Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

2016: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/keystroke_rec...

It's not much of a stretch to imagine that intelligence agencies have been heavily invested in this area and are far ahead of public research, given signals intelligence has basically been their bread and butter since forever. Moreover, Stuxnet was so advanced for the time that its existence stunned the world.

Keystrokes can be captured indirectly via audio analysis, electromagnetic emissions from wiring, and now RF imaging techniques looking at finger movements. Wouldn't be surprised if they can create multi-modal composite models to attain higher accuracy, or if RF imaging is able to capture lip/jaw movements these days.

The really sexy part is probably what they're able to do with fixed wing airborne platforms, where you can afford to pack ridiculously high-end sensors and local computing power on board.

It still weirds me out to think that a gimmick from 2008's The Dark Knight is more or less a reality now, or will be soon if it already isn't.

Who cares?

They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. Fake WMDs, never ending wars against goat herders, snowden, not to mention 13 Russians who apparently swung an election.

If someone is busy triggering mail bombers and lunatic shooters just by targeting and upvoting their posts on social media what's all this sci-fi stuff good for? The more complex the world gets the more pointless all this superficial gimmickry looks.

Just look at the budgets thrown at these agencies. Its frankly sickening.

The incentives aren't there to perform better. Even after all these failures you mentioned, they haven't really been punished in any significant way whatsoever, so why improve?

Correct. The incentives are only truly there, generally, as an organization, for intelligence agencies to do what retains them capabilities, and their budget.

And when every department is granularly information insulated, it's easy for an individual to get caught in a task that serves the above while not even realizing.

Well, looks like everything is functioning as expected. You get the drama that you are obliged to throw money at.

> They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11.

They weren't snoring of course, there's no shortage of evidence showing foreknowledge about 9/11 that was consciously ignored by the Bush administration and the intelligence services prior to the event and then (only half-successfully) covered up afterwards.

Hindsight bias at its finest.

The real issue was identified in the first few years after 9/11 - disparate patchwork of teams overzealously enforcing moats around their intel/data.

https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

Actually read the report, or at least skim it starting from page 254. What you're saying is just not true.

Since we're speculating about spies, politics and secrecy to begin with, is it really in the spirit of the game to just trust a report published by the government that says the government was doing things right?

I'm not playing a game.

Specifically, which part(s) of the report are you refuting? Please provide pages and paragraphs #s or quotes.

How's he going to refute anything specific without himself being privy to government knowledge?

>>consciously ignored by the Bush administration and the intelligence services prior to the event and then

No doubt someone is screaming that yesterday an attack was going to go on in X country.

And "consciously" is a very loaded word.

>If someone is busy triggering mail bombers and lunatic shooters just by targeting and upvoting their posts on social media what's all this sci-fi stuff good for?

Your first assumption is that any of those actions were against the ethos of the ones in charge of this technology. They aren't there to stop the bad guys. If anything, the bad guys winning some of the time helps provide public support for the endeavors of those behind this technology. Consider how the people in charge of this technology either gain or lose from the actions of the people you want monitored, compared to what they have to gain or lose from the actions of others who they could use this technology to monitor.

In my personal view, MLK Jr., after his turn to focus on the plight of the poor, is far more a schema of the intended target of this type of technology than James Earl Ray.

> They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. Fake WMDs, never ending wars against goat herders, snowden, not to mention 13 Russians who apparently swung an election.

Ouch. All apparently true, but ouch.

This kind of things won't change until major national security incidents cause budget cuts, not budget increases. It should be like the private sector. When you repeatedly F things up, you make less and not more.

The counter-argument will be "but you're hobbling our intelligence!" Okay, then create a competing intelligence agency to the CIA/NSA/etc. and give the budget to the one producing results.

Monitoring the blank landscape for signals of malevolence is one thing. But targeting a specific landscape for an attack is another thing entirely. In other words, it is easier to cause an action of attack than it is to monitor, forewarn or prevent somebody else's attack.

The possibilities are now open to detect presence behind doors or to shoot people deeply embedded in buildings.

Busy snoring? They were prosecuting Bill Clinton. So he was very distracted. The kill order for Bin Laden just sat on his desk.

> They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11.

The replies to this post completely dismiss the elephant in the room.

It seems that YouTube's censorship algorithms finally stopped blocking it: search YouTube for the 5 hour long DVD series "The New Pearl Harbor ~ full" (dWUzfJGmt5U if it becomes unlisted)

It's too bad people were arguing with your point about 9/11 as if they could prove that was invalid, it would completely invalidate your entire argument.

The most recent example of your argument was the death of Jamal Khashoggi. The Washington Post reported that the CIA had advance notice of the attack.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/saudis-lay-in-wait-for-...

The problem of course is because of the secret nature of their budgets, spending, successes, and failures, it's hard to know how good or bad they are for the country.

But there comes a time when we get real victories, even if they aren't revealed for decades. And the victories that happened this decade, may not be revealed for another two or more decades from now.

I see, well the reason you should care has nothing to do with their mandate.

What they have is a monopoly on hacking without consequence, and infinite budget to explore every vector in hardware, software and physics to exploit, for no particular reason for no discernable threat aside from "that agency over there is also doing it, maybe", and assuming that is a threat.

I full expect that our online speech from bunkers will be eventually the only thing that is hard to decrypt.

We will be tracked 24/7 by our gait and shape and facial recognition with handoffs between drones and tiny street level cameras, or perhaps to make things easier we may just be tagged eventually with a non invasive RF sensor or coating. Metadata of who you visited or interacted with will be analyzed for patterns with machine learning. Items you order will be tagged and possibly interdicted as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to do so. People won’t be able to organize anything dangerous because the state (which at that time will be 99% just AI) will already have predicted that the same way AlphaGo would predict any chess combination. Any uprising will be pre emptively quelled using pinpoint nanobots which were deposited to lie dormant in everyone’s bodies until activated. States will endure forever.

Speaking of those nanobots, once you have them in people’s bodies they can report back all your whereabouts and activities. It’s easy enough to get them in via people’s food and water supply.

The main hiccups will be in the early years as the nanobot swarms are still clumsy and may reveal themselves before they learn how to stay in an organism without getting washed out so easily and without triggering an immune response.

> Any uprising will be pre emptively quelled using pinpoint nanobots which were deposited to lie dormant in everyone’s bodies until activated.

Nanotech is so far away from this capability that it's pretty pointless to worry about.

A large solar flare/CME and/or comet impact will destroy a system like this.

All the stuff you're talking about doesn't really require nanobots. Most of us carry cell phones already.

Elevate side channel attack to another level.

>Moreover, Stuxnet was so advanced for the time that its existence stunned the world.

Not technically advanced. It was using a collection of 0-day exploits to get into a PC via a USB drive. Any basic hacker could accomplish that with existing exploit tooling.

What was so advanced about it was the coordination to enable it. The collection of 0-day exploits, the knowledge of the architecture of the centrifuge, and the engineering expertise to compromise the centrifuges in a non-obvious way.

Stuxnet was incredibly simple technologically, but it was distilled down to exactly what it needed to do and delivered to just the right people by an advanced vast intelligence apparatus. It did not depend on any breakthroughs in signals, encoding, hardware, etc. I'm not suggesting they aren't capable of technological breakthroughs, but stuxnet definitely isn't an example of one.

>I'm not suggesting they aren't capable of technological breakthroughs, but stuxnet definitely isn't an example of one.

Never suggested it was. My point still stands that the world was shocked it existed, if only for precisely the reasons you described. It was an indicator of the degree to which intelligence agencies had their shit together at the time. Things that advanced had never really been publicly seen nor pulled off before.

As an aside, one can likewise argue that imaging people via RF isn't really a breakthrough unto itself, but merely putting existing technology and knowledge together in a complicated but exacting fashion.

But it wasn't advanced technologically though. Any blackhat with a stash of 0 days and instructions from the right plc engineer could have put together the payload to do this.

When it comes to seeing through walls, these are new techniques. It's not about knowing the right target through intelligence gathering, etc. It requires new state of the art methods not already available to the public.

hmm, what holds more informational value - thousands of articles and detailed analysis from experts all over the world, or one presumably disgruntled anonymous user on public internet forum that keeps repeating itself?

The truth is not a vote.

There are not thousands of articles saying that it was a technological breakthrough. Most sophisticated doesn't mean a new technique was used, etc.

> presumably disgruntled anonymous user

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not disgruntled at all. I'm pointing out that it was not a technological breakthrough in any regard so it's wrong to identify it as one.

If someone unexpectedly accumulates the largest amount of gold in the world, it's impressive, but it's not a breakthrough in gold-mining technology.

You make it sound much simpler than reality, have you read any of the technical reports or just the latest CNN report? I would highly recommend at least reading the Wikipedia entry for Stuxnet, particularly under "Operation" [0] before brushing it off as a job any script kiddie with access to zero-days could accomplish.... never mind that using four zero-days is "unprecedented". Also you are ignoring the fact that they just didn't hack Windows, but also a number of very specific Siemens custom software packages and PLCs. All technical analysis of Stuxnet that I have read until now have said it could only be a government actor with enough resources and time to build something of this magnitude, targeted so specifically as to only affect centrifuges in Iran, although it was discovered in various countries. If you need more technical details, Symantic wrote up a ~60 page dossier with lots more technical details[1]. You would be surprised how insanely detailed this thing is.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Operation

[1]: https://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/secu...

I am completely aware of how it worked and you seem to have ignored what I said. The organizational effort to collect the 0 days, target the right centrifuges, etc is what was impressive but there was nothing new technological there. Putting together multiple 0 days is how hackers win sandbox busting competitions for browsers.

Stuxnet has been analyzed in detail and there were no new special hacking techniques like unknown ASLR vulnerabilities or arbitrary unprivileged memory reads like spectre. It was just some 0-days wrapped up with a laser focused task that took years of effort to research.

It's shockingly impressive how much effort went into researching what needed to be done, not the actual mechanism thag was used to do it.

If someone plans out a super elaborate assassination of the hardest target in the world and completes it with a homemade shiv, you don't comment on how impressive the shiv itself was. It was the ability to know when/where/how that was impressive.

Yeah, if Stuxnet had been using something like Spectre or Meltdown the world really would have exploded. And without the source/whitepaper I'm not sure people would have even figured out what it was doing for quite a while.

They say Stuxnet featured nothing very new or technological but I don’t recall anything else infecting PLC’s and using ambient temperature sensors to define behavior. That is just one techno. aspect I found original. The fact that this wasn’t anything new to Symantec researchers is kinda frightening of itself.

>but I don’t recall anything else infecting PLC’s and using ambient temperature sensors to define behavior. That is just one techno. aspect I found original.

The target was interesting and the attack subtle, but attacks on industrial control systems had been the target of research even in the public in the same time frame: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/09/26/power.at.risk/

You didn't even read the post you're responding to, you're just repeating what they said.

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