One very strange thing about Archimedes/Fulcrum is that the pivot machine's system language must be set to English. This restriction seems a bit weird and raises questions about the targets/use case. Does anyone have ideas about what sorts of people and groups the CIA may be targeting with Archimedes?
This requirement is stated in multiple documents, for example-
- "The pivot machine must be using the English locale (i.e. no Cyrillic or Chinese)" (Fulcrum Mission Manager Brief)
- "some are limitations of the current implementation (e.g. English‐only machines)" (Fulcrum Mission Manager Brief)
- "The FULCRUM, FULCRUMSHUTDOWN, and FULCRUMENCRYPTER binaries support only the multi byte character set (MBCS) character encoding, specifically the ASCII character set. NOTE: Althoughsupport for additional character encodings such as UNICODE and character sets such as Windows 1252 (Western Languages), Windows 1251(Cyrillic Alphabets), and Windows 1256(Arabic) may be added in the future, they are not supported or tested in this version." (Fulcrum User Manual 0.62)
This raises a few questions-
- Why does the locale matter for the operations of Archimedes/Fulcrum?
- Is it a character encoding requirement or a language requirement? Some places mention ASCII, but more mention English specifically.
- Just who was the CIA targeting with Archimedes/Fulcrum for English to be their top priority to support? English is pretty widespread, but Archimedes/Fulcrum is restricted solely to English and explicitly does not yet support languages that are typically considered intelligence priorities. This seems extremely weird.
Of course, there are also other details about Archimedes/Fulcrum in the documents that may help us figure out what sorts of targets the CIA was monitoring- the restriction to Ethernet networks, requirement for the Pivot machine to be a non-portable machine running Windows XP/Vista/7, etc.
Submitted May 07, 2017 at 12:50AM by InfiniteChronicle http://ift.tt/2pODLBu