Random detail, but "Maximator" is a type of beer (a Starkbier/Doppelbock) brewed by the the very popular Augustiner brewery, not a brand in itself. In fact, it's a Bavarian tradition for the names of Doppelbocks to generally end in "-ator": Celebrator, Optimator, Animator...
The article covers this fact well. I like the idea that a super secret cabal name is based on the drink they were having at the time. It humanizes the whole endeavour showing how they agree on more than secrecy.
(offtopic) Huh funny, there's a Czech beer called Primátor and I wondered for a second if it was named in the same tradition. However it is the title of a mayor of a "statutory city" [1] - which is apparently something like a City that isn't governed as part of a larger county/state/district.
They make decent beer but it's not so widespread (round here the main brands are Pilsner Urquell, Radegast ... or Starobrno. Don't bother with the latter) and you can only get it in supermarkets or a few bars.
You should give it a try. Though, original research is not allowed (and the much maligned bureaucratic processes around frequently vandalized and controversial topics get tiresome), a lot of topics are simply missing or have inadequate or out-of-date information. A lot of content that goes into blogs and other publications can be neatly summarised in a wiki-page, which is really useful to anyone doing a quick research on the topic.
One of the last articles I created on Wikipedia was of Sunder Katwala[1] who at the time was head of the Fabian Society[2]. Shortly after, a deletionist calling itself Wireless Keyboard stuck a Speedy Deletion notice[3] on my article, even though it was patently obvious to anyone who bothered to follow the links why he was notable.
I've only ever created one Wikipedia article since then. Fuck Wikipedia and fuck deletionists.
"Certain countries were deliberately not allowed to join because within the Maximator alliance they were considered as lacking relevant (signal-/crypto-analytical) expertise and/or experience. Allegedly, these countries include Norway, Spain and Italy."
And
"Belgium is a notable exception in north-western Europe; it had not been invited to join Maximator because of its lack of SIGINT (and COMSEC) capabilities." adding in a footnote that "Belgium’s cryptographic behaviour and discipline were problematic. For instance, at least once it compromised its own communications via a basic mistake in key management;"
"The details of this algorithm were shared by the BND within Maximator with TIVC. This enabled the Dutch to read Argentinian naval and diplomatic communications before the war started. As reported by Aldrich and Wiebes, the British SIGINT organisation GCHQ had neglected Argentina. It was not able to read communications secured by Crypto AG devices. When the war started, it asked, under pressure, countries on the European continent for help. A directly involved Dutch source states that at that stage a specialist from TIVC travelled to GCHQ and explained how the HC500 Crypto AG devices for Argentinian naval and diplomatic communications worked; subsequent solution of the ciphers was left to GCHQ itself."
This reads like GCHQ was the naughty kid, not paying attention, and they took pity on them when they asked for help ... but at least they asked. But to rub it in they did a "the solution is left as an exercise for the reader" deal. Kinda hilarious.
It sounds like the solution was always left as an exercise for the reader in the day-to-day dealings of the group even among the members: "Each participating country was supposed to perform its own decryptions. This is common practice in the intelligence community in order to prevent being fed cooked-up information."
and
"The cryptanalytical part of the cooperation involved exchanges of algorithms used in various (deliberately weakened) cryptographic devices used by target countries. It was then left up to the Maximator participants themselves to find out how to exploit weaknesses in the algorithms of these devices. Such exploitations are also called ‘solutions’."
That said, you could spin it another way: the UK had enough good will and political capital to lean on its European neighbors for a bare-minimum amount of help. "We can tell you how it works, but it's on you to figure the rest out".
Naughty kid not paying attention is also relevant -- you've only got so many hours in the day and so many hours to map out threats. This was still the Cold War and nuclear holocaust was a bigger priority than distant Latin American dictatorship.
I think it's about plausible deniability. If they only told gchq about the design of the algorithms, they're not saying they know how to break them or even that they're designed to be breakable.
It's interesting how many strings Britain was able to pull to get advantages in the Falklands War. It also was reported [0] that Thatcher convinced the French to hand over IFF codes that would effectively prevent Argentina's French-made Exocet missiles from targeting British ships. The war might have gone very differently if Argentina was the one with powerful diplomatic connections.
Yes, both France and the Netherlands are broadly aligned with the UK, and would fight alongside them in the case of any existential threat. But for colonial wars one might think they'd be happy to see Britain get some egg on her face.
According to this source (perhaps not completely credible) she called then French President Mitterrand and threatened to nuke Argentina if he did not give her the codes
> Yes, both France and the Netherlands are broadly aligned with the UK, and would fight alongside them in the case of any existential threat. But for colonial wars one might think they'd be happy to see Britain get some egg on her face.
Any “friend” who won’t help with small things is a lot less likely to help when it really matters. And the Dutch and French both also have possessions in the New World full of people perfectly happy with the status quo who deserve protection from would be conquerors.
Argentina ordered 15 Super-Etendards and AM39 Exocets from France. They received 5 of each, with 1 plane used for parts. The Sheffield was destroyed with one exocet, and 2 sank the Atlantic Conveyor (with most of the Army's supplies and helicopters.) An AM38 sank the Glamorgan.
Looks like the IFF info didn't help.
(Had either of the British carriers Hermes or Invincible been sunk, Britain would have retreated.)
Belgian here. We are one of the most highly taxed countries, so you really wonder were all that money is going.
Belgium is as divided as the EU itself. We have 6 distict governments: federal, flemish, walloon, french, german and brussels. That doesn't help in any way.
The things that happen here are sometimes too crazy to mention, like the time a serialkiller escaped because the 2 cops guarding him didn't do their job, and also didn't have any bullets in their guns to stop him. Surreal.
What's actually interesting is that they have some world-top cryptographers and security researchers (e.g. invented AES and SHA-3). So part of that money goes to academia, and with good results :) The government agencies are lagging behind though.
NATO and EU headquarters are located in Belgium....
But this will not work (at least for decades.) To get favors from US many will spill the beans. And that's not as bad as doing that to Russia or China. EU is made of countries with their own national interests
The reason they cannot cooperate is that the member states will always want to apply their own rules and local regulations, and allow different levels of incompetence across jurisdictions.
Specifically, Belgian police and standards are a joke. Just look at the way they bungled the response to the French terrorist attack where the perpetrator(s) fled to Brussels / Molenbeek. The rest of the country might be ok, but Brussels has exposed that the Belgian government is unable to govern its own largest city. And how Belgian passports are issued locally by every town government rather than a centralized authority. A joke.
It is disappointing to continue to see such rampant fragmentation within Europe.
I had hoped that the EU would break down regulatory barriers and force bureaucratic consolidation, but it seems progress has stalled in the last 10 years.
The EU should have one single intelligence agency - not a dysfunctional collection of fighting to be part of the "in" group.
That would be very premature, you’d need much stronger political union first. The risk is the joint Intelligence agency would end up as leaky and compromised as the most leaky, most compromised intelligence agency of the individual countries. That would make the sum equal to the weakest of its parts.
One single intelligence agency? And what if the Germans are interested in gaining better understanding of Viktor Orban? Or if the Italians want to know just how far Germany will really go to help them financially? An intelligence agency is a means of acquiring answers to intelligence needs - I'm not sure Europe is of one mind with regard to what questions merit answering.
The EU is an economic and political union. It might not be complete or perfect, but integration has been happening decade by decade. We now have a single currency, a unified supreme court, a single charter of citizen rights, freedom of movement and a single market. A lot of younger people feel European, there is such a thing as an European identity. Each one of these things was considered impossible at a certain point. It is a slow and hard process but it is happening.
I find that the English-speaking media is particularly keen on repeating the mantra that "the EU is collapsing". I've witnessed this all my life. It became more intense now with Brexit, but the UK was not ever a real member. It opted out and demanded exceptions for everything. Unfortunately, the EU had to be built around the UK, not with it. There was also a shift in attitude with the current administration in the US, which sees the EU as an adversary instead of as a friend. So I would take anything I read in English about the EU with a pinch of salt...
> the UK was not ever a real member. It opted out and demanded exceptions for everything. Unfortunately, the EU had to be built around the UK, not with it.
There's a tendency among hardcore europhiles to blame the nasty british for all questioning of the European ideal, as though if it weren't for perfidious albion Europe would be of one mind.
This completely ignores both the deep euroscepticism felt by many people across the EU(which European countries tend to just ignore instead of being so hasty like Britain as to actually have a referendum - and if a referendum must be held, just have it again and again until you get the right answer...) and also ignores that other countries have differing opinions to France and Germany too.
> There's a tendency among hardcore europhiles to blame the nasty british for all questioning of the European ideal, as though if it weren't for perfidious albion Europe would be of one mind.
Perhaps, but that was not what I said at all. What I said is that the UK always chose to not participate in the project, and that the project went on without it. Now, with Brexit, the UK government is openly hostile towards the EU. This is just a fact. Another fact is that the EU was able to maintain a united political front when faced with Brexit (which posed -- and was meant to pose -- an existential threat to the EU). So the reports of EU's death may be premature, as the cliché goes...
> This completely ignores both the deep euroscepticism felt by many people across the EU
Well, I haven't. On the contrary, I said that it is a very hard and incomplete project, and that it was considered impossible by a lot of people every step of the way. I also mentioned that it is among the younger generations that a European identity is growing. Not established, but growing.
> and also ignores that other countries have differing opinions to France and Germany too
Well, I ignored none of that. You just assumed it.
What I think is undeniable is that there are vested interests in the collapse of the EU. The EU is composed of many small countries, that could be much more easily pushed around if not acting as bloc. Naturally, those who would indeed like to push Europe around dislike the EU. With the stance of the current US administration and of the post-Brexit UK government, it just so happens that in the current year of 2020, a lot of people with such vested interests write in English.
Just yesterday the EU announced a massive stimulus, to be repaid over 30 years, perhaps partially by EU-wide taxes. What makes you way they are heading away from more integration?
Because the “integration” never existed and it failed the populations when they needed it more. Also, unrelated ex. Search what happened to peripheral economies when Germany wanted to sell Siemens trains to China.
Europe is not a country and the ones that insist it to be are high society politicians who like to pretend they are above the populace.
It's certainly not a single country right now, but the direction over the last few decades has definitely been more towards a union than away from it.
Let's not forget that it took even the USA several centuries and a civil war to get to a mostly unified country. Even then there are vast differences in culture between states. If (say) California and Texas wouldn't have been part of the USA right now, I doubt they'd choose to merge into it.
Europe "exists" for thousands of years, most modern country identities and cultures exist for very little less than that ( mine is almost 900 years ).
Compared to Europe, the US is as homogeneous as it can be. Of course it's heterogeneous but at a regional and sometimes city area level with different customs and traditions imported from other countries and "americanized"
The strength of Europe is their independent countries and diverse cultures and every time an enterprising young fella had grandiose ideas it always ends with an absolute bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions.
Generally speaking the ones that want a "fully integrated" Europe are:
1 - Politicians with a manager mentality who like to get frisky with concepts such as "economies of scale", "standardization", "efficiency", etc. Yet they don't know anything of what a society is.
2 - The usual crème-de-la-crème "citizens of the World" who in reality are just old-money rich ignorant "kids" who can't even fathom what an existence of a real "normal" person is.
3 - People from other parts of the World who think Europe is a country
4 - Competing superpowers who root for the destruction of Europe and know very well that their only hope is for it to implode.
That's a cheap excuse. The participating countries are known to have the best ties to the CIA. The others not so. They clearly want to avoid leaks, or punish them for their critical stance towards criminal practices.
> Crypto AG, a Swiss firm that dominated the global market, turns out to have been jointly owned by the CIA and its German counterpart, the BND. They would sell rigged machines to friends and enemies alike, including several NATO countries.
Because many of us come from the US and Germany and are what many consider the "good guys". Even if we don't come from the US or Germany our political and economic systems are more aligned with those countries than some other countries.
To flip this on its head, would you argue that the people working to secure the Nazi's torture camp computers were being the good guys? Did they have any ethical obligations to make it easier for Ally powers to decipher the records after the war was won (or even before) to help people reunite with their families?
Well espionage is a closed circle and not many people knows how it's done. If you want more flavors just Google "operation gladio" and read all sort aof crazy things they did back in the CW.
How does distrust create trust exactly? I give out trust freely (within reason) until it's broken. Gaining back trust is hard. When I find out you went through my mails to find out if I'm trustworthy, you loose my trust.
When I learned of the BND's Crypto AG involvement I felt a deep sense of shame. All the CIA's fuck ups in south america for example. Not only the CIA anymore, we where involved too. Which makes me loose some trust in my government to act on my/our behalf. There is a cost to it and the benefits are questionable at best.
One very prominent example is the Open Skies Treaty. Basically, signatories permit reconnaissance aircraft to fly over for the purposes of enforcing arms control. It is legalized spying.
I think the idea is that it forces allies to interact with genuine intentions, lest one tries to deceive the other and is caught because of some intelligence that's been gathered.
It's the backbone of a gentleman's agreement between allies to not act maliciously toward each other.
Yup like the time when the BND basically helps the US to do industrial espionage against Germany.
And the when the government found out about it (through Snowden) and didn't really do anything.
I mean even if giving asyl to Snowden wasn't possible permanently they could have given it to him for a short time to at least allow him to sadly speak in front of the German government.
Or EU countries allowing extradition to countries which haven't signed the human rights charter (like the US, ironically Russia did sign it).
Through then if we consider how the BND was founded it would be supposing if it's not at least partially undermined by some US intelligence agencies...
But normal people have been sufficiently scared, so that they "care" about privacy.
For example "Facebook bad" -- but everybody uses WhatsApp.
When you mention that its the same company, people don't care. The important thing is that they can tell their friends that they don't use Facebook, because "Facebook bad".
The problem is most also don't understand the consequences and possibilities even much less inversive privacy problems allow. Once you explain to them they tend to first care a lot, then are helpless because it seems holes and then at some point give up just because they don't know how to go on with upholding privacy.
But more importantly the bomb if the Snowden revelations was less about privacy inversion but industries espionage. Worse the institution which main purpose include preventing that had helped in it.
>Of course, that excludes spying to steal intellectual property.
Of course, only bad actors like China, Russia or North Korea would break patent-, copyright law, etc. The good guys only do it for financial gain or to get coordinates for kill drones.
The Cold War was mostly a spy game and it kept the peace for decades. There was no gigantic WW3, no nuclear holocaust, and kept the regional conflicts limited to that specific region.
Everyone plays the great game, even allies vs other allies (e.g. the French spying on US businesses, and the US NSA spying on Europeans during negotiations).
It's only objectively better until another world war comes - we are not immune, and then, it will be easily objectively worse. This argument is rather pointless - externalizing warfare to poor nations and then saying the world is "peaceful" is quite immoral.
Espionage is not used by governments to maintain peace and reduce war fatalities - it's used by governments to gain an edge over their adversaries. Espionage existed in WW2 as it did in times of peace - to say peace is a consequence of it is absurd.
MAD is the only thing that has prevented major world conflict.
It might, but that makes it even more important to use as a "normal" person. (Until it's proven to be a honeypot, of course.)
a) it befuddles the trite commercial spying done by google et al
b) you decrease the signal to noise ratio for those operating the honeypot by adding your mundane activities and have them spend resources trying to figure out what you are really up to
I enjoyed reading that the paranoia of the Soviets that it was a western plot was justified, but as their allies bought the technology it gave second hand information from Moscow anyways.
Fun part was that CIA was focused mainly on espionage purpose while the BND was mainly focused on earning money they can spend without supervision for other secret projects.
We don't know, but we do know that during the investigation into it when it became publicly know a complain from the CIA surfaced that the BND acted to profit orientated. Through I would have to look up the exact details tbh. Just something which I found kinda amusing when I stumbled over it.
As both an American (culturally) and European (by citizenship, as in European Union citizen), this whole ordeal is going to be profoundly damaging to US-EU relations.
But, you (Americans) should be angry because democracy has been in backslide hardcore in the US. Europe has dealt with populism before, unlike the US, and is more likely to recover from these bad times than the US—and it is really due to a multitude of reasons.
My bet is that the US closed the operation once they knew they were certainly busted. Who knows, maybe even a European counter-operation of some sort occurred. The US probably has several other covert operations now based directly on intelligence from the devices with poor encryption. Sure, post World War 2, the US maybe had legitimate reasons to be spying on such activities in general in Europe. They also probably knew (practically guaranteed) over time from various patterns (from good data—whatever that data could possibly be) that a super coordinated secret intelligence operation was going on between European countries, while not knowing who exactly they were (as in not being able to put their finger on what was going on, but still being able to rely on intuition to just know and to justify the means).
Swiss laws permitting ultra-confidentiality in banking do absolutely have a legitimate purpose, but they are problemsome too. Unless you have been living under a rock in recent years, everybody knows that there are plenty of oligarchs (Russian oligarchs in particular) funneling dirty money through the Swiss banking system. America also effectively has its own form of oligarchy too (by the way, guess who is listed top in the world for wealth inequality by Credit Suisse? Russia. Guess who is second? USA.), so it is not like this route seemed unnatural.
Even if the Europeans knew for certain that somebody had some sort of substantial counterintelligence on them, it would still take a long time to figure out the source of failure. That is, unless the US messed up severely, which, I suspect, is probably what happened.
“Metal Storm” is my favourite one. It’s the trademark for a company that produces an electrically controlled machine gun with an extraordinarily high rate of fire.
Conventional weapons can already do 4200 rounds per minute (ie 70 per second) at much higher accuracy and with much easier reloading. There just aren't that many cases where you need to shoot vast amounts of metal at something, even anti-missile guns don't need more than ~100 rounds to achieve satisfactory Pkill against anything but the most manoeuvrable targets. Most other engagements these days take place at a range where metal storm type weapons are ineffective.
Source: studied weapons engineering at Naval college.
It is but in my mind also kind of pointless. At 1600 barrels and 22000 rounds, you might as well lug around a bunch of RPGs, mortars and laser guided missiles.
Whenever I read about such organizations I always wonder who cleans the toilets. Whether they are real like the CIA, Five Eyes, or even Dr. Evil someone low down on the ladder has to get access.
Keep in mind that there are all sorts of odd circumstances and that the rules surrounding this stuff are necessarily inflexible, so there are lots of different arrangements.
That said, in the US, the janitor is probably a contractor. Typically ex-military, they have to pass a background check and are cleared to work in public spaces. When cleaning secure areas, they're escorted and watched.
This is no different in the cryptography community in at least one of the countries in this arrangement. With the broad exception that they usually have to be on the payroll of the company to avoid conflicts of interest (if at a privately held company working for the government in this role). I'm not experienced with the government itself but I suspect no different.
I chuckled. Still, poop and urine can contain some useful information that may otherwise be difficult to get. Anecdotally, Kim is very careful as to where he poops.
Obviously the choice of name wasn't made by the beer. It must have sounded like a good name too. Homer Simpson's alias Max Power came from a hairdryer but that wasn't the point of it.
Can somebody explain why The Register and The Economist suddenly pick up the subject, while the original article from Jacobs was published a few months ago, and several newspaper already covered the topic ?
The origins of the EEC were a French(agriculture + coal) and German (manufacturing) alliance. The other countries were just added on as export markets.
Generally treaties occur after interested parties have realized their interests and undertaken discussions for a great deal of time prior to the signing of anything.
(Found it since I cannot read the full economist article)