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Report: Russia and China Crack Encrypted Snowden Files

Posted by timothy on from the parallel-efforts dept.

New submitter garyisabusyguy writes with word that, according to London's Sunday Times, "Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services," and suggests this non-paywalled Reuters version, too. "MI6 has decided that it is too dangerous to operate in Russia or China," writes the submitter. "This removes intelligence capabilities that have existed throughout the Cold War, and which may have helped to prevent a 'hot' nuclear war. Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?"

8 of 546 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Proof by swilly · · Score: 4, Informative

    Your theory would work if the agents that were pulled out were American, but British agents are unlikely to have an SF-86.

  2. Re: Proof by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    As verbs:
    Cause = effect
    Alter = affect

    http://grammar.yourdictionary....

    It's fuzzy, but I think 'effect' would have been the better choice (and not worrying about it at all might have been an even better option for the AC higher in the thread :).

  3. Greenwald's reply by ameline · · Score: 5, Informative

    https://firstlook.org/theinter...

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    Ian Ameline
    1. Re:Greenwald's reply by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 4, Informative

      What's sad about Glen Greenwald's response is what the Sunday Times will do later. Mr. Greenwald's article repeatedly uses the phrase "retraction-worthy fabrications," but the actions of the Times already indicates that we're past that now. Newspapers as propaganda arms of the UK government, in the worst traditions of Soviet Russia and East Germany during the Cold War, are now firmly entrenched.

      One of the extremely few verifiable lies (as opposed to the numerous unverifiable lies) has been silently deleted from the online version of the Sunday Times. It was not retracted. It was not corrected. It was not apologized for. It just vanished. The Times claimed David Miranda was "seized at Heathrow in 2013" in possession of 58,000 NSA documents after meeting Mr. Snowden in Moscow. (Because it quoted a number, it must be true, right?) At the time, David Miranda had never been to Moscow and had never met Mr. Snowden. That blatant, verifiable lie got stuffed into the memory hole. Which improved the quality of the writing a microscopic amount. David Miranda was detained, not seized, but "seized" has a higher negative connotation rating in the thesaurus all Murdoch properties use to compose their texts and they were going for maximum negativity in this article, which is why they squeezed in the reference to David Miranda at all. Times readers were to be reminded that Glenn Greenwald is gay, so they would instantly ignore any rebuttal or response. Overreaching for the anti-gay, got caught in a lie.

      Given what they did with the verifiable lie, we can readily guess that the unverifiable lies will simply stand. They will never be retracted. They will never be corrected. They will never be apologized for. The Times will maintain the blatant lies for all time, and the readers of the Times will never know they have been lied to, because the readers of the Times don't read anything else. It's Soviet propaganda at its finest. Mikhail Suslov would be proud of Rupert Murdoch.

  4. Re:Aftermath by Steve+B · · Score: 4, Informative
    You want a citation? Here's a citation:

    In 2013, Reuters reported that documents released by Edward Snowden indicated that the NSA had paid RSA Security $10 million to make Dual_EC_DRBG the default in their encryption software, and raised further concerns that the algorithm might contain a backdoor for the NSA.

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    /. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
  5. Re:The first question that comes to my mind by Ly4 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Throw enough resources at a[n] encryption problem, it becomes a matter of time until it's cracked.

    That is completely wrong, unless you define 'enough time' as 'longer than the age of the universe'.

    More here (scroll down to the quote from Applied Cryptography): https://www.schneier.com/blog/...

  6. Re:Jane, you ignorant slut ... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Snowden has stated that he got access to documents and accounts at higher levels than his own access allowed by simply telling people with access that he needed their password to log in and fix something. Apparently security training at the NSA is pretty poor.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  7. Re:Proof by ahabswhale · · Score: 3, Informative

    Last I checked, the Congress isn't a database. Besides, that was the CIA -- not the NSA.

    --
    Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?