[ISN] The Online Threat

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/01/101101fa_fact_hersh

By Seymour M. Hersh 
The New Yorker
November 1, 2010

On April 1, 2001, an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an 
eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the 
South China Sea, triggering the first international crisis of George W. 
Bush's Administration. The Chinese jet crashed, and its pilot was 
killed, but the pilot of the American aircraft, Navy Lieutenant Shane 
Osborn, managed to make an emergency landing at a Chinese F-8 fighter 
base on Hainan Island, fifteen miles from the mainland. Osborn later 
published a memoir, in which he described the "incessant jackhammer 
vibration" as the plane fell eight thousand feet in thirty seconds, 
before he regained control.

The plane carried twenty-four officers and enlisted men and women 
attached to the Naval Security Group Command, a field component of the 
National Security Agency. They were repatriated after eleven days; the 
plane stayed behind. The Pentagon told the press that the crew had 
followed its protocol, which called for the use of a fire axe, and even 
hot coffee, to disable the plane’s equipment and software. These 
included an operating system created and controlled by the N.S.A., and 
the drivers needed to monitor encrypted Chinese radar, voice, and 
electronic communications. It was more than two years before the Navy 
acknowledged that things had not gone so well. "Compromise by the 
People’s Republic of China of undestroyed classified material . . . is 
highly probable and cannot be ruled out," a Navy report issued in 
September, 2003, said.

The loss was even more devastating than the 2003 report suggested, and 
its dimensions have still not been fully revealed. Retired Rear Admiral 
Eric McVadon, who flew patrols off the coast of Russia and served as a 
defense attaché in Beijing, told me that the radio reports from the 
aircraft indicated that essential electronic gear had been dealt with. 
He said that the crew of the EP-3E managed to erase the hard drive -- 
"zeroed it out" -- but did not destroy the hardware, which left data 
retrievable: "No one took a hammer." Worse, the electronics had recently 
been upgraded. "Some might think it would not turn out as badly as it 
did, but I sat in some meetings about the intelligence cost," McVadon 
said. "It was grim."

The Navy's experts didn't believe that China was capable of 
reverse-engineering the plane’s N.S.A. - supplied operating system, 
estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, 
according to a former senior intelligence official. Mastering it would 
give China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence 
and operational data. "If the operating system was controlling what 
you'd expect on an intelligence aircraft, it would have a bunch of 
drivers to capture radar and telemetry," Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in 
the field of encryption, said. "The plane was configured for what it 
wants to snoop, and the Chinese would want to know what we wanted to 
know about them -- what we could intercept and they could not." And over 
the next few years the U.S. intelligence community began to “read the 
tells” that China had access to sensitive traffic.

[...]


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