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Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.

The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.”

In a top-secret presentation, dated August 2009, the NSA describes a pre-programmed part of the covert infrastructure called the “Expert System,” which is designed to operate “like the brain.” The system manages the applications and functions of the implants and “decides” what tools they need to best extract data from infected machines.

Mikko Hypponen, an expert in malware who serves as chief research officer at the Finnish security firm F-Secure, calls the revelations “disturbing.” The NSA’s surveillance techniques, he warns, could inadvertently be undermining the security of the Internet.

“When they deploy malware on systems,” Hypponen says, “they potentially create new vulnerabilities in these systems, making them more vulnerable for attacks by third parties.”

Hypponen believes that governments could arguably justify using malware in a small number of targeted cases against adversaries. But millions of malware implants being deployed by the NSA as part of an automated process, he says, would be “out of control.”

“That would definitely not be proportionate,” Hypponen says. “It couldn’t possibly be targeted and named. It sounds like wholesale infection and wholesale surveillance.”

The NSA declined to answer questions about its deployment of implants, pointing to a new presidential policy directive announced by President Obama. “As the president made clear on 17 January,” the agency said in a statement, “signals intelligence shall be collected exclusively where there is a foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purpose to support national and departmental missions, and not for any other purposes.”

“Owning the Net”

The NSA began rapidly escalating its hacking efforts a decade ago. In 2004, according to secret internal records, the agency was managing a small network of only 100 to 150 implants. But over the next six to eight years, as an elite unit called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) recruited new hackers and developed new malware tools, the number of implants soared to tens of thousands.

To penetrate foreign computer networks and monitor communications that it did not have access to through other means, the NSA wanted to go beyond the limits of traditional signals intelligence, or SIGINT, the agency’s term for the interception of electronic communications. Instead, it sought to broaden “active” surveillance methods – tactics designed to directly infiltrate a target’s computers or network devices.

In the documents, the agency describes such techniques as “a more aggressive approach to SIGINT” and says that the TAO unit’s mission is to “aggressively scale” these operations.

But the NSA recognized that managing a massive network of implants is too big a job for humans alone.

“One of the greatest challenges for active SIGINT/attack is scale,” explains the top-secret presentation from 2009. “Human ‘drivers’ limit ability for large-scale exploitation (humans tend to operate within their own environment, not taking into account the bigger picture).”

The agency’s solution was TURBINE. Developed as part of TAO unit, it is described in the leaked documents as an “intelligent command and control capability” that enables “industrial-scale exploitation.”

TURBINE was designed to make deploying malware much easier for the NSA’s hackers by reducing their role in overseeing its functions. The system would “relieve the user from needing to know/care about the details,” the NSA’s Technology Directorate notes in one secret document from 2009. “For example, a user should be able to ask for ‘all details about application X’ and not need to know how and where the application keeps files, registry entries, user application data, etc.”

In practice, this meant that TURBINE would automate crucial processes that previously had to be performed manually – including the configuration of the implants as well as surveillance collection, or “tasking,” of data from infected systems. But automating these processes was about much more than a simple technicality. The move represented a major tactical shift within the NSA that was expected to have a profound impact – allowing the agency to push forward into a new frontier of surveillance operations.

The ramifications are starkly illustrated in one undated top-secret NSA document, which describes how the agency planned for TURBINE to “increase the current capability to deploy and manage hundreds of Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) and Computer Network Attack (CNA) implants to potentially millions of implants.” (CNE mines intelligence from computers and networks; CNA seeks to disrupt, damage or destroy them.)

Eventually, the secret files indicate, the NSA’s plans for TURBINE came to fruition. The system has been operational in some capacity since at least July 2010, and its role has become increasingly central to NSA hacking operations.

Earlier reports based on the Snowden files indicate that the NSA has already deployed between 85,000 and 100,000 of its implants against computers and networks across the world, with plans to keep on scaling up those numbers.

The intelligence community’s top-secret “Black Budget” for 2013, obtained by Snowden, lists TURBINE as part of a broader NSA surveillance initiative named “Owning the Net.”

The agency sought $67.6 million in taxpayer funding for its Owning the Net program last year. Some of the money was earmarked for TURBINE, expanding the system to encompass “a wider variety” of networks and “enabling greater automation of computer network exploitation.”

Circumventing Encryption

The NSA has a diverse arsenal of malware tools, each highly sophisticated and customizable for different purposes.

One implant, codenamed UNITEDRAKE, can be used with a variety of “plug-ins” that enable the agency to gain total control of an infected computer.

An implant plug-in named CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE, for example, is used to take over a targeted computer’s microphone and record conversations taking place near the device. Another, GUMFISH, can covertly take over a computer’s webcam and snap photographs. FOGGYBOTTOM records logs of Internet browsing histories and collects login details and passwords used to access websites and email accounts. GROK is used to log keystrokes. And SALVAGERABBIT exfiltrates data from removable flash drives that connect to an infected computer.

The implants can enable the NSA to circumvent privacy-enhancing encryption tools that are used to browse the Internet anonymously or scramble the contents of emails as they are being sent across networks. That’s because the NSA’s malware gives the agency unfettered access to a target’s computer before the user protects their communications with encryption.

It is unclear how many of the implants are being deployed on an annual basis or which variants of them are currently active in computer systems across the world.

Previous reports have alleged that the NSA worked with Israel to develop the Stuxnet malware, which was used to sabotage Iranian nuclear facilities. The agency also reportedly worked with Israel to deploy malware called Flame to infiltrate computers and spy on communications in countries across the Middle East.

According to the Snowden files, the technology has been used to seek out terror suspects as well as individuals regarded by the NSA as “extremist.” But the mandate of the NSA’s hackers is not limited to invading the systems of those who pose a threat to national security.

In one secret post on an internal message board, an operative from the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate describes using malware attacks against systems administrators who work at foreign phone and Internet service providers. By hacking an administrator’s computer, the agency can gain covert access to communications that are processed by his company. “Sys admins are a means to an end,” the NSA operative writes.

The internal post – titled “I hunt sys admins” – makes clear that terrorists aren’t the only targets of such NSA attacks. Compromising a systems administrator, the operative notes, makes it easier to get to other targets of interest, including any “government official that happens to be using the network some admin takes care of.”

Similar tactics have been adopted by Government Communications Headquarters, the NSA’s British counterpart. As the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported in September, GCHQ hacked computers belonging to network engineers at Belgacom, the Belgian telecommunications provider.

The mission, codenamed “Operation Socialist,” was designed to enable GCHQ to monitor mobile phones connected to Belgacom’s network. The secret files deem the mission a “success,” and indicate that the agency had the ability to covertly access Belgacom’s systems since at least 2010.

Infiltrating cellphone networks, however, is not all that the malware can be used to accomplish. The NSA has specifically tailored some of its implants to infect large-scale network routers used by Internet service providers in foreign countries. By compromising routers – the devices that connect computer networks and transport data packets across the Internet – the agency can gain covert access to monitor Internet traffic, record the browsing sessions of users, and intercept communications.

Two implants the NSA injects into network routers, HAMMERCHANT and HAMMERSTEIN, help the agency to intercept and perform “exploitation attacks” against data that is sent through a Virtual Private Network, a tool that uses encrypted “tunnels” to enhance the security and privacy of an Internet session.

The implants also track phone calls sent across the network via Skype and other Voice Over IP software, revealing the username of the person making the call. If the audio of the VOIP conversation is sent over the Internet using unencrypted “Real-time Transport Protocol” packets, the implants can covertly record the audio data and then return it to the NSA for analysis.

But not all of the NSA’s implants are used to gather intelligence, the secret files show. Sometimes, the agency’s aim is disruption rather than surveillance. QUANTUMSKY, a piece of NSA malware developed in 2004, is used to block targets from accessing certain websites. QUANTUMCOPPER, first tested in 2008, corrupts a target’s file downloads. These two “attack” techniques are revealed on a classified list that features nine NSA hacking tools, six of which are used for intelligence gathering. Just one is used for “defensive” purposes – to protect U.S. government networks against intrusions.

“Mass exploitation potential”

Before it can extract data from an implant or use it to attack a system, the NSA must first install the malware on a targeted computer or network.

According to one top-secret document from 2012, the agency can deploy malware by sending out spam emails that trick targets into clicking a malicious link. Once activated, a “back-door implant” infects their computers within eight seconds.

There’s only one problem with this tactic, codenamed WILLOWVIXEN: According to the documents, the spam method has become less successful in recent years, as Internet users have become wary of unsolicited emails and less likely to click on anything that looks suspicious.

Consequently, the NSA has turned to new and more advanced hacking techniques. These include performing so-called “man-in-the-middle” and “man-on-the-side” attacks, which covertly force a user’s internet browser to route to NSA computer servers that try to infect them with an implant.

To perform a man-on-the-side attack, the NSA observes a target’s Internet traffic using its global network of covert “accesses” to data as it flows over fiber optic cables or satellites. When the target visits a website that the NSA is able to exploit, the agency’s surveillance sensors alert the TURBINE system, which then “shoots” data packets at the targeted computer’s IP address within a fraction of a second.

In one man-on-the-side technique, codenamed QUANTUMHAND, the agency disguises itself as a fake Facebook server. When a target attempts to log in to the social media site, the NSA transmits malicious data packets that trick the target’s computer into thinking they are being sent from the real Facebook. By concealing its malware within what looks like an ordinary Facebook page, the NSA is able to hack into the targeted computer and covertly siphon out data from its hard drive. A top-secret animation demonstrates the tactic in action.

The documents show that QUANTUMHAND became operational in October 2010, after being successfully tested by the NSA against about a dozen targets.

According to Matt Blaze, a surveillance and cryptography expert at the University of Pennsylvania, it appears that the QUANTUMHAND technique is aimed at targeting specific individuals. But he expresses concerns about how it has been covertly integrated within Internet networks as part of the NSA’s automated TURBINE system.

“As soon as you put this capability in the backbone infrastructure, the software and security engineer in me says that’s terrifying,” Blaze says.

“Forget about how the NSA is intending to use it. How do we know it is working correctly and only targeting who the NSA wants? And even if it does work correctly, which is itself a really dubious assumption, how is it controlled?”

In an email statement to The Intercept, Facebook spokesman Jay Nancarrow said the company had “no evidence of this alleged activity.” He added that Facebook implemented HTTPS encryption for users last year, making browsing sessions less vulnerable to malware attacks.

Nancarrow also pointed out that other services besides Facebook could have been compromised by the NSA. “If government agencies indeed have privileged access to network service providers,” he said, “any site running only [unencrypted] HTTP could conceivably have its traffic misdirected.”

A man-in-the-middle attack is a similar but slightly more aggressive method that can be used by the NSA to deploy its malware. It refers to a hacking technique in which the agency covertly places itself between computers as they are communicating with each other.

This allows the NSA not only to observe and redirect browsing sessions, but to modify the content of data packets that are passing between computers.

The man-in-the-middle tactic can be used, for instance, to covertly change the content of a message as it is being sent between two people, without either knowing that any change has been made by a third party. The same technique is sometimes used by criminal hackers to defraud people.

A top-secret NSA presentation from 2012 reveals that the agency developed a man-in-the-middle capability called SECONDDATE to “influence real-time communications between client and server” and to “quietly redirect web-browsers” to NSA malware servers called FOXACID. In October, details about the FOXACID system were reported by the Guardian, which revealed its links to attacks against users of the Internet anonymity service Tor.

But SECONDDATE is tailored not only for “surgical” surveillance attacks on individual suspects. It can also be used to launch bulk malware attacks against computers.

According to the 2012 presentation, the tactic has “mass exploitation potential for clients passing through network choke points.”

Blaze, the University of Pennsylvania surveillance expert, says the potential use of man-in-the-middle attacks on such a scale “seems very disturbing.” Such an approach would involve indiscriminately monitoring entire networks as opposed to targeting individual suspects.

“The thing that raises a red flag for me is the reference to ‘network choke points,’” he says. “That’s the last place that we should be allowing intelligence agencies to compromise the infrastructure – because that is by definition a mass surveillance technique.”

To deploy some of its malware implants, the NSA exploits security vulnerabilities in commonly used Internet browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The agency’s hackers also exploit security weaknesses in network routers and in popular software plugins such as Flash and Java to deliver malicious code onto targeted machines.

The implants can circumvent anti-virus programs, and the NSA has gone to extreme lengths to ensure that its clandestine technology is extremely difficult to detect. An implant named VALIDATOR, used by the NSA to upload and download data to and from an infected machine, can be set to self-destruct – deleting itself from an infected computer after a set time expires.

In many cases, firewalls and other security measures do not appear to pose much of an obstacle to the NSA. Indeed, the agency’s hackers appear confident in their ability to circumvent any security mechanism that stands between them and compromising a computer or network. “If we can get the target to visit us in some sort of web browser, we can probably own them,” an agency hacker boasts in one secret document. “The only limitation is the ‘how.’”

Covert Infrastructure

The TURBINE implants system does not operate in isolation.

It is linked to, and relies upon, a large network of clandestine surveillance “sensors” that the agency has installed at locations across the world.

The NSA’s headquarters in Maryland are part of this network, as are eavesdropping bases used by the agency in Misawa, Japan and Menwith Hill, England.

The sensors, codenamed TURMOIL, operate as a sort of high-tech surveillance dragnet, monitoring packets of data as they are sent across the Internet.

When TURBINE implants exfiltrate data from infected computer systems, the TURMOIL sensors automatically identify the data and return it to the NSA for analysis. And when targets are communicating, the TURMOIL system can be used to send alerts or “tips” to TURBINE, enabling the initiation of a malware attack.

The NSA identifies surveillance targets based on a series of data “selectors” as they flow across Internet cables. These selectors, according to internal documents, can include email addresses, IP addresses, or the unique “cookies” containing a username or other identifying information that are sent to a user’s computer by websites such as Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Twitter.

Other selectors the NSA uses can be gleaned from unique Google advertising cookies that track browsing habits, unique encryption key fingerprints that can be traced to a specific user, and computer IDs that are sent across the Internet when a Windows computer crashes or updates.

What’s more, the TURBINE system operates with the knowledge and support of other governments, some of which have participated in the malware attacks.

Classification markings on the Snowden documents indicate that NSA has shared many of its files on the use of implants with its counterparts in the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance – the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

GCHQ, the British agency, has taken on a particularly important role in helping to develop the malware tactics. The Menwith Hill satellite eavesdropping base that is part of the TURMOIL network, located in a rural part of Northern England, is operated by the NSA in close cooperation with GCHQ.

Top-secret documents show that the British base – referred to by the NSA as “MHS” for Menwith Hill Station – is an integral component of the TURBINE malware infrastructure and has been used to experiment with implant “exploitation” attacks against users of Yahoo and Hotmail.

In one document dated 2010, at least five variants of the QUANTUM hacking method were listed as being “operational” at Menwith Hill. The same document also reveals that GCHQ helped integrate three of the QUANTUM malware capabilities – and test two others – as part of a surveillance system it operates codenamed INSENSER.

GCHQ cooperated with the hacking attacks despite having reservations about their legality. One of the Snowden files, previously disclosed by Swedish broadcaster SVT, revealed that as recently as April 2013, GCHQ was apparently reluctant to get involved in deploying the QUANTUM malware due to “legal/policy restrictions.” A representative from a unit of the British surveillance agency, meeting with an obscure telecommunications standards committee in 2010, separately voiced concerns that performing “active” hacking attacks for surveillance “may be illegal” under British law.

In response to questions from The Intercept, GCHQ refused to comment on its involvement in the covert hacking operations. Citing its boilerplate response to inquiries, the agency said in a statement that “all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.”

Whatever the legalities of the United Kingdom and United States infiltrating computer networks, the Snowden files bring into sharp focus the broader implications. Under cover of secrecy and without public debate, there has been an unprecedented proliferation of aggressive surveillance techniques. One of the NSA’s primary concerns, in fact, appears to be that its clandestine tactics are now being adopted by foreign rivals, too.

“Hacking routers has been good business for us and our 5-eyes partners for some time,” notes one NSA analyst in a top-secret document dated December 2012. “But it is becoming more apparent that other nation states are honing their skillz [sic] and joining the scene.” source

 XKeyscore gives ‘widest-reaching’ collection of online data  NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches  Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian’s earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

“I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”

But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

 

XKeyScore – the NSA’s secret tool that collects and reveals ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’

 

XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA’s “widest reaching” system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”, including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing “real-time” interception of an individual’s internet activity.

Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a ‘US person’, though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

One training slide illustrates the digital activity constantly being collected by XKeyscore and the analyst’s ability to query the databases at any time.

The purpose of XKeyscore is to allow analysts to search the metadata as well as the content of emails and other internet activity, such as browser history, even when there is no known email account (a “selector” in NSA parlance) associated with the individual being targeted.

Analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used.

One document notes that this is because “strong selection [search by email address] itself gives us only a very limited capability” because “a large amount of time spent on the web is performing actions that are anonymous.”

The NSA documents assert that by 2008, 300 terrorists had been captured using intelligence from XKeyscore.

Analysts are warned that searching the full database for content will yield too many results to sift through. Instead they are advised to use the metadata also stored in the databases to narrow down what to review.

A slide entitled “plug-ins” in a December 2012 document describes the various fields of information that can be searched. It includes “every email address seen in a session by both username and domain”, “every phone number seen in a session (eg address book entries or signature block)” and user activity – “the webmail and chat activity to include username, buddylist, machine specific cookies etc”.

Email monitoring

In a second Guardian interview in June, Snowden elaborated on his statement about being able to read any individual’s email if he had their email address. He said the claim was based in part on the email search capabilities of XKeyscore, which Snowden says he was authorized to use while working as a Booz Allen contractor for the NSA.

One top-secret document describes how the program “searches within bodies of emails, webpages and documents”, including the “To, From, CC, BCC lines” and the ‘Contact Us’ pages on websites”.

To search for emails, an analyst using XKS enters the individual’s email address into a simple online search form, along with the “justification” for the search and the time period for which the emails are sought.

The analyst then selects which of those returned emails they want to read by opening them in NSA reading software.

The system is similar to the way in which NSA analysts generally can intercept the communications of anyone they select, including, as one NSA document put it, “communications that transit the United States and communications that terminate in the United States”.

One document, a top secret 2010 guide describing the training received by NSA analysts for general surveillance under the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, explains that analysts can begin surveillance on anyone by clicking a few simple pull-down menus designed to provide both legal and targeting justifications. Once options on the pull-down menus are selected, their target is marked for electronic surveillance and the analyst is able to review the content of their communications:

Chats, browsing history and other internet activity

Beyond emails, the XKeyscore system allows analysts to monitor a virtually unlimited array of other internet activities, including those within social media.

An NSA tool called DNI Presenter, used to read the content of stored emails, also enables an analyst using XKeyscore to read the content of Facebook chats or private messages.

An analyst can monitor such Facebook chats by entering the Facebook user name and a date range into a simple search screen.

Analysts can search for internet browsing activities using a wide range of information, including search terms entered by the user or the websites viewed.

As one slide indicates, the ability to search HTTP activity by keyword permits the analyst access to what the NSA calls “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”.

The XKeyscore program also allows an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies.

The quantity of communications accessible through programs such as XKeyscore is staggeringly large. One NSA report from 2007 estimated that there were 850bn “call events” collected and stored in the NSA databases, and close to 150bn internet records. Each day, the document says, 1-2bn records were added.

William Binney, a former NSA mathematician, said last year that the agency had “assembled on the order of 20tn transactions about US citizens with other US citizens”, an estimate, he said, that “only was involving phone calls and emails”. A 2010 Washington Post article reported that “every day, collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7bn emails, phone calls and other type of communications.”

The XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time. Content remains on the system for only three to five days, while metadata is stored for 30 days. One document explains: “At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours.”

To solve this problem, the NSA has created a multi-tiered system that allows analysts to store “interesting” content in other databases, such as one named Pinwale which can store material for up to five years.

It is the databases of XKeyscore, one document shows, that now contain the greatest amount of communications data collected by the NSA.

In 2012, there were at least 41 billion total records collected and stored in XKeyscore for a single 30-day period.

Legal v technical restrictions

While the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008 requires an individualized warrant for the targeting of US persons, NSA analysts are permitted to intercept the communications of such individuals without a warrant if they are in contact with one of the NSA’s foreign targets.

The ACLU’s deputy legal director, Jameel Jaffer, told the Guardian last month that national security officials expressly said that a primary purpose of the new law was to enable them to collect large amounts of Americans’ communications without individualized warrants.

“The government doesn’t need to ‘target’ Americans in order to collect huge volumes of their communications,” said Jaffer. “The government inevitably sweeps up the communications of many Americans” when targeting foreign nationals for surveillance.

An example is provided by one XKeyscore document showing an NSA target in Tehran communicating with people in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and New York.

In recent years, the NSA has attempted to segregate exclusively domestic US communications in separate databases. But even NSA documents acknowledge that such efforts are imperfect, as even purely domestic communications can travel on foreign systems, and NSA tools are sometimes unable to identify the national origins of communications.

Moreover, all communications between Americans and someone on foreign soil are included in the same databases as foreign-to-foreign communications, making them readily searchable without warrants.

Some searches conducted by NSA analysts are periodically reviewed by their supervisors within the NSA. “It’s very rare to be questioned on our searches,” Snowden told the Guardian in June, “and even when we are, it’s usually along the lines of: ‘let’s bulk up the justification’.”

In a letter this week to senator Ron Wyden, director of national intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that NSA analysts have exceeded even legal limits as interpreted by the NSA in domestic surveillance.

Acknowledging what he called “a number of compliance problems”, Clapper attributed them to “human error” or “highly sophisticated technology issues” rather than “bad faith”.

However, Wyden said on the Senate floor on Tuesday: “These violations are more serious than those stated by the intelligence community, and are troubling.”

In a statement to the Guardian, the NSA said: “NSA’s activities are focused and specifically deployed against – and only against – legitimate foreign intelligence targets in response to requirements that our leaders need for information necessary to protect our nation and its interests.

“XKeyscore is used as a part of NSA’s lawful foreign signals intelligence collection system.

“Allegations of widespread, unchecked analyst access to NSA collection data are simply not true. Access to XKeyscore, as well as all of NSA’s analytic tools, is limited to only those personnel who require access for their assigned tasks … In addition, there are multiple technical, manual and supervisory checks and balances within the system to prevent deliberate misuse from occurring.”

“Every search by an NSA analyst is fully auditable, to ensure that they are proper and within the law.

“These types of programs allow us to collect the information that enables us to perform our missions successfully – to defend the nation and to protect US and allied troops abroad.”

X-Keyscore:
Allows the NSA and Allies to Monitor Emails,
Web Browsing, Internet Searches and Social Media

XKeyscore 

XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, Japan’s Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst.^[1]

In July 2013, Edward Snowden publicly revealed the program’s purpose and use by the NSA in The Sydney Morning Herald and O Globo newspapers. The code name was already public knowledge because it was mentioned in earlier articles, and, like many other code names, it appears in job postings and online résumés of employees.^[2][3]

On July 3, 2014, German public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, a member of ARD, published excerpts of XKeyscore’s source code.^[4] A team of experts analyzed the source code.^[5] cited

XKEYSCORE

NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications

Morgan Marquis-Boire, Glenn Greenwald, Micah Lee cited theintercept.com

ONE OF THE National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse. Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people’s Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing. As of 2008, the surveillance system boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers.

These servers store “full-take data” at the collection sites — meaning that they captured all of the traffic collected — and, as of 2009, stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days. NSA documents indicate that tens of billions of records are stored in its database. “It is a fully distributed processing and query system that runs on machines around the world,” an NSA briefing on XKEYSCORE says. “At field sites, XKEYSCORE can run on multiple computers that gives it the ability to scale in both processing power and storage.”

XKEYSCORE also collects and processes Internet traffic from Americans, though NSA analysts are taught to avoid querying the system in ways that might result in spying on U.S. data. Experts and privacy activists, however, have long doubted that such exclusions are effective in preventing large amounts of American data from being swept up. One document The Intercept is publishing today suggests that FISA warrants have authorized “full-take” collection of traffic from at least some U.S. web forums.

The system is not limited to collecting web traffic. The 2013 document, “VoIP Configuration and Forwarding Read Me,” details how to forward VoIP data from XKEYSCORE into NUCLEON, NSA’s repository for voice intercepts, facsimile, video and “pre-released transcription.” At the time, it supported more than 8,000 users globally and was made up of 75 servers absorbing 700,000 voice, fax, video and tag files per day.

The reach and potency of XKEYSCORE as a surveillance instrument is astonishing. The Guardian report noted that NSA itself refers to the program as its “widest reaching” system. In February of this year, The Intercept reported that NSA and GCHQ hacked into the internal network of Gemalto, the world’s largest provider of cell phone SIM cards, in order to steal millions of encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cell phone communication. XKEYSCORE played a vital role in the spies’ hacking by providing government hackers access to the email accounts of Gemalto employees.

Numerous key NSA partners, including Canada, New Zealand and the U.K., have access to the mass surveillance databases of XKEYSCORE. In March, the New Zealand Herald, in partnership with The Intercept, revealed that the New Zealand government used XKEYSCORE to spy on candidates for the position of World Trade Organization director general and also members of the Solomon Islands government.

These newly published documents demonstrate that collected communications not only include emails, chats and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions and more.

Bulk collection and population surveillance

XKEYSCORE allows for incredibly broad surveillance of people based on perceived patterns of suspicious behavior. It is possible, for instance, to query the system to show the activities of people based on their location, nationality and websites visited. For instance, one slide displays the search “germansinpakistn,” showing an analyst querying XKEYSCORE for all individuals in Pakistan visiting specific German language message boards.

As sites like Twitter and Facebook become increasingly significant in the world’s day-to-day communications (a Pew study shows that 71 percent of online adults in the U.S. use Facebook), they become a critical source of surveillance data. Traffic from popular social media sites is described as “a great starting point” for tracking individuals, according to an XKEYSCORE presentation titled “Tracking Targets on Online Social Networks.”

When intelligence agencies collect massive amounts of Internet traffic all over the world, they face the challenge of making sense of that data. The vast quantities collected make it difficult to connect the stored traffic to specific individuals.

Internet companies have also encountered this problem and have solved it by tracking their users with identifiers that are unique to each individual, often in the form of browser cookies. Cookies are small pieces of data that websites store in visitors’ browsers. They are used for a variety of purposes, including authenticating users (cookies make it possible to log in to websites), storing preferences, and uniquely tracking individuals even if they’re using the same IP address as many other people. Websites also embed code used by third-party services to collect analytics or host ads, which also use cookies to track users. According to one slide, “Almost all websites have cookies enabled.”

The NSA’s ability to piggyback off of private companies’ tracking of their own users is a vital instrument that allows the agency to trace the data it collects to individual users. It makes no difference if visitors switch to public Wi-Fi networks or connect to VPNs to change their IP addresses: the tracking cookie will follow them around as long as they are using the same web browser and fail to clear their cookies.

Apps that run on tablets and smartphones also use analytics services that uniquely track users. Almost every time a user sees an advertisement (in an app or in a web browser), the ad network is tracking users in the same way. A secret GCHQ and CSE program called BADASS, which is similar to XKEYSCORE but with a much narrower scope, mines as much valuable information from leaky smartphone apps as possible, including unique tracking identifiers that app developers use to track their own users. In May of this year, CBC, in partnership with The Intercept, revealed that XKEYSCORE was used to track smartphone connections to the app marketplaces run by Samsung and Google. Surveillance agency analysts also use other types of traffic data that gets scooped into XKEYSCORE to track people, such as Windows crash reports.

In a statement to The Intercept, the NSA reiterated its position that such sweeping surveillance capabilities are needed to fight the War on Terror:

“The U.S. Government calls on its intelligence agencies to protect the United States, its citizens, and its allies from a wide array of serious threats. These threats include terrorist plots from al-Qaeda, ISIL, and others; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; foreign aggression against the United States and our allies; and international criminal organizations.”

Indeed, one of the specific examples of XKEYSCORE applications given in the documents is spying on Shaykh Atiyatallah, an al Qaeda senior leader and Osama bin Laden confidant. A few years before his death, Atiyatallah did what many people have often done: He googled himself. He searched his various aliases, an associate and the name of his book. As he did so, all of that information was captured by XKEYSCORE.

XKEYSCORE has, however, also been used to spy on non-terrorist targets. The April 18, 2013 issue of the internal NSA publication Special Source Operations Weekly boasts that analysts were successful in using XKEYSCORE to obtain U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s talking points prior to a meeting with President Obama.

XKEYSCORE for hacking: Easily collecting user names, passwords and much more

XKEYSCORE plays a central role in how the U.S. government and its surveillance allies hack computer networks around the world. One top-secret 2009 NSA document describes how the system is used by the NSA to gather information for the Office of Tailored Access Operations, an NSA division responsible for Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) — i.e., targeted hacking.

Particularly in 2009, the hacking tactics enabled by XKEYSCORE would have yielded significant returns as use of encryption was less widespread than today. Jonathan Brossard, a security researcher and the CEO of Toucan Systems, told The Intercept: “Anyone could be trained to do this in less than one day: they simply enter the name of the server they want to hack into XKEYSCORE, type enter, and are presented login and password pairs to connect to this machine. Done. Finito.” Previous reporting by The Intercept revealed that systems administrators are a popular target of the NSA. “Who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom?’” read a 2012 post on an internal NSA discussion board.

This system enables analysts to access web mail servers with remarkable ease.

The same methods are used to steal the credentials — user names and passwords — of individual users of message boards.

Hacker forums are also monitored for people selling or using exploits and other hacking tools. While the NSA is clearly monitoring to understand the capabilities developed by its adversaries, it is also monitoring locations where such capabilities can be purchased.

Other information gained via XKEYSCORE facilitates the remote exploitation of target computers. By extracting browser fingerprint and operating system versions from Internet traffic, the system allows analysts to quickly assess the exploitability of a target. Brossard, the security researcher, said that “NSA has built an impressively complete set of automated hacking tools for their analysts to use.”

Given the breadth of information collected by XKEYSCORE, accessing and exploiting a target’s online activity is a matter of a few mouse clicks. Brossard explains: “The amount of work an analyst has to perform to actually break into remote computers over the Internet seems ridiculously reduced — we are talking minutes, if not seconds. Simple. As easy as typing a few words in Google.”

These facts bolster one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by The Guardian on June 9, 2013. “I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge to even the president, if I had a personal email.”

Indeed, training documents for XKEYSCORE repeatedly highlight how user-friendly the program is: with just a few clicks, any analyst with access to it can conduct sweeping searches simply by entering a person’s email address, telephone number, name or other identifying data. There is no indication in the documents reviewed that prior approval is needed for specific searches.

In addition to login credentials and other target intelligence, XKEYSCORE collects router configuration information, which it shares with Tailored Access Operations. The office is able to exploit routers and then feed the traffic traveling through those routers into their collection infrastructure. This allows the NSA to spy on traffic from otherwise out-of-reach networks. XKEYSCORE documents reference router configurations, and a document previously published by Der Spiegel shows that “active implants” can be used to “cop[y] traffic and direc[t]” it past a passive collector.

XKEYSCORE for counterintelligence

Beyond enabling the collection, categorization, and querying of metadata and content, XKEYSCORE has also been used to monitor the surveillance and hacking actions of foreign nation states and to gather the fruits of their hacking. The Intercept previously reported that NSA and its allies spy on hackers in order to collect what they collect.

Once the hacking tools and techniques of a foreign entity (for instance, South Korea) are identified, analysts can then extract the country’s espionage targets from XKEYSCORE, and gather information that the foreign power has managed to steal.

Monitoring of foreign state hackers could allow the NSA to gather techniques and tools used by foreign actors, including knowledge of zero-day exploits—software bugs that allow attackers to hack into systems, and that not even the software vendor knows about—and implants. Additionally, by monitoring vulnerability reports sent to vendors such as Kaspersky, the agency could learn when exploits they were actively using need to be retired because they’ve been discovered by a third party.

Seizure v. searching: Oversight, audit trail and the Fourth Amendment

By the nature of how it sweeps up information, XKEYSCORE gathers communications of Americans, despite the Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” — including searching data without a warrant. The NSA says it does not target U.S. citizens’ communications without a warrant, but acknowledges that it “incidentally” collects and reads some of it without one, minimizing the information that is retained or shared.

But that interpretation of the law is dubious at best.

XKEYSCORE training documents say that the “burden is on user/auditor to comply with USSID-18 or other rules,” apparently including the British Human Rights Act (HRA), which protects the rights of U.K. citizens. U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) is the American directive that governs “U.S. person minimization.”

Kurt Opsahl, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s general counsel, describes USSID 18 as “an attempt by the intelligence community to comply with the Fourth Amendment. But it doesn’t come from a court, it comes from the executive.”

If, for instance, an analyst searched XKEYSCORE for all iPhone users, this query would violate USSID 18 due to the inevitable American iPhone users that would be grabbed without a warrant, as the NSA’s own training materials make clear.

Opsahl believes that analysts are not prevented by technical means from making queries that violate USSID 18. “The document discusses whether auditors will be happy or unhappy. This indicates that compliance will be achieved by after-the-fact auditing, not by preventing the search.”

Screenshots of the XKEYSCORE web-based user interface included in slides show that analysts see a prominent warning message: “This system is audited for USSID 18 and Human Rights Act compliance.” When analysts log in to the system, they see a more detailed message warning that “an audit trail has been established and will be searched” in response to HRA complaints, and as part of the USSID 18 and USSID 9 audit process.

Because the XKEYSCORE system does not appear to prevent analysts from making queries that would be in violation of these rules, Opsahl concludes that “there’s a tremendous amount of power being placed in the hands of analysts.” And while those analysts may be subject to audits, “at least in the short term they can still obtain information that they shouldn’t have.”

During a symposium in January 2015 hosted at Harvard University, Edward Snowden, who spoke via video call, said that NSA analysts are “completely free from any meaningful oversight.” Speaking about the people who audit NSA systems like XKEYSCORE for USSID 18 compliance, he said, “The majority of the people who are doing the auditing are the friends of the analysts. They work in the same office. They’re not full-time auditors, they’re guys who have other duties assigned. There are a few traveling auditors who go around and look at the things that are out there, but really it’s not robust.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the NSA said:

“The National Security Agency’s foreign intelligence operations are 1) authorized by law; 2) subject to multiple layers of stringent internal and external oversight; and 3) conducted in a manner that is designed to protect privacy and civil liberties. As provided for by Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28), all persons, regardless of their nationality, have legitimate privacy interests in the handling of their personal information. NSA goes to great lengths to narrowly tailor and focus its signals intelligence operations on the collection of communications that are most likely to contain foreign intelligence or counterintelligence information.”

XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’

• XKeyscore gives ‘widest-reaching’ collection of online data
• NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches
• Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history

• NSA-backdoored equipment info found OFF this website
• U.S. Government Catalogue of Cellphone Surveillance Devices
• Backdoors on Wikipedia
• National Security Agency
• Central Intelligence Agency
• NSA EXTRACTED INFO
• CRYPTO MUSEUM
• Edward Snowden
• Stingray
• Pegasus Spyware
• X-Keyscore

Check out our article on the NSA SPYING SOFTWARE for CELL PHONES called Pegasus – Pegasus spyware: FBI vows not to use after grilling from Capitol Hill

Advanced Network Technologies (ANT) is a department of the US National Security Agency (NSA), that provides tools for the NSA‘s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) ¹ unit and other internal and external clients. With the tools it is possible to eavesdrop on conversations (room bugging), personal computers, networks, video displays, and a lot more, using covertly installed hard- and software implants (covert ware). Most of it is built from commercial off-the-shelf parts (COTS).

Some of these products are listed in the ANT Product Catalogue, an internal NSA document that was intended for the US intelligence and law-enforcement community, and that was disclosed to the press on 29 December 2013 by an unknown source. It is believed that this source is not NSA whistleblower Edward Swowden, which means there is at least one other whistleblower [3][5].

➤ Browse the NSA ANT catalog Here

LOUDAUTO is the codename or cryptonym of a covert listening device (bug), developed around 2007 by the US National Security Agency (NSA) as part of their ANT product portfolio. The device is an audio-based RF retro reflector that should be activited (illuminated) by a strong continuous wave (CW) 1 GHz ¹ radio frequency (RF) signal, beamed at it from a nearby listening post (LP).

Although the device is activated by an external illumination signal, it should also be powered by local 3V DC source – typically provided by two button cells – from which it draws just 15µA. In this respect, it is a semi-passive element (SPE).

Room audio is picked up and amplified by a Knowles miniature microphone, that modulates the re-radiated illumination signal by means of Pulse Position Modulation (PPM). The re-emitted signal is received at the listening post – typically by a CTX-4000 or PHOTOANGLO system – and further processed by means of COTS equipment.

LOUDAUTO is part of the ANGRYNEIGHBOR family of radar retro-reflectors. In this context, the term radar refers to the continuous wave activation beam from the listening post, that operates in the 1-2 GHz frequency band. The processing and demodulation of the returned signal is typically done by means of a commercial spectrum analyser, such as the Rohde & Schwarz FSH-series, that has been enhanced with FM demodulating capabilities. In many respects, LOUDAUTO can be seen as a further development of the CIA‘s EASY CHAIR passive elements, combined with later active bugging devices, like the SRT-52 and SRT-56, which also used Pulse Position Modulation (PPM).

Information about LOUDAUTO was first published in an internal Top Secret (TS) NSA document on 1 August 2007, that was available to the so-called five eyes countries (FVEY) ² only. Although it was scheduled for declassification on 1 August 2032 (25 years after its inception), it was revealed to the public on 29 December 2013 by the German magazine Der Spiegel. The source of this leak is still unknown. ³ According to a product datasheet of 7 April 2009, the price of a single LOUDAUTO device was just US$ 30. According to that document, the end processing — presumably the demodulation — was still under development in 2009 [1].

FiREWALK

FIREWALK is the codename or cryptonym of a covert implant, developed around 2007 by or on behalf of the US National Security Agency (NSA) as part of their ANT product portfolio. The device is implanted into the RJ45 socket of the Ethernet interface of a PC or a network peripheral, and can intercept bidirectional gigabit ethernet traffic and inject data packets into the target network.

The implant is housed inside a regular stacked RJ45/twin-USB socket, such as the one shown in the image on the right. At the top are two LEDs and inside are the ethernet transformer and in some cases even an Ethernet Phy (eg. Broadcom).

NSA was able to manipulate this standard off-the-shelf computer part – probably somewhere in the supply chain or directly at the factory where the product was assembled – and replace the internal electronics by a miniature ARM9 / FPGA computer platform, named TRINITY [2].

Also implanted inside the socket, is a miniature wideband radio frequency (RF) tranceiver, named HOWLERMONKEY. It allows the implant to bypass an existing firewall or air gap protection [3].

The implant is suitable for 10/100/1000 Mb (gigabit) networks and intercepts all network traffic, with is then sent through a VPN tunnel, using the HOWLERMONKEY RF module. If the distance between the target network and the node to the Remote Operations Center (ROC) is too large, other implants in the same building may be used to relay the signal. The implant can also be used to insert data packets into the target network. The diagram below shows the construction.

At the left are the RJ45 and twin-USB sockets, with two LED indicators at the top. Immediately behind the sockets is a PCB with the power circuitry. At the back is the actual NSA FIREWALK implant, which is built around a TRINITY multi-chip module, consisting of an 180 MHz ARM9 microcontroller, an FPGA with 1 million gates, 96 MB SDRAM and 4 MB Flash memory. The latter contains the firmware, which can be tailored for a specific application or operation. In practice, the firmware would filter the network packets and relay the desired ones to the NSA’s ROC, using a nearby RF node (outside the building) and the internet to transport the intercepted data [1].

The above information was taken from original NSA datasheets from January 2007, that were disclosed to the press in 2013 by former CIA / NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The items were developed by, or on behalf of, the cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the NSA, known as The Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), since renamed Computer Network Operations [4].

Cryptonyms

All products in the ANT catalogue are identified by a codeword or cryptonym, which is sometimes abbreviated. At present, the following ANT cryptonyms are known:

NSA Spy Gear

• ANGRYNEIGHBOR
• CANDYGRAM
• CROSSBEAM
• CTX4000
• CYCLONE Hx9
• DEITYBOUNCE
• DROPOUTJEEP
• EBSR
• ENTOURAGE
• FEEDTROUGH
• GENESIS
• GINSU
• GODSURGE
• GOPHERSET
• COTTONMOUTH-I
• COTTONMOUTH-II
• COTTONMOUTH-III

• FIREWALK
• GOURMETTROUGH
• HALLUXWATER
• HEADWATER
• HOWLERMONKEY
• IRATEMONK
• IRONCHEF
• JETPLOW
• JUNIORMINT
• LOUDAUTO
• MAESTRO-II
• MONKEYCALENDAR
• NEBULA
• NIGHTSTAND
• NIGHTWATCH
• PHOTOANGLO
• PICASSO

• RAGEMASTER
• SCHOOLMONTANA
• SIERRAMONTANA
• SOMBERKNAVE
• SOUFFLETROUGH
• SPARROW II
• STUCCOMONTANA
• SURLYSPAWN
• SWAP
• TOTECHASER
• TOTEGHOSTLY
• TAWDRYYARD
• TRINITY
• TYPHON HX
• WATERWITCH
• WISTFULTOLL

Room surveillance

• CTX-4000
• LOUDAUTO
• NIGHTWATCH
• PHOTOANGLO
• TAWDRYYARD

Documentation

1. NSA, ANT Product catalog
   8 January 2007. Obtained from [2].

References

1. IC off the Record, The NSA Toolbox: ANT Product Catalog
   29-30 December 2013.
2. Jacob Appelbaum, Judith Horchert, Christian Stöcker, Catalogue Advertises NSA Toolbox
   Spiegel Online. 29 December 2013.
3. Wikipedia, NSA ANT catalog
   Retrieved November 2020.
4. Wikipedia, Tailored Access Operations
   Retrieved November 2020.
5. James Bamford, Commentary: Evidence points to another Snowden at the NSA
   Reuters, 22 August 2016.

Further information

• About the NSA
• About the CIA
• Other bugs

source

Backdoors – Exploitable weaknesses in a cipher system

Deliberate weakening of a cipher system, commonly known as a backdoor, is a technique that is used by, or on behalf of, intelligence agencies like the US National Security Agency (NSA) – and others – to make it easier for them to break the cipher and access the data. It is often thought that intelligence services have a Master Key that gives them instant access to the data, but in reality it is often much more complicated, and requires the use of sophisticated computing skills.

In the past, intelligence services like the NSA weakened the ciphers just enough to allow it to be barely broken with the computing power that was available to them (e.g. by using their vast array of Cray super computers), assuming that other parties did not have that capability. Implementing a backdoor is difficult and dangerous, as it might be discovered by the user — after which it can no longer be used — or by another party, in which case it can be exploited by an adversary.

Below is a non-exhaustive overview of known backdoor constructions and examples:

• Weakening of the encryption algorithm
• Weakening the KEY
• Hiding the KEY in the cipher text
• Manipulation of user instructions (manual)
• Key generator with predictive output
• Implementation of a hidden ‘unlock’ key (master key)
• Key escrow
• Side channel attack (TEMPEST)
• Unintended backdoors
• Covertly installed hard- and/or software (spyware)

Weakening of the algorithm

One of the most widely used types of backdoor, is weakening of the algorithm. This was done with mechanical cipher machines – such as the CX-52 – electronic ones – such as the H-460 – and software-based encryption. NSA often weakened the algorithm just enough to break it with the help from a super computer (e.g. Cray), assuming that adversaries did not have that capacity.

This solution is universal. It can be applied to mechanical, electronic and computer-based encryption systems. One of the first known examples is the weakening of the Hagelin CX-52 by Peter Jenks of the NSA, in the early 1960s [1].

The Hagelin CX-52 had the problem that it was theoretically safe when used correctly. It was possible however to configure the device in such a way that it produced a short cycle, as a result of which it became easy to break. Jenks modified the CX-52 in such a way that it always produced a long cycle, albeit one that he could predict.

The modified product was designated CX-52M and was marketed by Crypto AG as a new version with improved security, which customers immediately started ordering in quantities. He repeated the exercise in the mid-1960s, when Crypto AG moved from mechanical to electronic designs.

The first electronic cipher machines were built around (non)linear feedback shift registers – LFSR or NLFSR – built with the (then) newest generation of integrated circuits (ICs). This part is commonly known as the crypto heart or the cryptologic. Jenks manipulated the shift registers in such as way that it seemed robust from the outside. Nevertheless NSA could break it, as they knew the exact nature of the built-in weakness.

Manipulating the cryptologic, or actually the cryptographic algorithm, requires quite some mathematical ingenuity, and is not trivial at all.

During the 1970s, the weaknesses were discovered by several (unwitting) Crypto AG employees and even by customers. Crypto AG usually fended them off with the excuse that the algorithm had been developed a long time ago, and that an improved version would be released soon. It should be no surprise that hiding the weaknesses became increasingly difficult over the years.

The same principle can be applied to software-implementations of cryptographic algorithms as well, but it has become extremely difficult to do that in such a way that it passes existing tests, such as NIST entropy-tests, and can with­stand the peer review of the academic community.

Another popular method for weakening a cipher system, is by shortening the effective length of the crypto KEY. The length is typically specified in bits, and in the 1980s, the keys of military cipher systems were typically 128 bits long, which was about twice the length that was needed.

The DES encryption algorithm – that was used for bank transactions – had a key length of 56 bits. It had been developed by Horst Feistel at IBM as Lucifer and had been improved by NSA.

In 1983, the small Dutch company Text Lite, introduced the small PX-1000 pocket terminal shown in the image on the right. It had a built-in text editor and an acoustic modem, by which texts could be uploaded in seconds. The device used DES encryption for the protection of the text messages, which was thought to be useful for journalists and business men on the move.

DES was considered secure at the time. Although it might have been breakable by NSA, doing so would cost a lot of resources (i.e. computing power). With DES available in a consumer product for an affordable price, NSA faced a serious problem, and turned to Philips Usfa

for assistence.Philips bought the entire stock of

DES-enabled devices and shipped it to the US. The product was then re-released under the Philips brand, with an algorithm that was supplied by NSA.

The new algorithm was a stream cipher with a key-length of no less than 64 bits. This is more than the 56 bits of DES, and suggested that it was a least a strong as DES, and probably even stronger. By reverse engineering the algorithm, Crypto Museum has meanwhile concluded that of the 64 key bits, only 32 are significant. This means that the key has effectively been halved.

Does this mean that it takes only half the time to break the key? No, as each key-bit doubles the number of combinations, removing 32 bits means that it has become 4,294,967,296 times easier to break the key (2³²). For example: if we assume that it takes one full year to break a 64-bit key, breaking a 32-bit key would take just 0.007 seconds. A piece of cake for NSA‘s super computers.

Hide the KEY in the ciphertext

It is sometimes suggested that the cryptographic key might be hidden in the output stream (i.e. in the cipher text). Not in a readable form, of course, but when you known where to look, the key will reveal itself. Although this method is prone to discovery it has in fact been used in the past.

A good example of this technique is the Hagelin CSE-280 voice encryptor, that was introduced by Crypto AG in the early 1970s. The product had been developed in cooperation with the German cipher authority ZfCh (part of the BND), and used forward synchro­nisation, to allow late entry sync.

The key was hidden in the preample that was inserted at the beginning of each transmission. If one knew where to look, the entire key could be reconstructed. A few years after the device had been introduced, Crypto AG‘s chief developer Peter Frutiger suddenly realised how it was done.

It was only a matter of time before customers would discover it too. In 1976, the Syrians became aware of the (badly hidden) key in the preamble, and notified Crypto AG, where Frutiger provided them with a fix that made it instantly unbreakable. NSA was furious and Frutiger got fired for this.

The exploit was based on redundancy in the enciphered message preamble. It caused a bias which was an unnecessary shortcoming by design. It involved solving a set of binary equasions, an exponentially large number of times, for which the special purpose device was developed.More bout Aroflex
Rigging the manualIn some cases, the cipher can be weakened by manipulating the manual. This was done for example with the manuals of the Hagelin CX-52 machine. Although the CX-52 was in theory a virtually unbreakable machine, it could be set up accidentally in such a way, that it produced a short cycle (period), which was easy to break.By manipulating the manual, guidelines were given for ‘proper’ use of the machine, but in reality the user was instructed to configure the machine in such a way that it generated a short cycle, which was easy to break by the NSA.

Another example of hiding hints in the output stream, is the T-1000/CA, internally known as Beroflex, that was the civil version of the NATO-approved Aroflex, a joint development of Philips and Siemens. It was based on a T-1000 telex.

Whilst the Aroflex was highly secure, Beroflex (T-1000/CA) was not. With the right means and the right knowledge, it could be broken. This was not a trivial task however, and required the use of a special purpose device – a super chip – that had been co-developed by experts at the codebreaking division of the Royal Dutch Navy.

Key generator with predictive outputMany encryption systems, old and new alike, make use of KEY-generators – commonly pseudo random number generators, or PRNGs – for example for the generation of unique message keys, for generating private and public keys, and for generating the key stream in a stream cipher.By manipulating the key generator, it is theoretically possible to generate predictable keys, weak keys or predicatable cycles. Examples are the mechanical key generator of the Hagelin CX-52M, but also the software-based random number generators (RNGs) in modern software algorithms.Creating this kind of weaknesses is neither simple nor trivial, as the weakened key generator has to withstand a variety of existing entropy tests, including the ones published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Nevertheless, various (potential) backdoors based on weakened PRNGs have been reported in the press, some of which are attributed to the NSA.In December 2013, Reuters reported that documents released by Edward Snowden indicated that NSA had payed RSA Security US$ 10 million to make Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual_EC_DRBG) the default in their encryption software. It had already been proven in 2007, that constants could be constructed in such a way as to create a kleptographic backdoor in the NIST-recommended Dual_EC_DRBG [3]. It had been deliberately inserted by NSA as part of its BULLRUN decryption program. NIST promptly withdrew Dual_EC_DRBG from its draft guidance [4].➤ Wikipedia: Random number generator attack
➤ Wikipedia: Dual_EC_DRBG
It is often thought by the general public, that intelligence agencies have something like a magic password, or master key, that gives them instant access to secure communications of a subject. Although in most cases the backdoor mechanism is far more complex, it is technically possible.An example of a possible master key, is the so-called_NSAKEY that was found in a Microsoft operating system in 1999. The variable contained a 1024-bit public key, that was similar to the cryptographic keys that are used for encryption and authentication. Although Microsoft firmly denied it, it was widely speculated that the key was there to give the NSA access to the system.There are however a few other possible explanations for the presence of this key — including a backup key, a key for installing NSA proprietary crypto suites, and incompetence on the part of Microsoft, NSA or both — all of which seem plausible. In addition, Dr. Nicko van Someren found a third – far more obscure – key in Windows 2000, which he doubted had a legitimate purpose [5].➤ Wikipedia: _NSAKEY
A good example of KEY ESCROW is the so-called Clipper Chip, that was introduced by the NSA in the early 1990s, in an attempt to control the use of strong encryption by the general public.It was the intention to use this chip in all civil encryption products, such as computers, secure telephones, etc., so that everyone would be able to use strong encryption. By forcing people to surrender their keys to the (US) government, law enforcement agencies had the ability to decrypt the communication, should that prove to be necessary during the course of an investigation.

Encryption systems are often attacked by adversaries, by exploiting information that is hidden in the so-called side channels. This is known as a side channel attack. In most cases, side channels are unintended, but they may have been inserted deliberately to give an eavesdropper a way in.Side channels are often unwanted emanations – such as radio frequency (RF) signals that are emitted by the equipment, or sound generated by a printer or a keyboard – but may also take the form of variations in power consumption (current) that occur when the device is in use (power analysis). In military jargon, unwanted emanations are commonly known as TEMPEST.An early example of a cryptographic device that exhibited exploitable TEMPEST problems, is the Philips Ecolex IV mixer shown in the image on the right, which was approved for use by NATO.As it was based on the One-Time Tape (OTT) principle, it was theoretically safe. However, in the mid-1960s, the Dutch national physics laboratory TNO, proved that minute glitches in the electric signals on the teleprinter data line, could be exploited to reconstruct the original plaintext. The problem was eventually soved by adding filters between the device and the teleprinter line.➤ Wikipedia: Side-channel attack <Unintended weaknessesBackdoors can also be based on unintentional weaknesses in the design of an encryption device. For example, the Enigma machine – used during WWII by the German Army – can not encode a This and other weaknesses greatly helped the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and allowed the cipher to be broken throughout World War II.Unintended weaknesses were also present in the early mechanical cipher machines of Crypto AG (Hagelin), such as the C-36, M-209, C-446 and CX-52. Although they were theoretically strong, they could accidentally be setup in such a way that they produced a short cycle, which could be broken much more easily. Similar properties can be found in the first generations of electronic crypto devices that are based on shift-registers.

It had to be assumed that the (US) government could be trusted under all circumstances, and that sufficient mechanisms were in place to avoid unwarranted tapping and other abuse, which was heavily disputed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other privacy organisations.

The device – which used the Skipjack algorithm – was not embraced by the public. In addition, it contained a serious flaw. In 1994, shortly after its introduction, (then) AT&T researcher Matt Blaze discovered the possibility to tamper the device in such a way that it offered strong encryption whilst disabling the escrow capability. And that was not what the US Government had in mind.

Cryptographic Key Escrow

The Clipper Chip was a cryptographic chipset developed and promoted by the US Government. It was intended for implementation in secure voice equipment, such as crypto phones, and required its users to surrender their cryptographic keys in escrow to the government. This would allow law enforcement agencies (CIA, FBI), to decrypt any traffic for surveillance and intelligence  purposes. The controversial Clipper Chip was announced in 1993 and was already defunct by 1996 [1].

The physical chip was designed by Mykotronx (USA) and manufactured by VLSI Technology Inc. (USA). The initial cost for an unprogrammed chip was $16 and a programmed one costed $26.

The image on the right shows the Mykotronx MYK78T chip as it is present inside the AT&T’s TSD-3600-E telephone encryptor. The chip is soldered directly to the board (i.e. not socketed) and was thought to be tamper-proof (see below). The AT&T TSD-3600 telephone encryptor was the first and only product that featured the ill-fated Clipper Chip before it was withdrawn.

in order to provide a level of protection against misuse of the key by law enforcement agencies, it was agreed that the Unit Key of each device with a clipper chip, would be held in escrow jointly by two federal agencies. This means that the actual Unit Key was split in two parts, each of which was given to one of the agencies. In order to reconstruct the actual Unit Key, the database of both agencies had to be accessed and the two half-Unit Keys had to be combined by bitwise XOR [3].

Skipjack Algorithm
The Clipper Chip used the Skipjack encryption algorithm for the transmission of information, and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm for the distribution of the cryptographic session keys between peers. Both algorithms are believed to provide good security.

The Skipjack algorithm was developed by the NSA and was classed an NSA Type 2 encryption product. The algorithm was initially classified as SECRET, so that it could not be examined in the usual manner by the encryption research community. After much debate, the Skipjack algorithm was finally declassified and published by the NSA on 24 June 1998 [2]. It uses an 80-bit key and a symmetric cipher algorithm, similar to DES.

Key Escrow
The heart of the concept was Key Escrow. Any device with a Clipper Chip inside (e.g. a crypto phone) would be assigned a cryptographic key, which would be given to the government in escrow. The user would then assume the government to be the so-called trusted third party. If government agencies “established their authority” to intercept a particular communication, the key would be given to that agency, so that all data transmitted by the subject could be decrypted.

The concept of Key Escrow raised much debate and became heavily disputed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), established in 1990, preferred the term Key Surrender to stress what, according to them, was actually happening. Together with other public interest organizations, such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the EFF challenged the Clipper Chip proposal, saying that it would be illegal and also ineffective, as criminals wouldn’t use it anyway.

In response to the Clipper Chip initiative by the US Government, a number of very strong public encryption packages were released, such as Nautilus, PGP and PGPfone. It was thought that, if strong cryptography was widely available to the public, the government would be unable to stop its use. This approach appeared to be effective, causing the premature ‘death’ of the Clipper Chip, and with it the death of Key Escrow in general.

In 1993, AT&T Bell produced the first and only telephone encryptor based on the Clipper Chip: the TSD-3600. A year later, in 1994, Matt Blaze, a researcher at AT&T, published a major design flaw in the Escrowed Encryption System (EES). A malicious party could tamper the software and use the Clipper Chip as an encryption device, whilst disabling the key escrow capability.

When establishing a connection, the Clipper Chip transmits a 128-bit Law Enforcement Access Field (LEAF). The above diagram shows how the LEAF was established. The LEAF contained information needed by the intercepting agency to establish the encryption key.

To prevent the software from tampering with the LEAF, a 16-bit hash code was included. If the hash didn’t match, the Clipper Chip would not decrypt any messages. The 16-bit hash however, was too short to be safe, and a brute force attack would easily produce the same hash for a fake session key, thus not revealing the actual keys [3] . If a malicious user would tamper the device’s software in this way, law enforcement agencies would not be able to reproduce the actual session key. As a result, they would not be able to decrypt the traffic.

Interior

Since the Clipper-project has failed, we think it is safe to show you the contents of the chip. Although this is something we would not normally do, this one is too good to be missed. Below, Travis Goodspeed shows us how easy it is to open the package and reverse-engineer a chip [4]. Luckily, according to Kerckhoff’s principle, the secret is in the key and not in the device [5].

The black dots along the four edges are the connection pads of the chip. The image was publised on Travis’ photostream on Flickr and is reproduced here with his kind permission. Click the image for a hi-res version. Note that this is a large file (18MB) which may take some time to download.

In some cases, the safety doctrine that is intended to make the device more secure, actually makes the cipher weaker. For example: during WWII, the German cipher authority dictated that a particular cipher wheel should not be used in the same position on two successive days. Whilst this may seem like a good idea, it effectively reduces the maximum number of possible settings.

By far the most common of the unintended weaknesses is operator error, such as choosing a simple or easy to guess password, sending multiple messages on the same key, sending the same message on two different keys, etc. Here are some examples of unintended weaknesses

With a special key combination, the key logger can be turned in a USB memory stick, from which the logged data can be recovered by a malicious party. A more sophisticated example of covert hardware, is the addition of a (miniature) chip on the printed circuit board of an existing device. As many companies today have outsourced the production of their electronics, there is always a possibility that it might be maliciously modified by a foreign party. This is particularly the case with critical infrastructure like routers, switches and telecommunications backbone equipment. This problem is enhanced by the increasing complexity of modern computers, as a result of which virtually no one knows exactly how it works. A good example is the tiny computer that is hidden inside Intel’s AMT processors, and that has been actively exploited as a spying tool [6].

• Crypto Museum, Operation RUBICON
  February 2020.
• Wikipedia, Backdoor (computing)
  Retrieved February 2020
• Wikipedia, Random number generator attack
  Retrieved February 2020
• Wikipedia, Dual_EC_DRBG
  Retrieved February 2020
• Wikipedia, _NSAKEY
  Retrieved February 2020
• Wikipedia, Intel_Active Management Technology
  Retrieved November 2020.
• Adding a small chip to the board (can only be done during production process)
• Adding a regular component with a built-in chip ➤ e.g. NSA’s FIREWALK
• Tiny computer inside a regular processor ➤ e.g. Intel AMT
• External key logger (USB or PS2)
• Key logger (spy) software
• Computer viruses
• Supply chain attack
• Weak keys
• A letter can not encode into itself (Enigma)
• False security measures
• Operator mistakes
• Software bugs

Another way of getting surreptitious access to a computer system, such as a personal computer, is by covertly installing additional hardware or software that gives an adversary direct or indirect access to the system and its data. Spyware can be visible, but can also be completely invisible.

An example of a hidden-in-plain-sight device is a so-called key logger that can be installed between keyboard and computer. The image on the right shows two variants: one for USB (left) and one for the old PS-2 keyboard interface.

Items like these can easily be installed in an office – for example by the cleaning lady – and are hardly noticed in the tangle of wires below your desk. It registers every key stroke, complete with time/date stamp, including your passwords. If the cleaning lady removes it a few days later, you will never find out that it was ever installed.

Manipulated hardware can be used to eavesdrop on your data, but can also be used as part of a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), or to disrupt the critical infrastructure of a company or even an entire country. In many cases, such attacks are carried out by (foreign) state actors. Manipulation of hardware is also possible by adding a secret chip to a regular inconspicuous component. A good example is the FIREWALK implant of the US National Security Agency (NSA) that is hidden inside a regular RJ45 Ethernet socket of a computer. It is used by the NSA to spy behind firewalls and was disclosed by former CIA / NSA-contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

This device is particularly dangerous as it can not be found with a visual inspection. Further­more, it transmits the intercepted data via radio waves and effectively bypasses all security.

Is this problem restricted to high-end (computing) devices? Certainly not. Most modern domestic appliances, such as smart thermomenters, smart meters, domotica and in particular devices for the Internet of Things (IoT), are badly built, contain badly written software and are rarely properly protected, as a result of which they are extremely vulnerable to manipulation (hacking).

source

• NSA-backdoored equipment info found OFF this website
• U.S. Government Catalogue of Cellphone Surveillance Devices
• Backdoors on Wikipedia
• National Security Agency
• Central Intelligence Agency
• NSA EXTRACTED INFO
• CRYPTO MUSEUM
• Edward Snowden
• Stingray
• Pegasus Spyware
• X-Keyscore

The intelligence agency expects traditional networking equipment to comply with the new standards by 2030.

Edward Joseph Snowden (21 June 1983) is an American computer professional and activist who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and later for the National Security Agency (NSA) as a contractor. In June 2013, he released thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, which has become known as the Snowden revelations. Snowden is currently living in Russia where he has been granted a temporary asylum.

Snowden started working for the CIA in 2006 after attending a job fair. He was then assigned to the Global Communications Division at CIA headquarters in Langley (Virginia, US). He was later sent to the CIA‘s secret training school for technology specialists where he spend 6 months training and studying. In March 2007, the CIA stationed him in Geneva under official cover of diplomacy and a fake identity, where he worked as the top technical and cybersecurity expert.

In 2009, after resigning from the CIA, Snowden started working as a contractor for computer giant Dell, who assigned him to an NSA facility at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo (Japan). In 2011 he returned to the US where he worked on Dell’s CIA account. In March 2012, Dell reassigned Snowden to Hawaii as lead technologist for the NSA‘s information-sharing office. On 15 March 2013 he quit his job at Dell and started working as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, after turning down a job offer at NSA‘s elite hacker team known as Tailored Access Operations.

Edward Joseph Snowden (21 June 1983) is an American computer professional and activist who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and later for the National Security Agency (NSA) as a contractor. In June 2013, he released thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, which has become known as the Snowden revelations. Snowden is currently living in Russia where he has been granted a temporary asylum.

Edward Snowden

Snowden started working for the CIA in 2006 after attending a job fair. He was then assigned to the Global Communications Division at CIA headquarters in Langley (Virginia, US). He was later sent to the CIA‘s secret training school for technology specialists where he spend 6 months training and studying. In March 2007, the CIA stationed him in Geneva under official cover of diplomacy and a fake identity, where he worked as the top technical and cybersecurity expert.

In 2009, after resigning from the CIA, Snowden started working as a contractor for computer giant Dell, who assigned him to an NSA facility at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo (Japan). In 2011 he returned to the US where he worked on Dell’s CIA account. In March 2012, Dell reassigned Snowden to Hawaii as lead technologist for the NSA‘s information-sharing office. On 15 March 2013 he quit his job at Dell and started working as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, after turning down a job offer at NSA‘s elite hacker team known as Tailored Access Operations.

On 20 May 2013, after working for Booz Allen Hamilton for less than three months, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at the NSA facility in Hawaii. There he revealed the classified NSA documents that he had been collecting during the past year to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, giving them an insight into the NSA‘s many unwarranted mass-surveillance and data-collecting programs that, according to Snowden, were unconstitutional.Stories based on the Snowden revelations have since appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The New York Times and others. Although many of the disclosures in the international press are based on the information revealed by Snowden, some of them have been falsely attributed to him, indicating that there are other sources of information leaks as well.On 23 June 2013, Snowden left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow with the intent to travel on to a South American country. However, as his passport had meanwhile been revoked by the US, he got stuck in Russia where he eventually obtained temporary asylum for one year. This was later extended by another three years. He is currently living at an undisclosed address in Russia.

Edward Snowden is regarded by some as a dissident, a patriot, a whistleblower and even a hero, but is called a traitor and a spy by others. In any case, his remarkable disclosures have fueled the worldwide debate about mass-surveillance, privacy, information security and (inter)national interests. The information provided here is largely based on the Wikipedia page about Edward Snowden and credits are due to the many contributors listed at the bottom of that page [1].

On 2 September 2020, a US federal court ruled that the NSA‘s mass surveillance program was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. During his tenure, US President Donald Trump hinted on several occasions that he might be willing to pardon Snowden, but so far no action was taken.

Films

• Verax (2013)
  Short 5-minute low-budget film made by a local production team in Hong Kong, depicting Snowden hiding in the Mira Hotel while being unsuccessfully tracked by the CIA and China’s Ministry of State Security. Uploaded to YouTube on 25 June 2013.
• Classified: The Edward Snowden Story (2014)
  Feature-length crowdfunded film, directed by Jason Bourque, available as a free download. Released 19 September 2014.
• Citizenfour (2014)
  Two-hour film, tracing Snowden’s time in Hong Kong and Moscow, edited by Laura Poitras. Edited in Germany as Poitras was afraid that here material would be seized in the US. Won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Released 10 October 2014.
• Killswitch (2014)
  Film about big businesses trying to control the internet, the government trying to regulate it and hacktivists trying to free up information, featuring Edward Snowden, Aaron Schwarz, Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu. World premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival. Released October 2014.
• Snowden’s Great Escape (2015)
  Second Edward Snowden documentary by Realscreen magazine, in coproduction with the German NDR and the Danish DR TV. Includes new interviews with Snowden, recorded in Moscow. Released on 12 January 2015.
• Snowden (16 September 2016)
  In 2014 The Guardian reported that American director Oliver Stone has bought the rights to Time of the Octopus, a novel based on Snowden’s life written by his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena. Stone will be using the book along with Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files for the screenplay of a forthcoming feature-length movie titled Snowden, which was largely shot in Germany in 2015. Release date: 16 September 2016.
  Dutch premiere: Thursday 10 November 2016.

Snowden – A movie by Oliver Stone

American film director Oliver Stone has made a feature film about Edward Snowden, based on the books Time of the Octopus, written by Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, and The Snowden Files by Luke Harding. The movie shows how Snowden was first trained by the CIA and then worked for the NSA, where he began to question the legality of the NSA‘s mass surveillance program and the unwarranted tapping and recording of everybodies personal communications.

It gives us a revealing insight about what the NSA‘s surveillance program is really capable of, but leaves it to the viewer to decide whether Snowden should be called a hero or a traitor.

Making and financing the movie in the US appeared to be very difficult, if not impossible, so Stone diverted to Munich (Germany) where much of the movie was shot. The screenplay is by Oliver Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Edward Snowden.

Crypto Museum was asked to supply crypto­graphic and espionage equipment for the movie. Together with one other museum and a private collector, we brought together well over 100 objects that are visible in several scenes.

Most of the objects were used to recreate the internal cipher museum at the Hill, the CIA‘s training center in Virginia (US), but you may also spot the STE crypto phones in the CIA office in Geneva. In March 2015, Crypto Museum’s Marc Simons and Paul Reuvers travelled to Munich to assist in the shooting of these scenes. Although photographing was not allowed on the film set, most of the actors took the opportunity to make a ‘selfie’ with the famous Enigma machine…

During the several weeks of shooting in Munich, the more than 60 objects from our collection were treated extremely well by the production team. All personnel was informed that the staged museum contained ‘real museum pieces’, which had to be treated as such. After several months, the high-value pieces were returned to us without a single scratch. But not without an incident: when the production company’s courrier returned the items, his unmarked van was pulled over at the German motorway twice. On both occasions the police searched the vehicle and summoned the driver to open the boxes, which he refused. Coincidence or intimidation? You decide. source

How Glenn Greenwald helped whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal NSA secrets

BY Philip Dorling

 

United States intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has provided his first disclosure of Australian involvement in US global surveillance, identifying four facilities in the country that contribute to a key American intelligence collection program.

Classified US National Security Agency maps leaked by Mr Snowden and published by US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the Brazilian O Globo newspaper reveal the locations of dozens of US and allied signals intelligence collection sites that contribute to interception of telecommunications and internet traffic worldwide.

The US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and three Australian Signals Directorate facilities: the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Facility at Geraldton and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra are among contributors to the NSA’s collection program codenamed X-Keyscore.

The New Zealand Government Security Communications Bureau facility at Waihopai near Blenheim also contributes to the program.

The US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and three Australian Signals Directorate facilities: the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Facility at Geraldton and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra are among contributors to the NSA’s collection program codenamed X-Keyscore.

The New Zealand Government Security Communications Bureau facility at Waihopai near Blenheim also contributes to the program.

• NSA-backdoored equipment info found OFF this website
• U.S. Government Catalogue of Cellphone Surveillance Devices
• Backdoors on Wikipedia
• National Security Agency
• Central Intelligence Agency
• NSA EXTRACTED INFO
• CRYPTO MUSEUM
• Edward Snowden
• Stingray
• Pegasus Spyware
• X-Keyscore

Mathematics 55A “Studies in Algebra and Group Theory” and Mathematics 55B “Studies in Real and Complex Analysis

DEMYSTIFYING MATH 55

Few undergraduate level classes have the distinction of nation-wide recognition that Harvard University’s Math 55 has. Officially comprised of Mathematics 55A “Studies in Algebra and Group Theory” and Mathematics 55B “Studies in Real and Complex Analysis,” it is technically an introductory level course. It is also a veritable legend among high schoolers and college students alike, renowned as — allegedly — the hardest undergraduate math class in the country. It has been mentioned in books and articles, has its own Wikipedia page, and has been the subject of countless social media posts and videos.

Most recently, Harvard junior Mahad Khan created a TikTok video dedicated to Math 55 that has received over 360,000 views to date. His is only one of many — his older brother created one, too — but it has the distinction of an insider’s perspective. “I thought it would be interesting if I cleared up the misconceptions about Math 55,” Khan said. While he hadn’t taken the course himself, he wanted to go beyond its reputation. “I wanted to get a real perspective by interviewing a former student and current course assistant.”

Over the years, perception of Math 55 has become based less on the reality of the course itself and more on a cumulative collection of lore and somewhat sensationalist rumors. It’s tempting to get swept up in the thrill of hearsay but while there might be kernels of truth to some of the stories, many of them are outdated and taken out of context. At the end of the day, however, Math 55 is a class like any other. Below, we take a stab at busting some of the more well known and persistent myths about the class. Or, at the very least, offering an extra layer of clarity.

MYTH #1: MATH 55 IS ONLY FOR HIGH SCHOOL MATH GENIUSES

Most articles or mentions of Math 55 refer to it as filled with math competition champions and genius-level wunderkinds. The class is supposedly legendary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the International Math Olympiad. There are even rumors of a special test students have to take before they are even allowed into Math 55. But while familiarity with proof-based mathematics is considered a plus for those interested in the course, there is no prerequisite for competition or research experience.

In fact students whose only exposure to advanced math has been through olympiads and summer research programs can have a harder time adjusting. Their approach to the material tends to be understandably more solitary and that can be a disadvantage for the level of collaboration higher level mathematics require. “It has become a lot more open to people with different backgrounds,” said Professor Denis Auroux, who teaches Math 55,. “Our slogan is, if you’re reasonably good at math, you love it, and you have lots of time to devote to it, then Math 55 is completely fine for you.”

Also, there is no extra test to get into the class.

MYTH #2: JUST TAKE A GRADUATE CLASS, INSTEAD

Math 55 is hard. Whether you’re just 55-curious, or a past or present student in the class, this is something everyone agrees on. The course condenses four years of math into two semesters, after all. “For the first semester, you work on linear and abstract algebra with a bit of representation theory,” said sophomore math concentrator Dora Woodruff. “The second semester is real and complex analysis, and a little bit of algebraic topology. That’s almost the whole undergraduate curriculum.” Woodruff — incidentally, the student Khan interviewed — took Math 55 as a freshman and returned her second year as a course assistant. She is intimately familiar with the course’s difficulty level.

So why not just take an upper level undergraduate course to begin with or even one at a graduate level, if you’re really looking for a challenge? What justifies the existence of a class with the difficulty level of Math 55? One argument is that the course helps structure and systemize the knowledge with which many students come to Harvard. It gives them a firm background in preparation for the rest of their math education. Math 55 is difficult and it is purposefully structured that way as it’s meant to help students mature as mathematicians rather than as simple course takers.

But more importantly, “it’s just not true that Math 55 is at the level of a graduate class,” Auroux said. “It goes through several upper division undergraduate math classes with maybe a bit more advanced digressions into material here and there, but it sticks very close to what is taught in 100-level classes. The difference is we go through it at a faster pace, maybe with more challenging homework, and ideally as a community of people bringing our heads together.”

A core goal of Math 55, according to Auroux, is to build a sense of community. Other schools might encourage advanced first-year students to take upper level undergraduate or even graduate classes, but Math 55 helps build a cohort of like-minded people who really like math, are good at it, and want to do a lot of it during their time at Harvard. That’s the experience Woodruff had, as well. “The community can be very strong,” she said. “You meet a lot of other people very interested in math and stay friends with them for the rest of college.”

MYTH #3: HOMEWORK TAKES BETWEEN 24 AND 60 HOURS

Horror stories of endless homework are synonymous with the class. You’ll read or hear about “24 to 60 hours per week on homework” in almost every reference to Math 55. But one, there is a world of difference between 24 and 60 hours that is never explained, and two, this timeframe is quite misaligned with reality.

Auroux frequently sends out surveys to his students asking how long homework takes them and the average for most is closer to 15 hours a week. Those with more extensive prior math backgrounds can take as little as five to ten hours. The key factor is collaboration. “This class doesn’t lend itself to self-study,” Auroux stressed. Once they have thought about each problem set on their own, students are welcome and encouraged to talk to their friends and collaborate. “As soon as I see that something took over 30 hours I ask the student, do you know you’re supposed to be working with people and come ask me questions when you’re stuck?”

It is true that between reviewing lectures, digesting the material, and solving the problem sets, students usually end up devoting between 20 and 30 hours a week to the class. However, that includes the time dedicated to homework. So while students are discouraged from taking too many difficult classes and extracurriculars in the same semester as Math 55, they are also not expected to spend the time equivalent to a full-time job on their problem sets every week.

MYTH #4: LESS THAN HALF OF THE CLASS MAKES IT TO THE SECOND SEMESTER

Math 55 is just as infamous for its attrition rate as it is for its difficulty. Most sources like to cite the 1970 class, which began with 75 students and — between the advanced nature of the material and the time-constraints under which students had to work — ended with barely 20. Since then, the rumor has been that the Math 55 class shrinks by half its original size or more before the first semester is over. The reality is much less shocking and a bit more complicated.

Enrollment in this past fall semester’s Math 55A peaked at (ironically) 55 students. Well into the spring semester’s Math 55B, 47 students were still enrolled in the course. “On average, a drop of about 10-15 percent is much closer to what I would expect,” Auroux said. And those numbers become even more flexible if one takes into consideration the weeks math students have at the beginning of each semester to try out different classes and “shop” around before they have to commit to anything. This means students find their way in and out of Math 55 in a variety of ways over the course of the academic year.

According to Auroux, some students shop Math 55 in the fall and switch to the less intense Math 25 for the remainder of the semester. Others start out in Math 25 and, if not sufficiently challenged, switch to Math 55. Even people who end up in academia are not exempt from this. During his time as a student, our own Department of Mathematics’ Professor Emeritus Benedict Gross switched to the lower level Math 21 after two weeks in Math 55. In fact, those two weeks almost made him reconsider his desire to pursue mathematics. “By the beginning of sophomore year, I had decided to major in physics,” he recalled. “But during shopping period that fall, I walked past a math class taught by Andrew Gleason and stopped in to listen. It turned out to be Math 55.” He enrolled and by the end of the semester had found his vocation in mathematics.

All this means that Auroux sees student numbers vacillate up and down throughout the academic year. “There are about four or five students in this spring semester’s Math 55 that took Math 25 or even Math 22 in the fall, and they’re doing mostly fine,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, but I think they’re having a great time.”

MYTH #5: 55-ER CULTURE IS CULT-Y AND EXCLUSIONARY

Even though her experience with Math 55 was a positive one, Woodruff is very aware of the unhealthy culture the class has been rumored to cultivate. It’s easy for students to form exclusionary cliques that consist only of other Math 55 students, and some look down on anyone taking lower level math classes. But Woodruff also stressed that the instructors are very aware of this and actively take steps to curb that kind of toxic behavior. She said Auroux frequently brings up the importance of keeping the Math 55 community inclusive through Slack messages and lecture references.

Some students come to Harvard just for the opportunity to take Math 55. Some view enrolling in the class as proof of their mathematical gumption and competence. A Harvard Independent article called Math 55 the “premiere mathematical challenge for overachieving and…ridiculously mathy freshmen” and a piece in The Harvard Crimson referred to it as “a bit of a status thing as far as math majors here are concerned.” Over the years, the Harvard Department of Mathematics has taken steps to correct these assumptions.

For one thing, neither the Math 55A nor the Math 55B official course descriptions boast the dubious honor of referring to it as “probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country” (don’t trust everything you read on Wikipedia). For another, “we’re trying to emphasize that there’s no magic to Math 55,” Auroux said. “It contains the same material as some of the other classes we have. People who take it are not intrinsically better or smarter than the ones who don’t.”

MYTH #6: YOU HAVE TO TAKE MATH 55 IF YOU’RE SERIOUS ABOUT GOING INTO ACADEMIA

One reason math concentrators could feel pressured to enroll in Math 55 is because they view it as a prerequisite for a career in academia. It’s a sort of badge of honor and proof of their commitment to the field of mathematics. It is true that quite a few graduates of the course have gone on to pursue a career in mathematics. Woodruff herself believes that will be the most likely path for her, and several faculty members in our own Department of Mathematics took Math 55 during their days as Harvard freshmen.

“Several times in my research career when I understood something fundamental, I would realize that this was what Math 55 was trying to teach us,” Gross said. “It was an amazing introduction to the whole of mathematics and it was transformative for me.” In fact, Gross met Higgins Professor of Mathematics Joe Harris when they took the class together, forging a lifelong friendship. When they returned to Harvard as faculty, they took turns teaching Math 25 and Math 55.

However, Auroux is quick to point out that while many graduates of the course do end up in academia, most professional mathematicians have likely never even heard of Math 55. “I would like to think that it’s a success story if people end up doing math, because the goal of Math 55 is to show students how beautiful math can be,” he said. “If they love it enough to go to grad school and become mathematicians, that’s wonderful. And if they want to take that math knowledge and do something else with their life, that’s just as wonderful.” BY ANASTASIA YEFREMOVA source

Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA

In January, the math community had its big event of the year — the Joint Mathematics Meeting — where 3,000 mathematicians and math students gathered to talk about new advances in the field and jostle for jobs. The National Security Agency is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country and so it always has a sizeable presence at the event to recruit new candidates. This year, it was even easier for the agency as the four-day conference took place at the Baltimore Convention Center, just 22 minutes away from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Thomas Hales, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who describes himself as a “mathematician who’s upset about what’s going on,” is dismayed at the idea of the brightest minds in his field going to work for the agency. In reaction to the Snowden revelations — which started exactly a year ago —  about NSA’s mass surveillance and compromising of encryption standards, Hales gave a grant to the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation to fly a representative to Baltimore to try to convince mathematicians young and old not to go help the agency with data-mining and encryption-breaking.

“Mathematicians aiding in national defense goes all the way back to Archimedes, defending against the Roman siege and designing the catapult. Mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson destroyed his work after realizing researchers in poison gas were looking at it. Mathematicians were involved in the Manhattan Project, developing nuclear weapons,” says Hales. “Many mathematicians work for the NSA or organizations with ties to it. They’re involved in facial recognition development and big data aspects of mass surveillance. If privacy disappears from the face of the Earth, mathematicians will be some of the primary culprits.”

The EFF sent to the conference a newly-hired staff technologist, Yan Zhu, a woman whose dyed red hair surely helped her stand out. She had a tiny table — between a math educational software company and Mathcamp — while the NSA had a huge “awesome” booth with multiple people and “lots of swag,” including laundry bags with the NSA logo. She said it was tough competing. “Students are mainly just interested in getting a job after graduation not in activism. People were around the NSA booth all the time when I walked by. When I looked at the NSA sign-up sheet for people who wanted to interview on site for summer internships, it was always full,” says Zhu. I imagine those interviews may have started like this scene from Good Will Hunting but didn’t end like it:

Zhu was dismayed by the NSA’s popularity at the event and the relative lack of attention to civil liberties concerns. “The NSA is illegally mass-spying on people,” says Zhu, who admitted she snagged an NSA laundry bag for herself. “I realize that people who have done pure math probably don’t have a lot of other career options, but I encouraged those who wanted to talk to learn to code or program, and pointed out that EFF has hired a lot of mathematicians.We weren’t doing recruiting just trying to inform them that there are people who are very against the NSA.”

Hales said he got depressed “every day walking in and seeing all the mathematicians gathered at the NSA booth,” but he is far from the only mathematician who is on the outs with the NSA right now. There have been a series of editorials written by mathematicians in the New Scientist and  Slate urging fellow mathematicians to speak out about how their research is being used in unconstitutional ways by the agency. Charles Seife is a mathematician who worked for the NSA briefly two decades ago, and is now a journalism professor. He wrote in Slate, “The agency insisted, over and over, that the weapons we were building—and weapons they are, even if they’re weapons of information—would never be turned on our own people, but would only be used upon our enemies. What do we do now that we have to face the fact that the Agency broke its word? … I feel compelled to speak out to say that I’m horrified. If this is really what the agency stands for, I am sorry to have helped in whatever small way that I did.”

The American Mathematical Society, a membership organization for mathematicians, has been addressing the anxiety within the profession in its newsletters. Last year, it printed a letter from Professor Alexander “Sasha” Beilinson of the University of Chicago asking the Society to cut ties with the NSA and stop accepting their grants for mathematical research. “The NSA destroyed the security of the Internet and privacy of communications for the whole planet,” wrote Beilinson. “If any healing is possible, it would probably start with making the NSA and its ilk socially unacceptable — just as, in the days of my youth, working for the KGB was socially unacceptable for many in the Soviet Union. Any relationship with an organization whose activity is so harmful for the fabric of human society is unhealthy. For the sake of integrity, the AMS should shun all contacts with the NSA.”

Beilenson says he “got some letters of support, mostly from the young mathematicians, which was very nice” but otherwise no response from the AMS after writing the letter. The leadership of the American Mathematical Society says it is not planning to deter members from working for the spy agency nor will it stop accepting administering the NSA grant program, noting that those grants support innocuous research on algebra, number theory, discrete mathematics, probability, and statistics. “Cryptology and classified research are specifically excluded from the grants,” say AMS president David Vogan and executive director Donald McClure in a statement. “The work of [the grant program] is directly in line with the mission of the American Mathematical Society ‘to further the interests of mathematical research and scholarship.’ It is strongly supported by the leadership of the AMS and, we believe, by a majority of the members.”

But the AMS is devoting six pages of its next newsletter — due out next week — to a discussion of the Snowden revelations. Notices of the AMS editor, Allyn Jackson, says she “solicited articles from mathematicians who we thought would write thoughtful and informative pieces.” I read an advance copy in which Andrew Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, decries society’s preoccupation with terrorism but seems more troubled by the government’s failure in allowing the leakage of documents and secrets than by what those leaks revealed.  “I do not see the NSA as a rogue organization engaging in amoral activities,” he writes. He says it fills an “important role both in spying on numerous hostile actors and setting security standards” and that he will not discourage students from applying there.

The other mathematician who wrote a piece, Keith Devlin of Stanford University, worked on Defense Department projects after September 11th and takes a far more critical view of the NSA after the Snowden revelations. He writes that he felt “intense betrayal when I learned how [the intelligence community] took the work I and many others did over many years, with a genuine desire to prevent another 9/11 attack, and subverted it in ways that run totally counter to the founding principles of the United States, that cause huge harm to the US economy, and that almost certainly weaken our ability to defend ourselves.”

“I think mathematicians should refuse to work for the NSA until they both follow the US Constitution and demonstrate responsible use of mathematical tools,” says Devlin in an email to me. “The latter is something they clearly failed to do by engineering weaknesses into mathematical crypto systems, which mathematicians know to be a very dangerous thing to do. I think it is very regrettable that the current NSA leadership has broken the immense goodwill that most of us in the mathematical community once had toward them.”

Thomas Hales, who sponsored the EFF representative to try to dissuade mathematicians from going to work for the NSA, says he taught a graduate level course on mathematical cryptography this fall and that it was influenced by Snowden.  “I would not have taught the course if not for the Snowden documents,” he says. He sees the spread of cryptographic practices as a defense against the NSA. When Google, for example, released an “end-to-end” encryption tool for Gmail this week, it placed a smiley face message in its code, an inside joke that was a subtle dig at the NSA, and a celebration of the fact that it will be harder for spying types to get access to messages sent this way by Gmail users. Hales says he has had students go work for the NSA in the past, but that he will discourage them from doing so moving forward.

“I’m a mathematician, I’m not in politics,” says Hales. “As a citizen, I’m outraged by what’s happening, and find the small size of the public response to be very disturbing. It seems that the most influence I can have is within the mathematics community. I really hoped that things would change for mathematicians as a result of the Snowden documents, but it’s happening more slowly than I hoped it would.”

Kashmir Hill source

Math 55

Math 55 is a two-semester long first-year undergraduate mathematics course at Harvard University, founded by Lynn Loomis and Shlomo Sternberg. The official titles of the course are Honors Abstract Algebra (Math 55a) and Honors Real and Complex Analysis (Math 55b). Previously, the official title was Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra.

1. Description

The Harvard University Department of Mathematics describes Math 55 as “probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.”^[1] Formerly, students would begin the year in Math 25 (which was created in 1983 as a lower-level Math 55) and, after three weeks of point-set topology and special topics (for instance, in 1994, p-adic analysis was taught by Wilfried Schmid), students would take a quiz. As of 2012, students may choose to enroll in either Math 25 or Math 55 but are advised to “shop” both courses and have five weeks to decide on one.^[2] Depending on the professor teaching the class, the diagnostic exam may still be given after three weeks to help students with their decision.

In 1994, 89 students took the diagnostic exam: students scoring more than 50% on the quiz could enroll in Schmid’s Math 55 (15 students), students scoring between 10 and 50% could enroll in Benedict Gross’s Math 25: Theoretical Linear Algebra and Real Analysis (55 students), and students scoring less than 10% were advised to enroll in a course such as Math 21: Multivariable Calculus (19 students).^[3]

A take-home final ends the class.^[4]

1.1. Historical Retention Rate

In 1970, Math 55 covered almost four years worth of department coursework in two semesters, and subsequently, it drew only the most diligent of undergraduates. Of the 75 students who enrolled in the 1970 offering, by course end, only 20 remained due to the advanced nature of the material and time-constraints under which students were given to work.^[5] David Harbater, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and student of the 1974 Math 55 section at Harvard, recalled of his experience, “Seventy [students] started it, 20 finished it, and only 10 understood it.” Scott D. Kominers, familiar with the stated attrition rates for the course, decided to keep an informal log of his journey through the 2009 section: “…we had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester after the fifth Monday” (the beginning of the fifth week being the drop deadline for students to decide whether to remain in Math 55 or transfer to Math 25).^[6] In 2006, the class was 45 percent Jewish (5 students), 18 percent Asian (2 students), 100 percent male (11 students).^[7]

2. Course Content

Through 2006, the instructor had broad latitude in choosing the content of the course.^[8] Though Math 55 bore the official title “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” advanced topics in complex analysis, point set topology, group theory, and differential geometry could be covered in depth at the discretion of the instructor, in addition to single and multivariable real analysis as well as abstract linear algebra. In 1970, for example, students studied the differential geometry of Banach manifolds in the second semester of Math 55.^[5] In contrast, Math 25 was more narrowly focused, usually covering real analysis, together with the relevant theory of metric spaces and (multi)linear maps. These topics typically culminated in the proof of the generalized Stokes’ theorem, though, time permitting, other relevant topics (e.g., category theory, de Rham cohomology) might also be covered.^[9] Although both courses presented calculus from a rigorous point of view and emphasized theory and proof writing, Math 55 was generally faster paced, more abstract, and demanded a higher level of mathematical sophistication.

Loomis and Sternberg’s textbook Advanced Calculus,^[10] an abstract treatment of calculus in the setting of normed vector spaces and on differentiable manifolds, was tailored to the authors’ Math 55 syllabus and served for many years as an assigned text. Instructors for Math 55^[11] and Math 25^[9] have also selected Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis,^[12] Spivak’s Calculus on Manifolds,^[13] Axler’s Linear Algebra Done Right,^[14] and Halmos’s Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces^[15] as textbooks or references.

From 2007 onwards, the scope of the course (along with that of Math 25) was changed to more strictly cover the contents of four semester-long courses in two semesters: Math 25a (linear algebra) and Math 122 (group theory) in Math 55a; and Math 25b (calculus, real analysis) and Math 113 (complex analysis) in Math 55b. The name was also changed to “Honors Abstract Algebra” (Math 55a) and “Honors Real and Complex Analysis” (Math 55b). Fluency in formulating and writing mathematical proofs is listed as a course prerequisite for Math 55, while such experience is considered “helpful” but not required for Math 25.^[1] In practice, students of Math 55 have usually had extensive experience in proof writing and abstract mathematics, with many being the past winners of prestigious national or international mathematical olympiads (such as USAMO or IMO). Typical students of Math 25 have also had previous exposure to proof writing through mathematical contests or university-level mathematics courses.

3. Notable Alumni

Problem sets are expected to take from 24 to 60 hours per week to complete,^[1] although some claim that it is closer to 20 hours.^[16] Many of those who are able to handle the workload and complete the course become professors in quantitative fields;^[5] alumni of Math 55 include Harvard mathematics professors Benedict Gross and Joe Harris as well as Harvard physics professor Lisa Randall,^[17] Harvard economics professors Andrei Shleifer and Eric Maskin, and Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong.^[18] Contrary to a 2006 article in The Harvard Crimson which alleged that only 17 women completed the class between 1990 and 2006,^[6] 39 women completed 55a and 26 completed 55b.^[19] Math 25 has more women: in 1994–95, Math 55 had no women, while Math 25 had about 10 women in the 55-person course.^[3]

Past students of Math 55 also include Bill Gates,^[20] Richard Stallman,^[5] and Simpsons executive producer Al Jean.^[21]

Demographics of students taking this course over the years have been used to study the causes of gender and race differences in the fields of mathematics and technology.^[22]

4. Historical Instances of Math 55

5. Fictional References

Math 55, along with several other high-level mathematics courses, was brought up by Dr. Spencer Reid in a 2015 episode of Criminal Minds entitled “Mr. Scratch.” However, graduates of the class are not forced to join the NSA, as the show states.^[36]

The US National Security Agency (NSA) is the cryptologic intelligence and security agency of the United States Government, based in Fort Meade (Maryland, USA). The NSA is part of the American Department of Defence (DoD) and is responsible for the collection (interception) and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence (signals intelligence and cryptanalysis).The NSA is also responsible for the protection of US government communication and information systems against evesdropping by similar agencies from other nations. For this, the NSA has (co) developed a range of cryptographic algorithms and encryption devices. Most of these products were initially developed for use by the US military and the US government, but some have been made available to restricted commercial users as well – often as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products via a range of suppliers – and also to the governments of allied and friendly nations.

Below is a non-exhaustive overview of the various types of encryption products developed and/or endorsed by the NSA. As most of the NSA‘s work is classified, there may be omissions or errors. The information below is based on publicly available information about NSA products, algorithms and protocols. We also show the evolution of the NSA encryption products, along with examples of devices that contain NSA algorithms. Finally, we show cases in which the NSA has intervened in order to create a so-called backdoor. source

• NSA-backdoored equipment info found OFF this website
• U.S. Government Catalogue of Cellphone Surveillance Devices
• Backdoors on Wikipedia
• National Security Agency
• Central Intelligence Agency
• NSA EXTRACTED INFO
• CRYPTO MUSEUM
• Edward Snowden
• Stingray
• Pegasus Spyware
• X-Keyscore