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

>remember that 1000s of paid russians were used to interrupt our election on sites like reddit.

Or so a 2017 version of the "red scare" goes, so that the military industrial complex can sell more weapons and more "safety", and the fingers can keep being pointed at some enemy or another. That way their budgets get approved, some poor countries pay the toll (who cares anyway), and they might even be able to plunder them afterwards. Worked wonders the last 30+ years.

Not to mention that the US sponsors tons of NGOs, magazines, organizations, events, political parties, etc, with favorable views to its interest all over the world, and has done that none stop since at least WWII, meddling with elections, paying journalists, etc -- and when nothing else works.

This is actually a tell-tale sign that whoever wrote this doesn't speak Russian. Let me explain why.

In English, the noun describing the nationality is also an adjective describing belonging to, or affiliation with, that nationality. E.g. "An American is driving an American car".

In Russian, this is not the case - they are different words, sharing the same root. Some examples (noun - adjective):

US: Amerikanets - Amerikanskiy EN: Anglichanin - Angliyskiy DE: Nemets - Nemetskiy AR: Arab - Arabskiy CN: Kitaets - Kitayskiy

There's one and only one exception, and that, ironically, is the word for "Russian": "russkiy". It's the same for both the noun and the adjective, and, as you can see by comparing it with the list above, morphologically it looks like an adjective. The historic explanation for that is that it originated from the time of the Varangian conquest of Eastern Slavic lands, when the population was referred as "the people of [belonging to] Rus" - "Russkie lyudi" - where Rus was the name of the Varangian tribe in question.

Anyway, what this means is that no native Russian speaker would use the word "Amerikanskiy" to refer to Americans. It only makes sense as an adjective in "American something". However, the addition of "-s" at the end to indicate plural unambiguously tells us that whoever wrote this, treated it as a noun. Which would make perfect sense for a native English speaker, for whom the two are naturally conflated.

And the most obvious explanation for that is that if you put the word "American" by itself into Google Translate, for example, it can't decide whether it's a noun or an adjective without context, so it has to assume one or the other. And it seems to be assuming adjective by default, so you get "Amerikanskiy" back.

Oh, and by the way, writing at as "Amerikanski", without the final "y", is also something that hints strongly that it's not a native speaker. A native speaker would likely transliterate it letter by letter, starting from Russian "Американский", yielding "Amerikanskiy". However, that final "y" is really short when spoken, which is why native English speakers often miss it entirely when transcribing.

On top of that, Polish uses "-ski" for the same words: "polski", "rosyjski", "angielski", "arabski" etc. In Polish, it's also a very common (and ethymologically related - think "of ...") ending for last names - e.g. Piłsudski. There are a lot more Poles, or at least families with Polish ancestry, in US in particular than there are Russians. As a result, Polish last names are pretty common and well-known, as is their spelling. So, that spelling is often applied to vaguely similarly looking and sounding Russian loanwords and transliterations, which also leads to dropping of that final "-y" in "-skiy".

So, definitely not Russian, and overall slightly more probable to be a native English speaker from US.

That's, of course, assuming that the wording wasn't deliberately mangled to look like fake Russian, in a double misdirection...

I think this form puts the emphasis on "how?" instead of "what?".

What do you want? - I want tea. How do you want your tea? - I want my tea hot with sugar.

This implies, without evidence, that all of the work that NSA does is directly related to keeping us safe. I wouldn't be so quick to lump it all together like that.

Then, of course, there's also the objection that "keeping us safe" is not an absolute. There are many ways to keep people safe, but they're so extremely onerous that we don't practice them. Totalitarian societies with pervasive open surveillance (think 1984) are very safe, for example, but at what cost? So clearly there's a balance, and one can't just dismiss any concerns about the cost of that safety by saying that it's necessary - it has to be demonstrated that it is (i.e. that the gains from that increased safety justify the losses from intrusiveness).

Trying to figure out who they are by analyzing the content of these posts is like trying to figure out if a child is lying by asking them repeatedly. Other sources of evidence are necessary.

Anyway, while their nationality isn't obvious, their childishness is. I think that's the only detail that can really be gleaned from the text itself.