[Cryptography] [cryptography] Equation Group Multiple Malware Program, NSA Implicated

[Jonathan Thornburg]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 04:18:08PM -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote:
> Is someone monitoring the email?  Almost definitely.  Is
> someone monitoring the text messages?  Yup.  Is someone
> monitoring the phone call?  "Metadata" sure but not likely
> storing the audio.  But postal mail?  Someone opening and
> reading the postal mail is unlikely, and if someone is, and
> they're not an unambiguously criminal organization to start
> with, that's a huge legal risk on their part.
> 
> The nice thing about postal mail, is that a letter is a physical
> object that some human being with hands and eyes and a mind,
> drawing a paycheck, would have to devote at least a few paid
> seconds to opening and reading and understanding.  Another
> nice thing is that there are still laws and court precedents,
> left over from a previous era, that should give any would-be
> eavesdroppers at least on the government side pause about
> opening and reading it, and most non-government organizations
> simply don't have any expertise in intercepting it selectively.

+1 on the above.

However, note that postal-mail *metadata* (i.e., everything on the
outside of the envelope, including specifically the to/from address,
date, and point of entry into the postal system), are defintely
recorded/logged/archived in at the USA (and probably many other
countries as well).  See, e.g.,
  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html
with the "money quote" buried in the 5th paragraph:
# a vastly more expansive effort,
# the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service
# computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is
# processed in the United States -- about 160 billion pieces last year. It
# is not known how long the government saves the images

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/us-secretly-monitoring-mail-of-thousands.html
is also informative:
# The Postal Service also uses a program called Mail Imaging, in which its
# computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail sent in
# the United States. The program's primary purpose is to process the mail,
# but in some cases it is also used as a surveillance system that allows
# law enforcement agencies to request stored images of mail sent to and
# received by people they are investigating.

ciao,

-- 
-- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <jthorn at astro.indiana-zebra.edu>
   Dept of Astronomy & IUCSS, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
   "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched
    at any given moment.  How often, or on what system, the Thought Police
    plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.  It was even conceivable
    that they watched everybody all the time."  -- George Orwell, "1984"