211–220 of 232 posts
I read through all the comments here before beginning to read the article. The comments that say that the usability of the article format is very bad are correct. The online format is too cute by half, and impairs readability. But the article is well worth reading. As Danso points out, the journalist who did the reporting on this article is a renowned independent investigative reporter, James Bamford, who has broken…
I've made a reformatted copy for easier reading: https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/m... (Plain text version in the history, at https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/c... )
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What?
The job of spies around the world is to infiltrate infrastructure. The intelligence value of knowing how much power is being produce, and the option to turn them off in case of war is of high military value. So let say the French intelligence service decide to plant one on a nuclear power plan in the US. Sadly however it has a bug which goes off and partial shuts down the reactor. A meltdown happens, killing a few th…
I read through all the comments here before beginning to read the article. The comments that say that the usability of the article format is very bad are correct. The online format is too cute by half, and impairs readability. But the article is well worth reading. As Danso points out, the journalist who did the reporting on this article is a renowned independent investigative reporter, James Bamford, who has broken…
> As a substantive comment on the article, let me say that I find it interesting that Snowden himself thinks it is appalling that NSA's internal security auditing is so poor that NSA can't even tell which documents Snowden disclosed to journalists, nor can it tell how many other leakers may still be on its staff. This seems to be a completely plausible claim, and that would be a reason why many American voters or lea…
This is probably already happening, though it isn't China or Russia. http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-to-have-offered-...
Two key 'new' things from this article, that were previously unknown: 1. The NSA exploited the firmware of a Syrian core internet router, and bricked it by mistake. This was an "oh shit" moment (sic). So in it's eagerness to scoop up all digital communications, it killed the majormost way for citizens to communicate while in the midst of a civil war. Great. 2. There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% autom…
Another interesting item I hadn't heard before is that Snowden tried to leave clues as to which files he copied, and which files he looked at but didn't take: But he believes the NSA's audit missed those clues and simply reported the total number of documents he touched—1.7 million. (Snowden says he actually took far fewer.) “I figured they would have a hard time,” he says. “I didn't figure they would be completely i…
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The Chinese spies are not in the NSA. They're in the Beltway Bandit and Silicon Valley companies, copying the source code for the drivers used in industrial machinery and weapons systems. They are smart enough to make spying into a profitable business instead of just a mechanism to move tax dollars to the right people. And with respect to using it as a tool of oppression, we simply don't have anything new to teach th…
There are plenty more hard-working, tax-paying Chinese engineers and high skilled workers making up for the occasional spying incident. And the high-earning engineers pay much more in taxes to help fund the American counterespionage programs. It seems a worthy trade for US businesses.
Workers in foreign countries and spying in those countries are not necessarily related in any way, aside from the occasional discount windfall that states get from assets with the right sense of patriotism, personal weakness, or political alignment.
There isn't really a trade happening there. The Chinese spying hurts everyone who is not a state-owned copycat company, regardless of their country of origin. The American spying hurts everyone who conducts business over the Internet or travels internationally. The ordinary Chinese people and American people get screwed both ways, because they're unimportant nobodies to the superpower state actors. So let's not get all defensive and start pointing fingers at each other, ok?
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>There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says. I have peers who have known about that for a solid 6 months who talk about it. It's nothing new. The Gov't has been working on stuff like that, with stuff like that & have those ideas at the core of everything they do for years.
Who are these peers of yours? ;]
And that's exactly what I'm doing through JackPair, a low-cost voice encryption device that empower every citizen to protect their privacy over the phone:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/620001568/jackpair-safe...
It uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange and stream cipher with keystream from pseudo random number generator seeded from DH. It's similar to one-time key pad with no key management and zero-configuration.
As Snowden mentioned in the article, by adopting end-to-end encryption technologies like this, we can collectively end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.
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The Chinese spies are in China. They install malware onto the computers of American engineers in Silicon Valley, which then takes on the task of copying the source code needed for critical software systems. This is the 21st century. There's no need to put yourself in physical danger by entering the country you wish to spy upon. Everything is done electronically.
I wish people backed their claims with evidence.
I prefer to think that everyone should always question everything I say, and independently verify my claims with their own trusted sources. Then, if they find contradictory information, they are free to share it, so that I might possibly disabuse myself of my prior misconceptions. (As you see, I also have need for wishes.)
Of course, if you have actual research funding for me, that's a different story. I'll give you as much evidence as you can afford.
Talk is cheap, and proof will cost you. If you want evidence, you might have to grab a shovel and start digging.