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Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

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Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#13

Post by remarkEon »

anotherturn wrote: post #9
remarkEon wrote: post #8

I haven't read enough broken English to take a gander at what the native language is for the authors of that...manifesto. Anyone have a good guess? There's some pretty common mistakes throughout ("peoples" for people, "Americans' having" for "Americans have").

It's likely to have been run through an author obfuscation tool which mangles the language to avoid stylometry detection.

I hadn't thought of that. Interesting.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#14

Post by iandanforth »

perlgeek wrote: post #7
iandanforth wrote: post #3

Can someone remind me why Snowden would be in a position to comment on if this release comprises a full or partial set of hacking tools? Specifically, does this imply that his cache of data included a list of these tools, or was his day to day job one such that he would have been normally in contact with this toolset?

> Can someone remind me why Snowden would be in a position to comment on if this release comprises a full or partial set of hacking tools? I wouldn't interpret that that tweet as "lost control of its full arsenal". It seems that say that, but then it's a tweet and length-limited. Maybe let's just wait until a more nuanced analysis surfaces?

It's further down in the thread: "Quick review of the #ShadowBrokers leak of Top Secret NSA tools reveals it's nowhere near the full library ..."

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#17

Post by itchyjunk »

Asking a president to do x,y or z by making this type of public statement probably implies it's geared towards the immediate readers and not some leader that might read it.

The security agencies might have made a lot of enemy over the years so it's not clear who benefits from this. Either financially or as ego boost.

The internet is definitely bigger that what most people might have predicted 20 years ago. So its not really a big surprising to see as much or even more power struggle than in real world battle fields.

Since every side has a propaganda to peddle, I, personally can draw no reasonable or coherent conclusions on what type of decisions are shaping the world I live in. But I am nonetheless curious to see how this all plays out in the coming years.

There is a related post on HN about this. [0]

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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14066596

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#18

Post by elastic_church »

tertius wrote: post #16
elastic_church wrote: post #11

ShadowBroker's blog posts always crack me up

http://pan.webis.de/clef17/pan17-web/author-obfuscation.html

Yes, I'm aware, or, I speculate that ShadowBrokers are utilizing this to unduly burden Eastern Europeans, Russians and Chinese hackers

but really, asymmetric information is asymmetric. We just don't know.

But now we can speculate that they are American citizens, with their mention of voting for the US President.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#20

Post by Dolores12 »

theocean154 wrote: post #15

Looking through some of the code and some of the docs, these look old. In absence of a lot of time or some missing docs, not sure how usable these things are.

It's usable. If i remember correctly, Cisco have patched few vulnerabilities from their 'free' version of leaked files.
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