Category Archives: Security

Energy, Food, History, Security

Armies Around the World Testing Electric Bikes (Yet Again)

1 Comment

A nod to military bike history can be found in a new article about the British military called “Charge of the light brigade: Army Parachute Regiment trial electric bikes”

Eighty years ago, wartime necessitated the introduction of the Royal Enfield WD/RE ‘Flying Flea’ and the Welbike, which were parachuted into occupied Europe, providing a means for airborne and assault troops to transmit messages. […] “Motorcycles have been in military use ever since they were invented. So, what we’re doing is nothing new – what’s new is the electrification side of it and the opportunities that presents…they can be used in a way where a petrol engine would just give your position away.”

Electric bikes have many obvious advantages, already getting a lot of attention from special forces in America: given low sound and heat profiles they are much safer, faster, lighter and easier to maneuver than liquid fuel bikes, not to mention an easier and safer supply chain.

What’s not to like about electric bikes?

Even more broadly, the bike in most cases is a far better tool for modern military application than any automobile including trucks. It’s not really any kind of news or secret.

Without a Motorcycle in Kandahar, ‘You Are Like a Prisoner’. A foreshadowing of how the Afghan war would be won and lost by distributed / localization networks, hit & run tactics, and terrain advantages.

See also:

In terms of the US Army, consider how they rode mountain-bike field tests way back in 1896, as I’ve written here before, so the Ogden Bolton electric bike from 1895 might be a better “nothing new” reference than a smelly, greasy 1939 Royal Enfield.

Source: ElectricBike

Speaking of references, in 1991 there was even a book published that detailed a century of bikes used in war. It’s kind of amazing to think how many better references there may be versus that WWII Enfield.

Swiss book that gets far less attention than it should

In WWI soldiers allegedly even were pulling heavy gear into battle using bicycles as if some kind of direct replacement for horse power. You’d think electricity would be on their mind.

Source: Leeds Bikes

Journalists in 1914 indeed mention that a bike has a major advantage because it can be dropped flat to the ground and completely hidden from enemy fire, which seems an odd point to make today yet it was an innovation in military thinking at the time.

Being completely hidden, of course, is again why the electric motor signature has been so compelling for 100 years versus oil burners.

And from there, the 1938 McDonald seems even more relevant, especially because by this time Japan was using bicycles in major offensive campaigns (1937 invasion of China).

Source: ElectricBike

Given the superiority of electric, it’s a wonder anyone bothered with gasoline bikes at all.

It seems all too easy to find evidence of electric bikes in military projects throughout history that are far more relevant to today’s British paratrooper than an Enfield of WWII. Here’s a good one:

In 1997, [US Government was] seeking a way to move military troops and equipment without the heat or noise signatures of a combustion engine and due to Montague’s experience in the field, they won the grant to develop the Tactical Electric No Signature (TENS) Mountain Bike. Montague worked closely with Currie Technologies on their earliest electric systems to equip these military models with the best electric motor technology of the time. Currie is still making electric drive systems used on many e-bikes today.

US military Tactical Electric No Signature (TENS) Mountain Bike. Source: Montague bikes

Someone in the US military surely thought TENS would be an hilarious acronym for an 18-speed electric bicycle.

So what really is new? The oil industry seems to be losing its death grip. In retrospect, bikes never should have been anything but electric this whole time.

I mean I know it’s fashionable to say electric bikes have short range, have trouble keeping a charge in extreme weather… but let’s be honest about such nonsense.

You can’t pull gasoline out of thin air or water like you can electricity. Even diesel has potential to be created from local sources that gasoline clearly does not. I’ve always found electricity available in even the most remote locations, places oil was nowhere to be found.

In fact, WWII motorcyclists reminisce about their leaky and wasteful fuel cans, which could never serve modern operations.

“We had flimsy cans of petrol, so you cut them in half, pierced it with a lot of holes, three-quarter fill it with earth, pour petrol and put a match on it and it would burn for a long while. That’s how we used to brew up [tea] while we’re on the road!”

With an electric bike he would have just heated water using a simple pad or pole plugged into the battery, having none of the signature/footprint issues of a setting that petrol can on fire.

History, Sailing, Security

USS Pueblo Capture by North Korea: Weak Translation to Blame?

2 Comments

USS Pueblo at the War Museum, Pyongyang

An inability to translate clear signals is perhaps the most interesting lesson I’ve found from an analysis of North Korea’s 1968 capture of the USS Pueblo spy ship.

The following paragraph comes from unclassified CIA files: Studies in Intelligence Vol 59, No. 1 (Extracts, March 2015).

The ship would gain little insight or warning from monitoring the North’s clear-voice communications because the rusty language skills of two Korean linguists belatedly assigned to the ship’s SIGINT detachment were not up to the job of rapidly translating fast-moving tactical traffic. At a tactical level, NSA observed that had the linguists been qualified they would have understood a full 20 minutes before the first shots were fired at Pueblo that North Korean patrol boats were maneuvering to fire.

The CIA might be making a subtle yet very poignant argument that all the best high-tech in the world doesn’t amount to a hill of beans when basic skills and wisdom for placement and use are missing.

As a corollary, someone thought it a good idea to mount exposed machine guns on the high deck of this “oceanographic research” vessel — too small to defend against threats, too large to be denied, and completely exposed to ice and enemy fire in a way nobody ever could want to use in bone-chilling hostile waters.

USS Pueblo

The CIA also has pointed out key material for stolen cryptography machines were leaked to the KGB around the same time by a US Navy Chief Warrant Officer, John Walker.

For a KGB station chief personally to meet a prospective agent was unprecedented, but Solomatin spent the next two hours talking privately with Walker. The American favorably impressed him by saying nothing about love for communism, which most phonies emphasized. This was strictly business.

That wasn’t a backdoor risk from engineering, but rather a front-door insider threat, made possible due to weakness in key management processes.

Because the KW-7 used key-lists it was considered expendable as long as the monthly key-list cards themselves were not compromised. […] KW-7 cryptographic machines were most certainly lost prior to the unit that was aboard
Pueblo. […] he one thing that the Soviets or the East Germans did not obtain was the key-lists. They may have possessed a few key-cards at various times but John Walker provided the constant flow that was needed to make penetration of US Naval communications by the Soviets such a continuing success. […] The flaw in the system was the assumption that the outdated key-cards had been destroyed. Walker certified he had destroyed the cards, when in actuality he simply took them and gave them to the Soviets. No one verified that Walker had indeed destroyed the previous month’s cards.

I find this all worth consideration today given how journalists repeatedly cast a negative light on the chief of security at platforms like Facebook (e.g. Alex Stamos), who clearly and repeatedly failed to deploy basic proficiency in spaces where information risks were known to be the highest.

Did the NSA come to any similar conclusions as the CIA about this fundamental failure in risk monitoring (skill for clear-voice translation), let alone management of how and where crypto should sail or not?

As I stood there Don Peppard came up behind me and asked if I had any idea of where we were. I said that I didn’t have the foggiest idea. When we’d left Japan and headed north, my knowledge of geography must have been on hold — it simply never dawned on me that the only countries west of us had to be China, Korea or Russia. Where were we?

On 28 July 1969, a document in the NSA files called “Report on the Assessment of Cryptographic Damage“, offered itself as the final assessment of the incident:

Source: NSA Declassified Documents

That rosy picture of risk definitely wasn’t carried into the 2015 CIA files, which argue significant damage was done by compromise of intelligence gathering materials as well as the link to Walker.

Congress was on to these things right away in their 1969 “Inquiry Into the U.S.S. Pueblo and EC-121 Plane Incidents: Hearings, Ninety-first Congress, First Session” (US Government Printing Office, page 729):

The National Security Agency, which questioned the risk of the Pueblo mission, had neither the responsibility nor the authority to do so. […] There is a great difference of opinion at high intelligence levels as to whether or not the loss of the Pueblo was very serious in terms of our national security and national intelligence effort.

The NSA today offers readers a raft (no pun intended) of related documents available to the public, which purports to be lessons learned.

Indeed, much of this history is directly relevant to the nature of problems faced by security officers today.

I just don’t see the clear-eyed analysis from the NSA. And in current context I wonder if anyone at Facebook security (often hired out of the NSA) thought about the Pueblo incident before claiming they didn’t anticipate basic translation skill or insider threats would be so important given all their fancy communication equipment being repurposed today in hostile countries.

Food, History, Security

“He seemed to find it surprising soldiers would have good things to say about him”

Leave a comment

A fascinating profile of the US Army’s top enlisted leader, Sgt Maj Michael Grinston, reminds me very much of the brilliant modesty found in American heroes like President Grant.

…while much of Grinston’s motivation over the years stems from his belief and desire to be with and help soldiers, that doesn’t mean his soldiers always liked him…. “I was mean,” he said. “There’s no way I could lie to you, if you were to talk to my soldiers … I was not nice, I was not fun. I wouldn’t want me as a drill sergeant.” That’s not all there is to it, of course. Soldiers who have served with him described him as technically proficient — impressively so. […] To those who know him, that is the real Michael Grinston — a soldier who confronts things head-on, not some soft leader who is more focused on nail polish than winning wars. […] Despite the many things he’s accomplished over his long career, he seemed to find it surprising that the soldiers who he served with would have overwhelmingly good things to say about him. When he learned that they did, he responded, “I don’t know why.”

Clearly this is a man who cares deeply about others, who works hard and takes care of those in need. He is the very definition of the “Alpha” personality, the doting pack leader — a proficient parent who can take on development of dependents (the “Betas” capable mostly of caring only for themselves) to help ensure they will survive.

Interesting to read that being so good at leadership by establishing care made him perceived both as mean (high Alpha standards for his pack) and also soft (applying standards in a way that undermines the influence of Beta personalities).

It reminded me of an old post I wrote about how wolves in reality prefer fishing to hunting since risk of casualty is lower.

History, Security

NSA Finds Lost “Rare Italian Cipher Machine” in its Collection

Leave a comment

The NSA in October 2021 posted a headline with the interesting title “Long lost and rare Italian cipher machine found“. That sounds innocent enough, yet check out the wobbly history they published along with it:

At the outbreak of WWII in 1939, Nazi Germany’s Enigma encryption machine stood as the state-of-the art method for sending and receiving secret messages. It wasn’t until 1940 that English mathematician Alan Turing, and the team at Bletchley Park, cracked the daily changes Berlin made to its cipher system, and helped the Allied powers win the war.

Technically those words are not wrong, yet the paragraph really obscures some important back-story. For years (last decade, really) the British have tried to raise flags and increase awareness about Polish cryptographers who deserve full credit for breaking Nazi Germany’s Enigma in the 1930s. Almost immediately after WWI ended the Enigma started circulating and the British had been trying to break it, but they owe a lot of credit to others (the Polish).

I’ve written here before in detail about this.

…in 1927 the British government gave Enigma plans to Foss and Knox, code breakers, for review. A book about Knox’s role in breaking Enigma explains how Foss reported in theory it “could be broken given certain conditions” knowing as little as fifteen letters to figure out the machine settings. This effort led to the British and French working together on deciphering Spanish (Civil War) and Italian (invasion of Ethiopia) military communications in 1936. […] Here’s the key issue (pun not intended). Britain was not as keen to monitor German Enigma traffic until long after the French and Polish had warned of its importance. France was able to extract German documentation and gave it to Poland, who then cracked even the most advanced Enigma by 1933. That should put in perspective Britain listening to “several countries” signals in 1936. That was the year Germany was pushing into Rhineland and getting no push-back from Britain.

See how different that telling reads to the NSA tone?

It’s unfair of the NSA to even hint that in 1940 the British suddenly and initially cracked a Nazi German Enigma machine. When anyone adds a caveat to text like “the daily changes Berlin made to its cipher system”, that doesn’t really give a fair depiction of who cracked what, why and when.

I bring up an earlier history of the Enigma also because the NSA post gives us the following paragraph, which seems to gloss over the fact that the Italians had used their own Enigma-like system before Germany and it was as much state-of-art before WWII started:

While the Enigma stands out as the most famous of encryption machines, Italy, set out to develop a high-end machine to rival its war partner, Germany. In 1939 Italy’s government secretly tasked a little-known photogrammetric equipment company, Ottico Meccanica Italiana (OMI), to build a device capable of rivaling its more famous cousin.

I’m nowhere near government archives right now or I might be heading into them. Is there evidence from British military intelligence files that Italy figured out its encryption was cracked in the 1930s? In other words, what if Italy set out to develop a replacement because they realized their systems were vulnerable.

Just a guess, but maybe OMI wasn’t trying to rival a German Enigma as much as stop leaks suspected in the earlier devices, ones giving them trouble with the British and French.

The cryptomuseum supports this guess and even calls Italian machines more advanced than German ones at the start of WWII.

Cryptograph-Alpha, or Alpha, is a wheel-based electromechanical cipher machine, developed and produced in secrecy by OMI in Rome (Italy) around 1939, at the start of WWII. It was intended for use by the Italian Army (Regio Ersetico), the Air Force (Regia Aeronautica) and the Navy (Regia Marina). […] The OMI Alpha is very similar to the Zählwerk Enigma, but is more advanced.

Italian Opto-Mechanics (OMI) machines were more advanced in 1939 than the Nazi Enigma? I’m reminded of the myth of Nazis being technologically advanced, given plain facts such as “75% of the Nazi German Army relied on horses“. It’s fairly clear how ahead the Italians were when you compare features:

The 1939 OMI Alpha had a couple distinct advantages over the Nazi Engima: motorized with five cypher wheels (one more than Engima, except Hungarian G-111) and integrated paper printer for single person to operate easily (much faster than watching lamps to write the letters). Source: Crypto Museum

Keep in mind that German Engima was cracked as early as 1931 by the Polish, and an ability to continue such secretive successful efforts were basically destroyed (abruptly gifted to the British) after German invasion. Again the Crypto Museum explains:

From 1933 onwards, the Poles intercept and decrypt a significant portion of the German radio traffic. In 1938 they see an increase in the number of messages sent by the Germans and it seems clear that Germany is preparing for war. All this time, the Germans have been using a common Grundstellung (basic setting) for all Enigma traffic. On 15 September 1938 however, this procedure is abandoned.

A year later on September 1st, 1939 Germany invades Poland and the codebreakers are forced into exile under extremely difficult conditions (unable to discuss their work to get protection, yet needing it to immediately continue under protection). Or as the NYT reported on Poland’s famously proficient self-defense up to September 7th:

Westerplatte Defenders Repulse Attacks From Sea, Air and Land; 70 to 200 Polish ‘Suicide Troops’ Shatter Two German Attempts to Storm Fortress After Plane and Ship Bombardments

So while the British focused heavily on cracking mainly Spanish and Italian crypto in the mid to late 1930s, and struggled with Germany, Poland had been able to “shatter” the Nazi Enigma during that same time.

In that sense the OMI history of abruptly releasing a state-of-art machine in 1939 (combining features of Enigma, similar yet improving it) should be filed as a tangible result of 1) Poles cracking the German codes 1930s 2) British cracking the Italian codes 1930s, which led into… 3) Italians moving to protect their codes against Allied forces combining 1 & 2.

The Cryto Museum, as well as the NSA, mention how very little is known about these early Italian crypto systems but I would go even further. British cracking Italian codes may have had a decisive effect (in contrast to their failure to crack German ones), helping bring quick Allied victories in northern Africa, such as Mission 101 (a tiny force sent into Ethiopia 1940 and quickly routing Axis forces at least 10 times larger), which far too few people know anything about.