Unfortunately, U.S. government agencies are faced with priorities. Decisions must be made as to where we point our assets which means there are lots of holes. Lots of INTEL ends up on the floor which could be used. This is a major problem which will not be fixed soon.
FM
No place to hide
November 17, 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Anti-Terror-Watch/No-place-to-hide/2004/11/16
/1100574470653.html#
A high-tech arms race is heating up between spies and their targets. As
the West monitors millions of phone calls and emails, terrorists find
new ways of hiding information. Deborah Snow reports.
The TV image of the laughing Bali bomber, Amrozi, might have tempted
some to think of him as a simple son of the Indonesian soil, and Osama
bin Laden strikes the pose of an old-time patriarch in his cave.
But despite their medieval take on theology, there's nothing
unsophisticated about the grasp which terrorism networks have on today's
communications revolution.
This year, Singapore's Home Affairs Minister, Wong Kan Seng, revealed
his agents had found encrypted documents on computers seized from
members of Jemaah Islamiah.
Encryption, or cryptography, uses mathematical algorithms to "scramble"
communications so they are meaningless to anyone who doesn't have a
numerical "key" to decode them.
Once the preserve of intelligence agencies and the rarefied world of
applied mathematics, high-grade cryptography started to become widely
commercially available a decade ago.
Peter Coroneos, the chief executive of the Internet Industry
Association, says the US tried at one stage to stop encryption
technologies from leaving the country, "but once this stuff became
commonly available on the net, the genie was out of the bottle".
These days intelligence experts talk of a new kind of cyber
arms race under way between the spy agencies and those who want to elude
the eavesdropping net.
Dr Alan Dupont, a former intelligence analyst now with the Lowy
Institute for International Policy in Sydney, confirms "there is no
doubt that the intelligence agencies would be very happy if a lot of
this off-the-shelf, high-grade cryptography was not available.
Unfortunately it is, and terrorists are availing themselves of it."
A senior intelligence insider states grimly that "it was a problem 10
years ago, it's a problem today, it will be a problem in another 10
years. It's a game of chase, catch up, run ahead, and chase all over
again."
The difficulty for government is that the art of encryption also serves
legitimate purposes. The world of e-commerce would collapse if companies
couldn't encrypt customers' financial data.
Protecting this while ensuring law enforcement and intelligence agencies
have a window into the exchanges of those plotting terrorism or other
crimes in cyberspace remains an unresolved dilemma.
In Australia, a glimpse of the agencies' concerns came in a report
prepared by a former deputy head of ASIO, Gerard Walsh, in 1997.
The report, first suppressed then censored by the Federal Government,
turned up later in an uncut version in a university library. It revealed
the warning that "strong encryption, which cannot be defeated by law
enforcement and national security agencies, is already ... in the public
domain".
More recently, this year's report on the intelligence agencies hints at
ongoing frustration by government eavesdroppers. "Individual access to
communications that are instantaneous, diverse and robustly encrypted"
could impose "great difficulties and costs on intelligence collection",
the author, Philip Flood, wrote.
He warned that the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), Australia's top
code-cracking agency, was encountering limits to its ability to "exploit
collected communications".
This carries echoes of the complaint by the head of America's National
Security Agency (NSA), Michael Hayden, three years ago that "we're
behind the curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications
revolution ... [It is] literally moving at the speed of light".
However, Professor Des Ball, of the Australian National University and
Australia's foremost expert on signals intelligence, believes the NSA
has made dramatic progress in some areas since then, particularly in
monitoring previously impenetrable fibre-optics traffic.
Australia's DSD works closely with the NSA. Together with the Defence
Imagery and Geospatial Organisation it forms part of a global
eavesdropping and intelligence-sharing club run by the US, Britain,
Australia, Canada and New Zealand under the decades-old "UKUSA"
agreement.
These five countries - but especially what some intelligence hands refer
to as the most closely interconnected "three eyes" (the US, Australia
and Britain) - run a matrix of spy satellites, satellite and radio
listening facilities, undersea listening devices and eavesdropping spy
planes to monitor the world's phone, radio, telex, fax and internet
traffic.
Australia's contribution is a ring of powerful satellite and radio
intercept ground stations. The main ones are at Pine Gap in Central
Australia, Cabarlah in Queensland, Kojarena near Geraldton in Western
Australia, Shoal Bay in the Northern Territory, and the newest, the
little-known DSD Riverina station near Wagga Wagga in NSW.
There are also regular forays by RAAF Orion reconnaissance aircraft
equipped with the latest surveillance equipment.
To this the Federal Government wants to add a fleet of US-supplied
aircraft, the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be packed
with listening and imaging equipment.
Worldwide, the sheer scale of the information siphoning operation
threatens at times to overwhelm the agencies. The NSA chief, Michael
Hayden, admitted to a US intelligence committee that "the volume,
variety and velocity of human communications makes our mission more
difficult each day...".
While DSD monitors communications traffic outside Australia, inside the
country the task of intercepting communications is left to ASIO and the
police, who may only do so under judicial warrant. Their job was made
easier in 1997 when the Federal Government began compelling
telecommunications carriers to build an intercept capability into
networks.
Yet there's not much point in eavesdropping on something if you can't
crack the code it's in.
Cryptography is not the only challenge. Some experts worry that al-Qaeda
has mastered another of the black arts of the computing world -
steganography, which involves hiding messages inside picture or music
files sent over the internet.
Intelligence and computer security experts vary widely in their
assessments of how much an organisation like DSD can or can't crack.
Ball says DSD computers are capable of crunching trillions of
calculations a second. "If you want to apply all that computing power
there's nothing they can't crack."
However a senior intelligence insider disagreed with this assessment.
Nick Ellsmore, a computer security expert who lectures to federal and
state governments, is also convinced its virtually impossible to crack
some of the newest algorithmic codes. He and other security experts say
the easier alternative is to surreptitiously gain the "keys" to
encrypted data.
One way to do this is to secretly monitor the keystrokes someone makes
when they enter passwords into a computer. This can be done by planting
"keyboard sniffers" on a target computer, or using the more cumbersome
method of remotely sensing the computer's electromagnetic emanations
from a nearby eavesdropping site.
A New York group of computer geeks claimed a few years ago that by using
components bought easily from electronics stores, they were able to
secretly extract data from an array of printers, cables and computer
monitors in offices around the city, including the police department, a
stockbroker's office and the World Trade Centre.
A Cambridge PhD student, Marcus Kuhn, recently documented an optical
eavesdropping technique which used a photo sensor to monitor light
emissions from a computer terminal, using that to reconstruct the text
remotely on another machine.
But paradoxically these kinds of technical opportunities could be making
the work of spies more dangerous.
Ball says it is difficult to read microwave transmissions and computer
emanations from satellites. "Some of this stuff can't be done remotely;
you still need the ground element," he told the Herald.
"The whole radio spectrum, which is how information flows, has changed
to shorter and shorter wavelengths, which means you have to get in
closer and closer. And that means the nature of covert operations is
going back much more to what it was in the 1960s."