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

Looks like bullshit. It does not match the vault7 leak, which is supposed to be from the very same NSA.

It is Russians. The classic example of Dunning Kruger effect. In a generally low IQ environment and primitive criminalized cultural environment they truly believe that what is enough to fool everyone around them, including the bosses (who are supposed to be really smart), will surely fool everyone else.

This is the phenomenon of negative selection of a cancer-like corrupted society (which ran for a three decades already) at work. They are literally decades behind of the technological progress and culture of the modern civilization.

They simply have no idea of what possible level of intelligence and sophistication could be found in places with decades of consistent high-IQ-based selection, like companies staffed with top 5% of MIT/Standford/Caltech/Berkeley graduates and what this kind of organization could do (think of Apple, Google, etc).

A high-tech US govt agency would never had such a crap in their folders. They are not a bunch of disconnected from reality, overconfident, self-deluded with their own primitive propaganda Russian punks.

> Also it's remarkably unfair for you to cherry pick our foreign policy misdeeds while leaving out all of the good we've done over that same time frame.

Considering the US government and it's MSM propaganda machine tell only one side of the story, I'd think you'd be comfortable with someone telling the other side of that story, if it's fairness you're seeking of course.

> "NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons"

This is just inaccurate, or at least purposefully misleading. The NSA did not just lose control of its "Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons".

They "lost control" of mainly a bunch of old exploits whose release will not matter because anyone who is running this old junk won't be updating their servers because of this news.

I wanted to link it but nothing came up in my bookmark search. As is typical. I think my bookmarks are too packed for search to even work right. So, I just described what I read in the past.

It's not so much about "making it look like Russia" as it is about making the current administration look illegitimate. There are literally trillions of dollars at stake, as well as very affluent lifestyles of some very influential people who have been running things for decades. They might end up being replaced by a different group of people, and they don't like that one bit. And they are fighting it tooth and nail. Just goes to show how little power is really vested in the officials we elect (yes, "we", I am a US citizen), and how much of it is wielded by the amorphous Washington DC apparatus that doesn't change no matter who you vote into office. Explicitly going after them, the way Trump promised in the final months of his campaign, is a suicide mission, if he actually decides to follow through on the threat. But I don't think he actually has the power or indeed the smarts to "drain the swamp" in any kind of meaningful way. This draining is long overdue, but there's no way to accomplish this without some world class statesmanship, and without having the intelligence community on your side, and Trump is at odds with both of those things.

And here's some Russian perspective on "draining the swamp": that's actually one thing Putin did when he came to power. Under Yeltsin, the government was basically run by oligarchs, and they could do whatever the hell they wanted. Putin and Russia's security/intelligence community that installed him laid down the ground rules, and made it clear that from there on out orders would be coming down from the Kremlin, not the other way around. One oligarch rebelled (Khodorkovsky) and was put in prison for a decade. Which, by the way, was entirely deserved. Most Russians were disappointed that other oligarchs didn't follow.

The issue with "draining the swamp" is that this creates voids that other people fill. Which they did under Putin. So even though oligarchs are pretty obedient now, there's a much stronger swamp sub-structure of Putin's pals under the covers which is darn near impossible to remove until he dies, and they're all under his control.

So armed with this perspective, I like two features of the US political system that many other Americans (native and naturalized) intensely dislike: the divided congress and the constant Mexican standoff between the executive and the legislative branch. If those guys could agree on anything, that's when we'd really be in trouble. Case in point is once again Russia, where the executive branch can request whatever laws it wants and be 100% sure they'll pass the Duma. The result is predictable: harebrained laws protecting the incumbent regime.