AC the US hacks find vast amounts of mil/gov data in plain text on wide open US infrastructure as networks have to connect with much older federal, mil, state computer networks.
Thats a problem thats unique to the way the US has to work on larger data sets and its own much older internal public and private sector networking or standards.
The hardware is too old to upgrade to allow any encrypt, decrypt standards or can only accept a limited format that has to be in plain text as submitted down a network.
Domestic law enforcement always expected data in plain text on any state or federal database when doing a national search. If a state or federal department or a local private sector gov/mil contractor had data in its own unique encrypted format, that search may not find vital results.
The US idea was that anyone doing the search could be fully trusted by default on vast networks as only trusted users got physical access to any gov/mil network to start a search. The show ID and sit down network terminal in a limited number of federal buildings or on a mil site idea was to keep such vast data sets very safe but very easy to search going back many decades.
Other nations might not need to keep such plain text access and can actually buy into very advanced software that can encrypt and decrypt for a researcher. Just walking out or getting a readable download in full is can now be made much more tricky on a network or for any one person with physical access.
i.e. the full dataset is protected not just the very secure chair in front of an older search terminal that makes every request in plain text.
Yes wealth will move out very quickly to safe areas or buy into established areas that will not face such policy changes.
Poverty will just take over as ever more people get full gov support to move in.
Expect policy moves on very focused rent support into each city or outer city area to move very poor populations into very wealthy areas with a lot of extra gov support payments just for rent.
The other creative policy idea is to mandate affordable housing in any new redevelopment or larger building project in all wealthy areas.
Its about the all files on the local OS too. Just blocking the links could be done at the provider level or set to never found as a search term as a first step.
Downloads and the OS is the new talking point about any file that made it back to the endusers OS and can be detected by the OS as a file of interest to law enforcement..
Long term a download, sneaker net drive connected, usb device, all files of interest get reported on via a networked OS with the users ip.
Plug and spy.
A bit like could based AV with hashes, checksums but it will be creating a list of all files stored locally and reporting with any files flagged to local and international law enforcement databases.
With all the fragments of data that get sent back? Just add a new always on layer of protection, a free cloud based AV product for all users.
Every file downloaded gets a checksum and that data is sent back with the ip for an instant AV report.
If that file is later registered or found to be of interest to a company, government, or political NGO... a record of all users globally who have that file can be created.
People thought it was only the 5 eye nations and their ex/former workers who got a look in via PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Govs and their 5 eye spies got invited in, now private sector DRM teams could soon get the same US corporate welcome to look over all users.
That end user encryption has to stop at some point for the ads to work. The 5 nations security services, their staff and their other contractors will be waiting for all the decrypted data in real time. PRISM (surveillance program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just looking for some software gets a user on a list:) "Whether you're a regular user of Web privacy tools like Tor and Tails, or you've just checked out their websites, the NSA could be tracking your online movements, a new investigation reveals." http://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-l... (4 July 2014)
AC they have via "GCHQ Created Spoofed LinkedIn and Slashdot Sites To Serve Malware" https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
The way out is not be a very interesting person online.
Visit the same news sites, run the same updates. Been repetitive to the same short list of news sites, sports, games is not interesting to the security services.
They want to follow interesting people into newly formed sites, forums, chats, web 2.0 and then get back into their more secure computer usage or get admin rights over larger invite only online groups.
The main issues is collection has to be online as thats all the gov's can collect from. Larger teams in shifts been detected wandering around getting overtime watching one person is an issue in very inward looking communities and many sections of cities.
How unique would a very average resolution, new OS and new browser be in a VM become?
The problem then becomes how unique the user wants to be with other settings. No flash? Fonts used, Do not track set, blocking ads, like/share buttons blocked, WebGL Renderer..
A default new browser, same OS every time from a VM? A browser that pools a lot of users real settings to present very random data back might be fun.
How unique are countermeasures to the fingerprint issue:)
Just the habit of a user to always install ad blocking or select one OS and hardware over another... the need to fix a list of defaults becomes tempting and telling.
Given the US has a long history with secret informants (Watergate) and the walking out of data vs entering, staying undetected in and moving data from a network only to allow the ip range and tools used to be found?
The interesting part is to listen to the comments.
Julian Assange: 'A lot more material' coming on US elections (July 27, 2016) http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07...
"Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are,"
For any group or nation to have the skills to enter a network, stay in, not be detected, exit with a lot of data and then get sloppy with something as simple as ip ranges, tools used seems strange.
EXCLUSIVE – NSA Whistleblower: Agency Has All of Clinton’s Deleted Emails (31 Jul 2016) http://www.breitbart.com/jerus... ..."surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community"...
+1 for shielding. Keep an eye on any outgoing account activity. Find a real bank that has services to protect its customers rather than wait for its consumers to report issues.
Use cash for a lot of smaller transactions.
Yet more AC propaganda stories to pull the nations away from China under the US 'Pivot' to Asia policy.
A big bold headline and then reality of the story becomes more clear.
Before and at the start of what is now NSA and GCHQ projects to get to Soviet and other nations communications was well funded. In the late 1940's the USS Cochino and the USS Tusk got used and the UK used the HMS Turpin. Converted to super-T specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... a lot of effort was made to get near Soviet sites.
The problem for the UK was the need for submarine broadcasts. Would the Soviet Union find their locations?
What slowed the UK's operations was the discovery of a UK scuba diver near a Soviet ship in Portsmouth harbour, the Crabb Affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... After that the UK was aware it had to be more careful. The US seemed ever more fixated with Murmansk and by the 1960's the UK was helping again with submarine work e.g. via HMS Taciturn and long term snorkelling to stay on site.
Later the newer upgrades became available into the 1970's. By the 1980's everyone knew of the Soviet underwater Ivy Bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... work that tapped Soviet communication cables.
Why any of this history made Slashdot is strange... given the CIRCUIT, REMEDY and GERONTIC news
"Snowden doc leak lists submarine'd cables tapped by spooks" (26 Nov 2014) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... http://international.sueddeuts...
The bending of the optical ensures no telco staff will be aware. The taps stay in place collecting all e.g.
political, business, negotiations and all other national and international calls given decades of cheap peering.
The only questing left is to ask is did the Soviet Union know? Could they detect the 1950's missions or well placed top staff mention the missions gaping back to the late 1940's? The Soviets knew about Ivy Bells.
The ability to pipe decades of disinformation deep into the NSA and GCHQ would have been successful given the US and UK's total collection dependance on such collection missions.
Thats the problem with huge budgets and a total reliance on electronic intelligence, signals intelligence once discovered.
Decades of overtime, medals and complex networking vs the thought that it was all for sorting disinformation.
AC if any nation is that good, nothing useful would be recovered by consultants able to freely talk to the press. Smart enough to get in, stay in, but details of entry left all over to find?
So what is the story going to be? A super power with super skills that have never been caught in the past decades got detected by consultants talking to the media this one time?
Or an ip range and tool set was left all over the network to be recovered later.... that conveniently points straight to another nation via method and ip range in the open and the domestic press got told about.
That nation with the super skills to get in, to get the data over time, stay totally undetected in real time, but lacked the most basic skills to cover its own path in and out?
If such an advance adversary is really detected no mention is made in the press of the investigative methods. Most advance nations like to keep that for their own security services investigations secure.
i.e. if its real no ability to just go running with the worlds media about tool sets and methods discovered....
The world now knows of efforts like QUANTUMSQUIRREL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that would give any friendly or other nation, its staff, ex staff and former staff the "skills" to become any ip range for any reason.
Just use the right tools, time of day and the perfect ip will always be stumbled upon by consultants to run to the press with.
Down the list:
An insider walks it out and the hint about another nation is the pre placed cover story that holds thanks to fragments left for any teams looking over systems later.
The insider is fully protected and pre placed cover story holds for decades.
So many people and other nations are discovered have had physical and network access that a short list of skilled nations is selected from and thats the presentable story.
A person or group uses a list of common tools and finds a huge number of other nations and people are also accessing the data. A trail is created to what is expected.
A smaller power or allied nation with insider help feels the need to see the material released and uses advance methods to ensure a common adversarial nation gets the full blame. i.e. they have their own virtual methods like QUANTUMSQUIRREL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Fragments of past tools, ip ranges, time of day would not be left by any advanced nation or other method. Someone created a trail, wants the trail to be found or understood the result would be great cover.
Long term a full release helps historians, authors, bloggers and any interested people fill in the redacted material after 30 years of official gov releases in some nations.
A limited, self censored release over years by a subset of the press seems useful in the short term to sell content but long term its all the information in its full context that helps.
A full release also prevents any questions surrounding members of the press who claim to be experts in certain areas and then only publish fragments on what they feel they understand or want write about for domestic consumption. That can be very limiting for any future historians and can result in a very small sub set of diverse material been covered many times.
Eg a group of journalists only feel comfortable about releasing material about corruption in a few nations... and hold back all the other interesting material as they see it as outside the help they can request from their own gov and mil contacts.
Members of the press then publish the same story with a few local twists or focus on a name in decades old material on advice of their legal departments.
A searchable full release is also good for details like format, dates. Names that did not hold a position that year, fonts, jargon that could point to alterations, self censorship, missing material, a limited hang out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
So the autonomy is perfected?
A totally secure command and control link?
So advanced that no other nation will be able to consider any counter measures?
The units will be watched, tracked and mapped. Even if the path taken has some random times and path changes built in per patrol, the locals will soon note the abilities and limitations.
After that comes a well funded intelligence sniffer to find out how much is an internal dumb database of possible maps or daily changes by human control and a burst of real time commands.
Any US command and control communications will undergo a full reverse engineering. The main question will be how much hardware crypto was allowed to be placed in each unit at that price point. Will the US allow any crypto to fall into the wrong hands per patrol or keep the device useless if lost? Some optics, a CPU a map, with data sent back..vs a full crypto package rolling around outside just waiting to be exported for a reward...
A dedicated effort to clone and offer back fake video, audio and motion detection, inject a halt command or induce a service fault on all local devices.
If that crypto effort fails, just flood and over power the command signal and see how the remote unit reacts - a shut down and wait for recovery, a rapid and very direct return to home, recovery or loss of control and the drone defaults to an anti tampering, avoid capture command?
Thats why most smarter nations use dedicated human special forces teams to watch over their bases 24/7 over any useful distances.
It seems the US did not learn much from Vietnam and has a lot of "locals" around its bases.
If your going to build any base in country, keep all locals a long way away... special forces are great for that every night.
NSA, GCHQ and other US federal law enforcement agencies have had no issues with any US private sector devices sold or consumer grade crypto created and used over the decades.
Generations of satellite phones, cell phones, mobile computing devices got collected on without any effort as sold to the global public.
Now state and federal law enforcement want the same tech. The way in was never an issue. Presenting the product in open court was the real question. The NSA and GCHQ did not want that kind of skill set presented to the world. State and federal law enforcement just thought of the next case and did not want to know about the reality of global collection going dark thanks to methods been presented in open court.
All devices are open to different levels of the UK and US governments, just the cost of total collection is now so low that every sector of US law enforcement now expects the same network and per device access. When that method goes to open court, will users habits change to not having a cell phone on them and collection reverts to on site collection or following people with teams. How many teams and shifts of 6 or 9 staff do most nations have per interesting person with the skills and cover stories to enter every part of a city to keep a person in sight?
Re "Making encryption standards so weak so that the company/person writing the software, can bypass them, is the very definition of a back door."
A few nations lost their cell networks.
SISMI-Telecom scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Greek wiretapping case 2004–05 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–05
Weak crypto just allows a lot of different groups to get the same total network access that only law enforcement thought it had.
Every phone then becomes open and trackable to anyone with the skills or cash.
Informants, undercover work with large teams, making deals with people in jail, prison or who had been in the prison system still wanted to earn cash.
The budgets for overtime and the funding of undercover skill sets have now been offered to consultants and contractors renting phone tracking and data recovery systems.
The idea that every person of interest has a phone on, a live mic in range of all conversations, has a gps device near them, takes video and images of all their friends for real time collection or later examination has become sold to US law enforcement officials by contractors.
Track the all movements, listen in, review details into a shared federal, private sector and state database, build a case with with logs and recordings.
Contractors often have their origins in signals intelligence and that is what they are going to sell back to the US gov once in the private sector.
What interesting person would meet any one with any powered phone on them?
Who would drive a car or truck with gps collecting its location, a microphone built in by the private sector that can be turned on by law enforcement?
Having a gps and mic ready cell phone with a sealed in battery in an area understood to be under constant law enforcement surveillance?
Nations can now afford to reconcile most of their users internet patterns over time. If that fails, just induce random network drops to see who falls off the network over a few 10's, hundred or 1000 interesting users per city and provider.
If most of a nations users are just surfing, using web 2.0, doing other tasks, getting a short list of people who went looking for software would not be too hard.
Slashdot Mirror
re “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.” https://theintercept.com/2014/... :)
and injecting all sorts of false material
Ty for requestpolicy :) Installed.
AC the US hacks find vast amounts of mil/gov data in plain text on wide open US infrastructure as networks have to connect with much older federal, mil, state computer networks.
Thats a problem thats unique to the way the US has to work on larger data sets and its own much older internal public and private sector networking or standards.
The hardware is too old to upgrade to allow any encrypt, decrypt standards or can only accept a limited format that has to be in plain text as submitted down a network.
Domestic law enforcement always expected data in plain text on any state or federal database when doing a national search. If a state or federal department or a local private sector gov/mil contractor had data in its own unique encrypted format, that search may not find vital results.
The US idea was that anyone doing the search could be fully trusted by default on vast networks as only trusted users got physical access to any gov/mil network to start a search. The show ID and sit down network terminal in a limited number of federal buildings or on a mil site idea was to keep such vast data sets very safe but very easy to search going back many decades.
Other nations might not need to keep such plain text access and can actually buy into very advanced software that can encrypt and decrypt for a researcher.
Just walking out or getting a readable download in full is can now be made much more tricky on a network or for any one person with physical access.
i.e. the full dataset is protected not just the very secure chair in front of an older search terminal that makes every request in plain text.
Yes wealth will move out very quickly to safe areas or buy into established areas that will not face such policy changes.
Poverty will just take over as ever more people get full gov support to move in.
Expect policy moves on very focused rent support into each city or outer city area to move very poor populations into very wealthy areas with a lot of extra gov support payments just for rent.
The other creative policy idea is to mandate affordable housing in any new redevelopment or larger building project in all wealthy areas.
Its about the all files on the local OS too. Just blocking the links could be done at the provider level or set to never found as a search term as a first step.
Downloads and the OS is the new talking point about any file that made it back to the endusers OS and can be detected by the OS as a file of interest to law enforcement..
Long term a download, sneaker net drive connected, usb device, all files of interest get reported on via a networked OS with the users ip.
Plug and spy.
A bit like could based AV with hashes, checksums but it will be creating a list of all files stored locally and reporting with any files flagged to local and international law enforcement databases.
With all the fragments of data that get sent back? Just add a new always on layer of protection, a free cloud based AV product for all users. ... a record of all users globally who have that file can be created.
Every file downloaded gets a checksum and that data is sent back with the ip for an instant AV report.
If that file is later registered or found to be of interest to a company, government, or political NGO
People thought it was only the 5 eye nations and their ex/former workers who got a look in via PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Govs and their 5 eye spies got invited in, now private sector DRM teams could soon get the same US corporate welcome to look over all users.
That end user encryption has to stop at some point for the ads to work. The 5 nations security services, their staff and their other contractors will be waiting for all the decrypted data in real time.
PRISM (surveillance program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just looking for some software gets a user on a list :)
"Whether you're a regular user of Web privacy tools like Tor and Tails, or you've just checked out their websites, the NSA could be tracking your online movements, a new investigation reveals."
http://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-l... (4 July 2014)
AC they have via "GCHQ Created Spoofed LinkedIn and Slashdot Sites To Serve Malware" https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
The way out is not be a very interesting person online.
Visit the same news sites, run the same updates. Been repetitive to the same short list of news sites, sports, games is not interesting to the security services.
They want to follow interesting people into newly formed sites, forums, chats, web 2.0 and then get back into their more secure computer usage or get admin rights over larger invite only online groups.
The main issues is collection has to be online as thats all the gov's can collect from. Larger teams in shifts been detected wandering around getting overtime watching one person is an issue in very inward looking communities and many sections of cities.
How unique would a very average resolution, new OS and new browser be in a VM become? :)
The problem then becomes how unique the user wants to be with other settings. No flash? Fonts used, Do not track set, blocking ads, like/share buttons blocked, WebGL Renderer..
A default new browser, same OS every time from a VM? A browser that pools a lot of users real settings to present very random data back might be fun.
How unique are countermeasures to the fingerprint issue
Just the habit of a user to always install ad blocking or select one OS and hardware over another... the need to fix a list of defaults becomes tempting and telling.
Given the US has a long history with secret informants (Watergate) and the walking out of data vs entering, staying undetected in and moving data from a network only to allow the ip range and tools used to be found?
..."surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community"...
The interesting part is to listen to the comments.
Julian Assange: 'A lot more material' coming on US elections (July 27, 2016)
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07...
"Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are,"
For any group or nation to have the skills to enter a network, stay in, not be detected, exit with a lot of data and then get sloppy with something as simple as ip ranges, tools used seems strange.
EXCLUSIVE – NSA Whistleblower: Agency Has All of Clinton’s Deleted Emails (31 Jul 2016)
http://www.breitbart.com/jerus...
+1 for shielding. Keep an eye on any outgoing account activity. Find a real bank that has services to protect its customers rather than wait for its consumers to report issues.
Use cash for a lot of smaller transactions.
Yet more AC propaganda stories to pull the nations away from China under the US 'Pivot' to Asia policy.
A big bold headline and then reality of the story becomes more clear.
Before and at the start of what is now NSA and GCHQ projects to get to Soviet and other nations communications was well funded. In the late 1940's the USS Cochino and the USS Tusk got used and the UK used the HMS Turpin. Converted to super-T specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... a lot of effort was made to get near Soviet sites.
The problem for the UK was the need for submarine broadcasts. Would the Soviet Union find their locations?
What slowed the UK's operations was the discovery of a UK scuba diver near a Soviet ship in Portsmouth harbour, the Crabb Affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... After that the UK was aware it had to be more careful. The US seemed ever more fixated with Murmansk and by the 1960's the UK was helping again with submarine work e.g. via HMS Taciturn and long term snorkelling to stay on site.
Later the newer upgrades became available into the 1970's. By the 1980's everyone knew of the Soviet underwater Ivy Bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... work that tapped Soviet communication cables.
Why any of this history made Slashdot is strange... given the CIRCUIT, REMEDY and GERONTIC news "Snowden doc leak lists submarine'd cables tapped by spooks" (26 Nov 2014)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://international.sueddeuts...
The bending of the optical ensures no telco staff will be aware. The taps stay in place collecting all e.g.
political, business, negotiations and all other national and international calls given decades of cheap peering.
The only questing left is to ask is did the Soviet Union know? Could they detect the 1950's missions or well placed top staff mention the missions gaping back to the late 1940's? The Soviets knew about Ivy Bells.
The ability to pipe decades of disinformation deep into the NSA and GCHQ would have been successful given the US and UK's total collection dependance on such collection missions.
Thats the problem with huge budgets and a total reliance on electronic intelligence, signals intelligence once discovered.
Decades of overtime, medals and complex networking vs the thought that it was all for sorting disinformation.
AC if any nation is that good, nothing useful would be recovered by consultants able to freely talk to the press. Smart enough to get in, stay in, but details of entry left all over to find? ....
So what is the story going to be? A super power with super skills that have never been caught in the past decades got detected by consultants talking to the media this one time?
Or an ip range and tool set was left all over the network to be recovered later.... that conveniently points straight to another nation via method and ip range in the open and the domestic press got told about.
That nation with the super skills to get in, to get the data over time, stay totally undetected in real time, but lacked the most basic skills to cover its own path in and out?
If such an advance adversary is really detected no mention is made in the press of the investigative methods. Most advance nations like to keep that for their own security services investigations secure.
i.e. if its real no ability to just go running with the worlds media about tool sets and methods discovered
The world now knows of efforts like QUANTUMSQUIRREL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that would give any friendly or other nation, its staff, ex staff and former staff the "skills" to become any ip range for any reason.
Just use the right tools, time of day and the perfect ip will always be stumbled upon by consultants to run to the press with.
Down the list:
An insider walks it out and the hint about another nation is the pre placed cover story that holds thanks to fragments left for any teams looking over systems later.
The insider is fully protected and pre placed cover story holds for decades.
So many people and other nations are discovered have had physical and network access that a short list of skilled nations is selected from and thats the presentable story.
A person or group uses a list of common tools and finds a huge number of other nations and people are also accessing the data. A trail is created to what is expected.
A smaller power or allied nation with insider help feels the need to see the material released and uses advance methods to ensure a common adversarial nation gets the full blame. i.e. they have their own virtual methods like QUANTUMSQUIRREL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Fragments of past tools, ip ranges, time of day would not be left by any advanced nation or other method. Someone created a trail, wants the trail to be found or understood the result would be great cover.
Long term a full release helps historians, authors, bloggers and any interested people fill in the redacted material after 30 years of official gov releases in some nations. .
A limited, self censored release over years by a subset of the press seems useful in the short term to sell content but long term its all the information in its full context that helps.
A full release also prevents any questions surrounding members of the press who claim to be experts in certain areas and then only publish fragments on what they feel they understand or want write about for domestic consumption. That can be very limiting for any future historians and can result in a very small sub set of diverse material been covered many times.
Eg a group of journalists only feel comfortable about releasing material about corruption in a few nations... and hold back all the other interesting material as they see it as outside the help they can request from their own gov and mil contacts.
Members of the press then publish the same story with a few local twists or focus on a name in decades old material on advice of their legal departments.
A searchable full release is also good for details like format, dates. Names that did not hold a position that year, fonts, jargon that could point to alterations, self censorship, missing material, a limited hang out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So the autonomy is perfected?
A totally secure command and control link?
So advanced that no other nation will be able to consider any counter measures?
The units will be watched, tracked and mapped. Even if the path taken has some random times and path changes built in per patrol, the locals will soon note the abilities and limitations.
After that comes a well funded intelligence sniffer to find out how much is an internal dumb database of possible maps or daily changes by human control and a burst of real time commands.
Any US command and control communications will undergo a full reverse engineering. The main question will be how much hardware crypto was allowed to be placed in each unit at that price point. Will the US allow any crypto to fall into the wrong hands per patrol or keep the device useless if lost? Some optics, a CPU a map, with data sent back..vs a full crypto package rolling around outside just waiting to be exported for a reward...
A dedicated effort to clone and offer back fake video, audio and motion detection, inject a halt command or induce a service fault on all local devices.
If that crypto effort fails, just flood and over power the command signal and see how the remote unit reacts - a shut down and wait for recovery, a rapid and very direct return to home, recovery or loss of control and the drone defaults to an anti tampering, avoid capture command?
Thats why most smarter nations use dedicated human special forces teams to watch over their bases 24/7 over any useful distances.
It seems the US did not learn much from Vietnam and has a lot of "locals" around its bases.
If your going to build any base in country, keep all locals a long way away... special forces are great for that every night.
NSA, GCHQ and other US federal law enforcement agencies have had no issues with any US private sector devices sold or consumer grade crypto created and used over the decades.
Generations of satellite phones, cell phones, mobile computing devices got collected on without any effort as sold to the global public.
Now state and federal law enforcement want the same tech. The way in was never an issue. Presenting the product in open court was the real question. The NSA and GCHQ did not want that kind of skill set presented to the world. State and federal law enforcement just thought of the next case and did not want to know about the reality of global collection going dark thanks to methods been presented in open court.
All devices are open to different levels of the UK and US governments, just the cost of total collection is now so low that every sector of US law enforcement now expects the same network and per device access. When that method goes to open court, will users habits change to not having a cell phone on them and collection reverts to on site collection or following people with teams.
How many teams and shifts of 6 or 9 staff do most nations have per interesting person with the skills and cover stories to enter every part of a city to keep a person in sight?
Re "Making encryption standards so weak so that the company/person writing the software, can bypass them, is the very definition of a back door."
A few nations lost their cell networks.
SISMI-Telecom scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Greek wiretapping case 2004–05 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–05
Weak crypto just allows a lot of different groups to get the same total network access that only law enforcement thought it had.
Every phone then becomes open and trackable to anyone with the skills or cash.
Informants, undercover work with large teams, making deals with people in jail, prison or who had been in the prison system still wanted to earn cash.
The budgets for overtime and the funding of undercover skill sets have now been offered to consultants and contractors renting phone tracking and data recovery systems.
The idea that every person of interest has a phone on, a live mic in range of all conversations, has a gps device near them, takes video and images of all their friends for real time collection or later examination has become sold to US law enforcement officials by contractors.
Track the all movements, listen in, review details into a shared federal, private sector and state database, build a case with with logs and recordings.
Contractors often have their origins in signals intelligence and that is what they are going to sell back to the US gov once in the private sector.
What interesting person would meet any one with any powered phone on them?
Who would drive a car or truck with gps collecting its location, a microphone built in by the private sector that can be turned on by law enforcement?
Having a gps and mic ready cell phone with a sealed in battery in an area understood to be under constant law enforcement surveillance?
Nations can now afford to reconcile most of their users internet patterns over time. If that fails, just induce random network drops to see who falls off the network over a few 10's, hundred or 1000 interesting users per city and provider.
If most of a nations users are just surfing, using web 2.0, doing other tasks, getting a short list of people who went looking for software would not be too hard.