March 18, 2014
A 10pt. Plan To Keep NSA Out Of Our Data; And, Increase The Chances Of A Successful, Nasty Strategic Surprise For America
Kim Zetter has an online article in today’s “Wired.com,” with the title above. With a picture of leaker Edward Snowden emblazoned with the U.S. Constitution in the background, Ms. Zetter argues that it is up to the technology community to “step in and do the right thing to secure “our” future….just ask Edward Snowden,” she says. The irony of Edward Snowden speaking of Internet freedom and privacy from Russia… I guess is lost on her. Let the inmates run the asylum is basically her argument. And be dammed any secrecy laws that Edward Snowden broke, and be dammed all the sensitive sources, methods, and techniques he exposed across the entire intelligence collection spectrum — putting all Americans and her allies at greater risk of a nasty strategic surprise — because of his reckless and irresponsible actions. The darker angels of our nature would love nothing more than to somehow get a nuclear device into the U.S. homeland and detonate it.
While my own personal guess is that the Malaysian Flight 370 is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, the speculation that al Qaeda, and/or others are going to use the plane “for another purpose,”– this incident/mystery and the speculation that such an plan could be in progress is illustrative of the dangers America and the West face with respect to extremist Jihadists. God forbid if such an event ever does occur; but, Ms. Zetter and others of her ilk may want to reflect on this potential nightmare scenario, as they praise someone who may well have set in motion the window of opportunity for our adversaries to carry out such an operation – BECAUSE EDWARD SNOWDEN’s leaks have made us more vulnerable to strategic surprise.
But, I digress. Ms. Zetter proposes ten steps to “reign” in those “cowboys” at Ft. Meade: (1) End-to-End Encryption; (2) Bake user friendly encryption into products at the front-end; (3) Make all websites SSL/TLS; (4) Enable HTTP strict transport security; (5) Encrypt data center links; (6) Use perfect forward security; (7) Secure software downloads; (8) Reduce storage/logging time; (9) Replace Flash with HTML 5; and, (10) Fund a global account to support community audits of open source code. All these things, she argues, would reign in NSA and GCHQ, etc. and make things better in the long run.
While I acknowledge that we “might” have gone too far in our intelligence collection efforts in the aftermath of 9/11 (and, that has yet to be proven -no one has been charged with any crime) Ms. Zetter and her colleagues may want to consider what if the Malaysian incident is a dry run for the real thing. Uploading a nuclear weapon onto an aircraft and exploding it over the continental U.S. Even if this turns out not to be the case, rest assured that al Qaeda and others are watching and learning that there are significant gaps in radar coverage around the world. They are learning that, a large Boeing 777 can “lose itself” if you have an experienced pilot and the knowledge of where these gaps lie. And, if we have a crippled NSA and intelligence collection apparatus — we have inadvertently increased their chances of success — providing a “tailwind” (no pun intended) to their efforts. Ms. Zetter may well want to consider some of the unintended consequences of these proposals. Or, as Dr Zaus says to Taylor (Charleton Heston) in the 1968 classic, Planet of the Apes, “Don’t go there Taylor, you might not like what you find,” V/R, RCP
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