http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/10/seymour_hersh_reports_on_a_big.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nymag%2Fintel+%28Daily+Intelligencer+-+New+York+Magazine%29Seymour Hersh Reports On A Big 2001 American Intelligence Failure10/25/10 at 01:49 AM 1Comment
In this week's New Yorker the investigative reporter has a big take-out on cyberwarfare. (That's when people use computers to fight each other, not to be confused with the kind that will occur when the computers take over.) Among other things, he reveals that the Bush Administration made really big intelligence mistakes earlier than previously assumed. In April 2001, there was a minor international crisis when a American reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea and was forced to land in China. The Americans claimed that they took all appropriate steps to destroy all the sensitive hardware and software on plane that included an "operating system created and controlled by the N.S.A., and the drivers needed to monitor encrypted Chinese radar, voice, and electronic communications."
Unsurprisingly, that wasn't the case, and there have been occasional hints and minor disclosures that some of the really interesting details have leaked to the Chinese. But the Navy didn't think that they could reverse-engineer the operating system of the plane, and "give China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data." Oops:
MORE AT ABOVE LINK OF THAT ARTICLE REPORTING ON THIS ARTICLE:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/01/101101fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all#ixzz13LeNxrXEANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY
THE ONLINE THREAT
Should we be worried about a cyber war?by Seymour M. Hersh
NOVEMBER 1, 2010
Some experts say that the real danger lies in confusing cyber espionage with cyber war.
Cyber Espionage; Cyber War; Internet; Technology; China, Chinese; Foreign Policy; National Security Agency (N.S.A.)
On April 1, 2001, an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea, triggering the first international crisis of George W. Bush’s Administration. The Chinese jet crashed, and its pilot was killed, but the pilot of the American aircraft, Navy Lieutenant Shane Osborn, managed to make an emergency landing at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, fifteen miles from the mainland. Osborn later published a memoir, in which he described the “incessant jackhammer vibration” as the plane fell eight thousand feet in thirty seconds, before he regained control.
- snip -
The loss was even more devastating than the 2003 report suggested, and its dimensions have still not been fully revealed. Retired Rear Admiral Eric McVadon, who flew patrols off the coast of Russia and served as a defense attaché in Beijing, told me that the radio reports from the aircraft indicated that essential electronic gear had been dealt with. He said that the crew of the EP-3E managed to erase the hard drive—“zeroed it out”—but did not destroy the hardware, which left data retrievable: “No one took a hammer.” Worse, the electronics had recently been upgraded. “Some might think it would not turn out as badly as it did, but I sat in some meetings about the intelligence cost,” McVadon said. “It was grim.”
The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of reverse-engineering the plane’s N.S.A.-supplied operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, according to a former senior intelligence official. Mastering it would give China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. “If the operating system was controlling what you’d expect on an intelligence aircraft, it would have a bunch of drivers to capture radar and telemetry,” Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in the field of encryption, said. “The plane was configured for what it wants to snoop, and the Chinese would want to know what we wanted to know about them—what we could intercept and they could not.” And over the next few years the U.S. intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had access to sensitive traffic.
The U.S. realized the extent of its exposure only in late 2008. A few weeks after Barack Obama’s election, the Chinese began flooding a group of communications links known to be monitored by the N.S.A. with a barrage of intercepts, two Bush Administration national-security officials and the former senior intelligence official told me. The intercepts included details of planned American naval movements. The Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their hand. (“The N.S.A. would ask, ‘Can the Chinese be that good?’ ” the former official told me. “My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I’d say, ‘Can you read Chinese?’ We don’t even know the Chinese pictograph for ‘Happy hour.’ ”)
Why would the Chinese reveal that they had access to American communications? One of the Bush national-security officials told me that some of the aides then working for Vice-President Dick Cheney believed—or wanted to believe—that the barrage was meant as a welcome to President Obama.
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