Inside “Eligible Receiver”

The NSA’s disturbingly successful hack of the American military

 

Excerpted from Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan. Out now from Simon & Schuster. On Wednesday, March 9, Kaplan will discuss his book in New York; for more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.

On June 9, 1997, 25 officials of the National Security Agency—members of a security squad known as the “Red Team”—hacked into the computer networks of the Department of Defense, using only commercially available equipment and soft­ware. It was the first high-level exercise testing whether the U.S. military’s leaders, facilities, and global combatant commands were prepared for a cyber attack. And the outcome was alarming.

The simulated hack was the brainchild of the NSA director, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan, who, before coming to the agency, had been commander of the Air Force Information Warfare Center in San Antonio, Texas. The center’s tech crews had been detecting frequent hackings of U.S. military computer networks, and had come up with ways to counter them—but few senior officers took notice or cared.

Each year, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff held an exercise called Eligi­ble Receiver—a simulation or war game designed to highlight some threat or opportunity on the horizon. Minihan wanted the next exercise to test the vulnerability of the U.S. military’s networks to a cyber attack. The most dramatic way to do this, he proposed, was to launch a realattack on those networks. He’d heard about small-scale exercises of this sort, against battalions or air wings of the Army or Air Force. In these war games, he’d been told, the hackers always succeeded. The NSA Red Team was part of the Information Assurance Directorate, the defensive side of the agency, stationed in FANEX, a drab brick building out near Friendship Airport, a 20-minute drive from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. During its most sensitive drills, the Red Team worked out of a chamber called the Pit, which was so secret that few people at NSA knew it ex­isted, and even they couldn’t enter without first passing through two combination-locked doors. In its workaday duties, the Red Team probed for vulnerabilities in new hardware or software that had been designed for the Defense Department, sometimes for the NSA itself. These systems had to clear a high bar to be deemed secure enough for government purchase and installation. The Red Team’s job was to test that bar.

Read the Remainder at Slate

Why the “Dumbing Down” of the NRA could be it’s Downfall

Consider the latest recruiting campaign by the NRA to try and increase their membership numbers with the “35 and under” demographic:

Now I don’t know about you, but after I watched this sixteen minutes of rambling non-sense, I had the overwhelming feeling I had been robbed, quite subliminally I might add, of both my time and brain cells at the same time. What is the NRA thinking? or to put it another way, Why are they NOT THINKING? Obviously, in their vain attempt to pad their membership numbers with the “hip” and “cool” demographic of what I am guessing from this clip, involves mostly “urban gun enthusiast” (Don’t even get me started on what that really means!) They have forgotten the cardinal rule of recruitment: NEVER DUMB DOWN YOUR MESSAGE TO GAIN MEMBERS. GIVE THEM THE FACTS AND THE ONES WORTH KEEPING WILL COME TO YOU. If you want to qualify that with a relevant historical example, look at what happened to the US Army during the recent Iraq War. Recruiters across the Nation admitted to lowering testing levels (through the “Waiver” program) to gain recruitment numbers. Military Strategist Author Fred Kaplan examines the negative repercussions HERE.

I look at it like this: When I was introduced to firearms at a young age, I new from the start that being a “gun enthusiast” was about more than owning a gun. It was about becoming a responsible citizen. It was about a lifestyle that promoted respect for firearms and the understanding that the right to own one had to be defended at all cost. To me, this is what the NRA has always represented..why change now? Popular Culture and Guns have a very dysfunctional relationship due to Hollywood and Video Games. The NRA cannot rectify that by trying to “blend in” with the younger generation. The NRA has to have the mentality of “You have to come UP to our level”, not, “We will come DOWN to yours” if they are to survive the 21st Century.

My .02 cents.

Stay Responsible, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!