{"id":18571,"date":"2014-01-01T17:36:23","date_gmt":"2014-01-01T17:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/brucesterling-now-even-more-obvious-than-ever\/"},"modified":"2018-12-05T19:55:32","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T02:55:32","slug":"brucesterling-now-even-more-obvious-than-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/brucesterling-now-even-more-obvious-than-ever\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-18571 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/brucesterling-now-even-more-obvious-than-ever\/attachment\/18572\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_myq2bg39B11s2jikwo1_500-100x100.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/brucesterling.tumblr.com\/post\/71840825030\/now-even-more-obvious-than-ever-before-texas\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">brucesterling<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>*Now, even more obvious than ever before! \u00a0Texas, all the way!<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>The NSA Uses Powerful Toolbox in Effort to Spy on Global Networks<\/p>\n<p>Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit<\/p>\n<p>By SPIEGEL Staff<\/p>\n<p>Google Earth<\/p>\n<p>The NSA\u2019s TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency\u2019s top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting.<\/p>\n<p>In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn\u2019t budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.<\/p>\n<p>n the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States\u2019 foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA\u2019s radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again.<\/p>\n<p>It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned just how far the NSA\u2019s work had encroached upon their daily lives. For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San Antonio. In 2005, the agency took over a former Sony computer chip plant in the western part of the city. A brisk pace of construction commenced inside this enormous compound. The acquisition of the former chip factory at Sony Place was part of a massive expansion the agency began after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.<\/p>\n<p>On-Call Digital Plumbers<\/p>\n<p>One of the two main buildings at the former plant has since housed a sophisticated NSA unit, one that has benefited the most from this expansion and has grown the fastest in recent years \u2014 the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. This is the NSA\u2019s top operative unit \u2014 something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.<\/p>\n<p>According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO\u2019s area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO\u2019s disposal have become \u2014 and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.<\/p>\n<p>The unit is \u201cakin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence community,\u201d says Matthew Aid, a historian who specializes in the history of the NSA. \u201cGetting the ungettable\u201d is the NSA\u2019s own description of its duties. \u201cIt is not about the quantity produced but the quality of intelligence that is important,\u201d one former TAO chief wrote, describing her work in a document. The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit head stating that TAO has contributed \u201csome of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen.\u201d The unit, it goes on, has \u201caccess to our very hardest targets.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A Unit Born of the Internet<\/p>\n<p>Defining the future of her unit at the time, she wrote that TAO \u201cneeds to continue to grow and must lay the foundation for integrated Computer Network Operations,\u201d and that it must \u201csupport Computer Network Attacks as an integrated part of military operations.\u201d To succeed in this, she wrote, TAO would have to acquire \u201cpervasive, persistent access on the global network.\u201d An internal description of TAO\u2019s responsibilities makes clear that aggressive attacks are an explicit part of the unit\u2019s tasks. In other words, the NSA\u2019s hackers have been given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries \u2014 nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, TAO specialists have directly accessed the protected networks of democratically elected leaders of countries. They infiltrated networks of European telecommunications companies and gained access to and read mails sent over Blackberry\u2019s BES email servers, which until then were believed to be securely encrypted. Achieving this last goal required a \u201csustained TAO operation,\u201d one document states.<\/p>\n<p>This TAO unit is born of the Internet \u2014 created in 1997, a time when not even 2 percent of the world\u2019s population had Internet access and no one had yet thought of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. From the time the first TAO employees moved into offices at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the unit was housed in a separate wing, set apart from the rest of the agency. Their task was clear from the beginning \u2014 to work around the clock to find ways to hack into global communications traffic.<\/p>\n<p>Recruiting the Geeks<\/p>\n<p>To do this, the NSA needed a new kind of employee. The TAO workers authorized to access the special, secure floor on which the unit is located are for the most part considerably younger than the average NSA staff. Their job is breaking into, manipulating and exploiting computer networks, making them hackers and civil servants in one. Many resemble geeks \u2014 and act the part too.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, it is from these very circles that the NSA recruits new hires for its Tailored Access Operations unit. In recent years, NSA Director Keith Alexander has made several appearances at major hacker conferences in the United States. Sometimes, Alexander wears his military uniform, but at others, he even dons jeans and a t-shirt in his effort to court trust and a new generation of employees.<\/p>\n<p>The recruitment strategy seems to have borne fruit. Certainly, few if any other divisions within the agency are growing as quickly as TAO. There are now TAO units in Wahiawa, Hawaii; Fort Gordon, Georgia; at the NSA\u2019s outpost at Buckley Air Force Base, near Denver, Colorado; at its headquarters in Fort Meade; and, of course, in San Antonio.<\/p>\n<p>One trail also leads to Germany. According to a document dating from 2010 that lists the \u201cLead TAO Liaisons\u201d domestically and abroad as well as names, email addresses and the number for their \u201cSecure Phone,\u201d a liaison office is located near Frankfurt \u2014 the European Security Operations Center (ESOC) at the so-called \u201cDagger Complex\u201d at a US military compound in the Griesheim suburb of Darmstadt.<\/p>\n<p>But it is the growth of the unit\u2019s Texas branch that has been uniquely impressive, the top secret documents reviewed by SPIEGEL show. These documents reveal that in 2008, the Texas Cryptologic Center employed fewer than 60 TAO specialists. By 2015, the number is projected to grow to 270 employees. In addition, there are another 85 specialists in the \u201cRequirements &amp; Targeting\u201d division (up from 13 specialists in 2008). The number of software developers is expected to increase from the 2008 level of three to 38 in 2015. The San Antonio office handles attacks against targets in the Middle East, Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia, not to mention Mexico, just 200 kilometers (124 miles) away, where the government has fallen into the NSA\u2019s crosshairs.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>brucesterling: *Now, even more obvious than ever before! \u00a0Texas, all the way! The NSA Uses Powerful Toolbox in Effort to Spy on Global Networks Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit By SPIEGEL Staff Google Earth The NSA\u2019s TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency\u2019s top secret weapon. It maintains its [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4Px","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18571"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18573,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18571\/revisions\/18573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}