"Russia carried out a 'stunning' breach of FBI communications system"

Razer g2s at riseup.net
Mon Sep 16 09:58:20 PDT 2019


Know your disinformation sources:

Zach Dorfman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

Jenna McLaughlin is a Johns Hopkins grad.

Sean D. Naylor is a writer for Army Times, owned by Gannett.

Rr

On September 16, 2019 9:37:51 AM PDT, coderman <coderman at protonmail.com> wrote:
>https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-russia-carried-out-a-stunning-breach-of-fbi-communications-system-escalating-the-spy-game-on-us-soil-090024212.html
>
>Exclusive: Russia carried out a 'stunning' breach of FBI communications
>system, escalating the spy game on U.S. soil
>
>Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin and Sean D. NaylorReporters, Yahoo
>News•September 16, 2019
>
>On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving
>nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United
>States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the
>Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack
>their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and
>denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the “dachas” — were
>anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.
>
>The Obama administration’s public rationale for the expulsions and
>closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia
>in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016
>presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret,
>reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.
>
>Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key
>roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched
>from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to
>former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI
>communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on
>U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI
>and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and
>prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security
>facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former
>U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about
>a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.
>
>“It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive
>operations,” said a former senior CIA official.
>
>American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically
>improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure
>communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI
>surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have
>devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications,
>including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior
>FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as
>part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S.
>counterintelligence vulnerabilities.
>
>These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S.
>officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including
>Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location
>of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance
>of FBI communications, according to former officials. They provided the
>Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and
>communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording
>devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers, the former
>officials said.
>
>“When we found out about this, the light bulb went on — that this could
>be why we haven’t seen [certain types of] activity” from known Russian
>spies in the United States, said a former senior intelligence official.
>
>The compromise of FBI systems occurred not long after the White House’s
>2010 decision to arrest and expose a group of “illegals” – Russian
>operatives embedded in American society under deep non-official cover –
>and reflected a resurgence of Russian espionage. Just a few months
>after the illegals pleaded guilty in July 2010, the FBI opened a new
>investigation into a group of New York-based undercover Russian
>intelligence officers. These Russian spies, the FBI discovered, were
>attempting to recruit a ring of U.S. assets — including Carter Page, an
>American businessman who would later act as an unpaid foreign policy
>adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
>
>The breaches also spoke to larger challenges faced by U.S. intelligence
>agencies in guarding the nation’s secrets, an issue highlighted by
>recent revelations, first published by CNN, that the CIA was forced to
>extract a key Russian asset and bring him to the U.S. in 2017. The
>asset was reportedly critical to the U.S. intelligence community’s
>conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally
>directed the interference in the 2016 presidential election in support
>of Donald Trump.
>
>Yahoo spoke about these previously unreported technical breaches and
>the larger government debates surrounding U.S. policies toward Russia
>with more than 50 current and former intelligence and national security
>officials, most of whom requested anonymity to discuss sensitive
>operations and internal discussions. While the officials expressed a
>variety of views on what went wrong with U.S.-Russian relations, some
>said the United States at times neglected to appreciate the espionage
>challenge from Moscow, and paid a significant price for a failure to
>prioritize technical threats.
>
>“When I was in office, the counterintelligence business was … focused
>entirely on its core concern, which is insider threats, and in
>particular mole hunting,” said Joel Brenner, the head of U.S.
>counterintelligence and strategy from 2006 to 2009. “This is, in fact,
>the core risk and it’s right that it should be the focus. But we were
>neither organized nor resourced to deal with counterintelligence in
>networks, technical networks, electronic networks.”
>
>The discovery of Russia’s newfound capacity to crack certain types of
>encryption was particularly unnerving, according to former U.S.
>officials.
>
>“Anytime you find out that an adversary has these capabilities, it sets
>off a ripple effect,” said a former senior national security official.
>“The Russians are able to extract every capability from any given
>technology. ... They are singularly dangerous in this area.”
> 
>
>The FBI’s discovery of these compromises took place on the heels of
>what many hoped would be a breakthrough between Washington and Moscow —
>the Obama administration’s 2009 “reset” initiative, which sought to
>improve U.S.-Russia relations. Despite what seemed to be some initial
>progress, the reset soon went awry.
>
>In September 2011, Vladimir Putin announced the launch of his third
>presidential campaign, only to be confronted during the following
>months by tens of thousands of protesters accusing him of electoral
>fraud. Putin, a former intelligence officer, publicly accused
>then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of fomenting the unrest.
>
>It was around this time that Putin’s spies in the United States,
>operating under diplomatic cover, achieved what a former senior
>intelligence official called a “stunning” technical breakthrough,
>demonstrating their relentless focus on the country they’ve long
>considered their primary adversary.
>
>That effort compromised the encrypted radio systems used by the FBI’s
>mobile surveillance teams, which track the movements of Russian spies
>on American soil, according to more than half a dozen former senior
>intelligence and national security officials. Around the same time,
>Russian spies also compromised the FBI teams’ backup communications
>systems — cellphones outfitted with “push-to-talk” walkie-talkie
>capabilities. “This was something we took extremely seriously,” said a
>former senior counterintelligence official.
>
>The Russian operation went beyond tracking the communications devices
>used by FBI surveillance teams, according to four former senior
>officials. Working out of secret “listening posts” housed in Russian
>diplomatic and other government-controlled facilities, the Russians
>were able to intercept, record and eventually crack the codes to FBI
>radio communications.
>
>Some of the clandestine eavesdropping annexes were staffed by the wives
>of Russian intelligence officers, said a former senior intelligence
>official. That operation was part of a larger sustained, deliberate
>Russian campaign targeting secret U.S. government communications
>throughout the United States, according to former officials.
>
>The two Russian government compounds in Maryland and New York closed in
>2016 played a role in the operation, according to three former
>officials. They were “basically being used as signals intelligence
>facilities,” said one former senior national security official.
>
>Russian spies also deployed “mobile listening posts.” Some Russian
>intelligence officers, carrying signals intelligence gear, would walk
>near FBI surveillance teams. Others drove vans full of listening
>equipment aimed at intercepting FBI teams’ communications. For the
>Russians, the operation was “amazingly low risk in an angering way,”
>said a former senior intelligence official.
>
>The FBI teams were using relatively lightweight radios with limited
>range, according to former officials. These low-tech devices allowed
>the teams to move quickly and discreetly while tracking their targets,
>which would have been more difficult with clunkier but more secure
>technology, a former official said. But the outdated radios left the
>teams’ communications vulnerable to the Russians. “The amount of
>security you employ is the inverse of being able to do things with
>flexibility, agility and at scale,” said the former official.
>
>A former senior counterintelligence official blamed the compromises on
>a “hodgepodge of systems” ineffective beyond the line of sight. “The
>infrastructure that was supposed to be built, they never followed up,
>or gave us the money for it,” said the former official. “The
>intelligence community has never gotten an integrated system.”
>
>The limitations of the radio technology, said the former senior
>officials, led the FBI’s surveillance personnel to communicate on the
>backup systems.
>
>“Eventually they switched to push-to-talk cellphones,” said a former
>counterintelligence executive. “The tech guys would get upset by that,
>because if they could intercept radio, they might be able to intercept
>telephones.”
>
>That is indeed what happened. Those devices were then identified and
>compromised by Russian intelligence operatives. (A number of other
>countries’ surveillance teams — including those from hostile services —
>also transitioned from using radios to cellphones during this time,
>noted another former official.)
>
>U.S. intelligence officials were uncertain whether the Russians were
>able to unscramble the FBI conversations in real time. But even the
>ability to decrypt them later would have given the Russians critical
>insights into FBI surveillance practices, including “call signs and
>locations, team composition and tactics,” said a former intelligence
>official.
>
>U.S. officials were also unsure about how long the Russians had been
>able to decipher FBI communications before the bureau realized what was
>happening. “There was a gap between when they were really onto us, and
>when we got onto them,” said a former senior intelligence official.
>
>Even after they understood that the Russians had compromised the FBI
>teams’ radios, U.S. counterintelligence officials could not agree on
>how they had done it. “The intel reporting was they did break our codes
>or got their hands on a radio and figured it out,” said a former senior
>intelligence official. “Either way, they decrypted our comms.”
>
>Officials also cautioned, however, that the Russians could only crack
>moderately encrypted communications, not the strongest types of
>encryption used by the U.S. government for its most sensitive
>transmissions. It was nonetheless “an incredible intelligence success”
>for the Russians, said the former senior official.
>
>While the Russians may have developed this capability by themselves,
>senior counterintelligence officials also feared that someone from
>within the U.S. government — a Russian mole — may have helped them,
>said former officials. “You’re wondering, ‘If this is true, and they
>can do this, is this because someone on the inside has given them that
>information?’’ said another former senior intelligence official.
>
>Russia has a clear interest in concealing how it gets its information,
>further muddying the waters. According to a former senior CIA officer
>who served in Moscow, the Russians would often try to disguise a human
>source as a technical penetration. Ultimately, officials were unable to
>pinpoint exactly how the Russians pulled off the compromise of the
>FBI’s systems.
>
>Mark Kelton, who served as the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA
>until he retired in 2015, declined to discuss specific Russian
>operations, but he told Yahoo News that “the Russians are a
>professionally proficient adversary who have historically penetrated
>every American institution worth penetrating.”
>
>This remains a core worry for U.S. spy hunters. The number of ongoing
>espionage investigations into U.S. government personnel — at the CIA,
>the FBI and elsewhere — including those potentially recruited by
>Russia, “is not a little, it’s a lot,” said another former senior
>counterintelligence official.
>
>Once the compromises of FBI communications devices were confirmed, U.S.
>officials scrambled to minimize the exposure of mobile surveillance
>team operations, quickly putting countermeasures in place, according to
>former senior officials. There was a “huge concern” about protecting
>the identities of the individuals on the teams — an elite, secret group
>— said the former senior counterintelligence official. U.S. officials
>also conducted a damage assessment and repeatedly briefed select White
>House officials and members of Congress about the compromise.
>
>After the FBI discovered that its surveillance teams’ cellphones had
>been compromised, they were forced to switch back to encrypted radios,
>purchasing different models, according to two former officials. “It was
>an expensive venture,” said one former counterintelligence official.
>
>But the spying successes went both ways. The U.S. intelligence
>community collected its own inside information to conclude that the
>damage from the compromises had been limited, partly due to the
>Russians’ efforts to keep their intelligence coup secret, according to
>a former senior intelligence official. “The Russians were reticent to
>take steps [that might reveal] that they’d figured it out,” the former
>senior official said.
> 
>
>Even so, the costs to U.S. intelligence were significant. Spooked by
>the discovery that its surveillance teams’ communications had been
>compromised, the FBI worried that some of its assets had been blown,
>said two former senior intelligence officials. The bureau consequently
>cut off contact with some of its Russian sources, according to one of
>those officials.
>
>At the time of the compromise, some of the FBI’s other Russian assets
>stopped cooperating with their American handlers. “There were a couple
>instances where a recruited person had said, ‘I can’t meet you
>anymore,’” said a former senior intelligence official. In a damage
>assessment conducted around 2012, U.S. intelligence officials concluded
>the events may have been linked.
>
>The impact was not limited to the FBI. Alerted by the bureau to
>concerns surrounding Russia’s enhanced interception capabilities, the
>CIA also ceased certain types of communications with sources abroad,
>according to a former senior CIA official. The agency “had to resort to
>a whole series of steps” to ensure the Russians weren’t able to
>eavesdrop on CIA communications, the former senior official said. There
>was a “strong hint” that these newly discovered code-breaking
>capabilities by Russia were also being used abroad, said another former
>senior intelligence official.
>
>The CIA has long been wary of Russian spies’ eavesdropping efforts
>outside of the United States, especially near U.S. diplomatic
>facilities. U.S. officials have observed Russian technical officers
>repeatedly walking close to those compounds with packages in their
>hands, or wearing backpacks, or pushing strollers, or driving by in
>vehicles — all attempts, U.S. officials believe, to collect information
>on the different signals emanating from the facilities. While the tools
>used by the Russians for these activities were “a bit antiquated,” said
>a former senior CIA official, they were still a “constant concern.”
>
>It’s not unusual for intelligence officers operating from diplomatic
>facilities, including the United States’s own operatives, to try and
>intercept the communications of the host nation. “You had to find ways
>to attack their surveillance,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former head of
>counterintelligence at the Department of Energy and a former CIA
>officer who first served in Moscow in the 1980s. “The Russians do
>everything in the U.S. that we did in Moscow.”
>
>Indeed, the focus on cracking radio communications was no different.
>
>“We put extraordinary effort into intercepting and monitoring the FSB
>surveillance radio networks for the purpose of understanding whether
>our officers were under surveillance or not,” said another former
>senior CIA officer who also served in Moscow.
>
>The discovery of the Russians’ new code-breaking capabilities came at a
>time when gathering intelligence on Russia and its leaders’ intentions
>was of particular importance to the U.S. government. U.S. national
>security officials working on Russia at the time received rigorous
>security training on how to keep their digital devices secure,
>according to two former senior officials. One former U.S. official
>recalled how during the negotiations surrounding the reset, NSC
>officials, partially tongue in cheek, “would sometimes say things on
>the phone hoping [they] were communicating things to the Russians.”
>
>According to a former CIA official and a former national security
>official, the CIA’s analysts often disagreed about how committed Russia
>was to negotiations during the attempted reset and how far Putin would
>go to achieve his strategic aims, divergences that confused the White
>House and senior policy makers.
>
>“It caused a really big rift within the [National Security Council] on
>how seriously they took analysis from the agency,” said the former CIA
>official. Senior administration leaders “went along with” some of the
>more optimistic analysis on the future of U.S.-Russia relations “in the
>hopes that this would work out,” the official continued.
>
>Those disagreements were part of a “reset hangover” that persisted, at
>least for some inside the administration, until the 2016 election
>meddling, according to a former senior national security official.
>Those officials clung to the hope that Washington and Moscow could
>cooperate on key issues, despite aggressive Russian actions ranging
>from the invasion of Ukraine to its spying efforts.
>
>“We didn’t understand that they were at political war with us already
>in the second term once Putin was reelected and Obama himself was
>reelected,” said Evelyn Farkas, the former deputy assistant secretary
>of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia during the Obama
>administration.
> 
>
>As high-level hopes for the U.S.-Russia “reset” withered, concerns
>about the threat of Russian spying made their way to Capitol Hill. Top
>officials at the FBI and CIA briefed key members of Congress on
>counterintelligence issues related to Russia, according to current and
>former U.S. officials. These included briefings on the radio
>compromises, said two former senior officials.
>
>Mike Rogers, a former Republican lawmaker from Michigan who chaired the
>House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 2011 to 2015,
>alluded to counterintelligence concerns at a conference earlier this
>year in Washington, D.C.
>
>One of those concerns was a massive intelligence failure related to the
>secret internet-based communications system the CIA used to communicate
>with agents. The extent of that failure, first reported publicly by
>Yahoo News in 2018, got the attention of Congress earlier.
>
>But the problems were broader than that issue, according to Rogers.
>
>“Our counterintelligence operations needed some adjustments,” said
>Rogers, adding that he and his Democratic counterpart from Maryland,
>Dutch Ruppersberger, requested regular briefings on the subject from
>agency representatives. “We started out monthly until we just wore them
>out, then we did it quarterly to try to make sure that we had the right
>resources and the right focus for the entire community on
>counter[intelligence].”
>
>Rogers later told Yahoo News that his request for the briefings had
>been prompted by “suspected penetrations, both physical and technical,
>which is the role of those [Russian and Chinese] intelligence
>services,” but declined to be more specific.
>
>The former committee chairman said he wanted the intelligence community
>to make counterintelligence a higher priority. “Counterintelligence was
>always looked at as the crazy uncle at the party,” he said. “I wanted
>to raise it up and give it a robust importance.”
> 
>
>The briefings, which primarily involved counterintelligence officials
>from the FBI and CIA and were limited to the committee leadership and
>staff directors, led to “some useful inquiries to help focus the
>intelligence community,” Rogers said. The leaders of the Senate Select
>Committee on Intelligence were also included in some of the inquiries,
>according to Rogers and a current U.S. government official.
>
>Spokespeople for the current House and Senate intelligence committees
>did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI and CIA declined to
>comment. The Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to a
>request for comment.
>
>The briefings were designed to “get the counterintelligence house in
>order,” said Jamil Jaffer, senior counsel at the House intelligence
>committee from 2011 to 2013, and to ensure that Congress and the
>intelligence agencies were “on the same page” when it came to such
>matters. “There were some concerns about what the agencies were doing,
>there were some concerns about what Congress knew, and all of these
>issues, of course, had China-Russia implications.”
>
>Rogers and Jaffer declined to provide further details about what
>specific counterintelligence issues the committee was addressing, but
>other former officials indicated that worries weren’t limited to the
>compromise of FBI radio systems. Senior U.S. officials were
>contemplating an even more disturbing possibility: that the Russians
>had found a way to penetrate the communications of the U.S.
>intelligence community’s most sensitive buildings in and around
>Washington, D.C.
>
>Suspected Russian intelligence officers were seen conspicuously
>loitering along the road that runs alongside the CIA’s headquarters,
>according to former senior intelligence officials. “Russian diplomats
>would be sitting on Route 123, sometimes in cars with diplomatic
>plates, other times not,” a former senior intelligence executive said.
>“We thought, they’re out doing something. It’s not just taking down
>license plates; those guys are interrogating the system.”
>
>Though this behavior dated back at least to the mid-2000s, former
>officials said those activities persisted simultaneously with the
>compromise of the FBI’s communication system. And these were not the
>only instances of Russian intelligence operatives staking out locations
>with a line of sight to CIA headquarters. They were “fixated on being
>in neighborhoods” that gave them exposure to Langley, said a former
>senior official.
>
>Over time, U.S. intelligence officials became increasingly concerned
>that Russian spies might be attempting to intercept communications from
>key U.S. intelligence facilities, including the CIA and FBI
>headquarters. No one knew if the Russians had actually succeeded.
>
>“The question was whether they had capabilities to penetrate our comms
>at Langley,” said a former senior CIA official. In the absence of any
>proof that that was the case, the working theory was that the Russian
>activities were provocations designed to sow uncertainty within the
>CIA. “We came to the conclusion that they were trying to get into our
>heads,” the former senior official said.
>
>A major concern was that Russian spies with physical proximity to
>sensitive U.S. buildings might be exfiltrating pilfered data that had
>“jumped the air gap,” i.e., that the Russians were collecting
>information from a breach of computers not connected to the Internet,
>said former officials.
>
>One factor behind U.S. intelligence officials’ fears was simple: The
>CIA had already figured out how to perform similar operations
>themselves, according to a former senior CIA officer directly familiar
>with the matter. “We felt it was pretty revolutionary stuff at the
>time,” the former CIA officer said. “It allowed us to do some
>extraordinary things.”
>
>While no one definitively concluded that the Russians had actually
>succeeded in penetrating Langley’s communications, those fears,
>combined in part with the breach of the bureau’s encrypted radio
>system, drove an effort by U.S. intelligence officials around 2012 to
>fortify sensitive Washington-area government buildings against
>potential Russian snooping, according to four former officials.
>
>At key government facilities in the Washington area, entire floors were
>converted to sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs.
>These are specially protected areas designed to be impenetrable to
>hostile signals intelligence gathering.
>
>The normal assumption was that work done in a SCIF would be secure, but
>doubts arose about the safety of even those rooms. “The security guys
>would say, your windows are ‘tempested’”—that is, protected against the
>interception of emissions radiating from electronic equipment in the
>building —“you’re in a SCIF, it’s fine,” a former senior
>counterintelligence executive recalled. “The question was, ‘Is it
>true?’”
>
>Increasingly, U.S. officials began to fear it was not.
>
>New security practices were instituted in sensitive government
>facilities like the FBI and CIA headquarters, according to former
>officials. “It required many procedural changes on our part to make
>sure we were not susceptible to penetrations,” said a former senior CIA
>official. These included basic steps such as moving communication away
>from windows and changing encryption codes more frequently, as well as
>more expensive adjustments, said four former officials.
>
>Revelations about the Russian compromise of the radio systems, recalled
>a former senior intelligence official, “kick-started the money flowing”
>to upgrade security.
> 
>
>While the breaches of the FBI communications systems appeared to
>finally spur Congress and the intelligence agencies to adopt steps to
>counter increasingly sophisticated Russian eavesdropping, it took the
>Putin-directed interference in the 2016 election to get the White House
>to expel at least some of those officials deemed responsible for the
>breaches, and to shut down the facilities that enabled them.
>
>Even then, the decision was controversial. Some in Washington worried
>about retribution by the Russians and exposure of American intelligence
>operations, according to a former senior U.S. national security
>official directly involved in the discussions. The FBI consistently
>supported expulsions, said another former national security official.
>
>More than two years later, the Russian diplomatic compounds used in the
>FBI communications compromises remain shuttered. The U.S. government
>has prevented many of the Russian spies expelled by the United States
>from returning, according to national security experts and senior
>foreign intelligence officials. “They are slowly creeping back in, but
>[the] FBI makes it hard,” said a senior foreign intelligence official.
>“The old guard is basically screwed. They need to bring in a whole new
>generation.”
>
>In the meantime, those familiar with Russian operations warn that the
>threat from Moscow is far from over. “Make no mistake, we’re in an
>intelligence war with the Russians, every bit as dangerous as the Cold
>War,” said a former senior intelligence officer. “They’re trying all
>the time ... and we caught them from time to time,” he said. Of course,
>he added, “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
>
>That’s the same message that special counsel Robert Mueller tried to
>convey during the highly contentious hearings to discuss his report on
>Russian interference in the 2016 election. “They are doing it as we sit
>here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign,” Mueller told
>lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee about covert Russian
>involvement in U.S. politics.
>
>But a number of observers believe Mueller’s message about the threat
>from Russia was largely lost amid a partisan battle on Capitol Hill
>over President Trump.
>
>During his Washington conference appearance earlier this year, Rogers,
>the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, also lamented
>that the current politicized state of the intelligence committees would
>make spy agencies more hesitant to admit their failures.
>
>“They're not going to call you to say, 'I screwed up.' They're going to
>say, 'God, I hope they don't find that,’” he said. “That's what's going
>to happen. I'll guarantee it's happening today.”

Rr
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