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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....
I'm in the US submarine force and I'll just suggest that the US is pretty good at getting a job done when (1) they want it done and when (2) the doors are closed to the public.
Separately, learn some of the facts surrounding JFK's assassination (and the likes who go to no end to increase their power) and you'll get a feel for what goes on behind closed doors. It's very depressing.
G-Force music visualization
Indeed! How slashdot duped its readers into thinking this one hadn't already been showed!!!!!!!!!
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.
If you look at this link, you'll find that, "In its espionage role, the KGB was mostly reliant on human intelligence, unlike their western counterparts, who relied far more on imagery intelligence (IMINT) and signals intelligence."
Bottom line is, the CIA has always had the edge in technology, but the KGB still had an advantage in human intelligence. They had far better human recruitment than the CIA ever did. (And for those who really follow this stuff, you probably already know that human intelligence is one thing that is very sorely lacking in our war on terror today.)
Line X...
Linux...
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
We'd all be drinking Vodka and making "In Democratic Europe" jokes?
programming is not telling a computer how to do something, but telling a person how they would instruct a computer to do something. -- J. Bartlett
if one accepts this definition he/she should definitly think that programming is highly ethical activity.
Aure entuluva!
From the article:
including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural-gas pipeline
I find this very hard to believe. *If* you actually made a system so fragile, that explosions could be triggered by software, would you install software you stole from the enemy on that system?
Besides, if it was indeed possible to trigger an explosion, it had to be very proprietary code. Didn't the russians wonder why code they stole from the enemy would run on their own computers?
I'm just wondering, not trying to say that this might not be exactly what happened.
23c. In no way do the authors of this software take responsibility or blame for any pipeline explosions that may or may not occur through the normal use of this software.
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
The odd dupe is OK, for me at least. I never saw this story the first time round. Some people don't sit and read every single story on Slashdot, all the time, ever, you know. I might have been (gasp) out, or on holiday.
Get your own free personal location tracker
... that to protect us from gangs and thugs and criminals, we have to employ gangs and thugs and criminals.
And don't just say "because, thats the way it is".
Whenever I hear about tactics like this from the very government that is supposed to represent 'higher values', I'm reminded that government is The Perfect Con.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
If this doesn't prove the case for open source software, I don't know what will.
... at the very least.
Those Russkies should've broken out their debuggers on these binaries before putting them into operation
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Yes, am I supposed to act surprised?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
obligatory "you must be new here" line....
I have the feeling that someone is trying to feed us a bogus story. I doubt there is a way to determine if any of this has actually happened.
Looks like it is tech that has won.
....but we all know how US intelligence brilliantly prevented the 9/11 strikes with its all tech, no human intellignece approach. It seems to me that US intelligence will have to do some rethinking on the subject of doing completely without human intel sources. If 9/11 and the whole Iraqi WMD mess have proven anything it is firstly, that satilites and other spytechnology no matter how advanced will never completely replace the humble human traitor and secondly that no matter how good you are at running high tech spy gear it does not qualify your to run human spies. That is a very special skill and hard to learn. The CIA cold do worse than to take a leaf out of the books of the KGB when it comes to recruiting human spies, it is a skill the CIA has all but lost.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
there's a bit of information on the CIA's website about it too. no explosion info though
Jeremy Logan's Website.
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...
I thought that was how all software developers treat their customers.
strange, huh?
Why else would the Supreme Court allow him to kidnap and hold foreign nationals indefinitely in Cuba in direct violation of both the spirit and the letter of our constituion, on the grounds that it doesn't apply to people unless they're a citizen of this country (And sometimes not even then.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
.. the Russians never managed to sneak some spy laden software into the US, and UK, software so pervasive it'd work its way into every home in the world. Hey.. why's my copy of Tetris trying to send something past my firewall?
The US had not declared war against the USSR, yet commited acts of sabotage and assassination against Russian targets. Doesn't that make the CIA and the US regiem terrorists?
Way to "think outside the box" and see the Cold War for what it really was: unilateral aggression by the USA and CIA against the poor, defenseless USSR and KGB! Seriously, it's one thing when you're talking about the USA bullying some third world country, but comparing that to the Cold War is apples and oranges (and a cheap attempt to score some anti-American karma points). And if you want to know which of these two formerly-equally-matched superpowers was the real terrorist regime, put it this way: there wasn't exactly a flood of Americans expatriating to Moscow to flee CIA gulags.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I think the parent wanted to point out that declarations of war seem to be a thing of the past. AFAIK none of the superpowers declared war on anyone since WWII. There was no declaration of war by the US in Vietnam, nor the Russians in Afghanistan, nor in either gulf war...
There is still a difference between an undeclared war and an act of terrorism mind you. Much as i disagree with the US role in some of the conflicts mentioned, i will never accept terrorism as an acceptable means of furthering ones goals.
The US attacks on Afghanistan or Iraq were obviously undeclared wars rather than terrorism as they target strategic and military installations, though with something like the "decapitation attempts" on Hussein it's getting a bit shady legally, but still a very different kettle of fish from terrorism.
Even the frequently cited israeli raids into palestinian territory don't pass muster for terrorism, though bulldozing or attacking the families of palestinian terrorist comes uncomfortably close to revenge terrorist attacks. (ie the people targetted are not the perpetrators and the aim is to terrorise families to the point that no-one would dare commit an attack for fear of his family meeting the same fate, which is a similar strategy to what terrorists use)
I think the reason the US or Israel (or the UK, France, etc.) get so much grief for their role is that a much higher standard is expected of a modern democracy compared to some shady underworld groups (Ie if your three year old hits another child you tell him off/send him to his room/... , but if it's an adult he goes to jail because you have much higher expectations of an adult responsible party...
excuse the unnecessarily long ramblings...
Ponxx
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
In the second segment of Hafner and Markoff's Cyberpunk, they write about the crackers that Cliff Stoll found, and reveal that they went to the Soviets, saying they could hack into several government and military sites. The Soviets said what they'd rather have is Unix source code. So, while the rest of the crew had fun getting into NORAD looking for the WOPR, the one with a job as a sysadmin cut a couple extra tapes in the backup schedule and carried them through Brandenberg Gate.
Gee, I guess GNU really is communist. B)
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.)
Actually the US committed no acts of any kind against the USSR in this particular case. They made some intentionally buggy software which was STOLEN by SPIES. A Soviet act of aggression was used in a passive way to entrap them. It was sneaky and nasty but I don't think it could be considered an act of war by any interpretation of international law.
I must have missed the part of the story that mentioned an assassination.
Also, while the term "terrorism" is fairly loose it does have SOME meaning. Terrorism is the use of violence to create fear in a population in order to intimidate or coerce a society or government. In this case the violence was rather passive (we passively let the soviets steal malware) The "sabotage" was not intended to cause fear in the general population or even among the leadership aside from a fear that stolen technology may be booby-trapped.
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