Electrospaces

I'm going to focus on voice as messengers are all over the place. People originally wanted secure voice. They started out as custom or value-added devices that, if worth a crap, often had special protections like dedicated IC's for crypto and TEMPEST protection:

https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2012/06/highly-secure-mobile-phones.html?m=1

Those were usually very simple. A good thing compared to modern ones. They all cost in the $1,000-3,000 per unit range due to extra costs and low volume. Sectera Edge was probably most secure and rugged. Cryptophone was easy to use plus had nice features like hardened Windows and published source for crypto. You basically called the person, read out what was on your screen, listened to them do the same, and listen to each other's voices to make sure you recognized them. It was favorite outside of just defense use. Switched to Android later. That's the demo I found.

http://www.cryptophone.de/en/products/mobile/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RchMr2B1KuU

Note: The letters you see are the codes you read.

These were pretty expensive. So, companies started developing software for regular phones... often one or two models... that turned them into encrypted phones optionally with hardening. Prior list had some. SecureStar (PhoneCrypt), SecureGSM, and Cellcrypt come to mind. Eventually, recognizing encryption wasn't enough, this segment sort of combined with Android and other software to produce dedicated phones that were cheaper than…

Here are some excerpts from the WSJ paywalled article:

Cellphones are programmed to connect automatically to the strongest cell tower signal. The device being used by the U.S. Marshals Service identifies itself as having the closest, strongest signal, even though it doesn’t, and forces all the phones that can detect its signal to send in their unique registration information. Even having encryption on one’s phone, such as Apple Co. ’s iPhone 6 now includes, doesn’t prevent this process...

The program cuts out phone companies as an intermediary in searching for suspects. Rather than asking a company for cell-tower information to help locate a suspect, which law enforcement has criticized as slow and inaccurate, the government can now get that information itself. People familiar with the program say they do get court orders to search for phones, but it isn’t clear if those orders describe the methods used because the orders are sealed.

Also unknown are the steps taken to ensure data collected on innocent people isn’t kept for future examination by investigators. A federal appeals court ruled earlier this year that over-collection of data by investigators, and stockpiling of such data, was a violation of the Constitution.

This isn't exactly new. Harris' Stingray price list has AIRBRN-KIT-CONUS for sale for $9,000, dating back to 2008:
https://info.publicintelligence.net/Harris-SurveillancePriceList.pdf

Here's a 2013 post on the so-called…

"In the telcos, singlemode fiber is used to connect long distance switches, central offices and SLCs (subscriber loop carriers, small switches in pedestals in subdivisions or office parks or in the basement of a larger building). Practically every telco's network is now fiber optics except the connection to the home." [1]

Specifically, AT&T has transitioned its PSTN backbone fully to SIP, which is a form of VoIP: "AT&T will exchange SIP traffic at the access border controller layer (i.e. SBCs, more specifically Acme Packet SBCs) via IP handoff at a few "strategic locations," directly peering with a select number of Tier 1 carriers. AT&T will also provide transit and direct termination through its network and support all roaming traffic to interwork with other wireless carriers" [2]

So both voice and data are going over the same fiber lines, since it's all IP (which reduces costs considerably.) We know that Room 641A was one of many QUANTUM locations, where traffic was beam-split. [3]

It seems from [4], that we have confirmation that TURMOIL and INCENSER snarf up PSTN as well as IP. Since all of that was working well before 2010, and we know TEMPORA acts as a buffer for high-volume stuff (fed by the Narus machines), and voice is IP now because of SIP, I feel reasonably confident it's getting stored at some duration at the exchanges.

1. https://www.lanshack.com/fiber-optic-tutorial-network.aspx

2.…

> I wrote blog entry on this subject with a very similar name [0] which covers the CryptoAG story in more detail. It doesn't have the 2020 news. [0]: A Brief History of NSA Backdoors (2013), https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html

Wow this is super interesting I noticed this paragraph in the text.

> 2013, Enabling for Encryption Chips: In the NSA's budget request documents released by Edward Snowden, one of the goals of the NSA's SIGINT project is to fully backdoor or "enable" certain encryption chips by the end of 201311. It is not publicly known to which encryption chips they are referring.

From what I know Cavium is one of these "SIGINT enabled" chip manufactures.

> https://www.electrospaces.net/2023/09/some-new-snippets-from-snowden-documents.html

>> "While working on documents in the Snowden archive the thesis author learned that an American fabless semiconductor CPU vendor named Cavium is listed as a successful SIGINT "enabled" CPU vendor. By chance this was the same CPU present in the thesis author's Internet router (UniFi USG3). The entire Snowden archive should be open for academic researchers to better understand more of the history of such behavior." (page 71, note 21)

> https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366552520/New-revelations-from-the-Snowden-archive-surface

Unfortunately the relevant text for the second is pretty long so I dont wanna quote it.

Not everything Secretary Clinton did was TS/SCI. The common practice is an Android device[0] that is approved to SECRET only. This would suffice for general email and messaging.

My understanding is that President Obama's blackberry [1] isn't really a mobile device as configured. This blackberry device connects to the a custom secure base station [2] or picocell, that follows him around just like the Football[3], when outside certain vehicles.

Another factor is that TS/SCI access is restricted by location. eg. AF1 or the Presidential vehicle.

I'm not sure the Secretary of State would have a full time [*24/7] detail, although as former First Lady, Sec. Clinton would have a Secret Service detail which is funded separately.

It would be more likely that the NSA offered a different solution and State Dept. bureaucrat balked at the cost involved, especially something like following senior staff around with a football.

[0] http://www.boeing.com/defense/boeing-black/index.page

[1] http://www.technologytell.com/gadgets/156930/yes-president-obama-still-uses-blackberry/

[2] http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-obamas-blackberry-got-secured.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_football

Edit: 24/7 detail at home. On official trips, the Secretary of State would have a security detail as commented by carboncopy below.

It's doubtful Snowden was in possession of his NSA data dump at the time he arrived to Moscow, the things he had memorized would have been of very limited value.

If the Russian government was in possession of his data, I'd consider it fairly surprising that they seemingly never leaked any of the materials.

While it's not strictly impossible that Snowden through the Russian Government was the "second source", given that all the leaks from the second source came after Snowden had landed in Moscow, none of the "second source" files were included within the Snowden dump a bunch of journalists have access to. There are also various more specific reasons to belive that Snowden probably would not have had access to all the things originating from the second source, and even more so many of the things originating from TSB.

Same is true of Snowden possibly being TSB, whether or not "second source" and the TSB were the one and the same. It's just not really credible.

Here's a good starting point if you're not familiar with the second source https://www.electrospaces.net/2017/09/are-shadow-brokers-identical-with.html