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

Five-Eyes intelligence services to help Europe circumvent encryption

Strongly secured chats annoy secret services and prosecutors worldwide. On this sensitive issue, the EU states are now to coordinate with the powerful Anglo-Saxon secret service alliance.

In future, the EU states are to work closely with the Anglo-Saxon secret service alliance of the "Five Eyes" to circumvent secure encryption in digital communications. This can be seen from documents sent to the member states by the German EU Council Presidency and available to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. As "Five Eyes", the secret services of the USA, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada are cooperating with each other.

A report by the Austrian radio station ORF had already pointed out two weeks ago the similarity of the wording in the draft EU paper with a statement by the secret service alliance "Five Eyes" as well as India and Japan on October 11, which also demanded "lawful access to encrypted communication". Another paper from the EU Council of Ministers now substantiates this suspicion: The document called "Recommendations for the future handling of the encryption issue" is dated November 16 and has been submitted to the SZ.

The document is addressed to the EU member states and is a kind of handout. Point six states that governments should engage in a close dialogue on the topic with the initiators of the paper "End-to-End-Encryption and Public Safety". This is the declaration of the Five Eyes countries, as well as India and Japan, in which they call on companies such as Facebook to allow states access to encrypted content.

👀 👉🏼 Translated with DeepL
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/geheimdienste-verschluesselung-crypto-wars-messenger-1.5131084

#fiveeyes #intelligence #eu #encryption #messenger #cryptowars #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Threema boss: Master key for secret services "not possible at all

The head of the messenger service Threema has sharply criticized demands for access to private chat messages for state security authorities. "These demands for a master key testify to the inexperience of the authorities," Martin Blatter told Welt am Sonntag. Technically, he said, it was not even possible. "We don't have a master key that we could deposit. The encryption is done by the users and not by us.

"Criminals almost always already known to the authorities"

In mid-November, alleged plans by EU countries to ban the secure encryption of messages on channels such as WhatsApp caused a great stir. The German EU Council Presidency had drafted a resolution on the subject. However, the paper was vaguely formulated and did not go into detail about how security authorities should be able to decrypt encrypted messages. Nevertheless, civil rights activists and data protectionists strongly criticized the initiative.

Blatter also emphasized that in the case of terrorist attacks, the perpetrators were almost always already known to the authorities and on file. "This means that politicians have not managed to protect citizens". In the newspaper interview, he also spoke of U.S. secret services having forced manufacturers of routers to install back doors, which in the end were also used by China.

👀 👉🏼 Translated with DeepL
https://telegra.ph/Threema-Chef-Generalschl%C3%BCssel-f%C3%BCr-Geheimdienste-gar-nicht-m%C3%B6glich-11-29

via www.heise.de

#fiveeyes #intelligence #eu #encryption #messenger #threema #cryptowars #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

2015: "Europe is the closest [] tied to the #FiveEyes but many [] more intelligence agencies across Europe cooperate [] & here we've added #Austria, #CzechRepublic, #Croatia, #Poland... most of Europe is cooperating [] w/ #NSA in some way w/ #GCHQ."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8FBGvfGh80

Electrospaces (@electrospaces): "A great new resource for studying the #Snowden revelations : summaries of documents and coverterms from the #FiveEyes #SIGINT agencies, compiled by @caparsons: https://christopher-parsons.com/resources/the-sigint-summaries/"|Stop cooming
https://twitter.censors.us/electrospaces/status/1625589847149928449#m

🇵🇸 TARGETING PALESTINE - Declassified Australia – 03/11/2023

The Pine Gap US surveillance base located outside of Alice Springs in Australia is collecting an enormous range of communications and electronic intelligence from the brutal Gaza-Israel battlefield – and this data is being provided to the Israel Occupation Forces. 

Two large Orion geosynchronous signals intelligence satellites, belonging to the US and operated from Pine Gap, are located 36,000 kms above the equator over the Indian Ocean. From there, they look down on the Middle East, Europe and Africa, and gather huge amounts of intelligence data to beam back to the Pine Gap base.

#Palestine #Gaza #Surveillance #Ozz #Australia #FiveEyes #Nato #US #Israel

Threat Actor Claims Classified Five Eyes Data Theft | Infosecurity Magazine

A known threat actor has leaked online classified documents from the US government and its allies that they claim were stolen from a government IT contractor.

IntelBroker took credit for the breach, alongside Sanggiero and EnergyWeaponUser, according to a screenshot posted to X (formerly Twitter) by security researchers HackManac.

There’s good reason to suspect that IntelBroker’s claims are legitimate, with the actor linked to a string of successful high-profile breaches in the past.

In November of the same year, they advertised for sale sensitive information purportedly stolen from industrial giant and US government contractor General Electric.

“Data included a lot of DARPA-related military information, files, SQL files, documents etc"

#FiveEyes