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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

#111

Post by RodericDay »

doktrin wrote: post #48
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #46

From the Medium post linked ( https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/dont-forget-your-base-867... ) - Don’t care if you swapped wives with Mr Putin, double down on it, “Putin is not just my firend he is my BFF”. - Don’t care if the election was hacked or rigged, celebrate it “so what if I did, what are you going to do about it”. This has got to be a fake group trying to discredit Trump right? I don't like him or what he'…

> surely surely his supporters don't subscribe to at least the latter view there? You must not have very many conservative friends on Facebook. "Russia didn't write the emails" has to be one of the most popular memes of the last 6 months.

How is that a "meme"?

I don't know any conservatives but every single leftist I know thinks that russophobia is at absolutely deranged levels, as a vehicle for Clinton apologism.

The idea that "Russia decided the election" is absurd, but repeated often enough, is starting to be taken as truth by those who find it palatable.

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

#112

Post by throwaway71958 »

doktrin wrote: post #108
atemerev wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. While those are still somewhat plausible (I am Russian, and I might have occasionally used all of these ironically), it was "POTUS" and "SCOTUS" that made me 99% sure that this text was written by an American (or at least a US insider). You guys love your acronyms.

I honestly don't know why you guys are trying to divine identity based on textual clues like this. It's safe to assume every stylistic and linguistic choice is deliberate.

Sure. But if that's what you really think, then you don't get to assume that the DNC was hacked "by the Russians". Agreed?

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

#115

Post by willstrafach »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #112
doktrin wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know why you guys are trying to divine identity based on textual clues like this. It's safe to assume every stylistic and linguistic choice is deliberate.

Sure. But if that's what you really think, then you don't get to assume that the DNC was hacked "by the Russians". Agreed?

Are you able to elaborate on how this case is related to the DNC hacks? ShadowBrokers was never accused of being the same as Guccifer2, as far as I understand.

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

#116

Post by celticninja »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #79
ooqr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that was GP's point. The text is intentionally garbled with no identifiable first-language bias.

Well, there's no Russian first-language bias in that text for sure. Another argument in favor of the opinion that this was written by an American: the author seems to be well versed in the memes of the US political discourse. Someone from outside the US is unlikely to even know or care about Trump's "movement", or who "Bannon" is, or "drain the swamp", or "white privilege" etc. They're also unlikely to abbreviate "Ne…

That's a terrible analysis, I'm not from the US and know all of the above and would abbreviate NYT. I'm not hugely into US politics but I'm not ignorant of it either. Hell the BBC, Der Spiegel and Le Monde all covered Bannon losing his NSC seat.

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

#117

Post by doktrin »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #112
doktrin wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know why you guys are trying to divine identity based on textual clues like this. It's safe to assume every stylistic and linguistic choice is deliberate.

Sure. But if that's what you really think, then you don't get to assume that the DNC was hacked "by the Russians". Agreed?

> if that's what you really think, then you don't get to assume that the DNC was hacked "by the Russians". Agreed?

Are you saying there's some letter written in broken english that's being used as proof of Russian involvement in the DNC hacks?

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

#118

Post by cyphunk »

corndoge wrote: post #10
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").

Most likely an American trying to write in an Eastern European accent.

this. and probably an american that had not lived outside the US long enough to notice how over the top the effort comes off as.

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

#119

Post by nickpsecurity »

hl5 wrote: post #39

Obviously, Perl is the NSA top language choice due to it's built in support for obfuscation and job security.

Although you're joking, Perl was invented to make an NSA project easier to develop. That project was first, high-assurance VPN: BLACKER. It was also NSA's attempt to do something secure for once since they lost the argument to INFOSEC co-founder, Roger Schell, where they thought only communications security, not computer security, mattered. They contracted it to TRW who made a lot of secure stuff & government systems in general back then. Larry Walls was a smart, properly-lazy programmer working at TRW who wanted to make irritating parts of his job easier with better tools. The resulting tool, PERL, had much more impact than BLACKER VPN. ;)

Whereas, the NSA's project failed initially because the team couldn't design a security kernel that had great security and acceptable performance. Told NSA they'd have to pick one. Schell told NSA he knew a guy with a design, GEMSOS, with both properties. NSA reluctantly used GEMSOS in BLACKER. The first, highly-secure VPN w/ general-purpose kernel was born. Who knows what the deployment or usability side of it was, though. Classification rules kept them from publishing on it for a decade or so where it then got paywalled. Classification is probably why Larry Walls didn't say much about BLACKER when describing its history. At least ones I read.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/213253/?arnumber=213253

http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse443-s12/docs/ch6.pdf

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

#120

Post by diminoten »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #82
ktta wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. The GP is implying that they are Russian with this >since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." But the person who replied is saying how the grammatical obfuscation doesn't look like something that's done by a Russian but by an English speaker who is trying to sound like a Russian with bad English. Because a Russian with bad English wouldn't mak…

To my ear, this obfuscation sounds Middle Eastern, due to the frequent use of "-ing" in verbs whether it belongs there or not. I know an Iranian guy who does this a lot.

The whole point is to feed it through translation services dozens of times until the meaning remains but the actual word selection is super poor and completely unidentifiable.

It's weird to me that you're trying to push this to blame another group so quickly, especially with an 8 day old account.

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