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Snowden: NSA Working On Autonomous Cyberwarfare Bot
WIRED published a long piece on Edward Snowden today (worth a read on its own), and simultaneously broke news of "MonsterMind," an NSA program to monitor all network traffic and detect attacks, responding with a counterattack automatically. From the article: Although details of the program are scant, Snowden tells WIRED in an extensive interview with James Bamford that algorithms would scour massive repositories of metadata and analyze it to differentiate normal network traffic from anomalous or malicious traffic. Armed with this knowledge, the NSA could instantly and autonomously identify, and block, a foreign threat. More than this, though, Snowden suggests MonsterMind could one day be designed to return fire — automatically, without human intervention...
Snowden raised two issues with the program: the source of an attack could be spoofed to trick the U.S. into attacking an innocent third party, and the violation of the fourth amendment since the NSA would effectively need to monitor all domestic network traffic for the program to work. Also in Bamford's interview are allegations that the NSA knocked Syria offline in 2012 after an attempt to install intercept software on an edge router ended with the router being bricked.
You're YEARS out of government service and if we're being honest, we're supposed to believe that you personally had in depth first hand technical knowledge of everything the NSA has ever and will ever do. There's two way to look at this. Either your paranoid soaked liar, or, you have a current contact in the NSA and you are bragging about committing treason.
Considering the absurd amounts of incompetence and waste we see with visible government entities, should we really be overly concerned about the NSA? Not saying I like them, or anything, but I'm not sure they're quite the beast we've made them out to be. Maybe.
Do the morons in NSA seriously believe that the USA is the only country with the technology to build a Digital Doomsday Machine? Has anyone of them watched Dr. Strangelove? Having said that, the level of hubris they are displaying seems about right.
Every US citizen is yelling for their constitutional rights broken by the NSA. But no Europeans complain about what the NSA is doing to THEM. Which is even worse. EU, fucking wake up.
I find Snowden to be a typical pampered, ego-centric product of his generation. If he actually surrendered himself to US authorities unconditionally, I'd think he just might be insane. So I totally get why he is in Russia. I'm not saying I approve of what he did as I don't, but I get why he felt the need to hide under protection to do what he did. But he undermines his credibility with statements in the article like this:
I told the government I'd volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose,” he says. “I care more about the country than what happens to me."
Yeah. Right.
Slashdot will soon be classified as a target for sharing this article
aren't we past this by now?
we've debated Snowden's actions ad infinitum
we've mapped the Snowden possible responses...everyone has expressed their opinions on his motivations...we've examined virtually every scenario
IMHO he was duped or blackmailed and is now essentially in jail in Russia...others say 'hero'...or 'traitor'
we know the whole universe of factors that could be combined to make an opinion on Snowden...we know all the possiblities...and have seen someone argue about them here on /.
**it's time we agree that spy agencies (CIA, NSA, etc) need more oversight & accountability & Snowden is more than he appears to be and has at least mixed motivations**
Thank you Dave Raggett
Skynet? This looks awfully like the start of Terminator 3 movie...
You haven't been paying attention. The Germans and the French howl about this constantly (or at least their governments do). In addition, the Germans want to become full partners in it.
This is pretty common knowledge in the Net Sec community. Has anyone ever heard of the DARPA cyber grand challenge? That's basically what it is.
http://www.darpa.mil/cybergrandchallenge/
The NSA/Pentagon/CIA always wants all sorts of bullshit scifi Star Trek shit.
Doesn't necessarily mean it's feasible.
It's easy to squander Other People's Money.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
'WIRED published a long piece on .. "MonsterMind," an NSA program to monitor all network traffic and detect attacks, responding with a counterattack automatically. From the article:'
Will this "MonsterMind" work on non Microsoft Windows network traffic?
welcome our new ...
The law should apply to everyone.
As you yourself pointed out, the NSA did illegal spying on Americans. Where is the court case being pursued on them? And if there is no court case taking up the case against the NSA for their illegal spying. Why would Snowden have ANY reason to expect any fairness in a court case for him? And the Mainstream Media would "cowtow" to whatever info the government would want to expose.
This project sounds to me like the NSA is attempting to build their own version of China's "great firewall", and that it'll be used domestically far more than it will be against foreign threats. I can easily see them sharing this with law enforcement agencies, even down to the local level, allowing them to essentially "turn off" internet access at will by blocking packets.
For example, yesterday, the FAA issued a no-fly order for parts of Missouri - this was presumably because there were racially-charged demonstrations over police killings planned for that day - to allow police helicopters free rein over that area. Now, with a system like this in place, I could easily see the police getting some intel that some people might be planning demonstrations and using this system to intercept a specific sub-set of packets: say, anything coming to and from social media from within the borders of the no-fly zone, to stop people organizing as easily.
The NSA approaches ES and convinces him to participate in a long-term project. Snowden "escapes" with tonnes of documents. He takes them to China. Then he takes them to Russia. The Russians and Chinese help convince the world he is a credible source. ES then starts releasing major BS aimed at convincing the Russians and Chinese that Uncle Sam still carries the biggest stick on the planet.
ZOMG!11!1!!!!, NSA can haz major counter-attacking AI monstermindbotswithzombiegoodness.
Profit.
I
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
Snowden's information is no longer cutting edge.
The Darpa Grand Challenge pretty much lays out an automated hacking tool.
http://www.darpa.mil/cybergrandchallenge/
because no one but him thought about IP spoofing?
Despotism is the word you are looking for.
Dictators are not mandatory for despotism. New kinds of despotism are possible the US is already well on it's way there but not the dictator kind... if you wait for a dictator you will feel OK all the way up to being sent to the gulag.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This would be interesting if it was not already a fully developed program with a 40 year history in network security and network attacks.
Probably what they meant to say is, that we are now telling you about this in case you notice random censorship on the web.
It is pain in the ass these kind of articles are babbling about pizza, elevator and all this irrelevant stuff about the personality of the interviewer and the interviewee. Go straigth to the facts of interest and cut down this article from 7 pages to only 1.
It's like the author is trying to write the first chapter of a novel he hopes Hollywood will buy for the next blockbuster. Give us the facts, we can wait for the movie.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Project 2501.
The photo at Mashable of both attending a gala and in Tuxedos is choice.
http://mashable.com/2014/08/13/snowden-hayden-tuxedo-photo/
Hayden is absolutely BEAMING. ;-D
Think of it as an chilling free speech tracking sock puppet without the need to hire staff and have then craft online personas just to find one person a gov/mil finds difficult.
Post the wrong set of words about funding a new war, new backing of freedom fighters, the use of drones in a new entanglement, the sending of boots on the ground.
Your IP, network and OS could then face a series of limited probes until your online life was constructed, ready for a file to be passed to a real human.
Your use of a firewall, AV and encryption would just be seen as fun and be bypassed thanks to tame consumer OS developers or poor quality open source code.
Then you may face the human set "disinformation" or "effects capabilities" psychological operations and information warfare by manipulating social media, spoofing communications from an individual.
In the past you would need a team of humans to interact with an ip, person posting. Now that can happen later after more detail has been gathered - with less human guidance.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The military commands in the EU nations are having fun driving, sailing, flying and coding advanced US provided platforms and systems at low cost.
All parts of the EU had to offer was a few shared sites with optical and telco interconnects.
Kind of hard to give up on all that free or low cost US export grade equipment over some data on some citizens when the deals where done over decades.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Down to the MAC and beyond, onto your own home networks, then a human can take over.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Two issues raised by Snowdon:
1). The source of an attack could be spoofed to trick the U.S. into attacking an innocent third party.
Response: This isn't a problem. The NSA is already attacking billions of "innocent third parties", including U.S. citizens, by violating their privacy and the security of their person.
2). The violation of the fourth amendment since the NSA would effectively need to monitor all domestic network traffic.
Response: This isn't a problem. The NSA is already monitoring all domestic network traffic. Their weasel-y implication that automated surveillance isn't surveillance is bought by enough people who are confused, or trusting, or scared, or disinterested. Also the NSA can now claim that "this isn't new" which is also an argument that many will buy. Since 2001 the NSA hasn't been troubled by the constitution, they have multiple presidential sign-offs. If things get difficult they will simply blame the executive branch.
Who will watch the watchers? This cannot end well.
Most spy agencies like to watch a new person as they advance, given small tests, trails, working with their handlers.
Left in place to advance and get to policy setting, overview or trusted command like level decades later without ever been noticed.
Walking in with bulk material for free and having another nation just accept it is a trap many nations have fallen for.
Any material offered might have spy bait mixed in it by default or be pre sorted to fool a nations own staff at different security levels. A nation that is offered this mix of random documents then rushes out to buy super computers, invests in new lasers or scans the skies for projects never started.
Russia has enough of its own trusted well placed people at different levels of other govs globally.
China likes the decades of very advanced education offered for free in other nations. Both outlooks differ from that of the US or UK in bulk instant 'win' of documents bought from people or from signals collected.
The planet wide signals intelligence network is great if your rushed/forced to use tame international telco like networks all the time. Other nations might just use people to travel the world and wait a week or so for a chat in person. Number stations like ideas can push rapid messages out globally.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
you missed my point:
"Snowden is X"
where X is a scenario that explains his behavior (hero, traitor, dupe, blackmail victim, etc, etc)
we've seen all possible variations of X debated here on /. and it's time to move the fuck on
Thank you Dave Raggett
Why to go to the trouble of mounting a distributed denial of service attack, that need thousands of infected computers to be effective, when you can just tickle a dumb bot to do the dirty work for you in the name of the government?
I haven't read the article, but "scour massive repositories of metadata and analyze it to differentiate normal network traffic from anomalous or malicious traffic" is the exact purpose of intrusion detection systems like Snort. Any smart or large business is using an IDS. They help block known attacks before vendors can publish patches or before the IT department is able to verify that the patch doesn't break any of their systems.
I worked on a bit on an AI that generated IDS rules to match known traffic patterns. Any non-matching traffic would be flagged and blocked by the IDS. The point was to make it that much harder to exploit unknown bugs. Not only would you have to exploit the bug, you'd also have to do it while looking like the site's normal web traffic. This is basically whitelisting existing traffic and blacklisting everything else.
Snowden's stuff is out of date. The project was renamed SkyNet,
Sounds like a contradiction to the silicon valley's media narrative.
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What the fuck should we do? I trust our government either allows NSA to spy on them, or has taken measures to prevent it. I personally try to keep my things safe, but I really don't think that NSA would be interested in me a small bit. And what if they were? I'm not living in America, be actually have some rights left here. It's very hard to bully someone using the courts as a weapon in here. NSA or the US couldn't do it. They would need the help of the local government. NSA is kinda supposed to be spying us. IT's your problem if you feel like they shouldn't be spying on yourselfs. We are just getting more popcorn over here.