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Whistleblowers: How NSA Created the 'Largest Failure' In Its History (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Former NSA whistleblowers contend that the agency shut down a program that could have "absolutely prevented" some of the worst terror attacks in memory. According to the ZDNet story: "Weeks prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, a test-bed program dubbed ThinThread was shut down in favor of a more expensive, privacy-invasive program that too would see its eventual demise some three years later -- not before wasting billions of Americans' tax dollars. Four whistleblowers, including a congressional senior staffer, came out against the intelligence community they had served, after ThinThread. designed to modernize the agency's intelligence gathering effort, was cancelled. Speaking at the premier of a new documentary film A Good American in New York, which chronicles the rise and demise of the program, the whistleblowers spoke in support of the program, led by former NSA technical director William Binney."
Only goes to show. Of course, we have no proof that thin thread would of actually worked, but instead of caring about America's safety, the NSA only cared about getting more money.
Be seeing you...
Where the powers that be were convinced that warrantless wiretapping of everyone was an improvement over concentrating on terror targets.
I imagine it got really cold in that room with all the hand waving going on.
Since the Snowden allegations I spend more time discussing my bowel movements with friends than ever before. Nothing else quite feels right.
... there you have it - the real incentive, the unique driving factor for USSA MIC
It's very easy after a disaster to claim that an unfunded or ignored project would have prevented the disaster. Since the whistleblowers in the article are talking about the 9/11 terrorist attack, it seems a bit late. to be blowing whistles on it now.
It does seem clear that the NSA suffered, and is suffering, from Jerry Pournell's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy"
>> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
>> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself
The amount of money, time, and manpower burned on oversampling incredible amounts of personal traffic would seem much better focused on parts of the world, and populations, where the monitoring is likely to bear more fruit. But that doesn't expand the NSA itself and its overall capacity.
The best clue for detecting bullshit in the efficacy claims for any intelligence apparatus is when its proponents state it would have prevented a complex security lapse like 9/11. Reading the article further it seems like a bunch of people just mad their ideas weren't adopted.
If NSA hadn't been caught searching and storing content there wouldn't now be such effort into encrypting everything.
And after conversations are encrypted effort will be made to render traffic analysis useless as well.
Well given the CIA report entited "Bin Laden determined to attack US" mentioning flying planes into buildings... and with the spooks trying to get emergency meetings with El Presidente Bush, I don't think Thin Thread would have helped.
The problem with 9/11 was a President who was too lazy to act, and was family friends with the Bin Ladens, so had a reason to ignore anything that might cause his friends/business partners bad press. It happened to suit his friends political agendas too. Giving them the excuse to pass Patriot act, and, as we learned from some of the leaks, the mass surveillance started 1998, and 9/11 Patriot act simply gave it a legal cover.
If my grandmother had wheels, she would've been a bike. Are we really supposed to attribute the failures of the three letter agencies to "unfortunate mistakes" and otherwise believe in their efficacy? Well, I consider myself a millionaire: Unfortunately I chose the wrong numbers on the lottery ticket, but other than that, I'm rich!
Let's say the NSA somehow knows there is a message between two people they want to decrypt. With the computing power they have how long would it take? What I'm getting at is if the NSA had to concentrate only on targets would they be able to break the encryption?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
If there was no minimum wage I'm sure some rich asshole would ask that. Actually even with that they try.
Legends and myths grow around the historic events.
It is true that a couple of years before 9/11 events CNN/ABC sent a crew to meet Bin Laden's to get the interviews multiple times. Even two months before the events bin Laden was giving interviews to the local journalists.
If journalists could meet, why the fuck do we need electronic surveillance at all and later we hear complains saying that we needed more surveillance, since if we had more surveillance events would have been prevented. If journalists can get interviews freely, then I would be really stupid to believe that US, which has very powerful and most expensive intelligence agencies in the world, really wanted to catch him, because they did not.
Money may be a necessary evil, but the problem is not the money it's the way we structure our society and government around it. There should be absolutely no way for politicians to make money from anything except their paycheck, period. Sure, give them a nice salary and pension so they can live well, but any other income should be illegal, period. Direct or indirect. If you want the privilege of representing your fellow Americans in the government, there is a price you pay. Americans should be absolutely disgusted with the amount of corruption in the government. I really don't understand how people can be so complacent about it.
So sadly true. People don't even expect their leaders to be honest or have any integrity anymore. But really, are the people any different? I think that it's a representative government. The lack of integrity in the public is reflected in their leaders.
Even with minimum wage, corporations have people working for no money. As long as they can pretend that the work serves some sort of educational purpose, they can use people as unpaid interns and get away with it.
iirc, the following is from Halberstam's best and brightest
a guy goes to see a friend who has been appointed to some very high post in the security apparatus - deputy secretary level
and the friend says, you would not believe how much information i get from the 3 letter agencys; every day, i learn about all this stuff, from all over the world, that i can't tell you about cause it is classified
next time he visits his friend, guy stops at a news kiosk, get a bunch of us and foreign papers (this is the 60s - newspapers are still rolling in their monopoly money)
guy shows his friend the newspapers: in all you secret info, is there *one thing* not in the papers already ?
Thanks a lot, Obama.
You are welcome on my lawn.
When it comes to subjects that journalists do not have access to there is no comparison on news vs intel.
A friend pointed me at this today: basically how a small number control governments to make more money. I have only seen a bit and would welcome an objective review by real historians.
Let's say the NSA somehow knows there is a message between two people they want to decrypt. With the computing power they have how long would it take? What I'm getting at is if the NSA had to concentrate only on targets would they be able to break the encryption?
That is the argument that trumps the whole "Warrantless wiretapping of everyone is the only way to be safe!! Murica!!!" crap.
If you try to surveil everyone, you are wasting limited resources with little return on investment. If you concentrate your resources upon the small subset of cases where there is a reasonable argument to be made and the letter of the law is followed so that you can, after the fact prove that you knew that you knew that you were spending resources wisely on keeping the USA and the world safe.. you wouldn't have a problem making the case that such creepy surveillance is needed, warranted and is not being misused.
The situation we have in contrast sounds like something nefarious is going on and that a weak argument is being made in a futile attempt to muddy the waters and confuse the issue. People should smell blood in the water when you get told some idiotic shit like "well if you're innocent you have nothing to fear" Anyone well informed should respond to that with.. "Talk to my lawyer" and "Get a warrant or fuck off" and be done with it. Also when they swat your house and ignore the law.. set up cameras.. record them and bring it up in a court of law and involve the public media. Do not take it like they want you to take it.. turn it around and make misusing and abusing authority and power painful like stupidity should be.
The positive here is that anyone of average intelligence who is paying attention and cares, knows that we are being lied to here. Don't put up this shit from our government. If you are at McDonalds and you ask for a cheeseburger and they bring you a dead mouse and a cup of piss.. you wouldn't pay them. Don't allow the government to do that either.. bait and switch, the whole playing legal games and persecuting people who refuse to put up with misuse and travesties of justice such as what happened to Aaron Schwartz, not following the letter of the law or using surveillance for political expediency will not be accepted and will result in a violent backlash if it continues. Democracy is not compatible with that type of misuse of authority.
Are you for real? We never hear the end of it when they supposedly handled something right. They'll parade the pettiest of wannabe terrorists all over the news for weeks and brag how catching them saved the free world from ending right then and there.
Yeah, then it turns out to be some patsy in a setup...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
money is our method of assigning value. It's wildly flawed but it is our system. that has no bearing on what we DO with that assigned value.
Take the asshat who bought up the cancer medication and raised it's price by 5000%. That's what you say should rule.?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
So...if a man has some money invested in stocks and bonds, he will make money from the dividend and interest income, and the investments themselves may grow in value. What happens once he is elected into office? Is he required to sell all his investments at that moment, since they might make money for him while he is in office? Such a requirement totally destroys a well-proven and frugal strategy for financial stability, and would be a terrible injustice. The same is true of preventing him from buying/selling new investments while in office.
Such a ridiculous requirement would drive qualified talent out of the candidate pool, leaving us with incompetent candidates that would drive our country into the ground immediately.
Furthermore, how will you prevent this little trick: the politician enacts laws that favor a specific corporation, and *after he retires* he is invited to the board of directors for that corporation. This happens quite a lot, but establishing the intent to do this is legally impossible.
Those are just two examples of how impractical your suggestion is, and they are both moot, because there is no way in hell legislation to that effect would ever fly (remember, the people who have the power to make this happen are the very people who would suffer from it).
Being effective at politics requires that people be able to see the big picture.
Should they be able to make money? just like everyone else yes they should. Preventing them from doing so is problematic, but disclosure is not. If you don't want your finances public, don't run for fucking office. That way we *know* when they are trading on their influence...they are automatically recused from anything in their financial portfolio or it's a crime.
The real tricky part is the revolving door between gov and private sector. That a congress member can make laws and then take a job in the industry making use of those laws is a real problem. You need qualified experts in government to regulate private business effectively but you won't get them if you prevent them from subsequently working in their expert field when they leave gov service.
How that's reconciled I'm not sure.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
And how old are YOU?
When money goes from being an important consideration to being the only consideration, society goes to hell. Perhaps with age you'll learn the subtlty of thought needed to understand that balance.
He won't pay me a living wage for mopping his floor once and I won't be his galley slave for whatever table scraps his dog doesn't want.
Didn't you read the follow-up story?. The free market fixed that problem, and the medicine is selling for a buck now.
That is how the market should and does work (when not overburdened with monopolies (government-enforced or otherwise)).
In my experience, people who don't know much about money assume that there simply isn't much to know, and that rich people are all evil, and that money is evil, and that we should basically abandon it all. These statements are all false, and clarity on the subject only comes through a proper education.
The backstory reason and purpose was TERRORISTS.
The final and overriding reason that SOLD THE DEAL, was enabling the SURVEILLANCE AND POWER STATE.
The one great dream and aspiration of all governments (and corp) in history... insight into, control over, and enslavement of you. And you GAVE IT TO THEM.
So now, that shitty govt that YOU installed, will control your lives forevermore in a descending spiral of shit and hard life until either revolt or invasion happens.
So much for those lofty plans you made in the 1770's.
YOU THREW THEM AWAY.
Idiots.
This really depends on the type of encryption used, and if the key can be discovered. When you discuss cryptanalysis from a math position, you have ideas like "this is a known plaintext attack- we know the first X bytes of the message, can we recover the rest of the message, or the key?" and so on down the list. If something is encrypted with a symmetric key- for instance, AES 128, or Serpent, or Twofish- then the odds of recovering the data given just the key, or a plaintext sample, seem hopeless.
But if you are asking from the perspective of law enforcement, you have a great deal of other options for not having to fight that mathematically impossible fight- you might be able to look at other communications, or exploit a weakness in the design of the sender or receiver, etc. You could keylog them, or put listen to their conversation with a microphone, etc.
To answer your question generally- no, the NSA could not decrypt the information of only targets. If you go get Veracrypt (or Truecrypt, or LUKS, or anything else using a block cipher), make a drive with it, and then never screw up your security, it would be beyond the current hypothesized resources of humanity to ever recover the data. If you died with a secret that would change society for the better in that drive, it would be more reasonable to cryopreserve your brain, because it's likely that within the next few millenia someone will learn how to read data out of a frozen human brain, and get the key that way- that would be a more effective way to get the key than trying to break the crypto.
So no, the NSA couldn't just focus their computing power on just targets and get to read everything they do, even assuming targets could be chosen with exact accuracy. The fact that the government knew that something was suspicious about most terrorists before they terrorize is generally something in their favor- but it skips that there are quite a few people who wish us harm at any given time, most of whom never get the chance or simply never turn their politics and rhetoric into violence.
Now, what the feds could *maybe* do, that more Americans *might* be ok with, is to greatly dial up their amount of targeted surveillance of suspected foreign nationals. While probably better for privacy than the "wide net" that we see, this obviously has other issues- not only is this extraordinarily expensive in ways that databases are not, but it is also fraught with privacy concerns as well, just not the exact same ones.
Or did they have to flee?
Yeah, yer right. It is easy to figure out which messages to decrypt, all you have to do is ask the sender and receiver if it is important and dangerous to U.S. security.
I, for one, have no problem with representatives making money. What they should not be able to do is use their policy influence to make themselves, their families, and their friends rich(er).
I've said it before and I've I'll say it again, the ultimate way this should be handled is as follows:
1) With few exceptions, the free and capital assets of the newly elected should be placed in a sort of mutual / trust fund, untouchable for the duration of their public service.
2) If the economy prospers, so will their mutual fund, and at a rate proportional to the success of the economy. Consequently, if the economy suffers, they suffer as well. This encourages sane and stable policy making.
3) Make participating in bribery of a representative a treason level offense, for both parties. This would encourage very good accounting, I suppose.
Three easy steps to cleaning all of the crap out. The founders should have thought of it. Of course, it could never go anywhere, because it would amount to congress cutting its own balls off.
Why in the world do you think he should react any differently when you ask him to give you his money for free?
You are the only one talking about getting something for free. For everyone else it's quid pro quo.
Didn't you read the follow-up story?. The free market fixed that problem, and the medicine is selling for a buck now.
Not quite that simple: many folks won't have access to a compounding pharmacy, the drug isn't for sale yet that I can tell, and for many or most drugs a compounding pharmacy won't be able to help. I think the real answer is pretty similar to your answer about money: not all monopolies are evil and we shouldn't abandon all monopolies. When rent seekers like Actelion and Turing learn to game the system it's time to reform the rules on restricted distribution and returning generic drugs to exclusive status; it's not time to blow up the FDA.
All that aside, the feds stopped those programs for this exact reason: "a program that could have "absolutely prevented" some of the worst terror attacks ".
When you create those attacks in the first place, so you can go Full On Nazi on your own population, you don't want someone or something else you created to derail your plans to take over.
Problem #1:
The aspiring politician fills his portfolio exclusively with the stocks of a few powerful corporations. Then, he runs and gets elected. Now, he can't touch his investments (under your proposal). So, he has direct incentives to pass laws that favor the corporations in which he is already invested. So he does, and the investments he can't touch increase greatly in value (the rest of the economy be damned). Then, when his term is up, he (and his corporate buddies) can freely cash in. Your solution won't solve the problem at all, and by preventing the politician from being able to cash-out early if things go south, you will make things even worse.
Problem #2:
Even if you can somehow prevent stock-market involvement from being a factor (which you can't, it's impossible), you also have the old-boy's club. The politician, while in office or possibly even before being in office, receives an under-the-table wink (not a bribe, just an unspoken nod) from his corporate buddies. So, he passes laws that favor them, to the detriment of whoever else. Then, once his term is up, he is invited to the board of directors. He rakes it in on his policies, *after* he is out of office so it is perfectly legal. And you can't prove collusion by any means, so he gets away with it.
Problem #3:
Bribery is already illegal, and they already get away with it. Making the punishments worse won't change that, since they aren't getting caught anyway.
Problem #4:
The people who make the laws are the people who would most suffer from your proposals, so it will never happen anyway.
So, in conclusion, your idea of how things should work is very poorly thought-out, wouldn't work at all, and would be impossible to implement anyway. You clearly need a lot more education in finance and political science before you have any business making proposals like these.
That's why I got out of the business. You folks need to realize TT was a program of many. You know in the black projects world, there are multiple stovepipes, more are doing the same thing, due to creating of competing teams. Where's the academic paper that shows how better this system was... against others? All we know is the politics since TBlazer was the big, most bloated, known contract of the time.
Though TT has some merit in its creation and performance, there's a dozen others you don't know about that could have did the same as TT... or better. Just that TT is being a poster child due to a few grumpy employees that did get a conscience to expose it.
No news here folks.
Making money is the problem in US politics, that and failure being rewarded and celebrated as long as sufficient corporate profits are generated. Take the failure in the Ukraine, Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, basically spent 5 billion dollars to give Russia back the Crimea for free. Nuland and Pyatt are still celebrated basically for being the greatest fuck ups in modern times, trotted off to Russia to try to humiliate the Russians but the Russian can barely contain the mocking and laughter. From the Russian view point, how much would they have paid to Nuland and Pyatt, to achieve what they achieved, return the Crimea and get rid of the economic leach of the Ukraine, would Russia have paid 5 billion dollars to get back the Crimea and get rid of the Ukraine, how much were they spending subsidising the Ukraine to maintain access to the Crimea, something they no longer have to spend, another major win.
Blatant failure celebrated because a big chunk of that five billion spent in the Ukraine was successfully syphoned off by contractors who did not give a shit about outcomes, beyond how much they would make and whether it would generate more conflict and chaos for greater profit opportunities.
Business government partnerships and contracting are nothing more than exercises in corruption and the more money wasted the more they are heralded as great success stories, something you are of course bound to do as covering up exercises. The fuck ups are allowed to roam free, no matter how great their failures because seemingly nothing more than embarrassment factor and their exposure might lead to greater investigation. Failure has become the norm in US government administration because failure means spending more money, success means problem solved and the end of cash flow, perversely the biggest failures become the greatest success stories for corporations ie F35 and it's now required replacement at even greater cost (this failure even forced on other countries via corporate driven US diplomatic threats, woot).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As long as they can pretend that the work serves some sort of educational purpose, they can use people as unpaid interns and get away with it.
Thats awful, and a good example of how the Corporation *do* rule America, far more than in other developed countries where such exploitation is illegal.
-1 Flamebait
Love it! You can always tell when the truth hits a nerve. Thank youuuu...
"What they should not be able to do is use their policy influence to make themselves, their families, and their friends rich(er)."
There's only one way to make sure that happens. Full transparency, and harsh penalties.
Why should they automatically get a pension? They should pay for their own pension like every other person has so.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Your extrapolation from "wanting privacy for all" to "wanting to see the world burn" is both ridiculous and very sad.
If it is impractical to have complete privacy in your communications with others -- friends, coworkers, businesses, organizations, etc. -- when desired, then what kind of life is that?
Millions of Americans fought in WW2 to defend the "American" way of life -- principally "freedom" (as plainly expressed in the U.S. Constitution). Many more Americans died in WW2 than hundreds of 9/11 attacks and Paris attacks. And, yet, you appear ready to discount the sacrifices of the past, and use the unfortunate victims of recent sensational events (notable because of how rare they are) to justify invading the private lives of everyone, through mechanisms which inevitably expose the American population to global exploitation (by hackers). I think it would be easy to establish that the bulk of the American population is harmed far more by lack of privacy than by all actual and "prevented" acts of terrorism since the establishment of the NSA and the adoption of the Internet.
Nobody doubts that the CIA and other parts of the federal government have occasionally cultivated a public image of incompetence to mask their very competent evil. I totally disagree with your assertions about Snowden however. You call those revelations "zilch"? WTF more can there be? NSA nanobots infecting our bodies and reporting on our biometric data? He really did give us the smoking gun as well as the dead body of the U.S. Constitution. The ho-hum reaction is due to ignorance and indifference; I don't think the public actively approves of this crap. Nor do they approve of a government which will not punish its own employees for their crimes.
If there was no minimum wage I'm sure some rich asshole would [you to work a full time job for him, for free]. Actually even with that they try.
Yea, and you could tell him to piss off. What is the problem? Do you not know how to say no?
Just check the status of the evil bit:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc35...