petrobas – Techdirt (original) (raw)

If The NSA Isn't Engaged In Economic Espionage, Why Is The USTR Considered 'A Customer' Of Intelligence?

from the simple-questions dept

We just had a story about how Australia used its equivalent of the NSA to do economic espionage for the sake of improving trade deals and helping private companies by passing along useful info they gleaned from spying on the Japanese. It had become so common that companies getting the info would joke that it had “fallen off the back of a truck.” Of course, many have argued that the US is obviously engaged in similar activity. The most damning evidence, of course, was the release a few months ago of details of how the NSA spied on Petrobas, the Brazilian oil giant.

The US has sworn up, down, left and right that it does not use the NSA for economic espionage. In August, the Department of Defense issued a statement to the Washington Post saying:

“The Department of Defense does engage” in computer network exploitation, according to an e-mailed statement from an NSA spokesman, whose agency is part of the Defense Department. “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

Those triple stars were in the original. That was before the Petrobas revelation. After that came out, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tried to explain that away, arguing that it was not for economic espionage at all, but to get a better sense of whether there was an upcoming financial crisis.

What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.

Of course, it’s a very blurry line between using that information to create policies that help US companies and just giving the information to them directly. Perhaps it’s true that the NSA doesn’t hand out the information it gleans from foreign companies directly to US companies to help them understand, say, how a foreign product is built — but reverse engineering is pretty good these days, so it’s doubtful that too many US companies need that kind of help anyway. Instead, it seems to be just as nefarious, and certainly a form of economic espionage, to use this information to create trade policies that clearly boost certain US interests.

But that’s certainly happening. The NY Times’ giant profile of the NSA’s activities that came out earlier this month included a list of “customers” for the NSA. Pay close attention to the last two on the list:

This huge investment in collection is driven by pressure from the agency’s “customers,” in government jargon, not only at the White House, Pentagon, F.B.I. and C.I.A., but also spread across the Departments of State and Energy, Homeland Security and Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative.

Now, one can make a (potentially compelling) argument that of course it’s US policy to try to improve situations for American companies. And that’s perfectly reasonable — but it seems like a clearly bogus argument for the NSA to say it “does not do economic espionage” just because it (allegedly) does not do one particular tidbit of economic espionage: directly handing companies information. If, instead, it’s spying on foreign companies and then providing that information to the USTR, you can assure that two things are happening: economic policies that help the special interests that have a close relationship with the USTR are getting extra favorable policies in their place, and some of that information is seeping out of the USTR to those companies anyway.

And we’ve already seen, repeatedly, how the USTR appears to have very cozy relations with certain legacy industries, while having almost no relationship at all with younger, more innovative industries. As such, not only is the NSA clearly engaged in economic espionage, it’s doing so to the detriment of actual innovation and economic growth, by using this information to prop up legacy industries, while handicapping the innovative industries.

Filed Under: australia, brazil, economic espionage, japan, nsa, surveillance, ustr
Companies: petrobas

Latest Leak Shows NSA Engaging In Economic Espionage — Not Fighting Terrorism

from the flying-pigs dept

As more and more information about the NSA’s global surveillance capabilities emerges through leaks of material obtained by Edward Snowden, the US authorities have been playing the terrorist card heavily. That is, they concede that they have been spying on pretty much everyone, but claim that it was only to fight terrorism, and thus to save lives. In particular, the NSA insists it is not spying on anyone for the purposes of industrial espionage — here’s what it wrote in an email to the Washington Post on the subject just a couple of weeks ago:

> “The Department of Defense does engage” in computer network exploitation, according to an e-mailed statement from an NSA spokesman, whose agency is part of the Defense Department. “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

Despite the screaming asterisks, like many other statements on the subject from the NSA, this one turns out to be untrue, as the Brazlian TV program “Fantastico” revealed on Sunday, drawing on new leaked documents provided by Glenn Greenwald, who lives in the country:

> The internal computer network of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant partly owned by the state, has been under surveillance by the NSA, the National Security Agency of the United States. > > … > > a top secret presentation dated May 2012 is used by the NSA to train new agents step-by-step how to access and spy upon private computer networks — the internal networks of companies, governments, financial institutions — networks designed precisely to protect information. > > The name of Petrobras — Brazil’s largest company — appears right at the beginning, under the title: “MANY TARGETS USE PRIVATE NETWORKS.” > > … > > The name of Petrobras appears on several slides, as the training goes deeper in explaining how data from the target companies is monitored.

The Fantastico article goes on to give more information about the attacks on the company’s internal networks, and points out that Petrobras is hardly a terrorist organization:

> The yearly profits of Petrobras are over 280 billion reais — US$ 120 billion. More than the GDP of many countries. And there are plenty of motives for spies to want access to the company’s protected network.

Here’s one of them:

> For example, the details of each lot in an auction [of oil drilling rights] set for next month: for exploration of the Libra Field, in the Bay of Santos, part of the Pre-salt. Whether the spies had access to this information is one of the questions the Brazilian government will have to put to the United States. > > Former Petrobras Director Roberto Villa considers this the greatest auction in the history of oil exploration. “It’s a very peculiar auction. The auction of an area where we already know there’s oil, there’s no risk”, he says. What no one else should know, Villa says, is which are the richest lots. “Petrobras knows. And I hope only they know.” He considers that such information, if stolen, could give someone an advantage. “Someone would have an edge. If this information was leaked and someone else has obtained it, he would be in a privileged position at the auction. He’ll know where to invest and where not to. It’s a handy little secret.”

Once again, the NSA’s rebuttal of these claims is weak and unconvincing:

> It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing. > > We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries’ economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets.

Or, you know, it could provide US companies with insights about which were the best lots in the forthcoming auction of seabed areas for oil exploration, or about highly-specialized deep-sea oil extraction technology, in which Petrobas is a world leader. After all, why wouldn’t the NSA drop some useful hints about such things to US companies as a way of justifying its huge budget?

This latest attack on Brazil’s flagship enterprise will make the country’s already strained relationship with the US even more difficult. But the Fantastico story on the NSA program, which is apparently called “Royal Net”, is about much more than those bilateral relations:

> Besides Petrobras, e-mail and internet services provider Google’s infrastructure is also listed as a target. The company, often named as collaborating with the NSA, is shown here as a victim. > > Other targets include French diplomats — with access to the private network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France — and the SWIFT network, the cooperative that unites over ten thousand banks in 212 countries and provides communications that enable international financial transactions.

There are also first details of other, hitherto unknown, spying programs and capabilities:

> The NSA presentation contains documents prepared by the GCHQ — the British Spy agency, from a country that appears as an ally of the United States in spying. The British agency shows how two spy programs operate. “Flying Pig” and “Hush Puppy” also monitor private networks which carry supposedly secure information. These networks are known as TLS/SSL. > > The presentation explains how data is intercepted, through an attack known as “Man in the Middle”. In this case, data is rerouted to the NSA central, and then relayed to its destination, without either end noticing.

This confirmation that man-in-the-middle attacks are used by the NSA to intercept data, along with detailed information about the high-level economic espionage that is going on, underlines why the Fantastico report is so important, and why it is well-worth reading in its entirety.

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Filed Under: brazil, economic espionage, nsa, nsa surveillance, surveillance
Companies: petrobas