The CIA Secretly Owned The World’s Top Encryption Supplier

Its been revealed that the CIA secretly owned the world’s top encryption supplier, Crypto AG, for a number of decades, selling equipment to governments for their secure use. All the while the CIA a backdoor into all of their communications, monitoring all government and espionage communiques to its wimaintained de variety of clientele around the globe.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

Imagine that. Now ask yourself what other backdoors exist amid the era of smart phones, social media and the PATRIOT Act.

Its for these reasons that in the classes I run we cover the basics of the techniques themselves rather than relying only on third party equipment with potential pitfalls built it. Because even if there’s a backdoor but your tradecraft behind operating the equipment remains sound, you’ll still have an unbreakable level of security.

That’s why I cover the old-hand methods that we’ve gotten away from in the past twenty years of no-peer adversary warfare. In a near-peer war, poor operating techniques are going to lead to a lot of casualties. Not only that, but to the average citizen concerned about privacy, it might be a good idea to get a course on the starting points of your own information security- we’ve got a class for that coming up in March.

Its techniques, not technology, that wins in the end. Know where to start, know how to win.

By NC ScoutPublished On: February 13, 2020Categories: NC Scout, News and Links6 Comments

About the Author: NC Scout

NC Scout is the nom de guerre of a former Infantry Scout and Sergeant in one of the Army’s best Reconnaissance Units. He has combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He teaches a series of courses focusing on small unit skills rarely if ever taught anywhere else in the prepping and survival field, including his RTO Course which focuses on small unit communications. In his free time he is an avid hunter, bushcrafter, writer, long range shooter, prepper, amateur radio operator and Libertarian activist. He can be contacted at [email protected] or via his blog at brushbeater.wordpress.com .

6 Comments

Kilo February 13, 2020 at 08:33

Owning the equipment supplier is one thing…owning the actual algorithm is completely different. The algorithms (the ones we use anyway) are open source and basically just a mathematical formula at the most basic level with the crypto ‘key’ being the ‘missing’ variable to make the equation work. I am grossly over-simplifying it, but that is it in a nutshell.

This is why we promote only using open source code. As long as we have access to the code, we can (and do) examine it for backdoors. AES (symmetric) and RSA (asymmetric) are good to go. Both have been vetted by multiple audits.

Now, if you want to go down a deep conspiracy crypto rabbit hole about who owns/created what…look into the NSA creating Bitcoin. Compare NSA’s encryption algorithms with Bitcoin’s algorithms and you’ll see some striking similarities, both coming to light concurrently when Bitcoin first came of the scene.

Interestingly enough is that they haven’t denied it.

-K
Anonymous February 13, 2020 at 11:37

5
PR February 13, 2020 at 14:43

One more great reason to never trust commercial encryption, be it a discrete device or one time pad generator. The Germans learned that in WWII with the Enigma; now a net generation is learning an old lessin.
PR
Bryce Sharper February 13, 2020 at 23:13

Kilo,

Why would the NSA create bitcoin?

What are your thoughts on sources of entropy for RNG seeds? I’m trying to understand this topic (crypto) since it seems to come up in all computer science courses. The Khan Academy has lectures on it also.
Kilo February 14, 2020 at 08:09

Bryce,

It might be easier to answer the question…”why wouldn’t they create Bitcoin?”

A digital currency which it promoted as being anonymous (it is not) and was the primary currency used on the Dark Web for years prior to other digital currencies evolving and surpassing it is an interesting nut to crack.

While everyone thought they were using it with impunity, the NSA was/is sitting back monitoring all of the transactions.

This takes what is commonly known as ‘counter threat finance’ to a whole new level, both on the terrorism/criminal side as well as on the nation state side.

With that thought process, I can’t think of a good reason why they would not create it or other digital currencies for that matter. There is no down side and they made quite a profit doing it.

There are all kinds of rabbit holes we can go down with finance (and we discuss several in the PSA course), but it is interesting to look at who is not using Bitcoin as well. While China, as a whole, mined it more than any other country through botnets, Russian chose not to use it and developed their own internal digital currency.

As for your other question, that could take several hours/days to discuss in depth and is way too much to type here. If you’d like to have a discussion about it off line, reach out to NCS for a way to contact me securely.

-K
Bryce Sharper February 14, 2020 at 11:18

Kilo,

Thanks. Yeah, the BTC blockchain is not anonymous. I think they used it as evidence against DPR. The whole thing seemed strange to me anyways. Some guy named Satoshi Nakamoto creates a libertarian currency that accomplishes none of its intended goals and isn’t libertarian at all?? Sounds like another psyop.

Now that I think about it, how can any of the other digital currencies have an “anonymous” blockchain that still works? An anonymous ledger is not a ledger, is it? Also, by what process is it made anonymous? To add more weight to your point, they just arrested a guy who tried to anonymize bitcoin, like it was ruining their plans. I’ve heard of other people getting arrested for trying similar things:

In May, the Dutch Financial Criminal Investigative Service seized and shut down the popular mixing service Bestmixer.io but other companies, such as the privacy-centric bitcoin wallet Wasabi, have built-in mixers as the backbone of their business strategy. These bitcoin wallet startups typically offer non-custodial mixers, unlike the custodial mixer Helix. The Canadian venture fund Cypherpunk Holdings is invested in both Wasabi’s parent company and Samourai Wallet, which also offers a mixing service. The public policy group Coin Center argued non-custodial mixers should not be subject to regulation because they offer user-hosted software tools. Only time will tell if the court agrees this reduces the developer’s liability.