[leftcenterright]

from an intelligence perspective, this is business as usual.

- Rovio sold data to ad companies (ad companies primarily based in the US)

- They used AWS (to which of course NSA has legal access)

- Data is not end to end encrypted, all metadata sits on servers in plain text and within AWS even moves from server to server in plain text

How much insight metadata can grant to someone like NSA is still wildly underrated.

- https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-...

[adeon]

Ah yeah, I saw the propublica as well, it was one of the first articles I found when looking on the topic. I don't doubt at all that Angry Birds data was used by NSA, doesn't seem controversial.

The specific question I am interested in is: Did Rovio knowingly and willingly accept $$$ from NSA (directly or indirectly) to weaken their security? I.e. were they acting as a willing accomplice.

Because that part would be unusual for Finland (well, at least as far as I know). For US companies I wouldn't bat an eye at news like this.

[leftcenterright]

Here is a nice talk by Byron Tau who has also written a book titled "Means of Control" detailing some of these flows covering ad tech companies, data brokers and how government contractors use them and serve as a key player to provide services to intelligence agencies.

- https://www.interface-eu.org/events/background-talk-with-byr...

[leftcenterright]

I think they definitely knew that they are embedding code from US based ad agencies who might either be selling it to the NSA or just doing it in an insecure manner (plaintext protocols).

Mostly in such cases, direct involvement and paying dollars is a clear no-go for the intelligence agencies. They could instead be paying the ad agencies.

Also note that we are talking pre-Let's encrypt and TLS everywhere world, a lot of this traffic was also just plain text making it much easier to harvest.

Some interesting insights from this piece: https://web.archive.org/web/20180719081149/https://theinterc...

[adeon]

Thanks for the resources. Got back to procrastinate on HN and checked the resources (briefly looked at transcript on the video, but found this article more interesting).

I've always assumed that some amount of unencrypted HTTP traffic is going to be slurped into archives, but I've been too lazy to really check an example and how does that look like in the real world. That BADASS system is an example, focusing on phones. I've also run mitmproxy in my home to learn and then I've wondered if the big agencies have something like that but much more scaled and sophisticated.

I've recently got into studying security, deobfuscated code, or decompiling, tried to find vulnerabilities or bad security, in websites and programs. I've found some, although not anything worth writing home about. I found a replay attack in one VSCode extension that implemented its own encrypted protocol, but it is difficult to use it to do real damage. Found a bad integrity check library (hopelessly naive against canonicalization attack) used by another VSCode extension. I've found something weird in Anthropic's Claude website after you log in, but because their "responsible security policy" is so draconian, I don't want to bother trying to poke it to research it further in case I earn their wrath.

Biggest bummer I found that a video game (Don't Starve Together) I had played for a long time with friends does not have any encryption whatsoever for chat messages to this day. (People gonna say private things in video game chats). The other video game I play in multiplayer a lot, Minecraft, has encryption (a bit unusual encryption but it is encryption).

That article gave me a bit of validation that I'm not a nut for giving shits about encryption and security, and being annoyed at ungodly amount of analytics I see in mitmproxy my laptop is blabbering about.