Maximator: European signals intelligence cooperation

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02684527.2020.1743538

by tormeh • 6 years ago

345 138 6 years ago

tormeh• 6 years ago

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.

Psyladine• 6 years ago

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.

billfruit• 6 years ago

How is this getting a free pass, while allegations about other countries prompt much consternation.

I think it is ethically problematic to assist/work for any espionage/intelligence related work during peace time.

corrupt_measure• 6 years ago

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.

khuey• 6 years ago

Boosters would argue that espionage/intelligence work helps keep the peace.

1014042• 6 years ago

Not really. Spying among friendly nations is actually desired. Because it creates and improves trust.

Of course, that excludes spying to steal intellectual property.

blaser-waffle3• 6 years ago

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).

zip12342• 6 years ago

Most of intelligence that states sponsor is of the military variety. Things such as:

- Where are all the SAM installations?

- How many aircraft and tanks does such and such country have?

markus_zhang• 6 years ago

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.

dathinab6• 6 years ago

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.

secfirstmd2• 6 years ago

Such as?

nolok• 6 years ago

If you say espionage agency with ocult sources of money for even more ocult projects to finance, CIA is the name on anyone's mind though.

winter_blue• 6 years ago

Hm, it makes one wonder: is ProtonMail (and ProtonVPN, etc) all a similar sort of thing?

jacobush3• 6 years ago

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

sgift• 6 years ago

Source article this is based on: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02684527.2020.1...

(Found it since I cannot read the full economist article)

SiempreViernes4• 6 years ago

This is much better than the very brief economist article, many thanks!

livatlantis2• 6 years ago

Thank you for this complete version.

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...

cmroanirgo• 6 years ago

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.

smcl2• 6 years ago

(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.

[1] https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prim%C3%A1tor

ttul3• 6 years ago

There is a German Wikipedia page on the topic. I created an English one that paraphrases the German one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Maximator_(Spying_Allian...

.. but it's stuck in Wikipedia's review queue, which means it will be weeks before it goes live, if ever.

cabalamat2• 6 years ago

it's stuck in Wikipedia's review queue, which means it will be weeks before it goes live, if ever.

Does that happen for all new articles on Wikipedia now?

If so, I'm glad I no longer edit Wikipedia.

smartbit• 6 years ago

- Hacker News 4 month ago https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Crypto%20AG

- April 8, in Dutch https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/nieuws/2020/Nederland-maakt-d...

BTW https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/ works for circumventing economist paywall.

dang• 6 years ago

Ok, since people seem to be liking this better, we've switched to it from https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/05/26/maximator-a-euro.... Thanks!

l1ghthouse• 6 years ago

http://archive.is/zmTgX

kleiba• 6 years ago

Supposedly, they mean West-Germany when they say Germany?

wyldfire• 6 years ago

Yes. BND originated as West German intelligence agency.

vslira• 6 years ago

"Maxinator", "Five Eyes"

Imagine being in the brainstorming session to come up with name for intelligence agencies alliances.

"It must sound dangerous, yes, but not evil. Like some kind of anti-villain"

abledon• 6 years ago

Maximator sounds pretty good with a french pronunciation

nabla92• 6 years ago

Maxinator was the name of the local beer they were drinking when they came out with the plan.

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/820/2864/

Hokusai2• 6 years ago

They should have drink Corona. The conspiracy level of the ‘Corona pact’ would have been off the charts.

LargoLasskhyfv• 6 years ago

I prefer https://www.paulaner.com/our-products/salvator/

Hicks!

edit: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/124/387/

ttul3• 6 years ago

Being familiar with the security industry, this does not surprise me at all. A lot of good work gets done over a beer.

anonymfus• 6 years ago

Did you read the linked article? It says that the name comes from the beer brand in its non-paywalled part.

lopmotr• 6 years ago

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.

dghughes• 6 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj3• 6 years ago

Here's your new 'eyes only' assignment, cleanup crew. Report for duty on Monday ...

_jal• 6 years ago

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.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

As always, there's a relevant XKCD https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/

influx• 6 years ago

Even the folks who change the soda/snack machines need clearances to go inside certain buildings.

CalChris• 6 years ago

I believe Five Eyes is an agreement rather than an organization. No one works for Five Eyes itself. Consequently, there is no janitor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

lozaning• 6 years ago

Imagine being at the meeting where Peter picked Palantir.

deathgrips6• 6 years ago

He should have picked Fastly or Applifi instead

qubex• 6 years ago

“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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm?wprov=sfti1

snazz• 6 years ago

It's an extremely accurate name (and logo). The product is scary.

aikinai• 6 years ago

It’s also an incredibly good Nintendo game from 1991.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm_(video_game)

SiempreViernes4• 6 years ago

From the source article:

"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;"

SiempreViernes4• 6 years ago

"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."

Nice going GCHQ!

pbhjpbhj3• 6 years ago

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.

dmurray• 6 years ago

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.

[0] I'll just link to skeptics.se here, where the accepted answer is that the evidence does not completely support this, but there are plenty of links for more reading https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/can-exoce...

wrnr• 6 years ago

Hey maybe thats why we have this old joke is Brussels: How do you know someone is working for the Belgium secretive service? ... They tell you.

rurban• 6 years ago

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.

onetimemanytime• 6 years ago

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

koheripbal• 6 years ago

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.

simonh• 6 years ago

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.

dathinab6• 6 years ago

It's still a union of separate and culture/ political diverse countries.

As such it's basically guaranteed to keep country specific intelligence agencies.

A EU based agency would be interesting, but given how problematic it is to oversee it probably a nightmare to.

A stronger cooperation between EU agencies should be possible.

jhelphenstine• 6 years ago

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.

deathgrips6• 6 years ago

Instead it should have one dysfunctional government :)

fulafel• 6 years ago

This is events from 1970-1990.

supernova87a• 6 years ago

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.

koonsolo2• 6 years ago

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.

gipsies• 6 years ago

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.

selimthegrim• 6 years ago

They let the Turkish Army into NATO and hold nukes and it reuses OTPs?

SiempreViernes4• 6 years ago

Don't worry, the US only lets them host Nukes, it won't let them buy secure communications equipment.

nabla92• 6 years ago

They don't let Turkish Army hold nukes.

They are just located in Turkey. Turkish Air force practises the delivery so that they can do it if necessary.

jacobush3• 6 years ago

Yeah, however there was talk that getting the nukes out of Turkey would not be easy, especially if Turkey would not cooperate.

Hokusai2• 6 years ago

to the considerable irritation of those who had kept it under wraps for decades

On one side, so much secrecy worries me. On the other side kudos for keeping the secret pact secret for so long.

Havoc2• 6 years ago

I wonder what is behind the comment that french/german works better than french/UK

frabbit2• 6 years ago

The origins of the EEC were a French(agriculture + coal) and German (manufacturing) alliance. The other countries were just added on as export markets.

DoingIsLearning• 6 years ago

Those were probably powerful lobbies for an enlargement of an economic union.

However, technically the concept of an european economic union originated with the treaty for the Benelux Economic Union (1958)

(Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg)

adaisadais• 6 years ago

Nothing on SPECTRE

prima-facie• 6 years ago

Sans paywall https://outline.com/VKPeR4

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.md/FMsZM

PatrolX• 6 years ago

What's most interesting about this is what Professor Jacobs omitted, and the stuff he omitted happens to be related to his circle of friends.

Set up a Google Alert for appropriate keywords, this could get really interesting in the coming months. That's all I can say, sorry.

secfirstmd2• 6 years ago

Intriguing comment given what he has worked on and with who.

disabled• 6 years ago

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.

microcolonel• 6 years ago

But, you (Americans) should be angry because democracy has been in backslide hardcore in the US. Europe has dealt with populism before...

Populism is a creature of democracy, what you're talking about is a failure of the republic; which itself is debatable.

Harvesterify• 6 years ago

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 ?

Anything new happened ?

Maximator: European signals intelligence cooperation

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