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NSA Owns Everything (2015)

blog.thinkst.com

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Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#51

Post by mh_ »

oefrha wrote: post #29
boomboomsubban wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many people saw it coming. This article is asking how the NSA managed a hacking empire leaving practically no evidence. Many people correctly assumed it was happening, they just couldn't prove much. "Why did we never see it coming?" Is a poor way of phrasing their premise, but it's not false.

Exactly. The other emphasized question, while less sexy and less quotable, is a much more accurate representation of the question TFA tries to answer: > If the NSA was owning everything in sight (and by all accounts they have) then how is it that nobody ever spotted them? It’s sad that people routinely find the first disagreeable thing in any submission then derail the whole discussion based on an out-of-context misr…

As the original author of the piece... I agree :)

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#52

Post by [deleted] »

panny wrote: post #4
mjevans wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, still as scary and relevant today.

More scary is how people in tech circles still call you paranoid when you call Intel ME/AMD PSP a backdoor. >We are also always open for ideas but our focus is on firmware, BIOS, BUS or driver level attacks. Anyone on WiFi AC or up are backdoored right now by NSA. All of them are compromised, no doubt in my mind. All the LTE. All the x86 hardware on the market. All of it. If you aren't running fully free software, yo…

[deleted]

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#53

Post by boomboomsubban »

oefrha wrote: post #29
boomboomsubban wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many people saw it coming. This article is asking how the NSA managed a hacking empire leaving practically no evidence. Many people correctly assumed it was happening, they just couldn't prove much. "Why did we never see it coming?" Is a poor way of phrasing their premise, but it's not false.

Exactly. The other emphasized question, while less sexy and less quotable, is a much more accurate representation of the question TFA tries to answer: > If the NSA was owning everything in sight (and by all accounts they have) then how is it that nobody ever spotted them? It’s sad that people routinely find the first disagreeable thing in any submission then derail the whole discussion based on an out-of-context misr…

While that practice is common, this article does say

>The purpose of this post isn’t to discuss the legality of the NSA's actions or the morality of the leaks, what we are trying to answer is: "Why did we never see it coming?"

They clearly made it the central theme. With enough context what they are saying makes sense, but that phrase is so often used to describe how people predicted something without evidence. I'm sure I've read several articles talking about how some health organization "saw the cornavirus pandemic coming in 200x"

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#54

Post by daffy »

panny wrote: post #25
Thorrez wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Libreboot? Doesn't that allow booting x86 without binary blobs?

Yes, very old hardware that's no longer on the market. I don't consider that a solution. Eventually that pool of hardware dries up.

It's easy to find x200 etc. used. Flashing is another story.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#55

Post by boomboomsubban »

mh_ wrote: post #51
oefrha wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The other emphasized question, while less sexy and less quotable, is a much more accurate representation of the question TFA tries to answer: > If the NSA was owning everything in sight (and by all accounts they have) then how is it that nobody ever spotted them? It’s sad that people routinely find the first disagreeable thing in any submission then derail the whole discussion based on an out-of-context misr…

As the original author of the piece... I agree :)

It was a great article, but that particular phrase is so often used with the "a mile away" idiom to refer to things that are obvious. Using it to refer to how people didn't spot any evidence was a bit confusing.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#56

Post by daffy »

numpad0 wrote: post #28
Thorrez wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Libreboot? Doesn't that allow booting x86 without binary blobs?

They still need some parts of blobs to configure/initialize the system and that “some” now means full MINIX kernel along its userland

Are you saying a librebooted machine is still probably backdoored?

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#57

Post by submeta »

I remember how the public was shocked in Germany in 2013 about the revelations. What we learned was way beyond what everybody thought possible. One of the most important figures discussing the implications for our democracy and the impact on our behaviour in light of the knowledge that we have no privacy at all was the editor of the German newspaper FAZ: Frank Schirrmacher. Unfortunately he died in 2014, very young, aged fiftysomething. After 2014/2015 these topics were discussed less and less here in Germany. Currently nobody talks about these things anymore.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#58

Post by dannyw »

daffy wrote: post #56
numpad0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still need some parts of blobs to configure/initialize the system and that “some” now means full MINIX kernel along its userland

Are you saying a librebooted machine is still probably backdoored?

Precisely.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#59

Post by mh_ »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #53
oefrha wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The other emphasized question, while less sexy and less quotable, is a much more accurate representation of the question TFA tries to answer: > If the NSA was owning everything in sight (and by all accounts they have) then how is it that nobody ever spotted them? It’s sad that people routinely find the first disagreeable thing in any submission then derail the whole discussion based on an out-of-context misr…

While that practice is common, this article does say >The purpose of this post isn’t to discuss the legality of the NSA's actions or the morality of the leaks, what we are trying to answer is: "Why did we never see it coming?" They clearly made it the central theme. With enough context what they are saying makes sense, but that phrase is so often used to describe how people predicted something without evidence. I'm s…

What they (we) are talking about, is that nobody caught the attacks.

The article then goes on to explain why, even with hundreds of thousands of ppl doing incident response investigations, nobody caught / correctly attributed these attacks.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#60

Post by nix23 »

azinman2 wrote: post #12

Yet somehow Russian / China are hacking the US left and right. If the NSA is so good, then at some point dont they have the responsibility to actively defend?

>China are hacking the US left and right

Can you proof that or is that maybe something the CIA or the Pentagon would say?

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