Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down

John Young jya at pipeline.com
Tue Jun 3 21:36:59 PDT 2003


The White House Communications Agency is also working
hard to secure presidential communications, with legacy
systems needing ever-increasing maintenance and upgrades,
the market continuing to outpace the big-ticket legacy
clunker equipment, too expensive to chuck outright, yet having
flaws begging for discovery, patches galore (most relying
upon obscurity and secrecy), and the operators from the
four military branches which run the system turning over
regularly and each new wave needing special training to 
work the patchwork klutz, with retiring old salts who are
the only ones who know how the hybrids work and whether
they are truly secure, and not least, NSA doing it damndest
to get new systems installed in all the prez's habitats and
vehicles and layovers around the world, deploying crypto
tools partly off the shelf, partly purpose-built at Ft Meade -- 
and the whole precarious mess subject to a 20-year-old 
pulling a thumb out of the dike and letting flow proof that the 
leader of the free world is up to what you'd expect despite 
the multi-million rig to hide the obvious. Rumor is that 98%
of what is handled top secretly is trivial fluff, as with most
mil comm, SIGINT, cellphone, microwave, fiber-optic, so that
snake oil is apt protection. If all telecomm was shut down no
more would change than pulling the plug on television.

The other 2% is what the billions and billions is trying to find
among the EM cataract of plaintext and speak smoke and whine 
-- by whoever may be plotting a world of pure bugfuck. But that
could also be discovered by thoughtful analysis of any singular
mania, whether religion, higher-ed, sport, stock market, politics, 
or mil-biz.

Here's a recent account from "Army Communicator" of 
what's up at ever busier and harried and thumbplugging
WHCA:

  http://cryptome.org/whca2003.pdg  (680KB)

WHCA itself is recruiting thumbs:

  http://www.disa.mil/whca





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