Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
As a sideline, the German Internet providers set up the central node DE-CIX
intended for routing about 80 % of the data traffic in Frankfurt. And in Frankfurt
of all places, where the NSA once rented the main post office to wiretap a
central switching node of the telephone network (the official tenant was the
BND; see [SchHad]).
However, illegal interception activities no longer appear to be the backbone
of national intelligence agencies. It is estimated that 80 % of the informa-
tion is from publicly accessible sources. Our privacy shrinks, and we can't
prevent it even with the best data protection. More about this further below.
The information edge of the national intelligence agencies in general and the
NSA in particular might be on account of their capabilities for evaluating this
information better than anybody else.
An unknown percentage of interesting messages are surely missed by systems
like the Echelon. But as long as we don't know better we have to assume that
potentially no phone conversation, no fax, no data transmission over intercon-
tinental networks (e.g., the Internet), and certainly no email is secure against
this system. Though the encryption of email doesn't prevent traffic analysis, it
does prevent a more detailed analysis of the content (if it is good).
What Can't Be Done
To spare you sleepless nights (though it gets worse!), I list a few problems the
NSA doesn't seem to be able to solve below.
While the evaluation of non-encrypted emails and printed faxes (using
OCR software for writing recognition) is very easy, handwriting recogni-
tion seems to cause big headaches. One reason might be that bad hand-
writing is deciphered in context, and computers don't understand contexts.
Voice recognition is even harder. When a Berliner and a Bavarian talk on
the phone they'll probably have problems the first time. This is true more
so for computers which don't even know what dialect and context people
are talking in. Many unclearly articulated words can eventually be under-
stood only in context. Computers don't know how to do this. It is believed
that several research contracts assigned by the NSA to solve this problem
have failed. One can conclude from this that listening in on spoken tele-
phone traffic is still hard physical work, requiring enormous intelligence
manpower input, despite digitalization. What makes you worry though is
the article on the Oasis computer program, which is believed to trans-
form voice to text. You find more about it in txt/policy/oasis.txt on the
Web site.
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