Wikileaks Unveils Vault 7 - The Largest Ever Publication Of CIA Documents

[jlittle]

(There is, to me, a 'flaw' in that the requirements specified for the Vernam cipher states to use a specified character (/) to represent a space...

No, not really. That substitution is applied before encrypting the data, so it's no different to any other character. Anyway, I think that substitution is only done when manually encrypting a physical message, for convenience. That article explains the method using a 5 bit code, which suggests ancient teletype communication such as telex; these days the raw data, ASCII, unicode, jpg, or whatever, would be xored with the random key data. What's necessary is that the key is as long as the message, and that it is truly random, not just pseudo-random; and of course only the sender and receiver ever have the key, and use it once only.

John Little

[GreyGeek]

Found an interesting readme on disabling Intel's management engine. Too scary for me to do, but I'm not impacted by *this* feature anyway

http://hardenedlinux.org/firmware/20...ivybridge.html

Thanks for the link! A very interesting read. I am not going to risk my laptop by running that app either. And, I don't care about the spying. I'm 75. What can they do, kill me?

I dropped essentially all of my political activity because, as far as I'm concerned, I've done my part. What happens will happen and if those who inherit the future don't care enough about it to protect the treasures of freedom that were passed on to them then let them "enjoy" their PC, inclusive, tolerant Marxist Utopian society. I'll be gone by then.

[GreyGeek]

What really concerned me was that the CIA put coders into specific application development teams so that they could plant back doors or holes into the code which could be exploited later.

For example, I recall that the Heartbleed vulnerability was put into the SSH code by PhD and his student who normally supported the code and "inadvertently" left out a simple bounds check. That bounds checking code had to be removed because it was in the code prior to 2012. The Heatrbleed security hole was active for TWO YEARS and left all TLS dependent security useless. That means that any VOIP or chat was susceptible to spying.

Another worrisome fact is that now the entire hacker world, including NKorea, Iran, China, Russia and ISIS have access to the CIA's most powerful cyber weapons.

[dequire]

The really shocking thing to me so far about this is articulated here in a scary reality:

The most striking thing about the WikiLeaks CIA data dump is how little most people cared

There’s also one other big difference between now and 2013. Snowden’s NSA revelations sent shockwaves around the world. Despite WikiLeaks’ best efforts at theatrics—distributing an encrypted folder and tweeting the password “SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheW inds”—the Vault 7 leak has elicited little more than a shrug from the media and the public, even if the spooks are seriously worried. Maybe it’s because we already assume the government can listen to everything.

Is their attempt to numb us down and get us conditioned that Big Brother is here to stay and privacy in our personal digital lives is a myth really working? I see no real discussion in my personal circles at all. To me this is worrying.

[GreyGeek]

Remember, that the rule of law under the Constitution is no longer in affect (See Obama's E.O. giving him and future presidents if they don't revoke it) the "right" to unilaterally declare,on his/her word alone, that an American citizen is a "threat to the United States" and to terminate that person anywhere in the world, without due process. I'm also reminded of the RICCO Law which we were told was create to help incompetent Federal prosecutors against the Mafia, and that it would "never be used" against ordinary citizens. Today, it is used an average of 10,000 times a year against anyone and everyone from all walks of life. The BIG HAMMER in that law is the use of the old English law of "Guilty Property". On their say so alone, police can declare any maney you are carrying on your person or in your vehicle or home, including your vehicle or home or other property and confiscate it without due process despite the 4th Amendment. The LEO's are smart enough to know that the average attorney bill to recover your property if you prove yourself innocent (didn't it used to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?) is around $10,000. So they are quick to take money less than that knowing that most people won't or can't afford to fight it. When they steal large sums, like the $150,000 a person was taking to a business deal to buy a franchise, as he later proved, they'll charge "holding fees" of $10K-20K, depending on how much they stole. Right now, the largest Mafia organization in the US call themselves Congressmen.

[oshunluvr]

Admittedly, if one were targeted by someone this sort of technology would be dangerous. Generally, I doubt the contents of my diet or the color of my skivvies would mean much to anyone - even my enemies if I had any. Going by the "20 year" rule they've had this for awhile. I know we had spy planes for decades before the public knew of them and I knew about stealth fighters about 8 years before you'all did.

I should probably be more worried than I am. These things a always a slippery slope and no doubt someone will find a way to abuse anything eventually. It's sort of human nature.

However, I have a hard time working up unfounded paranoia or living in fear of the unknown. The likelihood that I would appear on someones hit list is too low for me to stress over it too much.

[dibl]

Amazing (or maybe not ...) -- every time a new capability of the CIA is revealed, the news media announce it as a risk to American citizens. Then we have to have ANOTHER review of the law, which has ALWAYS limited the CIA's operations to foreign persons on foreign soil. Stupid!

[dequire]

There are so many angles here and tangents we will surely go on...but at the onset what worries me is all of our devices (Phones, SmartTVs, cars, smart light bulbs, computers (although admittedly mainly Windows PCs but the article referenced also included a Linux back door...)) collecting information on us 24x7. Maybe that information can not be adequately filtered and a logical framework of probability-prediction isn't likely to be in existence today, but I see able evidence and testimony all around that confirms the gov't. is spending big time on storage to keep up with all this data collected. So they'll keep indefinitely (of course) it until one day the AI's ability to arrange one' s life's data and even spoken words into a logic filter puts your data to the test. The implications of this info falling into the wrong hands (be they human, machine, or a combination of both) are pretty scary. The only slight vindication for me is that it proves all of us nut-jobs and tin-foilers were right all along.

[wizard10000]

Even worse is the revelation that Intel had created a CPU within the CPUs! So, if you bought an 8 core device you actually had a 9 core device, but you cannot access it from outside the CPU. That extra core allows remote login and gives the remote user complete control over the computer regardless of the OS it is running.

Found an interesting readme on disabling Intel's management engine. Too scary for me to do, but I'm not impacted by *this* feature anyway

http://hardenedlinux.org/firmware/20...ivybridge.html

[Snowhog]

And so-o-o-o-o...

http://www.pro-technix.com/informati...rnam_base.html

(There is, to me, a 'flaw' in that the requirements specified for the Vernam cipher states to use a specified character (/) to represent a space. Would seem to me then, that if the space can be identified within the encrypted text, you can determine the number of words in the text as well as their size. That alone would likely be sufficient to greatly enhance the possibility of decrypting such an encrypted message.)

[wizard10000]

We should all be very, very worried...Discuss.

Not sure why we should be worried; I'm just not that interesting

I remember reading a long time ago that there's about a ten-year gap between when the intelligence community gets new technology and when the public finds out about it.

I worked for the feds for > 20 years; the stuff I don't want seen gets encrypted with my own 2048-bit key and probably couldn't be cracked in my lifetime. Cell phones and computers are high-priority targets - I'm not at all surprised at the intel community's capabilities.

So IMO all that's happened here is that now we know about what they've been able to do all along.

[GreyGeek]

Even worse is the revelation that Intel had created a CPU within the CPUs! So, if you bought an 8 core device you actually had a 9 core device, but you cannot access it from outside the CPU. That extra core allows remote login and gives the remote user complete control over the computer regardless of the OS it is running.

[dequire]

Wikileaks Unveils 'Vault 7': "The Largest Ever Publication Of Confidential CIA Documents"; Another Snowden Emerges

We should all be very, very worried...Discuss.