Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

spiegel.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 295 posts

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#141

Post by nly »

Animats wrote: post #25

Everything at the lowest levels needs to be tightened up now. Buffer overflows in trusted code have to go. This means getting rid of the languages with buffer overflow problems. Mostly C and C++. Fortunately we have Go and Rust, plus all the semi-interpreted languages, now, and can do it. We need something that runs Docker-like containers and, all the way down the bare metal, has no unsafe code. We need dumber server…

Removing whole classes of software bugs, even if the cost were bearable, won't make a huge dent.

If you fix the software, the NSA will just backdoor the firmare/hardware (if they haven't already) and, even on an Android phone running AOSP, there are literally still millions of lines of proprietary, unaudited, closed-source code. Not to mention half dozen microprocessors containing circuitry you can't possible inspect. PCs are the same these days. Do you really expect these multi-billion $ industries to change? There's only a niche commercial interest for consumers of 'simple and well-understood'(read: secure) firmware.

And it's not like the hardware/consumer industry is sitting pretty as a lone miserable failure from a security sensitive standpoint. Then entire Internet stack from Ethernet and BGP up the way up to HTTP is complete and utter garbage. Our standards bodies (IETF, W3C etc) are failing to protect us and there's no sign of it getting better because the cost of starting over is simply too damn high.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#142

Post by krapp »

rhizome wrote: post #138
krapp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I doubt many people (including myself) with an opinion either way actually know what they're talking about. The expert pool for knowledge about high-level classified government hacking is probably pretty small, even on Hacker News. It's politics, and politics hits people in the lizard brain and short-circuits their ability to think rationally.

That's pretty condescending. How many sports fans know how to be a pro athlete or manage a team? How many critics of government, "know what they're talking about," by your standard?

I'm sorry, I should have been more specific. The poster I was replying to mentioned that it was odd that low-quality, uninformed arguments tend to crop up in threads like this a lot. People make broad statements about how evil and nigh-omnipotent the NSA is, and how deeply they've infiltrated every facet of human life. The existence of parallel construction leads to the assumption that every case involving the government is due to parallel construction. Google appears on a PRISM slide, they must be an NSA front company. Someone suggests politics may be more complex than they appear, or the NSA may not be as powerful as they seem, they must be a shill. The US government is involved with NIST and TOR, it means they've completely undermined all forms of encryption and TOR is a honeypot.

This subject seems to be a trigger for people to try to outdo each other to come off as cynical and in the know as possible about things which by definition almost no one knows much about.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#143

Post by benaiah »

diminoten wrote: post #107
pa7ch wrote: post #30

Looking at the comments in support of the NSA here makes me suspect an astroturfing campaign is happening. Edit: I should add that my suspicion came from noticing that the vast majority of the comments when this was first posted seemed aligned in favor of the NSA's mission. It wasn't the presence of pro-NSA comments that was interesting but rather that these opinions were the overwhelming majority. This is, of course…

There is absolutely no reason for the NSA to give a flying fuck about what you or I think. There just isn't, and it'd be a waste of resources to even attempt something like this. People do exist (I am one of them) who think the NSA is doing a nasty job that isn't very appealing, but is absolutely necessary for me to be able to sleep in my bed at night safely. They may not have the best guidance from the government, b…

> Why must there be a conspiratorial astroturfing campaign taking place?

Regardless of how you feel about it, there is a conspiratorial astroturfing campaign taking place - it's a well documented NSA activity. Whether it accounts for specific comments is impossible to say, but it does exist. Why then is it so absurd to think that it may be in play?

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#144

Post by AndrewKemendo »

alecco wrote: post #114
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #86

Here's a story for you. I'm not a party to any of this. I've done nothing wrong, I've never been suspected of doing anything wrong, and I don't know anyone who has done anything wrong. I don't even mean that in the sense of "I pissed off the wrong people but technically haven't been charged." I mean that I am a vanilla, average, 9-5 working man of no interest to anybody. My geographical location is an accident of my…

Indeed, Obama and US congress made it clear we foreign people are just fair game for targeting. At least I'm lucky not to live in a country where targeted assassinations are going on. Also, it's pretty obvious terrorism is an excuse. The main reason is power and control. Corporate espionage and controlling US-unfriendly political movements is very likely the main goal.

>we foreign people are just fair game for targeting

That's not exactly true in that not every non-U.S. citizen is an interest to the U.S. Government.

To your broader point though, the idea that a state's Security, Defense or Military arms are singularly focused on foreign "threats" or potential threats is a fundamental assumption of nearly every international relations theory. Why would you think it would be otherwise?

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#145

Post by benaiah »

anigbrowl wrote: post #122
nitrogen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But by stockpiling vulnerabilities they are making civilians less safe. Offensive digital capabilities should never come at the expense of fixing software.

I ended up rescuing & then adopting a German Shepherd 18 months ago, without having planned such a thing. These days I don't even bother to read the the scarevertising from burglar alarm suppliers that turns up in the mailbox every month or two. I don't want to barricade myself into my own home or have some corporation constantly surveilling it for me. While it's far from an exact analogy, I actually feel quite a bit…

That's a great and well-reasoned argument that is clearly relevant to the current scenario.

Oh, wait, no, it's not. Your German Shepherd isn't planting bombs underneath the neighbours' porches in case they decide to rob your house.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#146

Post by [deleted] »

diminoten wrote: post #107
pa7ch wrote: post #30

Looking at the comments in support of the NSA here makes me suspect an astroturfing campaign is happening. Edit: I should add that my suspicion came from noticing that the vast majority of the comments when this was first posted seemed aligned in favor of the NSA's mission. It wasn't the presence of pro-NSA comments that was interesting but rather that these opinions were the overwhelming majority. This is, of course…

There is absolutely no reason for the NSA to give a flying fuck about what you or I think. There just isn't, and it'd be a waste of resources to even attempt something like this. People do exist (I am one of them) who think the NSA is doing a nasty job that isn't very appealing, but is absolutely necessary for me to be able to sleep in my bed at night safely. They may not have the best guidance from the government, b…

[deleted]

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#147

Post by JoachimS »

krapp wrote: post #36
pa7ch wrote: post #30

Looking at the comments in support of the NSA here makes me suspect an astroturfing campaign is happening. Edit: I should add that my suspicion came from noticing that the vast majority of the comments when this was first posted seemed aligned in favor of the NSA's mission. It wasn't the presence of pro-NSA comments that was interesting but rather that these opinions were the overwhelming majority. This is, of course…

You're probably right. No need to consider the arguments made by people who don't agree entirely with a particular point of view, or even discuss it at all. They're obviously just shills. Edit: Much of the 'pro NSA' comments I see here seem merely to suggest that not everything the NSA does is evil, and not every disclosure is necessarily useful. As often happens in threads like these, any such comments are dismissed…

Being paranoid does not mean they are not targeting you.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#148

Post by AndrewKemendo »

pa7ch wrote: post #46
krapp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right. No need to consider the arguments made by people who don't agree entirely with a particular point of view, or even discuss it at all. They're obviously just shills. Edit: Much of the 'pro NSA' comments I see here seem merely to suggest that not everything the NSA does is evil, and not every disclosure is necessarily useful. As often happens in threads like these, any such comments are dismissed…

In the interest of facilitating a open and fair discussion on the larger issue of state surveillance, I highly recommend checking out the 2014 Munk debates: http://www.munkdebates.com/debates/state-surveillance General Hayden and Glenn Greenwald are given fair time to discuss the issue and to give rebuttals to each other. Its much more informative then trying to parse HN comments to form an opinion about state survei…

Thanks for this I didn't know this existed. Interesting for sure to see the evidence presented on each side and how little actual data came through in the course of the debate.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#149

Post by diminoten »

rhizome wrote: post #137
diminoten wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words, if the US just left everyone alone, there would be zero threats to the US? Everyone acts rationally, and once you remove all rational reasons to attack the US, folks will simply stop doing it? Right.

Of course not, and that's a highly uncharitable reading bordering on bad faith. 1) the current state of affairs does not remove threats, because the agencies are starting trouble, too; 2) the people are the ones who have to live with the effects of something, in the US a result of a democratic system where the agencies may prioritize their own imaginations over citizens' actual lives, where the agencies may have perv…

Just to be clear, is there any form of this conversation where you admit to being anything except absolutely correct on all points you're attempting to make?

I get the feeling you're one of those folks who won't accept anything except what you've already concluded.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#150

Post by krapp »

JoachimS wrote: post #147
krapp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right. No need to consider the arguments made by people who don't agree entirely with a particular point of view, or even discuss it at all. They're obviously just shills. Edit: Much of the 'pro NSA' comments I see here seem merely to suggest that not everything the NSA does is evil, and not every disclosure is necessarily useful. As often happens in threads like these, any such comments are dismissed…

Being paranoid does not mean they are not targeting you.

True. But it also doesn't mean you actually know they are.
Post reply on HN