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by zorked·13y ago·view on hn ↗
I just watched the TV report. It's interesting. The slides mention as targets: Petrobrás, French diplomacy, SWIFT and Google. Everything pointed towards MITM attacks against VPNs and SSL. There was no reference to what data was stolen.

The NSA actually called the program and said that none of their spying was used to give unfair advantages to American companies but they wouldn't comment further.

There were slides showing that they perform MITM against Google, as well as a slide that listed diplomatic and economic espionage as NSA goals.

4 comments
"The NSA actually called the program and said that none of their spying was used to give unfair advantages to American companies but they wouldn't comment further."

Nobody goes to the NSA and submits an RFP for insider information. Such information flows through informal, undocumented channels, e.g. an agent moonlighting at a bank or speaking freely to a friend.

Given (a) the value of the information and (b) the level of integration between information industries and the NSA, I think it improbable that this information hasn't leaked. Presuming the prior, it would be expected to dis-proportionately benefit firms who are closer to the leaky source, i.e. U.S. firms, a benefit which increases proportional to how quickly said information goes "stale". One may argue that Brasilian firms similarly benefit by being closer to the ultimate source, the Brasilian government. But that, in turn, is similar to the old Deutsch logic that bribes paid to foreign governments should be tax deductible to German firms - it's fighting fire with fire.

Some hitherto unreleased slides were shown in the video. Some screencaps are here: http://imgur.com/a/FD5VM

Of interest:

* A stolen CA (Diginotar) private key was used to implement at least one MITM attack.

* MITM attack vs. Google.

* Huawei is apparently another "target".

* They can monitor Tor on the metadata level at least.

Here's the report, in English, that aired on Globo tonight. It details most everything you've mentioned.

http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents...

Also of note there: claims that NSA does routine MITM attacks on SSL/TLS. The relevant programs are "Hush Puppy" and "Flying Pig", mentioned around the middle of the article; the description is a little garbled (I suspect translation artifacts), but the basics are clear enough.
They broke SWIFT ?! WTF! That's every inter-bank transfer - I mean everything. If they have swift they have everything. I should have thought of it but really this is breathtaking.