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posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 08 2019, @07:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the believe-it-when-you-see-it dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

NSA might shut down phone snooping program, whatever that means

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a boatload of buzz over the past few days with these two headline-makers:

First, a senior Republican congressional aide suggested over the weekend that the agency might be shuttering its phone metadata slurping program instead of renewing it in December (suppress your glee: the news is less encouraging for surveillance-adverse citizenry than it appears at first blush) and....

...Second, by releasing Ghidra, a free software reverse engineering tool that the agency had been using internally for well over a decade.

First, the political cat-and-mouse game:

News of the NSA potentially killing off its mass phone-spying program – exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 – came on Saturday in the form of a Lawfare podcast interview with Luke Murry, national security advisor to House minority leader Kevin McCarthy.

At 5 minutes in, Murry said that the NSA hasn’t been using its metadata collecting system for spying on US citizens for the past six months, due to "problems with the way in which that information was collected, and possibly collecting on US citizens.” The program is due for Congressional reauthorization in December 2019, but Murry suggested that the administration might not bother:

I’m not actually certain that the administration will want to start that back up given where they've been in the last six months.

[...] On a far more security-crowd-pleasing note, there’s the NSA’s release of Ghidra:

The NSA released Ghidra, a software reverse engineering tool, at the RSA security conference on Wednesday. It marked the first public demonstration of the tool, which the agency has been using internally and which helps to analyze malicious code and malware tracks down potential vulnerabilities in networks and systems.

ZDNet, reporting from the conference, said that the NSA’s plan is to get security researchers comfortable working with the tool before they apply for government cybersecurity positions, be those jobs at the NSA or at the other government intelligence agencies with which the NSA has privately shared Ghidra.

At this point, Ghidra is available for download only through its official website, but the NSA also plans to release its source code under an open source license on GitHub.

The initial reviews have been, overall, positive, in large measure because "free" is a lot cheaper than the alternative tool, IDA Pro. The commercial license for IDA Pro costs thousands of US dollars per year. Here are some early reviews from well-known security pros:


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @08:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @08:54AM (#811488)

    Not Saying Anything is giving away free software and killing off only one of their snooping departments. Where's my tinfoil cap?

  • (Score: 2) by deimios on Friday March 08 2019, @09:13AM (3 children)

    by deimios (201) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 08 2019, @09:13AM (#811491) Journal
    The NSA might kill off the phone metadata collection program because they aren't using it. Why would they NOT use such a powerful tool? Because they have a more powerful one.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @09:33AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @09:33AM (#811497)

      Windows, Facebook, ISPs, Telcos, Spy Sats... They've had the tools for a long time.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Friday March 08 2019, @01:54PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday March 08 2019, @01:54PM (#811523) Journal

      They collected all the metadata and now they are taking a break to sift through it.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday March 08 2019, @04:27PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 08 2019, @04:27PM (#811582) Journal

      Yea! NSA will stop collecting metadata. (eg, who calls whom and when)

      But secretly they will start collecting the entire conversations and contents of transmissions instead. Who needs metadata when you've got all the actual data.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 08 2019, @12:56PM

    They have several phone spying programs. Which particular one are they looking at ditching and what are they replacing it with?

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday March 08 2019, @03:16PM (1 child)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 08 2019, @03:16PM (#811540) Journal

    ren != del, mv != rm

    It's far more likely they are reconstituting the compromised program under a new name and management to make FOIA searches harder.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Tokolosh on Friday March 08 2019, @04:06PM

    by Tokolosh (585) on Friday March 08 2019, @04:06PM (#811569)

    Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.

  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday March 08 2019, @05:11PM (2 children)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday March 08 2019, @05:11PM (#811599) Journal

    The program is due for Congressional reauthorization in December 2019

    The only reason they're not using it right now is because they can't meet the limitations that were put in place in 2015.
    U.S. Surveillance in Place Since 9/11 Is Sharply Limited [nytimes.com]

    And also, CONGRESS reauthorizes the program, not the administration.

    You think the Republican majority in the Senate is going to vote against it?

    Clearly I lean Dem but I don't even think most Dems in the House are going to vote against it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @08:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @08:32PM (#811715)

      Not so much lean, as completely horizontal.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @09:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @09:19AM (#811978)

      Sharply limited? Changing who holds the data doesn't matter so much as stopping the data from being collected in the first place. Even the mere collection of this metadata violates our constitutional rights. Not to mention, these rubberstamping secret courts and the corporations who collude with our corrupt government don't care about limitations; they've already shown that.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @07:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @07:01PM (#811663)

    *US citizens will (maybe) not spied upon (via phone snooping)

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