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The GRU close access operation against the OPCW in perspective

October 09, 2018

(Updated: December 2, 2018) Last Thursday, October 4, the Dutch Ministry of Defence held a press conference about how its Military Intelligence and Security Service MIVD had disrupted a spying operation by the Russian military intelligence agency GRU last April. Four Russian operatives were caught red-handed when they tried to hack into the Wi-Fi network of the headquarters of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) published a formal indictment against seven GRU officers, including the four from the Netherlands. Here, the failed GRU operation will be compared to close access operations of the NSA, which learns us more about the methods for hacking wireless networks. There are also some answers to frequent questions about the disruption by the MIVD. Press conference with from left to right: MIVD director Onno Eichelsheim, Defence minister Ank Bijleveld, British ambassador Peter Wilson (photo: Bart

Trump's telephones in the Treaty Room

September 17, 2018

Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the White House became much less transparant than under previous administrations: most information has been stripped off the White House website and hardly any photos from behind the scenes are published. Therefore we see very little of how the White House rooms and West Wing offices are currently used. But a new photo, released by the president's social media director a few days ago, now shows a glimpse of the so-called Treaty Room, in which president Trump and vice-president Pence received an update call on the emergency preparedness concerning the impact of Hurricane Florence: Vice-president Pence and president Trump in the Treaty Room, September 15, 2018 (White House photo - click to enlarge) The Treaty Room The Treaty Room is on the second floor of the main building of the White House, the residential mansion, which includes both the ceremonial rooms and the private quarters of the president. The room is named after the peace treaty bet

Collection of domestic phone records under the USA FREEDOM Act

July 14, 2018

(Updated: July 15, 2018) One of the most controversial NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden was the bulk collection of domestic telephone records under the authority of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. A detailed analysis of the workings of this program was published on this weblog earlier. In 2015, Section 215 was replaced by the USA FREEDOM Act, which prohibited the collection in bulk and provided more safeguards. The NSA became much more transparant about this program, which gives the opportunity for the following explanation of how the domestic phone records program currently works. NSA is also more transparant about things going wrong: last month it revealed that it had to delete all the telephone records collected since 2015 due to technical irregularities. Screenshot from 60 Minutes from December 15, 2013, showing an NSA contact chaining tool used for the telephone records collected under Section 215. Collection under Section 215 USA PATRIOT Act The NSA started its bu

The hotlines between North and South Korea

February 13, 2018

(Updated: April 22, 2018) The current 2018 Winter Olympics , held in PyeongChang, South Korea, led to a charm offensive by neighbouring North Korea, which included the reopening of a border hotline with the South, that had been closed for almost two years. The reopening came with new photos of the fancy-looking communications equipment, which will be described here, as well as the fact that there's not just one phone line, but over 40. Unlike other hotlines, the ones between North and South Korea are mostly used for low-level practical issues. > See also: Bilateral hotlines worldwide A South Korean liaison officer speaks with his North Korean counterpart over the inter-Korean communications channel at Panmunjom, January 3, 2018 (photo: Unification Ministry - click to enlarge) The Red Cross hotline The first hotline between North and South Korea became operational on September 22, 1971. The link was the result of the first inter-Korean Red Cross meeting held on September 20, whi

Section 702 FAA expires: what are the problems with PRISM and Upstream?

December 31, 2017

(UPDATED: January 20, 2018) Two important NSA programs, PRISM and Upstream, are based upon section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), a law that was originally scheduled to expire today. Now the US Congress has to decide whether to continue or to reform this crucial legal authority . Although PRISM became almost synonymous for NSA's alleged mass surveillance, it's actually, just like the Upstream program, targeted collection aimed at specific foreign targets. Still, many people think that these programs pull in way too many data ( incidental collection ) to be subsequently queried in an illegal way ( backdoor searches ). Here we'll show some of the complexities of these two collection programs and that there are various internal procedures and methods in order to keep collection and analysis as focussed as possible. Slide from the PRISM presentation that for the first time revealed PRISM and Upstream as part of section 702 FAA collection. Until recently, US lawmakers w

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