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With Better Sharing of Intel Comes Danger
Hugh Pickens writes "Ellen Nakashima writes in the Washington Post that after the intelligence community came under heavy criticism after 9/11 for having failed to share data, officials sought to make it easier for various agencies to share sensitive information giving intelligence analysts wider access to government secrets but WikiLeaks has proved that there's a downside to better information-sharing. To prevent further breaches, the Pentagon has ordered that a feature that allows material to be copied onto thumb drives or other removable devices be disabled on its classified computer systems and will limit the number of classified systems from which material can be transferred to unclassified systems, as well as require that two people be involved in moving data from classified to unclassified systems. The bottom line is that recent leaks 'have blown a hole' in the framework by which governments guard their secrets. According to British journalist Simon Jenkins 'words on paper can be made secure, electronic archives not.'"
>"To prevent further breaches, the Pentagon has ordered that a feature that allows material to be copied onto thumb drives or other removable devices be disabled on its classified computer systems"
Yeah, like that is really going to make THAT much of a difference. Oh- make sure to remove all printers too, prevent all Email/IRC/IM, cut and paste, CD/DVDRW, etc. I suppose I can't criticize them for trying, but no amount of stuff like that is going to prevent information leaks if someone wants to leak information. It is no different than DRM.
Come on, using a headline with Intel in it meaning something other than the company, on a geek site? Avoid the jargon and it becomes unambiguous: "With Better Sharing of Gov. Intelligence Comes Danger" (though using the words intelligence and government in the same sentence keeps making me do a double-take)
Words on paper can be made secure because they're fucking worthless for replication and transfer.
They'd be even more secure if chipped into clay tablets in cuneiform.
This is precisely the outcome that Wikileaks was looking for: Assange's plan has been to leak information in order to make those who wish to keep secrets paranoid, so that they clamp down on their own internal communications and become less effective:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
If we didn't mark everything under the sun as classified it would be a lot easier to keep the stuff we need to keep secret that way. Only about 5% of what WikiLeaks has put out ever needed to be classified to begin with, and 95% of that didn't need to be classified anymore.
The real problem is the US government killed innocent people and covered it up. A soldier with a conscience decided his government should fess up and released all the documents. If the US government had been honest about it's mistakes and misdeeds, there would have been no motivation for a leak. When the US government breaks it's own laws and goes to great lengths to obstruct justice, it can expect this kind of release of confidential information because American soldiers have also been taught to do what is right. Forcing the government to admit it's illegal actions is the right thing to do.
" 'words on paper can be made secure, electronic archives not.'"
Really? Really? You really said that and seriously meant it?
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Of course it has to be a binary switch. You must either share all documents and be insecure, or not share any documents and be totally secure. Any middle ground is impossible. Thus the correct response to WikiLeaks must be to lock down all the documents and make sure nobody reads them at all. Only this will keep us safe!
That sounds like the same kind of logic that comes from a town that sends troops to Iraq in response to a threat from a man in Afghanistan, or that would like to repeat the policies of Herbert Hoover in response to a big recession, or would rather raise the retirement age on working stiffs than tax billionaires at 1999 rates. As always, these conclusions are treated as an inevitability -- there's just no other way to go.
While I was serving in the military and handling classified material on computers the regulations on data handling were quite clear. Classified material was never to be stored or manipulated on an unclassified system. Furthermore, even on classified systems the classification of the system set a maximum clearance level, material classified secret could not be handled on a classified confidential system, etc. You could handle confidential on a secret system but then it could never be put back on a classified confidential system. I can understand, in light of the 'connect the dots' problem that you need to have access to pretty much all material in the hopes someone will get the 'Eureka' moment but storing, even allowing access the wrong way is what gets you into this kind of mess and supposedly we had procedures to prevent it. Obviously not after 9-11.
And on that topic, post 9-11 changes, the Republicans, and Democrats when they wake up to this fact, can stick it. The post 9-11 changes to the handling classified material happened under a Republican administration at the behest of (severe pressure from) Congress on both sides of the aisle. As with the mortgage meltdown, Congressional members are pointing everywhere else but at themselves.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
So we should invest in AMD then?
The approaches do need to be more sophisticated.
You mean like using a cell-phone camera to take a picture of a screen?
You can also encode a LOT of info into just one jpg or png of the family dog.
As for printing, you can use a 600dpi laser to output the whole bible in encoded format on 5 sheets of paper. So yes, you could walk out with 250,000 cables pretty quickly.
That's the thing; I'm sure that there's way more than one leak in their dam. If wikileaks managed to get a hold of this information, why would anyone believe that every intelligence agency on the planet didn't already have all this information? I'm perplexed at the persecution that wikileaks has faced over this cable release as all they really did was expose the U.S. government's inability to keep classified information out of the hands of, well, anyone and everyone. I mean, the government would try to shift the focus away from their failure, but do people really not get that this info has probably been in the hands of every enemy we have for a good long time?
The system is broken. We can either fix it or try to blow smoke about the "terrorist organization" that let us all know how glaringly lax our security is. I guess now that our government is locking useful information away from every one who does need it, we know if they are concerned with keeping us safe or keeping themselves from being embarrassed.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ...
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"With better sharing of Intel Comes Danger"
I love this stuff. What Danger?
We are being told that this release of information has harmed the ability of the U.S. to carry out diplomacy. In what way? That we tell lies and other governments tell lies, and now some of these lies have been exposed? What was the "Danger"? Wasn't the danger in the telling of the lies in the first place? Better sharing of Intel didn't bring about this danger.
Besides, if this data dump was so easily acquired (I am assuming the obvious here, that Wikileaks never had to go all "Tom Cruise/Mission Impossible" to get it), surely the data dump was no surprise to various other governments. I'd even guess that this is a fraction of what our enemies know about what we have been saying to ourselves for decades. How could it be otherwise?
So the "Danger" is that increase sharing might also include the public? If there is a change here, it is that the public got into the loop. Is it possible that they might have to abide by a higher level of ethics to avoid embarrassing lies coming out in future leaks? Is it possible that this is the "Danger"?
I am struggling here. So far I haven't heard about anything leaked which can be properly described as a "Danger" appeared with the leak itself. All of the best tidbits I have heard so far that might cause some diplomatic ruffle are due to actions that either 1) Should not have occurred (agreements to lie to the public), or 2) Need not have occurred (Let's call Putin "Batman").
I don't like to negotiate in business with people that live in secret worlds. I don't like the fact that our government loves secrets. The default for government should be to play their cards on TOP of the table, face up. When secrets are really necessary, they become easier to keep if their numbers are few, and the period of secrecy is of very short duration.
So far we haven't actually seen ANY downsides of the wikileaks...
* We saw a german official get fired for leaking information to a foreign state
* We saw the Yemeni government conspiring to lie to its people
* We saw the UK foregin office trying to lie to the UK parliament about breaking international commitments on cluster bombs
* US secretary of defense Bob Gates explained that the leaks haven't hurt the US
There have ben only upsides so far.
I have a feeling that the machines on the classified network didn't have USB ports.
From what I've read, Pfc Manning went into the secure area and carried with him CD-RW's that when he checked in and out, had Lady Gaga and other artists written on them. The machines had a writable CD-ROM drives in them, and the people overseeing security apparently allowed soldiers to listen to music CD's on the drives, as access to the public internet wasn't possible from the classified network. He even said he lip-synced to artists making it appear to those around him he was merely listening to music to not raise suspicion, all the while he was pulling database files and writing them to the CD's. That's how he got them out of a secure area. To add insult to injury, the machines had removable hard drives that were wiped and re-imaged each time upon checking in and out, so the evidence of what was on these hard drives were lost when he left.
I was in the US Navy for nine years, and the system we were using was WinNT.
That was later shifted to an OS called "IT-21". It was a custom version of WinNT that had been cobbled together by SPAWAR. MS actually let them have the source code, so they could customize it. There were all kinds of tweaks, dibbles and fidgets added to it, but the biggest was to disable the USB ports, COM ports, and prevent the system from writing any info to the pagefile.
Now, blocking off the pagefile was a touch of brilliance, but blocking the COM ports meant we couldn't hook a teletype to the computer. So when we were doing HF teletype exercises, messages either had to be loaded using Win98 or done by hand.
And once the newer printers started coming out, blocking the USB ports gave everyone conniptions.
For a while there, they played around with preventing the OS from writing anything at all to the floppy drive, but that lasted all of 1 day when comms shacks all over the WORLD started calling SPAWAR support, screaming about how they couldn't load the CO's traffic to disk.
Soon, the patches came out, and IT-21 became just another hunk of crap we had to deal with. As time went on, we dumped it for Win2K. Before I left, I saw people using Vista Premium for classified traffic, so I doubt things have changed all that much.
At the end of the day, it comes down to three things:
1. Don't do shit that will make your people question your ethics.
2. Screen out people who are, themselves, unethical.
3. Trust but verify.
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At one point I was responsible for transferring four classified laptops (they were fully loaded Sun Solaris laptops (by Tadpole, I think) and therefore rather expensive), external hard drives, and a pile of DAT tapes out of the Pentagon to a new secure facility elsewhere. All of the laptops and all of the (4-8GB) tapes were Top Secret. I had all of the paperwork, it was a legitimate transfer, and I followed all of the rules. When I got down to the Metro Station entrance (there is a DC Metro terminal connected directly to the first sub-floor of the Pentagon), I waited in line for the guard to check my paperwork and the file cart with all of the equipment. Unfortunately the guy in front of me had NOT filled out his paperwork correctly and got in a protracted argument with the guard (and yes, the guard was armed). This went on long enough that the exasperated guard waved me through. No one looked at my paperwork. No one looked at the cart or what was on it.
We were told in one of the first security briefings that bad guys will often use the buddy system to work the guards. The first guy causes a minor but hard-to-resolve problem; the second guy walks out with all of the data. I am sure the guards were briefed on this too, but guards are human and have human weaknesses. They get bored, they get frustrated, and their job becomes routine. Often enough they don't want to give people like me trouble who were not causing any trouble for them. The fact that I was standing there politely probably had a lot to do with him waving me through. But a professional would have been calm and courteous and would have acted just like I did... and might have walked out with the whole kit and kaboodle. The equipment I was carrying alone was probably worth $100 grand at the time. Any extra equipment on the cart would have had no paper trail. Luckily I was a good guy; not everybody is.
That is why you need security in depth and you need to use the buddy-system to make sure that one distracted guard doesn't let something by that he should not. But that is expensive and budgets are always under pressure. You also need to have a system where people believe they are on the right side and want to help protect the secrets because they know good people's lives depend on them. Corruption gets people killed as much as loose lips.
That all _WAS_ there in the days when military systems ran on DGUX and Trusted Solaris. Things like not being cut-n-paste down data from a higher level security app into a lower level are just one of the basic features in both and are backed all the way to the OS level to ensure it is not easily bypassed.
It all WENT AWAY with the windows infestation of the networks. The military should not blame anyone but themselves here. Security levels and "colour" books were defined for a reason and no Windows system has ever managed to comply to them while connected to a network (NT had a C cert while disconnected and stripped of floppies and removable media).
As Gregg Lake used to sing: You get whatever Christmas you deserve and no knee jerk reaction can help against the fact that the system is no longer secure and no longer has a sufficient audit trail in the first place.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
And why is anyone able to access 250.000 items without raising a flag? If this would be about a dozen very revealing documents then it would be a mere oversight or someone being smart/lucky enough to get them out. But 250.000? Don't these systems have any log analyzers?
an INTEL analyst who was demoted for assault and scheduled for an early discharge should have had his SIPRNET access terminated.
Word. USAF he'd have had a hard time keeping his nipr(unclassified) access, much less sipr.
I don't read AC A human right