10 May 1999

We've had inquiries about the "NSA bot" which visits this site daily, Monday to Friday, to see what's new to take home. Now, despite our claim in our privacy policy to not willfully disclose what's in our site access log, we outed this machine, so, hark, it's clear we're no more trustworthy than any other lying site operator promising privacy.

Here's where we got the home of the bot:

http://www.arin.net/whois/

Punch in the domain address 144.51 and get:

National Computer Security Center (NET-NCSC2)
       9800 Savage Road
       Fort George G. Meade, MD 20755-6000

       Netname: NCSC
       Netnumber: 144.51.0.0

       Coordinator:
          McCool, Anna M.  (AMM32-ARIN)  amm@ROMULUS.NCSC.MIL
          (301) 688-5267

       Domain System inverse mapping provided by:

       ROMULUS.NCSC.MIL             144.51.5.2
       ZOMBIE.NCSC.MIL              144.51.15.1
       BARRIER.NCSC.MIL             144.51.1.200
       GRIZZLY.NRL.NAVY.MIL         132.250.116.12,132.250.110.12,132.250.108.12

       Record last updated on 17-Nov-97.
       Database last updated on 10-May-99 16:14:15 EDT.

We welcome the bot's visit*, it came here early in 1996 when few did, and it keeps on coming, day after day through doldrums and deliria, no vacations, no TDY to god's own cesspits to snarf 1's and 0's: IYAS9YAS

And it's drawn others from 144.51 and places doing cybersecurity work we'd like to know more about. We've gotten a few excellent documents from those places, not directly but from the people who work there who presented them in other fora. A couple of those have been crowd pleasers here:

"How to Make A Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash":

http://cryptome.org/jya/nsamint.htm (1996)

"The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments":

http://cryptome.org/jya/paperF1.htm (1998)

Through FOIA requests we hope to get a few oft-cited but un-outed security reports sometime in July (when hell freezes over):

http://cryptome.org/jya/nsa-foia-req.htm

And, patiently, we're still trying to coax these ultra-shy bot-people to unlimber more about Echelon, or whatever it's techno-morphed into since 72:

http://cryptome.org/jya/nsa-elint.htm

* We're counting on the bot to dump some good stuff as fair exchange.