Collaborate Disseminate
Bart Gellman’s long-awaited (at least by me) book on Edward Snowden, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, will finally be published in a couple of weeks. There is an adapted excerpt in the Atlantic. It’s an interesting read,… Continue reading Bart Gellman on Snowden
Bart Gellman’s long-awaited (at least by me) book on Edward Snowden, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, will finally be published in a couple of weeks. There is an adapted excerpt in the Atlantic. It’s an interesting read, mostly about the government surveillance of him and other journalists. He speaks about an NSA program called FIRSTFRUITS that… Continue reading Bart Gellman on Snowden
Ed Snowden has published a book of his memoirs: Permanent Record. I have not read it yet, but I want to point you all towards two pieces of writing about the book. The first is an excellent review of the book and Snowden in general by SF writer and essayist Jonathan Lethem, who helped make a short film about Snowden… Continue reading Edward Snowden’s Memoirs
Recently I’ve heard Edward Snowden talk about his working at the NSA in Hawaii as being "under a pineapple field." CBS News recently ran a segment on that NSA listening post on Oahu. Not a whole lot of actual information. "We’re in office building, in a pineapple field, on Oahu…." And part of it is underground — we see a… Continue reading NSA Hawaii
The Daily Beast is reporting that First Look Media — home of The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald — is shutting down access to the Snowden archives. The Intercept was the home for Greenwald’s subset of Snowden’s NSA documents since 2014, after he parted… Continue reading First Look Media Shutting Down Access to Snowden NSA Archives
The Daily Beast is reporting that First Look Media — home of The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald — is shutting down access to the Snowden archives. The Intercept was the home for Greenwald’s subset of Snowden’s NSA documents since 2014, after he parted ways with the Guardian the year before. I don’t know the details of how the archive was… Continue reading First Look Media Shutting Down Access to Snowden NSA Archives
A 2006 document from the Snowden archives outlines successful NSA operations against "a number of "high potential" virtual private networks, including those of media organization Al Jazeera, the Iraqi military and internet service organizations, and a number of airline reservation systems." It’s hard to believe that many of the Snowden documents are now more than a decade old…. Continue reading NSA Attacks Against Virtual Private Networks
The Intercept has a long story about the NSA’s domestic interception points. Includes some new Snowden documents…. Continue reading The NSA’s Domestic Surveillance Centers
The Intercept has a long article on Japan’s equivalent of the NSA: the Directorate for Signals Intelligence. Interesting, but nothing really surprising. The directorate has a history that dates back to the 1950s; its role is to eavesdrop on communications. But its operations remain so highly classified that the Japanese government has disclosed little about its work even the… Continue reading Japan’s Directorate for Signals Intelligence
The ISO has rejected two symmetric encryption algorithms: SIMON and SPECK. These algorithms were both designed by the NSA and made public in 2013. They are optimized for small and low-cost processors like IoT devices. The risk of using NSA-designed ciphers, of course, is that they include NSA-designed backdoors. Personally, I doubt that they’re backdoored. And I always like seeing… Continue reading Two NSA Algorithms Rejected by the ISO