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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.
And left to rot like the strange fruit you can be sure they are! Traitors, just like short people, have no reason to live.
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.
Humans have needs, damnit. All humans do, including you. You need food, medicine, recreation, etc. And in order for these things to be available, people must labor to produce them. Money is the most efficient means we have created to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.
So, since meeting our needs *must* rule (what in God's name do humans do apart from this, I mean really?), and since money is the best way to organize this enterprise, money *should* rule.
If some rich asshole asked you to work a full time job for him, for free, you would tell him to piss off. Why in the world do you think he should react any differently when you ask him to give you his money for free?
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.
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.
Their "failures" are noisy and public, by design. Their many successes? Well, we're not going to hear much about them, unless somebody snitches. And for the record, Snowden and Manning gave us nothing, no smoking gun, zilch, unless you are interested in the adventures of Anna Nicole Smith... And it doesn't matter anyway. The people have spoken, and they highly approve, even more so in light of recent events. Fascism is on the march.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
And after conversations are encrypted effort will be made to render traffic analysis useless as well.
In short: aiding the enemy.
I think I've seen reasoning like that before.
The bodies in Paris, only the latest kills in the West, are barely cold, and you apparently want more. Unfortunately that is very likely to happen.
The thing that puzzles me is the indifference. What is that? Autism? Narcissism? Lack of empathy? Misplaced idealism? Distorted thinking? Common cause with al Qaeda? Or simply wanting to see the world burn?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Just check the status of the evil bit:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc35...