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...
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?
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.
Pre-History means "before recorded history". The term gets the point accross in this instance without being confusing. Although there is of course recorded history of computing before 1930. IBM was founded in 1911 after all as "Computing Tabulating Recording Company". So it is basically wrong.
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.
Government Attic is offline. Any chance of a mirror?
Got it for you. It is called stuxnet-prehistory.pdf.exe
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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?
Pre-History means "before recorded history". [snip] So it is basically wrong.
I take your point. However, I would note the qualifier: "secret pre-history."
From the time of the "father of history" Herodotus himself, it's pretty clear that history is about people being able to tell a story about past events.
If facts about some devices were kept secret and thus were not available for historians to write about, there's a strong argument that such information is "pre-historical," in the sense that stuff may have been going on before the known written ("historical") record. Of course, once it is released and incorporated into known histories, it becomes "historical" and will no longer be "pre-history."
As I read this headline, it isn't "NSA Releases Secret Pre-History of [ALL] Computers." (How far do we go back? Charles Babbage? What counts as a "computer"?)
Rather, the "secret" in the headline implies that the NSA is probably talking about itself. Hence: "NSA Releases Secret Pre-History of [the NSA's and Preceding Intelligence Agencies'] Computers."
No Safeguards Assured.
I would note the qualifier: "secret pre-history."
It's a formerly secret history, not a secret pre-history. The former is what you get when you hide the records. The latter is what you get when there are no records, and nobody talks about it (or everyone is silenced, or dies of natural causes, etc.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Who did Herodotus have to fuck to be the father of history?
rewriting history since 2109
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
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?
Damn you! That won't run on Linux!
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
The links aren't dead. The NSA is logging every request.
Have gnu, will travel.
Who did Herodotus have to fuck to be the father of history?
Ananke, apparently.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
you need wine!
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'.
Wrong-o, AC!!
The need for high-quality Porn is at least as important a driver. This is admitted by all true geeks.
WAR lS PEACE
FREEDOM lS SLAVERY
lGNORANCE lS STRENGTH
My page loads have slowed to a crawl!
http://cryptome.org/2013/06/NSA-WasntAllMagic_2002.pdf
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"