U.S. Warms Up Its Own Old Spy Stories To
Bash Putative Chinese Espionage
By Moon Of Alabama
February 12, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The
Washington Post is
warming up an old crypto story:
For more than half a century, governments all
over the world trusted a single company to keep
the communications of their spies, soldiers and
diplomats secret.
The company, Crypto AG, got its first break
with a contract to build code-making machines
for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with
cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption
devices for decades, navigating waves of
technology from mechanical gears to electronic
circuits and, finally, silicon chips and
software.
The Swiss firm made millions of dollars
selling equipment to more than 120 countries
well into the 21st century. Its clients included
Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear
rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.
But what none of its customers ever knew was
that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in
a highly classified partnership with West German
intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the
company’s devices so they could easily break the
codes that countries used to send encrypted
messages.
The decades-long arrangement, among the most
closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid
bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history
of the operation obtained by The Washington Post
and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint
reporting project.
That Crypto AG had been a CIA/NSA/BND operation
has been known for decades. One wonders why the CIA
history was now leaked to the Washington Post
and to the German state TV channel ZDF.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
Scott Shane @ScottShaneNYT -
14:38 UTC · Feb 11, 2020
Back in 1995 at the @baltimoresun, with @TBowmanNPR,
I wrote a long story on the NSA's covert
relationship with Crypto AG, allowing the US to
read the secrets of many countries:
link. Now @gregpmiller got the official CIA
history of this decades-long project.
Greg's story is a fascinating read on what we
described in 1995 as one of the great
intelligence operations of the Cold War filling
in details we could only guess at 25 years ago.
I'm glad to see we got the story right.
I recall vividly how at the end of my trip to
Switzerland in 1995 to find former employees of
Crypto AG, one of them managed to find a
smoking-gun memo from 1975 that showed an NSA
crypto mathematician named Nora Mackebee had
attended a Crypto design meeting.
Two years after Scott Shane broke
the story Wayne Madsen basically plagiarized it to
write a similar story for some conspiracy lovers
magazine:
Sanho Tree @SanhoTree -
13:48 UTC · Feb 11, 2020
For the record, I published the Crypto AG
story 23 years ago when I was an editor at
Covert Action Quarterly.
If you want to understand why the US
intelligence community is so freaked out about
Huawei, it’s because they’ve been playing the
same game for decades.
Crypto AG: The NSA's Trojan Whore?
---
Scott Shane @ScottShaneNYT -
15:05 UTC · Feb 11, 2020
Replying to @SanhoTree
And for the record, the CAQ story from 1997
relied mainly on the @baltimoresun story I wrote
with @tbowman in 1995:
RIGGING THE GAME
The Swiss company Crypto AG became useless for
the NSA when
people moved to standard computers to encrypt
their information and used the Internet to send it.
It needed some other companies it could manipulate.
Around that time this writer was the chief
technical officer of a large Internet access
company. When we had to select a firewall platform
for our internal networks we cynically discussed if
it would be preferable to buy Cisco equipment, to
then be spied on by the NSA, or to buy from the
Israeli company Checkpoint which likely had a Mossad
backdoor. (We bought both and stacked them.)
That such cynicism was wholly justified became
evident when Edward Snowden revealed the NSA
machinations. Soon thereafter Juniper Networks, a
provider of large backbone equipment, was
found to have at least two NSA backdoors in its
operation system. Other 'western' telecommunication
equipment companies were
similarly manipulated:
Even neutral countries firms are not off-limits
to NSA manipulations. A former Crypto AG
employee confirmed that high-level US officials
approached neutral European countries and argued
that their cooperation was essential to the Cold
War struggle against the Soviets. The NSA
allegedly received support from cryptographic
companies Crypto AG and Gretag AG in
Switzerland, Transvertex in Sweden, Nokia in
Finland, and even newly-privatized firms in
post-Communist Hungary. In 1970, according to a
secret German BND intelligence paper, supplied
to the author, the Germans planned to "fuse" the
operations of three cryptographic firms-Crypto
AG, Grattner AG (another Swiss cipher firm), and
Ericsson of Sweden.
So why was the allegedly secret CIA history of an
already known story leaked right now? And why was it
also leaked to a German TV station?
Sanho Tree
points to the likely reason:
If you want to understand why the US
intelligence community is so freaked out about
Huawei, it’s because they’ve been playing the
same game for decades.
The WaPo story itself
also makes that connection:
There are also echoes of Crypto in the
suspicions swirling around modern companies with
alleged links to foreign governments, including
the
Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky, a texting
app tied to the
United Arab Emirates and the
Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.
The warmed up Crypto AG story is a subtle smear
piece against Huawei and Kapersky.
The U.S. wants to convince European countries to
not buy Huawei products for their 5G networks. It
wants to remind them that telecommunication products
can be manipulated. It wants to instill fear that
China would use Huawei to spy on foreign countries
just like the U.S. used Crypto AG.
This is also the reason for this recent
misleading Reuters headline which the story
itself debunked:
Germany has proof that Huawei worked with Chinese
intelligence: Handelsblatt
"At the end of 2019, intelligence was passed to
us by the U.S., according to which Huawei is
proven to have been cooperating with China's
security authorities," the newspaper quoted a
confidential foreign ministry document as
saying.
'U.S. intelligence' that is handed over to
manipulate someone is of course not 'proof' for
anything.
The U.S. is
pressing its allies on a very high level:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the
Chinese Communist Party “the central threat of
our times” on Thursday, even as he sought to
talk up the prospects of a United States trade
deal with Britain, which rebuffed American
pressure to ban a Chinese company from future
telecommunications infrastructure.
The scathing criticism of the Chinese
government was the strongest language Mr. Pompeo
has used as the Trump administration seeks to
convince American allies of the risks posed by
using equipment from Huawei, a Chinese
technology giant.
A week after Pompeo's panic message Trump took to
the phone to convince Boris Johnson who was
not impressed:
Donald Trump’s previously close relationship
with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks close
to collapse, following new revelations that the
president slammed down the phone on him.
Trump’s behaviour during last week’s call was
described by officials as „apoplectic,“ and
Johnson has now reportedly shelved plans for an
imminent visit to Washington.
...
The call, which one source described to the
Financial Times as „very difficult,“ came after
Johnson defied Trump and allowed Chinese
telecoms company Huawei the rights to develop
the UK’s 5G network.
Trump’s fury was triggered by Johnson backing
Huawei despite multiple threats by Trump and his
allies that the United States would withdraw
security co-operation with the UK if the deal
went ahead.
Trump’s threats reportedly „irritated“ the UK
government, with Johnson frustrated at the
president’s failure to suggest any alternatives
to the deal.
Huawei products are pretty good, relatively cheap
and readily available. They are just as buggy as the
products of other equipment providers. The real
reason why the U.S. does not want anyone to buy
Huawei products is that it is the one large network
company the U.S. can not convince to provide it with
backdoors.
European countries do not fear China or even
Chinese spying. They know that the U.S. is doing
similar on a much larger scale. Europeans do not see
China as a threat and they do not want to get
involved in the escalating U.S.-China spat:
"Whose side should your country take in a
conflict between the US and China?"
Source -
bigger
The U.S. just
indicted four Chinese military officers for the
2017 hacking of Equifax during which millions of
addresses and financial data were stolen. The former
CIA Director General Michael Hayden
had defended such pilfering as "honorable
espionage" and Equifax had made it laughably easy to
get into its systems:
[J]ust five days after Equifax went public with
its breach — KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that
the administrative account for a separate
Equifax dispute resolution portal catering to
consumers in Argentina was wide open, protected
by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password
combination ever: “admin/admin.”
To indict foreign military officers for spying
when they simply pilfered barely protected servers
is seen as offensive. What will the U.S. do when
China does likewise?
Every nation spies. It is one of the oldest
trades in this world. That the U.S. is making such a
fuss about putative Chinese spying when it itself
is
the biggest sinner is unbecoming.
This article was
published by "Moon
Of Alabama" -
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