The Friedman Papers - now a torrent

[Cryddit]

Recently the NSA declassified a large cache of papers having to do with the career of William F. Friedman. 

Friedman, for those who don't know, was chief cryptographer at the NSA for many years.  Before that, he was head of research for the Armed Forces Security Agency (which became the NSA).  Before that, he was head of the US Army Signals Intelligence Service.  And before that, he trained US cryptographers for WWI.

His career spans WWI, WWII, and the early cold war era.  His papers, talks, and patents pretty much are the foundation of modern cryptography; he's the guy who published attacks on pretty much every pen-and-paper cipher system then extant, worked out the theory behind breaking rotor machines, reverse-engineered Japan's PURPLE cipher in WWII working only from intercepts, and yada yada yada....

He got interested in cryptography (published 23 monographs on the subject before WWI) in the first place because his wife, Elizabeth, was a cryptographer.  Her career is also very illustrious; mostly she did crypto for the FBI and US Coast guard, working SIGINT against gangsters and smugglers.

Anyway.  The NSA recently declassified some 52000 pages of documents (PDF files) having to do with his career.  This is pretty much everything he ever published, all his patents, and a lot of ancillary materials like schedules, memoranda, letters, personnel matters, etc.  This is as a result of an FOIA inquiry, I think. 

However, the stuff is next-best-thing-to-hidden on their site.  The files all have unhelpful numeric names and the site forbids search engines from indexing, and absolutely nothing available to civilians links into it.  Furthermore, parts of this material have been declassified before - and then "re-classified", after a tortuous legal argument that if they were able by hook or crook to get the material out of public hands they were allowed to make it secret again.  So the stuff was literally stolen from, among other places, the New York Times research files and backup microfiches and withdrawn from public view.

Anyway, my opinion is that this is all fascinating material that provides a unique and valuable perspective on America's involvement in both World Wars and the early evolution of the cold war - in addition to containing what are pretty much the foundation documents of modern cryptography.

When I discovered that this material existed, I took the liberty of downloading it all, packing it into a zip archive, and making a torrent. 

Here's a magnet link.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3QQIFEKHSJGNMMIFG5HJ4M2I2KLFD7WE&dn=FriedmanPapers.zip&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fexodus.desync.com%3a6969&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fopen.demonii.com%3a1337&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3a6969&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3a6969

Here are some trackers.

udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969
udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969
udp://open.demonii.com:1337
udp://exodus.desync.com:6969

Please get it before my machine goes down. 

[Cryddit]

Update:

It has been an interesting couple of days since I put this up.  I've been offline three times.  Twice it was for less than a minute, because when my desktop machine crashed I failed over to a laptop that I had ready, and by the time the laptop crashed the desktop machine was ready to go again. 

Rather than trying to work out exactly *why* the desktop box crashed in the first place, I swapped out the local router, re-flashed the BIOS, and swapped out the hard drive (yes, I had another one already imaged, did that before I started; call me paranoid, I guess).  Now I'm trying to recover a memory image from the old hard drive's controller, on the off chance that there may be something interesting there. 

When the desktop box went down for the second time I didn't have the laptop ready again yet; I failed over to an older desktop machine that's been in active use as a doorstop for the last year and a half since I got my new desktop box.  And I'd been unable to find anything wrong with the router I'd swapped out, so the original router went back up with it. 

I've got the original desktop box up again, but there's something wonky about the video card now.  The fan's not working, and it siezes up if it gets too hot.  So I went and logged onto a library computer and brought home a re-flash of the video card controller on a USB stick, along with instructions on how to install it.  Aaaand, I don't know what up with my laptop machine yet; somehow it doesn't recognize its ethernet port anymore, and the first BIOS reflash didn't seem to help.

It's probably all just coincidences.   

Meanwhile, I now have over 30 peers spread across a dozen countries who have the whole archive.  So I'm counting it as a success. 

[Cryddit]

I've been reading it in my spare time, and I haven't found anything that would reflect badly on them. 

Friedman was an interesting man.  Possibly something of an obsessive-compulsive, nervous, and impatient with dullards, judging by a few of the reactions others had to him, but I think that's "normal" for certain kinds of genius. 

I knew there was a controversy during and after WWII, but the perspective shift from these documents makes it look like a full scale witch-hunt - the era's equivalent to the "911 truthers" as they call themselves was convinced that the Pearl Harbor attack was either orchestrated by or known in advance by the US intelligence community, and there was a big investigation about what intercepts we had from Japan and when and whether they were decrypted. 

So far, I've not seen a shred of anything that points to anybody in the US knowing specifically about the Pearl Harbor attack before it happened.  We knew a bunch of *other* things before Pearl Harbor; The "Zimmerman Telegram" offered Mexico much of the southwestern US in exchange for coming into the war on the Axis side for example.  The crucial consideration apparently was that Mexico could take the Panama canal and allow Axis naval forces to use it, or possibly even deny its use to the US navy.  It was however, an offer which Mexico wisely declined.  We'd apparently cracked Japanese diplomatic communications enough to know that their guy in Washington was supposed to deliver a formal declaration of war a day or so before he actually did, which would have had him doing it a few hours before the Pearl Harbor attack.  In fact it seems likely that by the time the Japanese Ambassador got to the White house with the declaration, the President knew the attack had already happened but the Ambassador hadn't gotten the word yet.  Both of them had known an attack was *going* to happen, but the question of where and when apparently remained unanswered to both until the attack actually came.

It is kind of interesting that if not for the American investigation into a possible Pearl Harbor coverup, a lot of information about the UK's Bletchley Park operation that did to ENIGMA essentially the same thing the Americans did to PURPLE probably would have been buried and forgotten.  And it's also kind of interesting that while the main work of figuring out how to crack ENIGMA was done at Bletchley Park, the US evidently threw more resources into building large-scale facilities for actually decoding the intercepts and transatlantic communications about the intercepts were possible in realtime. 

None of that is new information, though. Although the level of detail from the memoranda, schedules, etc, is kind of overwhelming, that's pretty much consistent with the history as we've learnt it today. 

[Cryddit]

I'm not even guessing about who's messing with my computers or why. Or even, really, whether;  As I said, it could all be coincidences.  It's just a funny darn string of coincidences to happen all in the same couple of days, is all. 

Looks like I went offline again last night, too. Several hours this time.  Could be the video card again. 

The deal is, this is an archive of historic source documents.  This is something that got declassified fair and square, and I'm doing something that is dead solid legal for any citizen to do.  If push comes to shove there's no crime to accuse me of over this. 

And if someone is messing with my computers, then once the archive is out well beyond their ability to find and control all the copies, there should be nothing more for them to gain by continuing to do so, and I can look forward to going back to the "usual" game of managing my machines connected to the wild wild Internet. 

As for the NSA, yeah, I'll admit to not being one of their favorite monkeys.  There's a history that goes back further than just this archive.  But I'll give them respect, because we have something in common.  Most of them - like me - are doing the best they know how to do as patriots working to keep America safe.  It's just that we have maybe some different notions of what it needs to be kept safe from. 

As regards the history questions, well, it's interesting!  Several people knew there was going to be an attack because of intercepts/decryptions.  Several people strongly suspected Pearl Harbor because of tactical considerations.   But most planners didn't believe that the Japanese had the range to hit Pearl, and were considering other targets more likely.  The crucial information that meant hitting Pearl Harbor was a possibility was that Japan had managed to move a carrier group almost close enough, and that information (also from intercepts) didn't get around fast enough to put the pieces in place before the attack.  As it was, the Japanese were operating on the extreme edge of their range; strap-on fuel tanks, difficult overloaded carrier takeoffs, planned landing on fumes or less, gear removed to save weight, etc. They had ZERO safety margin or maneuvering allowance for fuel.

[protokol]

Fascinating stuff, thanks for this.

[Cryddit]

Well, my machine's been stable for the last couple of days.  Either it really was just a string of coincidences, or whoever's been messing with it decided it wasn't worth their while any more.

I've been reading the patent stuff.  Interestingly, Friedman has a patent which is still current for a rotor machine with rotor movements controlled by paper tape.  He applied for the patent nearly seventy years before it was finally granted.  Inbetween, the application was classified.

It's a sound system; secure given WWII levels of traffic, which is more than we can say of most rotor machines.  But it wouldn't stand up to cryptanalysis given what we consider "reasonable" levels of traffic today "with streaming video, etc.  Which is reasonable I suppose; if you actually built it out of matter with, you know, mass and inertia limited tensile strength and other inconvenient properties, and tried to run it at those speeds? It would just explode.

So I guess "secure for the amount of traffic it is physically capable of encoding" is a reasonable endorsement.  Once you reach the point where the physical system is the weakest link, you can derive no benefit from making the encryption better.

[Cryddit]

Those are some nice franklin notes, but I've been looking for a briefcase like that that'll fit my laptop.  I just don't trust this soft case to be crush and bend proof.

This was never a problem with my old laptop.  I got it second hand so I don't know who it was originally made for, but it has a titanium body and a little sticker that says it's warrantied (presumably for the former owner) against shocks of up to 300G.  Who the hell needs a titanium-cased laptop?  I mean, it's awesome, but by this time it's also obsolete.