Category Archives: History

History, Security

NSA Top Secret History of Computer Security

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A FOIA request made ten months ago (Case 60495C) has just released the 1998 “Unknown Author, draft history of COMPUSEC” from the NSA

Here’s an example of the kind of juicy details to be found:

ON THE POLITICAL FRONT… in 1966, a Democratic Congressman from New Jersey, Cornelius Gallagher, chaired a special subcommittee of the House of Representatives Government Operations on the invasion of privacy. The hearings were the first of their kind regarding computer technology and the need to establish ethical and legal protection as well as technological safeguards for certain computer applications. They would not be the last!

The purpose of the hearings were to establish a “climate of concern” in regard to the Bureau of the Budget proposal for establishment of a data bank. The bank would combine all personnel and business files that were maintained by different government agencies.

The document then makes reference to one such result of the “climate of concern”: a February 1970 publication by the Department of Defense called Security Controls for Computer Systems.

Gallagher’s Invasion of Privacy Subcommittee was meant to ensure “that the Government computers do not provide the means by which federal officials can intrude improperly into our lives.” He then tried in 1969 to create a Select Committee on Privacy, Human Values, and Democratic Institutions, which failed in a 1972 political power struggle.

House committees and their chairmen do not react lightly to potential incursions on their jurisdiction, Mr. Gallagher of New Jersey discovered last Tuesday when the House defeated his resolution that would have created a select committee on privacy, human values and democratic institutions to look into potential invasions of privacy by government and industry. Mr. Gallagher’s resolution drew the opposition of Representative Emanuel Celler, Democrat of Brooklyn and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who argued on the House floor that his committee already was dealing with the issues that would have been handled by the new committee. Mr. Celler’s view prevailed, and Mr. Gallagher’s proposed committee was rejected, 216 to 168, with 20 New York Representatives voting with Mr. Gallagher and 18 New Yorkers siding with Mr. Celer, the dean of their delegation, and voting against the proposed committee.

In reality the committee on privacy was torpedoed by the FBI. Equifax (then known as the Retail Credit Corporation) was a staunch ally of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI mined the data bank for background checks on their agents.

More importantly, however, Hoover or the Treasury department blackmailed and destroyed political careers of anyone who dared attempt to investigate either commercial or political privacy problems in America.

Indeed, Gallagher faced a barrage of false allegations and fraudulent claims from Hoover to block any attempts to investigate government privacy abuses. In one infamous case Hoover tried to pressure Gallagher to frame the FBI’s illegal bugging of MLK as a Kennedy plot.

Mr. Gallagher said his troubles with the F.B.I. began in June, 1966, when as chairman of a House subcommittee on invasion of privacy, he refused to sign a letter to then Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbuch demanding copies of “the authorizations for the illegal bugging” of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “and of the casinos in Las Vegas.” He said Mr. Cohn, a personal friend, had dictated the letter for his signature and had urged that it be forwarded.

[…]

“He told me that Mr. Hoover was very upset about the statements being made by Mr. Kennedy about widespread illegal wiretapping, eavesdropping and bugging and that Mr. Hoover was sick and tired of being made the sole brunt of that kind of criticism. He stated that Robert Kennedy had authorized those two activities by the [F.B.I.] and that Mr. Hoover was furious with Senator Kennedy, who was blaming it on Mr. Hoover.”

The core of this debate really was civil rights when you look at who experiencing privacy violations by the FBI. Consider that Gallagher’s concerns were being aired just as FBI wiretaps and bugs targeting MLK were believed to have violated the privacy rights of over 6,000 people by 1968.

In case you haven’t heard the story, here’s a brief recap:

Hoping to prove the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was under the influence of Communists, the FBI kept the civil rights leader under constant surveillance. The agency’s hidden tape recorders turned up almost nothing about communism.

In fact, recordings turned bore the opposite truth, that MLK privately referred to communism as…

…an alien philosophy contrary to us.

It probably is important here to mention, therefore, that this very secret NSA history of Computer Security document made no mention anywhere of these core issues of American civil rights or the surveillance of black political leaders. And there’s only one mention of the FBI:

…the FBI file contained unsubstantiated gossip against many individuals…

Ok to be fair there are two mentions, but the other one is about the Soviets controlling an asset inside the NSA to expose intelligence information (an early Edward Snowden).

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History, Poetry, Security

How to Win With Propaganda

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An advertisement writer recently posted to LinkedIn his reflections on how to hire the best talent by using “the copy test“. It boils down to this:

… if you can get your readers to empathise with you, in a tone they resonate with, you’ve won.

Judging by comments I sometimes get here (e.g. a white woman angry about my Dambusters post because she thinks the n-word is a very fine name for a dog)… clearly I still have more copy tests to do before I’ve won.

In related news, a book by Thomas Kent is coming out now with advice on how to advance democratic values to combat dangerous Russian propaganda.

Significant attention has been given to Russian disinformation operations and their corrosive effect on the United States and other democratic governments. The Western responses have thus far been weak and uncoordinated, according to Thomas Kent, former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who is currently a Jamestown Senior Fellow and adjunct associate professor at Columbia University. He proposes an energetic new strategy to confront this threat: aggressive messaging to combat Russian information operations, while promoting the values of democracy that too many in the West have lost faith in.

I look forward to seeing how to get Russian readers to empathize with American democracy.

And on that note, a very old book called “Techniques of Persuasion” looked into Communist indoctrination camps run by the Chinese during the Korean War and highlighted how important information gathering (“confession”) was to any propaganda method.

Source: Techniques of Persuasion From Propaganda to Brainwashing by J.A.C.Brown, p. 257

Similar methods are described in the film “The Luft Gangster: Memoirs of a Second Class Hero“. When black pilot Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson, USAF (Ret) was shot down in Germany he was surprised to find Nazi prison camps working hard to get empathy out of him.

The Nazis demonstrated they already had access to every detail of every American’s life down to home street, even showing him high school photos. The real elephant in the room, and palpable in the film, is whether Jefferson fell for Nazi propaganda that they respected his life more than America.

That kind of propaganda gets right into the question of using tribalism to undermine morale and distract enemies from any kind of unified objective. It’s a whole other level of winning, as documented by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS).

…conflict does not necessarily imply a pure contest of arms. It may center on an economic crisis, a sponsored pattern of betrayal and defection, or broad civil unrest. Whatever form it takes, it remains for the instigator a divide-and-exploit or divide-and-distract strategy that turns the enemy against himself, away from others, and exposes opportunities not otherwise available to an external State actor.

Allegedly it was this kind of strategic thinking that compelled Britain, France and America to operate heavy propaganda and even false flag operations in Africa through the 1980s intended to undermine black nationalism. More specifically, the racist apartheid government of South Africa wanted all its neighboring states to constantly be in a state of permanent improvisation and thus frame itself — an oppressive white police state — as the only stable regional partner for business deals.

Food, History, Security

Swarms of Decoys Disarmed Anti-Aircraft Defenses… in World War II

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I probably should have put a spoiler alert in the title.

A brand new 2020 report from the British Royal Air Force (RAF) warns that they were able to use a swarm of “affordable off-the-shelf decoy to wreak havoc on enemy integrated air defense systems.”

“During the demonstration, a number of Callen Lenz drones were equipped with a modified Leonardo BriteCloud decoy, allowing each drone to individually deliver a highly-sophisticated jamming effect,” according to Leonardo’s press release. “They were tested against ground-based radar systems representing the enemy air defence emplacement. A powerful demonstration was given, with the swarm of BriteCloud-equipped drones overwhelming the threat radar systems with electronic noise.”

You may be wondering if this is the first successful test by an air force of affordable off-the-shelf decoys wreaking havoc on air defense systems.

To answer that quickly, I present to you an account of decoys in a 1946 report called “Paper Bullets” from the United States Office of War Information.

A Mitchell bomber crew, which had been bombing Italian rail communications carried a couple of bundles of leaflets and some wine bottles every time they went out to bomb. Questioned by a psychological warfare officer, who failed to find this particular plane on his schedule, one member of the crew replied: “This is psychological warfare, Mac. Before we hit the target we take a fake bomb run over the nearest flak crew and throw these bottles and the leaflets out. They whistle just like bombs and the flak crew takes cover. Then we go on and bomb as per schedule.”

Set aside the point that maybe the crew was joking and they came up with a funny story to hide the fact that they were alcoholics or at least drank a lot of wine while flying as some form of self-medication.

John Belushi stars in the movie “1941” directed by Steven Spielberg

The idea of dropping whistling bomb decoys over air defense units makes a lot of sense, and wine bottles might disintegrate or disappear enough to avoid suspicion of decoys.

Here’s the full report as a PDF on archive.org:

Another perspective from history on “drones” (human pilots seen as disposable) overwhelming air defenses is here:

RAND’s first attempt to model a nuclear strategy ignored so many key variables that it nonsensically called for deploying a fleet of aging turboprop bombers that carried no bombs because the United States did not have enough fissile material to arm them; the goal was simply to overwhelm Soviet air defenses, with no regard for the lives of the pilots.

In related news, DefenseOne asked readers earlier this year “Should the US Have a Secretary For Influence Operations” and Military.com has just published the headline “‘Data Is the Ammunition’: Inside the Pentagon’s New Strategy to Dominate Future Battlefields“.

Looking back again, the 1946 Paper Bullets view of the world ends with these questions:

We are very well aware that the right words properly put together, delivered at the right spot at the right moment, can capture and kill. Why not use words and ideas as an instrument of peace, rather than as an instrument of death? A longing for peace is deep in the hearts of all decent peoples everywhere. There are good arguments for those who insist the best way to maintain the peace is to maintain a war machine to police the world and to keep the peace by force. Why not, then, the establishment of a U.S. Department of Information on the same status as the War Department and the Navy Department? Why not a U.S. Department of Information to police the world with words of truth?

We’ve come a long way from swarms being empty wine bottles, yet it seems also we haven’t moved very far along at all.

And I have to wonder if veterans talking about dropping bottles from planes is the kind of story-telling that inspired the iconic opening scene in The Gods Must be Crazy…