The Guardian sourced information about it to Snowden's leaks in 2013. What makes you think it's from a separate leaker, and that it's the same leaker as the "shadow brokers"? All I see is conjecture in those links.
Multiple people who have seen the entire Snowden dump claim that various files leaked by specific sources were not contained within the Snowden dump.
Yes, the idea that the "second source" and TSB are the one and the same is necessarily based on conjecture. Nobody is presenting it as a fact, but as a rather likely option based on analysis of data released by TSB and NSA leaks which cannot be attributed to Snowden.
Both TSB leaks and "second source" leaks originate from the same time period, and the same locations within the NSA. That does not mean that they were leaked by the same person(s), but it is a fairly likely option.
I'm not aware of there being a single lick of evidence to suggest that kookery, but even if he was a Russian agent, he certainly accidentally provided Americans a laudable service.
Curiously, the US Government has never made that allegation. There's significant circumstantial evidence to suggest that the US Government may not believe TSB to be Russian intelligence.
USG had no problem blaming Russian intelligence for many other things that were going on at the same time, but they never tied TSB to that bigger picture.
Given what we know about the likes of Hal Martin, there's little reason to believe that only Russian intelligence could have been behind the shadow brokers leaks. In fact, there were rather suspiciously timed twitter DMs written by Hal Martin within minutes of TSB releasing NSA files.
However Marcy Wheeler does argue rather convincingly that Hal Martin's twitter account may have been hacked by TSB in an effort to frame him.
A curious OSINT detail about Hal Martin is that he was using the email address teamtao999@gmail.com on fling.com while looking for women interested in fetishes and group sex. The email address is a reference to the tailored access operations team within the NSA.
His twitter account (@HAL_999999999) created in 2010, also referenced TAO2 in it's avatar at the time of the TSB leaks. It's unclear for how long that was the case, as it was changed later on and there are no archives. Interestingly, he also used to be fairly active on the infosec twitter between 2011 and early 2016 and is featured in tweet chains with many fairly prominent individuals.
His OPSEC wasn't very good, it's perfectly possible he was compromised by some random person.
Edit #89: Okay, I'll throw in one more detail. Very interestingly, it was allegedly Kaspersky who turned in Hal Martin to the NSA after he tried to approach them over twitter. This might seem like a big deal right now, but at the time it wasn't. Russian cybersecurity companies used to be quite happy to work with their western counterparts and law enforcement shortly after this incident when among others Ruslan Stoyanov from Kaspersky was charged with (and later convicted of) treason for allegedly giving information to an American researcher.
His life literally depends on Putin's whims - a situation which the USA and EU have forced him into. How could you possibly fault him for not poking the bear that he was forced in a cage with?
Not really, he'd be risking whats left of his life by doing so.
There's also rather little reason for Snowden to bother commenting on the very widely known abuses by Russian government, what could he possibly have to offer on that topic that hasn't already been said?
The existing evidence seems to suggest that Snowden was not actively trying to flee to Russia, but ended up stuck there due to reasons outside of his control.
How relevant is this (and the NSA's general spying capability) in 2025?
We hear a lot about local agencies perusing the services of private companies to collect citizens' data in the US, whether that's traffic information, IoT recordings, buying information from FAANG, etc. What's the NSA's position in the current administration? (e.g. we've heard a lot of noise in the past about the FBI and CIA getting the cold shoulder internally. I wonder how this applies to the NSA.)
>NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
They don't. But they have other options.
For example, Cloudflare is an American company that has plaintext access to the traffic of many sites. Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
>Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
This is true given some possible interpretations, false given other possible interpretations. Cloudflare can be secretly compelled to share specific things, there's no legal mechanism to compel Cloudflare to share everything.
Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like. And speaking of, whatever happened to those?
> Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like.
Well, no. But Google does significant business in foreign countries and doesn't really want to give an excuse for foreign governments to start aggressively pursuing their own alternatives.
> And speaking of, whatever happened to those?
Cloudflare still has a warrant canary on their transparency report page, Reddit deleted theirs in 2016.
Or if they have a deal or double agent working for them, there is a possibility for "full take" just like at AT&T. Seems pretty likely to me. Allegedly there are tens of thousands of undercover employees stationed throughout the economy in the "signature reduction" program. National security programs don't respect laws when there is something considered "important" if they can get away with it.
A double agent would not get you "full take", it'd be impossible to hide the traffic. A double agent could maybe feasibly steal keys from Google, but they'd have to do that all the time because the keys are constantly rotated.
And even then, stealing keys does not give you passive decryption and active decryption would be incredibly noisy.
NSA does not have enough money to spend to be able to incentivize Google to give them full take intercepts either.
I think you are not being creative enough with how one might attempt this. For example, splice the cables leading to the datacenter, put an inconspicuous chip in the servers that intercepts the keys and feeds them via wireless signals to a collection point. Perhaps you could even do something clever like put very short range EMF into a metal co-location rack and collect the signals almost totally invisibly using a mesh network of devices built into the metal.
There's lots of fun tricks you can think of when you have national resources at your disposal.
However, you are forgetting that NSA works for Google. It works to support the promotion of American companies worldwide. They're on the same team, and Google knows that. They even have the same mission: To usefully organize the world's information!
Now that Google is openly a military contractor, it's even easier to make this click. Back in the day, you had to read things like this Julian Assuage piece to understand this: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
If we were to accept that the NSA works for Google, there's even less reason to believe that Google would grant NSA full take access to plaintext content.
Google has a lot to lose by doing so, and not all that much to gain. Google has also been a leading force in pushing for broader use of encryption on the internet, making the NSAs work significantly more difficult even in a hypothetical scenario where Google is happy to give them anything they want.
They don't break encryption, they circumvent it. They get into people's computers and access the stored data after it's been decrypted. They stockpile zero day vulnerabilities and use them against their targets in order to install persistent malware. They intercept equipment and literally implant hardware onto the PCBs that let them access the networks. They have access to hordes of government CCTVs. They have real time satellite imaging. They have cellphone tower data.
Yes but I wouldn't say their capabilities have been "greatly" degraded. It's still very much in the "push a button and have someone's entire life history up on the screen" territory.
Degraded would be "it is impossible for them to know anything about people unless they send dozens of human agents to stalk them".
I think going from "lol we can read and store all the emails sent by everybody" to "lol we can hack any specific person and then read their emails" indicates a massive loss of capability.
The first approach enabled them to find targets that were not on their radar based on message contents, they can no longer do that.
They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know.
No doubt they still read texts. I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.
They no doubt have access to the data big tech's mined out of the entire world's population. That capability alone puts them into "bring everything about this guy up on the screen" territory.
>They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know.
I don't doubt for a second that they can read specific emails, but to suggest that they have bulk collection capabilities within Google or Microsoft is a stretch. NSA lacks the legal authority to compel that, NSA lacks the money to bribe Google or Microsoft and NSA likely lacks the political backing to put the biggest US companies in such a compromised position.
>I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.
The NSA lacked legal authority to do this bulk collection prior to the Snowden leaks, and yet that didn't stop them from collecting. Why would I believe that their lack of legal authority today would stop them?
1) They don't necessarily need to break all encryption, just knowing who is talking to who and then delivering a tailored payload is their M.O.; The Tailored Access Operations division exists just for this.
2) They didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason
3) They have the capability to compromise certificate authorities. Pinned certs aren't universal.
4) Speculation, but, Snowden's revelations probably set off an "arms race" of sorts for developing this capability. Lots more people started using Tor, VPNs, and more, so it would almost be dereliction of duty on their part if they didn't dramatically increase their capability, because the threats they are there to stop didn't disappear.
5) ML/LLM/AI has been around for a while, machine learning analysis has been mainstream for over a decade now. All that immense data a human can never wade through can be processed by ML. I would be surprised if they aren't using an LLM to answer questions and query real-time and historical internet data.
6) You know all the concerns regarding Huawei and Tiktok being backdoored by the Chinese government? That's because we're doing it ourselves already.
7) I hope you don't think TAO is less capable than well known notorious spyware companies like the NSO group? dragnet collection is used to find patterns for follow-up tailored access.
I don't understand, all they have to do is tap submarine cables, why is that infeasible now? What specific thing do you think they were collecting before that they can't now?
Metadata is extremely valuable!! lots of things can be inferred from it. In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example. They can take any packet and trace it back to a specific individual, even if you're on Tor, chaining VPNs,etc.. without decrypting it. They can see what destinations you're visiting. they can build a pattern of life profile you and mine that. The ad industry does much of this without access to global internet traffic captures already lol.
That's perfectly feasible. It is not feasible to do the same kind of captures as NSA was doing pre-Snowden, when most of that traffic wasn't encrypted.
> In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example
That's still just as encrypted as the email body itself.
Active listening is very noisy, we can be very confident they're not doing that at scale.
My whole point is that they're no longer able to do passive listening of unencrypted content and massive scale, but instead are forced to rely on much smaller scale active attacks.
You're making assumptions that are not taking into account all the other capabilities revealed in the Snowden leak and several other prior leaks. The name "Tailored Access Operations" alone should tell you something. They still have presence in all the large tech company's networks (with cooperation from them of course), and they are able to access critical servers like MTA's. The shadowbroker leaks are also another glimpse into their historical capabilities.
You're assuming that despite their budget not having changed meaningfully, no repercussions against anyone from the historical leaks, the continued renewal of the patriot act and unchanged mission of the intelligence community orgs that somehow they've wound down. That they've stopped R&D and tailored access ops.
You're also assuming that tailored access is not used to facilitate, correlate and enrich traffic decryption.
You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that? If you hoard 0 days and sophisticated implants what's the advantage? I mean half the time comms alone aren't enough, you want access to internal networks, documents that will never get transmitted over the network,etc.. smartphone telemetry data from a large group of targets. They're not interested in decrypting traffic to grandma visiting facebook, they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp. Once targets are identified they can be implanted, or have their traffic selected for decryption.
But I think i get what you're saying, that most of the traffic they capture is encrypted. That much I agree, that has changed. But whether they can decrypt it on-demand, that is tough to speculate, whether they need to? That's what I'm disagreeing with. If their goal was that one-time traffic decryption, perhaps that has been curtailed with the prevalence of TLS and CT logging. But metadata alone is sufficient to select a target, and all the evidence suggests that even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups.
>You're assuming that despite their budget not having changed meaningfully, no repercussions against anyone from the historical leaks, the continued renewal of the patriot act and unchanged mission of the intelligence community orgs that somehow they've wound down. That they've stopped R&D and tailored access ops.
That's not at all what I'm assuming. I'm stating that the environment has become much more hostile to them, reducing their capabilities because all the super low hanging fruit is gone. The part where they're able to hack almost anyone they want hasn't changed.
>You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that?
Metadata lets you select a target sure. Having full content takes as they used to allows you to easily find new targets by simply matching keywords, that particularly cool capability has practically disappeared post-Snowden.
>they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp
I don't think this really reflects what the previously leaked files suggest their main interests to be.
>what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp
Whereas before they'd have been able to get that information off the wire together with the message content (for all messages, in real time!). Now? They actually have to actively compromise Facebook to get that for a single user.
It's also worth noting that the previously leaked NSA documents seem to suggest that the NSA was not particularly busy breaking the law by hacking American companies.
> even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups.
Because of CT, such MITM attacks will not work without creating noise that's visible to the whole world.
So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever.
The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
>So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever.
Even if true, significantly degraded. Probably not true though, NSA has been very leaky and such a story would be kind of devastating for Google. NSA lacks the legal capability to force Google to do so, the money to bribe Google to do so and also almost certainly lacks the political backing to put one of the biggest US companies in such a position.
I don't doubt for a second that NSA could hack Google (or just bribe employees with appropriate access) and break into specific Gmail accounts if they wanted to. Bulk collection would be far more difficult to implement.
>The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
They do try, they just haven't been very successful at it.
Google, along with all other major service providers, has a legal portal so law enforcement can process warrant orders. I think all you have to do is hack that portal or process.
Sure, and you could also just submit fake warrants as many criminals have successfully done.
Neither of these approaches would enable bulk collection.
I'm sure the NSA can read essentially any specific emails they're interested in, they just can't do so at anywhere near the scale they used to pre-Snowden.
Not only that, these days almost all chats have moved to E2EE platforms. Reading that traffic in a stealthy manner requires compromising endpoints, bulk collection simply isn't possible.
It’s not Google room whatever, it’s Cloudflare room whatever. That’s why you don’t hear much about undermining encryption standards anymore, who needs that when you have SSL termination for 40% of the internet?
You can't decrypt anything with letsencrypt root certs, you can issue your own certificates but it would be impossible to use those at any significant scale.
It's also worth considering that CT makes it extremely noisy to use such certificates to attack web browsers.
I'd bet they could absolutely proxy large parts of people and make use of these certs. I wonder how much are CT logs scrutinized, would these "rogue" certs be found easily because we can't find traces of them being generated by letsencrypt ? Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ?
They couldn't do that at scale without being detected, no. There are various people actively looking for this, and the existing tooling makes it easy to detect.
>Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ?
Yes, all modern browsers require certificates to be in the CT logs in order for them to be accepted.
This is naive to the point where it is indistinguishable from disinformation.
Aside from a tiny minority of people applying their own encryption (with offline confirmed public keys) at end points with securely stored air gapped private keys, this information is available to the US government, it’s the god damn job of the NSA.
The NSA can hack pretty much anybody, yes. The NSA can no longer collect everything as they were doing pre-Snowden.
The crucial difference is that it is no longer nearly as easy for the NSA to identify new targets as it used to be, because they don't have full take access to the vast amounts of content they used to.
So what? They can't do that at scale without making a ton of noise.
That's a very boring capability compared to what they were able to do pre-Snowden. That's also not a new capability, they were able to do that pre-Snowden too.
Could you be more specific? It's really hard to have an useful conversation based on a comment like this, but really easy to have one based on a comment which links to specific cases and perhaps even explains how the obvious parallel construction appears.
It's hard to find solid coverage of this because obviously the methods are often hidden and rarely leak out to the press at large. The press also gets confused and thinks that defending our constitutional rights will lead to criminals being acquitted.
If you spend a lot of time watching and studying these cases and how they evolve throughout the courts it becomes obvious that this is likely occurring more than most people realize.
I don't think the Mangione case is a particularly good example, you wouldn't use a 911 call by a random McDonald's manager to disguise parallel construction.
The caller is easy to identify, how could the government ever trust this person to not reveal their parallel construction? If they were planted by the government, that'd be extremely difficult to hide. The government also likely wouldn't be able to compensate them in any meaningful way for telling such a lie.
The Kohlberger case also does not suggest parallel construction, the DOJ policy isn't binding and the DOJ can in fact legally violate that whenever they want.
Being familiar with the USG classification system, I was thrown off by the beginning of this article. It doesn't sound like something that would be classified merely as Secret.
The article begins with:
> XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by...
This should be edited to:
> XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a classified computer system used by...
If you want someone to be actually pedantic about it, then no system is ever classified. Knowledge of the system might be classified, the system may be accredited to handle classified data, at some level. The data this system allegedly collects is obviously unclassified and only becomes classified after landing in some data lake.
Information is classified not anything else. All of that to say, this is one of the many secret computer systems the nsa allegedly has. As the Wikipedia article clearly indicates
Because Wikipedia. My edit got immediately auto-bot-reverted[1] by some anti-vandalism crusader. Insert bell-curve meme[1] where "just edit wikipedia" is the middle of the bell-curve.
This is a reminder why all the traffic should be encrypted and obfuscated (i.e. no SNI in clear text). Ideally, the traffic should be encrypted to resemble a random noise. If you are making an app, you can embed public keys and use those to completely encrypt traffic, without relying on CAs.
For example, Telegram does this, using a homemade encryption protocol that has no clear-text SNI like HTTPS. As I remember, WeChat also uses some home-grown form of obfuscation.
As a bonus, this makes it more difficult for telecoms to discriminate against certain sites or apps and helps enforce net neutrality no matter if they like it or not.
Isn't the whole issue with net neutrality that ISPs would be incentivized to prioritize their own traffic (or that of companies they collaborate with)? How does making it harder for them to identify traffic for my app/service/whatever stop them from doing that? As long as they can identify the traffic they do want to prioritize (by companies who haven't done the process you describe), it's not obvious to me why they wouldn't have trouble deprioritizing my stuff based on them at least knowing that it's not their own, effect if they don't know whose it is? "Random noise" isn't likely to look like it's their special favorite traffic.
If everyone including the priority traffic did this, then I guess it would have an effect on net neutrality, then I could see that it would make a difference, but I don't see how that could be construed as "whether they like it or not" given that they could just as easily not implement this if they didn't "like it".
That's not to say this isn't worth doing for the privacy and security benefits, but I'm struggling to see how this would have any real-world influence on net neutrality.
It's also a reminder that no mater how secure you think you are, some third party may have access.
Consider that TAO (or SSF) can probably get through your firewall and router, and maybe into the management engine on the servers with your critical data.
The only thing you've got going for you is that they will (probably) keep your data secure (for themselves).
I mean if I create an offline private key and encrypt my message to be only read with my public key and I’ve learned about math and encryption. I can be assured that my receiver would need to be compromised.
I don’t like these general observation comments. This kind of makes it unappealing to learn about encryption, but it’s worth it and makes you choose either a proper encrypted software or use a key for secret messages.
Back in they day, it is claimed they could only store 20 TB a day, but technology has improved considerably... but so have data volumes. I wonder if they can store more content for longer now or if the volumes have increased too much.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/nsa_targets_p...
https://www.reuters.com/article/opinion/commentary-evidence-...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/11/second-leake...
It is possible that the "second source" and the shadow brokers are one and the same.
https://www.electrospaces.net/2017/09/are-shadow-brokers-ide...
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/09/15/shadow-brokers-and-the...
And here's an interesting tidbit about a possible link between TSB and Guccifer 2.0
https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/11/01/show-me-the-metadata-a...
Yes, the idea that the "second source" and TSB are the one and the same is necessarily based on conjecture. Nobody is presenting it as a fact, but as a rather likely option based on analysis of data released by TSB and NSA leaks which cannot be attributed to Snowden.
Both TSB leaks and "second source" leaks originate from the same time period, and the same locations within the NSA. That does not mean that they were leaked by the same person(s), but it is a fairly likely option.
USG had no problem blaming Russian intelligence for many other things that were going on at the same time, but they never tied TSB to that bigger picture.
Given what we know about the likes of Hal Martin, there's little reason to believe that only Russian intelligence could have been behind the shadow brokers leaks. In fact, there were rather suspiciously timed twitter DMs written by Hal Martin within minutes of TSB releasing NSA files.
However Marcy Wheeler does argue rather convincingly that Hal Martin's twitter account may have been hacked by TSB in an effort to frame him.
A curious OSINT detail about Hal Martin is that he was using the email address teamtao999@gmail.com on fling.com while looking for women interested in fetishes and group sex. The email address is a reference to the tailored access operations team within the NSA.
His twitter account (@HAL_999999999) created in 2010, also referenced TAO2 in it's avatar at the time of the TSB leaks. It's unclear for how long that was the case, as it was changed later on and there are no archives. Interestingly, he also used to be fairly active on the infosec twitter between 2011 and early 2016 and is featured in tweet chains with many fairly prominent individuals.
His OPSEC wasn't very good, it's perfectly possible he was compromised by some random person.
Edit #89: Okay, I'll throw in one more detail. Very interestingly, it was allegedly Kaspersky who turned in Hal Martin to the NSA after he tried to approach them over twitter. This might seem like a big deal right now, but at the time it wasn't. Russian cybersecurity companies used to be quite happy to work with their western counterparts and law enforcement shortly after this incident when among others Ruslan Stoyanov from Kaspersky was charged with (and later convicted of) treason for allegedly giving information to an American researcher.
Why would they? It was a deeply embarrassing event for them.
There's also rather little reason for Snowden to bother commenting on the very widely known abuses by Russian government, what could he possibly have to offer on that topic that hasn't already been said?
What we know is he went to China, then Russia.
Honest question, what more needs to be said?
Why is this a problem?
We hear a lot about local agencies perusing the services of private companies to collect citizens' data in the US, whether that's traffic information, IoT recordings, buying information from FAANG, etc. What's the NSA's position in the current administration? (e.g. we've heard a lot of noise in the past about the FBI and CIA getting the cold shoulder internally. I wonder how this applies to the NSA.)
NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
They don't. But they have other options.
For example, Cloudflare is an American company that has plaintext access to the traffic of many sites. Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
This is true given some possible interpretations, false given other possible interpretations. Cloudflare can be secretly compelled to share specific things, there's no legal mechanism to compel Cloudflare to share everything.
Hence the famous "SSL added and removed here ;-)" slide
AT&T does not have much to lose by doing that, Google does.
Well, no. But Google does significant business in foreign countries and doesn't really want to give an excuse for foreign governments to start aggressively pursuing their own alternatives.
> And speaking of, whatever happened to those?
Cloudflare still has a warrant canary on their transparency report page, Reddit deleted theirs in 2016.
They were never very common.
https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-secret-u...
And even then, stealing keys does not give you passive decryption and active decryption would be incredibly noisy.
NSA does not have enough money to spend to be able to incentivize Google to give them full take intercepts either.
There's lots of fun tricks you can think of when you have national resources at your disposal.
However, you are forgetting that NSA works for Google. It works to support the promotion of American companies worldwide. They're on the same team, and Google knows that. They even have the same mission: To usefully organize the world's information!
Now that Google is openly a military contractor, it's even easier to make this click. Back in the day, you had to read things like this Julian Assuage piece to understand this: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Google has a lot to lose by doing so, and not all that much to gain. Google has also been a leading force in pushing for broader use of encryption on the internet, making the NSAs work significantly more difficult even in a hypothetical scenario where Google is happy to give them anything they want.
To quote a former Chief Scientist of the NSA, Rule #1 of cryptanalysis is "look for plaintext". Implementation flaws are very common.
They can easily go after specific targets, but bulk collection is no longer viable in the same way it was pre-Snowden.
Degraded would be "it is impossible for them to know anything about people unless they send dozens of human agents to stalk them".
The first approach enabled them to find targets that were not on their radar based on message contents, they can no longer do that.
No doubt they still read texts. I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.
They no doubt have access to the data big tech's mined out of the entire world's population. That capability alone puts them into "bring everything about this guy up on the screen" territory.
I don't doubt for a second that they can read specific emails, but to suggest that they have bulk collection capabilities within Google or Microsoft is a stretch. NSA lacks the legal authority to compel that, NSA lacks the money to bribe Google or Microsoft and NSA likely lacks the political backing to put the biggest US companies in such a compromised position.
>I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.
Sure, but that's increasingly iMessage.
It was certainly easy in a world where everything wasn't encrypted, that's not the case anymore.
2) They didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason
3) They have the capability to compromise certificate authorities. Pinned certs aren't universal.
4) Speculation, but, Snowden's revelations probably set off an "arms race" of sorts for developing this capability. Lots more people started using Tor, VPNs, and more, so it would almost be dereliction of duty on their part if they didn't dramatically increase their capability, because the threats they are there to stop didn't disappear.
5) ML/LLM/AI has been around for a while, machine learning analysis has been mainstream for over a decade now. All that immense data a human can never wade through can be processed by ML. I would be surprised if they aren't using an LLM to answer questions and query real-time and historical internet data.
6) You know all the concerns regarding Huawei and Tiktok being backdoored by the Chinese government? That's because we're doing it ourselves already.
7) I hope you don't think TAO is less capable than well known notorious spyware companies like the NSO group? dragnet collection is used to find patterns for follow-up tailored access.
Yeah, they can still collect lots of useful metadata.
Metadata is extremely valuable!! lots of things can be inferred from it. In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example. They can take any packet and trace it back to a specific individual, even if you're on Tor, chaining VPNs,etc.. without decrypting it. They can see what destinations you're visiting. they can build a pattern of life profile you and mine that. The ad industry does much of this without access to global internet traffic captures already lol.
> In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example
That's still just as encrypted as the email body itself.
My whole point is that they're no longer able to do passive listening of unencrypted content and massive scale, but instead are forced to rely on much smaller scale active attacks.
You're assuming that despite their budget not having changed meaningfully, no repercussions against anyone from the historical leaks, the continued renewal of the patriot act and unchanged mission of the intelligence community orgs that somehow they've wound down. That they've stopped R&D and tailored access ops.
You're also assuming that tailored access is not used to facilitate, correlate and enrich traffic decryption.
You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that? If you hoard 0 days and sophisticated implants what's the advantage? I mean half the time comms alone aren't enough, you want access to internal networks, documents that will never get transmitted over the network,etc.. smartphone telemetry data from a large group of targets. They're not interested in decrypting traffic to grandma visiting facebook, they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp. Once targets are identified they can be implanted, or have their traffic selected for decryption.
But I think i get what you're saying, that most of the traffic they capture is encrypted. That much I agree, that has changed. But whether they can decrypt it on-demand, that is tough to speculate, whether they need to? That's what I'm disagreeing with. If their goal was that one-time traffic decryption, perhaps that has been curtailed with the prevalence of TLS and CT logging. But metadata alone is sufficient to select a target, and all the evidence suggests that even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups.
That's not at all what I'm assuming. I'm stating that the environment has become much more hostile to them, reducing their capabilities because all the super low hanging fruit is gone. The part where they're able to hack almost anyone they want hasn't changed.
>You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that?
Metadata lets you select a target sure. Having full content takes as they used to allows you to easily find new targets by simply matching keywords, that particularly cool capability has practically disappeared post-Snowden.
>they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp
I don't think this really reflects what the previously leaked files suggest their main interests to be.
>what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp
Whereas before they'd have been able to get that information off the wire together with the message content (for all messages, in real time!). Now? They actually have to actively compromise Facebook to get that for a single user.
It's also worth noting that the previously leaked NSA documents seem to suggest that the NSA was not particularly busy breaking the law by hacking American companies.
> even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups.
Because of CT, such MITM attacks will not work without creating noise that's visible to the whole world.
The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html
Even if true, significantly degraded. Probably not true though, NSA has been very leaky and such a story would be kind of devastating for Google. NSA lacks the legal capability to force Google to do so, the money to bribe Google to do so and also almost certainly lacks the political backing to put one of the biggest US companies in such a position.
I don't doubt for a second that NSA could hack Google (or just bribe employees with appropriate access) and break into specific Gmail accounts if they wanted to. Bulk collection would be far more difficult to implement.
>The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
They do try, they just haven't been very successful at it.
Neither of these approaches would enable bulk collection.
I'm sure the NSA can read essentially any specific emails they're interested in, they just can't do so at anywhere near the scale they used to pre-Snowden.
Not only that, these days almost all chats have moved to E2EE platforms. Reading that traffic in a stealthy manner requires compromising endpoints, bulk collection simply isn't possible.
It's also worth considering that CT makes it extremely noisy to use such certificates to attack web browsers.
>Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ?
Yes, all modern browsers require certificates to be in the CT logs in order for them to be accepted.
For example, we can easily pull up logs for gmail.com and see which certificates browsers would accept. https://api.certspotter.com/v1/issuances?domain=gmail.com&ex...
Aside from a tiny minority of people applying their own encryption (with offline confirmed public keys) at end points with securely stored air gapped private keys, this information is available to the US government, it’s the god damn job of the NSA.
The crucial difference is that it is no longer nearly as easy for the NSA to identify new targets as it used to be, because they don't have full take access to the vast amounts of content they used to.
That's a very boring capability compared to what they were able to do pre-Snowden. That's also not a new capability, they were able to do that pre-Snowden too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1hlmq3...
The FBI apparently attempted to use this in the Bryan Kohberger case:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/us/idaho-murders-bryan-ko...
It's hard to find solid coverage of this because obviously the methods are often hidden and rarely leak out to the press at large. The press also gets confused and thinks that defending our constitutional rights will lead to criminals being acquitted.
If you spend a lot of time watching and studying these cases and how they evolve throughout the courts it becomes obvious that this is likely occurring more than most people realize.
The caller is easy to identify, how could the government ever trust this person to not reveal their parallel construction? If they were planted by the government, that'd be extremely difficult to hide. The government also likely wouldn't be able to compensate them in any meaningful way for telling such a lie.
The Kohlberger case also does not suggest parallel construction, the DOJ policy isn't binding and the DOJ can in fact legally violate that whenever they want.
The article begins with:
> XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by...
This should be edited to:
> XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a classified computer system used by...
The program is allegedly a Top Secret program.
Information is classified not anything else. All of that to say, this is one of the many secret computer systems the nsa allegedly has. As the Wikipedia article clearly indicates
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Discospinster#WTF_ed...?
[1] https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/533936279/Bell-Curve
For example, Telegram does this, using a homemade encryption protocol that has no clear-text SNI like HTTPS. As I remember, WeChat also uses some home-grown form of obfuscation.
As a bonus, this makes it more difficult for telecoms to discriminate against certain sites or apps and helps enforce net neutrality no matter if they like it or not.
If everyone including the priority traffic did this, then I guess it would have an effect on net neutrality, then I could see that it would make a difference, but I don't see how that could be construed as "whether they like it or not" given that they could just as easily not implement this if they didn't "like it".
That's not to say this isn't worth doing for the privacy and security benefits, but I'm struggling to see how this would have any real-world influence on net neutrality.
Consider that TAO (or SSF) can probably get through your firewall and router, and maybe into the management engine on the servers with your critical data.
The only thing you've got going for you is that they will (probably) keep your data secure (for themselves).
I don’t like these general observation comments. This kind of makes it unappealing to learn about encryption, but it’s worth it and makes you choose either a proper encrypted software or use a key for secret messages.