NSA Building US's Biggest Spy Center 279
New submitter AstroPhilosopher writes "The National Security Agency is building a complex to monitor and store 'all' communications in a million-square-foot facility. One of its secret roles? Code-breaking your private, personal information. Everybody's a target. Quoting Wired: 'Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. "We questioned it one time," says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. "Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys." According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, "You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking." It was a candid admission.'"
All your secrets belong to us... (Score:4, Funny)
Panopticon this week; Maybe we'll get Skynet by accident?
That might be best for everyone in the long run...
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
First post, never got that before.
You must be using the new FTL neutrino submission system.
Only 1 million square feet? (Score:2)
For comparison, The Pentagon is 6.5 million square feet. Maybe I'm just jaded, but is the CIA more efficient, or is this building grossly undersized for the task it's designed for? Looking ahead 50 years, it would seem that the CIA's importance is going to dwarf the military's as we continue the long slow slide in to a permanent cold war with the rest of the world.
I am glad, however, that they're moving some of these larger installations off the east coast. Too many major federal buildings are locat
Re:All your secrets belong to us... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Reminds me of this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_investigation [wikipedia.org]
"Shortly after its release, PGP encryption found its way outside the United States, and in February 1993 Zimmermann became the formal target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for "munitions export without a license". Cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were then considered munitions within the definition of the US export regulations; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits so it qual
USA...we miss you! (Score:5, Insightful)
In american America, people monitor the government.
In soviet America, the government monitors the people.
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In american America, people monitor the government.
In soviet America, the government monitors the people.
Just an observation and being an election year, is that when this type of stuff went on before it was always Bush's "plan", yet not one word against Obama to do anything about it. Not surprising, but interesting.
Re:USA...we miss you! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, here's a word from me at least. Obama can eat a dick. I'm getting so fed up with this gradual transition to full autonomous surveillance. There will be people out in the streets about this when things start getting bad. Soon enough, the schism between reality and the fairy tales they told us about freedom in public school will be too wide even for the American Idol crowd to believe. An interesting time to live. It's just too bad we can't be investing these man-years and resources on attaining sustainability before the Earth becomes a giant radioactive ball of toxic shit inhabited by cannibalistic asshats.
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Ah - I love the smell of optimism in the morning!
(Or afternoon, as it happens, but it doesn't quite have the same impact...)
Re:USA...we miss you! (Score:5, Insightful)
There will be people out in the streets about this when things start getting bad.
Yes, but the drones will take care of them.
Re:USA...we miss you! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's ok. As long we get to keep our birth control and our gay rights, democracy is safe, right?
a thought (Score:2)
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could you create an encryption method that generates a new encryption key for every new message.
Yes, modern cryptosystems do that. It's called an Initialisation Vector [wikipedia.org].
Re:a thought (Score:5, Interesting)
That's basically what happens today with most protocols like SSL/TLS. For each new connection, the client and server negotiate a new key via public key crypto like RSA. Actually, based on some comments in the article, like needing more "transactions" to help break the encryption, makes me believe the NSA is actually working to break RSA then AES.
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second, i don't know so just a thought. could you create an encryption method that generates a new encryption key for every new message.
Sure, but you have to be more specific. A one time pad might meet your definition, as might standard hybrid public/private encryption (which is widely used).
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PGP does this, as every message/file sent has its own symmetric encryption key, with only the key material encrypted with RSA/DSS.
However, if the public/private key gets broken, all bets are off.
Re:a thought (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, AES isn't public key, it's just usually used in conjunction with public key. The public key portion of the exchange is used to communicate an AES key (the "shared secret") which is then used for communication moving forward. This is because public key encryption is "expensive" by comparison to block cyphers like AES. Secondly, you don't communicate a passphrase with public key. The passphrase that you're used to using is so that keys can be securely stored and someone that gains access to your key file doesn't get access to your key.
You could potentially communicate a new AES key with every message, which would greatly reduce the chances of a bruce force attack being successfully since most rely on the ability to analyze a large number of blocks that use the same key. That said, if you crack one key you do gain access to every key that followed in the chain.
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You're assuming that you're chaining the new AES key into the preceding message. Better to increase the frequency of the PKI handshake and periodically exchange new, clean AES keys.
As for the parent's question about a new key for each message - you could exchange one-time keypads securely and then use a new keypad with each message. Bulky, but guaranteed to be as secure as your exchange and storage mechanisms.
Re:a thought (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway AES is public key encryption.
AES is a symmetric-key algorithm.
Brute force.... (Score:2)
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...seems appropriate as a term for how the US government takes its stance towards the rest of the world. Even although broke. How long, yet ?
We're not broke, just bleeding.
All the hand-wringing is because certain politicians are upset that we're not spending all of it on the haves.
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All the hand-wringing is because certain politicians are upset that we're not stealing all of it from the haves.
FTFY
How many bits? (Score:2)
How many bits should we use for encryption now?
Re:How many bits? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many bits should we use for encryption now?
More.
Re:How many bits? (Score:5, Insightful)
and even better: send false positives to waste their time.
perhaps the crypto protocols need enhancing to allow fake bullshit messages that can't easily be told from real crypto stuff.
ie, DOS them.
I know, they have lots of power but it IS a war. war on our privacy and its so blatant now, they don't even try to hide their break-in attempts to us, anymore.
the ONLY reason encryption was allowed in the first place was for banking and online 'business'. if there was not this use-case, we would be disallowed encryption entirely.
Re:How many bits? (Score:5, Informative)
How many bits should we use for encryption now?
If you assume peak computing power is doubling ever n years, they you need one more bit every n years to keep ahead.
And of course, whatever you use now will be breakable in the future, if anyone cares to save your messages until computing catches up.
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At most you need one (symmetric) key bit for every bit in every message you plan to send using that key. That effectively turns it into a one-time pad, which cannot be broken through brute force—there is a valid key for every possible cleartext of that length. (Be sure to pad the message!)
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At most you need one (symmetric) key bit for every bit in every message you plan to send using that key. That effectively turns it into a one-time pad, which cannot be broken through brute force—there is a valid key for every possible cleartext of that length. (Be sure to pad the message!)
Which cannot be GUARANTEED to be broken within a certain time through brute force, you mean.
No, I meant exactly what I said. If you try to brute-force a one-time pad you end up with all possible cleartexts, and no idea which one of them was the actual message. Basically, a brute-force search is pointless because you have no idea what you're searching for—no way to recognize the correct key.
The simplest way to implement a one-time pad digitally is a basic XOR operation. You have a private key K and a message M, both X bits long, and the ciphertext C = XOR(M, K). Decrypting is symmetric, M = X
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And of course, whatever you use now will be breakable in the future, if anyone cares to save your messages until computing catches up.
Which is the whole point of this new facility according to TFA.
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As many as you can. I get the feeling from TFA that they can at least crack AES-128.
Re:How many bits? (Score:4, Informative)
There's no way they can crack AES-128 unless there's a hole in the algorithm or they have quantum computing.
Current best practices are:
1) AES-128 to AES-256 for symmetric keys (although AES-256 has its own problems which can sometimes collapse it to AES-128 - these are ameloriated by increasing the key rounds)
2) 2048-bit to 4092-bit for RSA keys (2048 may be breakable by 2030 with conventional computing, 4092-bit will take much longer).
If quantum computing becomes feasible then AES keys will effectively halve in complexity (i.e. AES-128 goes to 64-bit, AES-256 goes to AES-128) and RSA and DSA keys will be useless.
Re:How many bits? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget there are commercially available quantum computers already, it's safe to say the NSA is already somewhat ahead of that, and they're on the bleeding edge of cryptography research. I've already phased out AES-128 and RSA-2048 from my systems just because I can.
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Yeah but I'm still using the Gmail address I signed up to in the early days, so the NSA's code-breaking capability is the least of my problems right now.
Re:How many bits? (Score:5, Funny)
Use no encryption and have a sig like mine. Eventually someone gets bored of reading every mundane post and email and puts you on an "ignore" filter.
Re:How many bits? (Score:4, Insightful)
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If it wasn't about how many bits you used, there would be no use for the giant cluster they are building.
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While those are legitimate attack vectors, they do not seem to be what this facility will perform. If it's purely a passive listener of all internet & phone communication, looking for "patterns" and "threats" from the entire haystack, then using stronger encryption would seem to be sensible.
Re:How many bits? (Score:5, Funny)
How many bits should we use for encryption now?
All of them.
Re:How many bits? (Score:4, Funny)
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I'd not worry about bits as much as the algorithm and the block size.
Ideally, one would cascade three solid encryption algorithms, be it AES, Serpent, and Twofish. Not so one can say they have a 768 bit key [1], but if one of the algorithms has a weakness that reduces its strength, the data is still protected. This is why I wish programs which signed documents would not just use RSA or DSS, but that, as well as a ECC key, as well as using a public/private key system that isn't vulnerable to Shor's Algorit
Not sure about that (Score:2)
The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns
IIRC, that's not true, for a good encryptation system.
For a *perfect* encryptation system, the messages would be indistinguishable from random patterns of bits.
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(it's "encryption", not "encryptation")
Think of the timing between messages, and the length of messages; those can tell a lot about the communication even without decoding anything. I'm not sure any popular cryptosystem uses junk payloads to thwart that kind of analysis, because of the extra computational and bandwidth burden.
It could also be the case that the NSA does have some weaknesses on popular algorithms, and that the "telltale patterns" fact does hold for bit analysis when the scales get really, re
NSA history and modern crypto's impact upon it (Score:3, Informative)
The whole we-can't-break-codes-anymore story is told in
http://www.amazon.com/Coded-Messages-Hoodwink-Congress-People/dp/0875868142/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331918025&sr=8-1
Coded Messages: How the CIA and the NSA Hoodwink Congress and the People
by Nelson McAvoy, former NSA person, who claims to have been at the early meetings from when the NSA was formed.
A secret role (Score:4, Funny)
One of its secret roles? Code-breaking your private, personal information. Everybody's a target.
Gee, if that is a secret, I promise not to tell anyone. Anyone joining me on that? Just hope that no one will read this article who doesn't already know, that would kind of spoil it.
Bluffdale?!??!?!?! (Score:2)
How sure are you that they are actually breaking into anything there?
Notice how the "crypto guys" are the "old guys"??? (Score:2)
I wonder if that sentence says more than they intended it to. Could it be that the skills of the NSA people are eroding just like the skills at CIA did? I knew that CIA was in trouble - tradecraft-wise - when a COS let an asset into their HQ and he blew half the station to kingdom come. No one would have done that in the old days. Maybe NSA is having the same problem.
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Because codebreaking has been obsolete since 1978, as the NSA will find out the hard way.
Hiding secrets from the future with math. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Best of all, your secret: nothing extant could extract it.
By 2025 a children's Speak-and-Spell could crack it.
You can't hide secrets from the future [youtube.com] with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh,
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past."
- MC Frontalot, Secrets from the Future [frontalot.com]
Secrets cost money. How long do you need to keep them? Today we believe - with good reason - that most cryptographic protocols are secure. Bue even if that's true (and there's no guarantee), why not hoover up the data while it's available and wait for your opponent to slip up, or your mathematicians (or computer engineers) to make a breakthrough, whichever comes first?
Re:Notice how the "crypto guys" are the "old guys" (Score:5, Interesting)
WHO would work for them, I ask you?
decades ago, the people didn't view their government quite the way they do today. some patriotism did exist and people wanted to help their government. *generally*.
today we all see how invasive and evil our government has become. totally 100% lost its way. almost anything it does, it does badly and hurts people, long and short run.
if I was offered a job for the so-called white hats (which I now see as black hats) I'd turn it down. I would not be able to live with myself knowing I'm helping an evil force become more evil and more forceful.
I do realize a lot of people can easily shelve their ethics and see money-making jobs as separate. but I wonder how many people still believe that if they join the government or gov-sponsored jobs, that they are really HELPING things?
too many black marks on the government. working for them could be as bad as working for the old mafias. the people that they do get, I would not trust. they are whores.
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WHO would work for them, I ask you?
Someone who likes lots of money.
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Mostly mathematicians. Where I went to college, after finishing undergrad you either went on to grad school, or you went and worked for the NSA. One of my friends who went to grad school to study abstract mathematics (as well as some encryption) said you could always tell the NSA people from the academics because they had no name tags on.
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when a COS let an asset into their HQ and he blew half the station to kingdom come.
In case anyone else didn't get the reference. [wikipedia.org]
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same thing, different tech
you collect data, look for patterns and break the code
if someone is spying to blow up a building then they will do it for months and report back. the code they use for the target will probably never change and you just have to look for similar patterns
Re:Notice how the "crypto guys" are the "old guys" (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if that sentence says more than they intended it to. Could it be that the skills of the NSA people are eroding just like the skills at CIA did? I knew that CIA was in trouble - tradecraft-wise - when a COS let an asset into their HQ and he blew half the station to kingdom come. No one would have done that in the old days. Maybe NSA is having the same problem.
Crypto-guys are the "old guys" from a tradecraft point of view. AFAIK, in the NSA, many of the old-guys are involved with developing clever new internal ciphers (so-called classified "suite-A" algorithms). Since many of the "bad-guys" aren't nation states with heavy duty crypto development capablities, they often are using off the shelf stuff like AES/ECDSA (members of the "suite-B" algorithms). Until someone discovers a huge gaping hole backdoor, breaking these "suite-B" algorithms benefit from mostly from brute force (even if you know a few clever tricks that others do not which chops things down an order of magnitude or two). This is pretty much an admission that there is no huge gaping back door in these suite-B algorithms, not that any crypto-tradecraft capability was in trouble.
I find it oddly somewhat comforting that the we have "old-guys" that realize that sometimes the best thing to do is to throw this problem at a box of computers and spend their time on other pursuits. Who knows, this facility might be dedicated to cranking on some clever cracking algorithm that is unknown to the public, all we know it it takes lots of OPS. Isn't surpising to me that cracking these algorithms are hard. As a historical data point, DES was apparently hard for even the NSA to crack so they deliberatly limited the DES key size from the original 64-bits, to the final 56-bit (although the NSA apparently lobbied for a mere 48-bits).
What am I missing? (Score:5, Insightful)
My understanding is that the best known general cryptanalytic attacks on AES are only marginally better than brute-force. Even AES-128 is essentially unbreakable under any known attacks then, since brute forcing a single AES-128 password is so far beyond feasibility, it's absurd. My understanding is that the best known attacks on AES are side-channel attacks, which require only modest computational resources, but need access to the encrypting machine, and related-key attacks that are only effective for certain small classes of keys.
So we can then assume that NSA has a general attack on AES that makes it many, many orders of magnitude easier to break than the best known published attacks? Or is this more likely to be disinformation spread to make people *think* that AES is broken by NSA? My understanding was that NSA is generally somewhat but not extremely far beyond the academic state of the art these days.
And there have been several reports of FBI and other federal agencies being unable to recover AES-256 encrypted hard drives. So if NSA has the capability to do so even for small numbers of keys using existing computing power, they obviously keep it incredibly restricted and under wraps.
So... this is BS by somebody, right? Either congress is getting BSed into funding stuff that won't do what they're being told it will do, or the public is getting BSed into believing that using encryption is pointless because NSA can real-time decrypt anything, so just don't bother, mmm'kay?
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My understanding is that the best known general cryptanalytic attacks on AES are only marginally better than brute-force
... known outside the NSA. If they have something that would break AES easily, they probably keep it safely classified.
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Even if they do have such a tool, it is still effectively useless. By analogy, during World War 2 the allies had broken the German ENIGMA codes, yet had to work very hard to pretend that the code was still secure, to prevent the Germans copping wise to the fact that their codes were useless and devising something better. The same applies here: if the NSA have broken AES, then they cannot use this hack for anything save national security, and must also work hard to prevent the merest suspicion of the hack ge
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The best thing we could do would be to club together to fund a bounty for information on how to break AES without using brute-force computing
That's basically what academia has been trying to do before Rijndael even became AES. There are more than a dozen papers on AES attacks, the fastest of which is faster than brute-force by a factor of 4.
It basically comes down to whether academia has more brains or NSA has more brains.
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My understanding is that the best publicly known general cryptanalytic attacks on AES are only marginally better than brute-force
That is what you are missing.
So we can then assume that NSA has a general attack on AES that makes it many, many orders of magnitude easier to break than the best known published attacks? Or is this more likely to be disinformation spread to make people *think* that AES is broken by NSA? My understanding was that NSA is generally somewhat but not extremely far beyond the academic state of the art these days.
How would we even know? The NSA will always have an advantage over public research: they have access to all the public research, as well as classified expertise.
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How would we even know? The NSA will always have an advantage over public research: they have access to all the public research, as well as classified expertise.
Maybe. If you can't publish your findings, others can't error check them. Great for getting funding, not so great for actual work. In the final analysis, the KGB made up as much information as they gathered. Even when they did uncover the truth, they wouldn't bump it upstairs, instead telling their leaders what the leaders wanted to hear.
During Gulf War I, General Swartzkopf (sp?) complained that the intelligence he was getting was useless, because it was facts followed by the analysis "X might happen
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"During Gulf War I, General Swartzkopf (sp?) complained that the intelligence he was getting was useless, because it was facts followed by the analysis "X might happen, or X might not happen""
Sounds like the intelligence sector was working as designed, they are supposed to give facts to policy makers and not try to make policy. Policy includes military strategy.
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Either congress is getting BSed into funding stuff that won't do what they're being told it will do
"star wars". lasers and shooting bad guys down. hey, idiots in 'elected office' can understand simple things like that. here, take my money!
same here: big supercomputers that cost money, staff to run it and fat budgets to keep it going. wet dreams, no? who would NOT want that? and its an easy sell. the world is filled with terr-a-wrists and we need lots and lots of big blinkinlight computers to keep us
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"keep us save".
sigh. OT: I really do know the difference between 'safe' and 'save'. so why did I type 'save' on that post? I don't know,;but I'm not alone in this problem and I see lots of people type one thing when they were thinking another. its a real problem. brain rate != finger rate? lost sync in the clock and data streams? something like that.
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Don't worry about it. "serve" -> "server" is even more common :-).
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encrypted message for the NSA (Score:5, Funny)
uckfay offway ationalnay ecuritysay agencyway
Stranger than fiction? (Score:2)
Does Anyone Have Lat/Long Numbers? (Score:2)
Just wondering if anyone has the exact latitude & longitude coordinates for this facility.
Gonna need 'em for programming all the home-brew autonomous high-explosive and incendiary-carrying kamikaze drones needed to take this facility out.
Strat
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I know that you're probably trying to be funny, but in this case discretion may be a better idea.
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Strange, I just got a new email from Amazon Web Services and how they've got some new service offerings coming on line soon for the Virginia area...Hmm...
One Time DVD or SD anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One Time DVD or SD anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_stations [wikipedia.org]
Using an image has problems in that they are not random, so are subject to analysis. If you stripped the headers, and used an "image" of captured static, it might be good enough, but almost anything organic like a photo of a tree, will have patterns in it.
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This. Your OTP can't have any pattern to it. You'd have to remove the entropy first, maybe by applying tight lossless compression and then XOR'ing a set of images together.
Who's going to work there? (Score:3)
The NSA is located in Maryland. At the end of the shift, traffic is bad enough between there and Columbia to block up the Interstates. That includes not just the cryptoanalysts, but the vast support staff: IT, cafeteria workers, security, human resources, etc etc etc.
Who's in Bluffdale? Where is all that support staff going to come from, and what are they going to do with the rest of their lives? Although the NSA is on a military base, a lot of the work is done by civilians, and you can't just order them into the middle of nowhere the way you can with soldiers.
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who's going to be in bluffdale? almost nobody. Security, facility maintenance, remote hands and thats about it. The rest of the folks will be in your way on Rt 32 on their way home from work. Srsly, they are building office buildings where the Ft. Meade golf course used to be. Who do you think is going to be working in those?
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They do not want new Americans, "dual" citizens with dreams of distant issues, people with no real pasts.
The other issue is power supply, cooling, room to expand and optical loops in the heart of the USA.
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That's a lot of space for just computers. But then, it's a big thing they're trying to do.
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Yea my impression was, "We need a lot of space for computers to brute force break your encryption, and a million square feet gives us room to expand."
Let the paranoid run loose! (Score:3)
Code-breaking your private, personal information. Everybody's a target.
To target everyone would be a total waste of resources. I would spend as much money figuring out who to target as I would decrypting anything send by that target.
It's like saying, "We're going to mine the whole state of California to find the gold there."
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To target everyone would be a total waste of resources
Not to mention unconstitutional and illegal [wikipedia.org] Oh wait, Obama's continuing the Bush policy? Never mind. Totally different then.
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Code-breaking your private, personal information. Everybody's a target.
To target everyone would be a total waste of resources. I would spend as much money figuring out who to target as I would decrypting anything send by that target. It's like saying, "We're going to mine the whole state of California to find the gold there."
But sampling a few people makes sense for the same reason. With a big enough infrastructure, 1,000,000 people is a reasonable sample, even if only 1,000 get full on 100% communications scrutiny. They have to have a baseline, what does a "normal" person look like, which they can then compare to known bad actors. Then they figure out the minimum amount of data they need to filters the bad guys from the norms. If that minimum amount times the population of the US is less than their resources, they could
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My point stands: The algorithms for deciding what to decrypt are as important as the
A tribute (Score:3)
Wow imagine that. (Score:2)
It's unlikely the real target is breaking codes (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually doubt that they are most interested in brute-force codebreaking through the front door except in a few rare situations.
Most of the time, it's massive traffic analysis: searching and analyzing a titanic, dynamically changing graph, nodes are IP addresses and phone numbers of the planet.
Once they find a 'target of interest', then they would usually ask the FBI or other authority just to put a tap on a specific line, or if necessary break in and install a trojan on the target's phone or computer, avoiding front-door code-bashing, which isn't generally feasible in large scale any more.
There are companies (e.g. http://www.conveycomputer.com/ [conveycomputer.com]) which make highly parallel co-processors from FPGA's which give user-definable vectorized instructions on enormous memory bandwidth.
This is just the thing for the NSA.
Where did I read this? (Score:2)
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Ahhh. This was from version 1.0 and no longer applies.
Intelligence pays for itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Intelligence pays for itself (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Intelligence pays for itself (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Intelligence pays for itself (Score:5, Interesting)
The cited section basically talks about widespread French spying on American companies, and then claiming it was all a big conspiracy to make the French look bad once it came to light.
The fact remains that even if the U.S. government were willing to steal information and share it with American companies -- and this is pretty unlikely given that the U.S. doesn't have the sort of cozy, formal overlap of public and private sectors that France, China, or even Great Britain have -- most other countries haven't had anything we want. You have to go back to 1793 Pawtucket to find a good example of the U.S. gaining an edge through industrial espionage.
Don't get me wrong, the U.S. government has shown it's willing to co-op private technology for its own ends. (For example, when it co-opted the patent for Phillip French's Crater Coupler and then used that state secrets privilege to get the dispute tossed out of court.) They just haven't been shown to help private U.S. firms with any of it, or to do it specifically to improve the competitive advantage of a U.S. company.
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and this is pretty unlikely given that the U.S. doesn't have the sort of cozy, formal overlap of public and private sectors that France, China, or even Great Britain have
That would be why there's never been any suggestion at all of US commercial interests influencing foreign policy, then.
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In this case, then, there's a market for the NSA to send trade secrets from company X in country Y to a different company in country W, too. Maybe that's how they're funding the whole operation...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_(signals_intelligence)#Controversy [wikipedia.org]
A reference, if not a citation.
I'm guessing this is what he was referring to.
Re: (Score:2)
You've got to make your spy centre impressive from the air (see also the Pentagon & Langley). How are low-budget TV spy shows supposed to insert a generic speeded-up aerial pan of that?
Not to mention that it's not going to be as cool-looking as the doughnut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Headquarters [wikipedia.org]
1984? (Score:2)
Yep.