Allegations of Russian SVR targeting NSA Tor operations and possible insider

The Russians Are Coming | 233 it targets Tor software. It even offered a cash prize to anyone in the hacking community who could break Tor. Prior to 2013, according to cyber-security experts, it spent over a decade building cyber tools aimed at unraveling the Tor networks used by hacktivists, criminal enterprises, political dissidents, and rival intelligence operatives. To this end, it reportedly attempted to map out computers that served as major Tor exit nodes (such as the one Snowden operated in 2012 near an NSA regional base in Hawaii). It also reportedly attached the equivalent of “electronic ink” to messages, which would allow it to trace the path of messages that passed through them. Through this technology, it could tag and follow Tor users as their commu- nications traveled across the Internet. It could even borrow their Internet identities. To be sure, the NSA also had such a capability. The Silk Road founder, Ross Ulbricht, discovered to his distress that his Tor software did not make his computer server in Iceland invis- ible. According to a former top official in the Justice Department, the NSA was able to locate it by cracking the Tor software (Ulbricht is currently serving a life sentence for his activities). Unlike adversary © services, however, the NSA needs a warrant to investigate U.S. citi- ® zens who use Tor. The NSA is hardly immune from an attack on its own computers. As the former CIA deputy director Morell wrote in his 2015 book, The Great War of Our Time, many financial institutions have “better cyber security than the NSA.” The Internet certainly helped make the activities of U.S. intelligence workers visible to the SVR. But to achieve its goals, the SVR still had to find at least one dis- gruntled civilian contractor inside the NSA who had access to the sealed-off computer networks. Did it find its man? If so, was it before or after Snowden arrived in Hong Kong with the Level 3 NSA files? | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 233 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019721