This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

The opportunities to sabotage the global supply chain were endless, Gosler told me. My mind also darted back to Times headquarters, to Sulzberger’s closet, to one of those two classified NSA documents Glenn Greenwald was so hesitant to give up—the one that laid out, in intelligence jargon, how the NSA was spiking the global supply chain. The document was a 2013 NSA intelligence budget request, outlining all the ways the agency was circumventing encryption on the web. The NSA called it the SIGINT Enabling Project, and the vast reach of the agency’s meddling and incursion into the world’s digital privacy was disguised in typical agency lingo: The SIGINT Enabling Project actively engages the US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs. These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through SIGINT collection (e.g., Endpoint, MidPoint etc.) with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems’ security remains intact. In this way, the SIGINIT Enabling approach uses commercial technology and insight to manage the increasing cost and technical challenges of discovering and successfully exploiting systems of interest within the ever-more integrated and security-focused global communications environment.