Back in the 1990s, security researchers and privacy watchdogs
were alarmed by government demands that hardware and software firms
build “backdoors” into their products, the millions of personal
computers and cell phones propelling communication flows along the
now-quaint “information superhighway.”
Never mind that the same factory-installed kit that allowed secret
state agencies to troll through private communications also served as a
discrete portal for criminal gangs to loot your bank account or steal
your identity.
To make matters worse, instead of the accountability promised the
American people by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal,
successive US administrations have worked assiduously to erect an
impenetrable secrecy regime backstopped by secret laws overseen by
secret courts which operate on the basis of secret administrative
subpoenas, latter day
lettres de cachet.
But now that all their dirty secrets are popping out of Edward
Snowden’s “bottomless briefcase,” we also know the “Crypto Wars” of the
1990s never ended.
Documents published by
The Guardian and
The New York Times
revealed that the National Security Agency “actively engages the US and
IT industries” and has “broadly compromised the guarantees that
internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their
communications, online banking and medical records would be
indecipherable to criminals or governments.”
“Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards,” The Guardian
disclosed, along with “the use of supercomputers to break encryption
with ‘brute force’, and–the most closely guarded secret of
all–collaboration with technology companies and internet service
providers themselves.”
According to
The New York Times, NSA “had found ways inside
some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses
and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors
or by surreptitiously exploiting existing security flaws, according to
the documents.”
In fact, “vulnerabilities” inserted “into commercial encryption
systems” would be known to NSA alone. Everyone else, including
commercial customers, are referred to in the documents as “adversaries.”
The cover name for this program is
Project BULLRUN.
An agency classification guide asserts that “Project BULLRUN deals with
NSA’s abilities to defeat the encryption used in specific network
communication technologies. BULLRUN involves multiple sources, all of
which are extremely sensitive. They include CNE [computer network
exploitation], interdiction, industry relationships, collaboration with
other IC entities, and advanced mathematical techniques.”
In furtherance of those goals, the agency created a “Commercial
Solutions Center (NCSC) to leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships
with industry partners” that will “further NSA/CSS capabilities against
encryption used in network communications technologies,” and already
“has some capabilities against the encryption used in TLS/SSL. HTTPS,
SSH, VPNs, VoIP, WEBMAIL, and other network communications
technologies.”
Time and again, beginning in the 1970s with the publication of perhaps the earliest NSA exposé by
Ramparts Magazine,
we learned that when agency schemes came to light, if they couldn’t
convince they resorted to threats, bribery or the outright subversion of
the standard setting process itself, which destroyed trust and rendered
all our electronic interactions far less safe.
Tunneling underground, NSA, telcos and corporate tech giants worked hand-in-glove to sabotage what
could
have been a free and open system of global communications, creating
instead the Frankenstein monster which AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein
denounced as a “Big Brother machine.”
The Secret State and the Internet
Five years after British engineer Tim Berners-Lee, Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau and their team at
CERN
developed a system for assembling, and sharing, hypertext documents via
the internet, which they dubbed the World Wide Web, in 1994 the Clinton
administration
announced it would compel software and hardware developers to install what came to known as the “Clipper Chip” into their products.
The veritable explosion of networked communication systems spawned by
the mass marketing of easy-to-use personal computers equipped with
newly-invented internet browsers, set off a panic amongst political
elites.
How to
control these seemingly anarchic information flows operating outside “normal” channels?
In theory at least, those doing the communicating–academics,
dissidents, journalists, economic rivals, even other spies, hackers or
“terrorists” (a fungible term generally meaning outsider groups not on
board with America’s imperial goals)–were the least amenable users of
the new technology and would not look kindly on state efforts to corral
them.
As new communication systems spread like wildfire, especially among
the great unwashed mass of “little people,” so too came a stream of dire
pronouncements that the internet was now a “critical national asset”
which required close attention and guidance.
President Clinton’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection released a
report
that called for a vast increase in funding to protect US infrastructure
along with one of the first of many “cyberwar” tropes that would come
to dominate the media landscape.
“In the cyber dimension,” the report breathlessly averred, “there are
no boundaries. Our infrastructures are exposed to new
vulnerabilities–cyber vulnerabilities–and new threats–cyber threats. And
perhaps most difficult of all, the defenses that served us so well in
the past offer little protection from the cyber threat. Our
infrastructures can now be struck directly by a variety of malicious
tools.”
And when a commercial market for cheap, accessible encryption
software was added to the mix, security mandarins at Ft. Meade and
Cheltenham realized the genie would soon be out of the bottle.
After all they reasoned, NSA and GCHQ were the undisputed masters of
military-grade cryptography who had cracked secret Soviet codes which
helped “win” the Cold War. Were they to be out maneuvered by some geeks
in a garage who did not share or were perhaps even hostile to the
“post-communist” triumphalism which had decreed America was now the
world’s “indispensable nation”?
Technological advances were leveling the playing field, creating new
democratic space in the realm of knowledge creation accessible to
everyone; a new mode for communicating which threatened to bypass
entrenched power centers, especially in government and media circles
accustomed to a monopoly over the Official Story.
US spies faced a dilemma. The same technology which created a new
business model worth hundreds of billions of dollars for US tech
corporations also offered the public and pesky political outliers across
the political spectrum, the means to do the same.
How to stay ahead of the curve? Why not control the tempo of product
development by crafting regulations, along with steep penalties for
noncompliance, that all communications be accessible to our guardians,
strictly for “law enforcement” purposes mind you, by including backdoors
into commercially available encryption products.
Total Information Awareness 1.0
Who to turn to? Certainly such hush-hush work needed to be in safe hands.
The Clinton administration, in keeping with their goal to “reinvent
government” by privatizing everything, turned to Mykotronx, Inc., a
California-based company founded in 1983 by former NSA engineers, Robert
E. Gottfried and Kikuo Ogawa, mining gold in the emerging information
security market.
Indeed, one of the firm’s top players was Ralph O’Connell, was described in a 1993
document published by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (
CPSR) as “the father of COMSEC” and the “Principle NSA Technical Contact” on Clipper and related cryptography projects.
A 1993 Business Wire release quoted the firm’s president, Leonard J.
Baker, as saying that Clipper was “a good example of the transfer of
military technology to the commercial and general government fields with
handsome cost benefits. This technology should now pay big dividends to
US taxpayers.”
It would certainly pay “big dividends” to Mykotronx’s owners.
Acquired by Rainbow Technologies in 1995, and eventually by Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex powerhouse
Raytheon in 2012, at the time the
Los Angeles Times
reported that “Mykotronx had been privately held, and its owners will
receive 1.82 million shares of Rainbow stock–making the deal worth $37.9
million.”
The Clipper chip was touted by the administration as a simple device
that would protect the private communications of users while also
allowing government agents to obtain the keys that unlocked those
communications, an early manifestation of what has since become know as
law enforcement’s alleged “going dark” problem.
Under color of a vague “legal authorization” that flew in the face of the 1987 Computer Security Act (
CSA),
which sought to limit the role of the National Security Agency in
developing standards for civilian communications systems, the
administration tried an end-run around the law through an export ban on
Clipper-free encryption devices overseen by the
Commerce Department.
This wasn’t the first time that NSA was mired in controversy over the
watering down of encryption standards. During the development of the
Data Encryption Standard (DES) by IBM in the 1970s, the agency was
accused of forcing developers to implement changes in the design of its
basic cipher. There were strong suspicions these changes had weakened
the algorithm to such a degree that one critical component, the S-box,
had been altered and that a backdoor was inserted by NSA.
Early on, the agency grasped CSA’s significance and sought to limit
damage to global surveillance and economic espionage programs such as
ECHELON, exposed by British and New Zealand investigative journalists
Duncan Campbell and
Nicky Hager.
Before the 1987 law was passed however, Clinton Brooks, a Special
Assistant to NSA Director Lieutenant General William Odom, wrote a Top
Secret
Memorandum
which stated: “In 1984 NSA engineered a National Security Decision
Directive, NSDD-145, through the Reagan Administration that gave
responsibility for the security of all US information systems to the
Director of NSA, removing NBS [National Bureau of Standards] from this.”
Conceived as a follow-on to the Reagan administration’s infamous 1981
Executive Order 12333,
which trashed anemic congressional efforts to rein-in America’s
out-of-control spy agencies, NSDD-145 handed power back to the National
Security Agency and did so to the detriment of civilian communication
networks.
Scarcely a decade after Senator Frank Church warned during
post-Watergate hearings into government surveillance abuses, that NSA’s
“capability at any time could be turned around on the American people,
and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to
monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t
matter . . . there would be no place to hide,” the agency was at it with
a vengeance.
“This [NSDD-145] also stated,” Brooks wrote, “that we would assist
the private sector. This was viewed as Big Brother stepping in and
generated an adverse reaction” in Congress that helped facilitate
passage of the Act.
Engineered by future Iran-Contra felon, Admiral John Poindexter,
President Reagan’s National Security Adviser who would later serve as
President George W. Bush’s Director of DARPA’s Information Awareness
Office, the Pentagon satrapy that brought us the
Total Information Awareness program,
NSDD-145
stated that the “Director, National Security Agency is designated the
National Manager for Telecommunications and Automated Information
Systems Security.”
NSA’s new mandate meant that the agency would “act as the government
focal point for cryptography, telecommunications systems security, and
automated information systems security.”
Additionally, NSA would “conduct, approve, or endorse research and
development of techniques and equipment for telecommunications and
automated information systems security for national security
information.”
But it also authorized the agency to do more than that, granting it
exclusive authority to “review and approve all standards, techniques,
systems and equipments for telecommunications and automated information
systems security.” As well, NSA was directed to “enter into agreements
for the procurement of technical security material and other equipment,
and their provision to government agencies, where appropriate, to
private organizations, including government contractors, and foreign
governments.”
In other words, NSA was the final arbiter when it came to setting standards for
all
government and private information systems; quite a coup for the agency
responsible for standing-up Project MINARET, the Cold War-era program
that spied on thousands of antiwar protesters, civil rights leaders,
journalists and members of Congress, as recently
declassified documents published by the National Security Archive disclosed.
NSA Games the System
Although the Computer Security Act passed unanimously by voice vote
in both Houses of Congress, NSA immediately set-out to undercut the law
and did so by suborning the National Bureau of Standards, now the
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
The battle over the Clipper Chip would be the template for future
incursions by the agency for the control, through covert infiltration,
of regulatory bodies overseeing civilian communications.
According to the Clinton White House, Clipper “would provide
Americans with secure telecommunications without compromising the
ability of law enforcement agencies to carry out legally authorized
wiretaps.”
Neither safe nor secure, Clipper instead would have handed government
security agencies the means to monitor all communications while giving
criminal networks a leg up to do the same.
In fact, as the Electronic Privacy Information Center (
EPIC) discovered in
documents
unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act, the underlying
algorithm deployed in Clipper, Skipjack, had been developed by NSA.
Cryptography expert Matt Blaze wrote a now famous 1994 paper on the subject before the algorithm was declassified,
Protocol Failure in the Escrowed Encryption Standard:
“The EES cipher algorithm, called ‘Skipjack’, is itself classified, and
implementations of the cipher are available to the private sector only
within tamper-resistant modules supplied by government-approved vendors.
Software implementations of the cipher will not be possible. Although
Skipjack, which was designed by the US National Security Agency (NSA),
was reviewed by a small panel of civilian experts who were granted
access to the algorithm, the cipher cannot be subjected to the degree of
civilian scrutiny ordinarily given to new encryption systems.”
This was precisely as NSA and the Clinton administration intended.
A partially declassified 1993
NSA memo
noted that “there will be vocal public doubts expressed about having a
classified algorithm in the device we propose for the US law enforcement
problem, the CLIPPER chip, we recommend the following to address this.”
We don’t know what those agency recommendations were, however; more
than 20 years after the memo was written they remain secret.
The memo continued: “If such people agree to this clearance and non
disclosure process, we could go over the algorithm with them to let them
develop confidence in its security, and we could also let them examine
the detail design of the CLIPPER chip made for the US law enforcement
problem to assure themselves that there were no trapdoors or other
techniques built in. This would likely require crypto-mathematicians for
the algorithm examination and microelectronics chip design engineers
for the chip examination.”
But the extreme secrecy surrounding Skipjack’s proposed deployment in commercial products
was
the problem. Even if researchers learned that Clipper was indeed the
government-mandated backdoor they feared, non-disclosure of these facts,
backed-up by the threat of steep fines or imprisonment would hardly
assure anyone of the integrity of this so-called review process.
“By far, the most controversial aspect of the EES system,” Blaze wrote, “is key escrow.”
“As part of the crypto-synchronization process,” Blaze
noted, “EES devices generate and exchange a ‘Law Enforcement Access
Field’ (LEAF). This field contains a copy of the current session key and
is intended to enable a government eavesdropper to recover the
cleartext.”
“The LEAF copy of the session key is encrypted with a device-unique
key called the ‘unit key,’ assigned at the time the EES device is
manufactured. Copies of the unit keys for all EES devices are to be held
in ‘escrow’ jointly by two federal agencies that will be charged with
releasing the keys to law enforcement under certain conditions.”
What those conditions were however, was far from clear. In fact, as
we’ve since learned from Snowden’s cache of secret documents, even when
the government seeks surveillance authorization from the FISA court, the
court must rely on government assurances that dragnet spying is
critical to the nation’s security. Such assurances, FISA court judge
Reggie B. Walton noted, were systematically “misrepresented” by secret
state agencies.
That’s rather rich considering that Walton presided over the farcical
“trial” that upheld Bush administration demands to silence FBI
whistleblower
Sibel Edmonds
under the state secrets privilege. Edmonds, a former contract linguist
with the Bureau charged that top FBI officials had systematically
covered-up wrongdoing at its language division and had obstructed
agents’ attempts to roll-up terrorist networks
before and
after the 9/11 provocation, facts attested to by FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley in her
2002 Memo to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller.
In 2009, Walton
wrote
that “The minimization procedures proposed by the government in each
successive application and approved and adopted as binding by the orders
of the FISC have been so frequently and systemically violated that it
can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall BR regime
has never functioned effectively.”
“The Court,” Walton averred, “must have every confidence that the
government is doing its utmost to ensure that those responsible for
implementation fully comply with the Court’s orders. The Court no longer
has such confidence.”
Predating those critical remarks, a heavily-redacted 1993
Memo
to then-Special Assistant to the President and future CIA chief, George
Tenet, from FBI Director William Sessions noted that NSA “has developed
a new encryption methodology and computer chip which affords encryption
strength vastly superior to DES [Digital Encryption Standard], yet
which allows for real time decryption by law enforcement, acting
pursuant to legal process. It is referred to as ‘Clipper’.”
[Two redacted paragraphs] “if the devices are modified to include the
‘Clipper’ chip, they would be of great value to the Federal, state and
local law enforcement community, especially in the area of counter
narcotics, investigations, where there is a requirement to routinely
communicate in a secure fashion.”
But even at the time Sessions’ memo was written, we now know that
AT&T provided the Drug Enforcement Administration “routine access”
to “an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades
of Americans’ phone calls,”
The New York Times reported, and had done so since 1987 under the auspices of DEA’s
Hemisphere Project.
Furthermore, in the wake of Snowden revelations we also learned that
listening in on the conversations of drug capos is low on NSA’s list of
priorities. However, programs like
X-KEYSCORE and
TEMPORA,
which copies all data flowing along fiber optic cables, encrypted and
unencrypted alike, at petabyte scales, is supremely useful when it comes
to building profiles of internet users by intelligence agencies.
This was an implicit goal of Clinton administration maneuvers to compel developers to insert Clipper into their product designs.
According to Sessions, “the ‘Clipper’ methodology envisions the
participation of three distinct types of parties.” [Redacted] It is
proposed that the second party, the two custodians of the ‘split’ key
infostructure [sic], be comprised of two disinterested and trustworthy
non law enforcement Government agencies or entities. Although, such
decision and selection are left for the Administration, a list of
reccommended [sic] agencies and entities has been prepared (and included
in the text), [redacted]. This party would administer and oversee all
facets of the ‘Clipper’ program and methodology.”
Based on NSDD-145′s mandate, one can assume “this party” would be
NSA, the agency that designed the underlying algorithm that powered
Clipper.
The Sessions memo averred: “The Clipper chip provides law enforcement
access by using a special chip key, unique to each device. In the
AT&T TSD 3600, a unique session key is generated, external to the
Clipper chip for each call.”
“This session key,” the memo explained, “is given to the
chip to control the encryption algorithm. A device unique ‘chip key’ is
programmed into each Clipper at the time of manufacture. When two TSD
3600s go to secure operation, the device gives out its identification
(ID) number and the session key encrypted in its chip key.”
Underlining a key problem with Clipper technology Sessions noted,
“Anyone with access to the chip key for that identified device will be
able to recover the session key and listen to the transmission
simultaneously with the intended receiver. This design means that the
list of chip keys associated with the chip ID number provides access to
all Clipper secured devices, and thus the list must be carefully
generated and protected. Loss of the list would preclude legitmate [sic]
access to the encrypted information and compromise of the list could
allow unauthorized access.”
In fact, that “anyone” could include fabulously wealthy drug gangs or
bent corporations with the wherewithal to buy chip keys from suborned
government key escrow agents!
Its ubiquity would be a key selling-point for universal deployment.
The memo explained, “the NSA developed chip based ‘Clipper’ solution
works with hardware encryption applications, such as those which might
be used with regard to certain telecommunications and computers
devices,” which of course would allow unlimited spying by “law
enforcement.”
Such vulnerabilities built into EES chip keys
by design not
only enabled widespread government monitoring of internet and voice
traffic, but with a few tweaks by encryption-savvy “rogues” could be
exploited by criminal organizations.
In his 1994 paper Blaze wrote that “a rogue system can be constructed
with little more than a software modification to a legal system.
Furthermore, while some expertise may be required to install and operate
a rogue version of an existing system, it is likely that little or no
special skill would be required to install and operate the modified
software.”
“In particular,” Blaze noted, “one can imagine ‘patches’ to defeat
key escrow in EES-based systems being distributed over networks such as
the Internet in much the same way that other software is distributed
today.”
In the intervening years since Blaze observed how easy it would be to
compromise key escrow systems by various bad actors, governments or
criminals take your pick, the proliferation of malware powered botnets
that infect hundreds of thousands of computers and smart phones every
day–for blanket surveillance, fraud, or both–is a fact of life.
It didn’t help matters when it emerged that “escrow agents” empowered
to unlock encrypted communications would be drawn from the National
Institute of Standards and Technology and the Automated Services
Division of the Treasury Department, government outposts riddled with
“No Such Agency” moles.
As EPIC pointed out, “Since the enactment of the Computer Security
Act, the NSA has sought to undercut NIST’s authority. In 1989, NSA
signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which purported to transfer
back to NSA the authority given to NIST.”
The MOU required that NIST request NSA’s “assistance” on all matters
related to civilian cryptography. In fact, were NIST and NSA
representatives on the Technical Working Group to disagree on standards,
the ultimate authority for resolving disputes would rest solely with
the Executive Branch acting through the President, the Secretary of
Defense and the National Security Council, thus undercutting the clear
intent of Congress when they passed the 1987 Computer Security Act.
EPIC
noted:
“The memorandum effectively returned to NSA many of the
powers rejected by the Computer Security Act. The MOU contained several
key goals that were to NSA’s benefit, including: NSA providing NIST with
‘technical security guidelines in trusted technology,
telecommunications security, and personal identification that may be
used in cost-effective systems for protecting sensitive computer data;’
NSA ‘initiating research and development programs in trusted technology,
telecommunications security, cryptographic techniques and personal
identification methods’; and NSA being responsive to NIST ‘in all matters related to cryptographic algorithms and cryptographic techniques including but not limited to research, development, evaluation, or endorsement’.”
A critique of the Memorandum in 1989 congressional testimony by the General Accounting Office (
GAO)
emphasized: “At issue is the degree to which responsibilities vested in
NIST under the act are being subverted by the role assigned to NSA
under the memorandum. The Congress, as a fundamental purpose in passing
the act, sought to clearly place responsibility for the computer
security of sensitive, unclassified information in a civil agency rather
than in the Department of Defense. As we read the MOU, it would appear
that NIST has granted NSA more than the consultative role envisioned in
the act.”
Five years after the GAO’s critical appraisal, NSA’s coup was complete.
“In 1994,” EPIC noted,
“President Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive (PDD-29).
This directive created the Security Policy Board, which has recommended
that all computer security functions for the government be merged under
NSA control.”
Since PDD-29 was issued matters have only gotten worse. In fact, NIST
is the same outfit exposed in Snowden documents published by
The Guardian and
The New York Times that allowed NSA to water down encryption and build backdoors into the Dual EC DRBG standard adopted by the Institute in 2006.
“Eventually, NSA became the sole editor.”
Besieged by widespread opposition, the Clinton administration was out
maneuvered in the court of public opinion and by 1996 had abandoned
Clipper. However, this proved to be a pyrrhic victory for
security-minded researchers and civil libertarians as we have since
learned from Edward Snowden’s revelations.
Befitting a military-intelligence agency, the dark core of America’s
deep state, NSA was fighting a long war–and they were playing for keeps.
Posts
Salt
has a lot of surprising uses in a survival scenario. The most common
uses of salt are as food flavoring, for food preserving and baking. But
here’s 35 more reasons to store salt – and lots of it!
By Michael Snyder, on November 10th, 2013
