Posted on 09/24/2016 9:40:29 AM PDT by Arthur Wildfire! March
Please brace for just one thick sentence:
ICANN's power is mainly legal, and a contract with ICANN could trigger a violent dispute over international law.
~ ~ ~
Bluntly stated: giving away ICANN could ultimately trigger a cyber war or worse.
~ ~ ~
Raw Power and International Law
When you face a super power like the USA it helps to have raw power. China probably assumes it will not come to that, but just like nuclear deterence, they need the war-making capability.
And the Chinese already enjoy raw power. Their encryption is superior, their nuclear capability suffices, and they are now experienced at cyber warfare.
Compare that to the US -- NSA recently got hacked. That was supposed to be the best encrypted, best protected agency in our nation. Imagine if all of our satellites got simultaneously hacked. We would be blind and appear weak in the eyes of the world.
International Law
The reason China is building a compound to welcome ICANN is international legitimacy. Other tyrants seeking to censor online speech can seek a shiny new contract with Obama's Free Range ICANN.
Bluntly stated: ICANN helps China build a large alliance to alienate the USA if it comes to a full-scale 'cyber-war'.
~~~
China's Cyber-Skirmishes, Probing with Bayonets
It's been widely reported that China is already waging a cyber-war. But in my opinion those are just skirmishes, raids to test their capability and possibly pick up more tech, intel to blackmail, etc.
~~~
Superior Chinese Encryption
China developed something revolutionary.
Back in 2014, the UK Telegraph reported that China developed 'quantum encryption'. It's a pioneering concept said to be impenetrable to hackers.
Here's a more recent headline:
Aug 20, 2016:
China's Latest Leap Forward Isn't Just Great—It's Quantum - WSJ
by The Verge:
China’s quantum network could soon span two continents, thanks to a satellite launched earlier today ... the Quantum Science Satellite is designed to distribute quantum-encrypted keys between relay stations in China and Europe. When working as planned, the result could enable unprecedented levels of security between parties on different continents. [snip]
That was written in August 15 -- mid-August of this year, the same time that Strickling boasted of his criminal transition plan of ICANN.
But actually, here's a March 2016 report ...
[Be advised -- the article is difficult to wrap your brain around.]
China's Quantum Satellite Could Change Cryptography Forever
-- by Jeffrey Lin, P.W. Singer, and John Costello [at popsci.com]
[snippets]
... China is poised to launch a project that may provide the path to an uncrackable communications system, by turning messages quantum and taking them into space. The new Quantum Space Satellite (QUESS) program is no mere science experiment. China is already becoming a world leader in quantum communications technology ... a strategic asset for Chinese power worldwide.
[snip]
Quantum entanglement is the act of fusing two or more particles into complementary “quantum states.” In such states, no particle can be independently described, instead the particles exist in a hazy shared quantum state that “collapses” when observed. Quantum encryption thus takes advantage of this feature, using it to detect would-be eavesdroppers, whose presence causes quantum states to collapse and reveal their spying to legitimate parties. Additionally, the complexity of quantum mechanics makes it virtually impossible to reverse engineer the quantum key generated through quantum entanglement.
[snip]
[link to be provided in followup post]
...
I am left to believe that it's unlikely that the USA currently stands a chance against China in a cyber-war until we work out better encryption ourselves, and we would have to develop it WHILE sustaining cyber-bombardment. We would need our developers to get off the internet completely, and that would slow down their progress.
The only reason why China doesn't dominate the internet yet is probably because they want us to keep importing their goods.
But it runs deeper than that. What about satellites?
Satellites are critical to dominance of today's internet.
Back in March 16 Bill Gertz wrote:
~
China, Russia Planning Space Attacks on U.S. Satellites
China and Russia are preparing to attack and disrupt critical U.S. military and intelligence satellites in a future conflict with crippling space missile, maneuvering satellite, and laser attacks, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials told Congress on Tuesday. [snip]
[The the primary concern in the article was a direct military threat ...]
U.S. Global Positioning System satellites remain vulnerable to attack or jamming.
[snip]
~
So yes, our targeting systems would be blinded. That in itself would would be decisive in cyber-warfare.
But destruction of GPS satellites is also a 'raw force' threat to our communications satellites as well. While our GPS is blinded, they can pick off our com-sats one-by-one. No more cell phones, no more wireless internet -- just landlines. We would be back in the '70s while China becomes the world's hub of online communications.
I doubt that China wants to destroy our economy let alone 'nuke' our cities. However, they would love to prove their super power status and be viewed as the world's new technological leader. And if they can't beat us via encryption, they can wipe out our communications satellites directly, one at a time, until we kowtow to their 'reasonable' demands.
In fact, it might be prudent to ask President Obama if it is already too late to oppose China's dominance. Behind closed doors he might be feeling 'blackmail pressure' to hand over ICANN to them as a gesture of surrender.
~~~
Brain Drain to China Quite Possible
If the US loses prestige regarding ICANN, it is possible that talent will 'drain' into China rather than the US. We currently draw in so much talent from the world that some of us feel contempt toward 'foreign geeks', but mark my words -- we benefited greatly from the 'foreign geeks' who fled from Nazi Germany into the US. And our weakness [loss of prestige] could cause us to lose that edge.
Even US college grads could feel enticed by job offers in China.
In such a climate, how could we ever hope to improve our encryption and win a prolonged cyber-war?
~~~
We should Not Trust Obama -- specifically why
The most glaring reason to not trust Obama is that his administration refuses to even contemplate the dangers in public.
Instead, they attempted two brazen stabs at spin:
1. Deregulation
The Obama administration claims that he is 'deregulating' the internet with a 'Free Range ICANN'.
First off, ICANN is assisting China in suppression of free speech. That's a good indicator of what a 'Free Range ICANN' looks like.
Secondly, the internet is the USA's most deregulated industry, and that all foreign governments want to do is increase its regulation.
A man who ought to know something about how foreign governments tick is John Bolton: “But the fact is, under American control, it’s had remarkable growth. It’s been kept free. It’s been able to withstand a lot of pressure to try and set rules that favor one side or another. And in an international environment, I can tell you from my own experience, when you get all kinds of governments from all over the world setting standards and making decisions, it will be far less free than it is now ... "
Bolton called the Internet handover “a mistake of such colossal proportions that you would have thought we’d have a huge debate about it in this country.”
2. A 'Gift to Russia'
The Obama administration also claims that renewing the contract would be a 'gift to Russia'.
First off, I'm not yet aware of Russia building any facilities for ICANN's relocation. China is.
Secondly, many in Obama's adminstration are or were close to the Clinton family. And it is well-documented that the Clinton administration sold US technology to China in exchange for illegal campaign funding. That includes satellite technology and encryption technology as well -- a corrupt gift from the Clintons.
[More on how Bill Clinton paved the way for this coming up in a followup post.]
Thirdly, Obama and Hillary Clinton dropped the ball on encryption. Why?
Fourthly, Obama has been begging China to buy bonds throughout his administration. He is beholden to them and thus this administration should recuse itself from this debate for that reason alone.
~~~
Conclusion:
Military intel is nothing like modern media. Your enemy doesn't 'spell out' his plans -- he simply attacks. And surprise preemption has been the trend in the history of modern warfare. So you don't have the luxury of being certain about 'friend or foe' until it is too late.
Renewing ICANN's IANA functions contract may help unravel China's apparent designs. While that could make us appear to be 'control freaks' in the world's eyes, we need a competent Executive Branch to navigate this clear and present danger.
More importantly, trusting the Clintons with our military and communications technology another time around would only make the problem worse. They gave massive amounts of it away before and would most likely do it again.
I'm putting libertarians on notice -- if you have any love for internet freedom of speech and online intellectual property rights, your choice is clear: Hillary Clinton must lose this election unless you think that high-tech drone development will fail to suppress China's people even more than they already are. The helplessness of China's people is getting worse every year. The government's technology outstrips human iniative.
It's true that ICANN could fracture. It's true that China's cyber-war might escalate regardless. But we are talking about the USA's Number 1 exporter. China might prefer a seamless transition -- a clean contract with the official ICANN organization.
We might owe China a lot of bond debt, but we do not owe them our nation's soul.
Another post you made is relavent here too:
“China has a couple goals: domination of their parts of the world. Control of natural resources wherever they can control. Controlling the internet for their population. Profit (as it supports the other goals). If they can gain financially from controlling the internet they will, maybe by charging those dictators for disabling parts of the internet they don’t like. They also have to allow access to the internet or lose out on physical product sales, but more importantly lose on encryption and every other software endeavor.”
And I learned of a new place China is adding to its umbrella: Europe.
[In article ...]
“China’s quantum network could soon span two continents, thanks to a satellite launched earlier today ... the Quantum Science Satellite is designed to distribute quantum-encrypted keys between relay stations in China and Europe. When working as planned, the result could enable unprecedented levels of security between parties on different continents. [snip]
“That was written in August 15 — mid-August of this year, the same time that Strickling boasted of his criminal transition plan of ICANN.”
What about the dark web or deep web? Isn’t there talk of an alternate web opening up just because of the ICANN debate?
That’s one thing I’m hoping for — this could be a powerful issue to spring on Hillary. Trump would most likely blindside her.
That might be something I posted. I speculated that China could start up ‘shadow TLDs’.
But it would probably be easier to simply hack into a TLD’s system and mix it up however they like. They could also take out the communication satellites and simply erase our wireless communications.
This is the role ICANN plays — it’s easier to build an alliance against the US if they sign a contract with ICANN. It adds a sense of legitimacy.
“Everybody has access to the same encryption algorithms. If we did not, then we would have security by obscurity which always fails eventually.”
Nope. Not even close. The entire purpose of the NSA was to secure our cryptography systems. We all do NOT use the same algorithms.
The phrase “security by obscurity” isn’t what you stated. It means to secure something by keeping it a secret. Our algorithms are not secure because no one knows them. Heck, we could publish them and they would still be secure. We don’t publish them because we don’t want our enemies to use such good stuff. That would make breaking their messages that much harder.
I think asking Hillary about cyber security would be a great line of questions. Trump knows the answers. Hillary violates every rule in the book.
I am (obviously) going to have to read up on this. I read something about the alternate web. Not necessarily the dark or deep web. Sure it has to rely on the same satellites but someone else controlling our satellites surely is a doubled-edged sword. You know China recently unveiled the biggest supercomputer yet. So even without the quantum aspect they can do some serious crunching.
Thank You !
It's also virtually impossible to reverse engineer an ordinary AES256 key. When I talked about public algorithms on the other thread, that's what I meant. AES was selected through an open and public process of selecting an encryption algorithm. Every cryptographer on the planet had their chance to find weaknesses. Of course there could be Chinese cryptographers who know some weaknesses. Or NSA might know about a weaknesses. But that is unlikely because many top ranked cryptographers looked at it.
The sole strength of the public algorithm, by design, is the secret key. If the algorithm is used properly there is virtually no realistic computing power that could reverse engineer the key given any amount of captured ciphertext (encrypted material). We expect that our adversaries are always snooping and eavesdropping but no matter how much ciphertext they gather they cannot figure out the key and decrypt the ciphertext.
That is quite different from quantum entanglement for a comms channel where my understanding matches what you quoted, namely that the channel cannot be eavesdropped, it is physically impossible to observe without altering it.
I think the advantage of quantum computing will eventually be very rapid parallel testing of keys so that algorithms like AES that are now quite safe may not be so safe (from reverse engineering the key). That quantum computing is different from the quantum entanglement although it uses the same underlying principles.
Yes, and there a ton of Chinese in the US and other countries that could go back to China. Right now most of them see much better opportunities here and Europe, but that could change.
Dark web is the primary means by which dissident Chinese get around internet blockages and censorship by their government. Specifically they use TOR. Using DNS is considered a type of vulnerability for TOR because it tips off the authorities. But the TOR network obfuscates the users' DNS lookups. I think that's because the actual lookup is done somewhere way off in the TOR network far away from your computer. So the authorities cannot trace that lookup to you. But the other advantage is that if they have broken the DNS server you use, that won't matter much. Might mean you have to connect to TOR with an IP address instead of a name, but I'm not sure
Deep web could be easily made immune to DNS problems simply by using IP addresses for all the deep web access points. Those aren't linked from anywhere to keep them invisible. Instead someone could hand them to you on a sheet of paper. Instead of domain names on the paper, there would be IP addresses. Your browser certainly won't care and it will save a step not having to look up an IP from a domain name.
In your opinion, is the NSA doing what it's supposed to? Didn't Wikileaks hack their emails? I'm not even sure what I'm asking because I don't know much about codes and things. Better question, can Trump, with his understanding and know how, improve the security of our security agencies?
“Everybody has access to the same encryption algorithms. If we did not, then we would have security by obscurity which always fails eventually.”
We all do NOT use the same algorithms.
Most of the world does. I think the Chinese have some of their own but that was 10 years ago, I don't know the current status.
The phrase “security by obscurity” isn’t what you stated. It means to secure something by keeping it a secret. Our algorithms are not secure because no one knows them. Heck, we could publish them and they would still be secure. We don’t publish them because we don’t want our enemies to use such good stuff.
That is completely incorrect. Here is AES, made 100% public so it could be vetted by the best cryptographers on the planet: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips197/fips-197.pdf
US export regulations require that any exported software package that encrypts data other than passwords (e.g., SSH, VPN, TLS) and uses nonstandard encryption algorithms to do so must disclose the algorithms to the federal govt. The penalties are pretty severe if you don’t.
‘Export’ includes simply putting your app on the Internet for free download.
“I am (obviously) going to have to read up on this.”
Good. People get tired of one viewpoint, and ‘fresh eyes’ would be helpful. I’m running out of curiosity on this.
“I read something about the alternate web.”
One thing I still keep wondering about is a kind of ‘Doppleganger’ TLD.
.com is a TLD as is .mil and .gov.
Each TLD has its own database.
If China were to create a doppleganger, it could prepare a massive amount of code to ‘take over’ key websites.
Of course, all of that is assuming that the official TLD is either hacked or disabled or cut off from its satellite feed.
“You know China recently unveiled the biggest supercomputer yet.”
Just the fuzziest of memories about that. I hardly paid attention at the time.
Please keep thinking and posting.
— FRegards ....
Thank you for your input.
If you notice an inconsistancy in my writing, I readily admit that I am bran new to this kind of information.
One thing I’ve always assumed about encryption and codes is that it takes many more man hours to crack a code than to make one.
Is that true? Reason to hope?
So far Trump’s never been hacked. I wonder if China could hack him, or if they simply don’t want to alarm us during the election?
So we could essentially ‘match’ China as being immune to hacking, although with us it would be 99% secure while China is 100%. Close enough to be ‘in the fight’, especially if each satellite and TLD had unique safeguards.
So — China’s dissidents use the ‘dark web’.
And ‘deep web’ could be secret IP addresses like you talked about.
Let me see if I have it right: currently any domain name owner can go to his TLD and get numerous IP addresses, a number sequence that works the same as his domain name.
So we punch in ‘39643’ [in the web address box] and go to china_dissident.com for example.
[No idea where that would take you BTW.]
I am AMAZED that China, being as advanced as it is with encyrption/decryption, still has that kind of thing going on.
But of course, the TLD could be based in Australia or Japan or the US and thus China has not been able to shut them out yet.
However, if ICANN subjects a TLD to a new “Registry Operator Code of Conduct” [due to a new globalist contract that favors China of course], that backdoor could be slammed shut.
Otherwise, China has a cassis belli to escalate cyber-attacks.
So when NSA got hacked, all legal US algorithms [required to register them] might have been copied by the hackers then.
One thing, if we are ever reduced to going ‘old school’, here is a ‘poor man’s encryption’:
In the old fashioned text document [the very most basic one], I sometimes ‘auto-replace’ several misspelled words at once.
You can use that for the opposite purpose — to encrypt.
You could replace ‘a’ with xyz
You could replace ‘e’ with zzz
Every vowel with constanants and every constenant with vowels. And that’s just the simplist way of doing it.
You could have multiple translations for each ‘a’, such as either xyz or yyy.
Or you could replace one letter with another single letter, but that takes more work.
Then reverse the process with auto-correct.
A lot of work unfortunately.
YAHOO sued for gross negligence over huge hacking...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-sued-gross-negligence-over-huge-data-breach-213708408—finance.html
[Even though NSA had their algorithm filed away. Might be NSA’s fault when NSA got hacked.]
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