The listings in the report are printouts from the Stethoscope program, run on the NSA’s Bogart computer, showing statistical and structural data extracted from encrypted messages, but the encrypted messages themselves are not included. They were used in NSA training programs to teach analysts how to interpret ciphertext behavior without seeing the original message...

Abstract: The National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly paid and pressured technology companies to trick their customers into using vulnerable encryption products. This Article examines whether any of three theories removed the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that this be reasonable. The first is that a challenge to the encryption backdoor might fail for want of a search or seizure. The Article rejects this both because the Amendment reaches some vulnerabilities apart from the searches and seizures they enable and because the creation of this vulnerability was itself a search or seizure. The second is that the role of the technology companies might have brought this backdoor within the private-search doctrine. The Article criticizes the doctrine­ particularly its origins in Burdeau v. McDowell­and argues that if it ever should apply, it should not here. The last is that the customers might have waived their Fourth Amendment rights under the third-party doctrine. The Article rejects this both because the customers were not on notice of the backdoor and because historical understandings of the Amendment would not have tolerated it. The Article concludes that none of these theories removed the Amendment’s reasonableness requirement...

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

It’s something a bunch of us were saying at the time, in reference to the vast NSA’s surveillance capabilities.

I have been thinking of that quote a lot as I read news stories of President Trump firing the Director of the National Security Agency. General Timothy Haugh.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote:

We don’t know what pressure the Trump administration is using to make intelligence services fall into line, but it isn’t crazy to ...

In any case, it was never clear what those ideas were. IronNet never seemed to have any special technology going for it. Near as I could tell, its success was entirely based on Alexander’s name...

It’s a wonderful talk: funny, engaging, wise, prescient. Remember that talk was given in 1982, less than a year before the ARPANET switched to TCP/IP and the internet went operational. She was a remarkable person.

Listening to it, and thinking about the audience of NSA engineers, I wonder how much of what she’s talking about as the future of computing—miniaturization, parallelization—was being done in the present and in secret.

Basically, the recording is in an obscure video format. People at the NSA can’t easily watch it, so they can’t redact it. So they won’t do anything.

With digital obsolescence threatening many early technological formats, the dilemma surrounding Admiral Hopper’s lecture underscores the critical need for and challenge of digital preservation. This challenge transcends the confines of NSA’s operational scope. It is our shared obligation to safeguard such pivotal elements of our nation’s history, ensuring they remain within reach of future generations. While the stewardship of these recordings may extend beyond the NSA’s typical purview, they are undeniably a part of America’s national heritage...

There are many interesting things in the 800 pages of newsletter. There are many redactions. And a 1994 review of Applied Cryptography by redacted:

Applied Cryptography, for those who don’t read the internet news, is a book written by Bruce Schneier last year. According to the jacket, Schneier is a data security expert with a master’s degree in computer science. According to his followers, he is a hero who has finally brought together the loose threads of cryptography for the general public to understand. Schneier has gathered academic research, internet gossip, and everything he could find on cryptography into one 600-page jumble...

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well...

MacAskill, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for their journalistic work on the Snowden files, retired from The Guardian in 2018. He told Computer Weekly that:

• As far as he knows, a copy of the documents is still locked in the New York Times office. Although the files are in the New York Times office, The Guardian retains responsibility for them.
• As to why the New York Times has not published them in a decade, MacAskill maintains “this is a complicated issue.” “There is, at the very least, a case to be made for keeping them for future generations of historians,” he said...

The AI security center’s establishment follows an NSA study that identified securing AI models from theft and sabotage as a major national security challenge, especially as generative AI technologies emerge with immense transformative potential for both good and evil.

Nakasone said it would become “NSA’s focal point for leveraging foreign intelligence insights, contributing to the development of best practices guidelines, principles, evaluation, methodology and risk frameworks” for both AI security and the goal of promoting the secure development and adoption of AI within “our national security systems and our defense industrial base.”...