IIRC, the message was sent via courier instead of cable or telephone to prevent interception. Did the military not even trust its own cryptographic methods? Or did they not think withdrawal of the Japanese ambassador was not very critical?
matthew black california state university, long beach From: Donald Eastlake [mailto:d3e...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 8:28 AM To: Matthew Black Cc: William Herrin; nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: [[Infowarrior] - NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug for Years] Matthew, On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Matthew Black <matthew.bl...@csulb.edu<mailto:matthew.bl...@csulb.edu>> wrote: Also on this same idea, in his book "The Puzzle Palace," James Bamford claims that we knew of the pending attack on Pearl Harbor but did nothing, because that would compromise we broke the Japanese Purple Cipher. I assume you refers to pages 36 through 39 of "The Puzzle Palace" which is almost entirely a recounting of bureaucratic fumbling and delay. The sensitivity of a Purple Cipher decode did cause the intercepted information to be sent by a less immediate means to the US Naval authorities in Hawaii. Nevertheless, it was sent with every expectation that those authorities would receive it before the time of the attack. We do not know what those authorities would have done it they had received the intercept information as expected, instead of receiving it about 6 hours after the first bomb struck Pearl Harbor. Your implication that Bamford says "we decided to do nothing" bears no relationship to what Bamford actually wrote. Thanks, Donald ============================= Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1-508-333-2270 (cell) 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA d3e...@gmail.com<mailto:d3e...@gmail.com> matthew black california state university, long beach -----Original Message----- From: William Herrin [mailto:b...@herrin.us<mailto:b...@herrin.us>] Sent: Friday, April 11, 2014 2:06 PM To: nanog@nanog.org<mailto:nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: [[Infowarrior] - NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug for Years] On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Niels Bakker <niels=na...@bakker.net<mailto:na...@bakker.net>> wrote: > Please go read up on some recent and less recent history before making > judgments on what would be unusually gutsy for that group of people. > > I'm not saying this has been happening but you will have to come up > with a better defense than "it seems unlikely to me personally". Let me know when someone finds the second shooter on the grassy knoll. As for me, I do have some first hand knowledge as to exactly how sensitive several portions of the federal government are to the security of the servers which hold their data. They may not hold YOUR data in high regard... but the word "sensitive" does not do justice to the attention lavished on THEIR servers' security. In WW2 we protected the secret of having cracked enigma by deliberately ignoring a lot of the knowledge we gained. So such things have happened. But we didn't use enigma ourselves -- none of our secrets were at risk. And our adversaries today have no secrets more valuable than our own. -Bill
