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15 October 2014 Bruce Schneier Censored by Snowden Censors Censoring Snowden's NSA technical documents to prevent devising countermeasures is criminally negligent.
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1410.html CRYPTO-GRAM October 15, 2014
by Bruce Schneier [Excerpt] FOXACID Operations Manual A few days ago, I saw this tweet: "Just a reminder that it is now *a full year* since Schneier cited it, and the FOXACID ops manual remains unpublished." It's true. The citation is this: "According to a top-secret operational procedures manual provided by Edward Snowden, an exploit named Validator might be the default, but the NSA has a variety of options. The documentation mentions United Rake, Peddle Cheap, Packet Wrench, and Beach Head--all delivered from a FOXACID subsystem called Ferret Cannon." Back when I broke the QUANTUM and FOXACID programs, I talked with the Guardian editors about publishing the manual. In the end, we decided not to, because the information in it wasn't useful to understanding the story. It's been a year since I've seen it, but I remember it being just what I called it: an operation procedures manual. It talked about what to type into which screens, and how to deal with error conditions. It didn't talk about capabilities, either technical or operational. I found it interesting, but it was hard to argue that it was necessary in order to understand the story. It will probably never be published. I lost access to the Snowden documents soon after writing that essay -- Greenwald broke with the Guardian, and I have never been invited back by the Intercept -- and there's no one looking at the documents with an eye to writing about the NSA's technical capabilities and how to securely design systems to protect against government surveillance. Even though we now know that the same capabilities are being used by other governments and cyber criminals, there's much more interest in stories with political ramifications. The tweet: https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/521333453439004672 The citation: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/how-the-nsa-thinks-about-secrecy-and-risk/280258/ or http://tinyurl.com/nnmq8sm QUANTUM and FOXACID: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity or http://tinyurl.com/onbjqju https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/08/quantum_technol.html
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