Russian Sigint

[Dave Emery]

> 
> I found this on The New American web page. ?
> 
> 
> GRU Snooping Continues. The interception, taping, and publication of a
> conference call between Newt Gingrich and other congressional leaders
> demonstrates the susceptibility of microwave-transmitted electronic
> communications to eavesdropping. A growing number of intracity phone calls,
> e-mail, and faxes, as well as nearly all long-distance calls, are carried via
> microwave. But it's not just itinerant Democratic Party activists with police
> scanners who can listen in on microwave communications.
> 
	This is complete horse pucky.   Microwave is less and less and
less used for long distance communications in the US.  Very little
traffic now flows over microwave links - fiber has so much higher
capacity and better data error characteristics that it has nearly
completely taken over long distance telephone and data communications. 
A typical microwave link can carry 45 or maybe 130 megabits per second
maximum per rf channel and maybe has 6 rf channels in use at a time
maximum whilst current fibers carry 1.5 Gigibits per fiber and can be
upgraded to 3.0 Gigabits easily and way more than 10 Gbs with current
WDM technology. Typical installed fiber routes have around 30 or more
fibers just because it is as easy to install that many as one.  

	The remaining active microwave links are primarily used as
backup for fiber routes and may not be carrying live traffic at all. 
Virtually every route that used to be microwave has now had one or more
fiber routes installed to replace it and if it hasn't they are planned
or being installed now.  At the best there are a few remote places where
installing fiber is impractical that still communicate with the world on
microwave links and there are a few microwave systems still in service
to carry certain vital national survival and security traffic where they
provide redundancy.

	Also, essentially all current common carrier microwave is now
digital rather than fm-fdm-ssb.  These high capacity and bit rate 64-QAM
or 256-QAM signals are significantly harder to intercept and demodulate
and demultiplex than the FM signals used until the late 80's were.  This
is especially true of reception from sites that see only marginal
scattered signals rather than the direct beam, as digital radio tends to
not work at all with marginal signals rather than being just noisy.

	I think that probably less than 1% of US long distance public
telephone and data communications currently travel by microwave at any
point in their journey compared to more than 68% at the peak  of
microwave usage in the early 1980's.  And this figure is dropping
steadily over time as more and more fiber is put in service.

> As the Center for Security Policy (CSP) points out, the GRU _ the Main
> Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces _
> maintains signals intelligence ("sigint") facilities in Lourdes, Cuba, and
> Cam Ranh
> Bay in Vietnam which are capable of intercepting nearly all microwaved
> communication across the continental United States as well as the Atlantic and
> Pacific.

	This is not entirely true.  Intercepting microwave signals from
over the horizon is not possible except under truly extraordinary
propagation conditions and then only for brief periods of time with
gigantic antennas and from relatively nearby places.  And the  resultant
scattered signal is of very poor quality and getting usable high bit
rate data out of such scatter signals,  as would be required to
intercept common carrier traffic, is not easily possible.

	At the very best the Lourdes facility might possibly be able to
see occasional microwave scatter traffic from southern Florida and the
Carribean on very good days.  This is hardly traffic from the entire
continental US and one can be very sure that the NSA and other agencies
responsible for thinking about US communications security have long ago
arranged in cooperation with the long distance carriers to ensure that
nothing of any great use was showing up.

	There are two catagories of microwave traffic those facilities
can intercept - domestic and international satellite traffic from US
satellites with footprints that cover the Carribean and whatever radio
traffic is intercepted by Russian low orbit ferret satellites as they
pass over North America and by high orbit monitoring satellites parked
over the western hemisphere.

	Very little public point to point telephone and data traffic
between points in the US is currently transmitted via satellite.  Fiber
is so much cheaper and better in quality that the carriers gave up
satellite transmission of domestic traffic some years ago.  There are
some compelling reasons for this - the long 240 ms delay in transmitting
traffic via geosynchronous satellite is very noticable to many humans in
the give and take of conversations, and without special protocol
provisions many data communications systems give horrible throughput
over links with that long a delay as well as giving unnacceptably long
echo delays in interactive applications.  And satellite bandwidths are
even less than terrestrial microwave bandwidths and compared to the vast
amount of fiber now in service are just a tiny fraction of the total.

	Domestic communications satellites are primarily used for point
to multipoint traffic such as credit card authorization systems for gas
stations and stores and distribution of video to TV stations and cable 
companies, and broadcasts of data to large numbers of receivers.  It is
rarely cheaper and more cost effective to put point to point traffic on
communications satellites.  And most of what is there is traffic sent by
private users of one sort or another such as large companies and
government agencies - much of which is securely encrypted if sensitive.
And that which is not encrypted is readily accessible to anyone with the
right commonly available equipment and a vanilla satellite dish of the
sort there are literally millions and millions of scattered throughout
the US, Canada and Mexico - the potential threat from this source dwarfs
what the Russians might do with the information (and is readily
controlled by link encryption).

	Even international communications from the US are less and less
routed via satellite as high capacity fiber trans-ocean cables are
installed.  I have seen numbers on the order of less than 10% satellite
transmission of international traffic and as new optical amplifier
cables are installed (which one can assume the UKUSA partners such as
the US NSA get the entire bitstream from) this number is also plunging.
And most international satellite communications can be monitored from
the other end and do not have to be monitored from near the US.

	As a point of fact I would be more concerned that Russian
submarines have tapped the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific cables
somewhere than that the Russians pick up satellite communications. One
hopes that the bitstreams on those cables are really securely link
encrypted - doing so would seem to be a no-brainer - but I have never
seen any reference to this being the practice.

	What capabilities Russian sigint satellites still have in the
post USSR era of economic collapse where Russia has not been able to
launch a single imaging spy satellite for several months and has no
usable ones in orbit, according to a recent NY Times story, is not
clear.  Russian satellites have generally had a much shorter useful life
in orbit than US satellites do and Russia and the Russian space program
has been pretty poor and disorganized for the last several years.  At
best such sigint satellites could conceivably be used  to monitor some
few domestic microwave links that happened to put a usable signal in the
direction of the satellite and were far enough away from other
transmitters on the same frequency to be separated by antenna
directivity enough to stand out.   While a satellite in geosynchronous
orbit could see all of North America, it is pretty certain that it could
see only a rather small fraction of modern digital microwave links well
enough to recover traffic from them.  And it is absolutely certain that
the capacity of the satellite to intercept and relay traffic is only a
few microwave links simultaneously at most.  This is hardly everything
or more than a small piece in fact.

	It has been reported that Russian sigint satellites use laser
optical links back to Lourdes rather than the Ka and higher frequency
band microwave links that US equivalents have used to pass the signals
they intercept, but one suspects that the relevant US agencies have
probably used whatever means were necessary to find these links and
determine what US traffic is being monitored and ensure that that
anything truly important was routed by fiber instead.

	In any case, the value of Lourdes is primarily as a base for
intercepting US satellite communications and as a conveniant place to
put a ground station for sigint and ferret satellites where  satellite
to satellite relay is not required to get the signals back to a ground
station.  If Lourdes were shut down most of the sigint functions of these
satellites could be operated from Russia using satellite to satellite
communications of one sort or another. The only major loss would be the
ability to intercept certain domestic communications satellite signals
which use focused beams and not readily intercepted from other places
where the Russians may have space to put antennas.  And one suspects
that the Russians could probably do most of this interception from
covert sites under cover as legitimate satellite installations in the US
and Canada or other Caribbean or Central American countries.

	In any case it is certainly not true that Lourdes can intercept
a significant fraction of US telecommunications simply because most US
telecommunications do not any longer travel via microwave radio. 
Lourdes undoubtably can intercept enough useful stuff to justify
continuing its operation, but this is partly because of blind US
government policy on encryption rather than anything else.  This
especially applies to cellular communications which can be intercepted
from satellites (and of course by anyone with a scanner or modified
cellphone as well).  How well even satellites with large 100 or 200 foot
dishes do at intercepting the dense network of US and other cellular
systems with hundreds of transmitters going at once on the same
frequency in the area of the footprint of the satellite receive antenna
at 800 mhz I do not know.  And tracking and identifying calls of
interest when the satellite can intercept only some cells on some
cellsites reliably must be fairly hard. 

	In any event the US operates several sigint satellites of much
more advanced design and capability than Russia and has for many more
years than the Russians have.   And it is widely reported that the US
has worldwide ground monitoring stations listening to essentially all
communications satellites in the Clarke orbit and probably any that
aren't that could possibly carry useful traffic.  Our capabilities and
technology and expenditure in this area is well beyond anyone elses. 
	
 Furthermore, according to the CSP, "it is believed that both the
> Russians
> and the Cubans are developing capabilities at Lourdes to conduct information
> warfare (IW). Such a capability would permit these facilities to be employed not
> only to intercept information [but also to] make it possible for Moscow or
> Havana
> to manipulate telecommunicated information so as to deny the American people
> and their government vital services or otherwise work against U.S. interests."
> 

	There may be some capability to jam US commercial communications
satellites which for the most part have not any kind of protection
against such jamming.  Vital US military communications satellites do.
Successfully conducting man-in-the-middle attacks on terrestrial
microwave communications from Clarke orbit is difficult at the very very
best and probably essentially impossible simply because of the 240 ms
delay involved and the enormous difficulty of sucessfully interjecting
the right kind of signal into a microwave link that uses highly
directional antennas and modulation techniques that are amplitude
sensitive such as QAM.   And one can certainly assume that the US is
carefully watching Russian sigint satellites at all times and would
certainly know immediately if they started radiating enough signal to
disrupt or spoof US communications systems.

	Of course all sigint yields information such as passwords and
encryption keys and spectral signatures of speakers and call addressing
and routing information (traffic analysis) that can be used to good
advantage in later active man-in-the-middle attacks.  And one can
certainly assume that the Russians and many other governments including
the US have spent considerable effort developing active penetration and
disruption capablity.  It has even been reported that the US has been
using this to force network traffic to be routed in Europe via 
facilities the US can monitor.


> According to former GRU Colonel Stanislav Lunev, "The strategic significance of
> the Lourdes facility has grown dramatically since the secret order from Russian
> Federation President [Boris Yeltsin] of 7 February 1996 demanding that the
> Russian intelligence community step up the theft of American and other Western
> economic and trade secrets. It currently represents a very formidable and
> ominous
> threat to U.S. national security as well as the American economy and
> infrastructure."
> 
> Yet the Clinton Administration insists that it is in America's interest to
> allow the
> GRU to continue its eavesdropping on the U.S. In congressional testimony
> delivered on March 16, 1995, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
> Affairs Alexander Watson asserted that pressuring Russia to discontinue sigint
> activities in Cuba "could limit our ability to promote reform and stability
> in Russia"
> as it could "be seen by the Russians as interfering with the exercise of
> their right
> under the START Treaty to monitor compliance with the agreement...."
> 


	And of course if we pressure them and other governments to
abandon sigint operations they can and will start to do the same to us. 
And ours are greater in magnitude and productivity than theirs.


> As with so many other issues, the Clintonites and the Soviets are reading
> from the
> same page regarding the Cuban sigint facility. Izvestia reported last
> November 30th
> that the U.S. "does not object in principle to the continuing existence of the
> electronic center in Cuba...."i
> 

	One can make the argument that sigint for national security
purposes is stabilizing and not altogether a bad thing.  Many of us who
are at least dimly aware of the technology fear its potential in the
hands of a future fascist police state greatly, but one suspects that
the Russians do not use the information effectively to damage US
interests.  After all we are the top economic and  military power in the
world and they are nearly in third world status economicly and have a
rapidly deteriorating military.  Perhaps the greatest risk from their
Soviet era sigint capabilities is that information will leak from
starved intelligence agency employees  and officials to the Russian
criminal mafias and benefit organized crime. There is certainly
potential there for mischief, especially considering that a good amount
of criminally useful information flows unencrypted over radio
communications in the US.

	If I was in the US government and thinking about the threat of
the Russian sigint capability I would be pushing for more use of
encryption in domestic commercial communications and especially such
things as cellphones and wireless data systems.  Universal link
encryption with secure ciphers of such radio based communications
systems  should not impact lawful interception of communications one
iota since the  government can always request wiretaps using their
spiffy new digital telephony tapping capablity.  The carriers would
always have access to the unencrypted traffic after all and could
forward it to the government. And many of us think that end-to-end
encryption of traffic is a better choice in the long run than no
encryption, even if it locks out the government (and everyone else) from
easily, and in large quantities, fishing through traffic.  One supposes
that the government will always be able to obtain most traffic it wants
badly enough, through cryptanalysis, TEMPEST, rubber hose cryptanalysis,
black bag jobs, bugging, and the perfidy of informants of one sort or
another, and of course most of all - carelessness and ignorance about
INFOSEC and bugs and configuration problems in software.

	But I would also be mindful that the Russians have decreasing
intelligence capability to monitor US intentions and perhaps allowing
them some access will keep them from developing paraniod fears of US
intentions.  The Russians probably still have a few working ICBMs after
all...

	In any case enough of these speculations.  Perhaps a
semi-retired telecommunications/computer engineer such as myself with
access only to public information gets the picture completely wrong. 
And perhaps not. I do know it is definately and without a doubt not true
that more and more domestic communications flow over microwave point to
point radio, however.  And I think that anyone propagating that myth
deserves a correction.

							Dave Emery
							die at die.com
							Weston, Mass.