{"id":2792,"date":"2013-06-12T11:08:40","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T17:08:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/?p=2792"},"modified":"2013-06-12T11:08:40","modified_gmt":"2013-06-12T17:08:40","slug":"how-the-u-s-is-infiltrating-servers-world-wide-stay-tuned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/?p=2792","title":{"rendered":"How the U.S. is infiltrating servers world wide, stay tuned"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tailored Access Operations<\/strong> (TAO<\/strong>) is a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency<\/a> (NSA). TAO identifies, monitors, infiltrates, and gathers intelligence on computer systems being used by entities hostile to the United States.[1]<\/a><\/sup>[2]<\/a><\/sup>[3]<\/a><\/sup>[4]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In an anonymous interview with Bloomberg Businessweek<\/a><\/em>, former US officials stated the unit uses automated hacking software to harvest approximately 2 petabytes<\/a> of data per hour which is largely processed automatically.[3]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\n

Obscured by trees and grassy berms, the campus of the National Security Agency sits 15 miles north of Washington\u2019s traffic-clogged Beltway, its 6\u00a0million square feet of blast-resistant buildings punctuated by clusters of satellite dishes. Created in 1952 to intercept radio and other electronic transmissions\u2014known as signals intelligence\u2014the NSA now focuses much of its espionage resources on stealing what spies euphemistically call \u201celectronic data at rest.\u201d These are the secrets that lay inside the computer networks and hard drives of terrorists, rogue nations, and even nominally friendly governments. When President Obama receives his daily intelligence briefing, most of the information comes from government cyberspies, says Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush. \u201cIt\u2019s at least 75\u00a0percent, and going up,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The key role NSA hackers play in intelligence gathering makes it difficult for Washington to pressure other nations\u2014China in particular\u2014to stop hacking U.S. companies to mine their databanks for product details and trade secrets. In recent months the Obama administration has tried to shame China by publicly calling attention to its cyber-espionage program, which has targeted numerous companies, including Google (GOOG<\/a>), Yahoo! (YHOO<\/a>), and Intel (INTC<\/a>), to steal source code and other secrets. This spring, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Beijing to press Chinese officials about the hacking. National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon is scheduled to visit China on May\u00a026.<\/p>\n

\"\"Illustration by James Dawe; Getty Images (18)<\/p>\n

The Chinese response, essentially: Look who\u2019s talking. \u201cYou go in there, you sit across from your counterpart and say, \u2018You spy, we spy, but you just steal the wrong stuff.\u2019 That\u2019s a hard conversation,\u201d says Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA, and later the CIA, under Bush. \u201cStates spying on states, I got that,\u201d says Hayden, now a principal at the Chertoff Group, a Washington security consulting firm. \u201cBut this isn\u2019t that competition. This is a nation-state attempting espionage on private corporations. That is not an even playing field.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tension between the two nations escalated in May, when a Pentagon report to Congress for the first time officially linked China\u2019s government directly to the hacking of U.S. defense contractors. It revealed that U.S. intelligence had been tracking a vast hacking bureaucracy adept at stealing technology from American companies. China\u2019s leaders have long denied being behind the hacks. An article about the Pentagon report in the official People\u2019s Daily newspaper called the U.S. the \u201creal hacking empire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. government doesn\u2019t deny that it engages in cyber espionage. \u201cYou\u2019re not waiting for someone to decide to turn information into electrons and photons and send it,\u201d says Hayden. \u201cYou\u2019re commuting to where the information is stored and extracting the information from the adversaries\u2019 network. We are the best at doing it. Period.\u201d The U.S. position is that some kinds of hacking are more acceptable than others\u2014and the kind the NSA does is in keeping with unofficial, unspoken rules going back to the Cold War about what secrets are OK for one country to steal from another. \u201cChina is doing stuff you\u2019re not supposed to do,\u201d says Jacob Olcott, a principal at Good Harbor Security Risk Management, a Washington firm that advises hacked companies.<\/p>\n

The men and women who hack for the NSA belong to a secretive unit known as Tailored Access Operations. It gathers vast amounts of intelligence on terrorist financial networks, international money-laundering and drug operations, the readiness of foreign militaries, even the internal political squabbles of potential adversaries, according to two former U.S. government security officials, who asked not to be named when discussing foreign intelligence gathering. For years, the NSA wouldn\u2019t acknowledge TAO\u2019s existence. A Pentagon official who also asked not to be named confirmed that TAO conducts cyber espionage, or what the Department of Defense calls \u201ccomputer network exploitation,\u201d but emphasized that it doesn\u2019t target technology, trade, or financial secrets. The official says the number of people who work for TAO is classified. NSA spokeswoman Vane\u00e9 Vines would not answer questions about the unit.<\/p>\n

The two former security officials agreed to describe the operation and its activities without divulging which governments or entities it targets. According to the former officials, U.S. cyberspies, most from military units who\u2019ve received specialized training, sit at consoles running sophisticated hacking software, which funnels information stolen from computers around the world into a \u201cfusion center,\u201d where intelligence analysts try to make sense of it all. The NSA is prohibited by law from spying on people or entities within the U.S., including noncitizens, or on U.S. citizens abroad. According to one of the former officials, the amount of data the unit harvests from overseas computer networks, or as it travels across the Internet, has grown to an astonishing 2\u00a0petabytes an hour\u2014that\u2019s nearly 2.1\u00a0million gigabytes, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pages of text.<\/p>\n

Business week<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tailored Access Operations (TAO) is a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency (NSA). TAO identifies, monitors, infiltrates, and gathers intelligence on computer systems being used by entities hostile to the United States.[1][2][3][4] In an anonymous interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, former US officials stated the unit uses automated hacking software to harvest approximately 2 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[104,114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-world-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/nsa.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2SfUR-J2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2794,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792\/revisions\/2794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}