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How The CIA Duped The Soviets' Line X Network
sundling writes "There are interesting articles here(1) and here(2)
on software espionage against the Soviets.
In the Ronald Reagan era, a Soviet spy network (Line X Network) was looking to steal software to run oil pipelines. The CIA found out what they were trying to steal and fed them bogus versions. This is of course not the only time the CIA has done this.
... An article on the ethics of programming mentions this very topic and the moral implications." Update: 03/02 09:22 GMT by T : Oops -- this is a dupe.
Dupe dupe dupe dupe dupe!
3 24 3&mode=nested
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/02/115
Even sent two messages to the 'on duty editor'. Not that it matters, apparently. Considering this is like story 7 in a row or so for him, spanning the last several hours, I suspect it's bedtime for someone...
Not to sound like a broken record (even if slashdot regularly does), but it isn't news a month later, guys....
If anyone wants a link to the original New York Times (#include "free_reg") article by William Safire about this incident, here it is. Now you don't have to hunt down the dupe to read it.
ediron2:
...
Thanks for sending the notes; it looks like the note-to-editor system is down at the moment, unfortunately. It *is* bedtime for me, but I was actually sitting there waiting, reading email
Sorry, I missed this one the first time around.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
there's a bit of information on the CIA's website about it too. no explosion info though
Jeremy Logan's Website.
To be fair, the number of dupes does seem to have dropped off quite significantly in the last month or two.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
And I really wouldnt like to be in the shoes of the morons who manage to convince people that they planted that software. If by some weird coincidence that thing was within 10 miles of any of the control rooms of that pipeline which exploded. I can just imagine 400 beraved families suing the Uncle Sam under the Patriot act for ... ahem... terrorist acts.
Oh and to make things more interesting, as this medical journal indicates, the US actually sent doctors to treat the poor burned children...
"We need to go to war against Canada or England so we can make better use of our human capital."
Modded insightful 4 when I read it and it speaks volumes of America.
Maybe there is a reason Arab americans aren't knocking on the door to join US intelligence services.
I suspect that this whole story is an urban myth that may have a grain of truth. I worked through the mid 70's and 80's on Process Control and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are used to control nuclear, chemical, space and pipeline systems. This was the period when systems moved from largely pneumatic telemetered systems to electronic and computerised control. The old technology had run large industrial systems since the war, and was by and large highly reliable. The new technology was considered cheap and inferior and was not (and is still not) trusted. Such systems were created fail safe, such that computer crashes caused shut downs, not explosions. This was very ingrained into the designers of such systems. Failures such as Chernobyl and Flixborough added to the designers' caution, even though control was sometimes not a contributory factor. Most software systems in this category required very significant source code modifications to make them fit for purpose. It was rare to ship a system without giving the purchaser inspection access to the code so that they could assess the quality for themselves. The designers of this soviet pipeline would have had double cause for concern, and would most certainly have been suspicious of the provenance of the system. In such a case, it is highly likely that they would have built in extra hardware constraints into the system to prevent failure due to malicious software, especially if they could not read and validate the source.
I stole this
Human intelligence, or HUMINT is mostly done by recruiting and operating local agents who are already of the target culture, not by infilitrating that culture (very hard to do) except in Hollywood movies or very very rare cases (sleeper agents etc.)
There were a number of reasons why the US Navy thought Pearl was safe.
1: Range. Japanese ships were not thought to have the range to come all the way to Pearl. Much less undetected. They developed refueling techniques to make this possible.
2: Bombs vs Battleships. Conventional bombs of the day were *not* able to affect a Battleship ( the ship used to project power in those days, the day of the carrier was not yet there, they were mainly seen as good for scouting ( battlecruiser replacements ) ). The deck armour was too thick. So, what about Arizona, you ask? Good question. They converted 16" Battleship shells ( the very items designed to go through the deck armour, *and* the much thicker side ( hull ) armour into bombs by adding fins. Then they dropped them from approx 10k meters so that they would have the KE to do the job. In that day, only torpedoes were thought to have what it took to sink a battleship. Which leads me to:
3: Topedoes. The harbor was thought to be safe from attack by torpedoes, as it was only about 40 feet deep ( just a bit deeper than the draught of the ships, IIRC ). This is important as the torpedoes of that day usually sunk to about 75 feet after being dropped from the airplane. The British had pulled off a similar raid at Taranto against the Italian navy using this, but that harbor was deeper than Pearl. The Japanese attached breakaway fins to the torpedoes to arrest their fall on hitting the water, keeping them from sinking so far, and thereby made the attack possible.
Not to mention that the CIA did not exist in those days.
And while I too would like to see our intellegence agencys perform better, I would suggest that it is altogether too easy to armchair QB what they do. I am sure that you have been through something that you did not see coming, but in hindsight, you kick yourself because it was blindingly obvious ( from that side of the event ). Go try to do that job before you kick them too hard about how they have done it.
emt 377 emt 4
There was a computer control system but all it did was really a glorified remote. You could setup some equations like when opening valve A 10%, close valve B by 1% but it wasn't It would have been non-trivial to insert a bug on the main control computer (it would have been detected) and the remote telemetry cards were always being moved around so you never knew which was where so they couldn't easily be sabotaged either.