Forwarded from BlackBox (Security) Archiv
The intelligence coup of the century’
For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries.
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.
👉🏼 Read more:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/?itid=hp_hp-top-table-main_crypto-730am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
👉🏼 In German:
https://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21
#CIA #BND #USA #Germany #spionage #cryptoAG #thinkabout #why
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries.
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.
👉🏼 Read more:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/?itid=hp_hp-top-table-main_crypto-730am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
👉🏼 In German:
https://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21
#CIA #BND #USA #Germany #spionage #cryptoAG #thinkabout #why
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
Forwarded from BlackBox (Security) Archiv
The Crypto AG Scandal And The Question Of Swiss Neutrality
On the 11 February 2020, the Washington Post published an extensive article revealing the #CryptoAG Scandal. The article damningly exposes the way in which the #Swiss #encryption company Crypto AG was co-opted by the #CIA for decades. The #spy #agency coerced the company’s founder into working for them in the 1950s, and later bought out Crypto AG in a secret partnership with the German spy agency the #BND. Throughout this time, faulty encryption machines were sold to governments around the world to improve American #espionage capabilities. This “audacious” project lasted well into the 21st century, presumably until the company’s liquidation in 2018. According to the Washington Post article, “CIA and BND documents indicate that Swiss officials must have known for decades about Crypto’s ties to the U.S. and German spy services, but intervened only after learning that news organizations were about to expose the arrangement.” It is this revelation which has led various news agencies (including the BBC) to declare that Swiss neutrality has been “shattered”.
The Swiss have long cultivated a policy of neutrality. This concept is ubiquitous in popular culture, from the end of The Sound of Music, to the English phrase “being Switzerland” which is synonymous with neutrality. What impact, (if any), will the implications of Swiss partiality toward the U.S. in the scandal have upon their aura of neutrality?
👉🏼 Read more:
https://theowp.org/the-crypto-ag-scandal-and-the-question-of-swiss-neutrality/
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
On the 11 February 2020, the Washington Post published an extensive article revealing the #CryptoAG Scandal. The article damningly exposes the way in which the #Swiss #encryption company Crypto AG was co-opted by the #CIA for decades. The #spy #agency coerced the company’s founder into working for them in the 1950s, and later bought out Crypto AG in a secret partnership with the German spy agency the #BND. Throughout this time, faulty encryption machines were sold to governments around the world to improve American #espionage capabilities. This “audacious” project lasted well into the 21st century, presumably until the company’s liquidation in 2018. According to the Washington Post article, “CIA and BND documents indicate that Swiss officials must have known for decades about Crypto’s ties to the U.S. and German spy services, but intervened only after learning that news organizations were about to expose the arrangement.” It is this revelation which has led various news agencies (including the BBC) to declare that Swiss neutrality has been “shattered”.
The Swiss have long cultivated a policy of neutrality. This concept is ubiquitous in popular culture, from the end of The Sound of Music, to the English phrase “being Switzerland” which is synonymous with neutrality. What impact, (if any), will the implications of Swiss partiality toward the U.S. in the scandal have upon their aura of neutrality?
👉🏼 Read more:
https://theowp.org/the-crypto-ag-scandal-and-the-question-of-swiss-neutrality/
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
Forwarded from BlackBox (Security) Archiv
Maximator: European signals intelligence cooperation, from a Dutch perspective
This article is first to report on the secret European five-partner sigint alliance Maximator that started in the late 1970s. It discloses the name Maximator and provides documentary evidence. The five members of this European alliance are Denmark Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. The cooperation involves both signals analysis and crypto analysis. The Maximator alliance has remained secret for almost fifty years, in contrast to its Anglo-Saxon Five-Eyes counterpart. The existence of this European sigint alliance gives a novel perspective on western sigint collaborations in the late twentieth century.
The article explains and illustrates, with relatively much attention for the cryptographic details, how the five Maximator participants strengthened their effectiveness via the information about rigged cryptographic devices that its German partner provided, via the joint U.S.-German ownership and control of the Swiss producer Crypto AG of cryptographic devices.
1. Introduction
The post-Second World War signals intelligence (SIGINT) cooperation between five Anglo-Saxon countries – Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States – is well-documented.1 This alliance is often called Five Eyes and is based on the 1946 UKUSA Agreement. What is not publicly known so far is that there is a second, parallel, western signals intelligence alliance, namely in north-western Europe, also with five members. It has existed since 1976 and is called Maximator. It comprises Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands and is still active today.
The Maximator alliance deepens our understanding of the recently-revealed operation Thesaurus/Rubicon: the joint CIA-BND ownership and control of the Swiss manufacturer of cryptographic equipment Crypto AG, from 1970 to 1993.2 Crucial information about the inner workings (and weaknesses) of cryptographic devices sold by Crypto AG (and by other companies) were distributed within the Maximator network. This allowed the participants to decrypt intercepted messages from the more than one hundred countries that had bought compromised devices from the 1970s onwards.
👉🏼 Read more:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02684527.2020.1743538
#Maximator #SIGINT #eu #cia #bnd #FiveEyes
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@NoGoolag
📡@BlackBox
This article is first to report on the secret European five-partner sigint alliance Maximator that started in the late 1970s. It discloses the name Maximator and provides documentary evidence. The five members of this European alliance are Denmark Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. The cooperation involves both signals analysis and crypto analysis. The Maximator alliance has remained secret for almost fifty years, in contrast to its Anglo-Saxon Five-Eyes counterpart. The existence of this European sigint alliance gives a novel perspective on western sigint collaborations in the late twentieth century.
The article explains and illustrates, with relatively much attention for the cryptographic details, how the five Maximator participants strengthened their effectiveness via the information about rigged cryptographic devices that its German partner provided, via the joint U.S.-German ownership and control of the Swiss producer Crypto AG of cryptographic devices.
1. Introduction
The post-Second World War signals intelligence (SIGINT) cooperation between five Anglo-Saxon countries – Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States – is well-documented.1 This alliance is often called Five Eyes and is based on the 1946 UKUSA Agreement. What is not publicly known so far is that there is a second, parallel, western signals intelligence alliance, namely in north-western Europe, also with five members. It has existed since 1976 and is called Maximator. It comprises Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands and is still active today.
The Maximator alliance deepens our understanding of the recently-revealed operation Thesaurus/Rubicon: the joint CIA-BND ownership and control of the Swiss manufacturer of cryptographic equipment Crypto AG, from 1970 to 1993.2 Crucial information about the inner workings (and weaknesses) of cryptographic devices sold by Crypto AG (and by other companies) were distributed within the Maximator network. This allowed the participants to decrypt intercepted messages from the more than one hundred countries that had bought compromised devices from the 1970s onwards.
👉🏼 Read more:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02684527.2020.1743538
#Maximator #SIGINT #eu #cia #bnd #FiveEyes
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@NoGoolag
📡@BlackBox
Taylor & Francis
Maximator: European signals intelligence cooperation, from a Dutch perspective
This article is first to report on the secret European five-partner sigint alliance Maximator that started in the late 1970s. It discloses the name Maximator and provides documentary evidence. The ...
Forwarded from BlackBox (Security) Archiv
A new license to hack
The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) is to be allowed to hack mobile phone and Internet providers quite legally in the future. This is the result of the new BND draft law, which we are publishing. The Federal Constitutional Court had classified the old law as unconstitutional and overturned it.
The German Federal Intelligence Service is looking for hackers (m/f/d) via job advertisement and overwrites an employee story with a license to hack. Business trips abroad belong to the intelligence hackers like "unique" attack tools with which they are supposed to penetrate computer networks and collect data. The focus of the BND is on networks outside Germany. For a long time, the secret service agents considered non-European countries in particular to be "outlawed".
In May, the Federal Constitutional Court set the BND the highest judicial limits. The judges from Karlsruhe made it clear: Even abroad, the German state is bound by basic rights; human dignity and the secrecy of telecommunications apply not only to Germans. The highest court declared the only four-year-old BND law of the Grand Coalition unconstitutional.
The legislator must therefore amend the BND law by the end of 2021. The Federal Chancellery has prepared a draft bill and sent it to the other ministries on Friday. We publish the draft law in full text.
As the employer of the secret service, the Federal Chancellery tries with the new law to comply with the court's requirements on the one hand and to restrict the BND as little as possible on the other hand. This can be seen among other things in the offensive hacking powers.
👀 👉🏼 Translated from German with DeepL:
https://netzpolitik.org/2020/bnd-gesetz-eine-neue-lizenz-zum-hacken/
👀 👉🏼 🇩🇪 Draft law amending the law on the Federal Intelligence Service to implement the provisions of the Federal Constitutional Court's ruling of 19 May 2020 (1 BvR 2835/17)
https://netzpolitik.org/2020/bnd-gesetz-eine-neue-lizenz-zum-hacken/#2020-09-25_Bundeskanzleramt_Referentenentwurf_BND-Gesetz
#bnd #germany #secretservice #law #hacking #netpolitics #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag
The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) is to be allowed to hack mobile phone and Internet providers quite legally in the future. This is the result of the new BND draft law, which we are publishing. The Federal Constitutional Court had classified the old law as unconstitutional and overturned it.
The German Federal Intelligence Service is looking for hackers (m/f/d) via job advertisement and overwrites an employee story with a license to hack. Business trips abroad belong to the intelligence hackers like "unique" attack tools with which they are supposed to penetrate computer networks and collect data. The focus of the BND is on networks outside Germany. For a long time, the secret service agents considered non-European countries in particular to be "outlawed".
In May, the Federal Constitutional Court set the BND the highest judicial limits. The judges from Karlsruhe made it clear: Even abroad, the German state is bound by basic rights; human dignity and the secrecy of telecommunications apply not only to Germans. The highest court declared the only four-year-old BND law of the Grand Coalition unconstitutional.
The legislator must therefore amend the BND law by the end of 2021. The Federal Chancellery has prepared a draft bill and sent it to the other ministries on Friday. We publish the draft law in full text.
As the employer of the secret service, the Federal Chancellery tries with the new law to comply with the court's requirements on the one hand and to restrict the BND as little as possible on the other hand. This can be seen among other things in the offensive hacking powers.
👀 👉🏼 Translated from German with DeepL:
https://netzpolitik.org/2020/bnd-gesetz-eine-neue-lizenz-zum-hacken/
👀 👉🏼 🇩🇪 Draft law amending the law on the Federal Intelligence Service to implement the provisions of the Federal Constitutional Court's ruling of 19 May 2020 (1 BvR 2835/17)
https://netzpolitik.org/2020/bnd-gesetz-eine-neue-lizenz-zum-hacken/#2020-09-25_Bundeskanzleramt_Referentenentwurf_BND-Gesetz
#bnd #germany #secretservice #law #hacking #netpolitics #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag
netzpolitik.org
BND-Gesetz: Eine neue Lizenz zum Hacken – netzpolitik.org
Der Bundesnachrichtendienst soll künftig ganz legal Mobilfunk- und Internetanbieter hacken dürfen. Das geht aus dem Entwurf zum neuen BND-Gesetz hervor, den wir veröffentlichen. Das Bundesverfassungsgericht hatte das alte Gesetz als verfassungswidrig eingestuft…