The White House Finally Got Color Printers (gizmodo.com) 122
An anonymous reader quotes an article on Gizmodo: Everyone loves an upgrade -- even POTUS. The New York Times reports that the White House has recently undergone a technological transformation, though it may not sound too impressive to many of us: Its employees are now equipped with modern laptops, iPhones and even... color printers. [...] Employees have new computers with "fast, solid-state drives and modern processors," according to the newspaper, along with color printers. There's a new phone system and many staff now tote iPhones. The Wi-Fi has been upgraded, so it's now fast enough to live-stream video. And security has been increased too, with a new software system for managing visitors and a chip-based card system which is used by staffers instead of passwords.
Surely (Score:2)
A chip based card system (Score:1)
Re:A chip based card system (Score:4, Informative)
It's chip and PIN [nytimes.com] -- not as bad as the summary made it sound.
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Probably a PIV card for two-factor authentication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_201 [wikipedia.org]
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Probably a PIV card for two-factor authentication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_201 [wikipedia.org]
Probably given that is pretty much the government standard for most machines, at least on the non-classified network.
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Where was the hardware made? (Score:1)
The new equipment better be made in the US and carefully examined by the folks like NSA afterwards. White House remains home to the most powerful man on the planet — both militarily and commercially.
It is the highest-value target for a very large number of people and even a printer can be used creatively by spies.
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I don't think anything done at the White House can be considered "non-secure".
For example, when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in 1945, Soviet doctors were analyzing the foreign leaders excrement daily. This was, how Stalin learned, Roosevelt does not have much longer to live... A similar analysis was done on Chairman Mao [bbc.com].
Bet you would've ridiculed an attempt to classify shit until you've read this...
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I can't wait until Slashdot gets Unicode. Imagine the possibilities.
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All you had to do is look at Roosevelt and figure out he was pretty ill. If doctors could establish your health status from excrement, you would be mailing a bag of shit to your insurance company instead of the company giving you shit all of the time because you are trying to spend their precious money.
Classifying excrement (Score:1)
Are you really trying to dispute the utility of stool [webmd.com] and urine [brighthub.com] analysis to medical diagnosis?
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They can - here in Oz there's a free test kit mailed out to everyone over 50 (55?) every couple of years.
You put this piece of paper in the toilet, do your business on it, swirl a swab through the turds, put the swab in a tube, seal the tube, mail it back, post paid. Oh, and flush the paper - it's designed to break down in the system.
It's a screening test for bowel cancer, and it's been effective enough for the govt to continue funding it.
All that poo in the post, no wonder Aus Post workers look grumpy.
Keep believing that. . . (Score:2)
. . . . as there are plenty of examples of classified, air-gapped systems leaking data to unclassified systems. To the point that there are standard procedures for a "spill" of classified data [nsa.gov] onto networks at lower levels of classification.
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. . . . as there are plenty of examples of classified, air-gapped systems leaking data to unclassified systems.
Like when Hillary Clinton told her staff to remove the classified label from a document and send it to her by an insecure system?
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/st... [cbsnews.com]
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/08/... [cnn.com]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... [dailymail.co.uk]
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Odd metonym, using the name of the security barrier to name the technique to breach that barrier.
Back in my day, we called the breaching technique "sneaker-net". Of course, we only did it when it was authorized. :)
Re:Where was the hardware made? (Score:5, Informative)
Queue the "Opps I lost the emails" v2.0.
I doubt that will ever happen again after the Bush Administration lost 22 million emails.
The Bush White House email controversy surfaced in 2007 during the controversy involving the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Congressional requests for administration documents while investigating the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal White House emails were available, because they were sent via a non-government domain hosted on an email server not controlled by the federal government. Conducting governmental business in this manner is a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the Hatch Act. Over 5 million emails may have been lost. Greg Palast claims to have come up with 500 of the Karl Rove emails, leading to damaging allegations. In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails may have been lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy [wikipedia.org]
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You Hillary shills know no bounds.
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You Hillary shills know no bounds.
Where in my comment did I mentioned Hillary?
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I think the AC was referring to the context in which you posted. Paraphrasing:
Them: "Hillary did it."
You: "So did Bush!"
It's quite reasonable that your comment could be construed as a defense of Hillary. That was my assumption.
I happen to think Bush is almost a model of how not to run a government. That Hillary did the same thing as him does not reflect well on her at all.
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That Hillary did the same thing as him does not reflect well on her at all.
When Hillary set up her server, it was legit under existing policy at that time. But her purpose was the same as the Bush administration: to hide emails from outside parties.
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It gets into the weeds a bit, but it was legit so long as she didn't send anything classified. Of course, since she was largely responsible for classifying documents...
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I can easily see an administrator leaking the documents for profit, political gain of their party, or fodder for smear tactics.
From a different article I've read a while back, the email server was set up to avoid that exact scenario.
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I doubt that will ever happen again after the Bush Administration lost 22 million emails.
Good thing he's not running for president. That sort of thing should disqualify a person... assuming Bush sent the emails in question and was the one who had the server set up, anyway.
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If Bush sent 22 million emails, he didn't have time to be President.
He was a big fan of forwarding emails to everybody on his contacts list.
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You Obamabots and Hill people are very deceptive.
Meanwhile, you're conveniently overlooking former Bush appointees Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice for also having retroactively classified emails on personal devices. Why?
The emails were discovered during a State Department review of the email practices of the past five secretaries of state. It found that Powell received two emails that were classified and that the "immediate staff" working for Rice received 10 emails that were classified.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/04/politics/hillary-clinton-email-classified-colin-powell-condoleezza-rice/ [cnn.com]
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As opposed to instructing staffers to remove classification markings and resend the content.
What was the content? Talking points for a Sunday morning TV show. Much of the information was already in the public domain.
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Also HUMINT, which is marked TOP SECRET//HCS
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
You know, the kind of stuff that leads to people dying in many countries?
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You know, the kind of stuff that leads to people dying in many countries?
How many people are CONFIRMED DEAD from [Hillary | Marco | Ted]'s leaks to the news media?
*crickets*
That's what I thought.
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Because the government will totally talk about things marked as TOP SECRET in the news media. If the leaks led to deaths, it would be hushed up, not screamed about in the news media.
You know, kind of like in mission impossible, they will disavow you if you are captured. The US government doesn't talk about these things as it could lead to the outing of other projects and methods.
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Because the government will totally talk about things marked as TOP SECRET in the news media.
Not the government, elected officials. Remember when Vice President Dick Cheney revealed Valarie Plame's identity as a CIA agent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair#Dick_Cheney [wikipedia.org]
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Creatively? effortlessly. HP laser printers can run code to spy on things, and if someone was able to slap a tiny extra board in there each printer could simply capture the print job and send it elsewhere disguised as harmless packets or sit and wait for the printer to be returned on it's lease to give up it's goodies, or transmit out of band, etc....
Copy machines were compromised like this a LOT. Just read the NSA archives on what they have found in our embassy's around the world as well as american of
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These are probably specially ordered. The normal ones print little yellow dots that let law enforcement identify the source of print outs. You can bet the Whitehouse ones have that disabled.
Fully vetted and spyware/backdoors removed by the NSA no doubt.
Re: Where was the hardware made? (Score:2)
hrm - no cracked firmware yet? My printer is so stupid the very last thing I expect it has is signed firmware.
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The printer on a secure network has no connection to the public internet. There is no routing between the secure and insecure networks. So, the printer can't use the network it's plugged to by wire. It would need to leak data via a cellular modem. Easy to do. Not every secure location jams the good old cell networks.
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I imagine the White House is swept regularly, and that any source not on the "approved" list would be quickly identified.
If it's your job to sweep the offices for bugs, you're going to pay special attention to anything electrical. That was my job, once and briefly in the 80s - pay special attention to the phone and fax, we were told. Update that to this century, and pay special attention to all the technology.
It's also possible that the White House has its own cell/s and anything trying to "call out" would
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Well they're using iphones, so there goes that theory.
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Maybe, Apple did a special run in an American facility just for the White House (and, maybe, some other agencies)? Or, maybe, NSA did it for them — as they've once made a special Blackberry [cnn.com]...
That's no help. (Score:1)
The new equipment better be made in the US and carefully examined by the folks like NSA afterwards.
That's no help.
Modern processors generally have hardware-level "remote administration" back doors built in (and non-deconfigurable).
The chip vendors tout it as a feature.
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Please, pardon my ignorance, but this is the first time I hear about it. Could you share a couple of links, please? Thank you.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Hopefully it's not all off-the-shelf stuff that's potentially riddled with Chinese back-doors and leaks classified information like a sieve.
No, they are riddled with American back doors. Much better.
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That is funny, I would have modded you up.
Unfortunately, somebody can't take a joke and modded you down for it.
iPhones (Score:1, Insightful)
Finally, iPhones, now that the FBI has a way to hack into them it should be a piece of cake to find out what our white house is up to these days.
The irony of equipping government with the exact same hardware you are trying to weaken security for hasn't sunk into them yet, has it?
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Somehow I doubt that the White House bought iPhone 5Cs, I would expect that they bought new phones rather than used phones.
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In terms of sensitive data, I wouldn't trust a VPN over wi-fi for this level of security. Chances are Wi-Fi can be used with standard unclassified, and even medium security type of information. There is a lot of standard boring work going on too. It isn't all Top Secret huge decisions going across. A lot of it would be things like requesting time off from work, making sure the payroll is done, setting up an appointment for a weekly meeting with others.... That stuff VPN over Wi-Fi would be good enough.
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But are these printers... (Score:1)
... super extra special, or do they insert yellow tracking dots [eff.org] like everyone else's?
The rest of the teknologee has similar problems these days: Firmware even containing entire OSes running with more privileges than the OS you see before you, everything calling home, and so on, and so forth. Me, paranoid? No, we know these things happen. I'm asking if the white house managed to get special treatment on this. Probably not, though. Can't wait to see them getting blind-sided by policies they instituted themsel
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Why couldn't/wouldn't the govt supply contract include requirements for special firmware/drivers? A manufacturer includes "yellow dot" routines, or phone home/remote update routines in its normal software, it wouldn't have to spend a lot of money removing that code for a customised "govt approved" firmware/driver package. Otherwise they miss out on lucrative govt supply contracts. All the other equipment is wiped/formatted when the lease is up, why couldn't a printer be given a firmware update before dispos
setting the trap (Score:2)
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Old analog tech sometimes has advantages. Why do you think the Navy still requires sailors to learn to navigate with a sextant?
Time travel.
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I don't think "still" is the word you mean. "Again" comes closer. As I recall, they just started that back up again.
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Next WH advance will be to not use printers at all (Score:4, Insightful)
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We've been promised the paperless revolution for like 20 years now. But paper has been around for thousands of years and isn't going anywhere soon.
I work in government IT. We're so paperless that I have to bring in my own pens and Post-It notes. We do get a paper calendar handed out at the beginning of each year.
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I work in government IT. We're so paperless that I have to bring in my own pens and Post-It notes. We do get a paper calendar handed out at the beginning of each year.
It must differ according to local policy.
I work for the DoD at a large west-coast military base. My office alone uses a full pallet of paper a year. I myself order several boxes of pens, and other assorted office products such as yellow legal pads, steno pads, bound log books, cases of post-its... We have a budget of around $15k a year for "office supplies"...
I'm sorry, but the concept of a "paperless office" is not practical in a great number of situations.
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It must differ according to local policy.
Some positions require getting work done, other positions require pushing paperwork. :)
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Some positions require getting work done, other positions require pushing paperwork. :)
Hey, it is a DoD job...
Thin Skinned response: Some positions require both, you insensitive clod...
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Actually, the paperless revolution was supposed to happen at least 30 years ago - the promise probably being made 40 years ago with the arrival of personal computers
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Especially, if I have some documentation that I'll refer to more than a couple of times, I prefer to have a dead tree copy of it.
I often make notes and doodle in the margins of the dead tree copies, and when I need to remember where something was, I can "see" these doodles and notations in my head, and know what document it was in and where I put it....
I just can't track and as readily remember things like that on digital copies....to me, much harder to f
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We've been promised the paperless revolution for like 20 years now.
Ah, kids.
When I was in elementary school in the late 1960s, my teacher talked about how companies like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific were worried that - thanks to computers - they'd be driven out of business within the next decade or so.
About 5 years ago (Score:2)
I went to a meeting about going paperless. The first thing my boss did was go around and hand everyone a pamphlet about how we were going paperless.
While it's probably less printing than it was before there is still quite a lot of printing where I work, as in cases of printer paper and dozens of cartridges per year.
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"The paperless office is as about as realistic as the paperless toilet!" - Keith Davidson
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Really? your office doesn't use paper anymore? i would love to hear what industry that is in!
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Paper mill
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Somehow I'm not surprised that even the whitehouse is victim to the bureaucracy and slow speed of the GSA (or whomever administers theirs systems) and its IT contractors.
We just got "new" computers in my lab.
64bit Athlon's running at 1.5GHz, and a whopping 3GB of RAM.
It absolutely screams compared to what it replaced: a 1.2GHz Athlon 32bit that had only 2GB of RAM.
As to printers, we're still using some b/w HP laser workhorses that are ~20 years old.
Near as I can tell the maintenance has never been performed
Truth-vs-fiction: which is more realistic? (Score:2)
I remember in House of Cards, the president wasn't allowed to use his game console. (Well, he could have it, but it wasn't about to be given any sort of network access.) But that was a TV show, and here's real life: where basically the same thing (iPhone) is allowed.
TV takes things too seriously. If real life, government is all "meh, whatever."
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In real life, government is all "meh, whatever."
...if you're really important or have a cosy relationship with whoever might otherwise make your life difficult. Whim also helps. Currently the federal government doesn't care as much about pot as it could, and enforces the laws for that more arbitrarily than it might have otherwise.
Additionally it might help to avoid being:
Will they trash it if a Republican wins? (Score:3)
Re:Will they trash it if a Republican wins? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, that turned out to be a myth. I'm sure some pranks happened, but relatively little, compared to the normal and routine wear and tear in offices.
Well, except not: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02360.pdf [gao.gov]
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Re:This will cost extra for no reason (Score:4, Funny)
99% of the stuff that needs to be printed does not need color.
Are you kidding? Have you ever seen a Powerpoint presentation printed in B&W? It's horrible. All of those important colored bars, dots and lines just blend into a sea of low contrast grey. It's bad enough when the data is just financial reports from a Fortune 500 company, but this is the highest level of the US government.
Just think if somebody printed out a map of the Middle East in B&W. It would be hard to differentiate borders - you might end up starting WWIII because you blew up the wrong country.
No, color in this case is cheap. The world has too many shades of grey as it is.
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99% of the stuff that needs to be printed does not need color.
Are you kidding? Have you ever seen a Powerpoint presentation printed in B&W? It's horrible. All of those important colored bars, dots and lines just blend into a sea of low contrast grey. It's bad enough when the data is just financial reports from a Fortune 500 company, but this is the highest level of the US government.
Just think if somebody printed out a map of the Middle East in B&W. It would be hard to differentiate borders - you might end up starting WWIII because you blew up the wrong country.
No, color in this case is cheap. The world has too many shades of grey as it is.
except that every printed thing ends up being copied on a b&w copier and disseminated sooner or later by somebody or other.
the wise author chooses fills, brightness etc. for charts so that items are still distinguishable when copied grayscale, even if less immediately so.
upgrade over the stopgap (Score:2)
the previous stopgap measure [ytimg.com] was temperamental and made strange sounds.
The security step function (Score:2)
When we buy a new printer or communications device, we have no need to think about that device in context with everything else we have. But in a high-security situation, it's probably easier to qualify whole integrating sets of upgraded technology at once than to go through the vetting process for each device in isolation.