From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 1996 03:45:23 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: NSA net trolling
Message-ID: <199602191852.KAA06662@slack.lne.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


 

Forwarded from alt.politics.datahighway, sorry I didn't
get the Message-ID when it was fowarded to me.

This is possibly old news to some, but I think it needs
to be spread widely.

 
> Article 1706 of alt.politics.datahighway:
> Date: Tue, 16 Jan 1996
> Subject: NSA SHORTCIRCUITING FUTURE CRYPTO CAPABILITIES
>
> from Global Net News
> ===
> [Want to know the easiest way... Puzzle Palace coauthor Wayne
> Madsen, in an article written for the June 1995 issue of Computer
> Fraud & Security Bulletin (Elsevier Advanced Technology Publications),
> wrote that "according to well-placed sources within the Federal
> Government and the Internet service provider industry, the National
> Security Agency (NSA) is actively sniffing several key Internet router
> and gateway hosts."
>
> Madsen says the NSA concentrates its surveillance on destination and
> origination hosts, as well as "sniffing" for specific key words and
> phrases.  He claims his sources have confirmed that the NSA has
> contracted with an unnamed private company to develop the software
> needed to capture Internet data of interest to the agency.
>
> According to Madsen, the NSA monitors traffic primarily at two Internet
> routers controlled by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
> (NASA), one in College Park, MD (dubbed "Fix East") and another at NASA
> Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, CA ("Fix West").
>
> Other NSA Internet sniffers, he said, operate at busy routers knows as
> Mae East (an East Coast hub), Mae West (a West Coast hub), CIX
> (reportedly based in San Jose), and SWAB (a northern Virginia router
> operated by Bell Atlantic).
>
> Madsen says the NSA may also be monitoring traffic at network access
> points, the large Internet gateways operated by regional and
> long-distance service providers. The NAPs allegedly under surveillance
> are in Pennsauken, NJ (operated by Sprint), Chicago (run by AmeriTech
> and Bell Communications Research), and San Francisco (Pacific Bell).
>
>    [Quote]
>    "Madsen claims the NSA has deals with Microsoft, Lotus, and Netscape
> to prevent anonymous email."
>    [quote]
>
> "One senior Federal Government source has reported that NSA has been
> particularly successful in convincing key members of the US software
> industry to cooperate with it in producing software that makes Internet
> messages easier for NSA to intercept, and if they are encrypted, to
> decode," Madsen wrote. "A knowledgeable government source claims that
> the NSA has concluded agreements with Microsoft, Lotus and Netscape to
> permit the introduction of the means to prevent the anonymity of
> Internet electronic mail, the use of cryptographic key-escrow, as well
> as software industry acceptance of the NSA-developed Digital Signature
> Standard (DSS)."
>
> Is the NSA really snooping on the Net? And if they are, would that
> violate the agency's charter, which specifically prohibits it from
> spying within the US?
>
> "Well, Net traffic is routed from God knows where to God knows where
> around the world," says George Washington University Professor Lance
> Hoffman, a professor of Communications and Telecommunications Systems
> Policy at George Washington University. "So if the NSA is doing this,
> they could say they are not violating their charter not to spy in the
> US. That's the thing. Intelligent routers send stuff any which way."
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com  ericm@motorcycle.com  http://www.lne.com/ericm
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