nanog mailing list archives

Pearl Harbor


From: Donald Eastlake <d3e3e3 () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 21:15:25 -0400

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





Current thread: