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CIA malware and hacking tools

wikileaks.org

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Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#761

Post by alehul »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #753
alpha_squared wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the purpose of devil's advocate in this, I think it's possible to state truths and still be misleading and/or distracting from another narrative. Just because something is true doesn't necessarily explain what the motive is for releasing that information. It's certainly healthy to have at least a shadow of a doubt as to what WikiLeaks's motivations are when it's already shown that it can either restrain itself fr…

Allegedly WL did not release every email they had from the Syria leak. While every email released may be legitimate, the omission of emails pertaining to russia creates a narrative. Wikileaks may be telling the truth but it's far from clear whether they are telling the whole truth. And in between "truth" and "whole truth" there's a lot of room to shape the narrative

It's known that WL will often save some of the worst leaks as an 'insurance' against retaliation from the entity the leaks pertain to. It's likely there's aspects they're holding back from this leak as well, if they don't already hold enough over the U.S. gov.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#763

Post by shard972 »

abandonliberty wrote: post #485

It's interesting to note that Julian Assange didn't demonstrate control of the wikileaks private key during his Reddit AMA 1 month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5n58sm/i_am_julian_as... Considering the political situation unfolding in the US and who this leak weakens, there is some evidence that wikileaks is not in the hands of a neutral party. There is clear motive right now for undermining the CIA. Th…

> This comment was immediately down voted on Reddit. Someone is seeking to control the narrative.

Reddit has been beyond terrible the last year and it didn't recover post election. There always used to be a bias but you could usually drill down into some good back and forths in the comments, now you will only find that if it even exists in heavily downvoted posts along with troll posts.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#764

Post by throwanem »

graycat wrote: post #333
pjc50 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the weapon too secret to use sounds very Dr Strangelove, there have been slightly similar things with real weapons. The one I remember is when radar-triggered proximity shells were invented at the end of WW2 they were only issued for use on ships, so that undetonated shells would fall into the sea, so couldn't be recovered and investigated by the enemy.

IIRC there was a claim that the shells with the proximity fuses were also used, likely by Patton's forces, in the Battle of the Bulge. Supposedly having the shells explode at a carefully determined distance above the ground made the shells especially effective against German ground troops. IIRC the proximity fuses were developed at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL); that is the story I…

> having the shells explode at a carefully determined distance above the ground made the shells especially effective against German ground troops

It does. WWII tanks' armor is mostly concentrated to the front and sides, because those tanks are designed to force enemy lines against ground-bursting shells, field pieces, and other tanks, all of which fire mostly on low trajectories; what's on top is much thinner, because no one expects to need to withstand a lot of damage there. Bursting a shell above ground level throws a lot of fragments at that weak armor, where a ground burst mostly wastes them against armor designed to withstand direct hits from much more powerful weapons. For infantry, it's even worse; the whole point of a trench or a foxhole is to put a thick layer of earth between you and all the metal that's flying around at ground level. When an airburst can send fragments right down into the hole with you, that earth doesn't help one bit.

Fun fact: "daisy cutter" bombs work the same way. Up until Vietnam at least, their proximity fuse was on the end of a rod protruding a few feet from the nose of the bomb. Low-tech compared to a radar proximity fuse, but fearsomely effective; probably the only reason you wouldn't find it on a shell is that, unlike an air-dropped bomb, a shell has to withstand the force of being fired from a gun, and I doubt any such expedient could. (That's also why bombs tend to be so much more effective than shells, even when no more accurate. When the strongest force involved is 1g, you can spend a lot less mass on structure, and a lot more on explosive.)

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#767

Post by Cookingboy »

incompatible wrote: post #674
Cookingboy wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we don't live in a Disney movie where everyone gets along and lives happily ever after? Do you think if we get rid of CIA the Russians will just disband the FSB? The Chinese will just suddenly become transparent and stop all international espionage? The entire world will suddenly love US and try to suck up to the biggest superpower?

Some of us are not USians. I'd say if your goal is to make people elsewhere in the world love the US, then CIA dirty tricks isn't the way to do it. Dirty tricks by other governments wouldn't do much if the US was a genuinely beneficial influence in the world. At the moment it's not so clear that the US is beneficial, with it doing some things that are useful, but which Trump seems to want to eliminate as soon as poss…

Nope, the goal is not to make the rest of the world love the US. It is to further our own national interest while fucking over our enemies. Just like any other countries that ever existed in the history of human civilization.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#768

Post by Cookingboy »

ruleabidinguser wrote: post #701
Cookingboy wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If this is true, this is incredibly bad, and the CIA should be discredited. What do you mean by "discredited"? If anything this gives a ton of credibility to CIA's rumored capability. Hell, it gives CIA so much credibility now that they can practically make up stuff and people will believe it by saying "oh they can bug everything, of course they found out about it".

It tells us what they can do but it certainly doesnt incentivize trust.

Public trust is a pretty low tier item on the list of priorities for global intelligence agencies. They exist to do their job and be effective at furthering our own national interest while screwing over enemies.

Public trust is a PR problem and there are other people that manage it.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#769

Post by guest »

xapata wrote: post #725
tlow wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In fact, the Devil's Advocate may be the biggest innovation killer in America today. "[1] [1] Tom Kelley, co-founder of Ideo as in '10 Faces of Innovation'

Perhaps I'm confused, but this seems like a non-sequitur. We're not discussing innovation.

I think the point being made is that the devil's advocate brought out the norm to mobilise for every contingency (not that innovation won't suffer, which is obvious as misstrust rises) and that it can be used to rhetorically balance two points of view that are not equal (or two questionable actions).

In general: Ownership of information and facts are key points in the overall discussion here, if something is known it can be manipulated (just as they discuss above). Defensive patenting could be achieved, or releasing news of something to knock away at funding for its continuation...

One example how it could be relevant in particular to the general discussion is how the software and partially hardware has been kept by CIA to formally avoid reprecussions from good honest people.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#770

Post by _jal »

ismay wrote: post #576
abandonliberty wrote: post #485

It's interesting to note that Julian Assange didn't demonstrate control of the wikileaks private key during his Reddit AMA 1 month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5n58sm/i_am_julian_as... Considering the political situation unfolding in the US and who this leak weakens, there is some evidence that wikileaks is not in the hands of a neutral party. There is clear motive right now for undermining the CIA. Th…

He very clearly explained his motives for not doing so in the AMA, and he gave an alternate POL by reading from the blockchain. This whole narrative of Wikileaks not being neutral is a very weird story, because they've never published anything that wasn't verified to be true. Since that's something they can't be attacked on, it seems that the strategy for discrediting Wikileaks has now become to accuse them of associ…

There is no such thing as 'neutral' where humans and politics intersect.

Many others have made the point that it is perfectly possible to lie with a collection of true statements.

It is also possible to be used in this context; that's where the phrase 'useful idiot' comes from. So Assange should be pure as the driven snow and be laundering manipulated documents, thereby giving them the imprimatur that you, among others, appear to grant great value. In fact, this is what I and others believe to at least occasionally happen with WL.

> which it has always been so far.

How do you know this? How do you know that 'truth' hasn't been shaded by blending observable facts with unverifiable ones or by omitting documents, or parts of documents? How do you know that everyone outside of WL insiders (loosely defined) is granted access to documents at the same time? I think there are still questions about Stone's access to the Clinton dumps.

> distracting from the real story here

Please. Everyone gets to pick "the real story" for themselves.

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