Two parts to a killer post today: 1) Jacob Appelbaum fulfills his intelligence mission and 2) he is a harbinger of digital social disease (BadBIOS).
On with the show!
Well, If you follow @ioerror on Twitter you knew that this post was coming. My favorite spook, Jacob Appelbaum, gave a talk to 30C3 (that’s Chaos Computer Club) today called “To Protect and Infect, Part II”. His talk is the stage show complimenting Der Spiegel’s latest on the NSA and it’s Tailored Access Operations unit (TAO).
If you read my blog, you’ll know that I predicted Jacob’s next move would be to protect corporate intelligence assets at the expense of full-time NSA spooks. That’s exactly what happened at 30C3, ad nauseam.
Why does this matter? Because the really important part of Snowden’s revelations was that private corporate entities are working with the NSA/GCHQ to spy on you. Appelbaum’s strategy is to paint these mega-tech companies, the corporate sponsors who can afford tickets to his talks, as the victims of stupid/malicious government. Give ‘em another chance, Joe Voter, so that we can salvage these invaluable, once-in-an-empire, intelligence assets. Watch the video. Appelbaum repeats the meme “It’s not the companies fault’ at least five times. I’m going to let him talk with a few quotes:
“This is part of a constant theme of [NSA] sabotaging and undermining American companies and American ingenuity. As an American, though generally not a nationalist, I find this disgusting, especially as someone who writes free software and would like my tax dollars to be spent on improving these things and when they do know about them [the vulnerabilities in Windows] I don’t want them to keep it a secret because all of us are vulnerable. It’s a really scary thing.”
And, in case you forgot who the bad guys are…
“Emperor Alexander, the head of the NSA, has a lot of power. If they want to right now, they’ll know that the IMEI of this phone [holds up his iPhone] is interesting, it’s very warm, which is another, uh, funny thing, and they would be able to break into this phone almost certainly and then turn on the microphone. And all without the court. So that to me is really scary. And I especially dislike the fact that if you were to be building these types of things, they treat you as an opponent if you wish to be able to fulfill the promises that you make to your customers. And as someone who writes security software, I think that’s bullshit.”
And tough-love, Tor-style…
“Now we’re going to name a bunch of companies, because fuck those guys for collaborating when they do. And fuck them for leaving us vulnerable when they do. And I mean that in the most loving way, because some of them are victims, actually. It’s important to note that we don’t yet understand which is which. So it’s important to name them so that they have to go on record, so that they can say where they are, and so that they can give us enough rope to hang themselves. I really want that to happen, because I think it’s important to find out who collaborated and who didn’t collaborate. In order to have truth and reconciliation, we need to have a little truth.”
Jacob refuses to believe Apple is evil…
“Do you think Apple helped them [the NSA] with that [iPhone targets]? I don’t know…. I don’t really believe that Apple didn’t help them with that.”
“Either they [the NSA] have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products, meaning that they are hoarding information about critical systems that American companies produce and sabotaging them, or Apple sabotaged it themselves. Not sure which one it is. I’d like to believe that since Apple didn’t join the PRISM program until after Steve Jobs died, that maybe it’s just that they write shitty software. We know that’s true.”
Stop attacking Microsoft, NSA!
“How many people from Al Qeada use Solaris, do you suppose? This tells you a really important point. They [the NSA] are interested in compromising the infrastructure of systems, not just individual people, they want to take control and literally colonize those systems with these implants. And that’s not part of the discussion. People are not talking about that because they don’t know about that yet, but they should, because, in addition to the fact that Sun is a US company, which they are building capabilities against, that to me, it really bothers me, I can’t tell you how much that bothers me. We also see that they are attacking Microsoft and other US companies, and Linux and Free USB (?) where there are a lot of people from all over the world who are building it, so they’re attacking not only collective efforts and corporate efforts, but basically every option you possibly can, from end-users down to telecom core things, um…”
Finally…
“I want to really harp on this. Now it’s not that I think European companies are worth less, I suspect especially after this talk that won’t be true, in the literal stock sense, but I don’t know. I think it’s really important to understand that they are sabotaging American companies because of the the so called ‘home field advantage’.
The problem is that as an American who writes software, who wants to build hardware devices, this really chills my expression and it also gives me a problem which is that people say: ‘Why would I use what you’re doing? What about the NSA?’ Man that really bothers me! I don’t deserve the Huawei taint. And the NSA gives it.
President Obama’s own advisory board, that was convened to understand the scope of these things has even agreed with me about this point. That this should not be taking place. That hording of zero-day exploits cannot happen simply without thought processes that are reasonable and rational and that have an social and economic valuing where we really think about the broad scale impact.”
So, yeah, Jacob’s on a mission to save that special relationship between Silicon Valley and the US intelligence community.
Appelbaum’s 30C3 talk had all the other attributes I’ve come to expect: 1) a shout-out to Laura, “My dear friend Laura Poitras who is totally fantastic, by the way”; 2) beating the ‘they spied on Merkel!’ drum and suggesting the NSA spied on another head of state, Hugo Chavez; 3) *not* outing Five-Eyes agents or targets, because some targets, Jacob feels, are “legitimate” (call off Louise Mensch!); 4) profiling hot-buttons like ‘the NSA “crusades” against Muslims’; and 5) political misdirection, such as the following:
“You go to a URL, QUANTUMINSERT puts some code in your web-browser, which you then execute, which causes you to load resources, one of the resources that you’ll load when you’re loading CNN.com, for example, which is one of their examples. You like that by the way? That’s an extremist site. So, you might have heard about that. A lot of Republicans in the United States read it, right before they wage illegal, imperialist wars.”
Oh, ho ho. CNN, Republicans and the NSA. Like the Republican president, Jacob?
I’ve marveled at Jacob’s god-like knowledge of the NSA’s operating capabilities and procedures for some time, but you knew that already. Thankfully, he puts it all in a nutshell for us:
“The NSA wants to be able to spy on you. If they have ten different options for spying on you that you know about, they have thirteen ways of doing it and they do all thirteen.”
I wanna know how Jacob writes his FOIA requests! So, seriously Jacob, what’s the NSA’s master plan?
“So that’s the goal: total surveillance and non-attribution. And they want to do it in the dark.”
“Dark” like Tor? And there’s the heart of the matter: Appelbaum is selling fear of the NSA. If I had a dollar for every time he used “scary” in this talk, I could buy a phone like his. He wants you to fear the NSA so that you’ll use Tor with all those old Microsoft/Apple/Facebook products that you’ve come to know and love. Self-selecting with Tor is a cheap way for the GLOBAL intelligence community to sort out who to watch– that’s their big problem, sorting through everything they steal.
It’s also interesting to note which companies Appelbaum chooses to protect and which ones he chooses to shame. Victims: Microsoft, Apache, Apple, Linux, Solaris… he even protects President Obama indirectly. Yahoo, however, must be behind on their payments:
“And boy oh boy do they [NSA-TAO] love Yahoo.”
“[35:40] You’ll notice that right here they explain how QUANTUM works… They do an injection and try to beat the Yahoo packet back. Another interesting point is that for the Yahoo packet to be beaten, the NSA must impersonate Yahoo. This is a really important detail because what it tells us is that they are essentially conscripting Yahoo and saying that they are Yahoo. So they are impersonating Yahoo. [That's why half the chat functions don't work?!] So they are impersonating a US company to a US company user and they are not actually supposed to be in this conversation at all. And when they do it, then they, of course, basically, if you’re using Yahoo you’re definitely going to get owned. And I don’t just mean that Yahoo is vulnerable, they are. But, I mean people who use Yahoo, maybe it’s a bad generalization, but you know, they’re not the most security minded people on the planet. They don’t keep their computers up to date, I’m guessing. And that’s probably why they love Yahoo so much. They also love CNN.com…”
Cool kids don’t use Yahoo.
On the other side of the spectrum: Jacob really likes Cryptophone, Redphone and Moxie Marlinspike. You know what that means– Moxie’ll build the new spy-system to replace the old cell phone infrastructure which was outed for being a spy-system.
So Jacob enlightens us with this message: who should we love, who should we hate, what should we fear… and finally, how can we protect ourselves? Well, the Tor network and Tor’s operating system Tails, naturally. On top of that, Appelbaum has told his followers that NSA-infection can be detected if your machine is emitting encrypted UDP traffic. Okay, that’s what they want you to look for– by all means do! But I’d bet my eye-teeth there’s more interesting stuff going on elsewhere.
Let me stop for breath…
The second intriguing thing about Appelbaum’s 30C3 talk was how he tried to smooth over his quarrel with Dragos Ruiu, a brilliant computer security researcher who you can read about here. Dragos has been researching a fascinating computer virus(es) that appears to use speakers to bridge the air-gap; the virus is called “BadBios”.
Before Appelbaum talked, I had never heard of said quarrel. But, in Appelbaum’s own words:
“STUCCOMONTANA is ‘BadBios’ if you’ve heard about that. I feel bad for Dragos. He doesn’t talk to me right now. I think he might be mad. After I was detained by the US Army on US soil, I might add, um, they took a phone from me. Now, it shouldn’t matter but they did, now, they also went after all my phone records so they didn’t need to take the phone, but they just wanted to intimidate me which is exactly the wrong thing to do to me, um, but, as he [Dragos] told the story, after that all of his computers including his X-box were compromised. And he says that even to this day that some of those things persist. And he talks about the Bios. Here is a document that shows clearly that they re-flash the Bios and they also have other techniques, including system management mode related root kits, and they have persistence inside of the Bios.”
“This is evidence of the thing that Dragos talks about– maybe he doesn’t have it– but it really does exist.”
So, what you’re saying Jacob, is that it wasn’t you and it won’t be you who does it again? Or are you giving the NSA credit for something that will scare the online community into a more perfect trap, a platinum age of computer surveillance? Totally heinous move, Jacob, but I’ll admit, it’s a clever tactic. How do I sign up for the Tor again? Does it support Yahoo?
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