levitate
I love you, you know.
Manafort might as well go ahead and commit that.
Would be quicker and less painful than polonium-laced tea.
Would be quicker and less painful than polonium-laced tea.
RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
Manafort might as well go ahead and commit that.
Would be quicker and less painful than polonium-laced tea.
Gotta be quicker and less painful than "falling" out of a 4th story window too
But don't let them see you sweat Paulie.
Cheeto loves you!
They're not the boss of you!
Oh look. Another important link by a reputable news source.
If only there was a way to share that information with excitement and alarm to warn people to pay extra attention to it without fielding stupid complaints about it.
Trump campaign bodyguard linked to ex-con who’s key in Russia probes
Trump campaign bodyguard linked to ex-con who’s key in Russia probes
By Ben Wieder and Kevin G. Hall
khall@mcclatchydc.com
WASHINGTON
Russian emigre Felix Sater, shown here in a screenshot from a YouTube video he posted on Aug. 8, 2014, is in the crosshairs of investigators probing possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Wieder, Ben
September 21, 2017 5:00 AM
Another connection has emerged between Donald Trump and Felix Sater, the Russian emigre and ex-con who's become a key figure in widening investigations into ties between Trump associates and Russian figures.
Trump plays down his relationship with Sater, despite growing evidence of links between the two, including recently published emails detailing how Sater worked with a top Trump Organization lawyer on a planned Moscow property deal as late as 2016, during the presidential campaign.
McClatchy’s investigation now shows that a trusted Trump security aide hired in 2015 had intimate knowledge that Sater, twice convicted, had a criminal past and underworld connections.
Before he became Trump’s bodyguard, Gary Uher was an FBI agent involved in a complex deal to bring Sater back from Russia in the late 1990s. The resulting plea deal allowed Sater to avoid prison time in a Wall Street probe by serving as a government informant until his sentencing in 2009. During much of the time that he was a secret informant, Sater was a Trump Organization business associate, working on projects in New York, Florida and Arizona.
It’s not clear if Sater and Uher maintained an active relationship. Sater declined comment, and Uher did not respond to multiple requests for a response.
But the new information raises more questions about Trump’s ties to the Russian-born felon, Sater, and those in Sater’s orbit. “This latest revelation adds yet another connection between Trump and Russian criminals,” said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor in St. Louis, who specializes in government ethics and national security law.
The Trump Organization did not respond to detailed questions about the two, and whether its executives or Trump himself were aware of Uher’s role in Sater’s federal plea deal.
But court documents from almost two decades ago, obtained by McClatchy, show that Uher played an important part in Sater’s decision to return from Russia.
This snipped section of a 2000 court deposition of then-informant Lawrence Ray shows how FBI agent Gary Uher worked to bring Felix Sater back from Russia. Almost 20 years later they both were in Donald Trump’s orbit.
Uher was a young FBI agent when he helped convince Sater to stay out of U.S. prison by cooperating in an operation that uncovered a $40 million scam by criminally connected Wall Street firms. Numerous members of the New York-area Mafia were eventually sent to prison.
FBI veterans loosely divide agents into two categories: the brainy, whose talents tend toward pursuing paper trails, and the brawny, who prefer to be out on the street and can be more inclined to be part of a security detail.
Tall, thick and imposing, Uher fell into the latter category.
“He was a good agent,” recalled Lewis Schiliro, an expert on organized crime who at the time was the assistant director of the FBI’s New York office. He referred to the late 1990s as “a really wild time” for Russia-linked crime.
Recent court documents obtained by McClatchy show that Uher, after leaving the bureau, was referred to the Trump Organization in 2015 by Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner and onetime nominee to head the federal Department of Homeland Security. Kerik withdrew his nomination and was imprisoned in 2010 after pleading guilty to tax fraud and making false statements in a federal bribery probe.
Kerik is also a former business partner of high-profile Trump surrogate Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor.
Uher said in a court deposition that he and Kerik had known each other since the early 1980s in New Jersey, when Kerik trained Uher in the Passaic County Sheriff’s Department.
The December 2016 deposition came after Uher briefly made headlines in the early days of Trump’s campaign. He and other members of Trump’s security detail were accused in a lawsuit of roughing up protestors in front of Trump Tower during a book signing in September 2015.
Uher indicated in the deposition that he had worked for both the campaign and the Trump Organization, reporting directly to Keith Schiller, who headed security for the organization and went on to a similar position at the White House this year. (Schiller left that post this month.)
Uher appears to no longer work for either the Trump campaign or Trump Organization, though his current employer’s website touts those past positions.
Oshirak Group International, headquartered in suburban Virginia, shows a picture of Uher on its website and lists him as director of law enforcement. The first item on his website bio cites his work as “Body guard for Donald Trump and family.”
This screenshot from the website of the security firm OGI Security shows Gary Uher’s biography, including his time as a bodyguard for Donald Trump and his long career at the FBI.
Disclosure records show Uher’s work for the Trump campaign, which paid him and a company he worked for called XMark LLC.
Uher was paid a total of $44,920 by the Trump campaign for security work and travel expenses between June 2015 and January 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records.
XMark LLC, which is run by another former FBI agent, was paid more than $500,000 for security-related services by the Trump campaign as recently as March 2017.
Uher’s work for the campaign occurred just as Sater was scouting potential real-estate deals for Trump in Russia.
Curious overlap
Sater derailed his early career as a trader on Wall Street when he went to prison in 1993 for slashing a man in a bar-fight.
After he emerged, having lost his brokerage license, Sater joined childhood friends Gennady Klotsman and Salvatore Lauria in a criminal stock-manipulation scheme through two brokerage companies: White Rock Partners & Co. and State Street Capital Markets Corp.
Sater and Klotsman left the business in 1996, moving to Russia and working in telecommunications, including with AT&T.
While Sater was in Russia, New York City police stumbled on a Manhattan storage locker belonging to him that held weapons and documents revealing details of the stock manipulation scheme.
And that’s where Uher and Sater’s lives seem to have first intersected.
As an FBI agent, Uher worked closely with a government informant named Lawrence Ray. In a 2000 affidavit, Ray said he was dispatched to Russia by the FBI to lure Sater home. McClatchy has corroborated much of what Ray testified to in the affidavit.
A convict who has served prison time, Ray had business interests in Russia. He was eventually charged in the same investigation that swept up Sater and associates.
Ray was also close friends with Kerik, frequently dropping his name to associates. The relationship soured, according to media reports, after Kerik refused to testify on Ray’s behalf in the same stock-fraud probe involving Sater.
Ray later turned over documents to investigators in the prosecution of the politically connected Kerik, which stemmed partly from gifts Kerik accepted from a Mafia-linked construction company called Interstate Industrial, where Ray worked at the time.
During the same period as Kerik’s legal woes, Sater was a government informant. He also became a top executive at the real estate company Bayrock Group. Located two floors down from the Trump Organization in Trump Tower, it worked on a number of Trump-themed projects, including Trump SoHo in Manhattan.
After leaving Bayrock because of news reports about his criminal past, Sater nonetheless would maintain Trump Organization ties, as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump,” according to a business card he carried in 2010.
In 2013, Trump would say of Sater in a Florida court deposition: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
Sater for his part has frequently touted his connection to Trump. In fact, e-mails that recently surfaced in the course of the investigation into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia show that Sater had plenty of back and forth about possible deals with Trump Organization lawyer Michael D. Cohen – whom he has known for decades -- on a potential Trump real-estate project in Russia in late 2015 and early 2016.
In one email, Sater exclaims to Cohen, “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it.”
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano
If only there was a way to share that information with excitement and alarm to warn people to pay extra attention to it without fielding stupid complaints about it.
Trump campaign bodyguard linked to ex-con who’s key in Russia probes
Trump campaign bodyguard linked to ex-con who’s key in Russia probes
By Ben Wieder and Kevin G. Hall
khall@mcclatchydc.com
WASHINGTON
Russian emigre Felix Sater, shown here in a screenshot from a YouTube video he posted on Aug. 8, 2014, is in the crosshairs of investigators probing possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Wieder, Ben
September 21, 2017 5:00 AM
Another connection has emerged between Donald Trump and Felix Sater, the Russian emigre and ex-con who's become a key figure in widening investigations into ties between Trump associates and Russian figures.
Trump plays down his relationship with Sater, despite growing evidence of links between the two, including recently published emails detailing how Sater worked with a top Trump Organization lawyer on a planned Moscow property deal as late as 2016, during the presidential campaign.
McClatchy’s investigation now shows that a trusted Trump security aide hired in 2015 had intimate knowledge that Sater, twice convicted, had a criminal past and underworld connections.
Before he became Trump’s bodyguard, Gary Uher was an FBI agent involved in a complex deal to bring Sater back from Russia in the late 1990s. The resulting plea deal allowed Sater to avoid prison time in a Wall Street probe by serving as a government informant until his sentencing in 2009. During much of the time that he was a secret informant, Sater was a Trump Organization business associate, working on projects in New York, Florida and Arizona.
It’s not clear if Sater and Uher maintained an active relationship. Sater declined comment, and Uher did not respond to multiple requests for a response.
But the new information raises more questions about Trump’s ties to the Russian-born felon, Sater, and those in Sater’s orbit. “This latest revelation adds yet another connection between Trump and Russian criminals,” said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor in St. Louis, who specializes in government ethics and national security law.
The Trump Organization did not respond to detailed questions about the two, and whether its executives or Trump himself were aware of Uher’s role in Sater’s federal plea deal.
But court documents from almost two decades ago, obtained by McClatchy, show that Uher played an important part in Sater’s decision to return from Russia.
This snipped section of a 2000 court deposition of then-informant Lawrence Ray shows how FBI agent Gary Uher worked to bring Felix Sater back from Russia. Almost 20 years later they both were in Donald Trump’s orbit.
Uher was a young FBI agent when he helped convince Sater to stay out of U.S. prison by cooperating in an operation that uncovered a $40 million scam by criminally connected Wall Street firms. Numerous members of the New York-area Mafia were eventually sent to prison.
FBI veterans loosely divide agents into two categories: the brainy, whose talents tend toward pursuing paper trails, and the brawny, who prefer to be out on the street and can be more inclined to be part of a security detail.
Tall, thick and imposing, Uher fell into the latter category.
“He was a good agent,” recalled Lewis Schiliro, an expert on organized crime who at the time was the assistant director of the FBI’s New York office. He referred to the late 1990s as “a really wild time” for Russia-linked crime.
Recent court documents obtained by McClatchy show that Uher, after leaving the bureau, was referred to the Trump Organization in 2015 by Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner and onetime nominee to head the federal Department of Homeland Security. Kerik withdrew his nomination and was imprisoned in 2010 after pleading guilty to tax fraud and making false statements in a federal bribery probe.
Kerik is also a former business partner of high-profile Trump surrogate Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor.
Uher said in a court deposition that he and Kerik had known each other since the early 1980s in New Jersey, when Kerik trained Uher in the Passaic County Sheriff’s Department.
The December 2016 deposition came after Uher briefly made headlines in the early days of Trump’s campaign. He and other members of Trump’s security detail were accused in a lawsuit of roughing up protestors in front of Trump Tower during a book signing in September 2015.
Uher indicated in the deposition that he had worked for both the campaign and the Trump Organization, reporting directly to Keith Schiller, who headed security for the organization and went on to a similar position at the White House this year. (Schiller left that post this month.)
Uher appears to no longer work for either the Trump campaign or Trump Organization, though his current employer’s website touts those past positions.
Oshirak Group International, headquartered in suburban Virginia, shows a picture of Uher on its website and lists him as director of law enforcement. The first item on his website bio cites his work as “Body guard for Donald Trump and family.”
This screenshot from the website of the security firm OGI Security shows Gary Uher’s biography, including his time as a bodyguard for Donald Trump and his long career at the FBI.
Disclosure records show Uher’s work for the Trump campaign, which paid him and a company he worked for called XMark LLC.
Uher was paid a total of $44,920 by the Trump campaign for security work and travel expenses between June 2015 and January 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records.
XMark LLC, which is run by another former FBI agent, was paid more than $500,000 for security-related services by the Trump campaign as recently as March 2017.
Uher’s work for the campaign occurred just as Sater was scouting potential real-estate deals for Trump in Russia.
Curious overlap
Sater derailed his early career as a trader on Wall Street when he went to prison in 1993 for slashing a man in a bar-fight.
After he emerged, having lost his brokerage license, Sater joined childhood friends Gennady Klotsman and Salvatore Lauria in a criminal stock-manipulation scheme through two brokerage companies: White Rock Partners & Co. and State Street Capital Markets Corp.
Sater and Klotsman left the business in 1996, moving to Russia and working in telecommunications, including with AT&T.
While Sater was in Russia, New York City police stumbled on a Manhattan storage locker belonging to him that held weapons and documents revealing details of the stock manipulation scheme.
And that’s where Uher and Sater’s lives seem to have first intersected.
As an FBI agent, Uher worked closely with a government informant named Lawrence Ray. In a 2000 affidavit, Ray said he was dispatched to Russia by the FBI to lure Sater home. McClatchy has corroborated much of what Ray testified to in the affidavit.
A convict who has served prison time, Ray had business interests in Russia. He was eventually charged in the same investigation that swept up Sater and associates.
Ray was also close friends with Kerik, frequently dropping his name to associates. The relationship soured, according to media reports, after Kerik refused to testify on Ray’s behalf in the same stock-fraud probe involving Sater.
Ray later turned over documents to investigators in the prosecution of the politically connected Kerik, which stemmed partly from gifts Kerik accepted from a Mafia-linked construction company called Interstate Industrial, where Ray worked at the time.
During the same period as Kerik’s legal woes, Sater was a government informant. He also became a top executive at the real estate company Bayrock Group. Located two floors down from the Trump Organization in Trump Tower, it worked on a number of Trump-themed projects, including Trump SoHo in Manhattan.
After leaving Bayrock because of news reports about his criminal past, Sater nonetheless would maintain Trump Organization ties, as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump,” according to a business card he carried in 2010.
In 2013, Trump would say of Sater in a Florida court deposition: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
Sater for his part has frequently touted his connection to Trump. In fact, e-mails that recently surfaced in the course of the investigation into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia show that Sater had plenty of back and forth about possible deals with Trump Organization lawyer Michael D. Cohen – whom he has known for decades -- on a potential Trump real-estate project in Russia in late 2015 and early 2016.
In one email, Sater exclaims to Cohen, “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it.”
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
ThinkProgress
3 hrs ·
After Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee acknowledged that the Obama administration did nothing improper.
On Fox News, Pence argues surveillance of Trump’s campaign chairman vindicates Trump. He’s wrong.
Also, he can't remember Paul Manafort's name.
THINKPROGRESS.ORG|BY AARON RUPAR
So this happened
3 hrs ·
After Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee acknowledged that the Obama administration did nothing improper.
On Fox News, Pence argues surveillance of Trump’s campaign chairman vindicates Trump. He’s wrong.
Also, he can't remember Paul Manafort's name.
THINKPROGRESS.ORG|BY AARON RUPAR
So this happened
More evidence Snowden is a traitor:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/21/distrustful-us-allies-force-nsa-to-back-down-in-encryption-row.html
Distrustful US allies force spy agency to back down in encryption row
1:48 PM ET Thu, 15 June 2017 | 00:40
Brooks Kraft | Corbis | Getty Images
The National Security Agency (NSA) logo is shown on a computer screen inside the NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland.
An international group of cryptography experts has forced the U.S. National Security Agency to back down over two data encryption techniques it wanted set as global industry standards, reflecting deep mistrust among close U.S. allies.
In interviews and emails seen by Reuters, academic and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but because it knew how to break them.
The NSA has now agreed to drop all but the most powerful versions of the techniques - those least likely to be vulnerable to hacks - to address the concerns.
The dispute, which has played out in a series of closed-door meetings around the world over the past three years and has not been previously reported, turns on whether the International Organization of Standards should approve two NSA data encryption techniques, known as Simon and Speck.
The U.S. delegation to the ISO on encryption issues includes a handful of NSA officials, though it is controlled by an American standards body, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
The presence of the NSA officials and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations about the agency's penetration of global electronic systems have made a number of delegates suspicious of the U.S. delegation's motives, according to interviews with a dozen current and former delegates.
A number of them voiced their distrust in emails to one another, seen by Reuters, and in written comments that are part of the process. The suspicions stem largely from internal NSA documents disclosed by Snowden that showed the agency had previously plotted to manipulate standards and promote technology it could penetrate. Budget documents, for example, sought funding to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems."
More than a dozen of the experts involved in the approval process for Simon and Speck feared that if the NSA was able to crack the encryption techniques, it would gain a "back door" into coded transmissions, according to the interviews and emails and other documents seen by Reuters.
"I don't trust the designers," Israeli delegate Orr Dunkelman, a computer science professor at the University of Haifa, told Reuters, citing Snowden's papers. "There are quite a lot of people in NSA who think their job is to subvert standards. My job is to secure standards."
The NSA, which does not confirm the authenticity of any Snowden documents, told Reuters it developed the new encryption tools to protect sensitive U.S. government computer and communications equipment without requiring a lot of computer processing power.
NSA officials said via email they want commercial technology companies that sell to the government to use the techniques, and that is more likely to happen when they have been designated a global standard by the ISO.
Asked if it could beat Simon and Speck encryption, the NSA officials said: "We firmly believe they are secure."
The case of the dual elliptic curve
ISO, an independent organization with delegations from 162 member countries, sets standards on everything from medical packaging to road signs. Its working groups can spend years picking best practices and technologies for an ISO seal of approval.
As the fight over Simon and Speck played out, the ISO twice voted to delay the multi-stage process of approving them.
In oral and written comments, opponents cited the lack of peer-reviewed publication by the creators, the absence of industry adoption or a clear need for the new ciphers, and the partial success of academics in showing their weaknesses.
Some ISO delegates said much of their skepticism stemmed from the 2000s, when NSA experts invented a component for encryption called Dual Elliptic Curve and got it adopted as a global standard.
ISO's approval of Dual EC was considered a success inside the agency, according to documents passed by Snowden to the founders of the online news site The Intercept, which made them available to Reuters. The documents said the agency guided the Dual EC proposal through four ISO meetings until it emerged as a standard.
In 2007, mathematicians in private industry showed that Dual EC could hide a back door, theoretically enabling the NSA to eavesdrop without detection. After the Snowden leaks, Reuters reported that the U.S. government had paid security company RSA $10 million to include Dual EC in a software development kit that was used by programmers around the world.
The ISO and other standards groups subsequently retracted their endorsements of Dual EC. The NSA declined to discuss it.
In the case of Simon and Speck, the NSA says the formulas are needed for defensive purposes. But the official who led the now-disbanded NSA division responsible for defense, known as the Information Assurance Directorate, said his unit did not develop Simon and Speck.
"There are probably some legitimate questions around whether these ciphers are actually needed," said Curtis Dukes, who retired earlier this year. Similar encryption techniques already exist, and the need for new ones is theoretical, he said.
ANSI, the body that leads the U.S. delegation to the ISO, said it had simply forwarded the NSA proposals to the organization and had not endorsed them.
From Jaipur to Hamilton
When the United States first introduced Simon and Speck as a proposed ISO standard in 2014, experts from several countries expressed reservations, said Shin'ichiro Matsuo, the head of the Japanese encryption delegation.
Some delegates had no objection. Chris Mitchell, a member of the British delegation, said he supported Simon and Speck, noting that "no one has succeeded in breaking the algorithms." He acknowledged, though, that after the Dual EC revelations, "trust, particularly for U.S. government participants in standardization, is now non-existent."
At a meeting in Jaipur, India, in October 2015, NSA officials in the American delegation pushed back against critics, questioning their expertise, witnesses said.
A German delegate at the Jaipur talks, Christian Wenzel-Benner, subsequently sent an email seeking support from dozens of cryptographers. He wrote that all seven German experts were "very concerned" about Simon and Speck.
"How can we expect companies and citizens to use security algorithms from ISO standards if those algorithms come from a source that has compromised security-related ISO standards just a few years ago?" Wenzel-Benner asked.
Such views helped delay Simon and Speck again, delegates said. But the Americans kept pushing, and at an October 2016 meeting in Abu Dhabi, a majority of individual delegates approved the techniques, moving them up to a country-by-country vote.
There, the proposal fell one vote short of the required two-thirds majority.
Finally, at a March 2017 meeting in Hamilton, New Zealand, the Americans distributed a 22-page explanation of its design and a summary of attempts to break them - the sort of paper that formed part of what delegates had been seeking since 2014.
Simon and Speck, aimed respectively at hardware and software, each have robust versions and more "lightweight" variants. The Americans agreed in Hamilton to compromise and dropped the most lightweight versions.
Opponents saw that as a major if partial victory, and it paved the way to compromise. In another nation-by-nation poll last month, the sturdiest versions advanced to the final stage of the approval process, again by a single vote, with Japan, Germany and Israel remaining opposed. A final vote takes place in February.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/21/distrustful-us-allies-force-nsa-to-back-down-in-encryption-row.html
Distrustful US allies force spy agency to back down in encryption row
1:48 PM ET Thu, 15 June 2017 | 00:40
Brooks Kraft | Corbis | Getty Images
The National Security Agency (NSA) logo is shown on a computer screen inside the NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland.
An international group of cryptography experts has forced the U.S. National Security Agency to back down over two data encryption techniques it wanted set as global industry standards, reflecting deep mistrust among close U.S. allies.
In interviews and emails seen by Reuters, academic and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but because it knew how to break them.
The NSA has now agreed to drop all but the most powerful versions of the techniques - those least likely to be vulnerable to hacks - to address the concerns.
The dispute, which has played out in a series of closed-door meetings around the world over the past three years and has not been previously reported, turns on whether the International Organization of Standards should approve two NSA data encryption techniques, known as Simon and Speck.
The U.S. delegation to the ISO on encryption issues includes a handful of NSA officials, though it is controlled by an American standards body, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
The presence of the NSA officials and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations about the agency's penetration of global electronic systems have made a number of delegates suspicious of the U.S. delegation's motives, according to interviews with a dozen current and former delegates.
A number of them voiced their distrust in emails to one another, seen by Reuters, and in written comments that are part of the process. The suspicions stem largely from internal NSA documents disclosed by Snowden that showed the agency had previously plotted to manipulate standards and promote technology it could penetrate. Budget documents, for example, sought funding to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems."
More than a dozen of the experts involved in the approval process for Simon and Speck feared that if the NSA was able to crack the encryption techniques, it would gain a "back door" into coded transmissions, according to the interviews and emails and other documents seen by Reuters.
"I don't trust the designers," Israeli delegate Orr Dunkelman, a computer science professor at the University of Haifa, told Reuters, citing Snowden's papers. "There are quite a lot of people in NSA who think their job is to subvert standards. My job is to secure standards."
The NSA, which does not confirm the authenticity of any Snowden documents, told Reuters it developed the new encryption tools to protect sensitive U.S. government computer and communications equipment without requiring a lot of computer processing power.
NSA officials said via email they want commercial technology companies that sell to the government to use the techniques, and that is more likely to happen when they have been designated a global standard by the ISO.
Asked if it could beat Simon and Speck encryption, the NSA officials said: "We firmly believe they are secure."
The case of the dual elliptic curve
ISO, an independent organization with delegations from 162 member countries, sets standards on everything from medical packaging to road signs. Its working groups can spend years picking best practices and technologies for an ISO seal of approval.
As the fight over Simon and Speck played out, the ISO twice voted to delay the multi-stage process of approving them.
In oral and written comments, opponents cited the lack of peer-reviewed publication by the creators, the absence of industry adoption or a clear need for the new ciphers, and the partial success of academics in showing their weaknesses.
Some ISO delegates said much of their skepticism stemmed from the 2000s, when NSA experts invented a component for encryption called Dual Elliptic Curve and got it adopted as a global standard.
ISO's approval of Dual EC was considered a success inside the agency, according to documents passed by Snowden to the founders of the online news site The Intercept, which made them available to Reuters. The documents said the agency guided the Dual EC proposal through four ISO meetings until it emerged as a standard.
In 2007, mathematicians in private industry showed that Dual EC could hide a back door, theoretically enabling the NSA to eavesdrop without detection. After the Snowden leaks, Reuters reported that the U.S. government had paid security company RSA $10 million to include Dual EC in a software development kit that was used by programmers around the world.
The ISO and other standards groups subsequently retracted their endorsements of Dual EC. The NSA declined to discuss it.
In the case of Simon and Speck, the NSA says the formulas are needed for defensive purposes. But the official who led the now-disbanded NSA division responsible for defense, known as the Information Assurance Directorate, said his unit did not develop Simon and Speck.
"There are probably some legitimate questions around whether these ciphers are actually needed," said Curtis Dukes, who retired earlier this year. Similar encryption techniques already exist, and the need for new ones is theoretical, he said.
ANSI, the body that leads the U.S. delegation to the ISO, said it had simply forwarded the NSA proposals to the organization and had not endorsed them.
From Jaipur to Hamilton
When the United States first introduced Simon and Speck as a proposed ISO standard in 2014, experts from several countries expressed reservations, said Shin'ichiro Matsuo, the head of the Japanese encryption delegation.
Some delegates had no objection. Chris Mitchell, a member of the British delegation, said he supported Simon and Speck, noting that "no one has succeeded in breaking the algorithms." He acknowledged, though, that after the Dual EC revelations, "trust, particularly for U.S. government participants in standardization, is now non-existent."
At a meeting in Jaipur, India, in October 2015, NSA officials in the American delegation pushed back against critics, questioning their expertise, witnesses said.
A German delegate at the Jaipur talks, Christian Wenzel-Benner, subsequently sent an email seeking support from dozens of cryptographers. He wrote that all seven German experts were "very concerned" about Simon and Speck.
"How can we expect companies and citizens to use security algorithms from ISO standards if those algorithms come from a source that has compromised security-related ISO standards just a few years ago?" Wenzel-Benner asked.
Such views helped delay Simon and Speck again, delegates said. But the Americans kept pushing, and at an October 2016 meeting in Abu Dhabi, a majority of individual delegates approved the techniques, moving them up to a country-by-country vote.
There, the proposal fell one vote short of the required two-thirds majority.
Finally, at a March 2017 meeting in Hamilton, New Zealand, the Americans distributed a 22-page explanation of its design and a summary of attempts to break them - the sort of paper that formed part of what delegates had been seeking since 2014.
Simon and Speck, aimed respectively at hardware and software, each have robust versions and more "lightweight" variants. The Americans agreed in Hamilton to compromise and dropped the most lightweight versions.
Opponents saw that as a major if partial victory, and it paved the way to compromise. In another nation-by-nation poll last month, the sturdiest versions advanced to the final stage of the approval process, again by a single vote, with Japan, Germany and Israel remaining opposed. A final vote takes place in February.
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
annnnnnnd another CIA agent went off the reservation
Wow. I would understand her willingness to comment from an academic perspective (Walt/mersheimer).
But this is bizarre.
Anti-semitism is some weird shyt man...and its always the ex-CIA agents who end up falling off the wagon and into some weirdo shyt.
Its sad.
Big news:
If only there was a way to highlight this
Kaspersky is having fukking hearings.
In-Fu¢king-Sane.
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano
If only there was a way to highlight this
Kaspersky is having fukking hearings.
In-Fu¢king-Sane.
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Paper ballots are back in vogue thanks to Russian hacking fears
Paper ballots are back in vogue thanks to Russian hacking fears
Elizabeth WeiseUpdated 6:42 p.m. ET Sept. 19, 2017
In preparation for the midterms, some states are ditching electronic voting machines for paper ballots, and it's all thanks to Russia. Nathan Rousseau Smith (@FantasticMrNate) reports. Buzz60
SAN FRANCISCO – Once about as newsworthy as water meters, the voting machines and computers used to record and tally the nation's ballots are suddenly a hot button issue due to mounting evidence Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
According to the FBI, as many as 39 states had their election systems scanned or targeted by Russia. There's no evidence of votes changed. But given the stakes, some state agencies that run elections are trying to curb any further interference prior to mid-term elections in November.
Their tool of choice: Ensuring systems can't be hacked, and if they are, making those breaches immediately obvious. To do this, some are taking the unusual move of rewinding the technological dial, debating measures that would add paper ballots — similar to how many Americans voted before electronic voting started to become widespread in the 1980s.
A week ago Virginia announced it would no longer use touch-screen-only voting machines after a hack-a-thon in Las Vegas showed how easily they could be breached.
States with electronic-only voting machines want to add a paper back-up that would mandate, for every electronic ballot cast, creation of a paper version that could be counted, and presumably, not easily altered.
Rhode Island is set to vote on a measureTuesday that would require an audit of voters' paper ballots after each election.
Georgia is fighting a suit by voters that, among other claims, alleges the state needs to switch to a paper-ballots-based voting system because it now uses touch-screen voting machines that do not meet the requirements of state law due to their age and vulnerability to hacking.
More: Hackers at DefCon conference exploit vulnerabilities in voting machines
More: Facebook finds Russian ads that sought to sow division during U.S. election
More: Election hacking suit over Georgia race could be sign of what's to come
More: 'U.S. spies slept' while Russia elected Trump, Russian politician says
The U.S. voting machine industry is dominated by three privately-held companies, Election Systems & Software in Omaha, Neb., Dominion Voting Systems in Toronto and HartInterCivic in Austin, Texas.A wholesale refitting of the nation's voting machine infrastructure would represent a sizable sales opportunity for them. But there's little money in the system to make that happen, say experts.
Too often voting officials lack the resources necessary to protect and upgrade election infrastructures, said Lawrence Norden, at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and author of a report in June called Securing Elections from Foreign Interference.
“The federal government says it’s up to the states to fund it, the states often put it down to the counties and the counties say they have no money. So we need some shared responsibility for funding elections and making sure they’re free and fair," he said.
Virginia dumps touch-screen-only voting machines
Hackers at DefCon conference exploit vulnerabilities in voting machines
Touch-screen voting machines are considered insecure because they don’t produce a paper copy of the vote and therefore can’t be rigorously audited. Voting integrity activists aren't advocating returning to a totally paper-based voting system, but instead requiring that voting machines produce a paper record that can be used to check the reported electronic totals.
“The step we took today to decertify paperless voting systems is necessary to ensure the integrity of Virginia’s elections,” said James Alcorn, chair of the State Board of Elections, in a statement.
Dean Logan, head of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials and also the registrar-recorder for Los Angeles County, said some of his workers attended DefCon. Hackers' ability to break into voting machines was a fresh reminder that agencies needed to make the process more secure.
“My staff came back with pretty eye-popping stories about when people have physical access to the voting equipment, that they can do things and they can do them pretty quickly,” he said.