This is getting pretty far afield so I thought I should at least change the subject. There was no initial withdrawal of the Japanese ambassador - it was the Japanese withdrawing from negotiations with the USA over USA demands -- essentially Japan declaring that it had given up on finding compromise and would not accede to USA demands for Japanese troop withdrawals. There were two messages related to the negotiations from the Japanese government to their embassy in Washington. The first was so long and meandering, that it has to be broken into 14 parts for transmission. Only in the final and 14th part, which was transmitted more than 24 hours after the first 13 parts were sent, did it direct the withdrawal from negotiations. This was considered within the Japanese government as tantamount to a declaration of war and it was felt that the attack would be dishonorable if it was not communicated to the USA government before the attack. Thus, there was a second much shorter message that specifically directed that the withdrawal be communicated to the US Government, if possible to the US Secretary of State, no later than 1pm later that day, Sunday December 7th. (It was immediately apparent to the American's reading this message that 1pm in Washington was dawn in Hawaii and probably the time of an attack.) There were some other messages sent about the same time including one ordering the Japanese embassy to destroy all cipher machines and codes. There were delays in USA decryption and translation of all of these messages. Then there was delay in getting what was clearly a threat of war to someone in Washington high enough to take action. But those were accomplished more than two hours before the attack. (The Japanese embassy in Washington was by no means immune to bureaucracy and delay and did not read the messages in time to implement then before the attack.) The fastest way to communicate with the US military in Hawaii would have been analog scrambled telephone which was, correctly, considered to be insecure and inappropriate for information derived from a Purple intercept. Such scrambled calls had been unscrambled by other countries before. So, it was given to the War Department's message center, who said that it would be delivered directly within a half an hour, after they encrypted it and sent it by radio. However, atmospheric conditions blocked that method and the encrypted message was given by the message center to a commercial wire carrier to send. It arrived and was printed out at the carrier's office in Honolulu at 7:33am local time, 22 minutes before the first bomb fell. Although obviously encrypted, it was apparently not marked for any special urgent handling -- remember the sender had though it would arrive directly at the military authorities in Hawaii over an hour earlier. As a result, it was not actually delivered to those authorities until 2:40pm, after the attack was over, and not read until 20 minutes later after decryption. Thanks, Donald ============================= Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1-508-333-2270 (cell) 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA d3e3e3@gmail.com On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 6:09 PM, Matthew Black <Matthew.Black@csulb.edu> wrote:

IIRC, the message was sent via courier instead of cable or telephone to prevent interception. Did the military not even trust its own cryptographic methods? Or did they not think withdrawal of the Japanese ambassador was not very critical?

matthew black

california state university, long beach

From: Donald Eastlake [mailto:d3e3e3@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 8:28 AM To: Matthew Black Cc: William Herrin; nanog@nanog.org

Subject: Re: [[Infowarrior] - NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug for Years]

Matthew,

On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Matthew Black <Matthew.Black@csulb.edu> wrote:

Also on this same idea, in his book "The Puzzle Palace," James Bamford claims that we knew of the pending attack on Pearl Harbor but did nothing, because that would compromise we broke the Japanese Purple Cipher.

I assume you refers to pages 36 through 39 of "The Puzzle Palace" which is almost entirely a recounting of bureaucratic fumbling and delay. The sensitivity of a Purple Cipher decode did cause the intercepted information to be sent by a less immediate means to the US Naval authorities in Hawaii. Nevertheless, it was sent with every expectation that those authorities would receive it before the time of the attack. We do not know what those authorities would have done it they had received the intercept information as expected, instead of receiving it about 6 hours after the first bomb struck Pearl Harbor. Your implication that Bamford says "we decided to do nothing" bears no relationship to what Bamford actually wrote.

Thanks, Donald ============================= Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1-508-333-2270 (cell) 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA d3e3e3@gmail.com

matthew black california state university, long beach

-----Original Message-----

From: William Herrin [mailto:bill@herrin.us] Sent: Friday, April 11, 2014 2:06 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: [[Infowarrior] - NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug for Years]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Niels Bakker <niels=nanog@bakker.net> wrote:

...

Please go read up on some recent and less recent history before making judgments on what would be unusually gutsy for that group of people.

I'm not saying this has been happening but you will have to come up with a better defense than "it seems unlikely to me personally".

Let me know when someone finds the second shooter on the grassy knoll. As for me, I do have some first hand knowledge as to exactly how sensitive several portions of the federal government are to the security of the servers which hold their data. They may not hold YOUR data in high regard... but the word "sensitive" does not do justice to the attention lavished on THEIR servers' security.

In WW2 we protected the secret of having cracked enigma by deliberately ignoring a lot of the knowledge we gained. So such things have happened. But we didn't use enigma ourselves -- none of our secrets were at risk. And our adversaries today have no secrets more valuable than our own.

-Bill