NSA Surveillance and What To Do About It - Bruce Schneier

my name is Alicia McDonald I'm the director of privacy here at the C is the Center for Internet and Society we're a public interest group at the forefront of technology law and policy based in the Stanford Law School last month former President Carter announced that he no longer sends email to other world leaders he is concerned that the NSA is reading his email so instead he writes things out longhand himself and Mail's them now I don't know if the NSA is reading President Carter's email or not but I do know that pulling back from things that are permissible that voluntarily stopping yourself from doing something we call that a chilling effect and you may have felt that chill to a Harris Poll at the beginning of this month found 47 percent of Americans have changed the activities they do online now that they know that they're being surveilled right so we change what we do we change who we connect with as a result one of the other comments President Carter made got picked up in the German press and it was this America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy right no functioning democracy that's a really strong statement again I don't know if that's right or wrong but I do agree that those are the stakes so these are really important issues and I'm very glad that you're here with us tonight as we've all been trying to figure out what does it mean that we have these documents from Snowden what do we do about this we've held a number of events Tuesday nights at Stanford we have some that are up online already you're able to go see about light beam from Mozilla about tor taught by Tom Lowenthal we have upcoming events as well on PGP email encryption and also an evening with Peter Eckersley from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and then the first Tuesday next month in May we will be hearing from Julia Angwin who's a journalist with Washington Post she has a new book out dragnet nation that focuses more on the consumer side rather than the government side so we have some great events I hope you'll join us for those and tonight is the highlight of events for the year for me for Bruce it's another Tuesday so he has been described as a security guru briefs Bruce has been a meme before memes went viral I learned today there's an action figure I hadn't known that and if you study crypto you've read Bruce Schneier and you're lucky that he's a terrific writer he's written 12 books he's he's at Harvard right now he can teach math to the masses he can speak geek to power and we're all very fortunate since he's trusted by academics government and privacy advocates alike he has an unusual ability to cross all sorts of boundaries so thank you very much and join me in welcoming Bruce Schneier so thank you thanks for coming it's a little later for me than for you but we'll get through this so there's a lot I could talk about you know when we talk about surveillance and privacy and the Internet and there are a lot of directions we can go on this talk I want to focus on the NSA but a lot of what I'm saying touches a lot of other areas and we gonna end up touching a lot of areas well you know since Edward Snowden walked out of the NSA with like seems like a copy of everything and and gave it to journalists in Hong Kong we've gotten a steady stream of news articles about things the NSA is doing and the first ones were very sensational and I remember them very clearly and and over the months there I think there's been a tiring in the public and even in the news about each additional one remains where they're exciting to me is a longtime NSA watcher they're exciting to techies but it seems really hard to continue to continue because for the average person what's different and the narratives set in the NSA spies and sort of now the question is whether you think is doing a good job or a bad job you and each individual story doesn't seem to change that right that might change right we know we get something you know on the order of the NSA spies on Martin Luther King jr. and you might get a change but what I want to step back and sort of give you what I think the takeaways are we start from from all the stories the first is that the NSA has turned the internet into a giant surveillance platform right this this this is platform is very robust its robust politically its robust technically and its robust legally right I can name three different programs the NSA has for getting at Google and Yahoo user data those programs are based on three different technical accesses right three different legal authorities agreements with three different corporations and that's just email user data I mean the same is probably true for cell phone for Internet data for everything else if you have a ten billion budget dumb didn't dollar budgets and you're given the choice of this way versus that way the correct answer is both the second important takeaway is that the NSA continues to lie about its capabilities again and again they're caught saying things that aren't true and it turns out it's actually very hard when you don't know what they got on you to lie properly because you say something in the next document contradicts it it's happened a couple of times but mostly it's hiding behind tortured definitions of words I collect incidentally targeted directed now you can be sure whatever the NSA says they don't do something under this program or under this Authority now it means they do it under some other program or some other authority right some of it is designed to obscure from the public some of this is I think designed to obscure it from Congress to obscure budget you will see the same thing under two different code names and that seems more budgetary than anything else the third portent takeaway is that there's a lot of sharing going on between different government organizations the NSA the CIA the FBI the DEA you know we see some shadows of this we saw one document that talked about the NSA passing information to the DEA and instructing them about how to lie about where it came from it's called parallel construction we know that some of the techniques we're seeing that the NSA does are mirroring FBI techniques you know very closely and it seems unlikely that they were independently developed so it's data its techniques so the NSA's mission you know fundamentally is to collect everything and you can see it in the documents Glenn Greenwald talked about this which slogans like collect it all know it all exploit it all it permeates the different documents you can see it in kind of the weird NSA stories about collecting data from the remote corners of the internet and the story the hit in the fall about the NSA collecting data from virtual worlds like EverQuest in Second Life I mean it was kind of funny and we could laugh at them but if actually you want to collect all communications that's a place for communications right and it and you could imagine the bad guys going on the Second Life and communicating its same with the collection of data from airplane to ground internet connections you know we heard about that last year they came out last week that Google Internet is is going beyond what's required by law to give data to the FBI so to me to understand this this this mentality you need to understand the history of the NSA I think it's really important to look back at their history and see how it evolved and the NSA was born after World War two at the beginning of the Cold War when the Soviet Union was the enemy lesser extent China but Soviet Union and the NSA's mission was to spy on the Soviet Union we had you know this is the Cold War we had this voyeuristic need to know everything that they were doing we collected a lot of data it's something useful some of it not I forget who someone talked about the difference between secrets and mysteries it's a lot easier to find out secrets with surveillance than mysteries it's a lot easier to know the speed of the new Soviet battle tank than it is to figure out you know who's gonna who's going to become chairman when when Stalin dies well right now it's probably easier to know how many Russian troops are in the Ukraine than to know what Putin is thinking right you know we were better at secrets than mysteries but that Soviet Union Warsaw Pact military focused an essay in a sense collapsed a little bit with the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the Cold War collapse of the Soviet Union and their mission refocused we saw a lot more security out of them we saw a commercial solution center we saw algorithms we saw our analysis we saw a much more openness they were doing a lot more to protect communications than they ever were that change stopped abruptly with the terrorist attacks December 11th now after those attacks President Bush gave the NSA an impossible mission and that is never again it's ridiculous it's impossible you I mean it's a crazy mission to give someone but if if if you are tasked with making sure something never happens the only way you can possibly achieve that is to know everything that does happen so that giant eye of the NSA was turned outward on the world and it went out ourselves and then this changed fundamentally the nature of the NSA's collection because when you're defined enemy can be anyone anywhere you have to collect data from everyone everywhere and the core NSA mission which was espionage government on government espionage as old as governments became government on population surveillance that was the change now this new mission came out of the terrorist attacks but it was very much aided by the natural trends in information technology I would going on on the internet during that decade it's fundamentally data is a byproduct of the information society everything we do on a computer produces a transaction record right whether it's your laptop whether it's your phone where there's an ATM machine a toll booth using your credit card anything with a computer creates a transaction record right data is a byproduct of all of our information societies socialization when I landed here in San Francisco we would you know this morning I had a nice conversation with my wife on iMessage right that conversation would have happened by voice before this though that conversation is recorded it's on my phone it's on her phone it snapples computers right increasingly company's computers are mediating all of our social interactions and all of this data is increasingly stored and increasingly searchable right and this is fundamentally Moore's law data storage drops to free data processing drops to free it becomes easier to save everything and to figure out what to save you know I remember this be when I first got email depends how old everyone is here when I first were got email I used to sort my email in a you know thirty or forty-five different email boxes throwing away stuff that wasn't important saving the important stuff did a lot of email filing I stopped in nineteen 2006 in 2002 F 2006 I just put everything in one mailbox and save it all right because in 2006 for email for me search became cheaper than sort it was easier to save everything to figure out what to save that line has been crossed for pretty much everything and where it hasn't and will be soon the marginal cost of saving is so low that the marginal value need to save is solo so you might as well save it all maybe we valuable at some point right the result here is a public private surveillance partnership there's a fundamental alliance of government and corporate interests now surveillance is the business model of the internet right we build systems that spy on people in exchange for services that's what we do right in the NSA surveillance largely piggybacks on all these corporate services right we see the NSA capturing location data that your cell phone producers we see them identifying people with cookies on the internet we see them collecting data on conversations and building social graphs from from phone calls but it's not that it's I was not at the NSA woke up and morning and said let's spy on everybody they woke up one morning and said you know corporations are spying on everybody let's just get ourselves a copy it's fundamentally we're living in the Golden Age of surveillance now one of the arguments you'll hear and we heard this from the president's back last June is that it's only metadata right the idea being that your conversation is not being recorded so just don't worry about it I don't worry it's only metadata that's odd for a computer person right you know one person one program is metadata as other programs data but it actually doesn't make sense in terms of surveillance because metadata equals surveillance I'll give you an easy thought experiment to understand this imagine you hired a private detective to to eavesdrop on somebody that detective would put a bug in there huh know their homes their cars their offices and you get a report of the conversations he had if you ask that same detective to put someone under surveillance you get a different sort of report the report would include where he went who he spoke to what he purchased what he looked at what are you read right that's all metadata metadata is fundamentally surveillance data and it's actually much more important than conversational data right metadata tracks relationships associations it shows what we're interested in it shows what's important to us I mean it basically funding reveals who we are and as an added bonus it's easier to store to search and to analyze this is why the NSA is focused on metadata over data right they can do a lot more with it and they do a lot to be this the NSA has some very sophisticated analysis tools to go through all the surveillance information and that's something that hasn't come out a lot in in the public stories the stories tend to focus on collection and not a lot on analysis the one exception there's a Washington Post story about the NSA's collection of cell phone location data and it includes some really interesting analysis tools that the NSA has there's something called Co traveler where the NSA will take all of the state if you think where this data is it's basically populations under surveillance the location data of every cell phone user is their movement data everyone's movement data 24/7 well you if you start analyzing this data one of the things they will look for are people who are to travel together more than normal and looking for associations just from movement data so they have somewhat of interest they might find people who are associated with them who never communicate with them electronically they also use that thing that actually actually this is really clever they have the phone numbers of US agents abroad they look for tails that's that's that's clever another thing they do is this is kind of neat they they they look for pairs of phones moving towards each other that turn themselves off and then turn on again an hour later moving away from each other look for secret meetings third cool thing they look for phones that are used get turned off permanently then another phone is turned on like shortly thereafter and then that gets turned off it looks they look for chains of burner phones if your watch the wire you know how this works right they look for those amongst the sea of data turns out you can find some of them so when you think about the data collection you have to think about data being used together right so calling metadata plus contactless collection from plus financial data or drones plus face recognition software plus Facebook's tagged photo database plus NSA location data I mean those are the things you have to think about because that's what's going on and it's very important in this debate to understand that this is not only about the NSA or about the United States or the United States has a very privileged position on the Internet quite a lot of the worldwide traffic goes through our borders and almost all of the big Internet companies our headquarter the United States but the techniques are general when we talk about the NSA because the Snowden documents have given us this extraordinary window and what the NSA is doing right there was a russian snowden we'd be talking about russia because these techniques are what any well-funded nation-state adversary will do right we know that that china uses some of the same techniques or packet injection I mean the NSA program or quantum we know that China is the exact same thing we know that Russia Syria Iran use a lot of these same things right and technology spreads quite a lot of techniques we see are also used in the hacker community they're not a slick they're not as well-funded there's not as well-documented but they're there so when you think of the NSA techniques think of it as a preview of what criminals gonna be doing in three to five years or over less lucky you know six months to 18 months because today's secret NSA program is become tomorrow's PhD theses the next days hacker tools this is the way technology works so when you think about it in this global sense it's much easier to understand what the harm is that we've built an internet that is insecure for everyone we've enabled global surveillance by anyone and the ramifications of what we're doing are much greater than us spies on the bad guys they're everyone's spies on anyone right in the US this NSA surveillance breaks pretty much all of our systems right they break our political systems Congress cannot provide oversight there's so much observation there's so much hiding citizens are kept in the dark so we can't provide any oversight it breaks our legal systems I can't believe I'm saying this but we where do we live in a country where secret courts make secret rulings on secret laws it breaks our commercial systems lots of US companies are complaining that products and services are no longer trusted worldwide because they cannot guarantee that the NSA hasn't forced them to make their products insecure and then lie about it and it breaks articulo systems is the very protocols and and standards we use the internet are no longer trusted and last week heartbleed I hope people remember this right we know happens on Monday by Thursday the big debate is did the NSA know about it right you know was this an accident or enemy action I will never know it seems like it was an accident and actually the debate was kind of kind of funny because right the debate was if basically if the NSA knew about it they were being irresponsible by not telling the community by by not fixing it on the other hand the NSA didn't know about it what the hell are we paying them for this easy one so they're kind of damned either way right but that's the choice there if the NSA finds a vulnerability should they use it to exploit or should they fix it to defend that's our choice now we could either have an internet that is vulnerable to all attackers or an internet that is secure for all users and this is not just a choice for today we're making architecture choices that will affect us 10 20 years down the road maybe we're building infrastructure now that we're gonna have to live with for a long time now there's some good news bad news here in his first interview after you know spearing in Hong Kong with with everything Edward Snowden was talking to Guardian reporters and his published interview he was talking about security and Morita's quote he says encryption works properly implemented strong crypto systems one of the few things you can rely on I believe he's right there's a lot of evidence that this is true evidence in the documents evidence and in various programs but then he said a sentence right after that which is the bad news unfortunately endpoint security is so terrifically weak that the NSA could frequently find ways around it or as I'll say the math works but math has no agency in order to get actual security you have to take the math and embed it in software in an operating system in Hardware on a network with people and all of those steps are highly vulnerable now we know that the NSA has some advances of cryptography and where this is a more mathy audience I'd go into it but most of how the NSA breaks cryptography is by getting around it right by exploiting bad implementations default or weak keys programming errors like heartbleed sabotaging standard deliberately inserting backdoors and products or I guess demanding keys from companies and the last one is exfiltrating keys that's NSA talk for stealing right they do a lot of that but mostly they rely on unencrypted streams of data right most of the internet is not encrypted most cloud services not encrypted most cell phone data and metadata is not encrypted other third-party data we hear a lot about third party data and then essai documents most of that's not encrypted all right so here's our problem right we've made bulk collection too easy it's too easy for the NSA to collect information everybody than it is to collect information on just the bad guys which means we made it too easy for everybody not just the NSA collect information on everybody now now solutions are varied solutions are complicated I think this is necessarily so right this is a complex problem and it's going to include self corrections in government self Corrections and corporations technical countermeasures legal countermeasures international cooperation there changes in social norms and I don't go sort of go over all of those first time talk about the self Corrections there's a lot of stuff going on inside the NSA right now and as amazing as it seems the NSA had absolutely no contingency plans for all of our secrets being stolen at once right no more they got that one now I it took them about two months to get a PR firm with the right clearances to help them with their messaging no they got that one now too but the basic cost benefit analysis has changed right when the NSA was playing an operation they would think about the risk as the risk of the victim finding out about it not the risk of it appearing in the newspaper right the political blowback from the NSA surveillance has been considerable and and knowing that that's gonna happen that's more likely to happen it's gonna limit what the NSA does because there actually is a changing nature of secrecy going on you think back to I don't know the 70s the 80s the August secret organizations the NSA the CIA right they would pick people out of college right Yale graduates and and they would take them into the fold and and teach them the secrets they become part of the community they have jobs for life they'd be one of the elites they protect the secrets and that's the way it used to work doesn't work like that anymore well I think these jobs are with contractors and the notion for job for life for anybody under 40 is a joke I mean you know Edward Snowden was 28 Chelsea Manning was 26 Edward stone was a contractor looking at maybe the contracts going up Manning was on a four-year tour these people didn't have jobs for life they didn't have the same relationship with the organizations that the previous generation did and that just secrecy harder and the NSA is gonna have to incorporate these new increased risks risks exposure in everything they do right you have to assume that any program they instantiate becomes public in three to five years and that changes things because nobody would have cared of the Snowden documents that the NSA spied on North Korea and the Taliban and I said a spied on Belgium or even worse that the UK spied in Belgium was like Connecticut spying on Nebraska and the NSA is very risk-averse so I think this changes things I think there are other conversations happening in within government I mean the effectiveness of bulk collection has been taken for granted and it's being increasingly questioned whether there's there is an increasing belief that this is not effective right too much noise obscures your signal in the early years after September 11th the NSA would pass tips to the FBI and I remember I figured couple of years after there's a big headline saying you know 10,000 tips no actual plot so the mesially I said stop sending us this stuff you're annoying us we have to follow up on all these dumb first false alarms we can't get our actual work done right in any of these systems false alarms overwhelm your signal and there's a lot of other arguments reliance on detection and there's other solutions I mean there's a lot of reasons why this doesn't work there are also limitations of intelligence my data does not equal information information as an equal knowledge I'd remember the story last year that the United States had a three-day advanced warning that Syria was gonna be using chemical weapons on our population and the question I ask reasonably is well if we knew that why didn't we stop it well the answer there's a lot of answers or other than is we couldn't write nothing we could do that all that data gave us is a little bit knowledge when the actionable it's just really not clear with a lot of surveillance is worth it and there's more now more arguments that it's not that is mostly voyeurism are the third self correction is inside corporations like corporations have a new cost-benefit analysis here right as late as 2002 when the NSA goes to AT&T and says hey we want to spy on all of your customers 18d says sure you know put your stuff in that closet over there don't tell anybody I'll lock the door right now we're seeing more companies fight more companies only respond to court orders and not do it informally like they used to more companies seeing PR value in standing up for their customers against government intrusion alright US and other countries as well maybe the reputation matters here and there's a little bit of game playing here you know doing things that that look good instead of actually fighting but there is more resistance so these Self Corrections are happening I think they're minor but I think they will they're real there are other things going on as well means there are technical changes going on on the internet maybe I'm often asked what is the most surprising thing at the NSA documents so far I'll tell you those surprising thing and then the NSA might have a bigger budget and every other intelligence agency in the world combined but they are not made of magic right they are there right they are susceptible to the laws of economics the laws of physics the laws of mathematics just like everybody else and so the technical goal is to leverage those laws that if we can technically make bulk collection more expensive we will make ourselves safer right we're never gonna get rid of targeted surveillance I don't think that's possible anytime in our lifetimes but we can bulk surveillance so expensive that it's limited and targeted surveillance is preferred where lots of different things to do here encryption tools and it in many tools other security tools my open standard open source that's harder to subvert heartily notwithstanding our target dispersal I think we were way more secure in there in ten thousand ISPs in there we're ten and and my favorite and the hardest is is information assurance it's some way to demonstrate that a piece of software does what we expected to do and nothing else my difficult maybe impossible but real important but largely this is a political problem and it's a difficult political problem right we're long past the point where singular legal interventions will do any good and a lot of the public debate has centered around the telephone metadata program probably because that was the first Snowden story that's the one that people most know about that's when the president talks most about and that's the one that the president is trying to reform in a variety of ways some of which useful some which meaningless right but that's just one particular collection program under one particular legal authority i that doesn't even begin to address the larger problem and we know basically how to solve this right we know the framework of the solution basically its transparency oversight and accountability right sort of fundamentally that's how we deal with the problem of giving power to authority and making sure they don't abuse it right the The Devil's in the details there's a lot of details but that's basically the way it works one of the as we're seeing is that law lags technology it isn't quote bye-bye general hi general hidin was the CIA to us are the NSA director before general Alexander who just retired and this is this quotes from after he retired and he's on television talking about NSA surveillance and I'm gonna read it because it's really interesting he says give me the box you will allow me to operate in I'm gonna play to the very edges of that box okay it's an interesting quote what are you saying is look I'm not in charge of the laws you Congress are uncharged give me my box pass the laws tell me what I can and can't do right I'm gonna operate to the edges of that box that's what you'd expect me to do cuz I'm a good guy and I'm gonna do my job to the fullest the problem with that idea is that technology changes the box all right you know Congress passed the law you have a box then someone invents you know I don't know wireless networking or the iPhone or Facebook or something else and suddenly the Box gets bigger right and then the NSA who's way quicker than Congress rushes to fill the new box because that's what those boxes and now it's harder to reduce capabilities and that seems to happen again and again I mean there's there's she's interesting article by a by Jack Goldsmith Jack Goldsmith was a actually he's my favorite ex Bush official and he's now at Harvard Law School and as you he was the one who forced that Ashcroft bedside meeting where the justum aren't almost almost resigned in mass because of an activity she said look this is illegal you can't do this anyway he wrote an essay early in this in the in the in the Snowden documents was talking about oversight actually I'm gonna save that story that never happened talk more about openness now one of the things I've been thinking about as as a way to deal with some of this is to how to deal with much less secrecy in this environment because the the the problem of the transparency oversight accountability sequence is you need transparency to start and how do you get that in such an inherently secret environment so one of the things I'm thinking about is if can we separate espionage from surveillance remember that internal history the NSA there's that government on government espionage mission and that government under surveillance government on population surveillance mission the government on government you know is going to happen that that's right that's right felici croteau government population can be much more open this is a great article that appear in the Atlantic website about a month ago and the title was why isn't the Fourth Amendment classified the interesting question and one of the arguments you hear from the NSA all the time is well we'd love to tell you what we're doing but if we tell you the enemy is listening we can't tell you and not tell them so we can't tell you right possible but if you look at the Fourth Amendment and if you look at all the case law surrounding the Fourth Amendment that is a how-to manual on how to evade police search right it tells you in exacting terms how to get around the letter of the law why is that not classified and given that it's not classified how a society survived all these centuries hey it turns out that we can do with much less secrecy in the police world there's a lot less secrecy right there exists no police budget in the country that is classified there exists no surveillance budget the country that is unclassified what's going on here we've postulating the terrorists are much much cleverer than organized crime it doesn't make sense so what's happened if you think about it this surveillance operation this government on population could in theory fall within the police norm or the military norm because of history because of where the agencies were it fell under the military norm it fell under the military norm of secrecy I think moving it to the police norm of secrecy will have enormous value right it is not the end it is just the beginning but it is I think it's an important beginning yes I mean lately I've been advocating breaking up the NSA we already have the problem of this NSA dual mission right if they learn about heartbleed should they exploit it or should they use it to protect people where there are two different groups than the NSA two halves on each of that each side of that equation and the but the exploit is just winning so if you think about it if you took something like the espionage function moved it to the CIA kind of where it belongs took all the counterterrorism stuff well do all the surveillance up moved to the FBI Connie where that belongs under the FBI rules which are way more open right and are sort of less vague less and runs around laws and what's left will be the protect component of the NSA which we actually can consorted that for protection kind of similar to what the president's review group on surveillance recommended they recommend that that these missions be broken up further that having them to close is a problem they also recommended moving cyber command right the military attack internet group away from the NSA more into the military I think that makes sense too and so thinking about these things I think is is really interesting and worth having these discussions you know how do we get out of this but of course you even if we succeed here in reining in NSA surveillance that only affects the United States right it doesn't affect the actions of any other country and regularly you will hear an argument of this form the NSA has to do what it's doing because China does too right I mean that that's that's an arms race argument right we're in an arms race with Russia where the arms race with China where there's a zero-sum game it's us versus them if you know one of us has to win it can't be them therefore it must be us but that's the basic argument I think we have to get beyond it right it's not us versus them it's everyone versus nobody we have to get to the point where governments realize that a secure Internet is in everyone's best interest right that the NSA and the US should work to secure the internet even if China doesn't play along then it's a question of you know are we gonna build a Maginot Line just because they do of course not because it doesn't make sense and that turns the zero-sum game into a positive sum game then you can have laws and treaties to support that you could have technology to support the laws you can have laws and technologies to deal with non-compliant actors both state non-state this doesn't solve the problem but it makes the sort of into any of those other really really hard international problems we have I think money laundering or nuclear non-proliferation or human trafficking or small arms trafficking I mean those are still big problems and where we're not solving them but at least you're moving in the same direction now with surveillance we're not even moving in the same direction now we're still stuck in this us-versus-them mentality so lastly and I'm most importantly this is a social problem but as long as we're scared we will allow everything and this is where the goldsmith story actually belongs he wrote an essay on the law fare blog basically said you know you guys are saying you want more oversight but actually you don't cuz right now if you get more oversight you'll get a much more permissive permissive NSA as long as lawmakers are scared as long as the NSA can say if you don't do this you will have blood on your hands right and people believe them when they say that more oversight means more permissions because no one wants to say no and potentially get it wrong but as long as we've prioritized control over Liberty will never get security as long as the argument is on the other side terrorists will kill your children we're not gonna get anywhere we have to get to the point where this is a ridiculous argument but we can look back at you know the US and Turman of the Japanese during World War two and say what in the world were we thinking or look back at McCarthyism and say are you kidding we'll be that crazy I mean we'll get to the point where we look back at the past decade and say oh don't be ridiculous we didn't actually do that at airports that's stupid right but it's gonna take a while and it could very well be that we have to get there first because right now you have judges who are scared being deferential to the NSA you have Congress who is scared being deferential the NSA you have a president who is scared being deferential the NSA and you've got a lot of the people who are saying look you know just make sure terrorists don't kill my children I don't care what else happens I mean it's hard to have a rational debate when there is such pervasive fear now there's less fear now than it was 10 years ago we're getting out of our our our collective post-traumatic stress syndrome but it's slow and the neat thing is once we get there the NSA can help but I've been mentioning a few times the NSA has a dual mission the dual mission was to eavesdrop on the enemy communications and protect domestic communications and that dual mission made a lot of sense during the Cold War right the NSA would spy on their stuff and protect our stuff because the stuff was different the stuffs all the same now right everyone uses email and tcp/ip and Microsoft Word and open SSL right we all use the same stuff there's no our stuff versus their stuff anymore it's all everyone's stuff right defending our infrastructure also defends their infrastructure right we have to recognize that defending is more important than attacking so I started out by saying that internet surveillance is robust right robust legally politically and technically it is I mean this is a real hard one and we need to solve this you know not just for the NSA but for everybody and we need to solve this in a way where what other governments do don't matter with cyber criminals do doesn't matter when rogue actors doesn't do it what do doesn't matter right we need to build resilience into our infrastructure security privacy all of those things that actually make us more secure I mean we're at the point where secure Internet is vital to society all of society and we need to move forward to get there thank you Caffe take questions ice-t two microphones there I assume they're on if they're not someone will turn them on kind of magically please yes here and I have a pretty good idea of like what which of my day is being collected what sort of day assists on the NSA servers but my question is why should I care like if the NSA has one gigabyte of my data and two petabytes of everyone else's why should I care that my data is sitting there in that server so you're a computer science person I mean so which one of them I mean I think this is a much more popular fallacy and it's it's the you know hiding in plain sight fallacy that because the NSA has lost it on everybody they can't possibly do anything about me but you know you know computers can are really really good at boring repetitive tasks that's where they excel at so sifting through everybody's data is easy I mean I didn't know this but I learned this last week that to ping the entire internet and see who's vulnerable to heartbleed takes like 20 minutes so so where it's it's not an impediment that they have petabytes petabytes are actually pretty easy now to deal with so it's a question of our data you know do we care I mean do we care that and this is where you know corporate and government kind of blur like Google knows what kind of porn all of you like is this good as this bad right the government knows I'm into our government and also the Chinese government they want know what everybody is reading which fundamentally knowing people's preferences knowing what's important to them and how is this useful well great corporations use of a psychological manipulation for advertising governments use it for crime prevention social control and lots of countries this day is collected to arrest people it happens in China happens happens in Ukraine the past week and happen in Syria so by defending the internet all of it we defend against all of these attackers it's less about the NSA and more about ever buddy I'm actually less concerned with the NSA collecting my data than Anna the NSA deliberately subverting security standards and products and protocols to make my data vulnerable to wall attackers the risks of data of data being lost we see a bunch of examples of data being stolen so so those those are the harm's some of them feel a bit extreme some of them are very real you know we're moving to a world where there actually is no privacy now what's interesting is that mention that conversation I had on an iMessage with my wife this morning and that it's on our phones but our phones only store the last 50 messages so in a couple of days they're going to roll off our phones Apple doesn't actually have that limitation of 50 message storage so that conversation is now stored on Apple computers potentially government computers forever and we're living in a world where we're increasingly judged by that data I mean some of these some of it's you know on different scales right if Google uses that data to decide if I want to buy a car and if they get it wrong I see and for Chevy I don't want to buy so what right in the middle people use that data to determine a credit score and maybe I get a house loan or I don't on the far end and a satisfies who to drop a drone strike on but false alarms really bad there so so how am i doing all right hi I've heard suggestions that if we encouraged all data online or as much as possible to be encrypted it would slow the NSA down I know Google has been encouraging more stuff to be encrypted do you think it's likely to happen that most data online is encrypted and do you think it'll make any difference so I don't think most well I think more will be I think I make a great difference great because my goal isn't to stop the NSA from going after the bad guys I wasn't to go where from the bad guys stop going after everybody and when encryption does is force them to target I have no doubt if tau tailored access operations is the NSA's black-bag teams they want to get at your date my data they got it but that's not what I'm trying to stop it's collecting data everybody I mean the remember the flap bout us collecting data on Angela Merkel's phone and that was like the only useful thing that the NSA did and all the documents we saw spying on foreign leaders you'd think is exactly what we want the NSA to do all right the question of which leaders that's foreign policy I don't care all right they know the president's figure that out it's spying on the entire population of Germany that I object to and that's spying on the entire population of Germany is because that data is unencrypted all right because that data can easily be collected and your Merkel's encryption and NSA's got a handle on don't worry about that I mean they're in so that's where that's where encryption helps it raises the cost of bulk collection so it becomes higher than targeted collection and that is enormous value I mean for all of us you talked about two different missions that the NSA has is it at its core attack and defense and looking at the attack side in the context where there's no our staff or their stuff there's just everybody stuff what does an attack look like and how do you differentiate that from espionage so this is actually a really important question I'll give you the military terms espionage a/c any computer network exfiltration attack is CNA computer network attack and the NSA does both actually the NSA does does the exploitation Cyber Command does the attack and this is why cyber can was put sort of in the same building as the NSA or at least next door I forget who's I'm Aaron actually note was where the same generals in charge of both because the techniques are exactly the same the only difference is what you do after you break into the computer do you steal data or do you you know leave a logic bomb and you watch the rhetoric it's really interesting that we use when the Chinese attack Google the headlines are all about China starting the cyber war they were breaking in to us computers when it came out that the US attacks China the headlines were all oh it's espionage happens all the time don't worry about it are the exact same stuff and the problem is when you're the the victim you can't tell the difference see and knee looks exactly like CNA except for the effect and and I think this makes it very difficult when I talk about moving the nsa's s transmission into the CIA or into the military I want him I want it to be where it belongs you're actually attacking someone else's computer breaking into it you're only stealing stuff but you're still doing the same offensive operation so make it a military thing make some military hierarchy sign off on it but you're right you can't tell the difference so why wouldn't a foreign power consider exfiltration or exploitation that doesn't have an attack payload not an act of war they bite I mean act of war is as much political as it is technical right you know lots of things are an act of war that you decide aren't because you don't want to go to war I mean Stuxnet when when the US and Israel attacked the Iranian nuclear power facility to send destroyed equipment now by any textbook definition that's an act of war but you know Iran says well I don't go to war with us that's not gonna be no fun right so he kind of so so yes I think it is it could be an act of war and actually worried about the US and China sort of doing this to each other because they can get out of hand pretty fast so I you know this kind of escalation could happen I think it's ready to stabilizing that you know we are doing it and decisioning we unilaterally went to China couple weeks ago and said okay look here are our rules right this is what we're doing and not doing anything else who knows we were lying or not but I think that was an attempt to sort of dampen down some of this rhetoric that was just getting a little bit scary for everybody involved and they could get there again there's a lot of I mean I worry about the destabilization here please the guy want to other people and succinctly what would you say to the fact that's the goal surveillance after September 11th basically has worked way I agree with all the technical reasons and and such things as what you said like why can't the budget be public for the NSA or why can't they just do targeted attacks but I feel like this is intuitive thing that that I don't have trouble arguing against about the fact that it has worked and we don't know what would happen if we try to restrict them in certain ways well it seems like it hasn't I mean the analyses we've seen is that it's not very effective you know hiding general hidin said I could have stopped 53 terrorist attacks you know after several xi and that number got whittled down eventually till we got you know one san franpsycho cab driver sending money back to Yemen you know it's not happened abroad means a whole lot of reasons but it may that really does seem farcical right the NSA said they could've stopped 9/11 they couldn't stop the Boston bombing and that was one guy than terrorist terrorist watchlist the other guy with a sloppy Facebook trail and that kind of should have been a gimme so it seems that the successes we have come from following leads and you have to remember in the earliest of summer 11th the government was trotting out any two-bit terrorist wannabe as a success anything that could remotely be a success they would trumpet if these programs produce successes they would have told us because they it was enormous PR value and having these successes right so the following the lead seemed to work so you think about the liquid bombers right the guy the guys in London they were caught they were arrested in their London apartments before they got to the airport they depict a plot designed to get around airport security and they were caught not through this bulk surveillance but through following leads and following leads is what works you know they're the the bulk surveillance seems to be far too expensive for its value or the Utah data center is ten billion dollars plus 100 million a year we just go get nearly that value from that how about a FBI agent hire for 10 billion dollars when they cost fully burdened a couple of thousand dollars a year I mean this is crazy please so you've talked about bulk surveillance and targeted exploits I'm wondering what happens if we have bulk exploits you said how you know if we can build encryption into things it becomes much harder for the NSA to spy on everyone and everything but they have these persistent payloads that have come out in these documents where your networks which might be exploited in such a way that it stays owned by the NSA your laptop chip and they've already hacked well way what's to say that every single Apple computer in this room isn't being exploited or won't the exploit nothing is to say that and actually I've never heard the bulk exploit I like it right that's a good way to describe it because because the thing that object to most is this subversion of products protocols of Santas right every Apple Computer being subverted so so and that is in a sense of bulk exploit when we saw that tião catalog and it's really cool if you haven't seen it but all these great you know grain of rice sized computers they slip in in places and in ways they have in grabbing data and that stuff super phenomenal that's very targeted I mean it's it's the list of good stuff the NSA does right I want you to go hack the computers in North Korea do them that's that's fantastic but don't hack everybody's so yeah I think that notion of bulk exploits is a good way of framing that and you will see it in a future article of mine very soon I'd write it down out of a pin oh and that's the Wi-Fi password in case I'm boring I think it's with bitter irony that we are talking about preserving our freedoms by essentially giving them up but I wanted to comment on your statement that you thought it might be a good idea for maybe portions of the NSA to maybe be moved under organization perhaps like the CIA and and I wanted to ask do you really feel comfortable that having the CIA run these same types of programs would provide more oversight more trust and and and a better kind of outcome because I struggle to see what just changing the lay-by so I just meant the focused government on government stuff I mean that's the thing I think we'll never get oversight on I think that's okay government spying on governments is a secret military operation I'm willing to cede all of that I don't need to know US operations against the Chinese government which don't terrorism is not a government function right it has a terrorism preserve habeas corpus how will you preserve constitutional law how will you preserve the Fourth Amendment all those types of that's the stuff to see yeah that's the stuff that I want to move into something more FB I like that kind of stuff that requires surveillance of populations feels a lot more like conventional it has a breach that what is Guantanamo about understood understood yeah that's what I feel very uncomfortable about if you were to take this and move it from okay yeah I mean I agree so so I think that this we're both talking about I don't want to move there so I think we agree we might not but I think we do yes the CIA has got its own problems no argument so the the stuff against terrorists I want to move to a more FBI like organization because that's how I deal tears of United States right there is an FBI like organization happily called the FBI that deals with counterterrorism in the u.s. so you would say make that function yes but then it also be a broader scope because it would be yes they would give up that police function so with the CIA and so with all the other I don't think a CIA has it I mean I don't know that much about the CIA's mission but it is much more of a government on government organization maybe you know maybe this won't work I mean I I got to do something to decrease the secrecy here where the secrecy is fundamentally poisoning all of us we can't have debates in this secret environment we can't know what's happening and and you know it prevents us from dealing with this in Congress stealing those in the courts prevents us do this anywhere so some way to pull secrecy out of this is gonna help I mean you will keep getting in line so like there's my last two questions in the last five and I know what's going on here stop getting in line I scare him that's good okay so there's there's tools like like PGP for email or OTR for chat that have been around for a long time but almost no one uses him yep so I'm wondering if you had any thoughts about what could be done to make those more popular well we need to make them more usable the OTR you know PGP is a great story if a twenty years of email cryptic email we've learned that one-click encryption is one-click way too many for most people right but but OTR I think has had actually much more success as much newer are you install it once it's pretty easy easy to use people seem to like it I think it's getting broader use then then then email and you know you know it's quicker I mean we need to need a lot of world work on usable security usable transparent and and the IETF deprivations are thinking about this finally so I think we are gonna make progress but yet tools have to be so easy to use that you know my mother can use them which if you know my mother is gonna be hard but but we really have to get there you know and some of it's things like like SSL and the encryption we're using on our browsers we don't even see it straps lis transparent right HTTPS and magically your encrypted now it's not perfect there are holes there are attacks against it but it really does a lot I mean in the NSA guinness ssl pisses them off and so we know it works but there is there's a lot here and it's really in usability and making this stuff usable for normal people cool I believe at one point the NSA was supposed to be simply intercepting or working with foreign communications at what point did it start having a charter to look at domestic well the Charter really happened after 9/11 in which some of those some of the domestic programs and court orders but it really started as communication started flopping around right back in the early days the NSA would be spying on the Soviet Union you'd go there and eavesdrop on the the wire between you know Moscow and Leningrad right and it's that wire and it's got communications between those two places and you Neves drop on it it was very easy to connect electronic surveillance with a geographical boundary as things started moving in to switch networking that became harder so originally you mean that they're not spying on Americans but occasionally they would get American data you know on these links they're listening to and then they would minimize it yeah and then they say has an enormous amount of rules about following procedures and compliance complying with the law they do a lot from minimization but the rules started changing with this terrorist threat and then a lot more US communications inadvertently right not targeted but it's there gets collected and there are rules that stuff it collects inadvertently they can use you're getting in line and I'm noticing you whether they can use so that's really where started changing technology technology change and the terrorist threat changed all right you are my last question sorry thanks for taking the last question that'd be a good one okay well I hope it will be so a lot of love by your peers on the quality of your question no pressure there nicely none no pressure Neal t he'll do it if you don't want I'm good right so the a lot of the focus of the bulk collection I mean we talked about there's the protection aspect as the foreign governments and there's this sort of terrorism thing right but since this has come out that they've been collecting all this data for so many years I've been a little surprised that we haven't seen subpoenas against this data for things like insider stock trading stock market manipulation and other kinds of white-collar crime I'm a little curious if you have any insight as to why that might be and if your perspective would change on the whole matter if they were using it for other sources like that well I mean the NSA makes a big deal about this is just for intelligent purposes there may be there a couple of purposes it's for they will pass data to the FBI if they happen to see something FBI would care about they don't look for it oh we saw one case where I think it was someone on trial for murder basically said the data in the NSA database will exonerate me right that that phone metadata is I mean I don't have any more Verizon have it you have it right I need that evidence and the NSA refused which i think is kind of really kind of immoral so I think there will be the tendency to use it because while it's there I mean you could imagine it right email just will just use it in kidnappings will just use it in child porn will just use it in major drug deal baby right you know you could see how this can easily creep into you know we're using it now for traffic light violations right we've got this we go we got the location data we know you started here we know you ended there it's four miles you took three minutes you're obviously sped we never know the Pennsylvania Turnpike does that because you get your ticket and it's time-stamped and if you you know go out the other end too fast they actually give you a ticket when you pay so at the last rest stop before the toll plaza everyone is sort of sitting there relaxing because they all sped alright so so I think I think it's kind of mission creep is inevitable and and it is one of the dangers thank you thank you all

Channel: Stanford Center for Internet & Society

Views: 32,353

Rating: 4.8674035 out of 5

Keywords: stanford cis, center for internet and society, NSA, bruce schneier, privacy

Id: 3v9t_IoOgyI

Length: 70min 28sec (4228 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 22 2014

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