Cornering the Zero-Day Market
The Schizophrenia of the Deep State
By Bill Blunden, August 7, 2014
A few days ago Dan Geer, the chief information security officer at In-Q-Tel, gave a keynote address at
Black Hat USA1. According to the company s web site In-Q-Tel is a non-profit, but it s a special sort of
non-profit. It offers venture capital funding on behalf of the intelligence community (read government
spies). During his presentation Geer proposed, among other things, that the U.S. government bolster
internet security by dominating the market for zero-day vulnerabilities.
Zero-days are basically flaws, unpatched bugs, in software and hardware which attackers can leverage to
compromise a computer and covertly gain access. Think of a zero-day vulnerability like an unlocked door
recessed back in an obscured alleyway of an otherwise secure home.
Geer s recommendation goes like this: using its buying power the United State government could act
like a hi-tech billionaire who s snatching up real estate in Silicon Valley and wade out into the digital
black market to outbid all of the other buyers. By driving up prices American security services would
corner the market on zero-day vulnerabilities.
On an aside this strategy would also make zero-day middle-men like the Grugq extremely wealthy2.
Anyway, according to Geer s reasoning the government would then disclose the aforementioned
unpatched bugs to hi-tech companies so that they could fix their products and shrink the attack surface
available to intruders.
Conflicting Directives
There s a problem with this scheme. Behind closed doors, where officials feel comfortable enough to be
honest, elements of the intelligence community confess that they aren t actually interested in bolstering
Internet security. In fact, according to documents provided by Ed Snowden, spy agencies are intent on
doing the exact opposite3:
Classified briefings between the agencies celebrate their success at defeating network
security and privacy &
Please understand that hi-tech subversion is a pillar of the NSA s global surveillance apparatus. It s how
they monitor people and defeat privacy measures like Tor4. Subversion empowers spies. Are we to
assume that U.S. intelligence having engaged in an extensive industry-wide campaign to insert
backdoors in software and hardware5, and sitting on a mountain of zero-day vulnerabilities which it
exclusively owns, will abruptly make an about face and completely disarm?
After all of the lies: about imaginary WMDs, about torture, about warrantless wiretaps, about spying on
Senators. After all the death and destruction6, there s no reason to believe that the Deep State would
act in the public s interest and voluntarily yield this sort of power. No sir.
Echoes of the Financial Collapse
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown the United States government intervened to bail out
the banks. The average American ultimately paid for the short-term unenlightened self-interest of
banking executives who handed out loans to anyone who could breathe7. Well, because doing so was
wildly profitable8. The current bailout mindset offers bankers an implicit subsidy9 as the entire industry
now recognizes that large banking houses can socialize their risk while keeping whatever profits they
make to themselves10. In a nutshell mega-banks are fragile by design.
Technology is also fragile by design. The costs associated with the security lapses that arise from zero-
day vulnerabilities are paid for by the victims. These same costs are viewed as a negative externality by
the companies that sell hi-tech products. Vendors make money by adding features and selling new
products. Well, because doing so is wildly profitable. Think about it. They aren t in business to do the
right thing, they re in business to make money11.
Assuming for the moment that the public were somehow able to marshal the raw political impetus
needed to put an end to the NSA s sweeping campaign of mass subversion, we d still have to worry
about accidental bugs and the market forces that encourage them.
But why, pray tell, should the public be held responsible for sloppy engineering? Why should we bear
the cost of shoddy hi-tech design just as the American public paid for the banker s screw-ups? Rather
than have the victims of bad security pay for zero-day exploits, why not redirect the cost of security
incidents back onto vendors so that they have incentives to get it right? Society as a whole is being
exposed to risk and therefore regulation (i.e. via liability) is necessary. The never-ending stream of zero-
days clearly shows that the market cannot deal with this problem on its own.
Denouement
Sadly, regulating the banks has been wishful thinking ever since executives and their operatives in D.C.
rolled back Glass-Steagall during Bill Clinton s tenure in the White House. Witness also the Commodity
Futures Modernization Act of 2000 which left the financial market for derivatives largely unregulated.
Put bluntly, the banks have the resources and power to reward those who serve them12. A similar
dynamic holds in the domain of hi-tech. For example, in 2013 Google spent more lobbying on the
beltway than Lockheed Martin or Boeing13.
So is it surprising that major players in both industries have considerable links to intelligence services?
Former LAPD detective Michael Ruppert declared The CIA is Wall Street. Wall Street is the CIA. A look
into the origins of the CIA reinforces this notion14. Likewise, thanks to Ed Snowden15 and WikiLeaks16, we
know that companies like Google have gladly clambered into bed with government spies. CIA officer
John Stockwell observed that:
The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I
realized that they may argue about details of strategy - a small war here or there.
However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system.
Poor cyber security is rooted in zero-day vulnerabilities, accidental and intentional. Yet disarming the
intelligence services and implementing meaningful regulation within the hi-tech sector will oblige
massive political shifts. In both cases such efforts will run up against profound sources of influence
outside the government, oligarchic factions that convey their mandates through the Deep State.
Bill Blunden is an independent investigator whose current areas of inquiry include information security,
anti-forensics, and institutional analysis. He is the author of several books, including The Rootkit Arsenal
and Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, and the Malware-Industrial Complex. Bill is the lead
investigator at Below Gotham Labs.
Notes
1
Kim Zetter, CIA Insider: U.S. Should Buy All Security Exploits, Then Disclose Them, Wired, August 6, 2014,
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/cia-0day-bounty/
2
Nicole Perlroth and David Sanger, Nations Buying as Hackers Sell Flaws in Computer Code, New York Times, July
13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/world/europe/nations-buying-as-hackers-sell-computer-
flaws.html?pagewanted%253Dall
3
James Ball, Julian Borger, and Glenn Greenwald, Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy
and security, Guardian, September 5, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-
encryption-codes-security/print
4
Bill Blunden, Mass Subversion is a Reality, Counterpunch, July 24, 2014,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/24/mass-subversion-is-a-reality/
5
Michael Riley, U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms, Bloomberg, June 15, 2013,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-
firms.html
6
http://costsofwar.org/article/civilians-killed-and-wounded
7
Martin Smith, The Untouchables, Frontline, January 22, 2013,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/untouchables/transcript-37/
8
Yves Smith, How the Banks Put the Economy Underwater, New York Times, October 30, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31smith.html
9
Matt Taibbi, Secrets and Lies of the Bailout, Rolling Stone, January 4, 2013,
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104
10
Gretchen Morgenson, Big banks Still a Risk, New York Times, August 2, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/business/big-banks-still-a-risk.html
11
George Smith, Keith Alexander Really IS a Pariah, Escape from WhiteManistan, August 2, 2014,
http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/?p=18406
12
David Corn, Hillary Clinton's Goldman Sachs Problem, Mother Jones, June 4, 2014,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/hillary-clintons-goldman-sachs-problem
13
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2013&indexType=s
14
Peter Dale Scott, "The Deep State and the Wall Street Overworld," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, March 10,
2014, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/4090
15
Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others,
Guardian, June 6, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data/print
16
http://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=1121800
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