[Cryptography] Sunday Times Snowden Decryption claims

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Mon Jun 15 14:47:40 EDT 2015


At 10:44 AM 6/15/2015, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>By now you are probably familiar with the claim that among the papers released by Snowden was a 'NOC List' of agents working under cover that the Soviets decrypted and have used to kill them all.
>
>Some folk have been suggesting the story is a nonsensical fraud on the silly and spurious grounds that:
>
>* There is no such thing as a NOC list outside stupid Hollywood movies.  Names of agents are never ever written down, let alone compiled in lists.
>
>* MI6 has Officers working for it, CIA spies are called operatives.  An agent is a source and can be any source.  Half the people on this list are probably regarded as 'agents' because whether intentionally or not, knowing or not, they have provided information to an operative in the past.
>
>* If such a list did exist, it would be compartmentalized intelligence.  There would be no reason for a signals intelligence outfit to have such a list, let alone Snowden.
>
>* If such a list did exist, it would be encrypted with 256 bit encryption minimum and the suite A ciphers are almost certainly at least as good as AES.
>
>But no, these are silly quibbles.
>
>NSA can break any encryption.  That is just a fact.  So it is time that we have to admit it and remove all the silly export restrictions on encryption algorithms that can be broken because everything can.
>
>Carry on.

The Sunday Times article was a complete setup/misdirect by GCHQ, probably at the behest of NSA, to take the heat off the fact that US OPM (why am I the only one who thinks that this means "Other People's Money") made _unencrypted_ records of SF86 data filed by > 4 million govt workers available to nation-state entities.  If the Brits are pulling out their spies, it is more likely due to the OPM breach than anything that Snowden did.

http://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/SF86.pdf

"Employees of intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, generally do not have the records of their clearance checks held by OPM, although some do, officials said." Hmmmm...

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/14/sunday-times-report-snowden-files-journalism-worst-also-filled-falsehoods/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chinese-hack-of-government-network-compromises-security-clearance-files/2015/06/12/9f91f146-1135-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html



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