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It was August 2004 in New York City and President George W. Bush was in town, attending the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden. Thousands of protesters were out in the streets in the sweltering summer heat, carrying placards emblazoned with slogans like Push Bush Out The Door and The War on Terror is A Lie. As the demonstrations rumbled on outside, the National Security Agency was getting to work on an unusual operation.

The agency, which mostly focuses on vacuuming up communications and monitoring events in foreign countries, had been drafted in to provide surveillance support to other federal agencies. A month earlier, in late July 2004, the NSA had served a similar role using its vast electronic spying apparatus to bolster security at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Thats according to a classified NSA document, published Monday by The Intercept, which offers a rare glimpse into the little-known circumstances surrounding the agencys domestically focused missions.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge speaks at a press conference in New York City, on Aug. 25, 2004. Ridge was in New York surveying security preparations for the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan.

Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

The NSA became involved after then-Homeland Security Secretary Thomas Ridge and Attorney General John Ashcroft declared the conventions to be National Special Security Events. This designation came into existence following a secret directive issued in May 1998 by then-President Bill Clinton. The directive ensured that major gatherings of national or international significance would receive special federal resources to boost security, with the goal of preventing terrorist attacks and criminal acts, the classified NSA document explains. Between September 1998 and February 2008, there were 28 events approved for this extra level of protection, U.S. Department of Transportation records show. These included aside from Republican and Democratic conventions Super Bowls, presidential inaugurations, State of the Union addresses, and the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. It is not known whether NSA provided support to all of these events, but previous reporting and a document published by The Intercept have revealed that NSA was involved in carrying out surveillance at the Salt Lake City Olympics, where it worked with the FBI in a fusion cell known as the Olympics Intelligence Center.

The targets of NSAs surveillance during the 2004 conventions and whether they were foreigners, Americans, or both are not disclosed in the agencys documents, which were obtained by The Intercept from the whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents do specify, however, that six employees from the agencys Signals Intelligence Directorate were deployed to New York City and Boston for the events, and that their role was to provide SIGINT [signals intelligence] support to the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other national agencies. NSA staff were equipped with computers that linked them back to the agencys headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. And if they gathered any intelligence they believed concerned a threat, they could get it declassified so that it could be shared with federal, state, and local officials on site who did not have security clearances.

Protesters are arrested at Union Square after attempting to march without a permit on the second day of the Republican National Convention, in New York City, on Aug. 31, 2004.

Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

The Republican convention at Madison Square Garden took place over four days between August 30 and September 2. During some of the large-scale protests on the streets outside, the New York Police Department arrested more than 1,800 activists, bystanders, journalists, and lawyers. In 2012, after a lengthy court battle, federal Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled that the arrests were illegal. Sullivan noted in his judgment that the NYPD had been responding to a threat derived from intelligence sources namely, that demonstrators aimed to shut down the City of New York and the R.N.C. through continuous unlawful behavior.

Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney with the ACLUs National Security Project, said there needed to be transparency on whether NSA had eavesdropped on any communications about the demonstrations. If NSA surveillance was used directly or indirectly to monitor protesters or domestic political activities, as opposed to detecting foreign threats, that would be a matter of serious concern, Toomey told The Intercept. The public should know more about the nature of any NSA surveillance, whether it swept up the private communications of Americans, and whether law enforcement relied on that information to monitor people exercising their First Amendment rights.

The NSA declined to comment for this story. The Department of Homeland Security and New York Police Department had not responded to requests for comment at time of publication. A spokeswoman for the FBI said she could not comment because she had no knowledge of the 2004 operation.

Top photo: A group carrying what was described as 1,000 coffins representing the U.S. dead in Iraq marches past Madison Square Garden during the anti-Bush march organized by United for Peace and Justice in New York, on Aug. 29, 2004, on the eve of the Republican National Convention.

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NSA Kept Watch Over Democratic and Republican Conventions, Snowden Documents Reveal - The Intercept

Three years after the 9/11 attacks, a frustrated NSA employee complained that Osama bin Laden was alive and well, and yet the surveillance agency still had no automated way to search the Arabic language PDFs it had intercepted.

This is just one of many complaints and observations included in SIDtoday, the internal newsletter of the NSAs signals intelligence division. The Intercept today is publishing 251 articles from the newsletter, covering the second half of 2004 and the beginning of 2005. The newsletters were part of a large collection of NSA documents provided to The Intercept by Edward Snowden.

This latest batch of posts includes candid employee comments about over-classification, descriptions of tensions in the NSA-CIA relationship, and an interns enthusiastic appraisal of a stint in Pakistan.

Most revealing perhaps are insights into how NSA has operated domestically. The Intercept is publishing two stories on this topic, including one about NSA cooperation with law enforcement during American political conventions, and in a throwback to the movie Bladerunner, another article describes a spy balloon used over the United States.

Finally, The Intercept, in cooperation with the Japanese broadcaster NHK, is revealing the history of U.S. surveillance cooperation with Japan. Starting with the American occupation of Japan after World War II and reaching a standoff after the Soviet shoot-down of a South Korean aircraft, the long and sometimes tense relationship reveals how even close U.S. allies can find themselves targeted by the NSA.

The NSAs Follow-the-Money Branch (the actual name of the division) brings together experts from across a spectrum of disciplines and organizations. The division in 2004created a North Korea CRASH Team, short for Combined Rapid Analysis and Synthesis Hit, after the State Department issued a requirement for a new emphasis on regime finance and an increased emphasis on North Koreas financing of its nuclear proliferation. In response, the CRASH Team looked at North Korean transactions that went through foreign banks. In particular, the team targeted leadership finance, i.e. Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader who died in 2011, and traced sales of precious metals allegedly owned by him, weapons shipments, and relationships among regime leaders.

The 6throck drill on Korea brought together NSA and officials from the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to rehearse the scenarios involving civilian evacuations in Seoul and Pyongyang during a hypothetical Korean War. Participants planned a response to a North Korean attack and held a brainstorming session about signals intelligence operations in a hypothetical newly unified Korea. In the discussions, critical gaps were found in communications with trusted Five Eyes countries, which did not have access to the computer networks for the Korea Theater of Operations. Twenty-two other nations committed to defending South Korea are not included in intelligence sharing either.So NSA will be working through some of these problems, with the goal of exercising the resulting solutions sometime in early 2005.

Czech youngsters stand atop an overturned truck as the Soviet-led invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies crushes the so-called Prague Spring reform in former Czechoslovakia, in Prague on Aug. 21, 1968.

Photo: Libor Hajsky/AFP/Getty Images

Back in the late 1960s, Charlie Meals, the deputy director of SID, worked in the Soviet weather shop. The only way the U.S. could track weather in the Soviet Union was by listening to Soviet communications. The Soviets knew the U.S. was listening and so it encrypted the locations of weather reports. U.S. Strategic Air Command needed to have weather reports in case bombers ever had to fly into Soviet air space, and the weather reporting could also be an indicator of impending military action. For example, before the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviets started including Czech weather reports in military broadcasts. (The intricacies of collecting weather data as intelligence is also described in this article by Jeffrey Richelson of National Security Archive.) The weather effort had at least 250 people at NSA and people at bases around the world. This desk was still in operation in 2004.

FBI field office staff made little use of signals intelligence and many didnt know how to access the information for themselves on the Intelligence Communitys Intelink system, according to an NSA intern, describing assignments at the bureau. The FBI field offices had little or no Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility space, which made it difficult to share the higher levels of intelligence between the agencies. The intern had higher regard for FBI headquarters. With data from the NSA, FBI analysts can now immediately tell if an individual in the U.S. has any foreign terrorism-related contacts.

A rebel is blessed during a Voodoo ceremony of the Gonaives Resistance Front, during a march in Gonaives, Haiti, on Feb. 13, 2004.

Photo: Walter Astrada/AP

The NSA tracked High Value Targets in Haiti following the 2004 coup, according to an article classified Top Secret. An NSA staffer reports that a task force on HVTs traveled to the central highlands of Haiti where they met with rebel leaders. During this trip they had collected several telephone numbers of these leaders and their associates, the staffer wrote. Soon thereafter, the NSA began to see multi-page reports of conversations between one important rebel leader and his wife which provided insight into his negotiating position and plans for control of the central highlands. Those private conversations proved useful. I received several emails from people who were incredulous that a conversation between an HVT target and his girlfriend was of any importance, the staffer went on. The truth is that a lot of SIGINT leavings that never make it into normal SIGINT reporting are actually valuable intelligence items for tactical warfighters.

NSA interns see the sights, even in Pakistan. An intelligence analysis intern working in SIDs Pakistan branch was deployed to assignments in Islamabad and Lahore. At the embassy, the intern focused on signals intelligence related to the non-tribal Settled Areas and coordinated communications among NSA, CIA and the local counterpart i.e. Pakistani partners, in tracking and targeting terrorists. The Settled Areas Office along with their local counterparts was responsible for the arrests of more than 600 alleged terrorists from September 11, 2001to 2004. Outside of working hours, the blonde American attracted a constant stream of stares and curious looks as she ventured out to tourist sites. Station Islamabad, which has been fictionalized in Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty, was to this staffer one of the most exciting, challenging, and fast-paced locations to work in the world.

Q: What do SIGINT and mad cows have in common?

A: Both are of critical interest to the U.S. Department of Agriculture

SIGINT isnt just for intelligence or military agencies. NSAs two-person Washington Liaison Office responds to signals intelligence requests from Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Interior, Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, Export-Import Bank, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Reserve System, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. With such a wide range of subject matter and competing priorities, the liaison officers have to balance topics from bovine spongiform encephalopathy to space launch vehicle capabilities; from narcotics interdiction techniques to wine labeling regulations; from toxin delivery technologies to secure communications options, and much, much more.

A protestor holding a portrait of Osama bin Laden shouts Allahu Akbar during a protest in front of Baiturrahman mosque, Banda Aceh, Indonesia, on Oct. 10, 2001.

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Imagine if the NSA missed warning signs of an attack for no other reason than it couldnt search Arabic words in PDF format. If you were looking for Osama bin Laden, wrote an NSA employee in SIDtoday, and you had entered every Arabic word known to mankind in every possible encoding and Osama were doing nothing more than using PDF and writing in Arabic, youd never get a hit. Quite reassuring, isnt it?

Near the end of 2004, SIDtoday began publishing a technical advice column written by an experienced Digital Network Intelligence analyst under the pseudonym Raul. One articledescribes a gaping intelligence hole that NSA had at the time, three years after the 9/11 attacks. Though analysts at NSA understood exactly how foreign-language PDFs were encoded, they lacked the technology to untangle them in real-time in order to search them for keywords.

Apparently, this article hit a few nerves. Rauls subsequent column responded to a flood of complaints he had received. In the subsequent column, he outlined requirements for a hypothetical solution to the foreign-language PDF problem, and concluded with a bit of snark: Bin Laden is still safe and we, to the best of my knowledge, still have no reasonable solution to the PDF problem.

For some sensitive missions, NSA personnel need cover identities while working in the field. An article from October 2004 describes how agents go about making NSA personnel look like they actually work for an entity other than NSA. The Special Operational Support office is responsible for NSAs cover and sensitive personnel support programs. In addition to ensuring that cover operations comply with Department of Defense regulations, SOS provides logistics, transportation, personnel and medical support. The office also provides undercover operatives with DoD Common Access Cards (CAC), travel documents, state drivers licenses, credit cards, post office boxes, social security cards, pocket litter and telecommunications.

The NSA, it turns out, likes to stay on top of the latest scientific developments. Writing at the end of 2004, an NSA cryptanalyst described her experience working as an intern, and using her cryptography skills, on looking for information about genetic sequencing in the signals intelligence collected by the NSA. The ultimate goals of this project are to gain general knowledge about genetic engineering research activity by foreign entities, she wrote, and to identify laboratories and/or individuals who may be involved in nefarious use of genetic research.

Chairman Thomas Kean speaks during a news conference to release the 9/11 Commissions report in Washington on July 22, 2004.

Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Even though the 9/11 Commission report harshly criticized intelligence agencies failures to share information, the NSA touted its contribution to the July 22, 2004, report. It goes without saying that NSA Cooperation was absolutely vital to this effort, an article in SIDtoday says. SID staff aided in the declassification of material, turned over documents, and patiently explained the intricacies of their work. SID workers also scrubbed references to the NSA from the final report, rewording sections to avoid indications that certain pieces of intelligence derived from SIGINT. You should all feel proud, writes the posts author.

Yet the report itself points to specific SIGINT that could have led to the discovery of the attackers conspiracy that remained unshared due to agencies fear of disclosing intelligence to inappropriate channels and a culture of secrecy in which agencies feeling they own the information they gathered at taxpayer expense.

A prior SIDtoday article touted the agencys extraordinary level of cooperation and provision of large volumes of SIGINT assessment reporting on terrorism, strategic business plans, and a wide range of other topics.

Cooperation between the NSA and CIA runs deep, but it hasnt always been smooth. An August 6 post, CIAs Directorates . . . Understanding More About Them, talks about turf wars due to real or perceived mission overlap, particularly within the CIAs technical division. Yet the Special Collection Service (SCS), which surveils foreign communications from U.S. embassies, is seen as a positive example of joint CIA-NSA work. SIDtoday cites the achievements of that highly classified organization, which came under scrutiny in 2013 for reports that its Berlin office had been intercepting Chancellor Angela Merkels mobile phone data. The August 18 post, SCS and Executive Protection details the interception of Philippine police communications about a bomb that had been placed on President Clintons motorcade route, which the police were trying to defuse without informing the Americans. SCS passed this information to the Secret Service, who re-routed the cars.

The NSA-CIA relationship was also the subject of two SIDtoday articles in 2003.

Even the NSA acknowledges that it classifies too much. In an article, Do We Overclassify? Are We Sharing Enough Information? a senior SID leader echoes language from the 9/11 Commission report, specifically citing the need to go from a climate of need to know to one of need to share. This interview shares the reports concern that intelligence agencies err on the side of over-classification: If we continue to insist on classifying information which has already become known to our adversaries or for which disclosure would cause little or no harm to national security, we risk losing control over the really sensitive stuff. Tellingly, though, he fears that Congress itself will act to force the NSA to disclose more information.

Post-9/11, the NSA has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service. In February 2004, SID formalized a relationship with the Marshals and its Electronic Surveillance Unit, which functions like an intelligence operations team, as it both monitors fugitives and provides support and threat assessments to other agencies. The U.S. Marshals Service represents an ideal client for the NSA given its interest in stay(ing) out of the public limelight and courthouses.

Top photo: North Korean soldiers carry a portrait of late leader Kim Jong Il during a military parade to mark 100 years since the birth of the countrys founder Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang on April 15, 2012.

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Why Soviet Weather Was Secret, a Critical Gap in Korea, and Other NSA Newsletter Tales - The Intercept

By Ms. Smith, Network World | Apr 24, 2017 7:50 AM PT

Ms. Smith (not her real name) is a freelance writer and programmer with a special and somewhat personal interest in IT privacy and security issues.

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The number of Windows computers infected with NSA backdoor malware continues to rise sinceShadow Brokers leaked the hacking tools on April 14.

Two different sets of researchers scanning for the DoublePulsar implant saw a significant bump in the number of infected Windows PCs over the weekend.

For example, Dan Tentler, CEO of the Phobos Group, suggested that Monday would not be a good day for many people, as his newest scan showed about 25 percent of all vulnerable and publicly exposed SMB machines are infected.

On Sunday, Tentler had scanned 1.17 million hosts and found 33,468 to be infected.

The infection rate had been holding steady at 2.85percentbefore it climbed to 2.91 percent and then 2.95 percent. Tentler explained:

It is important to note that DoublePulsar is like a stealthy malware downloader; infected devices are open for more exploitation, as it can be used to download other malware.

The presence of DoublePulsar doesnt mean theyre infected by the NSA. It means there is a loading dock ready and waiting for whatever malware anyone wants to give it, Tentler told CyberScoop. The chances are none that all these hosts [were hacked by] the NSA. It is effectively trivial to go compromise all these hosts with the flick of a wrist.

Elsewhere, using the detection script developed by Luke Jennings of Countercept, security firm Below0Day tweeted that it had detected 30,626 DoublePulsar implants on April 18. Of those, 11,078 were in the U.S. A few days later, Below0Day had detected an additional 25,960 implants.

On Sunday, Below0Day wrote:

On the afternoon of April 21st, we initiated another masscan to get a new list of hosts with open 445 port. This time around we identified 5,190,506 hosts with port 445 open. We then ran Countercepts detect script and identified 56,586 hosts with DOUBLEPULSAR SMB implant.

The U.S. was still the most infected country, but 14,091 DoublePulsar implants were detected this time. That's up 3,013 from a few short days ago.

It was widely reported on Friday that thousands of Windows machines were infected with DoublePulsar. As it does now, the exact number of affected Windows boxes varied, depending upon which security researcher's numbers you trusted.

Microsoft, which issued patches to mitigate most of the exploits, expressed doubts about the accuracy of the number of real-world infections. However, Microsoft did tell Ars Technica on Friday that people should know that there's growing consensus that from 30,000 to 107,000 Windows machines may be infected by DoublePulsar. Once hijacked, those computers may be open to other attacks.

John Matherly, the creator of Shodan, added detection for DoublePulsar last week.

Matherly told CyberScoop that Shodan had indexed over 2 million IPs running a public SMB service on port 445 that are vulnerable to DoublePulsar. Last Friday, Matherly said more than 100,000 devices could be impacted, with 45,000 confirmed to be infected thus far.

Tiago Henriques, CEO of BinaryEdge, also said the number of devices infected with DoublePulsar is still climbing. The total number of infections on Monday morning, according to BinaryEdge, has increased 76,697 since the Friday. The company showed the total number of infections per day:

Ms. Smith (not her real name) is a freelance writer and programmer with a special and somewhat personal interest in IT privacy and security issues.

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More Windows PCs infected with NSA backdoor DoublePulsar - Network World

In its second year, the free cybersecurity day camp will host about 20 students on the Mount Vernon Campus from June 19 to June 30.

Updated: April 24, 2017 at 11:48 a.m.

A National Security Agency grant will fund a free camp for middle school girls on campus this summer.

The free GenCyber cybersecurity day camp will host about 20 students on the Mount Vernon Campus from June 19 to June 30. Shelly Heller, a professor of engineering and applied science who is overseeing the camp, said the event will stimulate the campers interest in computer science at a young age and encourage more women to pursue careers in computer science.

The NSA is providing a $100,000 grant to fund the camp this year, $20,000 more than a year ago. Heller said the new increased funding will help create an online camp with lessons and activities that the students will be able to access nightly with their parents.

The virtual camp will include an activity and review of that days topic, which will range from networking to forensics.

This will strengthen what the campers learned during the day, but it will teach the parents, Heller said. The parents will learn alongside them and learn good internet practices themselves.

Heller said the camp was designed a year ago with the intention of exposing young women to science, technology, engineering and math fields while advertising safe online practices like creating secure passwords. Heller applied for the NSA grant again this year and decided to include a proposal for the virtual camp.

Two middle school STEM teachers and two GW computer science students will teach the students and help with daily activities like scavenger hunts, case studies and question and answer sessions. The camp will also take students on field trips to the National Cryptologic Museum and the Spy Museum in downtown D.C.

Heller said having two college student counselors will allow the campers to learn about potential majors and career opportunities in computer science through a relationship with a near peer, someone close to the students but a bit older in age.

It is one thing for me to tell a junior high kid, boy or girl, that this is a career for them, but I am so far away from them, she said. These near peers have much more relevance to high school and junior high kids.

Students in the local area can apply for the camp online and need to answer open-ended questions about why they care about computer science or cybersecurity. The camp runs for two weeks from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, with aftercare provided from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Heller, who has been at GW since 1985, said much of her work has involved recruiting and retaining women in the STEM fields, an effort that inspired her to start thecamp last year. She said to increase the number of female professors in STEM, students must be introduced to the fields at a young age to build confidence and interest in the subject.

Ive worked with students and you need to raise the womens interest early and you need to give them the confidence that this is an interesting opportunity and they can do it, Heller said.

Women are consistently underrepresented in computer science and STEM fields. A recent study by the National Science Boards Science found just 10.7 percent of electrical or computer hardware engineers are women, and only 17.9 percent of bachelors degrees earned in the computer science field are by women.

GW has been working to increase the numbers of women in STEM undergraduate and graduate programs. Out of the 15 computer science professors at GW, six are women.

Vernecia Griffin, an instructional technology teacher and academic support team leader at Jeffers Hill Elementary School in Columbia, Md., will be one of the camps instructors. She said the camp will bring in female professionals in the field, helping attendees learn about potential careers within the cybersecurity field and giving them a bit of insight into their job title and education path.

They also discuss the challenges they may encounter, being a female in a male-dominated field, Griffin said.

This post was updated to reflect the following correction: The Hatchet incorrectly reported that Shelly Heller is the associate provost for academic affairs at the Mount Vernon Campus. She no longer holds this title. We regret this error.

This article appeared in the April 24, 2017 issue of the Hatchet.

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NSA grant funds free GW cybersecurity camp for middle school girls - GW Hatchet (subscription)

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