181–190 of 206 posts
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User error, for one. People get sloppy and reuse a not-so-one-time-pad. That alone compromises secrets with frequency analysis.
Yeah that's obvious and telling me what I already know and pointed out. I thought there was some other cryptographic issue.
I wonder.
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Yes, we actually can get yearly bonuses though they are minimal and tied to the performance rating process and tenure to the agency (at least at my agency). For those that are interested, I’d check out the General Schedule pay scales on the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) website. OPM is the agency responsible for providing guidance to federal agencies on all matters related to HR. OPM’s pay scales: https://ww…
"I get to do things that I would never get to do in the private sector" well I know people who switched from NSA to private sector and pretty much keep doing the same things :) So I guess it depends :)
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Defense is always harder than offense when it comes to computers.
Computers at its core have no clue about offense or defense, that is in the realm of context (and lawyers).
Computer security VERY MUCH cares about offense vs. defense.
The attacker only has to win once and he wins. The defender has to win every single time or he loses.
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> you don't know what you're talking about. Personal attacks aren't welcome here. The government has the money . As evidenced by their defense budget. The government does not pay the money to their employees. As evidenced by NSA employees making less than high-grade truck drivers. The government does pay billions to corporations such as Lockheed or Booz, etc. SO let's recap: they have the money , they just choose not…
Saying you don't know what you're talking about is not a personal attack when you seem to be going out of your way to prove me right. "The government" is not a gigantic neolithic behemoth doing whatever it wants whenever it wants. You might be surprised to learn that there are in fact three branches of government in the United States. Congress has passed more than one law detailing the manner in which federal employe…
It's attacking the person, not the central point. Thus making it ad-hominem.
> You might be surprised to learn that there are in fact three branches of government in the United States
See above comment.
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Obviously a revelation on Twitter about a secretive organisation's workings should always be taken with a grain of salt. However these sorts of reports aren't too uncommon, and it surprises me how there's a lot of pro-china commentators in communities such as HN who seem to glaze over these sorts of things and still aggressively promote the "Chinese way of doing things" is superior to whatever western value or opinio…
If you study the grammar on a lot of these posts, all over the internet even, you may come to the conclusion that the posters are government plants or Chinese CCP zealots. I wouldn't rule out a massive propoganda campaign; HN, mainstream news article comments, suspicious Quora "questions" about China with manipulative "answers", Confucius Institutes!..
I've read plenty of news articles that view China and their foreign policy with suspiciously rose tinted glasses. Especially around the One Belt One Road initiative.
>But the CIA’s interim system contained a technical error: It connected back architecturally to the CIA’s main covert communications platform. When the compromise was suspected, the FBI and NSA both ran “penetration tests” to determine the security of the interim system. They found that cyber experts with access to the interim system could also access the broader covert communications system the agency was using to i…
How stupid it is to spend so much effort on compartmentalising their intel net in the country, but have all spies report by dialing in into the same website in a country employing few brigades worth of people reading tcpdumps 24/7? Compare that to one way coded messages over hf radio: a place for pick up of a dead drop in n days is broadcasted, then it is picked up by a man who reads it, destroys it, and gtfos from t…
Having a shortwave radio in your possession is justification enough to haul you in for questing in some countries.
There is also relatively little "radio traffic" to inspect relative to internet traffic.
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I don't think that's it. I personally think the best window into this world is William Binney and his thinthread project. He developed thinthread to protect Americans privacy, and it only was going to cost a handful of millions. His functioning program was scrapped for a billion dollar program that didn't protect Americans privacy and that didn't work because all it did was make the haystack so big finding the needle…
Binney is a complete crank.. I'd be very cautious of any first person narratives that he tells, especially when he paints himself as the hero.
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So you are not condemning: - death penalty - death penalty for relatives of criminals - death penalty for pregnant relatives I'd love to know what country you live in and if you would condone laws that allow this.
Don't forget the part where they carry the sentence in front of civilians.
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From my brief view into a federal agency: Employee breakdown is as follows: 1/6 extremely capable and dedicated high performers 1/6 extremely capable and dedicated but go home at 5pm 1/3 average (not going to screw things up massively, but also never going to make a large contribution) 1/3 shocking (as in where do you even find people this useless and disagreeable - if you’re lucky their managers put them in an offic…
So 1/3 high performers, 1/3 average, and 1/3 low performers? Not a particularly amazing revelation. And why the differentiation between folks who leave after 8 hours of work and those that don't?
You literally work inside a room with no windows, poor ventilation, and sound dampening. Anyone who doesn't go home after 8 hours has something wrong with them.