It's isn't just the Democrats and Republicans who have a bag of tricks, those Wikileaks people have apparently leaked again. Yikes!
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Sunday, November 28, 2010 - When I heard that those crazy Wikileaks people were releasing more classified documents, I wondered to myself, "just exactly HOW do they do that? How do they get ahold of Top Secret documents?"
When I worked at an aerospace company many years ago, I had a Secret Clearance so I could only deal with Secret documents. That was a big deal. Having a Top Secret Clearance was a huge deal. And you also had to have a "need to know."
It all seems wrong for someone on our side to do this to us. So, I looked around and the information below is what I found out. It is VERY interesting.
How Wikileakers Wikileak
Wikileaks has been in the news a lot lately due to its disclosure of tens of thousands of classified American documents, leading many to ask, "How do they get away with this?" Or, to put a finer point on it, "How does an Army Private in an Army office using Army computers on an Army network transmit tens of thousands of classified documents to a suspect Web site and nobody notices or intercepts it?" (I say "suspect" because the U.S. military has long been suspicious of Wikileaks and its motives, therefore it's suspect in the Army's eyes, at least.)
But this massive leak of classified data got by more than just the U.S. Army. The NSA and other government agencies comb the Internet and other communications networks daily, much of it in real time, looking for precisely this kind of information. Yet somehow they all missed this massive transfer of secret info happening right under their noses.
It's like people counting goldfish missing a whale that went by. How did that happen?
Well, there's a one-word answer: TOR.
"TOR" stands for The Onion Router, a communications network embedded within the Internet, staffed and run by volunteers, that, like an onion, has layer upon layer that hide what's inside. In this case the layers are random communications paths: Messages that enter TOR are encrypted and bounced around many times among the thousands of nodes of the TOR network around the world, finally emerging from TOR to reach its destination from a remote node in a way that makes it near-impossible to correlate what went in with what came out.
TOR also strips off much of the identifying information that would normally allow messages on the Internet to be traced back to their source. So even if the data transfer was detected in real time, it could not have been traced back to the source. And because the data sent to Wikileaks was encrypted, even if it had been intercepted it would have been very, very difficult to tell what was being sent.
So what does this tell us? That despite efforts by many governments to increase their monitoring and control of the Internet, it's still possible for the motivated and mildly tech-savvy to get around such control and surveillance, even in very regimented environments such as the U.S. Army. Such capabilities can be a great force for good, such as allowing dissidents under repressive regimes to communicate with each other and the outside world, but they can also be abused.
Where to draw the line is not only the subject of ongoing public debate, but also of an ongoing technical battle between those who want to spy on others and those who do not want to be spied on.
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This afternoon, I heard that they released the Wikileaks documents to certain news outlets. Well, don't they have the option to NOT publish that information? I suppose if they have it they HAVE TO do it or they'll burst. The internet -- we didn't even know about it just a few years ago. Now, everyone knows everything about everyone. TMI -- see ya later, djb
posted by Andrew and Jarrett's Mom @ 7:40 PM
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