 Hello, you're watching Newsclick and we're talking about what the Washington Post is calling the intelligence coup of the century. The story is about Crypto AG, a Swiss firm that has been making encryption, all sorts of equipment. But what we're talking about today specifically is the ZDF and Washington Post story detailing how the CIA has essentially been listening to or been decrypting information or conversations with, between allies, its allies, its adversaries, our 120 countries for decades. Now Praveer Bukharastha, Newsclick editor-in-chief is joining us for all the juice on this actually quite wide-ranging story which goes into history. It goes into current espionage and counter-espionage as well as the politics of technology and also what is going to happen in the future given 5G and things like that. So Praveer, to start with what is this Washington Post story all about and why does it come out now? Because it's something that we've known about for these 20 years. Let's park that issue right now. Why has it come out now? This is a story which did come out earlier in Baltimore Sun I think in 1995. And then also there have been other people who have written on it. The essential story was that the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency or the NSA, and the German intelligence owned the basically crypto AG. They had an agreement in some way by which they owned the, put in money, they owned the company. And later on the CIA or the United States even bought out the Germans. They paid some extra money and bought them out. It is entirely controlled by them. So this people came to not the other European countries but to Switzerland thinking that this is a neutral country. Therefore, if you buy equipment from Swiss companies, you're likely to be safe. This is the understanding. So what they got was cryptographic equipment by which you could communicate to each other. And if you had the keys, then you could actually be able to read what was being sent to you. That's a standard cryptography as you know. Now what happened in this particular case was they actually embedded the key into the machine itself. So that for all others if you, it would still be encrypted. But the CIA, they could recover the key if they had access to the communication. So it's as if you are sending a key along with the communication but that key only could be seen by the United States, NSA or CIA, whichever agency was involved. And they could then decrypt the information. So this went on for about four decades. And in fact it came to light part of other things that might have been going on or the talks about this. It came to light much more when the Iranians caught on to it. And they arrested a AG crypto, crypto AG is one of their engineers in Iran. And they kept him in for nine months. And then they paid about one million dollars, crypto AG paid one million dollars to get him back. And they wanted to recover this money from this guy. So he then found out, in fact then he started asking his friends and relations in the company. What was this all about? What's going on? And he discovered this whole issue that actually they were breaking their own cryptographic equipment to help the United States. Now this stopped for a different reason. It stopped because most people, once computers became prevalent, they switched to digital communication. And then our communication became really computers and the internet. This is the way today we communicate. And therefore crypto AG's mode of communication is not the one we use today. And therefore this company is no longer central to whatever the US and others are doing. In the case of US. In fact the German intelligence agency in fact pulled out of this whole operation way back and like you said earlier the CIA then took over the entire thing. About 20 years down the line the Germans said, you know, you run the whole stuff. We don't really want to be, we are done with it. But I think the other part of it is also important. What happens subsequently that all the companies who are US based companies, manufacturing equipment, if you remember when we were relatively younger Cisco routers used to be used widely. Then we had the Juniper routers. Both of these now we know had NSA backdoors. Nodin has made that public. So all of the equipment, the communication equipment that came from the United States, from the manufacturers had NSA backdoors. So this is a part of the story that it wasn't just crypto AG we are talking about with Nodin. And if you go to Vault 7 of WikiLeaks, they have identified also they've given there, there's a wiki on that apart from what Vault 7 itself has. The wiki on Vault 7 gives details of how many backdoors of what equipment are there, how widespread. Then it will find that almost everything we used had backdoors. One of the major issues in this is that this seems to have been a collaboration between the manufacturers of software as well as hardware so that the US had these backdoors built in right from the beginning. And this is something that they had done earlier with crypto AG. Now we know and this is what they have also done with their own companies as well as with other companies who collaborate with them or under their influence, talking about the Cold War, battle has to be won, the battle against the ISIS, the global war on terror, the N number of wars they are fighting. And as of now the war against China, the war against Russia, it's not a shooting war but it's never been a trade war, political war of a different kind. So this then comes in that this is how the collaboration that takes place between the companies and the government. The state has been something we have known and the crypto AG brings it out that how direct it was for when it was 40 years, 30 years back that basically from the 50s to 90s, this is what the major encryption model was really being sabotaged by the United States using Swiss company. Giving them essentially access to all sorts of almost unlimited sort of data as well as communications within governments themselves so everything ranging from Operation Condor like we talked about and how the US essentially had knowledge of what was going on in these countries in the 70s, going into then the Falklands where it's being said that. Let's be very clear, whatever the Argentinean government did, the Chilean government did, who are also collaborating with the United States at the time. In fact the Operation Condor was spearheaded by the United States. All of this was also internal communication within themselves, how illegal things were, what are all the legal violations they were doing. All of this the CIA knew because essentially whatever was encrypted was known to them and the state to state communication was also encrypted. That means anything that Chile or Argentina talked among themselves is also available to them and that's what one of the organizations who works on this, they have asked for now that you've never made the documents regarding Operation Condor public. Now you're declassifying this. Now that we know that you hacked into all of it, that means you have this whole documents of the communication, you should declassify them, that's the demand that's come out now. So I guess that leads to the question of the timing of this declassification and also of the fact that Washington Post is doing this story at this time. What are the sort of implications of that or the backstory to that? You know this of course as we know it's almost impossible to say why somebody or an organization has done something. That's something only they can say. We can only speculate on that. One of the arguments is because Huawei is now under the crosshairs of the US government that this story is being released to say well Americans are doing it earlier. So Huawei this is the threat, Huawei will be doing it. Now Americans have been saying Huawei is doing it and a lot of people have argued that well you know since all your companies are doing it, why are you just making Huawei one single company which is responsible for back doors? Huawei in fact is a different problem. It knows it's breaking into a world which is dominated by Western equipment, particularly American equipment. So they are saying we'll be very foolish if we allow any back doors because if we do a market is gone. Now there the American argument is well you know there are softer updates. They don't all of it that they give that may not have any of these things because they have allowed their software to be completely audited in the UK and other places. Which is something most companies will not give. And the problem that has been there with Huawei software like with Cisco, like with other companies is buggy software. Software is never that clean. But the problem of back doors has never been found in any of this analysis. So the Huawei argument has been that we will be very stupid. We'll lose our market completely. Unlike the American companies who still have a market even after the fact that everybody knows their back doors, their market hasn't taken such a hit. So this is the shall we say the challenge that Huawei is breaking into a market dominated by Western countries. So they have been ultra careful on this. So the idea is this a story at the moment it brought out to show that this is the normal course of things. And therefore Huawei is suspicious and therefore to strengthen the argument against Huawei. This is one part of a possible explanation. The other explanation is that Bezos is very unhappy because he lost a $10 billion contract to Microsoft. Donald Trump's direct intervention specifically because he owns Washington Post and Trump did not like something that Washington Post reported on him. Therefore it's a Trump versus Bezos war. Clash of egos. Clash of egos. I would sort of leave that question aside. But it's a very interesting point that we need to also register that how to contain Huawei has become now a major issue. And if you see Europe where the European Union and Britain, the United Kingdom, both of them allies of the United States. They seem to be dragging dragging their foot on Huawei. They have not bought the line. And Boris Johnson who wants a good trade deal from the United States also has not bought the line. And he has not banned Huawei as Trump was demanding. So this is one part of it that Huawei in spite of all the opposition, all the bands and so on is the only player at the moment who can give complete 5G solutions. And therefore European players, European governments, if they want to give 5G to their people or to be left behind from the Chinese or from countries which use Chinese equipment then have to build the 5G network. So therefore they are also accepting that without Huawei it can't be done. So they say core things will keep European manufacturers, other things will give to Huawei. This is the kind of compromise they seem to be made. It's interesting to see what the Attorney General of the United States Barr has said. He has said, well US cannot fight Huawei like this. We have to buy Ericsson or Nokia or both and prompt them up to fight Huawei. It seems to me that he is essentially saying the crypto AG line is what we should take except that he is saying it publicly. That was done quite surreptitiously. The intelligence school of the century and you have that model established so then why reinvent the wheel? Just do it that way. Except that that was an intelligence school done in secret. This should be done in public eye. If I can ask you just out of personal interest as much as anything else. When we say that the CIA or the German intelligence agency has invested in a company or owns a company secretly. Where does that money come from and how is that sort of process happening? And similarly when they sort of divest from it, when they get rid of liquided assets in these companies. Does that money go back to the intelligence agency and remain sort of like a fund for? You see the US is a huge number of funds which are run by NSA, CIA, Defense Department. Lot of the for instance venture capital funds. There are also funds which are run by the CIA, NSA. In fact some of the investment in Google, the algorithm itself initially funded by again a company which is a venture capital fund run by the military establishment. So this is quite widely known that they invest in key technologies well ahead of time because they know others are way behind. And they need to be ahead of the market therefore they invest in it. And when they invest in it obviously they have various layers to which they do it. Then budgets are not open. Not open. Then budgets are not open and those budgets what they are used for are not clear. And then of course you have various you know secrecy rules by which the money is squirreled away. And its control the investors investment funds are controlled by their agents again. Their agents may be in public eye or something else. So there are various ways they do it. So let us face it. There is a huge investment budget under the control of the US military which is used for a lot of civilian activities in terms of tech. Because a lot of the technologies will use. So therefore that instead of the government investing in it the US model has been that the private sector do it. We will invest in the private sector. We will tell them we are the military. We are investing in you. We are the intelligence agency. We are investing in you. Quit pro quo. And that is the basis of the military industrial complex. Military industrial complex is really much closed. And now with encryption on all of our devices I suppose the range of this sort of technology or all of this is so much more widespread. Because it is not only about I suppose espionage based on state communications but it is also individuals and organizations that are outside of that framework. Yes. Monitoring people's communication, breaking the standard encryption is basically a part of the global watch. As you know this is being done in India. It is being done in the United States. It is routinely being done by governments. How many people to what extent and the cooperation with the private companies. This is the key question. We saw recently in fact there was a massive hiring drive for engineers at the NTR and the center for development of telematics here in New Delhi. Massive growth in numbers and essentially some most of their operations are these kind of general public surveillance operations. It is interesting just quickly bring in an India angle because of course India and Pakistan both also nuclear adversaries. We know the history of that is. But both of these countries also bought this equipment. Anything specific that you heard from the Indian side that kind of. Well you know as far as the crypto AG how much of the Indian military and Pakistan military bought it I do not know because list of 120 countries I have not gone through. But it was thought to be neutral and therefore a lot of countries bought this equipment. So it is quite possible that Indian government and others would have. India was aware of the fact that the US was an adversary state as far as intelligence operations went and they wanted to be opaque to it. That was then Cisco for instance routers were not used in Indian military and I have been told because they knew that Cisco had back those. So this was the state then but now we seem to have handed over a lot of our key facilities or digital infrastructure of this kind to essentially Israeli private companies. And these Israeli private companies have come out of the Israeli military establishment. And again there is a very close link between Israeli military establishment CIA and NSA and a lot of the funding is also coming from those sources. So this is it's not Israel funding all of it. So these are the issues that we need to flag that Pegasus if it was being used in India. It's also true that that is a part of a larger operation which is maybe relationship between the Israeli military establishment, security establishment, the Indian security establishment. And all these things you are talking about NTR, etc. are really a part of that. So do you think for example there should be maybe a push from our end at least in India to figure out what off these communications during this period what equipment was being used. Should people be asking these kind of questions now that the US has declassified some documents. Should people be asking these kind of questions now that the US has declassified some documents. Do you think that will be sparked off because I definitely remember seeing that both India and Pakistan are on the list and there is a lot of the information regarding India's classified issues. CIA has already declassified and so I'm not sure that we'll glean much more from it and also the cable gate is brought out later than that. So much more of information on the US embassy. Of course that's low grade information, that's not high grade information. But yes, I think there is a case now just as the Americans group that I talked about is demanded that Operation Condor should declassified. There should be a demand that the CIA or NSA whichever agency was a key snooping agency declassified whatever they gleaned from the Operation Crypto AG and that should be at least paid available to the Indian public. Operation Rubicon as they call it. Thanks very much for being for that. So there you have it, that's the story of the day on this front, the intelligence school of the century and some of the context in which this story has taken place over the decades and how it's going to go forward in the what is going to be a at some point of 5G world. Thank you for watching today and stay tuned to Newsday.