How Did Wikileaks Do It? 973
grassy_knoll writes "Related to the Wikileaks video recently released and discussed here, the NY Times reports: 'Somehow — it will not say how — WikiLeaks found the necessary computer time to decrypt a graphic video, released Monday, of a United States Army assault in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The video has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube, and has been replayed hundreds of times in television news reports.'
The article is light on details; what encryption algorithm was used? Was this a brute force attack? Did someone pass the decryption keys to Wikileaks along with the video? Something else?"
Re:They did it for the money. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not why they did anything, but how they did it. They have employees, need to pay for servers and other services. If some organization in the world should get donations, it's Wikileaks. Even democratic nations should support them, but I can clearly see why not. Instead even US tries to shut them down and have been spying and interrogating their workers.
The article states they posted this three months ago:
“Have encrypted videos of U.S. bomb strikes on civilians. We need super computer time,"
supercomputer (Score:5, Interesting)
The original encrypted file (Score:3, Interesting)
Here you can find the original file
http://leaks.telecomix.org/
http://leaks.telecomix.org/cm.rda
Did not analyze
Of course there's the little problem.... (Score:1, Interesting)
They kind of screwed up the facts.
Here's some shots of the video with the so called "civilians" (actually armed insurgents) and shots of the Pentagon report explaining the results of the research:
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201878.php [mypetjawa.mu.nu]
This is a non story, a grab for attention.
Re:It was leaked. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're assuming the keys were in a form that could be easily shared. I very much doubt that military encryption works that way. Having your keys in a file on your PC my be adequate for you and me, but when Blofeld is out to steal your plans for invading Normandy, you need to make it a little harder for him to steal access.
And of course, it wasn't brute force. That approach was obsolete even back in Turing's day.
Re:They also left out a good deal of context (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ah, so it is the bias, not the money you object (Score:3, Interesting)
What run up to the release? This was posted months before there was any kind of media frenzy. Rather than leave yourself open to charges of 'making shit up' or 'spreading misinformation,' you could post links to these sources.
And to be clear, what I saw on those tapes was not 'a mistake made in wartime' any more than My Lai was. It was a deliberate massacre of civilians.
Re:Wikileaks = Enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
I would question who classified the video and why.
Explicit guidance exists that you are not to classify something just because it is embarrassing. What national secret is protected by classifying this video? Security Guidance says that the use of the SECRET classification is to prevent harm to the security of the US.
I believe an investigation needs to be opened into the misuse of classification for this video.
Re:They also left out a good deal of context (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Did you even watch the footage? (Score:2, Interesting)
Did you even watch the video?
Re:They also left out a good deal of context (Score:3, Interesting)
Everyone I've discussed the video with has agreed that it does look like the guy was preparing to fire an RPG from around the corner. It's really unfortunate if it was actually a camera with a telephoto lens, but I still think it was a reasonable assumption to make.
It's the second half of that video -- the part that seems to be ignored by that website of yours -- that baffles me. A van rides up to recover the last limping guy -- both the van and him showing no signs of hostility -- and the guys still beg their superiors for an OK to fire.
Encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikileaks made a public request for computer time to help decrypt it, and announced they had succeeded some six weeks later.
This is odd because it seems slow for a very weak encryption and far, far too fast for strong encryption.
Likewise, why would a whistleblower leak an encrypted video without the key?
I'm not doubting Wikileaks' claims about the origin, but it is odd.
Re:GPU Parallel processing (Score:3, Interesting)
Encryption is far behind the current power of hardware these days.
Wow, you really have no idea how cryptography works, do you? Adding one bit to the key length doubles[1] the search space. My computer can test about a million AES keys a second. It's a bit old now, so a recent GPU could probably do a couple of orders of magnitude more than that. If you are brute forcing AES-128 then you need to test 2^128 keys. A hundred million is about 2^26. Let's say 2^28 (assume we have a few GPUs). That gives 2^100 seconds, or around 4x10^22 years. Well, on average you only need to check half of the keys, so that gives you 2x10^22 years. Let's assume computers get 1000 times faster in the next few days, now we're down to 2x10^19 years. There are around half a billion computers in the world, so let's use all of them. Let's round up to a billion (10^8) to make it easier. Now we're down to 2x10^11 years.
For reference, the age of the universe is around 1.3x10^9 years. So, if computers were a couple of orders of magnitude faster than they are and you were able to use all of them, it would take about a hundred times the current age of the universe to crack a single AES-128 key (with a brute force attack).
Now, you might be saying, Moore's law tells us that the available computing power doubles every 18 months. How many times would it have to double for us to be able to crack AES in one year (with all of the computers in the world working on it). Take the base 2 log of our time and we get 37.5, or around 56 years (if Moore's Law holds).
In practical terms, there are some attacks that are better than brute force, but on the other hand you probably aren't allowed to use all of the computers in the world when hunting for the key. AES-128 is probably good for a few decades yet though. Adding one bit to the key length of a symmetric cypher doubles the time taken to crack it normally, but this isn't quite true for AES (some attacks work better on the longer-keyed variants).
Cracking a random AES key at the moment, however, is completely unfeasible.
[1] In theory. For some attacks it multiplies it by some constant factor slightly less than two.
Re:It was leaked. (Score:3, Interesting)
I very much doubt that military encryption works that way.
You are probably thinking of an AN/PYQ-10 or for the old timers (?) a AN/CYZ-10 or a truly ancient KYK-13
Generally end users are not trusted to properly enter the keys, although some devices allow manual rekeying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:National_Security_Agency_encryption_devices [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not true (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't look at the website, watch the video.
Weapons clearly shown at 3:33, 3:36, 3:50, 4:06.
Re:Who cares how? The better question is why the b (Score:5, Interesting)
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
What is non-factual about this ?
Re:They also left out a good deal of context (Score:1, Interesting)
You're obviously not a Star Wars person. There are many other sites with competent analysis.
Here's one:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/collateral-murder-baghdad-anything
And here is another post at the mypetjawa site that CLEARLY shows an insurgent carrying an RPG:
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201889.php
Re:The original encrypted file (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, okay.. that's a lot better. It's an openssl encrypted file (magic=53 61 6c 74 65 64 5f 5f, "Salted__"). Most likely it was DES or RC4 encrypted if they were able to decrypt in 3 months. I only downloaded the first few kb...
So, uh, NOT MILITARY GRADE ENCRYPTION, but perhaps encrypted by someone in the military.
Re:They also left out a good deal of context (Score:4, Interesting)
As the sibling post notes, the Fox News article mentions that the truck that pulled up was unmarked. No red cross/crescent, no "ambulance", no nothing. If they're assuming that the people they just killed were enemy combatants because they had AKs and RPGs, then the next logical assumption is that the unmarked van that pulls up is affiliated with those people and is therefore also a target.
So, no, Fox didn't fail to mention that small detail.
Why are we assuming it was ever encrypted? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps Wikileaks ( or the submitter ) simply setup a few receiver stations to capture the video footage over the air.
Now regarding this "encryption" buzzword being thrown around by Wikileak's PR and journalist, I'm guessing they heard something like "the video feed was transmitted as 64QAM over Ku-band 12.8475Ghz" and thinks all those technical jargons means "encryption".
Re:It was leaked. (Score:3, Interesting)
But how does that affect the patriotism of the whistleblower, as GP mentioned?
Re:GPU Parallel processing (Score:1, Interesting)
Why can't say 65536 bit keys or even 16-256x that be used to prevent unauthorized decryption from ever happening?
Re:supercomputer (Score:1, Interesting)
That could be a great plausible deniability cover if the video came to them unencrypted
The original file (Score:1, Interesting)
If anyone is interested I was part of the decryption effort back in December, the original file was merely a encrypted zip file with a single wmv file in it.
brute forcing it using fzipcrack is by no means easy but still doable with enough resources as well as decent dictionary attacks.
Re:occam's razor (Score:5, Interesting)
What this video shows seems brutal because you are not exposed to military situations on a daily basis. Try to put yourself in their shoes *with no preconceptions*. While watching the video imagine that your family is walking down that street and that these people may be trying to kill them. Then watch the video in a windy, noisy, hot, shaking location (maybe in a car with the windows down and the heat cranked up and the radio blaring.) Now decide whether the guy leaning around the corner and pointing and sighting along a big long tube at your family is a valid target. Now decide if you'd pull the trigger or not, knowing that, if you're wrong, your whole family is dead.
What you're engaging in is damn Monday Morning Quarterbacking at its worst.
Re:Not true (Score:3, Interesting)
Then how do you explain the van incident?
Re:maybe (Score:3, Interesting)
Try watching it. People *inside* the armed forces leaked this. They feel its wrong enough to leak. People who were in Iraq an saw the video also think its pretty bad.
I watched it. I found the event to be pretty bad but I'm one of the (apparent) few here that doesn't buy the way the event is being couched by wikileaks. But I think it was the right thing to leak it simply because the air of cover-up around it. These sorts of things should be vetted in the light of day.
But shooting a Family that did nothing but stop to pick a wounded man on the side of the road, is nothing short of a war crime. And the "don't bring kids to battle" doesn't work when its the US that took the battle to Baghdad (Where, shock horror, families live with children).
The problem I have with this interpretation is that, on first viewing the video, I couldn't see the children until ground forces were carrying them out of the van. It wasn't until the very nicely done zoom-and-crop job that they stand out. With that in mind, you see footage of a van showing up to pick up wounded. And that has me wondering how often this happened in that environment. Was this a first-time event? Or were troops often dealing with bodies and weapons disappearing?
Re:They also left out a good deal of context (Score:3, Interesting)
We are not trained in the rules of war. We do not face these life or death decisions every day and hold the lives of other men in the palms of our hands. We will not take the video and watch it once, in real time, with no foreknowledge, and try to make decisions based on that. We, who are not in that position, will do what has been done with this video.
We will go through the video in slow motion. We will use the after-action report to point out the civilians (but not the identified RPG toting fellow.) We will zoom in to insane levels and use our after-knowledge to point out that maybe, just maybe, you can separate the blurry blob in the passenger window into two individuals. We have the luxury to scroll back and forth through the video. We don't have the sword of Damocles hanging over our friend's heads ready to plunge down if we make a wrong decision so we can be leisurely in our perusal and consideration. And someone who has spent weeks going over the video can give us a nice written opinion of what to think before we even view it.
The military knew this video would be used for propaganda by the insurgents. "Look, they shoot unarmed cameramen and children!"
The highest number of casualties in 2007 was still coming from RPG attacks against vehicles. This group had an RPG and multiple rounds. The pictures from the reporter's camera show the side of a humvee about a block away. The very vehicles the Apache was there to protect.
I will not engage in Monday Morning Quarterbacking on this video. If you can go back and watch it without preconceptions, you'd probably come to the same conclusion. It is clear, however, that you do not come to this without preconceptions. You assume that the non-release of the video was a "coverup" rather than any other possibility (For example, it demonstrates exactly how accurate [or inaccurate] the Apache's gun is, how good our FLIR video cameras are, what zoom level we can reach, how to use buildings to block the line-of-sight, etc, etc. that could be very useful to the insurgents. Not to mention a lot of information about when they will be cleared to fire, etc.) You assume the military is embarrassed by the video, even though, having worked with former military, that the most telling thing about this video is that the American troops came through it unharmed which is considered a "win" by command. You also assume that all the video the military has must be just like this. Why hasn't wikileaks put out the videos of Apaches gunning down roadside bombers burying IEDs and the ones with pickup trucks full of high explosives? Where are the videos of them gunning down clear militants on WikiLeaks? The answer is that those can't be "Monday Morning Quarterbacked" the same way. We watch those and they're just as completely justified no matter how many times it's watched.
How many of those have you seen? Or do you assume they don't exist because you haven't seen them. I have, and it puts this one in context. It's a war, in a war zone. People die. Sometimes people who shouldn't. It's an ugly truth. I assume that, since you're outraged at these reporters' deaths, that you also have watched the Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg videos? Ask yourself which set of people were killed more unjustly.
Re:Not true (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can't wage war from the moral high ground, you should look yourself in the mirror long and hard and ask if you should be waging it in the first place.
Schneier explained the drone thing (Score:3, Interesting)
From memory (you can look it up on his blog). The NSA has come up with drastic requirements for key management for encryption, and every time the military encrypts something it has to obey them. That's not such a problem for control data, such as commands from the operator to the drone; but it's unusable for high bandwidth, high maintenance stuff like the video feed. Local support has to be able to access it, but they can't handle the requirements for key management; so they had to forgo encryption for that altogether. The solution would be for the NSA to establish another tier for encryption requirement with lesser requirements.
Re:They also left out a good deal of context (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean the guy turning around at 3:45 doesn't have an RPG? Look at http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201889.php [mypetjawa.mu.nu]
Now, some that guy is now behind that wall where the camera operator is crouching taking a picture of an allied APC http://www.scribd.com/doc/29487634/Centcom-FOIA?page=41 [scribd.com] (possible it seems for bragging rights later based on that photogs other shots). If I were wanting to blow that up I'd crouch by the wall for cover to observe then move and fire - the pilots appear to believe the armed men are going to fire imminently and clearly become urgent to remove the threat. The taking of photos is the precursor to the RPG being used.
Re:Ah, so it is the bias, not the money you object (Score:5, Interesting)
Pure horse shit.
Did you listen to the radio chatter? Did you read the captions supplied?
Once again, for the obtuse who refuse to look, listen, and think:
That gunship was called in by a ground unit, Hotel 26, which was under fire. Bullets were being fired at a US ground unit from this location. The gunship came in, and cleared away armed personnel. In fact, that reporter was embedded with an enemy unit, just like reporters have been embedded with US forces. The only mistake made in the entire video was the identification of a camera as an RPG.
Personally, if it were my call, I probably wouldn't have fired on the van. I say, "probably". I might have, had I actually been there. But, the van had no internationally recognized markings on it - no Red Cross, no Red Crescent. I saw people in a van aiding and abetting a member of an armed group that had fired upon our side on the ground.
Unless and until you understand that Hotel 26 had taken fire from this area, and almost certainly THESE ARMED PEOPLE, then you have zero understanding of what you saw on the video.
Re:Did you even watch the footage? (Score:4, Interesting)
The military investigation that followed this event found that there were no AK-47s and no RPGs, just cameras with long lenses.
As was pointed out at 3:45 - 3:46 in the short video and a capture posted by another person: http://i41.tinypic.com/343tb0j.jpg [tinypic.com] -- that's either an RPG or a collapsed tripod with a conical camera on top.
Re:Not true (Score:3, Interesting)
Some have called the RPG a tripod, but have ignored the fact that war photographers don't use tripods because they slow them down. There's also the fact that an RPG was found at the scene, and nobody else in the group was carrying one, so this must be the RPG.
Some have called the AK-47 a jacket, but ignore the fact the jackets don't glint in the sunlight when they are turned to a certain angle. Only things that are made of metal do that. You can also see the general shape of the AK-47, including the barrel and the magazine.
Re:Did you even watch the footage? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't know if it's in the short version, but in the long version after the attack has finished and the ground forces have moved in to the area, there are two references to an RPG round under one of the victims of the attack. The first is saying it looks like there's an RPG round under one of them, and a while later someone asks if the round is still live (or something to that effect, I forget the exact terminology) and the response is that is still live. So at that point it seems pretty certain there was at the very least a round for an RPG in the group, which makes the theory of an RPG launcher being present much more likely.
I agree about the attack on the van seeming to be unprovoked, and was certainly a case of the gunner seeing what they wanted/expected to see. In the previous story on the subject someone mentioned that the "insurgents" often have someone come by after a battle to collect weapons and bodies, so perhaps from the point of view of the Apache crew it was expected behaviour, leading to a false assumption.
The thing about shots being fired was I think regarding the ground forces. There's a part where the subtitle says something about "the area we took fire from" (when someone in the helo is speaking), even though the audio clearly says "where you were taking fire from" (again I'm paraphrasing since I can't remember the exact text). But at no point did I hear the pilot/gunner saying they themselves were under fire. As I understand it, the Apaches were called in by ground forces who were under attack by small arms fire. There seems to be a bit of confusion here as the radio chatter suggests the people the helo engaged were on a roof, and the pilot jumps in to clarify that everyone they engaged was at ground level.
Another thing I found disturbing was that after a while the pilot asks if the ground forces need them to engage anywhere else, and they're directed to an abandoned/under construction building which some enemies are in. There seems to be no doubt that there's bad guys in it and it's a legitimate target. They get some distance and come around to put a Hellfire in it, and another man is seen walking past the front of the building - doesn't seem to be going in, and gives every appearance of just being a civilian who happens to be walking past the building. The gunner has a good few seconds with this guy in his camera, but fires the missile anyway.
There's two subsequent missile attacks on the building where a small crowd has gathered in front to look, and I can grant they didn't have much choice there since they had no way of dispersing the crowd. But that first one seemed to be entirely at their discretion and they could've waited for that guy to get clear.
Also, I fully agree about it being covered up afterwards. Yes, it would've been embarrassing and caused a bit of an outrage, but I don't think anyone was acting outside of the rules of engagement in effect at the time given the situation. Of course, any fallout probably would've been directed at those who set these rules, which probably explains why they decided to try to cover it up.
Re:Not true (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a gunner with a certain European airforce and it was clear they did not verify their targets as they were too concerned with getting a firing solution. It was also clear to me that those cameramen were not carrying RPGs and the uncertainty of what they were carrying warranted more attention. The attitude within the video is not a surprise though, it's almost an American trademark.
Re:Who cares how? The better question is why the b (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, if the chain of command mistakenly believes you've got a rocket launcher, the ROE permit an indiscriminate and unprovoked attack.
Mistakenly? I'm pretty sure he said they found not one, but TWO RPG launchers and warheads.
The wikileaks video is heavily biased. As others have said, they should have just released the unedited video and let people decide for themselves.
Re:Hindsight is useless. So try foresight next tim (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish I could type harder to get this to show up in HUGE FREAKING LETTERS, since some troll-mod put you up +insightful.
They did have weapons, which were positively identified before the helicopter fired. The only ambiguity was that they did not identify the cameras as such. The journalists were NOT wearing identification vests. It was not a group of unarmed civilians. IT WAS NOT A GROUP OF UNARMED CIVILIANS!!!1!!eleventyone THEY WERE ABOUT TO ATTACK A CONVOY.
Read the report before you keep repeating this uninformed drek
http://www.scribd.com/doc/29468022/6-2nd-Brigade-Combat-Team-15-6-Investigation [scribd.com]
Re:maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
It was not a fucking accident.
Criminals who should pay for thier crimes (Score:2, Interesting)