Tag: United States

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Unpacking the Global Pivot from AI Safety

The global pivot away from AI safety is now driving a lot of international AI policy. This shift is often attributed to the current U.S. administration and is reshaping how liberal democracies approach AI governance.

In a recent article on Lawfare, author Jakub Kraus argues there are deeper reasons behind this shift. Specifically, countries such as France had already begun reorienting toward innovation-friendly frameworks before the activities of the current American administration. The rapid emergence of ChatGPT also sparked a fear of missing out and a surge in AI optimism, while governments also confronted the perceived economic and military opportunities associated with AI technologies.

Kraus concludes his article by arguing that there may be some benefits of emphasizing opportunity over safety while, also, recognizing the risks of not building up effective international or domestic governance institutions.

However, if AI systems are not designed to be safe, transparent, accountable, privacy protective, or human rights affirming then there is a risk that people will lack trust in these systems based on the actual and potential harms of them being developed and deployed without sufficient regulatory safeguards. The result could be a birthing or fostering of a range of socially destructive harms and long-term hesitancy to take advantage of the potential benefits associated with emerging AI technologies.

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Implications for Canada of an Anti-Liberal Democratic USA

Any number of commentators have raised concerns over whether the USA could become an illiberal state and the knock on effects. A recent piece by Dr. Benjamin Goldsmith briefly discussed a few forms of such a reformed state apparatus, but more interestingly (to me) is his postulation of the potentially broader global effects:

  • The dominant ideology of great powers will be nationalism.  
  • International politics will resemble the realist vision of great powers balancing power, carving out spheres of influence.  
  • It will make sense for the illiberal great powers to cooperate in some way to thwart liberalism – a sort of new ‘Holy Alliance’ type system could emerge.  
  • The existing institutional infrastructure of international relations will move towards a state-centric bias, away from a human-rights, liberal bias.   
  • International economic interdependence, although curtailed since the days of high “globalisation,” will continue to play an important role in tempering great-power behaviour.  
  • Democracy will be under greater pressure globally, with no great power backing and perhaps active US encouragement of far-right illiberal parties in established and new democracies.  
  • Mass Politics and soft power will still matter, but the post-truth aspect of public opinion in foreign policy will be greater.  

For a middle state like Canada, this kind of transformation would fundamentally challenge how it has been able to operate for the past 80 years. This would follow from the effects of this international reordering and due to our proximity to a superpower state that has broadly adopted or accepted an anti-liberal democratic political culture.

Concerning the first, what does this international reordering mean for Canada when nationalism reigns supreme after decades of developing economic and cultural integrations with the USA? What might it mean to be under a ‘sphere of influence’ with an autocratic or illiberal country? How would Canada appease Americans who pushed our leaders to support other authoritarian governments, or else? Absent the same commitments (and resources) to advocate for democratic values and human rights (while recognizing America’s own missteps in those areas) what does it mean for Canada’s own potential foreign policy commitments? And in an era of rising adoptions of generative AI technologies that can be used to produce and spread illiberal or anti-democratic rhetoric, and without the USA to regulate such uses of these technologies, what does this mean for detecting truth and falsity in international discourse?

In aggregate, these are the sorts of questions that Canadians should be considering and is part of why our leaders are warning of the implications of the changing American political culture.

When it comes to our proximity to a growing anti-liberal democratic political cultural, we are already seeing some of those principles and rhetoric taking hold in Canada. As more of this language (and ideology) seeps into Canadian discourse there is a growing chance that Canada’s own democratic norms might be perverted with extended exposure and following American pressures to compel alterations in our democratic institutions.

The shifts in the USA were not entirely unexpected. And the implications have been previously theorized. An anti-liberal democratic political culture will not necessarily take hold amongstAmericans and their political institutions. But the implications and potential global effects of such a change are before us, today, and it’s important to carefully consider potential consequences. Middle states, such as Canada, that possess liberal democratic cultures must urgently prepare ways to plot through what may be a very chaotic and disturbing next few decades.

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An Initial Assessment of CLOUD Agreements

The United States has bilateral CLOUD Act agreements with the United Kingdom and Australia, and Canada continues to also negotiate an agreement with the United States.1 CLOUD agreements are meant to alleviate some of the challenges attributed to the MLAT process, namely that MLATs can be ponderous with the result being that investigators have difficulties obtaining information from communication providers in a manner deemed timely.

Investigators must conform with their domestic legal requirements and, with CLOUD agreements in place, can serve orders directly on bilateral partners’ communications and electronic service providers. Orders cannot target the domestic residents of a targeted country (i.e., the UK government could not target a US resident or person, and vice versa). Demands also cannot interfere with fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech. 2

A recent report from Lawfare unpacks the November 2024 report that was produced to explain how the UK and USA governments actually used the powers under their bilateral agreement. It showcases that, so far, the UK government has used this substantially to facilitate wiretap requests, with the UK issuing,

… 20,142 requests to U.S. service providers under the agreement. Over 99.8 percent of those (20,105) were issued under the Investigatory Powers Act, and were for the most part wiretap orders, and fewer than 0.2 percent were overseas production orders for stored communications data (37).

By way of contrast, the “United States made 63 requests to U.K. providers between Oct. 3, 2022, and Oct. 15, 2024. All but one request was for stored information.” Challenges in getting UK providers to respond to US CLOUD Act requests, and American complaints about this, may cause the UK government to “amend the data protection law to remove any doubt about the legality of honoring CLOUD Act requests.”

It will be interesting to further assess how CLOUD Acts operate, in practice, at a time when there is public analysis of how the USA-Australia agreement has been put into effect.

  1. In Canada, the Canadian Bar Association noted in November 2024 that new enabling legislation may be required, including reforms of privacy legislation to authorize providers’ disclosure of information to American investigators. ↩︎
  2. Debates continue about whether protections built into these agreements are sufficient. ↩︎
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Details from the DNI’s Annual VEP Report

For a long time external observers wondered how many vulnerabilities were retained vs disclosed by FVEY SIGINT agencies. Following years of policy advocacy there is some small visibility into this by way of Section 6270 of Public Law 116-92. This law requires the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to disclose certain annual data about the vulnerabilities disclosed and retained by US government agencies.

The Fiscal Year 2023 VEP Annual Report Unclassified Appendix reveals “the aggregate number of vulnerabilities disclosed to vendors or the public pursuant to the [VEP] was 39. Of those disclosed, 29 of them were initial submissions, and 10 of them were reconsiderations that originated in prior years.”1

There can be many reasons to reassess vulnerability equities. Some include:

  1. Utility of given vulnerabilities decrease either due to changes in the environment or research showing a vulnerability would not (or would no longer) have desired effect(s) or possess desired operational characteristics.
  2. Adversaries have identified the vulnerabilities themselves, or through 4th party collection, and disclosure is a defensive action to protect US or allied assets.
  3. Independent researchers / organizations are pursuing lines of research that would likely result in finding the vulnerabilities.
  4. By disclosing the vulnerabilities the U.S. agencies hope or expect adversaries to develop similar attacks on still-vulnerable systems, with the effect of masking future U.S. actions on similarly vulnerable systems.
  5. Organizations responsible for the affected software (e.g., open source projects) are now perceived as competent / resourced to remediate vulnerabilities.
  6. The effects of vulnerabilities are identified as having greater possible effects than initially perceived which rebalances disclosure equities.
  7. Orders from the President in securing certain systems result in a rebalancing of equities regarding holding the vulnerabilities in question.
  8. Newly discovered vulnerabilities are seen as more effective in mission tasks, thus deprecating the need for the vulnerabilities which were previously retained.
  9. Disclosure of vulnerabilities may enable adversaries to better target one another and thus enable new (deniable) 4th party collection opportunities.
  10. Vulnerabilities were in fact long used by adversaries (and not the U.S. / FVEY) and this disclosure burns some of their infrastructure or operational capacity.
  11. Vulnerabilities are associated with long-terminated programs and the release has no effect of current, recent, or deprecated activities.

This is just a very small subset of possible reasons to disclose previously-withheld vulnerabilities. While we don’t have a strong sense of how many vulnerabilities are retained each year, we do at least have a sense that rebalancing of equities year-over-year(s) is occurring. Though without a sense of scale the disclosed information is of middling value, at best.

  1. A locally stored version of the document is also available. ↩︎
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American Telecommunication Companies’ Cybersecurity Deficiencies Increasingly Apparent

Five Eyes countries have regularly and routinely sought, and gained, access to foreign telecommunications infrastructures to carry out their operations. The same is true of other well resourced countries, including China.

Salt Typhoon’s penetration of American telecommunications and email platforms is slowly coming into relief. The New York Times has an article that summarizes what is being publicly disclosed at this point in time:

  • The full list of phone numbers that the Department of Justice had under surveillance in lawful interception systems has been exposed, with the effect of likely undermining American counter-intelligence operations aimed at Chinese operatives
  • Phone calls, unencrypted SMS messages, and email providers have been compromised
  • The FBI has heightened concerns that informants may have been exposed
  • Apple’s services, as well as end to end encrypted systems, were not penetrated

American telecommunications networks were penetrated, in part, due to companies relying on decades old systems and equipment that do not meet modern security requirements. Fixing these deficiencies may require rip-and-replacing some old parts of the network with the effect of creating “painful network outages for consumers.” Some of the targeting of American telecommunications networks is driven by an understanding that American national security defenders have some restrictions on how they can operate on American-based systems.

The weaknesses of telecommunications networks and their associated systems are generally well known. And mobile systems are particularly vulnerable to exploitation as a result of archaic standards and an unwillingness by some carriers to activate the security-centric aspects of 4G and 5G standards.

Some of the Five Eyes, led by Canada, have been developing and deploying defensive sensor networks that are meant to shore up some defences of government and select non-government organizations.1 But these edge, network, and cloud based sensors can only do so much: telecommunications providers, themselves, need to prioritize ensuring their core networks are protected against the classes of adversaries trying to penetrate them.2

At the same time, it is worth recognizing that end to end communications continued to be protected even in the face of Salt Typhoon’s actions. This speaks the urgent need to ensure that these forms of communications security continue to be available to all users. We often read that law enforcement needs select access to such communications and that they can be trusted to not abuse such exceptional access.

Setting aside the vast range of legal, normative, or geopolitical implications of weakening end to end encryption, cyber operations like the one perpetrated by Salt Typhoon speak to governments’ collective inabilities to protect their lawful access systems. There’s no reason to believe they’d be any more able to protect exceptional access measures that weakened, or otherwise gained access to, select content of end to end encrypted communications.

  1. I have discussed these sensors elsewhere, including in “Unpacking NSICOP’s Special Report on the Government of Canada’s Framework and Activities to Defend its Systems and Networks from Cyber Attack”. Historical information about these sensors, which were previously referred to under the covernames of CASCADE, EONBLUE, and PHOTONICPRISM, is available at the SIGINT summaries. ↩︎
  2. We are seeing some governments introducing, and sometimes passing, laws that would foster more robust security requirements. In Canada, Bill C-26 is generally meant to do this though the legislation as introduced raised some serious concerns. ↩︎
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New Russian APT Daisy-Chain Capability Revealed

In an impressive operation, a Russian APT reportedly targeted a Washington, DC network after daisy chaining through a sequence of neighbouring networks and devices in 2022. The trick: they may have done so without ever using any local operatives.

This is a movie-like kind of operation and speaks to the immense challenges in defending against very well resourced, motivated, and entrepreneurial adversaries.

Wired has a good and accessible article on the cyber activity. The full report is available at Volexity’s website; it’s well worth the read, if only to appreciate the tradecraft of the adversaries as well as Veloxity’s own acumen.

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The Ongoing Problems of Placing Backdoors in Telecommunications Networks

In a cyber incident reminiscent of Operation Aurora,1 threat actors successfully penetrated American telecommunications companies (and a small number of other countries’ service providers) to gain access to lawful interception systems or associated data. The result was that:

For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.

…

The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.

Not only is this a major intelligence coup for the adversary in question, but it once more reveals the fundamental difficulties in deliberately establishing lawful access/interception systems in communications infrastructures to support law enforcement and national security investigations while, simultaneously, preventing adversaries from taking advantage of the same deliberately-designed communications vulnerabilities.

  1. Or Greece’s 2004 Olympics wiretap scandal. ↩︎
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Publicly Normalizing Significant Espionage Operations is a Good Thing

The USA government recently took a bad beat when it came to light that alleged Chinese threat actors undertook a pretty sophisticated espionage operation that got them access to sensitive email communications of members of the US government. As the details come out it seems as though the Secretary of State and his inner circle weren’t breached but that other senior officials managing the USA-China relationship were.

Still, the actual language the US government is using to describe the espionage operation is really good to read. As an example, the cybersecurity director of the NSA, Rob Joyce, has stated that:

“It is China doing espionage […] That is what nation-states do. We need to defend against it, we need to push back on it, but that is something that happens.”

Why is this good? Because the USA was successfully targeted by an advanced espionage operation that has likely serious effects but this is normal, and Joyce is saying so publicly. Adopting the right language in this space is all too rare when espionage or other activities are often cast as serious ‘attacks’ or described using other inappropriate or bombastic language.

The US government’s language helps to clarify what are, and are not, norms-violating actions. Major and successful espionage operations don’t violate acceptable international norms. Moreover, not only does this make clear what is a fair operation to take against the USA; it, also, makes clear what the USA/FVEY think are appropriate actions to take towards other international actors. The language must be read as also justifying the allies’ own actions and effectively preempts any arguments from China or other nations that successful USA or FVEY espionage operations are anything other than another day on the international stage.

Clearly this is not new language. Former DNI Clapper, when describing the Office of Personnel Management hack in 2015, said,

You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don’t think we’d hesitate for a minute.

But it bears regularly repeating to establish what remain ‘appropriate’ in terms of signalling ongoing international norms. This signalling is not just to adversary nations or friendly allies however, but also to more regular laypersons, national security practitioners, or other operators who might someday work on the national or international stage. Signalling has a broader educational value for them (and for new reporters who end up picking up the national security beat someday in the future).

At an operational level, it’s also worth noting that this is intelligence gathering that can potentially lower temperatures. Knowing what the other side is thinking or how they’re interpreting things is super handy if you want to defrost some of your diplomatic relations. Though it can obviously hurt by losing advantages in your diplomatic positions, too, of course! And especially if it lets the other side outflank you.

Still, I have faith in the EquationGroup’s ongoing collection against even hard targets in China and elsewhere to help balance the information asymmetry equation. While the US suffered a now-publicly reported loss of information security, the NSA is actively working to achieve similar (if less public) successes of its own on a daily basis. And I’m sure they’re racking up wins of their own!

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National Security Means What, Again?

There have been any number of concerns about Elon Musk’s behaviour, and especially in the recent weeks and months. This has led some commentators to warn that his purchase of Twitter may raise national security risks. Gill and Lehrich try to make this argument in their article, “Elon Musk Owning Twitter is A National Security Threat.” They give three reasons:

First, Musk is allegedly in communication with foreign actors – including senior officials in the Kremlin and Chinese Communist Party – who could use his acquisition of Twitter to undermine American national security.

…

Will Musk’s foreign investors have influence over Twitter’s content moderation policies? Will the Chinese exploit their significant leverage over Musk to demand he censor criticism of the CCP, or turn the dials up for posts that sow distrust in democracy?

…

Finally, it’s not just America’s information ecosystem that’s at stake, it’s also the private data of American citizens.

It’s worth noting that at no point do the authors provide a definition for ‘national security’, which causes the reader to have to guess what they likely mean. More broadly, in journalistic and opinion circle communities there is a curious–and increasingly common–conjoining of national security and information security. The authors themselves make this link in the kicker paragraph of their article, when they write

It is imperative that American leaders fully understand Musk’s motives, financing, and loyalties amidst his bid to acquire Twitter – especially given the high-stakes geopolitical reality we are living in now. The fate of American national security and our information ecosystem hang in the balance.1

Information security, generally, is focused on dangers which are associated with true or false information being disseminated across a population. It is distinguished from cyber security, and which is typically focused on the digital security protocols and practices that are designed to reduce technical computer vulnerabilities. Whereas the former focuses on a public’s mind the latter attends to how their digital and physical systems are hardened from being technically exploited.

Western governments have historically resisted authoritarian governments attempts to link the concepts of information security and cyber security. The reason is that authoritarian governments want to establish international principles and norms, whereby it becomes appropriate for governments to control the information which is made available to their publics under the guise of promoting ‘cyber security’. Democratic countries that emphasise the importance of intellectual freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and other core rights have historically been opposed to promoting information security norms.

At the same time, misinformation and disinformation have become increasingly popular areas of study and commentary, especially following Donald Trump’s election as POTUS. And, in countries like the United States, Trump’s adoption of lies and misinformation was often cast as a national security issue: correct information should be communicated, and efforts to intentionally communicate false information should be blocked, prohibited, or prevented from massively circulating.

Obviously Trump’s language, actions, and behaviours were incredibly destabilising and abominable for an American president. And his presence on the world stage arguably emboldened many authoritarians around the world. But there is a real risk in using terms like ‘national security’ without definition, especially when the application of ‘national security’ starts to stray into the domain of what could be considered information security. Specifically, as everything becomes ‘national security’ it is possible for authoritarian governments to adopt the language of Western governments and intellectuals, and assert that they too are focused on ‘national security’ whereas, in fact, these authoritarian governments are using the term to justify their own censorious activities.

Now, does this mean that if we are more careful in the West about our use of language that authoritarian governments will become less censorious? No. But being more careful and thoughtful in our language, public argumentation, and positioning of our policy statements we may at least prevent those authoritarian governments from using our discourse as a justification for their own activities. We should, then, be careful and precise in what we say to avoid giving a fig leaf of cover to authoritarian activities.

And that will start by parties who use terms like ‘national security’ clearly defining what they mean, such that it is clear how national security is different from informational security. Unless, of course, authors and thinkers are in fact leaning into the conceptual apparatus of repressive governments in an effort to save democratic governance. For any author who thinks such a move is wise, however, I must admit that I harbour strong doubts of the efficacy or utility of such attempts.

  1. Emphasis not in original. ↩︎
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Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX)

CISA has a neat bit of work they recently published, entitled “Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) – Status Justifications” (warning: opens to .pdf.).1 Product security teams that adopt VEX could assert the status of specific vulnerabilities in their products. As a result, clients’ security staff could allocate time to remediate actionable vulnerabilities instead of burning time on potential vulnerabilities that product security teams have already closed off or mitigated.

There are a number of different machine-readable status types that are envisioned, including:

  • Component_not_present
  • Vulnerable_code_not_present
  • Vulnerable_code_cannot_be_controlled_by_adversary
  • Vulnerable_code_not_in_execute_path
  • Inline_mitigations_already_exist

CISA’s publication spells out what each status entails in more depth and includes diagrams to help readers understand what is envisioned. However, those same readers need to pay attention to a key caveat, namely, “[t]his document will not address chained attacks involving future or unknown risks as it will be considered out of scope.” Put another way, VEX is used to assess known vulnerabilities and attacks. It should not be relied upon to predict potential threats based on not-yet-public attacks nor new ways of chaining known vulnerabilities. Thus, while it would be useful to ascertain if a product is vulnerable to EternalBlue, today, it would not be useful to predict or assess the exploited vulnerabilities prior to EternalBlue having been made public nor new or novel ways of exploiting the vulnerabilities underlying EternalBlue. In effect, then, VEX is meant to address the known risks associated with N-Days as opposed to risks linked with 0-Days or novel ways of exploiting N-Days.2

For VEX to best work there should be some kind of surrounding policy requirements, such as when/if a supplier falsely (as opposed to incorrectly) asserts the security properties of its product there should be some disciplinary response. This can take many forms and perhaps the easiest relies on economics and not criminal sanction: federal governments or major companies will decline to do business with a vendor found to have issued a deceptive VEX, and may have financial recourse based on contactual terms with the product’s vendor. When or if this economic solution fails then it might be time to turn to legal venues and, if existent approaches prove insufficient, potentially even introduce new legislation designed to further discipline bad actors. However, as should be apparent, there isn’t a demonstrable requirement to introduce legislation to make VEX actionable.

I think that VEX continues work under the current American administration to advance a number of good policies that are meant to better secure products and systems. VEX works hand-in-hand with SBOMs and, also, may be supported by US Executive Orders around cybersecurity.

While Canada may be ‘behind’ the United States we can see that things are potentially shifting. There is currently a consultation underway to regenerate Canada’s cybersecurity strategy and infrastructure security legislation was introduced just prior to Parliament rising for its summer break. Perhaps, in a year’s time, we’ll see stronger and bolder efforts by the Canadian government to enhance infrastructure security with some small element of that recommending the adoption of VEXes. At the very least the government won’t be able to say they lack the legislative tools or strategic direction to do so.

  1. You can access a locally hosted version if the CISA link fails. ↩︎
  2. For a nice discussion of why N-days are regularly more dangerous then 0-Days, see: “N-Days: The Overlooked Cyber Threat for Utilities.” ↩︎