Herald: Good morning to this last minute edition to our “Fahrplan” today.
There will probably be time for a few minutes of Q&A in the end, so you can
ask questions here or on IRC and Twitter via our Signal Angels.
Please welcome Jake Appelbaum, independent journalist,
for his talk “To Protect And Infect Part 2”.
*applause*
Jacob: Okay. Alright. Thanks so much for coming so early in the morning.
Or maybe not so early in the morning for most of you apparently since
you’ve all been up for more than an hour. But I’m gonna talk today a little bit
about some things that we’ve heard about at the conference and I’m gonna talk a bit
about some things that you have not probably ever heard about in your life and
are even worse than your worst nightmares.
So recently we heard a little bit about some of the low-end corporate spying
that’s often billed as being sort of like the hottest, most important stuff, so the
FinFisher, the HackingTeam, the VUPEN. And sort of in that order it becomes
more sophisticated and more and more tied in with the National Security Agency.
There are some Freedom of Information Act requests that have gone out that actually
show VUPEN being an NSA contractor writing exploits, that there are some ties there.
This sort of covers the… sort of… the whole gamut, I believe,
which is that, you know you can buy these like little pieces of forensics hardware.
And just as a sort of fun thing I bought some of those and then I looked at
how they worked and I noticed that this ‘Mouse Jiggler’, you plug it in and
the idea is that it like keeps your screen awake. So have any of you seen that
at all? It’s a piece of forensics hardware so your screensaver doesn’t activate.
So I showed it to one of the systemd developers, and now when you plug those
into a Linux box that runs systemd, they automatically lock the screen
when it sees the USB ID. *applause*
So when people talk about Free Software, ‘free as in freedom’, that’s part of
what they’re talking about. So there are some other things which I’m not going
to really talk a lot about it because basically this is all bullshit that
doesn’t really matter and we can defeat all of that. This is individualized things
we can defend against. But I want to talk a little bit about how it’s
not necessarily the case that because they’re not the most fantastic, they’re
not the most sophisticated, that therefore we shouldn’t worry about it.
This is Rafael. I met him when I was in Oslo in Norway
for the Oslo Freedom Forum, and basically he asked me to look at his computer
because he said, “You know, something seems to be wrong with it. I think that
there’s something, you know, slowing it down.” And I said:
“Well, I’m not going to find anything. I don’t have any tools. We are just
going to like sit at the computer…” And I looked at it, and it has to be
the lamest back door I’ve ever found. It was basically a very small program that
would just run in a loop and take screenshots. And it failed to upload
some of the screenshots, and so there were 8 GB of screenshots in his home directory.
*laughter and applause* And I said, “I’m sorry to break it to you
but I think that you’ve been owned. And… by a complete idiot.”
*laughter* And he, he, yeah, he was,
he was really… actually, he felt really violated and then he told me what he does,
which is he’s an investigative journalist who works with top secret documents
all the time, with extreme, extreme operational security to protect
his sources. But when it came to computing J[ournalism] school failed him.
And as a result, he was compromised pretty badly. He was not using
a specialized operating system like Tails, which if you’re a journalist
and you’re not using Tails you should probably be using Tails unless
you really know what you’re doing. Apple did a pretty good job at
revoking this application, and it was, you know, in theory it stopped, but there are
lots of samples from the same group and this group that did this is tied to
a whole bunch of other attacks across the world, actually, which is why
it’s connected up there with Operation Hangover. The scary thing, though, is that
this summer, after we’d met, he was actually arrested relating to some
of these things. And now, as I understand it, he’s out, but,
you know, when you mess with a military dictatorship it messes with you back.
So even though that’s one of the lamest backdoors, his life is under threat.
So just simple things can cause serious, serious harm to regular people that are
working for some kind of truth telling. And that to me is really a big part
of my motivation for coming here to talk about what I’m going to talk about next,
which is that for every person that we learn about like Rafael, I think there are
lots of people we will never learn about, and that’s, to me that’s very scary,
and I think we need to bring some transparency, and that’s what we’re
going to talk about now. And I really want to emphasize this point. Even though
they’re not technically impressive, they are actually still harmful, and that,
that is really a key point to drive home. I mean, some of the back doors that
I’ve seen are really not sophisticated, they’re not really that interesting, and
in some cases they’re common off-the-shelf purchases between businesses,
so it’s like business-to-business exploitation software development.
I feel like that’s really kind of sad, and I also think we can change this.
We can turn this around by exposing it. So, what’s it all about, though?
Fundamentally it’s about control, baby, and that is what we’re going to get into.
It’s not just about control of machines. What happened with Rafael is about
control of people. And fundamentally when we talk about things like internet
freedom and we talk about tactical surveillance and strategic surveillance,
we’re talking about control of people through the machinery that they use.
And this is a really, I think a really kind of – you know I’m trying
to make you laugh a little bit because what I’m going to show you today
is wrist-slitting depressing. So. Part 2, or Act 2 of Part 2.
Basically the NSA, they want to be able to spy on you, and
if they have 10 different options for spying on you that you know about,
they have 13 ways of doing it and they do all 13. So that’s a pretty scary thing,
and basically their goal is to have total surveillance of everything that
they’re interested in. So there really is no boundary to what they want to do.
There is only sometimes a boundary of what they are funded to be able to do and
the amount of things they’re able to do at scale. They seem to just do those things
without thinking too much about it. And there are specific tactical things
where they have to target a group or an individual, and those things seem limited
either by budgets or simply by their time. And as we have released today
on Der Spiegel’s website, which it should be live – I just checked, it should be live
for everyone here – we actually show a whole bunch of details
about their budgets as well as the individuals involved with the NSA
and the Tailored Access Operations group in terms of numbers. So it should give you
a rough idea showing that there was a small period of time in which the internet
was really free and we did not have people from the U.S. military that were watching
over it and exploiting everyone on it, and now we see every year
that the number of people who are hired to break into people’s computers as part of
grand operations, those people are growing day by day, actually. In every year
there are more and more people that are allocated, and we see this growth. So
that’s the goal: non-attribution, and total surveillance, and they want to do it
completely in the dark. The good news is that they can’t. So,
now I’m going to show you a bit about it. But first, before I show you any pictures,
I want to sort of give you the big picture from the top down. So there is
a planetary strategic surveillance system, and there – well, there are many of them
actually. Everything from I think off-planetary surveillance gear, which is
probably the National Reconnaissance Office and their satellite systems
for surveillance like the Keyhole satellites – these are all things most,
for the most part we actually know about these things. They’re on Wikipedia.
But I want to talk a little bit more about the internet side of things because
I think that’s really fascinating. So part of what we are releasing today
with ‘Der Spiegel’, or what has actually been released – just to be clear
on the timeline, I’m not disclosing it first, I’m working as an independent
journalist summarizing the work that we have already released onto the internet
as part of a publication house that went through a very large editorial process
in which we redacted all the names of agents and information about those names,
including their phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
*applause*
And I should say that I actually think that the laws here are wrong,
because they are in favor of an oppressor who is criminal.
So when we redact the names of people who are engaged in criminal activity including
drone murder, we are actually not doing the right thing, but I believe that
we should comply with the law in order to continue to publish, and I think
that’s very important. *applause*
We also redacted the names of victims of NSA surveillance,
because we think that there’s a balance. Unfortunately there is a serious problem
which is that the U.S. government asserts that you don’t have standing to prove
that you’ve been surveilled unless we release that kind of information,
but we don’t want to release that kind of information in case it could be
a legitimate target, and we – I’m really uncomfortable with that term, but let’s
say that there is a legitimate target, the most legitimate target, and we didn’t want
to make that decision. But we did also want to make sure
that we didn’t harm someone, but we also wanted to show concrete examples.
So if you look at the ‘Spiegel’ stuff online, we redacted the names even of those
who were victimized by the NSA’s oppressive tactics, which I think
actually goes further than is necessary, but I believe that it strikes
the right balance to ensure continued publication and also to make sure
that people are not harmed and that legitimate good things, however rare
they may be, they are also not harmed. So if you’ve been targeted by the NSA
and you would have found out today if we had taken a different decision,
I’m really sorry, but this is the thing I think that keeps us alive,
so this is the choice that I think is the right choice, and I think it’s also
the safest choice for everyone. So that said, basically the NSA has
a giant dragnet surveillance system that they call TURMOIL. TURMOIL is a passive
interception system. That passive interception system essentially spans
the whole planet. Who here has heard about the Merkel phone incident?
Some of you heard about Chancellor Merkel? So we revealed that in ‘Der Spiegel’, and
what we found was that they tasked her for surveillance. And I’ll talk a little bit
about that later. But basically the way that this works is that they have this
huge passive set of sensors; and any data that flows past it, they actually look at it.
So there was a time in the past where surveillance meant looking at anything
at all. And now the NSA tries to basically twist the words
of every person who speaks whatever language they’re speaking in, and they
try to say that it’s only surveillance if after they collect it and record it
to a database, and analyze it with machines, only if – I think – an NSA agent
basically looks at it personally and then clicks
“I have looked at this” do they call it surveillance.
Fundamentally I really object to that because if I ran a TURMOIL collection
system – that is passive signals intelligence systems collecting data
from the whole planet, everywhere they possibly can – I would go to prison
for the rest of my life. That’s the balance, right?
Jefferson talks about this. He says, you know, “That which the government
is allowed to do but you are not, this is a tyranny.” There are some exceptions
to that, but the CFAA in the United States, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,
you know, it’s so draconian for regular people,
and the NSA gets to do something like intercepting 7 billion people all day long
with no problems, and the rest of us are not even allowed to experiment
for improving the security of our own lives without being put in prison
or under threat of serious indictment, and that I think is a really important point.
So the TURMOIL system is a surveillance system, and it is a dragnet surveillance
system that is a general warrant dragnet surveillance if there ever was one.
And now we shot the British over this when we started our revolution. We called them
“general writs of assistance.” These were generalized warrants which
we considered to be a tyranny. And TURMOIL is the digital version of a
general writ of assistance system. And the general writ of assistance itself,
it’s not clear if it even exists, because it’s not clear to me that a judge
would understand anything that I just said.
*applause*
Okay, so now we’re gonna get scary. So that’s just the passive stuff.
There exists another system that’s called TURBINE, and we revealed about this system
in the ‘Spiegel’ publications today as well. So if TURMOIL
is deep packet inspection, then TURBINE is deep packet injection.
And it is the system that combined together with a thing…
– with TURMOIL and TURBINE you can create a platform which they have consolidated
which they call QFIRE. QFIRE is essentially a way to programmatically
look at things that flow across the internet that they see with TURMOIL
and then using TURBINE they’re able to actually inject packets to try to do attacks,
and I’ll describe some of those attacks in detail in a moment. But essentially
the interesting thing about QFIRE also is that they have a thing that’s called
a diode. So if you have for example a large number
of systems where you control them, you might say: “Hey, what are you doing
on that backbone?”, “Hey, what’s going on with these systems?” And they could say,
well, you know, we paid for access, we’re doing this, it’s all legal, etcetera.
QFIRE has this really neat little detail which is that they compromise
other people’s routers and then redirect through them so that they can beat
the speed of light. And how they do that is that they have
a passive sensor that’s nearby, a thing that they can inject from.
And when they see that that thing sees a selector that is interesting to them
or is doing a thing that they would like to tamper with in some way, then they
take a packet, they encapsulate the packet, they send it to the diode,
which might be your home router potentially, and then that home router
decapsulates that packet and sends it out. And because that is very close to you,
and let’s say you’re visiting Yahoo, then the Yahoo packet will not beat you.
That is, they will not beat the NSA or GCHQ. So it’s a race condition.
And so they basically are able to control this whole system and then
to localize attacks in that process. So that’s a pretty –
pretty scary stuff, actually. And while it is a digital thing, I think it’s important
to understand that this is what Jefferson talked about when he talked about tyranny.
This is turnkey tyranny, and it’s not that it’s coming, it’s actually here. It’s just
merely the question about whether or not they’ll use it in a way that we think is
a good way or not a good way. One of the scariest parts about this is that
for this system or these sets of systems to exist, we have been kept vulnerable.
So it is the case that if the Chinese, if the Russians, if people here
wish to build this system, there’s nothing that stops them. And in fact the NSA has
in a literal sense retarded the process by which we would secure the internet
because it establishes a hegemony of power, their power in secret,
to do these things. And in fact I’ve seen evidence that shows that there are so many
compromises taking place between the different Five Eyes signals intelligence
groups that they actually have lists that explain, “If you see this back door
on the system, contact a friendly agency. You’ve just recompromised the machine
of another person.” So when we talk about this,
we have to consider that this is designed for at-scale exploitation.
And as far as I can tell it’s being used for at-scale exploitation.
Which is not really in my mind a targeted particularized type of thing,
but rather it’s fishing operations. It’s fishing expeditions. It’s
more like fishing crusades, if you will. And in some cases, looking at the evidence
that seems to be what it is. Targeting Muslims, I might add. Because that’s
what they’re interested in doing. So that said, that’s the internet,
and we get all the way down to the bottom and we get to the Close Access Operations
and Off-Net. Off-Net and Close Access Operations are pretty scary things,
but basically this is what we would call a black bag job. That’s where these guys,
they break into your house, they put something in your computer and
they take other things out of your computer. Here’s an example.
First top secret document of the talk so far.
This is a Close Access Operations box.
It is basically car metasploit for the NSA,
which is an interesting thing. But basically they say that the attack is
undetectable, and it’s sadly a laptop running free software.
It is injecting packets. And they say that they can do this from as far away as
8 miles to inject packets, so presumably using this they’re able to exploit
a kernel vulnerability of some kind, parsing the wireless frames, and, yeah.
I’ve heard that they actually put this hardware, from sources inside of the NSA
and inside of other intelligence agencies, that
they actually put this type of hardware on drones so that they fly them over areas
that they’re interested in and they do mass exploitation of people.
Now, we don’t have a document that substantiates that part, but
we do have this document that actually claims that they’ve done it from up to
8 miles away. So that’s a really interesting thing because it tells us
that they understand that common wireless cards, probably running Microsoft Windows,
which is an American company, that they know about vulnerabilities and they
keep them a secret to use them. This is part of a constant theme of sabotaging
and undermining American companies and American ingenuity. As an American,
while generally not a nationalist, I find this disgusting, especially as someone
who writes free software and would like my tax dollars to be spent
on improving these things. And when they know about them I don’t want them
to keep them a secret because all of us are vulnerable.
It’s a really scary thing.
*applause*
And it just so happens that at my house, myself and many of my friends,
when we use wireless devices – Andy knows what I’m talking about,
a few other people here – all the time we have errors
in certain machines which are set up at the house, in some cases as a honey pot
– thanks, guys – where kernel panic after kernel panic,
exactly in the receive handler of the Linux kernel where you would expect
this specific type of thing to take place. So I think that if we talk about
the war coming home, we probably will find that this is not just used in places
where there’s a literal war on but where they decide that it would be useful,
including just parking outside your house. Now I only have an hour today,
so I’m gonna have to go through some other stuff pretty quickly. I want to make
a couple of points clear. This wasn’t clear, even though it was written
in the New York Times by my dear friend Laura Poitras, who is totally fantastic
by the way, and… you are great. But 15 years of data retention –
*applause*
So the NSA has 15 years of data retention.
It’s a really important point to drive home. I joked with Laura
when she wrote the New York Times article with James Risen, she should do the math
for other people and say “15 years”. She said: “They can do the math on their own,
I believe in them”. I just wanna do the math for you. 15 years, that’s scary!
I don’t ever remember voting on that, I don’t ever remember even having
a public debate about it. And that includes content as well as metadata.
So they use this metadata. They search through this metadata retroactively.
They do what’s called ‘tasking’, that is, they find a set of selectors – so that’s
a set of unique identifiers, e-mail addresses, cookies, MAC addresses, IMEIs…
whatever is useful. Voice prints potentially, depending on the system.
And then they basically task those selectors
for specific activities. So that ties together with some of the attacks
which I’ll talk about, but essentially QUANTUMINSERTION and things that are
like QUANTUMINSERTION, they’re triggered as part of the TURMOIL and TURBINE system
and the QFIRE system, and they’re all put together so that they can automate
attacking people based on the plain text traffic that transits the internet
or based on the source or destination IP addresses.
This is a second top secret document.
This is an actual NSA lolcat
for the QUANTUMTHEORY program.
*applause*
You’ll notice it’s a black cat, hiding. Okay.
So there are a few people in the audience that are still not terrified enough, and
there are a few people that as part of their process for coping with
this horrible world that we have found ourselves in, they will say the following:
“There’s no way they’ll ever find me. I’m not interesting.” So I just want to dispel
that notion and show you a little bit about how they do that. So we mentioned
TURMOIL, which is the dragnet surveillance, and TURBINE, which is deep packet injection,
and QFIRE, where we tie it all together, and this is an example of something which
I think actually demonstrates a crime but I’m not sure, I’m not a lawyer, I’m
definitely not your lawyer, and I’m certainly not the NSA’s lawyer.
But this is the MARINA system. This is merely one of many systems where they
actually have full content as well as metadata. Taken together, they do
contact chaining, where they find out you guys are all in the same room with me
– which reminds me, let’s see, I’ve got this phone…
Okay. That’s good. Let’s turn that on. So now…
*laughter* You’re welcome.
*laughter* You have no idea!
*laughter* But I just wanted to make sure that
if there was any question about whether or not you are exempt from needing to do
something about this, that that is dispelled.
*applause*
Okay? Cell phone’s on. Great. So. Hey, guys!
*laughter* So, the MARINA system is a
contact chaining system as well as a system that has data, and in this case
what we see is in fact reverse contact and forward contact graphing. So,
any lawyers in the audience? If there are American citizens in this database,
is reverse targeting like this illegal? Generally? Is it possible that that
could be considered illegal? *Someone from audience mumbling*
Yeah, so, interesting. If it’s called reverse contacts instead of
reverse targeting – yeah, exactly. So, you’ll also notice the,
on the right-hand side, webcam photos.
So, just in case you’re wondering, in this case this particular target,
I suppose that he did not or she did not have a webcam.
Good for them. If not, you should follow the EFF’s advice and you should put
a little sticker over your webcam. But you’ll also note that they try to find
equivalent identifiers. So every time there’s a linkable identifier that you
have on the internet, they try to put that and tie it together and contact chain it,
and they try to show who you are among all of these different potential identifiers –
if you have 5 e-mail addresses, they would link them together – and then they try
to find out who all your friends are. You’ll also note at the bottom here,
logins and passwords. So they’re also doing dragnet surveillance
in which they extract – the feature set extraction where they know semantically
what a login and a password is in a particular protocol. And in this case
this guy is lucky, I suppose, and they were not able to get passwords or webcam,
but you’ll note that they were able to get his contacts and they were able to see
in fact 29, give or take, received messages as well,
of which there are these things. Now in this case we have redacted the e-mail
and instant messenger information, but this is an example of how
*laughs* you can’t hide from these things, and
thinking that they won’t find you is a fallacy. So this is basically
the difference between taking one wire and clipping onto it in a particularized
suspicious way where they’re really interested, they have a particularized
suspicion, they think that someone is a criminal, they think someone has taken
some serious steps that are illegal, and instead what they do is they put all of us
under surveillance, record all of this data that they possibly can, and then
they go looking through it. Now in the case of Chancellor Merkel,
when we revealed NSRL 2002-388, what we showed was that
they were spying on Merkel. And by their own admission 3 hops away, that’s everyone
in the German Parliament and everyone here.
So that’s pretty serious stuff. It also happens that if you should be visiting
certain websites, especially if you’re a Muslim, it is the case that you can be
attacked automatically by this system. Right? So that would mean that
they would automatically start to break into systems. That’s what they would call
‘untasked targeting’. Interesting idea that they call that targeted surveillance.
To me that doesn’t really sound too much like targeted surveillance unless
what you mean by carpet bombing, it – you know, I mean it just – you know, like… it
just doesn’t… it doesn’t strike me right. It’s not my real definition of ‘targeted’.
It’s not well defined. It’s not that a judge has said, “Yes, this person is
clearly someone we should target.” Quite the opposite. This is something where
some guy who has a system has decided to deploy it and they do it however they like
whenever they would like. And while there are some restrictions, it’s clear that
the details about these programs do not trickle up. And even if they do, they
do not trickle up in a useful way. So this is important, because members
of the U.S. Congress, they have no clue about these things. Literally, in the case
of the technology. Ask a Congressman about TCP/IP. Forget it.
You can’t even get a meeting with them. I’ve tried. Doesn’t matter. Even if you
know the secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act and you go
to Washington, D.C. and you meet with their aides, they still won’t talk to you
about it. Part of that is because they don’t have a clue, and another part of it
is because they can’t talk about it, because they don’t have a political solution.
Absent a political solution, it’s very difficult to get someone to admit that
there is a problem. Well, there is a problem, so we’re going to create
a political problem and also talk about some of the solutions.
The Cypherpunks generally have come up with some of the solutions
when we talk about encrypting the entire internet. That would end dragnet mass
surveillance in a sense, but it will come back in a different sense
even with encryption. We need both a marriage of a technical solution
and we need a political solution to go with it, and if we don’t have
those 2 things, we will unfortunately be stuck here. But at the moment the NSA,
basically, I feel, has more power than anyone in the entire world – any one
agency or any one person. So Emperor Alexander, the head of the NSA, really has
a lot of power. If they want to right now, they’ll know that the IMEI of this phone
is interesting. It’s very warm, which is another funny thing, and they would be
able to break into this phone almost certainly and then turn on the microphone,
and all without a court. So that to me is really scary.
And I especially dislike the fact that if you were to be building these
types of things, they treat you as an opponent, if you wish to be able to
fulfill the promises that you make to your customers. And as someone who writes
security software I think that’s bullshit.
So. Here’s how they do a bit of it. So there are different programs.
So QUANTUMTHEORY, QUANTUMNATION, QUANTUMBOT, QUANTUMCOPPER
and QUANTUMINSERT. You’ve heard of a few of them. I’ll just go through them real quick.
QUANTUMTHEORY essentially has a whole arsenal of zero-day exploits.
Then the system deploys what’s called a SMOTH, or a seasoned moth.
And a seasoned moth is an implant which dies after 30 days.
So I think that these guys either took a lot of acid or read a lot of Philip K. Dick,
potentially both! *applause*
And they thought Philip K. Dick wasn’t dystopian enough.
“Let’s get better at this”. And after reading VALIS, I guess,
they went on, and they also have as part of QUANTUMNATION
what’s called VALIDATOR or COMMONDEER. Now these are first-stage payloads
that are done entirely in memory. These exploits essentially are where they
look around to see if you have what are called PSPs, and this is to see, like,
you know, if you have Tripwire, if you have Aid, if you have some sort of
system tool that will detect if an attacker is tampering with files or
something like this, like a host intrusion detection system.
So VALIDATOR and COMMONDEER, which, I mean, clearly the point of COMMONDEER,
while it’s misspelled here – it’s not actually… I mean that’s the name
of the program… but the point is to make a pun on commandeering your machine. So,
you know, when I think about the U.S. Constitution in particular, we talk about
not allowing the quartering of soldiers – and, gosh, you know?
Commandeering my computer sounds a lot like a digital version of that, and
I find that’s a little bit confusing, and mostly in that I don’t understand
how they get away with it. But part of it is because until right now we didn’t know
about it, in public, which is why we’re releasing this in the public interest,
so that we can have a better debate about whether or not that counts, in fact,
as a part of this type of what I would consider to be tyranny, or perhaps
you think it is a measured and reasonable thing. I somehow doubt that. But
in any case, QUANTUMBOT is where they hijack IRC bots, because why not?
They thought they would like to do that, and an interesting point is that
they could in theory stop a lot of these botnet attacks and
they have decided to maintain that capability, but they’re not yet doing it
except when they feel like doing it for experiments or when they do it to
potentially use them. It’s not clear exactly how they use them. But
the mere fact of the matter is that that suggests they’re even in fact able to do
these types of attacks, they’ve tested these types of attacks against botnets.
And that’s the program you should FOIA for. We’ve released a little bit of detail
about that today as well. And QUANTUMCOPPER to me is really scary.
It’s essentially a thing that can interfere with TCP/IP and it can do things
like corrupt file downloads. So if you imagine the Great Firewall of China,
so-called – that’s for the whole planet.
So if the NSA wanted to tomorrow, they could kill every anonymity system
that exists by just forcing everyone who connects to an anonymity system to reset
just the same way that the Chinese do right now in China with the Great Firewall
of China. So that’s like the NSA builds the equivalent of the Great Firewall
of Earth. That’s, to me that’s a really scary, heavy-handed thing,
and I’m sure they only use it for good. *clears throat*
But, yeah. Back here in reality that to me is a really scary thing, especially
because one of the ways that they are able to have this capability, as I mentioned,
is these diodes. So what that suggests is that they actually repurpose
other people’s machines in order to reposition and to gain a capability
inside of an area where they actually have no legitimacy inside of that area.
That to me suggests it is not only heavy-handed, that they have probably some
tools to do that. You see where I’m going with this. Well, QUANTUMINSERTION,
this is also an important point, because this is what was used against Belgacom,
this is what’s used by a whole number of unfortunately players in the game where
basically what they do is they inject a packet. So you have a TCP connection,
Alice wants to talk to Bob, and for some reason Alice and Bob have not heard
about TLS. Alice sends an HTTP request to Bob. Bob is Yahoo.
NSA loves Yahoo. And basically they inject a packet which will get to Alice
before Yahoo is able to respond, right? And the thing is that if that was a
TLS connection, the man-on-the-side attack would not succeed.
That’s really key. If they were using TLS, the man-on-the-side attack could at best,
as far as we understand it at the moment, they could tear down the TLS session but
they couldn’t actually actively inject. So that’s a man-on-the-side attack.
We can end that attack with TLS. When we deploy TLS everywhere
then we will end that kind of attack. So there was a joke, you know, when you
download .mp3s, you ride with communism – from the ’90s, some of you may
remember this. When you bareback with the internet, you ride with the NSA.
*applause*
Or you’re getting a ride, going for a ride. So the TAO infrastructure,
Tailored Access and Operations. Some of the FOXACID URLs are public.
FOXACID is essentially like a watering hole type of attack where you go to,
you go to a URL. QUANTUMINSERT puts like an iframe or puts some code
in your web browser, which you then execute, which then causes you to
load resources. One of the resources that you load while you’re loading CNN.com,
for example, which is one of their examples, they – you like that, by the way?
So, you know, that’s an extremist site. So *coughs*
you might have heard about that. A lot of Republicans in the United States read it.
So – right before they wage illegal imperialist wars. So,
the point is that you go to a FOXACID server and it basically does a survey
of your box and decides if it can break into it or not, and then it does.
Yep, that’s basically it. And the FOXACID URLs, a few of them are public.
Some of the details about that have been made public, about how the structure
of the URLs are laid out and so on. An important detail is that they pretend
that they’re Apache, but they actually do a really bad job. So they’re
like Hacking Team, maybe it’s the same guys, I doubt it though, the NSA wouldn’t
slum with scumbags like that, but… Basically you can tell, you can find them,
because they aren’t really Apache servers. They pretend to be, something else.
The other thing is that none of their infrastructure is in the United States.
So, real quick anonymity question. You have a set of things and you know that
a particular attacker never comes from one place. Every country on the planet
potentially, but never one place. The one place where most of the internet is.
What does that tell you in terms of anonymity? It tells you usually that
they’re hiding something about that one place. Maybe there’s a legal requirement
for this. It’s not clear to me. But what is totally clear to me is that if you see
this type of infrastructure and it is not in the United States, there is a chance,
especially today, that it’s the NSA’s Tailored Access and Operations division.
And here’s an important point. When the NSA can’t do it, they bring in GCHQ.
So, for example, for targeting certain Gmail selectors, they can’t do it.
And in the documents we released today, we show that they say: “If you have
a partner agreement form and you need to target, there are some additional selectors
that become available should you need them”. So when we have a limit
of an intelligence agency in the United States, or here in Germany or
something like this, we have to recognize that information is a currency
in an unregulated market. And these guys, they trade that information, and
one of the ways they trade that is like this. And they love Yahoo.
So, little breather?
It’s always good to make fun of the GCHQ with Austin Powers!
*laughter* Okay. Another classified document here.
That’s actual NSA OpenOffice or Powerpoint clip art of their horrible headquarters
that you see in every news story, I can’t wait to see a different photo of the NSA
someday. But you’ll notice right here they explain how QUANTUM works. Now SSO is
a Special Source Operations site. So you’ve seen U.S. embassies? Usually
the U.S. embassy has dielectric panels on the roof, that’s what we showed in Berlin,
it was called “DAS NEST” on the cover of ‘Der Spiegel’. That’s an SSO site.
So they see that this type of stuff is taking place, they do an injection and
they try to beat the Yahoo packet back. Now another interesting point is
that for the Yahoo packet to be beaten, the NSA must impersonate Yahoo.
This is a really important detail because what it tells us is that they are
essentially conscripting Yahoo and saying that they are Yahoo. So they are
impersonating a U.S. company to a U.S. company user
and they are not actually supposed to be in this conversation at all.
And when they do it, then they of course – basically if you’re using Yahoo,
you’re definitely going to get owned. So – and I don’t just mean that in that
Yahoo is vulnerable, they are, but I mean people that use Yahoo tend to
– maybe it’s a bad generalization, but, you know – they’re not the most
security-conscious people on the planet, they don’t keep their computers up to date,
I’m guessing, and that’s probably why they love Yahoo so much. They also love
CNN.com, which is some other… I don’t know what that says, it’s like a sociological
study of compromise. But that’s an important detail. So the SSO site sniffs
and then they do some injection, they redirect you to FOXACID. That’s for
web browser exploitation. They obviously have other exploitation techniques.
Okay. So now. We all know that cellphones are vulnerable.
Here’s an example. This is a base station
that the NSA has that, I think it’s the first time ever anyone’s ever revealed
an NSA IMSI catcher. So, here it is. Well, actually the second time, because
‘Der Spiegel’ did it this morning. But you know what I mean.
*applause*
So they call it ‘Find, Fix and Finish targeted handset users’.
Now it’s really important to understand when they say “targeting” you would think
‘massive collection’, right? Because what are they doing? They’re pretending to be
a base station. They want to overpower. They want to basically be the phone
that you connect to… or the phone system that you connect to. And that means
lots of people are going to connect potentially. So it’s not just one
targeted user. So hopefully they have it set up so that if you need to dial 911,
or here in Europe 112 – you know, by the way, if you ever want to find
one of these things try to call different emergency numbers and note which ones
route where. Just as a little detail. Also note that sometimes if you go
to the Ecuadorian embassy you will receive a welcome message from Uganda Telecom.
Because the British when they deployed the IMSI catcher against Julian Assange
at the Ecuadorian embassy made the mistake of not reconfiguring the spy gear they [had]
deployed in Uganda [before] when they deployed in London.
*applause*
And this can be yours for only US$ 175.800.
And this covers GSM and PCS and DCS and a bunch of other stuff.
So basically if you use a cell phone – forget it. It doesn’t matter
what you’re doing. The exception may be Cryptophone and Redphone. In fact
I’d like to just give a shoutout to the people who work on free software, and
software which is actually secure. Like Moxie Marlinspike – I’m so sorry I mention
your name in my talk, but don’t worry, your silence won’t protect you!
I think it’s really important to know Moxie is one of the very few people
in the world who builds technologies that is both free and open source, and
as far as I can tell he refuses to do anything awful. No backdoors or anything.
And from what I can tell this proves that we need things like that.
This is absolutely necessary because they replace the infrastructure we connect to.
It’s like replacing the road that we would walk on, and adding tons of spy gear.
And they do that too, we’ll get to that. Okay.
So I’m gonna go a little quick through these because I think it’s better that you
go online and you adjust. And I wanna have a little bit of time for questions.
But basically here’s an example of how even if you disable a thing the thing is
not really disabled. So if you have a WiFi card in your computer the SOMBERKNAVE
program, which is another classified document here, they basically repurpose
your WiFi gear. They say: “You’re not using that WiFi card? We’re gonna scan
for WiFi nearby, we’re gonna exfiltrate data by finding an open WiFi network
and we’re gonna jump on it”. So they’re actually using other people’s
wireless networks in addition to having this stuff in your computer. And this is
one of the ways they beat a so-called air-gapped target computer.
Okay, so here’s some of the software implants. Now we’re gonna name a bunch
of companies because – fuck those guys basically, for collaborating when they do,
and fuck them for leaving us vulnerable when they do.
*applause*
And I mean that in the most loving way because some of them are victims, actually.
It’s important to note that we don’t yet understand which is which.
So it’s important to name them, so that they have to go on record, and so that
they can say where they are, and so that they can give us enough rope
to hang themselves. I really want that to happen because I think it’s important
to find out who collaborated and who didn’t collaborate. In order to have truth
and reconciliation we need to start with a little of truth. So STUCCOMONTANA
is basically BadBIOS if you guys have heard about that. I feel very bad
for Dragos, he doesn’t really talk to me right now. I think he might be kinda mad.
But after I was detained – by the US Army on US soil, I might add –
they took a phone from me. Now it shouldn’t matter but it did. They also
I think went after all my phone records so they didn’t need to take the phone. But
for good measure, they just wanted to try to intimidate me which is exactly
the wrong thing to do to me. But as he told the story after that happened
all of his computers including his Xbox were compromised. And he says
even to this day that some of those things persist. And he talks about the BIOS.
Here’s a document that shows clearly that they actually re-flash the BIOS
and they also have other techniques including System Management Mode
related rootkits and that they have persistence inside of the BIOS.
It’s an incredibly important point. This is evidence that the thing that Dragos
talked about, maybe he doesn’t have it, but it really does exist.
Now the question is how would he find it? We don’t have the forensics tools yet.
We don’t really have the capabilities widely deployed in the community
to be able to know that, and to be able to find it. Here’s another one.
This one’s called SWAP. In this case it replaces the Host Protected Area
of the hard drive, and you can see a little graph where there’s target systems,
you see the internet, Interactive OPS, so they’ve got like a guy who is hacking you
in real time, the People’s Liberation Army… uh, NSA! And…
*laughter* And you can see all of these different
things about it. Each one of these things, including SNEAKERNET, these are
different programs, most of which we revealed today in ‘Der Spiegel’.
But you’ll notice that it’s Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.
How many Al Qaeda people use Solaris, do you suppose?
This tells you a really important point. They are interested in compromising
the infrastructure of systems, not just individual people.
They want to take control and literally colonize those systems
with these implants. And that’s not part of the discussion. People are not talking
about that because they don’t know about that yet. But they should. Because
in addition to the fact that Sun is a U.S. company which they are building
capabilities against – that to me, really, it really bothers me; I can’t tell you
how much that bothers me – we also see that they’re attacking Microsoft,
another U.S. company, and Linux and FreeBSD, where there are a lot of people
that are building it from all around the world. So they’re attacking not only
collective efforts and corporate efforts, but basically every option
you possibly can, from end users down to telecom core things.
Here’s another one, DEITYBOUNCE. This is for Dell,
so Dell PowerEdge 1850, 2850, 1950, 2950…
RAID servers using any of the following BIOS versions. Right?
So just in case you’re wondering, hey Dell, why is that? Curious about that.
Love to hear your statements about it. So if you write YARA sigs [signatures]
and you’re interested in looking for NSA malware, look for things
that use RC6, so look for the constants that you might find in RC6.
And when they run, if they emit UDP traffic – we’ve actually seen a sample
of this but we were not able to capture it, sadly, but
emitting UDP traffic that is encrypted. You know, people that I’ve worked with
on things related to this, they’ve even, they’ve had their house black bagged.
They’ve had pretty bad stuff happen to them. That’s their story to tell.
But one of the interesting details is that after those events occurred,
these types of things were seen. Ben has a really bad idea for those guys,
I might add, because I wouldn’t have put this slide in if that had not occurred.
But if you want to look for it, you’ll find it. I know some people that have
looked with YARA sigs and they have in fact found things related to this,
so I suspect a lot of malware researchers in the near future are going to have
a lot of stuff to say about this particular slide. I’ll leave that to them.
I think it’s very important to go looking for these things, especially to find out
who is victimized by them. Here’s an iPhone back door.
So DROPOUTJEEP, so you can see it right there.
So, SMS, contact list retrieval, voicemail, hot microphone,
camera capture, cell tower location. Cool. Do you think Apple helped them with that?
I don’t know. I hope Apple will clarify that. I think it’s really important
that Apple doesn’t. Here’s a problem. I don’t really believe
that Apple didn’t help them. I can’t prove it yet, but they literally claim
that any time they target an iOS device, that it will succeed for implantation.
Either they have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products,
meaning that they are hoarding information about critical systems that
American companies produce and sabotaging them,
or Apple sabotaged it themselves. Not sure which one it is!
I’d like to believe that since Apple didn’t join the PRISM program until
after Steve Jobs died that maybe it’s just that they write shitty software.
We know that’s true! *laughter*
*applause*
Here’s a HVT, high-value target. This is a high-value target
being targeted with a back door for Windows CE Thuraya phones.
So if you have a Thuraya phone and you’re wondering if it was secure – yeah maybe.
Good luck! Here’s one where they replaced the hard drive firmware.
There was a talk at OHM this year [OHM2013] where a guy talked about
replacing hard drive firmware. You were onto something.
You were really onto something. Whoever you are, you were onto something.
Because the NSA has a program here, IRATEMONK, and that’s exactly
what they do. They replace the firmware in the hard drive, so it doesn’t matter
if you reformat the hard drive, you’re done. The firmware itself can do
a whole bunch of stuff. So. Here are the names of the hard drive companies
were it works: Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung, and of course
they support FAT, NTFS, EXT3 and UFS. They probably now have support for
additional file systems, but this is what we can prove. Please note
at the bottom left and the bottom right: “Status: Released and Deployed.
Ready for Immediate Delivery”. And: “Unit Cost: $0”.
It’s free! No, you can’t get it. It’s not free as in free software.
It’s free as in “You’re owned!”. *laughter*
*applause*
I want to give a shoutout to Karsten Nohl and Luca [Luca Melette] for their
incredible talk where they showed this exact attack without knowing that
they had found it. Right? They say – yeah, absolutely.
*applause*
Important point. The NSA says that when they know about these things, that
nobody will come to harm, no one will be able to find them, they’ll never be able
to be exploited by another third party. Karsten found this exact vulnerability.
They were able to install a Java applet on the SIM card without user interaction,
and it was based on the service provider’s security configuration, which is exactly
what the NSA says here, and they talk about attacking the same toolkit
inside of the phone; and Karsten found the same vulnerability
and attacked it in the wild. This is perfect evidence, not only of
how badass Karsten and Luca are – they are, no question – but also about
how wrong the NSA is with this balance. Because for every Karsten and Luca, there
are hundreds of people who are paid to do this full-time and never tell us about it.
*applause*
Important detail. Do you see that ‘interdiction’ phrase right there?
“Through remote access” – in other words, we broke into your computer –
“or interdiction” – in other words, we stole your fucking mail. Now.
This is a really important point. We all have heard about these paranoid
crazy people talking about people breaking into their houses – that’s happened to me
a number of times – motherfuckers, getting you back – it’s really important
to understand this process is one that threatens all of us.
The sanctity of the postal system has been violated. I mean – whoa!
God, it makes me so angry, you know? You can’t even send a letter without
being spied on, but even worse that they tamper with it! It’s not enough that
the U.S. Postal Service records all of this information and keeps it
– that’s not enough. They also have to tamper with the packages! So every time
you buy from Amazon, for example, every time you buy anything on the internet,
there is the possibility that they will actually take your package and change it.
One of the ways that I’ve heard that they change it is that they will actually
take the case of your computer and they will injection mold a hardware back door
into the case of the computer. So that even if you were to look
at the motherboard or have it serviced, you would not see this. It merely
just needs to be in the proximity of the motherboard. So.
Let’s talk about hardware implants that they will put into your devices.
Here’s one. This is called BULLDOZER. It’s a PCI bus hardware implant.
Pretty scary, doesn’t look so great, but let’s go on a little bit. Okay?
Here’s one where they actually exploit the BIOS and System Management Mode.
There’s a big graph that shows all of these various different interconnections,
which is important. Then they talk about the long-range comms, INMARSAT, VSAT,
NSA MEANS and Future Capabilities. I think NSA MEANS exists. Future Capabilities
seems self-explanatory. “This hardware implant provides
2-way RF communication.” Interesting. So you disable all the wireless cards,
whatever you need. There you go. They just added a new one in there and
you don’t even know. Your system has no clue about it. Here’s a hardware back door
which uses the I2C interface, because no one in the history of time
other than the NSA probably has ever used it. That’s good to know that finally
someone uses I2C for something – okay, other than fan control. But,
look at that! It’s another American company that they are sabotaging.
They understand that HP’s servers are vulnerable, and they decided,
instead of explaining that this is a problem, they exploit it. And IRONCHEF,
through interdiction, is one of the ways that they will do that.
So I wanna really harp on this. Now it’s not that I think European companies
are worth less. I suspect especially after this talk that won’t be true,
in the literal stock sense, but I don’t know. I think it’s really important
to understand that they are sabotaging American companies because of the
so-called home-field advantage. The problem is that as an American who writes
software, who wants to build hardware devices, this really chills my expression
and it also gives me a problem, which is that people say: “Why would I use
what you’re doing? You know, what about the NSA?”
Man, that really bothers me. I don’t deserve the Huawei taint,
and the NSA gives it. And President Obama’s own advisory board
that was convened to understand the scope of these things has even agreed with me
about this point, that this should not be taking place, that hoarding of zero-day
exploits cannot simply happen without thought processes that are reasonable
and rational and have an economic and social valuing where we really think about
the broad-scale impact. Now. I’m gonna go on to a little bit more.
Here’s where they attack SIM cards. This is MONKEYCALENDAR. So it’s actually
the flow chart of how this would work. So in other words, they told you all of
the ways in which you should be certainly, you know, looking at this. So if you ever
see your handset emitting encrypted SMS that isn’t Textsecure, you now have
a pretty good idea that it might be this. Here’s another example. If you have
a computer in front of you… I highly encourage you to buy the Samsung SGH-X480C
– that’s the preferred phone of the NSA for attacking another person’s phone.
I’m not exactly sure why, but an important point is, they add the back door, then
they send an SMS from a regular phone – what does that tell you? What does that
tell you about the exploitation process? It tells you that it’s actually something
which is pretty straightforward, pretty easy to do, doesn’t require
specialized access to the telecoms once they’ve gotten your phone compromised.
That to me suggests that other people might find it, other people might use
these techniques. Okay, here’s a USB hardware implant called COTTONMOUTH.
We released this in ‘Spiegel’ today as well. See the little red parts. It will
provide a wireless bridge onto the target network with the ability to load
exploit software. Here’s a little bit of extra details about that. It actually
shows the graph at the bottom, how they do this, how they get around, how they beat
the air gap with these things. And they talk a bit about being GENIE compliant.
So GENIE, and for the rest of these programs, these are – like DROPOUTJEEP
is part of the CHIMNEYPOOL programs, and COTTONMOUTH is part of the rest of
these programs over here. These are huge programs where they’re trying to beat
a whole bunch of different adversaries, and different capabilities are required.
And this is one of the probably I think more interesting ones, but here’s
the next revision of it where it’s in a USB plug, not actually in the cable.
And look, 50 units for US$ 200,000. It’s really cheap.
You like my editorializing there, I hope? So, $200,000, okay.
And here’s where you look for it. If you happen to have an x-ray machine,
look for an extra chip. And that’s a HOWLERMONKEY radiofrequency transmitter.
Well what’s a HOWLERMONKEY? We’ll talk about that in a second, but basically
this is for ethernet, here. This is the FIREWALK. It can actually do injection
bidirectionally on the ethernet controller into the network that it’s sitting on.
So it doesn’t even have to do things directly to the computer. It can actually
inject packets directly into the network, according to the specification sheet,
which we released today on Der Spiegel’s website. As it says,
‘active injection of ethernet packets onto the target network’. Here’s another one
from Dell with an actual FLUXBABBITT hardware implant for the PowerEdge 2950.
This uses the JTAG debugging interface of the server. Why did Dell leave
a JTAG debugging interface on these servers? Interesting, right? Because,
it’s like leaving a vulnerability in. Is that a bug door or a back door or
just a mistake? Well hopefully they will change these things or at least make it so
that if you were to see this you would know that you had some problems.
Hopefully Dell will release some information about how to mitigate
this advanced persistent threat. Right? Everything that the U.S. Government
accuse the Chinese of doing – which they are also doing, I believe – we are learning
that the U.S. Government has been doing to American companies. That to me is really
concerning, and we’ve had no public debate about these issues, and in many cases
all the technical details are obfuscated away and they are just completely
outside of the purview of discussions. In this case we learn more about Dell, and
which models. And here’s the HOWLERMONKEY. These are actually photographs
of the NSA implanted chips that they have when they steal your mail.
So after they steal your mail they put a chip like this into your computer.
So the one, the FIREWALK one is the ethernet one, and
that’s an important one. You probably will notice that these look pretty simple,
common off-the-shelf parts. So.
Whew! All right. Who here is surprised by any of this?
*waits for audience reaction* I’m really, really, really glad to see
that you’re not all cynical fuckers and that someone here would admit
that they were surprised. Okay, who here is not surprised? *waits*
I’m going to blow your fucking mind! *laughter*
Okay. We all know about TEMPEST, right? Where the NSA pulls data
out of your computer, irradiate stuff and then grab it, right? Everybody
who raised their hand and said they’re not surprised, you already knew
about TEMPEST, right? Right? Okay. Well.
What if I told you that the NSA had a specialized technology for beaming
energy into you and to the computer systems around you, would you believe
that that was real or would that be paranoid speculation of a crazy person?
*laughter* Anybody? You cynical guys
holding up your hand saying that you’re not surprised by anything, raise your hand
if you would be unsurprised by that. *laughter*
Good. And it’s not the same number. It’s significantly lower. It’s one person.
Great. Here’s what they do with those types of things. That exists, by the way.
When I told Julian Assange about this, he said: “Hmm. I bet the people who were
around Hugo Chavez are going to wonder what caused his cancer.” And I said:
“You know, I hadn’t considered that. But, you know, I haven’t found any data
about human safety about these tools. Has the NSA performed tests where they
actually show that radiating people with 1 kW of RF energy
at short range is safe?” *laughter*
My God! No, you guys think I’m joking, right? Well, yeah, here it is.
This is a continuous wave generator, a continuous wave radar unit.
You can detect its use because it’s used between 1 and 2 GHz and
its bandwidth is up to 45 MHz, user adjustable, 2 watts
using an internal amplifier. External amplifier makes it possible to go
up to 1 kilowatt.
I’m just gonna let you take that in for a moment. *clears throat*
Who’s crazy now? *laughter*
Now, I’m being told I only have one minute, so I’m going to have to go
a little bit quicker. I’m sorry. Here’s why they do it. This is an implant
called RAGEMASTER. It’s part of the ANGRYNEIGHBOR family of tools,
*laughter* where they have a small device that they
put in line with the cable in your monitor and then they use this radar system
to bounce a signal – this is not unlike the Great Seal bug that [Leon] Theremin
designed for the KGB. So it’s good to know we’ve finally caught up with the KGB,
but now with computers. They send the microwave transmission,
the continuous wave, it reflects off of this chip and then they use this device
to see your monitor.
Yep. So there’s the full life cycle. First they radiate you,
then you die from cancer, then you… win? Okay, so,
here’s the same thing, but this time for keyboards, USB and PS/2 keyboards.
So the idea is that it’s a data retro-reflector. Here’s another thing,
but this one, the TAWDRYYARD program, is a little bit different. It’s a beacon, so
this is where probably then they kill you with a drone.
That’s pretty scary stuff. They also have this for microphones to gather room bugs
for room audio. Notice the bottom. It says all components are common off the shelf
and are so non-attributable to the NSA. Unless you have this photograph
and the product sheet. Happy hunting!
*applause*
And just to give you another idea, this is a device they use to be able to actively
hunt people down. This is a hunting device, right? Handheld finishing tool
used for geolocation targeting handsets in the field. So!
Who was not surprised by this? I’m so glad to have finally reached the point
where no one raised their hand except that one guy who I think misheard me.
*laughter* Or you’re brilliant. And
please stay in our community and work on open research!
*somebody off mike shouts:* Audience: Maybe he can add something!
Yeah! And if you work for the NSA, I’d just like to encourage you
to leak more documents! *laughter*
*applause, cheers*
*applause*
*applause, cheers, whistles*
*applause, cheers, whistles, ovation*
*applause, ovation*
*applause, cheers, ovation*
*applause, ovation*
Herald: Thank you very much, Jake.
Thank you. I’m afraid we ran all out of time for the Q&A.
I’m very sorry for anyone who wanted to ask questions.
Jacob: But we do have a press conference. Well, if you guys… you know,
I’d say: “occupy the room for another 5 minutes”, or… know that there’s
a press conference room that will be opened up, where we can all ask
as many questions as we want, in 30 minutes, if you’re interested.
And I will basically be available until I’m assassinated to answer questions.
*laughter, applause* So…
in the immortal words of Julian Assange: Remember, no matter what happens,
even if there’s a videotape of it, it was murder! Thank you!
Herald: Thank you. Please give a warm round of applause to Jake Appelbaum!
*applause*
*silent postroll*
*Subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2016. Join, and help us!*