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US-UK relations

Strong Now

Military cooperation in the status quo proves UK and US still work together on key issues

LONDON — In an effort to allay concerns in Washington about cuts in British military spending, an American official has joined a British review panel that was established to determine the future of Britain’s armed forces. Speaking to reporters in London on Thursday, Michael Fallon, the British defense secretary, said he had “deliberately invited and included a U.S. official” to join the review, adding that his government was “liaising very closely with the Department of Defense throughout.” No further details about the official were given. Mr. Fallon also emphasized other areas of cooperation with the United States, adding that a recent American airstrike in Libya targeting Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the mastermind of the 2013 attack at an Algerian gas plant, had been initiated from a British air base. “That’s how we cooperate,” Mr. Fallon said, adding that he rejected the idea that Britain was reducing its presence on the global stage.

Military and spying coordination remains resilient in the status quo

Zetter 6/22— award-winning, senior staff reporter at Wired covering cybercrime, privacy, and security (Kim, “US and British Spies Targeted Antivirus Companies,” Wired, 6/22/15, http://www.wired.com/2015/06/us-british-spies-targeted-antivirus-companies/). WM

WHEN THE RUSSIAN security firm Kaspersky Lab disclosed recently that it had been hacked, it noted that the attackers, believed to be from Israel, had been in its network since sometime last year. The company also said the attackers seemed intent on studying its antivirus software to find ways to subvert the software on customer machines and avoid detection. Now newly published documents released by Edward Snowden show that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, were years ahead of Israel and had engaged in a systematic campaign to target not only Kaspersky software but the software of other antivirus and security firms as far back as 2008. The documents, published today by The Intercept, don’t describe actual computer breaches against the security firms, but instead depict a systematic campaign to reverse-engineer their software in order to uncover vulnerabilities that could help the spy agencies subvert it. The British spy agency regarded the Kaspersky software in particular as a hindrance to its hacking operations and sought a way to neutralize it. “Personal security products such as the Russian anti-virus software Kaspersky continue to pose a challenge to GCHQ’s CNE [Computer Network Exploitation] capability,” reads one of the documents, “and SRE [software reverse-engineering] is essential in order to be able to exploit such software and to prevent detection of our activities.” An NSA slide describing “Project CAMBERDADA” lists at least 23 antivirus and security firms that were in that spy agency’s sights. They include the Finnish antivirus firm F-Secure, the Slovakian firm Eset, Avast software from the Czech Republic. and Bit-Defender from Romania. Notably missing from the list are the American anti-virus firms Symantec and McAfee as well as the UK-based firm Sophos. But antivirus wasn’t the only target of the two spy agencies. They also targeted their reverse-engineering skills against CheckPoint, an Israeli maker of firewall software, as well as commercial encryption programs and software underpinning the online bulletin boards of numerous companies. GCHQ, for example, reverse-engineered both the CrypticDisk program made by Exlade and the eDataSecurity system from Acer. The spy agency also targeted web forum systems like vBulletin and Invision Power Board—used by Sony Pictures, Electronic Arts, NBC Universal and others—as well as CPanel, a software used by GoDaddy for configuring its servers, and PostfixAdmin, for managing the Postfix email server software But that’s not all. GCHQ reverse-engineerred Cisco routers, too, which allowed the agency’s spies to access “almost any user of the internet” inside Pakistan and “to re-route selective traffic” straight into the mouth of GCHQ’s collection systems. Legal Cover To obtain legal cover for all this activity, the GCHQ sought and obtained warrants granting permission to reverse-engineer the software. The warrants, issued by the UK Foreign Secretary under the UK’s Intelligence Services Act 1994 Section 5, gave the spy agency permission to modify commercially available software to “enable intercept, decryption and other related tasks.” One of the warrants, used to reverse-engineer Kaspersky software, was valid for six months from July 7, 2008 to January 7, 2009, after which the agency sought to renew it. Without a warrant, the agency feared it would be in breach of Kaspersky’s customer licensing agreement or violate its copyright. Software makers often embed protection mechanisms in their programs to thwart reverse-engineering and copying of their programs and include language in their licensing agreements prohibiting such activity. “Reverse engineering of commercial products needs to be warranted in order to be lawful,” one GCHQ agency memo noted. “There is a risk that in the unlikely event of a challenge by the copyright owner or licensor, the courts would, in the absence of a legal authorisation, hold that such activity was unlawful[…]” But, according to The Intercept, the warrant itself was on shaky legal grounds since the Intelligence Services Act, Section 5, references interference with property and “wireless telegraphy” by intelligence agencies but does not mention intellectual property. Its use to authorize copyright infringement is novel, to say the least. Target Kaspersky Earlier this month, Kaspersky disclosed that it had been hacked last year by members of the infamous Stuxnet and Duqu gangs. The intruders remained entrenched in the security firm’s networks for months siphoning intelligence about nation-state attacks the company is investigating and studying how Kaspersky’s detection software works so they could devise ways to subvert it on customer machines. Kaspersky claims to have more than 400 million users worldwide. The attackers were also interested in the Kaspersky Security Network, an opt-in system that gathers data from customer machines about new threats infecting them. Any time Kaspersky’s antivirus and other security software detects a new infection on the machine of a customer who has opted-in to the program, or encounters a suspicious file, data gets sent automatically to Kaspersky’s servers so the company’s algorithms and analysts can study and track emerging and existing threats. The company uses KSN to create maps outlining the geographical reach of various threats and is an important tool for tracking nation-state attacks from agencies like the NSA and GCHQ. The newly published NSA documents describe a different method for gaining intelligence about Kaspersky and its customers. The spy agencies apparently monitored email traffic coming to Kaspersky and other antivirus companies from their customers in order to uncover reports about new malware attacks. The spy agencies would then examine the malware sent by these customers and determine if it had use to them. A 2010 presentation indicates that the NSA’s signals intelligence would pick out for analysis about ten new “potentially malicious files per day” out of the hundreds of thousands that came into Kaspersky’s network each day. NSA analysts would then check the malicious files against Kaspersky’s antivirus software to make sure they weren’t being detected by the software yet, then the NSA’s hackers would “repurpose the malware” for their own use, checking periodically to determine when Kaspersky had added detection for the malware to its anti-virus software.

No Impact

The UK is no longer important to world issues or US influence

O’Hanlon 15— senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (Michael, “Are the U.S. and UK still BFFs? It doesn’t really matter.,” Reuters, May 14, 2015, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/05/13/just-how-special-is-the-u-s-britain-special-relationship/). WM

But again, beyond the fact that Britain’s economic power would only decline about 10 percent if Scotland did someday secede, London’s sway in overall geostrategic terms should not be exaggerated. British defense spending may be marginally the greatest of any European country, at about $60 billion a year in U.S. dollars. But it is just one of five key U.S. allies — including Japan, Germany, France and Saudi Arabia — that spend in the range of $40 billion to $80 billion annually. Nations like South Korea, Italy, Israel, Brazil and Australia occupy a third tier, in the range of $20 billion to $35 billion each. Closer to home, Canada and Colombia are not far behind. India, not quite an ally but increasingly an important partner, clocks in at around $50 billion a year. (By comparison, China spends around $150 billion and Russia about half that.) Of course, dollars don’t tell it all. Besides the United States, Britain remains the only country able to project on short notice nearly a division of ground power to distant theaters. In light of budget pressures, though, it is cutting its army, which will wind up less than half the size of the U.S. Marine Corps. With a population almost a fifth of the United States’, Britain will now have only about one-tenth as much ground power. Yet this would still leave London with the world’s second-most-powerful deployable ground force. For most key regions, however, Britain is no longer the predominant U.S. ally, in either military or diplomatic terms. Japan and South Korea, followed by Australia, matter more in terms of the Korean peninsula and Western Pacific more generally. Saudi Arabia and Turkey matter at least as much in the Middle East. Colombia is probably the key player in the Central America and Caribbean region. Germany has a lead role in dealing with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Looking back in history, moreover, the U.S.-Britain collaboration is rooted in a shared history, values and sense of purpose. Yet, it has its limits. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, was hardly a popular global cause just because British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave President George W. Bush strategic cover. The partnership has been, for some years, a notch below the unique special relationship it is often depicted as. Not because it is unimportant, but because other relationships now matter just as much. It is still one of Washington’s key five or six strategic partnerships — but not necessarily more than that. Most of all, it is dubious that the strength and value of the relationship would suffer greatly even if Scotland were to indulge its inner Braveheart and go its own way.

Relations don’t matter- US officials already working without the UK

Dyer 15— British Journalist (Geoff, “White House no longer sees anything special in UK relations,” Financial Times, May 1, 2015, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6f11da8c-ef8d-11e4-a6d2-00144feab7de.html#axzz3fW6NS4XN). WM

Britain’s nail-biting election, and the fragile coalition government it seems likely to produce, are confirming many of Washington’s worst fears about the country’s dwindling influence in the world. Once the US’ most reliable ally, the UK is now seen as a distant player in the crisis over the Ukraine and the euro, has introduced swingeing cuts to its military and recently rebuffed Washington by joining a China-led bank. On top of that, the Obama administration is waking up to the prospect that the next government in London could be even more inward-looking as it grapples with Britain’s membership of the European Union and strong support for Scottish independence. US officials say they still value close intelligence and military ties with the UK, but at times sound almost dismissive about the current British government’s reluctance to play a bigger role in the world. “They are still one of our first phone calls but there are times when they just do not seem that engaged,” says a senior administration official. The fabled “special relationship” between Washington and London has always contained an element of hype that played to Britain’s postcolonial quest for relevance. Successive US administrations have valued Britain’s role as a bridge between North America and the EU, as a mediator within Nato and as a reliable supporter in times of crisis. “Until recently, Britain was very much our most trusted, dependable and capable ally,” says Nicholas Burns, a former US ambassador to Nato and third-ranking official at the state department, who worries that Britain might soon no longer play a “central role in global affairs”. “It is very striking the way that Angela Merkel has become the undisputed leader of Europe,” he said. British officials demur that Germany was always going to be the dominant voice in discussions over the euro — of which the UK is not a member — and even over Ukraine, given its greater proximity and ties with Russia. But American anxiety about British relevance is also based on the major reductions in the British military, which has seen the army cut from 102,000 to 82,000 and has left the navy without a functioning aircraft carrier. Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, has called the defence cuts in the UK and other parts of Europe “very concerning”, while General Ray Odierno, head of the US army, said last month that the smaller British force meant the Pentagon would have to make adjustments “to see that we can still work together”. The worry in Washington is that election results will only further British disengagement. President Barack Obama has a reasonably close and personal relationship with British prime minister David Cameron and would not relish having to establish a rapport with a new leader, especially given the predictions that the next British government might be shortlived. It has not gone unnoticed in Washington that Labour leader Ed Miliband’s recent foreign policy speech barely mentioned the US or that he has been making a virtue of his 2013 opposition to US air strikes in Syria. “Standing up to the leader of the free world shows a certain amount of toughness,” he said last month. However, Mr Cameron has promised a referendum on Britain’s place in the EU — something the US sees as central to London’s international influence — and the one certainty about the election results seems to be a new debate about Scotland’s place within the UK. Some analysts also believe Mr Cameron might have to make additional cuts to the military in order to meet his budget targets. Frank Hoffman, at the National Defense University in Washington, says he doubts that “the UK is turning inward in a strategic sense”. But he also believes that further cuts would mean “Britain’s claim as a major power will be more precarious than it has been in hundreds of years”. The frustrations in Washington with Mr Cameron’s government burst into the open last month when a senior US official accused the UK of “constant accommodation” of China after London decided to join the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Mr Obama himself has also been accused of looking to disengage from parts of America’s traditional role in the world and one former senior US official said that the president had not been helped by Mr Cameron’s international reticence. He pointed to Margaret Thatcher’s famous warning to George HW Bush after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 that he should not “go wobbly”. The former US official continued: “Obama has at times looked lost and it would have helped him to have a stronger British prime minister who could have given him some direction.”

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