[Cryptography] Hayden on encryption v. metadata

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Wed Mar 23 20:11:11 EDT 2016


https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-general-michael-hayden-discusses-american-intelligence-age-terror

Highly recommended, *especially* if you disagree with Hayden.

Basically, Hayden is ok with just about anything -- including torture -- so long as it is approved by someone higher up.  Methinks he might not fare so well in a Nuremburg-type trial, but perhaps those ethics are sooo last century.

However, Hayden does think that the FBI is p*ss*ng into the wind on encryption, because any restrictions on encryption will drive technology overseas & weaken the U.S. tech economy.

Hayden is basically agreeing with the statement "we kill people based on metadata", so you'd better believe that social graphs, GPS coordinate positions, etc., are being hoovered up, big time.  Perhaps the FBI will be forced to de-parallel-construct their DRT-bag data for the U.S. courts, but I suspect that NSA has no such scruples.

There was an unclassified program by a small midwest company a couple of years ago that did 2 things: collected huge amounts of continuous hires video surveillance imagery and built a time-line database.  Subsequently, an inquiry about the position of a car a 2:17pm at such-and-such a location could be run *backwards* in time to see where the car came from.  Although this data was used to catch a few very surprised criminals who found the police patiently waiting for them at their homes, it was either deemed too creepy (hard to believe!) or too expensive to continue.

However, I think the real reason why this surveillance technique was dropped (from public discussion, anyway) is that exactly the same database technology is *already* in use to track cellphones backwards in time.  This can be done with cheap, ubiquitous NSA junior-varsity-type technology -- collect cellphone signals, wifi signals, Bluetooth signals.

Thus, if person X is noticed at location Y at time T, then the database can track person X backwards over the past hours, days, months to see if person X ever came close to person Y.

If this happens in some locations on the globe, and if person Y is considered a "bad guy/gal", then person X is now considered to be a "bad guy/gal".  Hayden may not even know person X's name or gender, but the U.S. might still target person X for killing simply on the basis of this metadata.  Hayden seems completely ok with this sort of thinking, but then he has lime on his cleats (his too cute football analogy re coming too close to getting out of bounds).

So while the encryption fight is going on, a far more insidious type of surveillance is taking place, but without being discussed or approved by anyone in Congress or the courts.

I believe that this type of system is what Hayden is referring to when he says that -- far from "going dark" -- this is currently the "golden age" of surveillance.



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