Tag Archive for 'politics'

The evolution of American counterintelligence

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on 16 November 2008
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The US Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive recently published a four-part reader as an accompaniment to the lectures they conduct:

Our reader’s three volumes cover counterintelligence’s past and present. Nevertheless they form a whole: the first volume provides material elucidating counter- intelligence’s antecedents from the American Revolution to World War II. Volume two focuses on World War II while volume three begins with the Atom Bomb spies and concludes with the latest espionage cases. History is more than background; it is the framework of the present.

We have taken material from official government documents, indictments from several espionage cases, and articles written by professors, scholars and counterintelligence officers. We have abridged some selections while trying not to change the sense of the original but we have not altered the original usage of the English language.

Each chapter in the three volumes has an introduction, which sketches out the main trends and characteristics of the period in question. There is a chronology with each chapter for volumes one and three, but volume two only has one chronology to cover the entire period. At the end of each chapter is a selected bibliography. We hope this will help you get a sense of the period as a whole. The reader is not all-inclusive and people may disagree with our selections, but at least we hope to have provided sufficient material to entice our colleagues to do further research.

Counterintelligence is a fascinating and challenging discipline. Our response to these challenges is determined, not by the requisites of the immediate situation but by our historical legacy. Thus we urge that the materials presented in the three volumes be read, not as background to the present, but as part of the present itself.

A fourth volume covers recent spying successes, failures, programs and reports.

Cryptome ZIP of PDFs

NCIX Site

A hidden chronicle of horrific destruction

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on 12 November 2008
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A rather entrancing article, published originally in the Guardian, meditates on the hidden images of America’s “last good war.” Following the surrender of Japan in WWII, the US issued a strict writ of censorship stating that “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility.” Consequently, the atomic bombings in Japan have become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, “a kind of hole in human history,” unaccompanied by much of a visual record. The article follows the discovery of an amazing cache of photographs, previously unseen to the public, taken by the US Military’s Physical Damage Division at the end of the war:

One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor’s house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps.

He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges — snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home.

At the kitchen table, he looked through the photographs again and confirmed what he had suspected. He was looking at something he had never seen before: the effects of the first use of the Atomic bomb. The man was looking at Hiroshima. [link]

Resolving the Golden Shield

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marc
on 28 October 2008
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Throwing a bit dye into the geist, a group of programmers have developed a Firefox plugin that will route your websurfing through a Chinese server, thus allowing you to get sense of what sort of Internet the Chinese state security services have in mind for their citizens. [Link to the plugin project website]

The control that governments, and other interested parties, can exert over one’s websurfing can take a much more insidious form than simply block content. Through some form of packet injection, or server based cacheing, web pages can be changed en route to the web browser, thus allowing for the manipulation of the user’s trust and expectation.

For more information, The Atlantic published an interesting article during the 2008 Olympics about the limitations and scope of the system.

Discrete circuits; or, Trojan architecture

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on 23 October 2008
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IEEE Spectrum published an article this past May about the growing concern within defense circles about the loss of oversight along the military hardware supply chain. With many of the semiconductor components manufactured in the People’s Republic of China, rumors and fears of maliciously implanted “backdoors” abound:

According to a U.S. defense contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity, a “European chip maker” recently built into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be accessed remotely. French defense contractors have used the chips in military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the equipment fell into hostile hands, “the French wanted a way to disable that circuit,” he said. Spectrum could not confirm this account independently, but spirited discussion about it among researchers and another defense contractor last summer at a military research conference reveals a lot about the fever dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)…

Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can’t be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can’t afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone’s various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn’t interfere with the chip’s normal functions won’t show up in these tests…

Nor can chip makers afford to test every chip. From a batch of thousands, technicians select a single chip for physical inspection, assuming that the manufacturing process has yielded essentially identical devices. They then laboriously grind away a thin layer of the chip, put the chip into a scanning electron microscope, and then take a picture of it, repeating the process until every layer of the chip has been imaged. Even here, spotting a tiny discrepancy amid a chip’s many layers and millions or billions of transistors is a fantastically difficult task, and the chip is destroyed in the process…

The Pentagon is now caught in a bind. It likes the cheap, cutting-edge devices emerging from commercial foundries and the regular leaps in IC performance the commercial sector is known for. But with those improvements comes the potential for sabotage. “The economy is globalized, but defense is not globalized,” says Coleman. “How do you reconcile the two?” [link]

With respect to recent news pertaining to electronic security and surveillance see also:

Dreaming of the future at 11km per second

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marc
on 22 October 2008
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India launched its first unmanned moon mission on Wednesday following in the footsteps of rival China, as the emerging Asian power celebrated its space ambitions and scientific prowess.

Chandrayaan-1 (Moon vehicle), a cuboid spacecraft built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) blasted off from a southern Indian space centre shortly after dawn in a boost for the country’s ambitions to gain more global space business.

The project cost $79m, considerably less than the Chinese and Japanese probes in 2007 and ISRO says the moon mission will pave the way for India to claim a bigger chunk of the global space business.

The mission is also expected to carry out a detailed survey of the moon to look for precious metals and water.

Fresh on the steps of the confidence that comes to any nation that can launch a few thousand pounds of metal faster than the 11km/s velocity needed to escape the earth’s gravitational pull on towards the moon is the Indian culture industry. To be released this summer is what seems to be a Bollywood take on the intense, high budget, the future is now Hollywood sci-fi film.

But what would even the most Doc Brown, cyberpunk metropolis be with out an appropriate measure of dance sequences? (Answer? something to be rewritten with more song and dance sequences)

Project Grey Goose report released

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marc
on 16 October 2008
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Accompanying the recent military action on the ground in Georgia was a cyber campaign that took down many government sites and generally impeded the dissemenation of information throughout the country. Shortly after things cooled down in Georgia, a collection of security researchers in and around the intelligence community got together under the banner of “Project Grey Goose” in an attempt to see if open source information, particularly through semantic analysis of Russian hacker forums, could be used to unmask those responsible. The team drew widely from the community:

  • Lewis Shepherd - former CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency; CTO, Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments
  • Bob Gourley - former CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency; founder, Crucial Point LLC, a technology research and advisory firm
  • Matt Devost - former Senior INFOSEC Engineer at SAIC; Security Consultant to foreign governments and corporations; President, Total Intelligence Solutions
  • Preston Werntz - Project Manager, Newbrook Solutions, currently engaged at DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis
  • Derek Plansky - former Director, Lexis-Nexis Risk and Information Analytics Group; President, Informatic Ideas Consulting
  • Andrew Conway - former analyst performing classified work for a three letter agency analyzing leadership emergence in covert networks; currently a Ph.D candidate in Politics, NYU
  • Jeremy Baldwin - Analytic Tradecraft Developer, The Analysis Corporation [source]

Following 56 days of investigation the group has published its findings [pdf] [intelfusion blog]. The conclusions?

  • We assess with high confidence that the Russian government will likely continue its practice of distancing itself from the Russian nationalistic hacker community thus gaining deniability while passively supporting and enjoying the strategic benefits of their actions.
  • We assess with high confidence that nationalistic Russian hackers are likely adaptive adversaries engaged in aggressively finding more efficient ways to disable networks.
  • We judge with moderate confidence that a journeyman-apprentice relationship will continue to be the training model used by nationalistic Russian hackers.
  • We estimate with moderate confidence that hacker forums engaged in training Russian cyber warriors will continue to evolve their feedback loop which effectively becomes their Cyber Kill Chain.
    • After analyzing over 200 posts in the Xakep.ru and StopGeorgia.ru forums, as well as Georgian network server data, Grey Goose analysts were able to discern a cyber kill chain which is comprised of the following steps:
    • 1) Encourage novices through patriotic imagery and rhetoric to get involved in the cyber war against Georgia
      2) Publish a target list of Georgian government Web sites which have been tested for access from Russian and Lithuanian IP addresses.
      3) Discuss and select one of several different types of malware to use against the target Web site.
      4) Launch the attack
      5) Evaluate the results (optional step)
  • We assess with high confidence that all visitors to Russian hacker forums which originate from U.S. IP addresses will be monitored.

The chilly curiosities of nation states

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marc
on 5 August 2008
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Durham University’s International Boundaries Research Unit has drawn up the first ever ‘Arctic Map‘ to show the disputed territories that states might lay claim to in the future. The new map design follows a series of historical and ongoing arguments about ownership, and the race for resources, in the frozen lands and seas of the Arctic. The potential for conflicts is increasing as the search for new oil, gas and minerals intensifies.

The move to comprehensively map the region illustrates the urgent need for clear policy-making on Arctic issues – an area rich in natural resources. The Durham map shows:

1. where boundaries have been agreed
2. where known claims are
3. the potential areas that states might claim

Director of Research at the International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU), Martin Pratt says: “The map is the most precise depiction yet of the limits and the future dividing lines that could be drawn across the Arctic region.

“It’s a cartographic means of showing, and an attempt to collate information and predict the way in which the Arctic region may eventually be divided up. The freezing land and seas of the Arctic are likely to be getting hotter in terms of geopolitics; the Durham map aims to assist national and international policy-makers across the world.”

It’s a year since Russia planted a flag on the seabed, underneath the North Pole, highlighting its claim to a huge chunk of the Arctic.

The Russian demands relate to a complex area of law covered by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS). Under that law, any coastal state can claim territory 200 nautical miles (nm) from their shoreline (Exclusive Economic Zone, EEZ) and exploit the natural resources within that zone. Some coastal states have rights that extend beyond EEZ due to their continental shelf. Areas of the seabed beyond the continental shelf are referred to as ‘The Area’ and any world state – landlocked or not – has equal rights in this area.

The continental shelf is the part of a country’s landmass that extends into the sea before dropping into the deep ocean. Under UNCLOS, if a state can prove its rights, it can exploit the resources of the sea and the seabed within its territory.

Russia claims that its continental shelf extends along a mountain chain running underneath the Arctic, known as the Lomonosov Ridge. Theoretically, if this was the case, Russia might be able to claim a vast area of territory.

Mercenary optics come to a blog post near you

Published
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marc
on 17 July 2008
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Attributor, a silicon valley start up a few years and 32-million dollars in the making, provides an impressive panorama of cyberspace. Employing similar techniques to Google’s search indexing process, Attributor dispatches spiders across the web that search all new content published in the blogosphere and social networks. Its objective in this exploration is to monitor the usage and propagation of copyrighted material and to use this information either to intervene or to study the pathology of viral content.

As might be expected, this business model has quite a bit of traction in the market today. Indeed, Attributor has scored some large contracts for their wide-net surveillance system including Reuters, The Associated Press and the Conde Nast Group.

But what does this type of system foretell about the relationship between the producers of media and those who comment upon and critique it? The arguments posed on the web run rather simply: A. Surveillance technologies like Attributor impede the flow of information by creating circumstances of a de facto, abusive restriction of fair use OR B. Content management technologies like Attributor allow content creators to benefit from their work by having total knowledge of its online uses and either (1) being able to collect credit\revenue from it or (2) to better appreciate the reception of their own work by the public.

Both sides certainly have some points in their favor, but regardless of the synthetic arguments that can be eloquently presented on the issue, there are some underlying creepy forces at play. Marketing materials for Attributor proclaim a near real time awareness of content across 19 Billion pages throughout the web. What are the implications of such a vast, mercenary optics? What do the designators private and public mean when one is applying them to discourse on the web? Certainly everything published and accessible by means of an open hyper text transfer protocol is offered up to the public, but what about an industrial-automated surveillance robot? Is such an entity entitled to interface with the public? Does it have rights? An old world analogue of what Attributor does would involve, let us say, an author writing about new airship technology who quotes a Boeing press release. Consequent to this, Boeing dispatches a van to sit in front of said author’s house and photograph it for a few minutes before driving off.

One must ask, is this a reasonable research initiative on the part of Boeing so that they may understand the architectural and design environments of those people that write about them, or a a type of coercive invasion? How do things change when the case becomes one computer connecting to another instead of men in vans with cameras? Is it more seemly because it is simply a relationship of two machines? Or is something of the first moment preserved? Since it is an actor upon the stage, who is this virtually unknown visitor, what is Attributor?

Spectral interventions visited upon tourists

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on 2 July 2008
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Julius von Bismarck with his creation

The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.

Herr Bismarck’s creation is so powerful because he breaches what is assumed to be an impermeable frontier. The photograph, in some ways, is supposed to be the paragon of realism when it comes to documenting the world. Yet here is this device that can be deployed tactically in moments of performance to intervene how photographers, as such, perceive the moment. It is marvelous that most people who would use flash photography during the day in places like Checkpoint Charlie are going to be hapless tourists who, instead of confronting the history and visceral experience before them, snap away so that they may keep themselves busy and make something of the trip. Perhaps this is precisely the sort of person upon whom a mysterious intervention, a ghostly cue, would be best received by. Hmm, but I only wish that someone could get one of these into a presidential news conference and strike the requisite sub-text into the photographic record for the morning papers.



[via]

The frontier of history and lost cities

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on 27 June 2008
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For part of the 10th century, this pocket of northwestern Cambodia was the capital of the famed Angkorian empire, a sprawling city studded with homes, irrigation channels, and more than 1,000 temples. Satellite photography helps archaeologists survey this land mine laden and largely unexplored site. [via ]


 Bit-rot, book worms, city swallowing hurricanes. The archaeologist is firstly set to task in the compilation of archives. Gathering up information in all of its varied forms after it has fallen out of the coherence and illumination of active human knowledge, pulling from the dust stories and dreams that have become untethered from the human network and reintroducing them to the possibility of knowledge and life. The first steps in the process are to index and collate these orphans and then to integrate and connect them into databases and libraries. A cartography of this knowledge, of those languages dead but in writing, those margin notes about household needs in medieval prayer books, represents the frontier of history at this moment. Or, to be more precise, one of the frontiers of history, the frontier of the public domain.


The Kirtas Technologies’ APT Bookscan 1200 can automatically digitize 1200 pages per hour. The machine weights 77kg and is priced at EUR 120,000. [company site]

There are regions even here overgrown with bush and scarcely traveled. Surely the maps have a record of them and lines extend out around them to show that they are claimed within the purview of history, but what are the declinations of the mountains there? Are there caves? Cities? These answers may yet to be discovered, or those dark places on the map may survive the map itself, may never be looked upon by human eyes, and fall into oblivion. However, recent advancements in the methods by which our civilization patrols, explores and defines frontiers will bring lonely wayfarers to these outposts along routes not originally conceived by the cartographers. The pharaonic enterprise of private corporations like Google and public institutions like the Library of Congress are taking point by point measurements of our the vast expanse of history’s frontier that is contained upon the continent of the public archive. The resolution is precise: each pebble a word whose characters are optically recognized and related to all other characters in the realm. This morphology transforms the frontier almost into a vast schizophrenic ocean where point to point geometry does not obtain, where a journal entry from an arctic expedition, a paper on audiology and a facebook profile might by happenstance resolve in the same state before a traveler searching for a friend who exists in midtown Manhattan.

This Pegasus sculpture was micromachined from a particle of diamond dust using a focused ion beam (FIB) microscope. It was produced as a piece of marketing ephemera to showcase Norsam Technologies’ archival etching process which can shrink down and inscribe between 1,000 and 100,000 pages on a 2 inch nickel disc. [company site]

But this frontier is an inherently fragile and fluid one. While some territories are constantly being opened through the labors of scientists probing the heavens and of suburban mothers cataloging their anxieties over which of the many baby carriages on the market they ought to select, others are consigned to an inescapable oblivion. The frontier of history traces out a wholly technological interior. What is knowable historically lives in media. Buildings, infrastructure, inscriptions, papyrus, punch cards, floppy disks, all as physical containers of meaning are intimately tied to the preservation and persistence of history. The contemporary reality of digital representation as the prevailing medium of history presents two radical possibilities for the future frontiers of history. Either on the one hand history will become more monolithic in its shape as all of human activity in the real world recedes not quietly back into time, but rather is inscribed persistently in a record which in turn pushes the frontiers of history further and further outward. However, the consequence of this may be precisely the thing that results in a complete foreclosure of this period of history. What will become of our harddrives, and our PDF file formats hundreds (even dozens) of years hence? Even baring a catastrophic interruption in our civilization, a generation of technological progress and poor preservation could relegate the prior generation to naught.