department, which he was being hired to direct. I turned him down. Does the article excerpted above give you an idea why?

Marian McPartland (1918–2013)

One of the original great jazz pianists. Jazz radio broadcaster, Pacifica Radio and NPR. Participant in that amazing photo of 57 jazz artists in Harlem in 1958. Jazz composer until she was almost 90 years old. Wikipedia praises her "encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz standards," and lists seven (7) different major categories of jazz into which her long career carried her. Oh, and she was British, and eventually OBE. (She studied at Guildhall. So did several of my early music buddies, many years later.)

They don't make 'em like McPartland anymore. She will be greatly missed.

Bradley Manning's Sentence: 35 Years

Details here.

Particulars aside, the Obama administration may have succeeded in finding what many White House residents have long desired: a way to shut down whistleblowers. And our nation is the worse for it, again putting aside the particulars of Bradley Manning's case.

I spent some time thinking about how social and political change has been accomplished in my adult lifetime, and how Manning fits into the pattern. Very little has been accomplished to the benefit of our nation without premeditated civil disobedience on the part of determined citizens who refuse to be intimidated. Coward that I am, I have never "been to jail for justice" (the closest I've come is having been "escorted" by police away from the scene of a nonviolent Iraq War protest in the middle of Main Street), but most of my friends and political allies have been jailed at some point in their activist lives. For decades now, arguably much longer than that, civil disobedience has been part of our system, without which essential change would not happen. Likewise, leaks of information about illegal government actions, information held secret for the worst of purposes, have been utterly essential to the improvement of the worst aspects of our government. Civil disobedience and leaks are crucial to the improvement of the government in any free society; we can't do without them.

And yet Obama & Co. along with his DoJ wielding the antiquated Espionage Act, not to mention the police departments of many if not most large cities, not to mention other agents of government and a growing involvement of the military, are making their very best attempt to render the consequences of civil disobedience and leaks so unpleasant, so disruptive of a citizen's life, that few citizens will undertake it, in fear of those very consequences.

Believe me: whatever Obama and his henchmen may think, the nation is the worse for the loss of whistleblowers and nonviolent demonstrators. To turn the ACLU's "safe and free" saying on its head, we are now less safe... AND less free. Go ahead and chant "U-S-A... U-S-A..." all you want; the nation has suffered a devastating loss of all the elements that many of us treasured in the U-S-A. And this presidential administration, like the previous one, is very much to blame.

Freedom of speech as a corrective to governmental malfeasance may someday return to America. But it's going to be a long, hard road back...

Fukushima: How Bad Is It, And How Bad Will It Become?

The typography alone
should have been a clue

This bad... and not getting any better. In fact, according to this interview with Christina Consolo, "founder and host of Nuked Radio," 1300 spent fuel rods must be extracted in an absolutely error-free manual process, or any one mistake in handling a rod could result in its going critical, triggering a cascading failure, an "above-ground meltdown, releasing radioactive fallout with no way to stop it." Given the danger, one might be inclined not to attempt the high-risk manual process... but doing nothing has consequences statistically just as risky over time.

Remember the 1957 Disney show "Our Friend the Atom," with its glowing (ahem) claims of "power too cheap to meter"? Right. How about "power no one will live to meter"?

The problem with nuclear power is that it requires only one catastrophic failure... ever... to wreak havoc in the very worst way, and all odds aside, we've had that catastrophe at Fukushima. Hold your breath... no, that won't do any good, either...

UPDATE: thanks to ellroon, who did a much better job excerpting the original ZNet interview than I did.

Ted Cruz Releases His Birth Certificate And Thereby Proves...

Which finger, Ted?

... that he is a Canadian citizen... as well as a US citizen, but hey, we didn't start the process of accusing presidential candidates of citizenship problems, and Cruz does, in fact, hold dual citizenship. Via TPM, here's the Dallas Morning News, to which Cruz released a copy of his birth certificate:

WASHINGTON — Born in Canada to an American mother, Ted Cruz became an instant U.S. citizen. But under Canadian law, he also became a citizen of that country the moment he was born.

Unless the Texas Republican senator formally renounces that citizenship, he will remain a citizen of both countries, legal experts say.

...

That's odd... when the same question arose over President Obama's birth, I don't recall any news sources printing the likes of the Dallas Morning News paragraph 1 above, saying that he was American because he was born to an American mother. I guess that only applies if you're a Republican.

What does Teddy-boy say? What do you expect... he lies about it, disclaiming the Canadian citizenship-by-birth, though he has never formally renounced it, saying there is no need for him to do so.

Far be it from me to question Sen. Cruz's loyalty to the U.S. Far be it, because I just don't know the man; I'm not wealthy enough to run in his circles. But if you think for a moment about the clause in Article II Section 1 of the US Constitution that requires a President of the United States to be a natural born citizen, the clear implication is that our founders felt that a natural born citizen is more likely to have that presumably unbreakable bond of loyalty to one's place of birth. On that basis, we have to assume Cruz's loyalties lie with Canada. Now of course that's OK; one could surely do worse than to be loyal to Canada. But we're talking about the President of the United States here, POTUS, the man who occupies the position increasingly appropriately titled Dictator-in-Chief...

As this is really a matter of law more than politics, I'm not going to push it the way "birthers" all but assaulted President Obama. It just isn't an issue with this candidate, any more than it should have been with Obama. So I will dutifully ignore the fact in the case of Ted "Ameri‑Canuck" Cruz...

Krugman: People Are Ignorant Of The Decline... Yes, Decline... Of The Deficit

Krugman:

...

Paul Krugman

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that voters are poorly informed about the deficit. But you may be surprised by just how misinformed.

In a well-known paper with a discouraging title, “It Feels Like We’re Thinking,” the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels reported on a 1996 survey that asked voters whether the budget deficit had increased or decreased under President Clinton. In fact, the deficit was down sharply, but a plurality of voters — and a majority of Republicans — believed that it had gone up.

I wondered on my blog what a similar survey would show today, with the deficit falling even faster than it did in the 1990s. Ask and ye shall receive: Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, offered to run a Google Consumer Survey — a service the company normally sells to market researchers — on the question. So we asked whether the deficit has gone up or down since January 2010. And the results were even worse than in 1996: A majority of those who replied said the deficit has gone up, with more than 40 percent saying that it has gone up a lot. Only 12 percent answered correctly that it has gone down a lot.

...

Bolds mine. Be sure to tell your Republican coworkers so they can mock you for their ignorance. Your ignorance... I mean "mock you for your ignorance." ☺