Posts by stephen clover
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to AndrewH,
So, this is what I meant when I said "please can we not?". Here's a neat old thread for talking about Julian Assange. Because it's OT here, and also triggering and extremely upsetting to survivors / victims / people who have had bad experience with the way some dudes from "the left" talk and behave around politics and sexual violence.
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Seriatim,
Please, can we not?
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Thank you, Grant. I’m a wee bit heartbroken by this.
PS. the new material I saw him play last year with Hope and Danny etc was pretty amazing. I hope recordings exist..
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OnPoint: "Project SPEARGUN underway", in reply to Che Tibby,
Yes. This (from the business case):
Technology
41. GCSB is not proposing to procure or develop bespoke systems. No material level of software development is required of GCSB or a second party. The proposal is to procure then integrate capability components already available and tested, [redacted]. The hardware and software components range from widely available commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems, through to single-source COTS, to systems only available through government-to-government agreement. All of the technology has been in use for some time, [redacted]. -
Imagining X-KEYSCORE scenarios: a search criteria containing the geospatial coords of the polygon bounding the Auckland Town Hall and some date/time parameters for last night will give you the phone numbers of all attendees (with GPS turned on.)
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to Alfie,
Ahh… but the “Big Norton” was called ‘Cortex’ and didn’t get off the ground, we’re told. Key even declassified documents to prove that.
CORTEX was green-lighted only recently, in July 2014. Which is probably why it wasn’t able to protect Spark last weekend.
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Great summary, Keith. To be clear: it appears CORTEX was greenlighted in July 2014. However *something else* ("Initiative 7418", enhancing the activity of the National Cyber Security Center) was stopped in Sept 2012 (tho Key claimed it was Mar 2012.)
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Southern Cross cable hit by an outage, November 9, 2012 ;)
Southern Cross cable has reportedly been hit by a "catastrophic failure" at its Alexandria landing station in Sydney.
New Zealand Labour IT spokesperson Clare Curran said today that the outage occurred this morning due to an "unauthorised and un-notified software change" made to the wavelength switching platform.
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
Yeah, that was my reaction too. What exactly does this disprove?
What it shows: there was a discussion at Cabinet level (SEC Min (12) 4/1, 3 April 2012) to enhance the activity of the National Cyber Security Center which’d been earlier established within GCSB to detect and “address advanced and persistent cyber intrusions”. Phase one had been greenlighted in Dec 2010 (DES Min (10) 4/1). Two options tabled – Option 1 agreed to proceed; business case for preferred Option 2 (no substantive detail) to be developed by GCSB.
“Initiative 7418” refers to this NCSC enhancement work programme.
On 2 Sept 2013 (CAB Min (43) 30/25) the Option 2 business case was squashed. No reason given. Funding for Initiative 7418 noted as being redirected to an “alternative proposal.” No details. Appears that this is what became CORTEX.
CORTEX business case lays out several options, preferred option is “Option 3 (‘Active’) as set out in the paper under CAB (14) 409” and on 28 July 2014 GCSB directed to implement it (CAB Min (14) 25/9), as well as investigate Option 4 (as per Opt. 3 plus involvement of an ISP).
CAB (14) 409 is missing from docs, but could refer to covering Cab Paper for Project CORTEX Business Case, supplied.
What it disproves: not sure it disproves anything, Though it appears to back-up Key’s story it’s not related at all to [meta]data collection and analysis. However it is true that deep packet sniffing on the scale discussed could be misinterpreted.
Note: one paragraph in the business case stands out due to out-of-place tone and language. Very curious:
27. The controls in question – which Joint Ministers have considered when reviewing the CORTEX proposal – will be specified in relevant warrants and access authorisations. They will include attention to how data is accessed, stored, sharing and disposed of. There will be no ‘mass surveillance’, and data will be accessed by GCSB only with the consent of owners of relevant networks or systems.