The Stalker Outside Your Window: The NSA and a Belated Horror Story

[photo: Gwen's River City Images via Flickr]

[photo: Gwen’s River City Images via Flickr]

It’s a shame Halloween has already come and gone. The reaction to Monday’s Washington Post The Switch blogpost reminds of a particularly scary horror story, in which a young woman alone in a home receives vicious, threatening calls.

There’s a sense of security vested in the idea that the caller is outside the house and the woman is tucked safely in the bosom of her home. Phew, she’s safe; nothing to see here, move along…

In reality the caller is camped directly outside the woman’s window, watching every move she makes even as she assures herself that everything is fine.

After a tepid reaction to the initial reporting last week, most media and their audience took very little notice of the Washington Post’s followup piece — what a pity, as it was the singular voice confirming the threat sits immediately outside the window.

Your window, as it were, if you have an account with either Yahoo or Google and use their products. The National Security Agency has access to users’ content inside the corporate fenceline for each of these social media firms, greasy nose pressed to glass while peering in the users’ windows.

There’s more to story, one might suspect, which has yet to be reported. The disclosure that the NSA’s slides reflected Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) unique to Google and Yahoo internal systems is only part of the picture, though this should be quite frightening as it is.

Access to proprietary RPCs means — at a minimum — that the NSA has:

1) Access to content and commands moving in and out of Google’s and Yahoo’s servers, between their own servers — the closest thing to actually being inside these corporations’ servers.

2) With these RPCs, the NSA has the ability to construct remote login access to the servers without the businesses’ awareness. RPCs by their nature require remote access login permissions.

3) Construction through reverse engineering of proprietary RPCs could be performed without any other governmental bodies’ awareness, assuming the committees responsible for oversight did not explicitly authorize access to and use of RPCs during engineering of the MUSCULAR/SERENDIPITY/MARINA and other related tapping/monitoring/collection applications.

4) All users’ login requests are a form of RPC — every single account holder’s login may have been gathered. This includes government employees and elected officials as well as journalists who may have alternate accounts in either Gmail or Yahoo mail that they use as a backup in case their primary government/business account fails, or in the case of journalists, as a backchannel for handling news tips.

5) The public may not understand, nor may they ever receive adequate clarification with regard to the breadth of NSA’s access over time to Google’s and Yahoo’s content, given the rolling application of masking methodology which ostensibly protected non-targets’ data. In 2006, Google researchers disclosed that as many as 60 applications used “Bigtable” [PDF] — a proprietary distributed storage system for structured data. That number is likely larger today, but some applications have come and gone since then. What Google applications don’t use Bigtable, and are otherwise not included in the “defeat” list believed to be the applications excluded from tapping/monitoring/collection applications? We don’t know on the face of it; Google engineers do, of course, though they may not be able to communicate this publicly for proprietary and security reasons. Further, what content was monitored and collected from the initial tap to today’s partially masked state? There was a slow ramp up of the defeat list over time; the applications on the list to be masked off from NSA’s screening/collection were not present initially. We can only assume that the same challenges exist with Yahoo’s content and applications — or worse, given the business’s somewhat disorganized approach to its application portfolio up until 2012.

6) The data screened/collected including the RPCs may also include metadata — it may indicate users’ location by IP address, which in some cases is the same as a physical address. It’s not at all clear this was masked out for any user.

7) To bypass the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)  employed to secure transmissions between users and the social media businesses’ servers, the NSA tapped either private and/or leased lines directly between servers, not the public transmission lines between users and servers, in order to access Google’s and Yahoo’s content as it moved between servers. This is yet another example of the NSA ignoring property rights, though they may claim that because the taps were located outside the US they were not limited by US law.

In spite of these challenges, the media and the public continue on blithely as if there were no new problems revealed this last week with regard to the NSA’s behavior.

What should truly shake them up is not merely the threats revealed so far, or the initial angry reaction of Google engineers shared by the Washington Post in the 30-OCT revelatory article.

It’s the persistent and increasing anger of Google engineers who are now going public, though speaking not for Google but as individuals about the breach of Google’s systems by the NSA. The degree of anger suggests there is far more to this story than appears on the surface. What would torque off engineers enough to be so deeply angry, so very openly?

As @Public_Archive tweeted earlier this week,

We’ve reached a point in history where the writings of JG Ballard & Philip K Dick have clattered into the quotidian realm of realism.

Be afraid; the horror is no longer a mere story. Happy much-belated Halloween.

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10 replies
  1. What Constitution? says:

    Yeah, but there’s always that reassuring understanding that “if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear.” I mean, the obvious difference between the horror story of the guy outside the window vs. the NSA in your Google is that the guy outside the window is a bad guy, while NSA is only there to protect you, right? Right? Move along, nothing to see here. Right? You can trust them, they’re from the government and are here to help. Also, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

    “Very truly yours, Ben Wittes.”

  2. Rayne says:

    @What Constitution?: LOL Even this jest doesn’t work well, because the UK’s GCHQ is a partner in this, and we don’t have a clue what their agenda is at all. It’s bad enough we don’t know what the hell the NSA is doing with this stuff because it sure as hell doesn’t look like counterterrorism work.

    It’s driving me crazy that the media apart from WaPo has rolled over on this story.

    If memory serves there was at least one recent IT outage of some sort at Tne New York Times; I’m pretty sure I remember seeing comments about it on Twitter. What’d those folks use as a backup communications system?

    Hotmail? Because we know how secure that MSFT-owned system is in comparison to any other email provider, right?

    Ah, here’s a link re: outage.

  3. 4jkb4ia says:

    It’s driving me crazy that the media apart from WaPo has rolled over on this story

    This is the kind of story my husband can and does get. NYT reported it the day after WaPo had it on page B1, but is more interested in tapping Angela Merkel, which my husband promptly realized is the sort of thing everyone does. Evidently supervisors told him to watch what he said around Air France planes.

  4. greengiant says:

    Anytime they need an informant or entrapper all they have to do is spam some incriminating files into their victims computer, gen up a complaint from their internet dragnet and call them in for an offer the victim can’t refuse.

  5. Rayne says:

    @greengiant: Yup. Of course there’s the financial transaction route, too. I have suspicions this kind of approach was used on Eliot Spitzer (though I admit I don’t have proof, just suspicions). He may have conducted business through an account he thought was anonymous; the content passing in/out of his account could have been sniffed, then the bank through which the money was paid out was notified they might have “unusual transactions” to monitor and report.

    Because the banking transactions are claimed as the trigger, nobody would be the wiser about email and other related social media content being sniffed.

    And presto — the pain in the ass flogging the Bush White House about banking regulations and subprime mortgages is no longer a problem, forced to confess his sins publicly the same week that Bear Stearns went under. What timing.

  6. Stephen says:

    Perhaps the public will get more excitable when the Washington Post and the Guardian get round to publishing the NSA slides about their work subverting Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Macintosh OS X. (If Microsoft has been collaborating with the NSA on allowing their spies encryption-free access to Skype sessions then they have presumably also been doing so on Windows as well. Indeed, German government officials are already calling one of the components of Windows 8 a trojan horse for the NSA.)

    http://news.techworld.com/security/3465259/is-windows-8-a-trojan-horse-for-the-nsa-the-german-government-thinks-so/

  7. Rayne says:

    @Stephen: MSFT’s social network compromised early on, see slides on PRISM released back in June. Their OS has been an intelligence asset (whether with MSFT’s blessing TBD), the vulnerabilities of which have been used in cyberweapons; Microsoft’s CryptoAPI is definitely suspect given its ubiquity. As for Apple: if the system was built to NIST standards, they were compromised. No slides needed–public needs to get its head out of its iPhone/iPad case and pay attention.

    As for Germany: I wrote about their concerns back in August. I also wrote in July about my own concerns wrt MSFT’s business strategy as Win8 evolves.

  8. Rayne says:

    @klynn: Hmm, no, not really; I think most of us who are following this stuff closely and/or are activists assume the worst.

    I asked almost immediately after the first Snowden revelations what “direct access” meant, wondering why journos didn’t follow that line of inquiry. Here we are, months later, with one answer from a media outlet that provided some of the earliest coverage. What happened to the rest of the media — why’d they just sit on their haunches and wait? Ugh. The amount of content collected since the ball was dropped is staggering.

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