The largest leak of classified documents in American military history, by WikiLeaks, has turned the Internet into a war zone.

On the one hand, WikiLeaks has gathered under its wing the most talented and fanatical hacker activists, ostensibly in order to turn the Internet into a bastion of openness and freedom of information.

On the other hand, the United States attracted:

♣ Ministry of Defense

♣ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
♣ National Security Agency,

...to suppress free speech on the Internet through censorship and anti-encryption laws.

Both sides, however, are fully aware of the importance Internet and that the outcome of their battle will change the face of the world.

Prerequisites for the Internet war...

Earlier in 2010, WikiLeaks, then a little-known network project, published on YouTube video entitled "Collateral Murder", which shows American soldiers in Iraq killing civilians, two Reuters journalists and two children. “Okay, let’s shoot already,” the machine gunner shouts in the video. - Go!". "Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards."

“A lot of my friends are in that video,” Iraq War veteran Josh Stieber told AntiWar Radio. “I can say with complete confidence that in nine cases out of ten, this is exactly how it all ended.” The killing was in compliance with military protocol. Does this video make you shocked and outraged? This is the cruel reality of war."

Before the video was released, the US military had repeatedly said the shooting was carried out in accordance with the rules of engagement and withheld information about the incident from Reuters.

The video sparked international outrage.

Very quickly, WikiLeaks became a dangerous enemy in the eyes of the American government. The world was in an uproar demanding answers, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation began searching for the whistleblower who leaked the video to WikiLeaks.

First arrest...

In May 2010, the FBI finally arrested Private First Class, 23-year-old American soldier Bradley Manning on suspicion of leaking classified documents.

Manning was betrayed by the famous hacker and drug addict Adrian Lamo, Manning's colleague, who gave Manning's chat records to Army intelligence. Lamo said his actions were dictated by a “crisis of conscience.” According to Lamo, Manning admitted to passing more than 260,000 classified diplomatic documents to the Internet portal WikiLeaks, but WikiLeaks has repeatedly denied receiving this information.

At the July 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference—a convention of hackers dedicated to discussing ethics and politics on the Internet—the hacker community rallied against Lamo, with one speaker calling him a “crazy junkie” (Lamo also attended the conference and even spoke ).

According to some, Lamo's betrayal was an attempt to "appease" the law, with which he had his own scores to settle - in particular, a $60,000 fine for hacking websites famous companies, such as The New York Times and Microsoft. Others attributed his misbehavior to a desire to become famous and see his name on the pages of the tabloids.

Manning was sent to a prison in Kuwait (where he was serving at the time of his arrest), where he spent two months, and then was transferred to a military base in Quantico, Virginia.

At the end of June 2010, WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange announced that he had hired three civil lawyers for Manning, none of whom were allowed to see his client.

Throughout 2010, protests in support of Manning were held regularly around the world. Many have called the American military man “a modern-day Daniel Ellsberg,” including Ellsberg himself. Daniel Ellsberg is a former American military analyst and employee of the RAND Corporation, who in 1971 gave a secret collection of American-Vietnamese Relations, 1945-1967: A Study to a New York Times reporter.

Hackers conference...

The WikiLeaks portal was represented at the hacker conference by Jacob Appelbaum, famous computer hacker, famous for breaking the FileVault encryption system developed by Apple. In addition, Appelbaum is one of the leaders of the Tor project, which provides almost complete anonymity on the Internet.

“By ignoring injustice in the world, you help create it,” Appelbaum said at the conference, where he stood in for Assange, who was unable to attend because he was on the international wanted list. There were so many federal agents that they were literally “climbing the walls,” as one source put it.

“If you've read anything about hackers, you know that we can't be stopped. Our goal is to provide you with information so you can do own conclusions"Appelbaum said. Appelbaum cited public distrust in the media due to the fact that tabloid articles always bear the imprint of the author's personal opinion, while WikiLeaks publishes only "raw" material for free interpretation by the reader.

“The media has been silenced, but we refuse to remain silent,” Appelbaum said. “This whole hunt for Assange... you can cut off the head, but new people will appear.”

After this speech, Appelbaum had to use a body double to escape federal agents who wanted to capture him on stage. Appelbaum was eventually caught up by two FBI agents at the same conference; they urgently wanted to take him away “for a conversation.”

The world's most important battles have long been fought on the Internet.

In the weeks following the WikiLeaks conference, the site released into the public domain more than 92,000 classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan, as well as a sensational Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) document exploring the possibility of the US being perceived as an "exporter of terrorism." .

The Pentagon, already conducting a full-scale hunt for Assange, has begun the war against Wikileaks with renewed vigor. Pentagon officials demanded the “return” of illegally obtained documents so that the Pentagon could later accuse WikiLeaks of espionage.

War on the Internet: a new blow to WikiLeaks...

The FBI and the US government teamed up and announced the launch of the Internet eavesdropping program Going Dark with an initial budget of $9 million. She should help the FBI collect information on the Internet ( we're talking about about the possibility of eavesdropping on Internet communicators, in particular Skype). At the same time, President Obama supported a bill that would ban any encryption of sites for which the government cannot obtain the code, i.e. the encryption used by WikiLeaks to keep its sources safe.

At the end of September 2010, the US government dealt a new blow to WikiLeaks by introducing a bill to combat copyright infringement and the distribution of counterfeit products on the Internet, which at first glance appears to be an anti-piracy law. But once you read the fine print, its true purpose becomes clear.

"This law will target domains that 'host infringing material,' which is a very broad definition," said Aaron Swartz, owner of an anti-censorship website. “Any site that is “central to counterfeit products or copyright infringing materials” will be blocked.”

The government, which is already planning to charge WikiLeaks with espionage, may well add charges of piracy and distribution of “counterfeit products” to the existing ones.

The United States has launched an all-out war against the rights, freedoms and privacy of its citizens in a desperate attempt to undo the fallout from WikiLeaks.

Ideal at gunpoint …

In March, WikiLeaks published a classified CIA document detailing the various means the US government could use to take down WikiLeaks. “The strength of websites like WikiLeaks is their credibility, as they protect the anonymity of their whistleblowers and whistleblowers,” the report says. – Successfully identifying the whistleblowers, identifying them, removing them from their positions and prosecuting them, and incriminating the leakers to the government and private companies affected by WikiLeaks will damage and possibly destroy it trust, and will serve as a warning to others, which will keep them from similar actions.”

Many saw chilling parallels between the report's proposed strategy to take down WikiLeaks and Manning's recent arrest.

“We appear to be under attack on all fronts under US control,” WikiLeaks said in a June 2010 blog post on Twitter. These words turned out to be prophetic.

United behind their ideal, the world's most talented and ideological hackers have embraced WikiLeaks and what it stands for, forming the largest group of political "hacktivists" in history. The United States found itself facing an enemy it was not prepared to fight.

The Internet has become one nation, a perfect meritocracy, a state - which is at war.

This state has its own culture, which includes:

♣ those who entertain;

♣ heroes

♣ those who produce media content;

♣ those who play;

♣ those who work

The Internet has created a virtual empire, and WikiLeaks has become the first capital of this empire, which has no precedent in the past.

It is the unprecedented nature of this phenomenon that causes such panic in the real world.

The world of the Internet and power...

In its architecture, the structure of the Internet is fundamentally different from the structure of the real world. On the Internet, by definition, rulers are impossible, but in the world of information there cannot but be power and rulers of thoughts.

In the meritocracy (“rule of the worthy”) of the Internet, the capable, enterprising, smart, and resourceful can gain fame and fortune. From the earliest days, this elite group consisted exclusively of hackers, since hackers gain knowledge through the use of various systems, that is, their power is built on knowledge of the “underside” of the Internet and the ability to use it for their own purposes.

So Appelbaum created the Tor Project, leveraging the endless possibilities of Internet architecture to provide anonymous web access. Assange changed the face of classified information - with his help, tens of thousands of classified truths poured from the abysses of the Internet into the real world.

The Hackers of Planet Earth conference—featuring both “fallen heroes” (Adrian Lamo) and representatives of a digital superpower (WikiLeaks)—was a gathering of the virtual nation's most powerful figures, deciding the future of their country.

Their homeland, the world they built and in which their main lives take place, entered into a war with another country that exists in a completely different dimension - and in many ways superior in strength, thanks to its dominance in physical reality.

Lately, the United States has felt threatened by the Internet, which is waging war in the only way it can – with information. In a world without official leaders, Julian Assange, a former hacker himself, achieved the fact that he became a respected and influential person in his virtual homeland, and in the real world he turned into an odious figure.

Unlike the Internet, the United States has a president and a government, and they are not yet accustomed to the fact that Internet users consider knowledge to be free and information to be free. Moreover, freedom of information on the Internet is a direct threat to their power in the real world.

The behavior of both sides in this conflict indicates that they are at war. The US government is trying to counteract the enemy, create hatred and fear of him in society, destroy him, cause discord in his ranks, and even completely block access to the Internet with the help of relevant laws.

The United States is seeking to use its territorial advantage to establish control over the Internet. The Internet, on the other hand, seeks to exploit the exact opposite: the lack of space and time to gain complete control over the most important weapon - information.

The more information WikiLeaks releases, the more threats it receives from the US government.

The United States is allegedly only striking back in a war that they believe they did not start - WikiLeaks considers it its duty to open the eyes of the entire Internet to what is happening in the real world, for the sake of truth and justice. The aggression that we see today speaks of the shock of the authorities, who did not expect such a scale of “military action.” No state has ever fought, or could even imagine a war with a country that is not on the map, whose warriors have no face.

This is why US leaders fight so hard against those who hold their own views on truth and courage.

This war will end only if both sides understand that this is the war of the worlds, which science fiction writers warned about, because the Internet and the real world are practically different civilizations.

This is a war of worldviews and ethical principles: information transparency versus the view that only a select few have the right to know the truth. There is no doubt that the side that wins this war of ethical principles will decide according to at least, in the coming decades, the future of freedom of expression online Internet.

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Information wars on the Internet

Introduction.

In this series of articles, I plan to talk about such an important phenomenon affecting the Internet as information wars. It is no secret that in our time on planet Earth the confrontation between various centers of power is largely informational in nature. This applies both to relationships between states and between different social groups or classes. The consequences of information wars can be as global and long-lasting as the results of real wars. Thus, defeat in the cold information war cost the life of such a state as the Soviet Union. Together with the USSR, communist ideology was defeated and pushed into the underground. In this regard, the task of self-determination of a person in the chaos of information battles, that is, his awareness of his interests, is especially acute, because without such awareness, no development of civil society is possible, just like the evolution of social relations in general. The problem is that there is no universal methodology that allows us to describe confrontations in the information sphere as holistically and logically as military history describes classical wars. Therefore, the majority of Internet users, especially young people, are not able to navigate the processes taking place on the network and easily pick up ideas and information viruses that harm their class or public interests. That is, they become victims of information attacks. The proposed material aims to help overcome the gaps in understanding the laws of the flow of information wars, and therefore should increase the survival and effectiveness of one’s own efforts, both of fighters on the information front and of civilians who accidentally find themselves in a combat zone.

Part one: goals and meaning of information wars.

1.What is information warfare.

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by the emergence of a fundamentally new weapon - information. Accordingly, there arose the new kind wars - information war. And if before the birth of the Internet, the conduct of information warfare was greatly limited by access to the media, then with the advent of the World Wide Web, all natural boundaries between “information territories” disappeared, and “opposing armies” got the opportunity to invade someone else’s land and conduct combat operations in essentially the same way as this is what “regular” troops do in “regular” wars. So, first, let's define information warfare.

Information warfare is purposeful actions taken to achieve information superiority by causing damage to information, information processes and information systems of the enemy while simultaneously protecting own information, information processes and information systems.[Wikipedia]

Under the information in this definition ideas, meanings, as well as their systems (ideologies), which serve as a factor in the formation around them, are understood social communities. Therefore, the original background of information wars lies outside the media space and is determined by the entire set of socio-political and economic processes in the real world.

2. Participants, customers and the territory of information wars.

As in the case of classical war, information warfare involves its own information armies, formed from information units, which in turn consist of fighters on the information front. But what makes these combat units take part in combat? What force gives them orders and forces them to act purposefully? There are two factors here. The first factor is internal, psychological. It determines the need of people with a certain psychological make-up to convey their ideas to others and try to persuade them to their point of view. He also determines the unification of these people along ideological lines into large and small groups. in fact, these groups are a kind of analogues of military units in real wars. The second factor is external, selective. It determines in which direction the actions of ideological groups will be directed. The effect of this factor is that the correct (beneficial to the customers of information wars) ideological groups and their actions, as well as convenient leaders, are encouraged and promoted in the information space, while unprofitable ones, on the contrary, remain without support and are drowned out. The instruments of external factors are the media, religion, the dominant culture in society, and other institutions that serve the interests of the customers of information wars. That is, people (journalists, bloggers, Internet visitors) act on their own, of their own free will, and customers only cultivate profitable movements and direct them in the right direction. But who are these mentioned “customers”?

Of all the existing sociological paradigms, the most scientifically developed is the Marxist paradigm, which considers the class model of the structure of society. According to this model, the ruling classes (bourgeoisie) exercise their dominance over the lower classes (the proletariat), which is expressed in the alienation of the surplus value of the product of labor of the lower classes and the disproportionate distribution of material wealth in their favor. In order to exercise such dominance, the ruling class (elite) needs to maintain its monopoly on power, which goes to those who know how to use available resources most effectively. In the conditions of information civilization, this actually means the need to maintain a monopoly on humanitarian knowledge, which includes social and political technologies, psychology, pedagogy, management, in general, everything that allows you to most effectively organize work, leisure, training and development of people, and This means it helps to increase the potential of society as a whole. Thus, the most important goal of the ruling class becomes hiding this knowledge from the lower classes. The most effective means of achieving this goal in 21st century society is information wars, and the battlefield, i.e. the territory on which wars are fought, is global network the Internet, which also includes the brains of its visitors. Information on the Internet, which is the carrier of the mentioned knowledge, we will further call information entities (information systems).

Here the question arises: can the lower classes themselves be the customers of the information war, that is, wage a defensive war in order to protect their knowledge and provide opportunities to improve it and obtain new ones? The answer is yes, they can, but to wage such a war they need the resources that are at the disposal of representatives of the ruling class. Therefore, if the oppressed class wants to become an independent force, it is important to be able to conclude tactical alliances with individual representatives of the bourgeoisie, using their own selfish interest and thus hiring them into their service. No wonder V.I. Lenin wrote:

“It is possible to defeat a more powerful enemy only with the greatest effort and with the obligatory, most careful, caring, cautious, skillful use of any, even the slightest, “crack” between enemies, any opposition of interests between the bourgeoisie of different countries, between different groups or species bourgeoisie within individual countries - and any, even the slightest, opportunity to gain an ally, even a temporary, shaky, fragile, unreliable, conditional one. Whoever did not understand this did not understand a single gram of Marxism and scientific, modern, “civilized” socialism in general.”

Contrary to the theories of conspiracy theorists, there is no single center of power on Earth - some organization with common interests that would decide what information policy carry out on the population. The world bourgeoisie is represented by many centers of power different scales, each of which has its own interests, often contradicting the interests of other centers. The same can be said about the proletariat, which is no longer as monolithic and homogeneous as it was in the time of Karl Marx. Because of this, information wars cannot be imagined as a simple “wall to wall” confrontation with a clearly defined front line. For example, if we imagine a strategic military information map of the Internet, it will look like a patchwork quilt with many multi-colored zones of control, multi-directional fronts and battles.

In order to learn to effectively participate, or at least survive, in the information war, you need to learn to identify the main active forces, fronts and directions of attacks in the information wars currently ongoing on the planet, which will make it possible to connect local information battles with global confrontations and understand what forces are behind this or that individual action. Here we will be greatly helped by understanding the so-called “superposition principle”, which operates in the same way as the principle of superposition of forces in physics. The principle is that the totality of multidirectional interests of subjects of one global group (for example, the American bourgeoisie) can be replaced by one resulting interest - a vector equal to the sum of the vectors of interests of each of the subjects of the global group. This vector determines the direction of the information strike, beneficial to this global group. The difficulty is that this resulting interest is not so easy to calculate, especially if the initial set of interests looks like a chaotic jumble of completely multidirectional forces. However, on the information and ideological map there are always points where the interests of one group of players are clearly expressed and oppose the interests of another group.

3.Goals and objectives of information wars.

The main goal of information warfare directly follows from, in fact, the definition of information warfare and can be formulated as the liberation of a given information space from those objectionable to the customer. information entities replacing them with other information entities beneficial to the customer. At the same time, the information entities for which there is a struggle are often composite and represent a combination of several simpler information entities. Moreover, the most valuable information entities, as a rule, are the most complex and lose their value when at least some of their components are removed. This has two important consequences. The first is that the destruction of the most important information entities is especially effective when the carriers of individual necessary components of a complex entity are separated into different network communities that do not intersect with each other. This means that the tasks of information warfare also include the formation of some online communities (clusters) and the destruction of others. For example, there is a certain community whose members have knowledge sufficient to create a car. But this is not profitable for us and we need to “prevent” the community from combining their knowledge into new metaknowledge. This can be done by splitting this community into interest groups: a group studying engines, a group of experts in transmission systems, a group of tire fitting specialists, etc. As a result, the exchange of knowledge between groups will be difficult, which means that a holistic idea of ​​a car from disparate ideas of its no parts will be formed. The second consequence of the mentioned property of complex information entities is the targeted nature of the most effective information attacks. In other words, there is no need to destroy the entire enemy ideology; it is enough to simply destroy the connections between its key links. The precision of information attacks allows you not only to save forces and concentrate them on the direction of the main attack, but also to hide your true intentions from the enemy. An example of a complex information entity is Soviet ideology, which included the interconnected ideas of communism, as an economic system, and democracy, as the basis of a political system. During perestroika, at some point, bourgeois ideologists managed to contrast the communist idea with the democratic one, which was the beginning of the collapse of Soviet ideology, and with it the state.

In this way, we can identify the main goals of the information war.

- Suppression and destruction of harmful (for the customer) information entities.
- Protection and distribution of useful information entities.
- Destruction of those network groups whose members have knowledge that is part of harmful information entities.
- Cultivation of those network groups whose members have knowledge that is the components of useful information entities.
- Targeted impact on complex information entities in order to neutralize harmful information entities or turn them into useful ones.

These goals can be both strategic and tactical. A goal is strategic if its achievement leads to a transformation of the target area of ​​the information space that is useful for the customer. Tactical goals, as a rule, do not provide immediate benefits, but their implementation is necessary to achieve a strategic goal, or a tactical goal more high order. Therefore, planning a global military information operation requires drawing up a hierarchy of goals, in which each higher-order goal requires the implementation of several low-level goals in order to achieve it. As a rule, strategic goals concern large online social groups, and their implementation has long-term consequences. Tactical goals are more local in space and time. A good example of a tactical task in the information war is the promotion at the end of Gorbachev’s perestroika of the topic of privileges for senior party officials. The problem (a real one) was exaggerated and taken to the extreme in such a way that, as a result, the people's trust in the institutions of Soviet power, as such, was destroyed. Once the task of destroying such trust was completed, the topic of privilege and the social stratification associated with it was forgotten. And a completely different idea began to be promoted - privatization and building capitalism.

4. Classification of methods of conducting information wars.

From the above, the classification of methods that are used in waging information warfare also becomes clear.

The first and main classification is by purpose:

- Methods of propaganda.
- Methods of counter-propaganda.

Propaganda methods are aimed at conveying the required ideas to the population, i.e., forming the necessary information entities in a certain area of ​​the information space. Accordingly, counter-propaganda methods are aimed at discrediting enemy ideas, destroying harmful information entities and preventing their occurrence in the future.

The second classification is based on the nature of the action.

- Explicit methods.
- Implicit (hidden) methods.

Explicit methods differ from implicit ones in that in them the purpose and nature of the impact are not hidden from the enemy. For example, agitation is an example of overt propaganda, and an information virus is hidden. In the first case, the agitator clearly indicates what idea he is conveying to the public. In the second case, the conveyed idea (the virus) is disguised, while a completely different idea is clearly advertised, usually popular and conducive to the spread of the virus. Looking ahead, we note that hidden methods of information warfare are most effective during an information offensive on enemy positions, and explicit methods more suitable for protecting and strengthening controlled territory. Thus, we get four main groups of methods of waging information wars - overt propaganda, covert propaganda, overt counter-propaganda and covert counter-propaganda. We will look at these groups in more detail later.

5. Time factor.

One of the key factors that determines the success of an outreach campaign is timing. It often happens that even a weak, unprofessional and poorly organized propaganda campaign ends with an impressive result only because it was lucky enough to take place at the right time. On the contrary, a powerful and carefully prepared information attack can hit the wall if its timing is not well chosen.

The reason for this is banal and lies in the fact that people, oddly enough, are rather distrustful creatures. Who are reluctant to accept any new information and really do not like to give up their beliefs. Don't believe me? Go up to the first passerby you see on the street and ask to lend you money, promising to give twice as much the next day. Or go to church and try to prove to the priest that God does not exist. Does not work? But information wars are being waged, which means it is still possible to influence people’s beliefs.

For. For every person, there are moments when his consciousness opens up and is ready to swallow any informational “food” inside himself, without subjecting it to absolutely any critical analysis and taking it for granted. This usually happens in childhood, but not only. In our time, when everything around is rapidly changing, people always come into contact with something about which they did not yet have a priori information, and because of this, the so-called "opinion". And this is where an interesting effect arises. As soon as a person asks a question about something that he consciously does not understand, but really wants to figure it out and find out the TRUTH, his mental filters relax, his ears hang in different directions, and his head turns into a jug open for filling with any information brew, the main thing is that the cook was a smart-looking expert “in the subject.”

As a rule, the head does not stay open for long and soon it closes, and the liquid poured into it solidifies, forming a crystal lattice of Knowledge. And here, as they say, whoever didn’t have time is late. This leads to a very important conclusion: in order to conduct a propaganda operation, it is very important that at the time of the operation the target group develops the maximum degree of active uncertainty on the issue on which propaganda is planned. Active uncertainty in this case is understood as a conscious ignorance of the answer to a question with a desire to receive it.

That is why all professional information operations are carefully planned according to the time, which is chosen with sniper precision.

Suggestions that intelligence agencies are so far ahead of us that there is no point in defending against them with encryption are incorrect. As one document from the Snowden archive shows, the NSA was not successful in deciphering a number of communication protocols, at least in 2012. A presentation for a conference held that year included a list of encryption programs that the Americans were unable to crack. During the decryption process, NSA cryptologists divided their targets into five levels according to the level of complexity of the attack and the result obtained, ranging from “trivial” to “catastrophic.”

Monitoring the path of a document on the Internet is classified as a “trivial” goal. Recording a Facebook chat is a "simple" task, while the difficulty level of decrypting emails sent through Russian internet service provider Mail.ru is considered a "moderate complexity" task. But all three of these classification levels do not pose serious problems for the NSA.

Things get more complicated at level four. According to the presentation, the NSA is experiencing "significant" problems trying to decrypt messages sent through email providers that use strong encryption methods, such as Zoho, or monitoring users. Tor networks, which was developed for anonymous web searches. Tor, also known as The Onion Router, is free software open source that allows users to access the Internet through a network of more than 6,000 interconnected and voluntarily donated computers to the project. The software automatically encrypts data so that no single computer on the network contains all the information about the user. This makes it very difficult for surveillance experts to track the location of a person visiting a particular website or to carry out an attack on someone using Tor to search the Internet.

A program for encrypting files on a computer is also causing “significant” problems for the NSA. Its developers stopped developing the program in May last year, which raised suspicions of pressure on them from the state agency. A protocol called Off-The-Record (OTR) for end-to-end encryption instant messages, also appears to be causing the NSA significant difficulties. The code for both of these programs can be freely viewed, modified, and distributed. Experts agree that open-source software is much more difficult for intelligence agencies to manipulate than many of the closed systems developed by companies such as Apple and Microsoft. Since anyone can view the code of such software, it is extremely difficult to introduce a backdoor into it without being detected. Transcripts of intercepted OTR chats provided to the agency by its partners in Prism, an NSA program to collect data from at least nine US Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple, show that the NSA's efforts were unsuccessful in this case: "This a message encrypted using OTR cannot be decrypted.” This means that the OTR protocol can at least sometimes make communications unobservable by the NSA.

For the Agency, the situation becomes "catastrophic" at level five: when, for example, the subject uses a combination of Tor, another "anonymization" service, the CSpace instant messaging system, and an Internet telephony (VoIP) system called ZRTP. Such a combination, as stated in the NSA document, leads to “an almost complete loss of the ability to track the location and communications of the selected object.”

ZRTP system, used for secure encryption of negotiations and chats on mobile devices, used in free programs open source such as RedPhone and Signal.

“It's nice to know that the NSA considers the encryption of communications through our services to be truly opaque,” ​​says RedPhone developer Moxie Marlinspike.

"Die Hard" for Fort Meade

The letter “Z” in the name ZRTP is a tribute to one of the system’s developers, Phil Zimmermann, who also created the Pretty Good Privacy system, which remains the most widely used program for encrypting letters and documents today. PGP was created more than 20 years ago, but, surprisingly, it is still too tough for the NSA. “This PGP-encrypted message cannot be decrypted,” reads an NSA document obtained by Spiegel regarding emails sent via Yahoo.

Phil Zimmermann wrote PGP in 1991. An activist to stop America's nuclear weapons program wanted to create an encryption system that could allow him to securely share information with other like-minded people. His system quickly became very popular among dissidents around the world. Given the program's widespread use outside the United States, the US government began prosecuting Zimmermann in the 1990s for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act. Prosecutors agreed that creating an encryption system of such complexity and distributing it outside the country was illegal. Zimmermann responded with a post source code system in the form of a book - it was a manifestation of freedom of speech protected by the constitution.

PGP continues to be improved, and many versions of the system are available today. The most widely used is GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG), a program developed by German programmer Werner Koch. One of the documents shows that representatives of the Five Eyes alliance sometimes use PGP themselves. It turns out that hackers obsessed with their own security and the US authorities have much more in common than one could imagine. Initially, the Tor project was developed with the support of the US Naval Research Laboratory.

Today, as stated in one of the documents, the NSA and its allies are trying with all their might to destroy the system that the US military helped create. "Deanonymizing" Tor is clearly one of the NSA's top priorities, but the agency has hardly achieved success in this area. One of the documents from 2011 even mentions an attempt to decipher the results of the use of Tor by the Agency itself - as a test.

The Snowden documents should bring some degree of relief to people who believed that nothing could stop the NSA from its inexhaustible thirst for information collection. It appears that we still have secure communication channels. However, the document also shows how far intelligence agencies have gone in their efforts to preserve and decipher our data.

Internet security operates at multiple levels—and the NSA and its allies are apparently capable of “exploiting” (i.e., “breaking”) some of the most widely used ones on a scale heretofore unimaginable.

VPN security is truly “virtual”

One example is virtual private networks (VPNs), which are often used by companies and institutions operating across multiple offices and locations. In theory, a VPN creates a secure tunnel between two points on the Internet. All data, cryptographically protected, is sent to this tunnel. But when it comes to VPN security, “virtual” is the best word to describe it. That's because the NSA is working on a large-scale project. using a VPN to hack a large number of connections, allowing the Agency to intercept information transmitted over VPN networks - including, for example, the Greek government VPN network. According to the document obtained by Spiegel, the NSA team responsible for working with Greek VPN communications consists of 12 people.

The NSA also targeted the Irish VPN service SecurityKiss. The following "digital fingerprint" for Xkeyscore, a powerful spyware program created by the agency, was tested and used to extract service data, according to NSA reports:

Fingerprint("encryption/securitykiss/x509") = $pkcs and (($tcp and from_port(443)) or ($udp and (from_port(123) or from_por (5000) or from_port(5353)))) and (not (ip_subnet("10.0.0.0/8" or "172.16.0.0/12" or "192.168.0.0/16"))) and "RSA Generated Server Certificate"c and "Dublin1"c and "GL CA"c;

According to an NSA document dated 2009, the agency processed 1,000 requests per hour from VPN connections. This number was expected to rise to 100,000 per hour by the end of 2011. The system's goal was to fully process "at least 20%" of these requests, meaning that the received data had to be decrypted and transmitted to the recipient. In other words, by the end of 2011, the NSA planned to continuously monitor up to 20,000 supposedly secure VPN connections at one o'clock.

VPN connections can be built based on various protocols. The most commonly used protocols are Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) and Internet Protocol Security (IPsec). These protocols pose little problem for NSA spies if they really want to hack the connection. Experts have already called PPTP insecure, but it continues to be used in many commercial systems. The authors of one NSA presentation boasted of a project called FOURSCORE, which stores information including encrypted metadata transmitted over PPTP protocols.

NSA documents state that using a large number of various programs, the Agency's services have penetrated many corporate networks. Among those subject to surveillance are Russian airline Transaero, Royal Jordanian Airlines, and Moscow-based telecom provider Mir Telematics. Another achievement of this program is the establishment of surveillance of internal communications of diplomats and government officials in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey.

IPsec is a protocol that, at first glance, creates spyware more problems. But the NSA has the resources to carry out a variety of attacks on the routers involved in the process of creating connections, to obtain keys and decrypt rather than decrypt transmitted information– this is evidenced by a message from the NSA department called Tailored Access Operations: “TAO gained access to the router through which the main banking traffic passes,” says one of the presentations.

Nothing to do with security

Supposedly secure systems that ordinary Internet users rely on constantly to conduct financial transactions, pay electronic shopping or access to mail accounts, turn out to be even less secure than VPNs. The average person can easily recognize these "safe" connections by looking at address bar in the browser: with such a connection, the address will begin not with “http” - but with “https”. “S” in this case means “secure”. The problem is that these protocols have nothing to do with security.

The NSA and its allies hack such connections effortlessly—a million a day. According to the NSA document, the agency planned to increase the volume of hacked https connections to 10 million per day by the end of 2012. Intelligence services are especially interested in collecting user passwords. By the end of 2012, the system was expected to "monitor the health of at least 100 encrypted, password-based applications" as they were used approximately 20,000 times per month.

For example, the UK Government Communications Center collects information about encryption using the TLS and SSL protocols - these are protocols for encrypting https connections - in a database called "FLYING PIG". British spies create weekly reports on the current state of the system to catalog the services that most often use SSL protocols, and store details of those connections. Services such as Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, Yahoo and iCloud are particularly frequent use similar protocols, and the number of connections recorded weekly by the British service is in the billions - and this is only for the 40 most popular sites.

Hockey website monitoring

The Canadian Center for Communications Security even monitors sites dedicated to the nation's most popular pastime: “We have seen a significant increase in chat activity on sites dedicated to discussing hockey. This is likely due to the start of the playoff season,” one of the presentations says.

The NSA has also created a program that it claims can decrypt the SSH protocol. It is typically used by system administrators to remotely access employee computers, primarily for use by Internet routers, business infrastructure systems, and other similar services. The NSA combines data obtained in this way with other information to control access to sensitive systems.

Weakening cryptographic standards

But how does the Five Eyes alliance manage to break all these standards and encryption systems? The short answer is that they take advantage of every opportunity available.

One of them is a serious weakening of the cryptographic standards used to create such systems. Documents obtained by Spiegel show that NSA agents attend meetings Internet organizations The Engineering Task Force (IETF), which develops such standards, collects information and presumably also influences discussions at meetings. “A new session of policy extensions may improve our ability to passively monitor two-way communications,” it reads. short description IETF meeting in San Diego in the internal information system NSA.

This process of weakening cryptographic standards has been going on for quite some time. The Compendium of Classifiers, a document explaining how to classify certain types of classified information, labels “the fact that the NSA/Central Security Agency makes cryptographic modifications to commercial devices or security systems for subsequent use” as “Top Secret.”

Collection of NSA classifiers: “Cryptographic modifications”

Cryptographic systems, thus sufficiently weakened or faulty, are then processed using supercomputers. The NSA created a system called Longhaul, an “end-to-end attack orchestration and key recovery service for Data Network Cipher and Data Network Session Cipher traffic.” In essence, Longhaul is a source for the NSA to search for opportunities to decrypt various systems.

According to the NSA document, the system uses the power of the Tordella Supercomputer in Fort Meade, Maryland, and the Oak Ridge Data Center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The service can transmit decrypted data to systems such as Turmoil, part of a secret network that the NSA has deployed around the world to intercept data. The code name for developments in this direction is Valientsurf. Similar program called Gallantwave, it is designed to “hack tunnel and session protocols.”

In other cases, spies use their infrastructure to steal cryptographic keys from router configuration files. The repository, called Discoroute, contains “active and passive router configuration data.” Active collection involves hacking or otherwise infiltrating computer systems; passive collection means obtaining data transmitted over the Internet through secret computers operated by the NSA.

An important part of the Five Eyes decryption work is simply collecting huge amounts of data. For example, they collect so-called SSL handshake messages - information exchanged between computers to establish an SSL connection. A combination of connection metadata and encryption protocol metadata can help obtain keys that in turn allow decrypted traffic to be read or written.

Finally, when all else fails, the NSA and its allies rely on brute force: They hack the target computer or router to obtain sensitive data - or intercept the computers themselves on the way to the delivery point, open them and plant bugs - this process is called "impeding the enemy's actions."

Serious security risk

For the NSA, decryption represents a permanent conflict of interest. The agency and its allies have their own secret encryption methods for internal use. But the NSA is also required to provide the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with “guidelines for selecting reliable technologies” that “can be used economically.” efficient systems to protect sensitive data." In other words, checking the quality of cryptographic systems is part of the NSA's job. One encryption standard recommended by NIST is the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). It is used in a variety of systems, from bank card PIN encryption to encryption hard drive computer.

One of the NSA documents shows that the agency is actively looking for ways to break the standard it itself recommends - this section is marked "Top Secret": "Electronic code books, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard, are both widely used and well protected from cryptoattack The NSA only has a small number of internal hacking techniques. The TUNDRA project is exploring a potential new technique to determine its usefulness in the analysis of electronic codebooks."

The fact that so many of the cryptographic systems that litter the Internet have been deliberately weakened or hacked by the NSA and its allies poses a huge threat to the security of everyone who relies on the Internet—from users who rely on the Internet to be safe, to institutions and companies that work with cloud computing. Many of these holes can be exploited by anyone who finds out about them - and not just the NSA.

The intelligence agency itself is well aware of this: according to a 2011 document, 832 employees of the Government Communications Center themselves became participants in Project BULLRUN, the purpose of which is a large-scale attack on Internet security.

Two of the article's authors, Jacob Appelbaum and Aaron Gibson, work for the Tor Project. Appelbaum also works on the OTR project and is involved in the creation of other data encryption programs.

In our time of free access to a huge amount of information, the struggle for human minds has begun to be waged in this area. Giving to society necessary materials and news, the social sentiments and aspirations of the prevailing population can be controlled.

What is information warfare?

The term "information warfare" was originally used in American military circles. Information warfare is psychological pressure on all or part of society. Skillful presentation of the necessary information helps create certain moods and provoke a reaction. The first information about this type of war dates back to the 50s of the 19th century and concerns the Crimean War.

Information warfare can be waged both within a state and between different countries and is part of a complex process of confrontation. The presence of information pressure on society is an indicator of behind-the-scenes political actions or preparation for any changes. It does not require large financial investments and efforts. The effectiveness of information warfare depends on well-designed propaganda based on the feelings and desires of members of society.

Signs of an information war

The essence of information warfare is to influence society through information. Signs of an information war include:

• restricting access to certain information: closing web resources, television programs, printed publications;
• the emergence of different information sources with the same information;
• creating a negative psychological background on specific issues;
• the emergence of emotional tension in society;
• penetration of implanted information into various spheres of society: politics, culture, business, education.

Information war - myth or reality

Information wars between countries have become commonplace. Although the use of information propaganda in military conflicts has been known since the 19th century, this type of warfare acquired particular power at the end of the 20th century. This is due to an increase in the number information resources: newspapers, magazines, TV shows, web resources. The more information a society has freely available, the easier it is to carry out information propaganda.

To wage an information war, there is no need to convince people or impose your point of view on them. You just need to make sure that the suggested information comes across as often as possible and does not cause rejection. At the same time, a person may not even suspect that he has become a participant in information influence. To conduct an information war, they hire specialists with deep knowledge of marketing, social psychology, politics and history.

Information warfare goals

Conducting an information war is one of the components of the policies of many states. The battle for human minds is not an end in itself, but refers to a set of measures to maintain the security of one’s state or to influence the citizens of another state. Based on this, information warfare has the following goals:

• ensuring the security of your state;
• maintaining patriotic sentiments;
• influence on citizens of another state for the purpose of misinformation and achieving certain goals.

Types of information warfare

Information warfare can be used among the military and among civilians. For this purpose, one of the types of information warfare or a set of measures can be used. Types of information confrontation include:

1. Information warfare on the Internet - different and often contradictory information is offered, used to confuse the enemy.
2. Psychological operations are the selection and presentation of information that sounds like a counter-argument to the mood existing in society.
3. Disinformation – promotion false information in order to direct the enemy side along the wrong trail.
4. Destruction - physical destruction or blocking electronic systems, important for the enemy.
5. Security measures - strengthening the protection of your resources in order to preserve plans and intentions.
6. Direct information attacks are a mixture of false and true information.

Methods of information warfare

Information war is called cold because it achieves the desired results without the use of weapons. There are such methods of information warfare among civilians:

1. Involvement of influencers. The essence of this method is to support necessary actions or slogans by famous authoritative people.
2. Accurate statements. The desired slogans are presented as one hundred percent true and do not require proof.
3. The winning side. Society is asked to choose a solution that is presented as the best and is winning.
4. Compulsion. This method is often used in slogans and sounds like a precise instruction to action.
5. Substitution of information source. When it is not possible to stop the penetration of unwanted information, its author is called a source that does not enjoy public trust.

Information warfare and propaganda

Information warfare is effectively used in the political sphere. With its help, candidates for office fight for votes. Given the fact that most voters do not have access to true information, psychological influence techniques are used to influence them. Information warfare in the media is a popular way of influencing society. In addition, political propaganda can use the method of substituting information, distorting reality, coercion, and the participation of authorities.

How to protect yourself from information warfare?

Information warfare is used in different areas, but its goal always remains constant: to influence public opinion. It can be difficult to counter information warfare, because manipulation and propaganda are being developed experienced specialists. To avoid becoming a victim of information influence, you should consider the opinions of different people on the issue of interest and use diverse sources of information. When understanding a difficult situation, it is worth answering the following questions:

1. What is the other side of this coin?
2. Who can benefit from this information?
3. To what extent is the issue under consideration covered from different angles?
4. Is there a logical chain and evidence on this matter, or is there direct suggestion, coercion and influence on emotions?

Information wars in the modern world

Thanks to modern technologies The information wars of our time can be waged all over the world. At the same time, it became possible to create a reality that does not correspond to reality. Modern world information wars are waged both between states and within states, between politicians, companies, organizations, and religious denominations. The main weapon in the information war is the media. Full control above them allows you to provide society with only the information that will form the necessary view of the problem.

All fighting in modern world are covered in the media in such a way as to show the need to wage war and create negativity among the warring parties. Recent military conflicts in Syria and Ukraine are clear examples of this. Information warfare and terrorism are also directly related. To understand what is really happening between the warring parties, to an ordinary person does not seem possible.

Information wars in politics

Political struggle takes place between political parties, organizations and other political institutions. The information war in this area occurs constantly, but intensifies before government elections. Influencing society with the help of information is carried out in such a way that members of society do not notice it and believe that they are making a choice on their own.

Modern information wars in politics aim to discredit the opponent in the eyes of the public and form the necessary opinion among members of society. To solve these problems, they hire specialists in information sabotage - ivors, who carry out an attack on the opponent using various information sources. The main methods of information attacks are: editing, rumors, myths, threats, bluffs, twisting information.

Information warfare in business

Information warfare in the business system is used to weaken the position of any corporation or enterprise. To conduct a confrontation in this area, the enemy tries to collect as much information as possible on the work of the company with which he competes. Particular attention is paid to the enemy's weaknesses. They are made public in an exaggerated form, showing the failure of the company's work.

Information war - consequences

The consequences of information wars can make themselves felt at the very beginning of the struggle. It is impossible to protect yourself from information influence, since it penetrates into all spheres of human life. The essence of information warfare lies in pressure on society, as a result of which members of society receive a distorted view of reality and are not able to draw the right conclusions and make the right decisions.

Intelligence agencies in the UK and US are taking every possible step to decrypt any kind of Internet messages. There is a feeling that the “cloud” is full of “holes”. Good news: Snowden's new documents confirm that some forms of encryption can't even be cracked by the NSA.

On Christmas Eve [ article published on December 28, 2014 – approx. translation] spies from the Five Eyes alliance [eng. Five Eyes] are waiting for a little respite from their hard work. In addition to their regular duties - deciphering messages around the world - they play a game called Kryptos Kristmas Kwiz, in which participants have to solve complex number and letter puzzles. The winners of the competition become the proud owners of “crypto mugs”.

Encryption - the use of mathematical techniques to protect communications from espionage - is used in electronic transactions of all types and is used by governments, companies and individuals. But according to former NSA agent Edward Snowden, not all encryption technologies actually do their job.

One case in point is encryption in Skype, a program whose 300 million users use its vaunted “secure” Internet video chat service. In fact, we are not talking about information security here. "Regular collection Skype data began in February 2011,” reads the NSA training document released by Snowden. Less than six months later, in the fall, the codebreakers announced that their work was done. From that moment on, Skype data became available to NSA spies. Software giant Microsoft, which bought Skype in 2011, says: "We do not provide direct or indirect government access to user data or encryption keys." The NSA began monitoring Skype even before the company was bought by Microsoft, but in February 2011 the secretive US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court extended an order to the company, according to which it not only had to provide information to the NSA, but also serve as an accessible source of data for the agency.

The "routine collection of Skype data" is the next step the government has taken in an arms race of intelligence agencies looking to penetrate the privacy of users and especially those who thought they were protected from spying. Although encryption, in turn, has also won several victories: there are several systems that have proven their strength and are true quality standards for over 20 years.

To the NSA, encryption of communications—or what everyone else on the Internet calls secure communications—is a “threat.” In one of the NSA training documents obtained by Spiegel, an NSA employee asks: “Did you know that encryption mechanisms ubiquitous on the Internet are the main threat to the NSA's ability to conduct intelligence on digital networks and defeat adversary malware?”

Excerpt from NSA document: Encryption called a "threat"

– Did you know that encryption mechanisms ubiquitous on the Internet are a major threat to the NSA's ability to conduct digital intelligence and defeat adversary malware?

“Twenty years ago, the very fact that communications were encrypted meant that they likely contained foreign intelligence data, since only the government and other important targets had the ability to purchase or develop and implement communications encryption. Today, anyone who uses the Internet can access web pages using the strong encryption mechanisms provided by HTTPS, and companies of all sizes can implement virtual private networks (VPNs) to allow their employees to access sensitive or proprietary corporate information over the Internet. from anywhere in the world. SID refers to such widely used encryption formats that pose greater challenges to SIGINT as “ubiquitous encryption.”

Snowden's documents revealed which NSA encryption mechanisms were decipherable and, more importantly, which they were not. Although the documents released are almost two years old, experts doubt that NSA digital spies have been able to decipher such hack-resistant technology in that time. "At correct use“Strong cryptosystems are one of the few things you can rely on,” Snowden said in June 2013 after flying to Hong Kong.

The “digitalization” of society over the past few decades has been accompanied by the widespread use of cryptography, which has ceased to be the domain of secret agents. Today, almost every Internet connection is encrypted in one way or another - whether you conduct an online banking transaction, buy goods online, or make a phone call. The very essence of cloud computing - which allows you to outsource a number of tasks to remote data centers, sometimes located on another continent - is based on cryptographic security systems. Internet activists hold “crypto meetings” where they explain to those interested in maintaining the security of honest communications how to encrypt their data.

The German government proposes the use of "always-on data encryption"

In Germany, they have already started thinking about the need to use strong encryption mechanisms. high level. Chancellor Angela Merkel and her cabinet now communicate using phones that have strong encryption systems. The government also invited residents of the country to take steps to protect their own communications. Michael Hange, President Federal Agency By Information Security, stated: “We recommend that you use cryptography—that is, permanently encrypting your data.”

This suggestion is unlikely to please some intelligence agencies. After all, the Five Eyes alliance—the secret services of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States—has a clear goal: to stop encrypting Internet information coming from other countries whenever possible. In 2013, the NSA had a budget exceeding $10 billion. According to the US intelligence budget in 2013, funding for the NSA's Cryptanalysis and Exploitation Services (CES) department alone amounted to $34.3 million.