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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

#301

Post by NDlurker »

microtonal wrote: post #270
throwaway71958 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit too good for an unskilled speaker. Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. They're wrong.

Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. Or it is Russian and they intentionally formulated this as cartoonesque Russian, so that everyone says "this can't possibly be Russian, it's someone who tries to put the blame on Russia". The problem is that if this comes from a government power, it is likely that…

Why do people keep saying it's Russian or someone faking Russian? Clearly it was written to avoid identification by text analysis or whatever it's called.

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

#302

Post by willstrafach »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #294
pstuart wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a third agency that focuses on securing our digital infrastructure?

How about NSA just does this, per its name, and the offensive signals intelligence gets handled by the CIA?

CIA is primarily HUMINT (and intel triage, covert operations, etc) so their focus is going to be on the end points for individual targets. SIGINT is a gigantic field and a shift like this would essentially just a merger of NSA's SID into CIA while leaving NSA with just IAD.

Genuinely curious, what would be the gain in doing that?

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

#303

Post by Dylan16807 »

M_Grey wrote: post #289
Dylan16807 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prejudice and discrimination are close enough to synonyms. You shouldn't be confused by the word swap.

...But neither of us said Prejudice either!

"It's the popular thing to assume these days. It's also very insulting to Russian people in my opinion. But I guess it's ok to be prejudice towards some group of people but not others."

Is that not the comment you were calling correct?

That's what "the person [you] replied to" was talking about, that use of the word prejudice.

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

#304

Post by willstrafach »

iandanforth wrote: post #235
iandanforth wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's further down in the thread: "Quick review of the #ShadowBrokers leak of Top Secret NSA tools reveals it's nowhere near the full library ..."

Replying to self because I just got around to watching the movie. In his final days before the leak Snowden was part of the counter espionage cyber division as an NSA contractor. He was actively hacking and preventing hacks from China. These might not be part of the toolset he used, but its reasonable to believe he would have been aware of them and had access to them.

I disagree with this. These tools appear to be for information collection, not offensive cyber operations.

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

#305

Post by M_Grey »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #303
M_Grey wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...But neither of us said Prejudice either!

"It's the popular thing to assume these days. It's also very insulting to Russian people in my opinion. But I guess it's ok to be prejudice towards some group of people but not others." Is that not the comment you were calling correct? That's what "the person [you] replied to" was talking about, that use of the word prejudice.

This is a discussion about the Russian government, it doesn't really have much to do with Russian people in general.

That is what the person I replied to actually said, and the comment I was clearly referring to; the point being of course, that a discussion of the Russian government has no more to do with the Russian people than the Russian government does.

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

#306

Post by Dylan16807 »

M_Grey wrote: post #305
Dylan16807 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's the popular thing to assume these days. It's also very insulting to Russian people in my opinion. But I guess it's ok to be prejudice towards some group of people but not others." Is that not the comment you were calling correct? That's what "the person [you] replied to" was talking about, that use of the word prejudice.

This is a discussion about the Russian government, it doesn't really have much to do with Russian people in general. That is what the person I replied to actually said, and the comment I was clearly referring to; the point being of course, that a discussion of the Russian government has no more to do with the Russian people than the Russian government does.

Two points then:

1. When you made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14069152 you may have thought it "clearly" referred to the sentence by burkaman, but multiple people thought you were refuting burkaman and referring to snowpanda's comment.

2. Even though you were referring to burkaman's comment, he was directly talking about the sentence that used the word prejudice, and arguing that it was not prejudice. Your claim in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14069723 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14071992 that burkaman was not saying anything about prejudice is untrue. He was directly refuting a claim of prejudice.

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

#307

Post by cyphunk »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #163
cyphunk wrote: post #110

A good time to remember the official US Intelligence Community statement and policy/lie on 0days, as given post-heartbleed: When Federal agencies discover a new vulnerability in commercial and open source software – a so-called “Zero day” vulnerability because the developers of the vulnerable software have had zero days to fix it – it is in the national interest to responsibly disclose the vulnerability rather than t…

A good time to remember the actual policy of the US government on 0-days (the so-called VEP), which is more nuanced than the tinfoil hat crowd is willing to understand. https://epic.org/privacy/cybersecurity/vep/

Interesting read. Anyone know where the vulns disclosed under so-called VEP are listed? Effectiveness the VEP policy, which the FBI directory calls "informal", would be measurable now when comparing disclosed via VEP vs undisclosed/disclosed via leak.

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

#308

Post by [deleted] »

nyolfen wrote: post #176
throwaway71958 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The peoples" is unlikely. "-ing" after most verbs is unlikely. "the" is unlikely before "Freedom Caucus" and "NSC". There's no "the" in Russian, and ESL speakers often omit it, or put it where it doesn't really belong. The word "caucus" in itself is unlikely: I've never even heard of it before I moved to the US, it's not in common use abroad. "Whose" is unlikely. "To destroying" is very unlikely. "Will be happening"…

'freedom caucus' is a proper noun referring to an organization, they wouldn't need to know the meaning in order to use it. also you seem to ignore the possibility of using some machine translation assistance (eg for short phrases or sentences) which could account both for irregularities and correct verb conjugations.

[deleted]

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

#309

Post by kbenson »

suls wrote: post #279
kbenson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynical and conspiracy theory believing person might suspect that regardless of all the reasons stated for the release the last one, namely the attack in Syria, is the only one that actually prompted this. I don't necessarily subscribe to the whole "Russia is controlling everything" line (there still so much that's unknown for sure), but it sure is easy to see a connection between Trump launching missiles against…

> [..] with an embarrassing and costly release of secret information belonging to the security apparatus in the U.S. by what many people say is a front for the Russian security apparatus. I have difficulties interpreting your statement. Are you implying US security services are "a front for the rudsian security apparatus"?

No, I'm stating that some people have accused the shadow brokers and other hackers that have released U.S. assets of actually being fronts for Russia.

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

#310

Post by kahnpro »

labster wrote: post #266
pstuart wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a third agency that focuses on securing our digital infrastructure?

Then we'd need a fourth agency to coordinate between them, and don't forget the fifth agency in charge of oversight.

And don't forget to give all the money and power to the offensive agency, while keeping the oversight agency to an intern in a broom closet somewhere.
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