The Empire Strikes Back: Part 1

[Dave Aitel <dave () immunityinc com>]

With the right kind of eyes, there are no shadows. And likewise, with
the right kind of ears, Obama's NSA speech was the beginning of the
second wave. You can view the transcript
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/full-text-of-president-obamas-jan-17-speech-on-nsa-reforms/2014/01/17/fa33590a-7f8c-11e3-9556-4a4bf7bcbd84_story.html>and
the speech itself, and of course there are parts of it that fall
completely flat, such as the continued insistence by the Obama team that
they can convince the American public there is a difference between
Metadata and Data. Likewise, nobody believes Obama would be considering
significant reforms, or even talking about the NSA, if Snowden had not
happened. No amount of "I was going to go there" is going to convince
people of that.

But the majority of the speech was historical precisely because it echos
the unseen successes of today's Intelligence Community (IC). In
particular, nuclear threats from Iran and others have been thwarted.
Cyber threats that attack the very heart of our economy and
infrastructure are held back, and the evolution of fully networked
warfare is what defeated Al Qaeda. His speech also called out our allies
for their weirdly pandering holier than thou drama queen public
reactions to the Snowden documents.

None of the more crazy suggestions of the NSA Task Force
<https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/2013-December/000546.html>
got any time at all - restricting 0days, changing the meaning of need to
know, etc.

And today the second shoe dropped - the French and Americans announced
that "Trust is restored
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-26140744>".

The next step will be commercial - a message from the IC to the US
corporations currently whining the most (Google and Microsoft, in
particular) that if they want to protect themselves from China, they
have one partner, and one partner only. Look for something like the
Mandiant APT1 paper to come out soon, but bigger, and better. :>

-dave

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