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<blockquote type="cite">..and no, I don't give a fuck about anyone's
Greenwald-bashing. AFAICT he's doing it EXACTLY right. Want Dox
dumps? Talk to the Anonymous children. The ones with more than a
3rd grade vocabulary MIGHT be able to formulate a coherent
sentence on paper.<br>
<br>
Also see this thread at a reddit IAMA that greenwald held
regarding the topic. A number of engineering types [scroll down...
'bardfinn'] were speculating based on Greenwald's discussion
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1nisdy/were_glenn_greenwald_and_janine_gibson_of_the/">https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1nisdy/were_glenn_greenwald_and_janine_gibson_of_the/</a></blockquote>
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[...]<br>
<p>On September 5, 2013, <a style="font-style: italic"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security">The
Guardian</a>, the <em><a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?_r=0">New
York Times</a></em><em> </em>and<em> <a
href="http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption">ProPublica</a> </em>jointly
reported — based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward
Snowden — that the National Security Agency had compromised some
of the encryption that is most commonly used to secure internet
transactions. The <em>NYT </em>explained<em> </em>that NSA “has
circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital
scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems,
protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records,
and automatically secures the emails, web searches, internet chats
and phone calls of Americans and others around the world.” One
2010 memo described that “for the past decade, NSA has led an
aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used internet
encryption technologies.”</p>
<p>In support of the reporting, all three papers published redacted
portions of documents from the NSA along with its British
counterpart, GCHQ. Prior to publication of the story, the NSA
vehemently argued that any reporting of any kind on this program
would jeopardize national security by alerting terrorists to the
fact that encryption products had been successfully compromised.
After the stories were published, U.S. officials <a
href="http://www.reuters.com/article/net-us-usa-security-snowden-intelligence-idUSBRE9850RU20130906">aggressively
attacked</a> the newspapers for endangering national security
and helping terrorists with these revelations.</p>
<p>All three newspapers reporting this story rejected those
arguments prior to publication and decided to report the
encryption-cracking successes. Then-<em>NYT</em> Executive Editor
Jill Abramson <a
href="http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/decision-to-publish-against-government-request-was-not-a-particularly-anguished-one/">described</a>
the decision to publish as “not a particularly anguished one” in
light of the public interest in knowing about this program, and <em>ProPublica</em>
editors published <a
href="http://www.propublica.org/article/why-we-published-the-decryption-story">a
lengthy explanation</a> along with the story justifying their
decision.</p>
<p>All three outlets, while reporting the anti-encryption efforts,
redacted portions of the documents they published or described.
One redaction in particular, found in <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html">the
<em>NYT </em>documents</a>, from the FY 2013 “black
budget,” proved to be especially controversial among tech and
security experts, as they believed that the specific identity of
compromised encryption standards was being concealed by the
redaction.</p>
<p>None of the documents in the Snowden archive identify all or even
most of the encryption standards that had been targeted, and there
was a concern that if an attempt were made to identify one or two
of them, it could mislead the public into believing that the
others were safe. There also seemed to be a concern among some
editors that any attempt to identify specific encryption standards
would enable terrorists to know which ones to avoid. One redaction
in particular, from the <em>NYT</em>, was designed to strike this
balance and was the one that became most controversial:</p>
<div class="img-wrap align-center width-fixed" style="width:540px">
<img class="aligncenter size-article-medium wp-image-46980"
src="cid:part8.04090806.06040207@riseup.net" alt=""> </div>
<p>The issue of this specific redaction was <a
href="https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/464044144906600448">raised</a>
<a
href="https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/464015111913369600">again</a> by
security researchers <a
href="https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/678573907947966464">last
month</a> in the wake of <a
href="https://forums.juniper.net/t5/Security-Incident-Response/Important-Announcement-about-ScreenOS/ba-p/285554">news</a> of
a backdoor found on Juniper systems, followed by <em>The Intercept</em>’s
<a
href="https://theintercept.com/2015/12/23/juniper-firewalls-successfully-targeted-by-nsa-and-gchq/">reporting</a>
that the NSA and GCHQ had targeted Juniper. In light of that news,
we examined the documents referenced by those 2013 articles with
particular attention to that controversial redaction, and decided
that it was warranted to un-redact that passage. It reads as
follows:</p>
<div class="img-wrap align-center width-fixed" style="width:540px">
<a
href="https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/01/bull.png"><img
class="aligncenter size-article-medium wp-image-46989"
src="cid:part14.08080902.04070809@riseup.net" alt=""></a> </div>
<p>The reference to “the two leading encryption chips” provides some
hints, but no definitive proof, as to which ones were successfully
targeted. Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins,
declined to speculate on which companies this might reference. But
he said that “the damage has already been done. From what I’ve
heard, many foreign purchasers have already begun to look at all
U.S.-manufactured encryption technology with a much more skeptical
eye as a result of what the NSA has done. That’s too bad, because
I suspect only a minority of products have been compromised this
way.”</p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">NSA requested until 5 p.m. today to
respond but then failed to do so. <span class="s1">(<em>Update</em>:
The NSA subsequently emailed to say: “</span>It would be
accurate to state that NSA declined to comment.”)</span></p>
[...]<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://theintercept.com/2016/01/04/a-redaction-re-visited-nsa-targeted-the-two-leading-encryption-chips/">https://theintercept.com/2016/01/04/a-redaction-re-visited-nsa-targeted-the-two-leading-encryption-chips/</a><br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
RR
"You might want to ask an expert about that - I just fiddled around
with mine until it worked..."</pre>
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