Google’s NSA alliance: Deals between Silicon Valley and the security state

Going out on a limb here, as I posted a pretty lengthy comment on Nation State attacks in the past [1], but does this Google/NSA relationship qualify as terrifying? Google finds out it has been targeted by a Nation State, who is actively siphoning off user data and company crown jewels, so they enter into an agreement with the NSA to share information about the attack, and develop technology and methods to prevent future attacks. I would argue that Google must share knowledge of Nation State APTs with the US Government, and other Silicon Valley firms, once they found out the scope included Symantec, Yahoo, and Adobe, Northrop Grumman, etc. NSA/Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon should be trying to advance countermeasures and leveling up the industry as a whole, because they arguably have some of the most exposed attack surfaces, host most of our data, and have the financial resources and in house expertise to deal with it best. I would be terrified if Google did not have a relationship where it shared intrusions of this scope with the US Government.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316430

    The NSA helps the companies find weaknesses in their
    products. But it also pays the companies not to fix some
    of them. Those weak spots give the agency an entry point
    for spying or attacking foreign governments that install
    the products in their intelligence agencies, their
    militaries, and their critical infrastructure.

That's probably the most frightening thing imaginable, but where is this info coming from? What are the sources on all of these accusations because it feels like a pretty casual mention that all of the hardware/software manufacturers in the US intentionally leave in back doors.

I assume the book has a lot better sourcing and footnotes than this excerpt has, because the excerpt has none of either. The only part of this article you need to read is "It’s not clear what the NSA and Google built after the China hack. But [thousands of words of speculation and innuendo follow]" It's not clear, as in the author doesn't know.

Once again the meme that China was hacking to find dissidents was a lie for propaganda purposes, and the actual motivation was to see who the USG had wiretap orders on, to see if any of China's own spies had been burned.

But, it makes China sound evil when you tell the public that they are doing it for human rights reasons.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chines...

It would be ironic if the original attack was actually the NSA pretending to be China as a false flag.

Google then willingly accepts the NSA's 'tailored solution', which was simply a trojan horse to monitor Google assets (I.e. users) from inside the network.

Unlikely but would make a good fictional story nevertheless!

The article describes two NSA systems almost as something made for Google:

"The cooperative agreement and reference to a “tailored solution” strongly suggest that Google and the NSA built a device or a technique for monitoring intrusions into the company’s networks. That would give the NSA valuable information for its so-called active defense system, which uses a combination of automated sensors and algorithms to detect malware or signs of an imminent attack and take action against them. One system, called Turmoil, detects traffic that might pose a threat. Then, another automated system called Turbine decides whether to allow the traffic to pass or to block it. Turbine can also select from a number of offensive software programs and hacking techniques that a human operator can use to disable the source of the malicious traffic."

But if you followed all the news since Snowden appeared, you'd know that the TURMOIL is simply the NSA's global passive internet (and more!) monitoring system and the TURBINE one cog of the global active "attack on the internet" one.

https://robert.sesek.com/2014/9/unraveling_nsa_s_turbulence_...

"TURMOIL is a “high-speed passive collection systems intercept [for] foreign target satellite, microwave, and cable communications as they transit the globe"

"The TURBINE system “provides centralized automated command/control of a large network of active implants”"

The fact that nobody blinks when agencies openly admit doing this for economic interests is the part I find terrifying. Could there be a more blatant admission of the unethical nature of military-industrial complex?

The two things I got from this story:

- If anyone of us, that didn't work for Google, had cracked into a sever that breached our servers and just looked around, not destroying data. Wouldn't that be illegal?

- The NSA is getting access to software and hardware back doors before the public is made aware so they can try and catch Chinese hackers. Doesn't this also give them the access they would need to route all our traffic to their giant datacenter and mine it? Aren't the 'Chinese' hackers giving them a convenient excuse?

kudos to shane harris for shedding light on our industry's modern story of Gleichschaltung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung)

instead of representative democracies regulating, protecting, and/or supporting technology firms and citizens through systems governed by laws and regulations, we're entering an era of opaque and voluntary "partnerships" where all tech companies are equal, but some are more equal than others.

this sort of coordination outside of legal and especially democratic processes has implications for everyone, and should concern us all.

perhaps unsurprisingly, moxie portended these developments in 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxz7r4E2li8

Multinationals that give preference to one nation's TLAs have no right to complain when they're penalized for being preferential.

Not mentioned in the article, but I believe that around that time Google switched developers 'en masse' to the Mac platform.