81–90 of 129 posts
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NSA is a military agency; their norm has always been to protect US assets and attack others.
The NSA is not a military agency. It is within the dod, it provides combat support. But it is emphatically not a military agency.
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In any SCIF or SCIF-like office space, they're all prohibited. You leave your cell phone at the front door of the secured area. Internet access is via SIPRNet (for classified) or NIPRNet (non-classified, but secured). Phones are through dedicated secure switchboards. The above is common in the DC area (lots of DoD contractors).
A relative of mine used to work in this space 20 years ago. Seems policies haven’t changed at all. Tangental story about how serious the Gov takes OpSec. When I was in Iraq, a Marine in my unit found a roll of red Classified tape. He thought it would be cool to put a strip on his personal laptop, which was confiscated almost immediately. It was very clearly a personal machine, but policy is policy, and he never got t…
...and yet, Chelsea Manning walked in with nothing more than a CD player and a self labeled CD-RW and exfiltrated tons of data from a secured facility.
> and he never got that laptop back.
There are several morals to this story.
these are the caliber of the American praetorian guard who owns our politicians.
The NSA is an intelligence agency. The NSA doesn't want people bringing things in that might have the ability to exfiltrate voices or other signals, and in any event the NSA doesn't want random employees talking about it to the press. Where's the element of surprise here? I don't understand why it was even newsworthy in the first place.
As for the intelligence agencies "owning our politicians," LOL. If there were the slightest truth to that, Trump's headstone would read "1946-2016."
So, look of concern at whomever thought it was a good idea to bring an effectively blackbox electronic device with a microphone into a secure area where those were prohibited. Kudos to whomever raised the issue.
Someone should've done a proof of concept mod (firmware or hardware) of a Trojan Furby to appear (to visual and X-ray inspection) to have the stock hardware, but do something nefarious. Or shown how, say, the stock Furby hardware and firmware turned sound into RF leakage.
The FOIA documents are up on archive.org now: https://archive.org/details/nsa-furby-memo/ I'm amused at page 8 of the listserve doc, in which someone points out that the ongoing discussion may at some point be released to the public under FOIA and to consider how it might look after showing up on the front page of a news site
Yep. Who would have guessed 25 years later I'd be bored and then a year later this packet showed up at my doorstep? It's oddly perfect timing, around all the AI discourse. :)
I always wanted to see the chain of events that led to the Special Branch turning up on my door step in England.
[0] I FOIA'd this a couple of years back, but I changed address and never got the documents, only a letter to say it was being worked on.
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I'm surprised it only took them a year. Would you care to share more about your experience on filing FOIA? The circles I run in seem to view it as a clunky, bloated process, but I feel like it has gotten better than when it was introduced. I have zero first-hand experience, though.
No problem to help, but bad news: Every government agency has different processes. You'll have to go through their own FOIA office. The NSA FOIA form is actually really easy: https://www.nsa.gov/about/contact-us/Submit-a-FOIA-Request/ I simply asked for what I wanted (information about policy memos about 'Furby Alerts' and recording devices at the NSA from late 1998 to early 1999) and submitted the form. About a mont…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In any SCIF or SCIF-like office space, they're all prohibited. You leave your cell phone at the front door of the secured area. Internet access is via SIPRNet (for classified) or NIPRNet (non-classified, but secured). Phones are through dedicated secure switchboards. The above is common in the DC area (lots of DoD contractors).
How strictly are SCIF policies enforced? I'm just a civilian who's never had exposure to that world, but based on my experience with other parts of the government, I'd expect SCIF compliance to fall on a broad spectrum from "sloppy or non-existent" to "overly strict and paranoid." Is my intuition accurate? Who's accountable for the compliance of a given SCIF - can anyone with clearance "setup a SCIF" or does it need…
Context: Furbys were the toy for a year or two, and were actively marketed as learning from speech, had an active mic, and did adjust their speech based on what they heard, "learning" to speak English from Furbish. [^1] It's not so different from the fundamental fear of Alexa/Assistant/microphones that's fairly well diffused now. Except the Furby actively claimed to learn how to speak based on your speech, and had a…
Of course some people really wanted to teach it to say new things, and figured out how to swap out the audio files (among other modifications): https://github.com/Jeija/bluefluff Fun fact: If you mess up and need to reset the furby, the procedure is to turn it upside down and hold down the tongue while pulling the tail for ten seconds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised it only took them a year. Would you care to share more about your experience on filing FOIA? The circles I run in seem to view it as a clunky, bloated process, but I feel like it has gotten better than when it was introduced. I have zero first-hand experience, though.
No problem to help, but bad news: Every government agency has different processes. You'll have to go through their own FOIA office. The NSA FOIA form is actually really easy: https://www.nsa.gov/about/contact-us/Submit-a-FOIA-Request/ I simply asked for what I wanted (information about policy memos about 'Furby Alerts' and recording devices at the NSA from late 1998 to early 1999) and submitted the form. About a mont…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NSA is a military agency; their norm has always been to protect US assets and attack others.
The NSA is not a military agency. It is within the dod, it provides combat support. But it is emphatically not a military agency.