NEWS from Tom Porter, your host.

Current: 05/01/96

I have mentioned NSA montitoring of traffic before in these pages.  Here 
is an article with quotes by a co-author of "The Puzzle Palace" covering 
this rather extensively:

Start of article:

[Want to know the easiest way... Puzzle Palace coauthor Wayne
Madsen, in an article written for the June 1995 issue of Computer
Fraud & Security Bulletin (Elsevier Advanced Technology Publications),
wrote that "according to well-placed sources within the Federal
Government and the Internet service provider industry, the National
Security Agency (NSA) is actively sniffing several key Internet router
and gateway hosts."

Madsen says the NSA concentrates its surveillance on destination and
origination hosts, as well as "sniffing" for specific key words and
phrases. He claims his sources have confirmed that the NSA has
contracted with an unnamed private company to develop the software
needed to capture Internet data of interest to the agency.

According to Madsen, the NSA monitors traffic primarily at two
Internet routers controlled by the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), one in College Park, MD (dubbed "Fix East") and
another at NASA Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, CA ("Fix West").

Other NSA Internet sniffers, he said, operate at busy routers knows as
Mae East (an East Coast hub), Mae West (a West Coast hub), CIX
(reportedly based in San Jose), and SWAB (a northern Virginia router
operated by Bell Atlantic).

Madsen says the NSA may also be monitoring traffic at network access
points, the large Internet gateways operated by regional and
long-distance service providers. The NAPs allegedly under surveillance
are in Pennsauken, NJ (operated by Sprint), Chicago (run by AmeriTech
and Bell Communications Research), and San Francisco (Pacific Bell).

[Quote]
"Madsen claims the NSA has deals with Microsoft, Lotus, and Netscape
to prevent anonymous email."
[quote]

"One senior Federal Government source has reported that NSA has been
particularly successful in convincing key members of the US software
industry to cooperate with it in producing software that makes
Internet messages easier for NSA to intercept, and if they are
encrypted, to decode," Madsen wrote. "A knowledgeable government
source claims that the NSA has concluded agreements with Microsoft,
Lotus and Netscape to permit the introduction of the means to prevent
the anonymity of Internet electronic mail, the use of cryptographic
key-escrow, as well as software industry acceptance of the
NSA-developed Digital Signature Standard (DSS)."

Is the NSA really snooping on the Net? And if they are, would that
violate the agency's charter, which specifically prohibits it from
spying within the US?

"Well, Net traffic is routed from God knows where to God knows where
around the world," says George Washington University Professor Lance
Hoffman, a professor of Communications and Telecommunications Systems
Policy at George Washington University. "So if the NSA is doing this,
they could say they are not violating their charter not to spy in the
US. That's the thing. Intelligent routers send stuff any which way."

End of article.

[RANT MODE ON]

Well, I got a very interesting message the other day, concerning more 
of the same and thought I would pass it along:

It seems that not only is traffic being sucked in, but PGP traffic, easily
identified, is being attacked and broken as well.  All serious discussions 
about cracking PGP refer to "how long" and not "if" it can be broken.  
It seems that there are clever lads making all sorts of jokes about their 
machines and the set up at the major NAP's.

The large cracking computers at these locations, are "..chewing their 
cuds(codes)..."  and so are all named after cows.  Elsie is at Mae-East, 
Elmer elsewhere.  (Named Borden and the Glue peopel respectively.)  
Evidently there are jokes about being tied to Gateways (the NAP's) and 
references to the famous manufacturer in Dakota with the black and 
white shipping boxes.  They may actually have Gateway PC's as front 
end terminals, since Gateway 2K is a large government supplier.  
(Anyone out there know if they have sold any machines to No Such 
Agency?)

At any rate, analysis of PGP traffic appears to take about 9 - 11 months, 
mostly spent waiting on prioritization and jockying for scarce 
computational resources.  Actual cracking of keys takes about 10 days.  
Not sure how much traffic needs to be assembled  to do this effectively.

These fellows are patient though, and have a _lot_ of Hierarchical 
Storage to save messages on until they can get to them.

ALL OF THIS BEING THE CASE, CHANGE YOUR PGP KEYS AS OFTEN 
AS YOU SHOULD CHANGE THE FILTERS ON YOUR FURNACE, AT 
LEAST TWICE A YEAR!  USE THE LONGEST KEY POSSIBLE, 
2048 CAN BE ENTERED WHEN ASKED FROM THE "pgp -kg" PROMPTS.

I am now revoking my current key and posting a new one.  Please update 
your key rings if you have my public key.

[/RANT MODE OFF]

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