NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now.
NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
2) They didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason
3) They have the capability to compromise certificate authorities. Pinned certs aren't universal.
4) Speculation, but, Snowden's revelations probably set off an "arms race" of sorts for developing this capability. Lots more people started using Tor, VPNs, and more, so it would almost be dereliction of duty on their part if they didn't dramatically increase their capability, because the threats they are there to stop didn't disappear.
5) ML/LLM/AI has been around for a while, machine learning analysis has been mainstream for over a decade now. All that immense data a human can never wade through can be processed by ML. I would be surprised if they aren't using an LLM to answer questions and query real-time and historical internet data.
6) You know all the concerns regarding Huawei and Tiktok being backdoored by the Chinese government? That's because we're doing it ourselves already.
7) I hope you don't think TAO is less capable than well known notorious spyware companies like the NSO group? dragnet collection is used to find patterns for follow-up tailored access.
Yeah, they can still collect lots of useful metadata.
Metadata is extremely valuable!! lots of things can be inferred from it. In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example. They can take any packet and trace it back to a specific individual, even if you're on Tor, chaining VPNs,etc.. without decrypting it. They can see what destinations you're visiting. they can build a pattern of life profile you and mine that. The ad industry does much of this without access to global internet traffic captures already lol.
> In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example
That's still just as encrypted as the email body itself.
My whole point is that they're no longer able to do passive listening of unencrypted content and massive scale, but instead are forced to rely on much smaller scale active attacks.
You're assuming that despite their budget not having changed meaningfully, no repercussions against anyone from the historical leaks, the continued renewal of the patriot act and unchanged mission of the intelligence community orgs that somehow they've wound down. That they've stopped R&D and tailored access ops.
You're also assuming that tailored access is not used to facilitate, correlate and enrich traffic decryption.
You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that? If you hoard 0 days and sophisticated implants what's the advantage? I mean half the time comms alone aren't enough, you want access to internal networks, documents that will never get transmitted over the network,etc.. smartphone telemetry data from a large group of targets. They're not interested in decrypting traffic to grandma visiting facebook, they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp. Once targets are identified they can be implanted, or have their traffic selected for decryption.
But I think i get what you're saying, that most of the traffic they capture is encrypted. That much I agree, that has changed. But whether they can decrypt it on-demand, that is tough to speculate, whether they need to? That's what I'm disagreeing with. If their goal was that one-time traffic decryption, perhaps that has been curtailed with the prevalence of TLS and CT logging. But metadata alone is sufficient to select a target, and all the evidence suggests that even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups.
That's not at all what I'm assuming. I'm stating that the environment has become much more hostile to them, reducing their capabilities because all the super low hanging fruit is gone. The part where they're able to hack almost anyone they want hasn't changed.
>You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that?
Metadata lets you select a target sure. Having full content takes as they used to allows you to easily find new targets by simply matching keywords, that particularly cool capability has practically disappeared post-Snowden.
>they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp
I don't think this really reflects what the previously leaked files suggest their main interests to be.
>what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp
Whereas before they'd have been able to get that information off the wire together with the message content (for all messages, in real time!). Now? They actually have to actively compromise Facebook to get that for a single user.
It's also worth noting that the previously leaked NSA documents seem to suggest that the NSA was not particularly busy breaking the law by hacking American companies.
> even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups.
Because of CT, such MITM attacks will not work without creating noise that's visible to the whole world.
> I don't think this really reflects what the previously leaked files suggest their main interests to be.
I strongly disagree. I wish i had the time to compile evidence to back that up but plenty exists if you look it up. Matter of fact, I recall some of NSA's leadership oppose things like backdooring encryption or apps because they don't need it, and it only hurts the nation's security.
In 2010 almost all messaging traffic on the internet was plaintext (or using badly broken encryption). Telephony? Hah.
These days nobody even uses regular phone calls or SMS, except US-based android users.
> That was just icing on the cake, the main purpose as I understood was metadata mining, and not just the internet but phone calls and sms as well
Metadata mining was just the fallback when they absolutely couldn't legally capture the content, or were not able to do so for logistical reasons. If you hack China Mobile and get access to all the call content, you'll still have a hard time sending that to the US. Metadata? Much easier.
These days even metadata collection has been gimped, most of the interesting metadata is encrypted. When I text someone, the NSA can see an encrypted connection from my phone to Apple. They can not feasibly see who that message goes to. They might not even be able to tell that I sent a message at all.
> I don't think any information as to what organizations they compromised has ever been revealed, but they certainly had the capability and it is only reasonable to presume they improved upon that capability
TSB leaks include tons of such information. Snowden leaks include some specific cases too, like Gemalto. Although just for the sake of accuracy I'm not sure which of these are actually TAO and which are other similar teams inside the NSA, but as I recall at least the TSB stuff seems to primarily originate from TAO.
There have also been a bunch of public and non-public incidents attributed to the Equation group (almost certainly NSA TAO) by the private sector.
I think these capabilities were already so good a decade ago that it would be hard to significantly improve upon them, you just slap in new exploits and keep doing what you're doing.
>I strongly disagree. I wish i had the time to compile evidence to back that up but plenty exists if you look it up. Matter of fact, I recall some of NSA's leadership oppose things like backdooring encryption or apps because they don't need it, and it only hurts the nation's security.
I was trying to suggest that the NSA is mostly interested in spying on foreign governments and maybe sometimes catching terrorists, not exactly "they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who the source of some journalist is".
> "they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who the source of some journalist is"
They don't care about random people doing those things, but if someone with a known terrorist cell association is in the US talking over signal. Or if someone is visiting extremist sites using tails, they'd want to know (and they can using metadata available today). They're not interested in home-grown terrorism or law enforcement, but all other matters of national security don't neatly fall into "foreign vs domestic" buckets. Even if it is all happening outside of the US, the servers Signal uses might be in the US for example.
I think we broadly agree on the details, and whatever differences remain are probably mostly attributable to us looking at the topic from slightly different angles. There's probably not much more we could usefully address on this topic via HN comments, so it is probably a good time to conclude :)
If the story behind the shadow brokers leaks is of interest to you, I dumped some details in a reply to a now-flagged thread. It's quite the rabbit hole if you want to dig into it, especially with the whole Hal Martin situation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46186975
To quote a former Chief Scientist of the NSA, Rule #1 of cryptanalysis is "look for plaintext". Implementation flaws are very common.
They can easily go after specific targets, but bulk collection is no longer viable in the same way it was pre-Snowden.
Degraded would be "it is impossible for them to know anything about people unless they send dozens of human agents to stalk them".
The first approach enabled them to find targets that were not on their radar based on message contents, they can no longer do that.
No doubt they still read texts. I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.
They no doubt have access to the data big tech's mined out of the entire world's population. That capability alone puts them into "bring everything about this guy up on the screen" territory.
I don't doubt for a second that they can read specific emails, but to suggest that they have bulk collection capabilities within Google or Microsoft is a stretch. NSA lacks the legal authority to compel that, NSA lacks the money to bribe Google or Microsoft and NSA likely lacks the political backing to put the biggest US companies in such a compromised position.
>I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.
Sure, but that's increasingly iMessage.
It was certainly easy in a world where everything wasn't encrypted, that's not the case anymore.
They don't. But they have other options.
For example, Cloudflare is an American company that has plaintext access to the traffic of many sites. Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-secret-u...
And even then, stealing keys does not give you passive decryption and active decryption would be incredibly noisy.
NSA does not have enough money to spend to be able to incentivize Google to give them full take intercepts either.
There's lots of fun tricks you can think of when you have national resources at your disposal.
However, you are forgetting that NSA works for Google. It works to support the promotion of American companies worldwide. They're on the same team, and Google knows that. They even have the same mission: To usefully organize the world's information!
Now that Google is openly a military contractor, it's even easier to make this click. Back in the day, you had to read things like this Julian Assuage piece to understand this: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Google has a lot to lose by doing so, and not all that much to gain. Google has also been a leading force in pushing for broader use of encryption on the internet, making the NSAs work significantly more difficult even in a hypothetical scenario where Google is happy to give them anything they want.
This is true given some possible interpretations, false given other possible interpretations. Cloudflare can be secretly compelled to share specific things, there's no legal mechanism to compel Cloudflare to share everything.
Hence the famous "SSL added and removed here ;-)" slide
AT&T does not have much to lose by doing that, Google does.
Well, no. But Google does significant business in foreign countries and doesn't really want to give an excuse for foreign governments to start aggressively pursuing their own alternatives.
> And speaking of, whatever happened to those?
Cloudflare still has a warrant canary on their transparency report page, Reddit deleted theirs in 2016.
They were never very common.
The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
Even if true, significantly degraded. Probably not true though, NSA has been very leaky and such a story would be kind of devastating for Google. NSA lacks the legal capability to force Google to do so, the money to bribe Google to do so and also almost certainly lacks the political backing to put one of the biggest US companies in such a position.
I don't doubt for a second that NSA could hack Google (or just bribe employees with appropriate access) and break into specific Gmail accounts if they wanted to. Bulk collection would be far more difficult to implement.
>The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
They do try, they just haven't been very successful at it.
Neither of these approaches would enable bulk collection.
I'm sure the NSA can read essentially any specific emails they're interested in, they just can't do so at anywhere near the scale they used to pre-Snowden.
Not only that, these days almost all chats have moved to E2EE platforms. Reading that traffic in a stealthy manner requires compromising endpoints, bulk collection simply isn't possible.
That's a very boring capability compared to what they were able to do pre-Snowden. That's also not a new capability, they were able to do that pre-Snowden too.
It's also worth considering that CT makes it extremely noisy to use such certificates to attack web browsers.
>Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ?
Yes, all modern browsers require certificates to be in the CT logs in order for them to be accepted.
For example, we can easily pull up logs for gmail.com and see which certificates browsers would accept. https://api.certspotter.com/v1/issuances?domain=gmail.com&ex...
Aside from a tiny minority of people applying their own encryption (with offline confirmed public keys) at end points with securely stored air gapped private keys, this information is available to the US government, it’s the god damn job of the NSA.
The crucial difference is that it is no longer nearly as easy for the NSA to identify new targets as it used to be, because they don't have full take access to the vast amounts of content they used to.