telecom@ucbvax.ARPA (10/08/84)
From: Jon Solomon (the Moderator) <Telecom-Request@MIT-MC>
TELECOM Digest Monday, 8 Oct 1984 Volume 4 : Issue 98
Today's Topics:
NYT- NSA Secure Telephone article.
Echo Suppressors
white house radios
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Date: 6 Oct 1984 23:48-PDT
Sender: GEOFF@SRI-CSL
Subject: NYT- NSA Secure Telephone article.
From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow <Geoff@SRI-CSL.ARPA>
n062 1458 06 Oct 84 BC-PHONES 2takes NSA Seeking 500,000 'Secure'
Telephones Exclusive 6 p.m. EDT embargo By DAVID BURNHAM c.1984 N.Y.
Times News Service
WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency is proposing that the
government and industry be equipped with as many as 500,000 telephones
that can be secured against interception.
The agency is convinced that the Soviet Union and the other
nations are obtaining important intelligence from United States
telephones.
Although cloaked in secrecy, a program like the one the agency
proposes could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The project could
also lead to a new role for the intelligence agency in private
industry. Under the proposal, production of the secure phones would
begin in two years.
The decision by the largest and most secretive American
intelligence organization to propose a major effort to combat
telephone eavesdropping was disclosed by Walter G. Deeley, the senior
official in charge of protecting government communications.
He said in an interview that electronic eavesdropping by the
Soviet Union, other countries he did not name and corporations posed a
genuine threat to the security of the United States.
''I want the country to be aware that if we don't protect our
communications, it can do a great deal of damage to us,'' Deeley said.
''This is a problem that goes to the very fabric of our society. It is
not just a worry of the national security agencies.''
He said he believed the United States was in ''deep trouble,''
adding: ''They are having us for breakfast. We're hemorrhaging. Your
progeny may not enjoy the rights we do today if we don't do
something.''
A Reagan administration official familiar with intelligence
matters agreed there was a surveillance problem, but he also said no
final decision had been made to go beyond research or to request money
to produce the phones.
In August, the National Security Agency sent a letter to more than
2,000 major corporations saying, ''The U.S. has initiated an effort to
develop low-cost, user-friendly secure telephone instruments.''
The number of secure telephones currently used by government
agencies is classified information. But the Carter administration said
there were 100 such phones in the government, and it planned to buy
150 more. The cost of each phone then was $35,000. The Reagan
administration has bought an unknown number of additional secure
phones.
The phones proposed by the NSA would be used by the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Defense and State departments, military
contractors and other private corporations such as banks that handle
information of possible use to a foreign power.
The NSA was set up by President Truman in a secret executive order
in 1952 to conduct electronic intelligence all over the world and
protect the sensitive messages of the United States. It has used its
secret budget, now estimated at $4 billion a year, to make itself a
major sponsor of advanced computer research, and it has played an
important covert role in shaping national communication policy. Its
top officials almost never grant on-the-record interviews.
''Anyone making a phone call to the West Coast or Boston from the
Washington area has no idea how the conversation will be
transmitted,'' Deeley said. ''It might go via fiber optics,
conventional cable, microwave towers or one of the 19 domestic
satellites. If is going via satellite you can presume the other guy is
listening to it.''
Asked for specific examples of electronic espionage, he said he
could not disclose them because they were classified. Citing
individual cases, he said, would give the Russians important clues
about the ability of the United States to detect their efforts.
Deeley said his agency was developing a similar program to
improve the security of computerized data. ''This area has blown up
extraordinarily fast,'' he said. ''In many ways computerized data is
more harmful than telephones because it's all record information.
''The financial institutions have become aware of this problem.
The insurance companies are becoming aware. The rest of the private
sector companies are just now beginning to see that if they are going
to survive, they have to protect their communications.''
He said increasing American use of communication satellites and
microwave transmission towers made it economically possible for almost
any nation and many large corporations to intercept messages, then use
high-speed computers to sort them out.
A spokesman for the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. said he
could not estimate the amount of telephone traffic that was subject to
relatively easy interception because it was transmitted by microwave
towers or satellites. But he added that one rough indicator was that
70 percent of AT&T's domestic equipment and 60 percent of its overseas
equipment transmitted telephone messages through the atmosphere rather
than by cable, which is harder to intercept.
Few members of Congress other than members of the Senate and House
intelligence committees are aware of the NSA's plan. One exception is
Rep. Glenn English, D-Okla., chairman of the House Government
Operations Subcommittee on Information. In a letter Sept. 24 to the
General Accounting Office, a congressional investigative arm, he said,
''There can, of course, be no objection to maintaining adequate
security for classified information.''
He said, however, that he knew ''from past experience that the
national security bureaucracy has a tendency to require a degree of
protection for classified information that may be excessive.'' He
added, ''Technological security measures are very expensive, and my
concern is that the unnecessary use of these measures is a waste of
scarce federal funds.''
English asked the GAO to prepare an unclassified report on
whether the proposed protective measures were necessary and worth the
cost.
Henry Geller, director of the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration in the Carter administration and now the
head of the Washington Center for Public Policy Research of Duke
University, raised questions about the project.
He said that when the Carter administration studied Soviet
eavesdropping, it decided that its biggest security agency should be
responsible for assuring the communications security of the American
military and American intelligence services but that the Commerce
Department should be responsible for working with private companies.
''There was a strong belief in the Carter administration that the
United States has a long and important tradition that the telephone
systems and broadcasting groups are independent, privately owned
entities,'' he said. ''Adopting a plan that gives the NSA, a branch of
the Pentagon, an important role in the communication network of
private corporations and civilian agencies of government is a
significant policy change that should be carefully examined by
Congress before it is adopted.''
Deeley said his agency's concern prompted it earlier this year to
award five of the major American communication companies small
contracts to conduct individual studies; the object would be to
determine whether they could mass-produce a low-cost, easy-to-use
telephone that would be difficult to intercept. The companies are
AT&T, the GTE Corp., the ITT Corp., the Motorola Corp. and the RCA
Corp.
Deeley did not describe the telephones, but experts in the field
said each would presumably have a small computer that would transform
the voice signals into a stream of coded digits. They said this would
require time and expensive equipment for an outsider to decode the
message.
However, after the coded message was transmitted by conventional
means to another special telephone, the receiving unit's computer
could quickly turn the digits back into an understandable voice.
As a result of the preliminary studies supported by his agency,
Deeley said that he hoped to get bids on the project in November and
sign an agreement with two of the five companies before the end of
this year, and that production of the devices could begin before the
end of 1986. ''We're talking about a half a million phones,'' Deeley
said.
While the Carter administration paid $35,000 for each such phone,
Deeley said the NSA hoped that mass production could cut the cost.
''Communications security is like insurance,'' he said. ''It has
no intrinsic value until it is needed. Some people buy insurance, some
don't. If you are a responsible person with a family, you take out a
little term insurance. If you aren't, you buy a case of beer.''
Deeley said a major investment in secure telephones by the private
sector would result in a substantial reduction of the cost of such
equipment for the federal government.
''If Exxon or Hanover Trust want to protect themselves,'' he said,
''they ought to be able to get the right equipment to achieve that
goal. If they don't care about other people reading their mail, that's
their business.''
nyt-10-06-84 1808edt ***************
------------------------------
Date: 07-Oct-1984 0952
From: covert%castor.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (John Covert)
Subject: Echo Suppressors
Echo suppressors are currently only used on circuits longer than
approximately 2000 miles. In addition, the echo suppressors are in a
layer of the network not at all related to accounting and billing.
You can rest assured that the telcos are not today, nor will they in
the near future, be using anything related to echo suppressors to
determine whether a modem is in use.
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Date: Tuesday, 18 September 1984 21:06-MDT
Sender: pur-ee!uiucdcs!uok!mpackard@Ucb-Vax
From: pur-ee!uiucdcs!uok!mpackard@Ucb-Vax
Subject: white house radios
The most distressing thing to hear is the secretary of state
discussing problems or passing information over a clear radio, but it
happens all the time. Just listen to HF in the 11.200 to 11.300 band
and you will here just about everyone of importance talking around the
subject. The fact that the military spends billions on communications
gear, doesn't mean they use it. Usually the operator is lazy and just
gets a frequency the fastest way he can. "get me a freq as soon as
possible I must speak to the president" and the operator says gee not
again, Oh piss I'll just give him the HF. The easiest way to
determine an aircrafts communications capability is to look at it's
antenna's. (you can't tell which ones are the bogus ones) Don't forget
to examine the skin for bumps which house some of the antenna's. The
reason for bumps is because the maintenance types have to fix them
sooner or later. uok!mpackard
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End of TELECOM Digest
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