I feel like this might get lost in the shuffle, so I'm posting it independently.
I'm not shocked at any of this. The writing has been on the wall as early as 2001 that the NSA and CIA has been gearing up and building these exploits out. Here is a nice PBS documentary on the subject of FISA & NSA surveillance, and of course the CIA is no lone wolf, these agencies were given carte blanche by previous administrations to work together. While I believe they are different in aspects of what they do, from this perspective, I think its fair to say that likely if the CIA has it, the NSA has it, and if the NSA has it, the CIA most likely has it or can get it.
To illustrate a nice timely, take a look at this gem from 2001
https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/fl32-soc-ussfisa/un...
Around the same time, we even had this pop up: its a run down as to why the NSA needs to have this 'legal authority' to act with impunity for 'American interests'
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB178/surv34.pdf
and of course, we have the NPR story that breaks it all down over the NSA wiretapping debate:
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/nsawiretap/legality.html
Take special note here: hardly any at length commentary at all so far and the news is pretty sparse. Largely, it seems people were not paying attention, yet right here its clear as day that the NSA was gearing up to expand and use its surveillance capabilities.
Of course, around all this, it is clear the NSA and the CIA would be sharing exploits like these, it is likely these were all used in joint context with each other:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0006184107....
and of course, the ACLU has a relevant statement on this as well, i think its quite a good summary of the feelings at the time:
https://www.aclu.org/other/how-anti-terrorism-bill-puts-cia-...
Then, we have these here, around 2004-2006:
The first real report coming out is from the ACLU, reporting about the NSAs massive build up since 9/11 and how its creating a lot of questionable actions to be undertaken by the agency, in which they allege, at the time, among other things, that the NSA is spying on US citizens:
https://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/surveillance_report.pdf
My favorite quote:
National Security Letters. These obscure devices, which can be written by FBI officials in field offices without the approval of a judge, give the government broad power to demand records. Once upon a time this sweeping power could only be used to get information about “agents of a foreign power” from banks, credit agencies and Internet service providers. But the Patriot Act changed the law to allow their use against anyone, including persons not suspected of a crime. The bill quietly signed into law by President Bush in December 2003
but wait, there is more!
Around the same time, the GAO had noted that there was an increasing amount of trouble coming from cyber security experts about cybersecurity infrastructure in the states. How easy they were to exploit, their threat to infrastructure, and how it could affect people. How is this related? This same type of report details alot of the exploits that the NSA has used, such as stuxnet, which come to light many years later:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04321.pdf
and less us not forget, the NSA tried to sway attention away from itself by releasing this tidy memo, which got leaked, in and around 2004:
https://epic.org/privacy/nsa/foia/EPIC-NSA-USSID-18-and-Dome...
In which they promise to quote 'no longer use their spying apparatus on US citizens knowingly'(i'm paraphrasing)
and of course,
We have this report from 2006 from the Indiana Law Journal detailing all of the potential pitfalls and abuses of the FISA courts. In essence, to sum it all up, it states:
Accordingly, to extend the “special needs” doctrine to the NSA program, which
authorizes unlimited warrantless wiretapping of the most private of conversations
without statutory authority, judicial review, or probable cause, would be to render that
doctrine unrecognizable. The DOJ’s efforts to fit the square peg of NSA surveillance
into the round hole of the “special needs” doctrine only underscores the grave
constitutional concerns that this program raises
oh and i didn't forget: we got concrete evidence of state sponsored Russian hacking against US systems since as early as 2008:
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB424/docs/Cyber-027.pdf
relevant quote:
The head of the Russian Army Centre for Military Forecast, Colonel Anatoly Tsyganok,
made comments to the Russian news outlet, Gazeta, about the cyber attacks on Estonia. He
believes that there was nothing wrong with the attacks because there are no international
agreements established. Colonel Tsyganok also believes that NATO couldn’t do anything to stop
the attacks and that they were highly successful. The most telling example of Russian government involvement in cyber warfare was with Herman Simm selling IT secrets to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service that was discussed in Section VIII of this monograph. This case showed that the government of the Russian Federation is actively seeking information on cyber defenses and is willing to pay large sums of money (Mr.Simm is accused of selling cyber security secrets for millions of dollars) to receive information on cyber security.
I feel like the tech public that should be doing the diligence on this has been asleep at the wheel. On the recent stories from NSA surveillance, the CIA leak we are reading here, or other government programs. Its not crackpot. Its not a conspiracy. The evidence has been out there in our faces for years. I feel like we fell asleep at the wheel as a tech community to stand up to this.