Slashdot Mirror
NSA Releases Secret Pre-History of Computers
An anonymous reader writes "The National Security Agency has declassified an eye-opening pre-history of computers used for code-breaking between the 1930s and 1960s. The 344 page report, entitled It Wasn't All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis (pdf), it is available on the Government Attic web site. Government Attic has also just posted a somewhat less declassified NSA compendium from 1993: A Collection of Writings on Traffic Analysis. (pdf)"
to the man in the Russian airport.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Am I crazy for opening a PDF from the NSA?
How about Bush's blackmail scheme where he used the NSA to try to obtain material to blackmail UN ambassadors into voting for invading Iraq. Most of the media treated that like it was secret...
We will know all the truth of Facebook and Google deals around 2070 declassified
I thought we already knew about this.
Hey you guys who are talking about Snowden, download this PDF with some cool additional code! Don't worry about it. I promise we didn't buy exploits from Adobe or Microsoft!
As we all know it was Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, using a steam powered analog computer to break (and make) secret communications. Case closed, this is clearly more lies by the NSA.
Dear NSA, I think you're confused. The current topic of discussion is your ongoing violation of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. constitution.
Compared to that, I truly doing give a fuck about your history of codebreaking.
Squirrel!
There's a relatively old book about the NSA and SIGINT written by a journalist who studied publicly available materials using Tom Clancy's MO, that you can buy at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com. I remember reading it and thinking it was more like "what it's like to work at the NSA" than an expose, though. Still, IIRC the author and publisher had to square off with the NSA to get it in print.
Secret service intervention or just slashdotted?
What do you mean Pre-History?
According to Wikipedia: Prehistory means "before we had written records,"
So while the written records of these code breaking computers may just recently have been declassified, its not like they didn't exist, and of course there were 'computers' before that (Hollerith punched cards, and of course Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace)
For something in the time periods mentioned, it is a good read, especially with the issues at the time.
I would say that crypto advances and computers go hand in hand, from the mechanical rotor devices to more advanced algorithms like DES, then to ones that have a larger bitsize and block size (AES.)
What will be the next big crypto advance is a next generation public key algorithm. RSA has been good, but it, DSA, and ECC can fall if a quantum computer of a decent size can be built. What is needed is a next generation public key algorithm, but those are a lot harder to come by than symmetric algos. What would be nice is an algorithm with a small key size like ECC (which since in theory a 256 bit ECC key is as secure as a 128 bit AES key), compared to 16384 bit keys for RSA.
Of course, the applied crypto part is important as well.
From the traffic analysis document page 3: Thanks are due .... for her encouragement and support in the making
of this collection. Without the access to her files she so generously offered, it could not
have been produced.
LOL. All sorts of scenarios crossed my mind reading this.
or are the links dead? both!
pls repost. Uploaded.to would be nice...
Government Attic is offline. Any chance of a mirror?
The only link on the NSA's site that mentions it was this one:
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/crypto_almanac_50th/NSA_Before_Super_Computers.pdf
But it's not the actual pdf... And no trace of the pdf on torrent sites. Can anyone seed it and post a link?
No Safeguards Assured.
Site has been suspended... lol
Seems like it was released in 2002, picked up by a crypto blog today, and now we're claiming it was just released by the NSA.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Well, that didn't take long.
Name: www.governmentattic.org
Address: 127.0.0.1
An agency that can't even host a single file certainly can't do all those horrible internet things my grandson tries to explain to me. For a second I was almost worried no go and kill that fucking traitor before he get's on my lawn!
Well played, NSA.
The prevailing geek narrative is that only space provides the impetus to develop technology. NASA invented computers. Everyone else in other spheres of human knowledge were idiots.
slashdotted. either that, or the flash drive with the files is on a plane to the jungle
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I just get "This site has been suspended" from the hosting provider. Anyone has alternative links to the pdfs?
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
...a collection of writings on traffic analysis............
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
Prove yourself: gazette
Instead visit http://preview.tinyurl.com/p4o5n78
Respect the glorious slashdot tradition for once, with pride. :-)
http://preview.tinyurl.com/p4o5n78
Speculation:
The secret pre-history of the NSA may apply to the current Snowden issues. Reading Bamford (Puzzle Palace et al) it's obvious that the USA has been able to "coax" carriers and software developers into providing back-doors into their trunk lines and software. I've always wondered if it's because the NSA has prior art in much of computing discoveries of the pas 75 years, and uses it to gain access to whereever it wants to go? I mean, it does go whereever it wants to, and this may be why.
I'm just sayin'.
People please don't get distracted from the real issue.
Indeed Google is your friend. Type into Google:
type:pdf "it wasn't all magic"
then view Google cached copy
profit.
*knock knock knock*
Now that Google Books allows uploading of PDF files, I don't have to worry about any back-doors in the PDF. Just let Google process the thing and spit out a web-service based document.
http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/nsa-has-total-access-via-microsoft-windows/
No Sauce?
I CALL BULLSHIT!!!!!!!!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
This action by the NSA doesn't distract from Snowden but verifies that they are worried about him/the situation.
So here's what happened:
the Government Attic site published a few interesting documents on FBI Ultrasonic Device Phone-based wiretapping and on the use of early computers as code-breaking devices. The site was slashdot-ed and the web hosting company suspended the site for excessive web traffic. The problem was exacerbated because the documents were each pretty large. Incidentally, the copies posted were nicely prepared and OCR'd. If anyone grabbed copies, perhaps they can put them up somewhere.
Incidentally, the NSA documents were requested from the NSA a couple of years ago. It always takes a few years to get anything substantive from NSA, FBI and other agencies. Any timing is coincidental.
I'm confident Government Attic will re-appear sometime in the next month or two with new more robust site hosting, and all its documents will be there. Government Attic follows proper protocols and publishes documents released through channels following a polite request, and publishes the release letters along with the documents, which serves as a form of provenance.
http://cryptome.org/2013/06/NSA-WasntAllMagic_2002.pdf
Well...another SlashDotted website.
This one seems legit: http://cryptome.org/2013/06/NSA-WasntAllMagic_2002.pdf
http://view.samurajdata.se/
There's no SSL and it would be better as a Tor Hidden Service, but it's ad-free and works on most on-line (or off-line manual upload) PDF files. Nothing is "safe", but this is "safer" and doesn't require javascript, flash, or other stupid ****.
WAR lS PEACE
FREEDOM lS SLAVERY
lGNORANCE lS STRENGTH
> an eye-opening pre-history of computers
That's not too long a reading:
circa 1800BC: someone said "I am who I am."
circa 1943AD: a jewish guy going by the name of John von Neumann invented stored program computing
Not much of significance happened in-between those dates, excepting Conrad Zuse and Alan Turing.
My page loads have slowed to a crawl!
Non taken down link
http://cryptome.org/2013/06/NSA-WasntAllMagic_2002.pdf
http://cryptome.org/2013/06/NSA-WasntAllMagic_2002.pdf
Although there may be some other mirrors available, this is setup at: http://www.theblackvault.com/m/articles/view/Wasn-t-All-Magic-The-Early-Struggle-to-Automate-Cryptanalysis if you need a good, reliable, download.
So what if the NSA records everything? Intelligence is only as useful as political leaders want to make it. If political leaders want "actionable intelligence" then the reader should already know that if those political leaders are either crooked or of a totalitarian mindset - or both - and they want to "get" you, they will - even if they have to gin up that "actionable intelligence".
If reading of Stalin's and Mao's purges didn't teach you that, then the still-unsatisfied quest for WMDs and al Qaida training camps in Iraq should have.
What Americans should be worrying about is the threat to themselves that will result from the empowering of a wealthy few - the kind who believe that America isn't a "democracy", it is a "republic" and the only people who should be "represented" by its government are the wealthy (or "job creators", as they like to misname themselves now) - if the American people again put their stooges into elected office. The kind of people who want to destroy government's role as the protector of "the people" - the kind of people, that is, who insist that they are entitled to increase their rate of wealth accumulation even if that requires deregulation/the elimination of laws that now protect "the people"...
That's the kind of people who gin up intelligence...who set records for the dozens of times they say a variation of "I do not recall...". That's the kind of people who alter "the evidence"...be it ASCII or videotape.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"