Anonymous Source Claims Feds Demand Private SSL Keys From Web Services

Lauren Weinstein writes "With further confirmation of the longstanding rumor that the U.S. government (and, we can safely assume, other governments around the world) have been pressuring major Internet firms to provide their 'master' SSL keys for government surveillance purposes, we are rapidly approaching a critical technological crossroad. It is now abundantly clear — as many of us have suspected all along — that governments and surveillance agencies of all stripes — Western, Eastern, democratic, and authoritarian, will pour essentially unlimited funds into efforts to monitor Internet communications." If this is true it means that SSL/TLS to any Internet service could be useless — the authorities could simply man-in-the-middle anyone. Without knowing who has given keys over, or if anyone has given keys over... The NSA does claim encryption poses a problem for them, but honesty isn't their best attribute. The source claims that major providers at least have resisted (assuming it is happening), but that smaller companies may have folded to the pressure.

Comments

"Main-in-the-middle"?

[Lieutenant_Dan]

Well, at least it's not "man-in-the-middle" because that would be bad.

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[TWiTfan]

It's not a "man in the middle" attack. It's the "government on top" attack.

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[lgw]

The larger issue IMO is

governments and surveillance agencies of all stripes â" Western, Eastern, democratic, and authoritarian, will pour essentially unlimited funds into efforts to monitor Internet communications.

We haven't had a constitutional amendment in the US for some time now. We need one here. Forget specific technologies and the bizarre precedents that have twisted the 4th to allow this - we need a major reset.

Something like "The government shall not collect or store any information, even publically available information, about the activities of a citizen except upon issuance of a warrant; said warrant shall only issue upon evidence that a specific individual has committed a specific crime."

I casn accept a lower bar for "collecting and storing information" than for "searching" but there must be some bar to clear.

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[ProzacPatient]

Shouldn't it be called "the-man-in-the-middle" since it's being done by The Man, man?

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[lgw]

I chose "the activities of a citizen" as a way to say "what we do, not who we are". Keeping "who we are" records: birth certificates, permits licensing of various kinds, etc, is different in kind from monitoring daily activities. But I'm no lawyer and don't know how to say this better.

Also, why does the government need "census data" beyond a simple headcount? Heck, I'd like to move to an income tax system that's purely a payroll tax (so the government doesn't learn how much any given individual makes, but can still tax our income).

The government collects every bit of information it possibly can, but it's time to start saying "NO! Find a way to do that without spying on us!" It's time for the pendulum to swing the other way.

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[sl4shd0rk]

It's the "government on top" attack.

Don't you mean "government from behind"?

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[jythie]

Census data is also used for things like determining how many representatives you get in congress. It is also used for all sorts of long term planning.

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[evilRhino]

There isn't anything wrong with the 4th Amendment. The problem is that Congress has authorized and re-authorized the PATRIOT act that allows this type of surveillance. If we have an amendment, it should be for Congress to start representing Americans instead of donors, who pick up these fat contracts to spy on us.

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[lgw]

Right, so why does the government need "census data" beyond a simple headcount? The constitution calls for a headcount, but the government naturally uses it as an excuse to collect all the additional data it can get away with. Will they ask "list every online alias you've ever used" in the next census? Would it really surprise anyone here if they did?

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[ejasons]

What would the purpose of this be? They would just violate that amendment also.

That is the biggest problem with the Constitution -- if the branches of the government are allied, there is no way to punish anyone for violating its tenets.

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Will they ask "list every online alias you've ever used" in the next census

Probably not...

Would it really surprise anyone here if they did?

Yes.

Now, the census after that? Wouldn't be at all surprised...

Oh, and thanks for giving them the idea....;-)

Re:"Main-in-the-middle"?

[cheekyjohnson]

and ensuring that no thinking person is ever going to agree with you.

The general public isn't made up of thinking people anyway.

Self signed?

[Ubi_NL]

Does this mean a self-signed certificate is more secure than a commercial one?

Re:Self signed?

[Darkinspiration]

Kind of ironic then that every modern browser treat self sign like a pestilence. Frankly i've always tought that forcing warning on self signed were more about creating a legitimate certificate racket. I mean when buying a wild card certificate cost you more then 5000$....

Re:Self signed?

[MightyMartian]

Yes, providing you can guarantee the security of the private keys, if you're concerned about government(s) spying on your communications, that is definitely the way to go.

For our organization, due to the highly confidential nature of some of our data and communications, I am about to build a machine that will have no network connection whatsoever that will hold the CA and private keys, and will use it to produce public keys for our VPN, mail server, web services and the like. The server will be behind lock and key and locked down with LUKS, and the keys for that will be held in a separate location. Obviously nothing is 100%, but it's going to physical access to the server and to the private keys to compromise the system.

Re:Self signed?

[Todd Knarr]

No. The Feds are requesting the private keys from the server operators themselves, not from the CA. A self-signed certificate's no guarantee the site operator hasn't coughed up the private half to the surveillance people. I'm not any more worried about this, though, since as demonstrated with XMission the government doesn't need to eavesdrop on communications when they can get access directly at the server end of things. As long as the Feds can threaten the site operator with unspecified nasty things if they don't cooperate or if they even say a word about what's going on, I have to assume any site I don't control myself is potentially compromised and any data sent to it's potentially visible to the various agencies involved or to the private contractors those agencies are using to do the grunt work. In many cases that doesn't matter much since the nature of the site's such that I won't put anything sensitive or compromising on it in the first place.

Re:Self signed?

[h4rr4r]

A wild card cert is a lot cheaper than that.
$600 is closer to what they actually cost.

Re:Self signed?

[Sarten-X]

No. When a CA signs a certificate, they don't get the private key used for decryption. They just assert that a particular public key really does belong to who it says.

If the NSA has Verisign's key, for example, they'd be able to do two things:

1. decrypt traffic sent to Versign, which isn't very useful in itself
2. Create and sign their own certificates as though they were Verisign.

The latter is where the man-in-the-middle attack comes in. The NSA can claim to be whoever you're trying to reach, and the certificate will look valid and be trusted by default on any system that trusts Verisign. On the other hand, a self-signed certificate isn't signed by anybody else. The NSA doesn't need anyone else's private keys to make their own and claim to be anyone. The client will see the certificate, ask you if you trust it, and unless you're in the habit of memorizing certificate fingerprints, you won't notice a difference. Once any certificate is trusted (either by default or by your acceptance), your traffic will be sent to (and decrypted by) the certificate holder.

This is actually already a problem. CAs have been compromised, and their stolen credentials have been used to sign certificates claiming to be governments, Microsoft, and other generally-trusted sites. The apparently-trusted certificates are then used to make scams look more legitimate.

Re:Self signed?

[TWiTfan]

The Feds are requesting the private keys from the server operators themselves, not from the CA.

Something tells me that before this is over, we'll find out they've been requesting them (and getting them) from the CA's too.

Re:Self signed?

[Sarten-X]

With a self signed cert, you cant verify the identity of the signer/cert.

Correct, and that's really all you're paying for when you buy a certificate from a CA: You pay enough money and provide enough documentation that they're confident you are who you say you are.

With the possibility of a compromised CA, you have (essentially) the same problem.

Almost correct. You can't really verify the identity, but your computer won't really even try because it trusts the compromised CA. The solution is to check revocation lists, but there are problems with that.

What I would like to know is what (if anything) can be done to verify keys without a CA?

Let each person be a CA. If I know you, I can sign your certificate myself. Anybody who knows me and trusts me would then trust you. Again, compromises are fixed by revocation and expiration, but the impact is somewhat less severe.

Re:Self signed?

[Unordained]

Self-signed is only fine if the client and server are in a trusted environment, exactly the environment where pre-shared keys are a possibility, so you should have loaded that cert into your client before attempting the connection.

Barring that, and in the 99% of cases where clients are talking to servers out on the wide-open internet, CA's and the warning against self-signed certs serve a very good purpose -- preventing man in the middle attacks during handshake.

If anyone (your ISP and the NSA included) hijacks your initial connection, proxies it, and substitutes their own cert, you need a way to know whether that cert is really from the destination site, or a phony. That's exactly the problem CAs solve. (Other solutions include "web of trust", pre-sharing all important keys, concensus methods, etc.)

At worst, this news means that it's possible NSA (but probably nobody else) has been able to decrypt legitimately encrypted traffic (no MitM attack with substituted keys, just a tap using the real ones) for some services, or if they have CA keys, might have been able to issue their own legit-looking certs, which with some additional work, could have enabled them to perform MitM attacks on arbitrary sites and all of their users.

But this does not mean that self-signed certs are just as good as CA-backed ones in a general sense; if you rely on those, without pre-sharing keys with all clients, then all clients are vulnerable to MitM attacks from anyone with access to modify the communication channel, not just the NSA. And considering the known issues with insecure DNS, that's a much wider field of potential attacks.

Re:Self signed?

[EvanED]

Actual question: do the CAs even ever have access to the private keys?

I'm pretty sure there's no technical reason they need them -- the CAs just need to attest to the public key, which they could do just by signing the public key. But that doesn't mean that's how the system is set up in practice, of course.

Re:Self signed?

[Znork]

There's always the Convergence project (based on the previous Perspectives CMU work).

Basically, instead of CA's you have notary servers that track changes to certificates and that you (your browser) contacts to verify that they and you are seeing the same certificates.

That way, if a MITM attack is ongoing it will, if targetting you specifically, probably show a discrepancy between the certificate presented to you and the one presented to them. If targetting the specific website and MITM'ing all connections to it the only demonstration of a problem might be that the site suddenly appears to have a new certificate, but that would still most likely alert site operators who may be surprised to note a change they didn't do.

Re:Self signed?

[Speare]

Please see Schneier's paper on the "compelled certificate creation attack." Rather than asking a CA for the keys from Alice to Bob, they could compel a CA to vouch for an Alice to Eve, Eve to Bob connection as if it were Alice to Bob directly.

Re:Self signed?

[TubeSteak]

For our organization, due to the highly confidential nature of some of our data and communications, I am about to build a machine that will have no network connection whatsoever that will hold the CA and private keys, and will use it to produce public keys for our VPN, mail server, web services and the like. The server will be behind lock and key and locked down with LUKS, and the keys for that will be held in a separate location. Obviously nothing is 100%, but it's going to physical access to the server and to the private keys to compromise the system.

Counterpoint:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/16/the_cias_new_black_bag_is_digital_nsa_cooperation?page=full

During a coffee break at an intelligence conference held in The Netherlands a few years back, a senior Scandinavian counterterrorism official regaled me with a story. One of his service's surveillance teams was conducting routine monitoring of a senior militant leader when they suddenly noticed through their high-powered surveillance cameras two men breaking into the militant's apartment. The target was at Friday evening prayers at the local mosque. But rather than ransack the apartment and steal the computer equipment and other valuables while he was away -- as any right-minded burglar would normally have done -- one of the men pulled out a disk and loaded some programs onto the resident's laptop computer while the other man kept watch at the window. The whole operation took less than two minutes, then the two trespassers fled the way they came, leaving no trace that they had ever been there.

Over the past decade specially-trained CIA clandestine operators have mounted over one hundred extremely sensitive black bag jobs designed to penetrate foreign government and military communications and computer systems, as well as the computer systems of some of the world's largest foreign multinational corporations. Spyware software has been secretly planted in computer servers; secure telephone lines have been bugged; fiber optic cables, data switching centers and telephone exchanges have been tapped; and computer backup tapes and disks have been stolen or surreptitiously copied in these operations.

Re:Self signed?

[tlhIngan]

What I would like to know is what (if anything) can be done to verify keys without a CA? I don't know that much about crypto, so am genuinely curious. Are there techniques to do this? (Diffie-Hellman-Merkle?)

Well, you can always fingerprint a key and verify with the owner of the site that the fingerprint is correct.

The CA model is called a "web of trust" model - it relies on you trusting someone and then seeing if a key you've been given was signed by someone you trust. In the CA model, the CA signs public keys with their private key. Your browser looks at the certificate and sees if it can verify it against the pre-stored CA public key (you presumably trust the browser vendor to give you good keys - though you're able to import the CA cert yourself if you don't trust them). If so, it's considered "trusted".

It's called a web of trust because it starts with someone. A more personal example would be your friend gives you his public key - you trust it because he physically handed it to you and for the most part, he appears to be himself. Now, your friend sends you some public keys online. You verify those keys against your trusted key you got earlier. If they match, you trust your friend has given you good keys. (This is the weakest link - which is why CAs get compromised).

Of course, you can always verify the keys yourself - you can choose to meet with those people and compare the public keys you got (or a subset, i.e., the fingerprint).

Basically, for public key encryption, the weakest link has always been trusting that the key you have is legit.

Re:Self signed?

[Adnonify]

You are better off this way (which I use by the way) Get some PKI compliant smartcard, compile everything on an offline machine (drivers, pcsc / opensc) and then make the smartcard's crypto engine generate a private key and protect it with a pin. Use the smartcard to hold the keys. Keep the card on you at all times. Cloak it with printing a banklogo on top! You can make 2 cards, one holding the CA and you can vault that one (it has 3 pin attempts after which the cards data is LOST) and use that card to sign some other certs for your SSH keys and others ;) Its secure and if you modify the DF(filesystem) of the smartcard any non-targetted attack against you, even when you connect it to non-secure machine will fail! Your private key will always stay safe. Y

Re:Self signed?

[Abalamahalamatandra]

Actual answer: no.

The CSR (Certificate Signing Request) contains only the public half of the key, to be signed by the CA's key which results in the CA attesting that the information is verified.

The entity whose key was signed always maintains control of the private key. Which, to me, is the reason that public-key encryption is not "over". The NSA would have to strong-arm every single holder of an SSL key, not just the Certificate Authorities.

Granted, though, those private keys are not often held terribly securely - they're most often just files on a server that aren't even password-protected, because that requires an admin to type in passwords whenever the Web server is restarted. They COULD be held in an HSM, a hardware security module much like a TPM on steroids, but that's very expensive and difficult to set up.

However, none of this means that public-key crypto is broken. It's possible that individual sites could be compromised via this route (Facebook, Google, etc) but as a whole, no.

Re:Self signed?

[EvanED]

because the CA is just one extra link in the chain to be broken.

No, no it isn't. Not really.

According to this post, this post, and my own intuition, CAs never see your private keys. A CA cannot reveal more information than is known publicly anyway, even if they are thoroughly malicious. The most you could argue about the standard set up is that CAs give a false sense of security.

I can only think of one attack that could occur with CA-signed certificates but not with self-signed certs. If you remove all default CAs from being accepted and just store the fingerprint of the public key (e.g. what happens with SSH), then it becomes impossible for the real amazon.com public key to be silently substituted with an imposter (but malicious-CA-cleared) amazon.com public key. But if you don't clear out your list of CAs, there is no hard benefit to be gained here.

Re:Self signed?

[X.25]

Does this mean a self-signed certificate is more secure than a commercial one?

I have spent almost 10 years of my life trying to explain people why self-signed certs are much more secure.

People don't care.

Re:Self signed?

[Abalamahalamatandra]

If the data is that confidential, you should probably look into an actual FIPS-certified network-connected HSM instead of rolling your own.

I did a project a few years back using nCipher NetHSMs (they've since been bought up, I believe) and they were quite cool technology. Even then, I think one of these devices was in the $25K range at most.

The great thing is, if you generate a key pair with one of these, you literally cannot get access to the private key to hand over to the government, even if you wanted to.

Re:Self signed?

[Sarten-X]

I work in finance. Until recently, my company had several million dollars being controlled through a bank whose website required exactly 6-character passwords, which they'd happily send to you in plaintext via email if you forgot it.

No, I do not want to trust banks with information security.

Re:Self signed?

[Sarten-X]

Not to sound dismissive, but that's an implementation detail. PGP uses a system of partial trust, though its particular implementation I don't know.

I do recall some (long-outdated) research into this particular problem, where a trust network didn't simply have "trust" or "do not trust". Rather, it maintained a percentage of trust - Each hop in a chain decreased the total trust in the chain, but each separate path increased it. At the end of the chain, the client could compute exactly how much a particular server should be trusted, based on the whole network.

Re:Self signed?

[mattpalmer1086]

Good question. The short answer is that they don't know it's really from you. A root CA certificate is the root of trust - it is self signed by the CA. It cannot by itself prove it is genuine.

In a corporate environment where you control the infrastructure you could automatically distribute the root certificate to your users with group policy or some other trusted distribution mechanism. If you don't control the infrastructure, then you would need some other out-of-band method to assert that cert is genuine. Maybe you could publish a hash of the certificate on a web site you control or in some other place they already trust.

It's not turtles all the way down...

Re:Self signed?

[EvanED]

And BTW, my interpretations on the italics point and my final "in this world" were formed by i kan reed's original post;

That's actually been my opinion a while. When Firefox tells me "This connection may not be trusted" I'm less inclined to worry, because the CA is just one extra link in the chain to be broken.

That opinion is not based in reality.

Re:Self signed?

[Burz]

CAs including Verisign actually advertise the fact that they provide "lawful intercept" services. IOW, they cooperate with the spies and I assume they don't have to give up their master keys to the NSA in order to assist with MITM attacks. CAs are in the business of intercepting our communications.

All they have to do is keep a database of bogus certs for the addresses they verify, and perform a verification against a bogus cert for particular user IPs on a surveillance list supplied by the spies. Then all the NSA has to do is get in the middle between the user and the server he is accessing.

People may think that PKI is the strong link because CAs cannot access the website's private keys. But I believe it is the weak link, because all the spies have to do is share a list of bogus 'doppleganger' private keys with CAs who then sign the certs generated them. Undermining PKI is the easy part if you have cooperation from CAs. It the physical part of MITM that is more challenging, IMHO, which may be why the NSA finds it simpler to get the private keys from high volume sites allowing them to simply record packets instead of doing the work of singling people out for MITM sessions ahead of time.

Re:Self signed?

[ron_ivi]

That's exactly the problem CAs solve.

That's exactly the problem the commercial CA's *cause* when they co-operate with oppressive governments. http://arstechnica.com/security/2010/03/govts-certificate-authorities-conspire-to-spy-on-ssl-users/

Govâ(TM)t, certificate authorities conspire to spy on SSL users ... which meant that CAs must be handing over certificates so that they could be used with the device.

Time To Learn Klingon

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to learn Klingon, or invest in carrier pigeons and a Little Orphan Annie decoder pin.

I wonder if our government will be responsible for single handedly killing our consumer tech industry.

Re:Time To Learn Klingon

[Sparticus789]

We're talking about the NSA. Half of the probably play Klingon Boggle at lunch.

A "problem," you say?

[meta-monkey]

Of course encryption is a problem for them. It's the same problem Allied intelligence had acting on information that could only be attained because Enigma was broken.

Cisco

[zlives]

I wish I was back in my last cisco vpn class and see what my instructor (who according to his self was installing security for major industry) has to say now about my question about transparent proxies and ssl and cisco road map. he was recommending ssl as a better replacement to ikev2. Granted my tin foil hat was fully deployed about NSA snooping but...

i wish i was wrong.

Oh the land of the free ...

[Anonymous Coward]

So the next time the US wants to chastise another country for spying on their citizens, the response is going to be "go away you hypocritical assholes".

America has lost her moral compass, and is quickly turning into a police state.

Papers please comrade.

Re:Oh the land of the free ...

[Anonymous Coward]

america has been a police state ruled by fear for some time now, your among the most oppressed people in the world but its balanced by ignorance, its taken you guys this long to notice.

How is this "confirmation"?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> "The government is definitely demanding SSL keys from providers," said one person who has responded to government attempts to obtain encryption keys. The source spoke with CNET on condition of anonymity.

So...some guy said "yes, they're collecting keys." No written evidence, no names. We demand "citation" from people posting backstories of cartoon characters on Wikipedia, so how exactly is this "confirmation" of anything?

Re:How is this "confirmation"?

[Alok]

Do you really expect people to say this publicly, when the most likely consequence is imprisonment and a media circus that paints them as evil villains?

Re:How is this "confirmation"?

[zlives]

I am sorry we are currently on a little trip winding through Hong Kong and Russia, please try again when the constitutional rights are restored.

What about non-american CA's?

[Midnight_Falcon]

Many have assumed for a long time that root SSL certificates have been provided by American CA's (GoDaddy, VeriSign, Network Solutions etc), but what about foreign ones? StartSSL is Israel-based, so it can be assumed the Israeli government has the root key. What about SwissSign, based in Switzerland and run by the Swiss Post? :)

Re:What about non-american CA's?

[GameboyRMH]

Who says they don't all have a big sharing agreement? Even countries that are unfriendly to each other, it would be worth it to both sides. You can be sure the governments themselves aren't using this stuff.

US Military shares your opinion.

[ron_ivi]

The US DoD shares your opinion. https://www.my.af.mil/afp/netstorage/login_page_files/afportal_faqs.html Looks like a self-signed cert not issued by any commercial vendor in the default browser lists.

Re:US Military shares your opinion.

[EvanED]

You set up the CA Authority - and use it to self-sign your certs - and it's safer than a commercial one.

That depends what you mean by "safer".

It's safer to you. Onto your machines you can install the certificate of your CA, and you'll know everything is peachy.

But if your audience is "the general internet population", e.g. because you're trying to sell stuff to them, it's less secure. Without a trusted or semi-trusted third party (normally served by the default CAs), there is no way to convey the authenticity of your own CA and thus of your own public key to them.

Re:US Military shares your opinion.

[pixelpusher220]

Couldn't somebody like the EFF or ACLU create a certificate that people could trust? Yes it's a manual thing, but given that the automatic system (was likely previously) and is now utterly untrustworthy, it seems that manual type of update might become necessary until we can get Firefox and other open source OS/apps to add it in automatically?

Re:US Military shares your opinion.

[ron_ivi]

So best of both worlds would be if *TWO* certificates need to match --- both a self-signed one; and a commercial one.

Seems that would fix many of the problems.

That way if the commercial CA is trustworthy at first, you can transfer your public key; and if the commercial CA gets compromised later, your self-signed key protects you.

Think of cold war police states

[DickBreath]

In some cold war police states half the population was employed to spy on the other half. No wonder their economies sucked.

Will this do it?

[Taantric]

If this does not kill off the cloud or at least seriously damage the business model, I think it would be safe to say human apathy has reached critical mass and we deserve everything that is coming in the next 20-30 years.

Re:Will this do it?

[FriendlyLurker]

You are missing the point amiga3D. When "the government pretty much knows everything about [everyone] now anyway" - then there is no more ability to effectively and democratically reform society for the better, right injustices, fight to change the status quo etc. For example try and organize a rally, information drive, any form of community organization against or for [insert cause]. If it upsets those in power you will be picked up/harassed/fired/detained before any of your emails/chats/phone calls to organize democratically allowed protest even hit anyones inbox. This is not speculation, all these police state things have already happened. One recent example: if you care to look into the details of one particular movement called "Occupy ..." that threatened the heart of power and money by asking for those in wall street that broke laws to actually be punished for their crimes.

Allowing the surveillance state means any slippery sloped we are now on with just continue to get worse, no leaders in our community can take charge to organize others to resist/complain/pushback against [insert cause]. What Taantric said is correct, history has given us enough examples now to know that if we do not reject the surveillance state we now find ourselves living in, then we really do deserve everything that is coming...

If true not so bad!

[Anonymous Coward]

If true this could be bad as presently SSL uses the public / private RSA key pair for encryption as well as authentication.

BUT under the latest SSL / TLS standard (only presently client side supported by Chrome) the encryption half of the secure connection can be performed by Diffie-Hellman key exchange and that would offer perfect forward security. Meaning that all a government with the private key can do is a MITM attack, and it is possible to spot that by using multiple IP path checking and other tests.

Unfortunately, for now this scenario seems unlikely as many providers excluding google are not providing access to this key exchange scheme.

ALSO, under existing SSL you are not protected presently if a provider hands over their old expired keys to the government and these are used to crack stored session data.

SO - Put pressure on your providers to support TLS with Diffie-Hellman, like Gmail and OpenSSL!!

Re:Don't entirely buy this

[dave562]

"If that were the case, why would they need to request data from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, etc. All of these companies have discussed how the government requests data from them, and how they have to provide it. If the government simply had the private keys and could just sniff all traffic, they wouldn't need to."

It comes down to legality. If the government intends to eventually prosecute someone, they have to follow the legal process.

On the other hand, if all they want to do is snoop and "prevent terrorism", they can bypass the legal channels.