NRT: A global cyberwar against everyone

14 comments on “NRT: A global cyberwar against everyone ”

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1. Jim in Tokyo 1

   14 March 2014 at 11:52 am

   IMHO Labour need to go on the warpath over this.

   Latest Greenwald has teh NSA boasting that changes of government rarely impact their global total surveillance programme because

   in many of our foreign partners’ capitals, few senior officials outside of their defense-intelligence apparatuses are witting to any SIGINT connection to the U.S./NSA.

   Labour’s emphasis needs to change from “what John Key knew” to “here is new evidence of NZs complicity in the illegal NSA/GCHQ dragnet, and here is what we will do to safeguard NZers”.

   For Labour to have any credibility on this they need to admit that things got out of hand under THEIR watch and prove that they are now prepared to put surveillance quislings to the sword.
   • One Anonymous Bloke 1.1

     14 March 2014 at 12:09 pm

     Things got out of hand long before Helen Clark. Waihopai has been in operation since 1989 and the five eyes network has its roots in WWII.
     • Jim in Tokyo 1.1.1

       14 March 2014 at 12:30 pm

       I agree that Echelon / Waihopai has a dubious past pre-September 11 2001 regarding industrial espionage, but the Snowden leaks paint a pretty clear picture showing a change in tactics around 2004 from (loosely) targeted interception to a new approach to blanket global surveillance made possible by real-time deep packet inspection and the massive caching of all internet traffic.

       NYTimes does a good job of linking this post WTC attack ‘raw take’ strategy to specific legislation introduced in 2002 and subject to secret rulings on interpretation in 2004 and 2006.

       I guess everyone’s free to draw a line at what they deem reasonable surveillance, I’m picking the 2001 US patriot act, parts of which we seem to have adopted first secretly through defacto 5 eyes ties and more recently through overt legislation GCSB and TICS bills.
       • One Anonymous Bloke 1.1.1.1

         14 March 2014 at 12:41 pm

         I’m against any sort of blanket surveillance. It has far too much potential for misuse, and is in effect the use of military tactics against a civilian population: a war crime.

         Not only that, the erosion of trust it represents is destabilising: a truly perverse outcome.
   • karol 1.2

     14 March 2014 at 12:25 pm

     That article says there is some diferences between governments – some governments, more positively inclined towards the US enable more US-dominated surveillance. Some countries make it more difficult for the NSA.
     • One Anonymous Bloke 1.2.1

       14 March 2014 at 12:31 pm

       Yes, like ours tried to during the fifth Labour government. The whole point of Snowden’s evidence is that the NSA has been finding ways to do it anyway regardless of sovereignty, and in fact regardless of the US constitution.

       The CIA is implicated in similar behaviour.

       There’s a knotty paradox here, though: HUMINT is always going to involve trying to get people into high places. What would the US give for an agent in the People’s Central Committee, for example? Or the PCC an MP or congressional representative or two?

       Politicians are legitimate targets for spies.

       That should set the cat among the pigeons.
   • Murray Olsen 1.3

     14 March 2014 at 8:51 pm

     Yep, the only reasonable thing to do is to start again and build what we democratically decide we need, by ourselves and for ourselves. The US spy agencies such as the SIS and GCSB that we pay the bill for have been totally incompetent at doing anything in our interests. The one foreign attack that they should have picked up, on the Rainbow Warrior, they probably provided SIGINT and logistic support for. Get rid of the lot.
2. Tracey 2

   14 March 2014 at 1:56 pm

   i would like to hear mr mapp speak to something like this.

   thats scary stuff and i think those couple of paras would scare most computer users, middle claas and all
3. Populuxe1 3

   14 March 2014 at 2:09 pm

   I would also like to hear about the cyber threat from Russia, China, Iran, and for all I know, Australia. Just if you have time in between screaming imotently about the Great White Satan. Pretty sure it’s not just the US we have to worry about.
   • karol 3.1

     14 March 2014 at 2:29 pm

     The probelm is, our GCSB is meant to be protecting us from espionage and atttacks from China, Russia, etc. However, the GCSB seems to be working with the NSA and the rest of the 5 Eyes in spying on citizens of the 5 Eyes countries, and using their systems for covert online operations against such citizens.
   • Jim in Tokyo 3.2

     14 March 2014 at 2:42 pm

     If Russia, China, Iran, and Australia ARE exploiting NZ internet traffic, then they are most probably doing so using backdoors in SSL, TLS and RSA security protocols planted by the NSA.

     http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption
     http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/us-usa-security-rsa-idUSBRE9BJ1C220131220
     https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/02/was_the_ios_ssl.html
     http://bits-n-bytes-tech.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/is-linux-ssltls-flaw-nsa-backdoor.html

     Ironically Snowden’s leaks and the media “screaming imotently about the Great White Satan” has led to the patching of many of these suspected NSA back doors, making us far more secure against the other external threats you mention.
   • emergency mike 3.3

     14 March 2014 at 7:16 pm

     The US is supposedly our security partner Pop, our doors are wide open to them. So if we are worrying about cyber threats from them, that’s a concern of a different kind than cyber threats from the countries you mentioned. Our own ‘defense’ network is attacking us and your response is ‘oh China proly is too so wot about dat’?
4. Tracey 4

   14 March 2014 at 2:15 pm

   has someone from those countries blown the whistle?
5. BLiP 5

   14 March 2014 at 9:37 pm

   ‘

   Working hand-in-glove with the governments they now own, the corporations are laying down the infrastructure . . .

   . . . Today’s phones come with two separate processors: one is a general-purpose applications processor that runs the main operating system, e.g. Android; the other, known as the modem, baseband, or radio, is in charge of communications with the mobile telephony network. This processor always runs a proprietary operating system, and these systems are known to have backdoors that make it possible to remotely convert the modem into a remote spying device. The spying can involve activating the device’s microphone, but it could also use the precise GPS location of the device and access the camera, as well as the user data stored on the phone. Moreover, modems are connected most of the time to the operator’s network, making the backdoors nearly always accessible . . .

   . . . probably can’t prevent the inevitable, but you can slow it down just a tad.

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