Some new snippets from the Snowden documents

Last year some new snippets of information from the Snowden documents appeared in the PhD thesis of hacktivist Jacob Appelbaum. In 2012, Appelbaum moved to Berlin, where he worked closely with Laura Poitras on the NSA documents which she had received from Edward Snowden in May and June 2013. "As part of our research, we uncovered evidence that the telecommunications infrastructure in many countries has been compromised by intelligence services. The Snowden archive includes largely unpublished internal NSA documents and presentations that discuss targeting and exploiting not only deployed, live interception infrastructure, but also the vendors of the hardware and software used to build the infrastructure. Primarily these documents remain unpublished because the journalists who hold them fear they will be considered disloyal or even that they will be legally punished. Only a few are available to read in public today." "Targeting lawful interception equipment is a known goal of the NSA. Unpublished NSA documents specifically list their compromise of the Russian SORM LI infrastructure as an NSA success story of compromising civilian telecommunications infrastructure to spy on targets within reach of the Russian SORM system." " "Review of unpublished Snowden documents about NSA's activities compromising deployed, lawful interception systems and as well as additional success against the vendors of such hardware or software. Needless to say, a compromised interception system is anything but lawful in the hands of an adversary." Manipulation of DUAL EC DRBG. "Many documents released in public from the Snowden archive and additional documents which are still not public make clear that this type of bug is being exploited at scale with help from NSA's surveillance infrastructure. It is still unclear who authored the changes at Juniper and if bribery from the NSA was involved as with RSA's deployment of DUAL EC DRBG to their customers as is discussed in Section 4.4.". > Comment: Since the start of the Snowden revelations, numerous Top Secret documents from the FISC have been declassified, showing that the court examines the NSA's activities in great detail.