91–100 of 169 posts
NSA's job is to bug computers before they even enter Amazon.
Do you all expect to see "SECRET NSA WAREHOUSE" on the packing slip?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seem to remember it being popular in Hollywood. Enemy of the State, The Simpsons.. even AAA movies like Swordfish.. "The Carnivore program, reading every ISP subscribers email- I did what every federal judge wouldn't do"
And of course, Enemy of the State is a sort of sequel to The Conversation, a (great) movie from the '70s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it. Why is an administrative non-profit at all interesting here?
You're using public sources of information to refute theories of where a highly-secret and officially-denied program might operate. That makes no sense. Whatever office, department, or contractor does the NSA's package intercepts, all public sources will describe it as something innocent and unrelated.
I have no particular objection to saying, "this stuff would be secret so of course there would be no information on it". Oddly, nobody has actually tried that.
However, that still goes back to the point I raised: why Alexandria? It's not particularly convenient to the NSA. It's not convenient to shippers. It doesn't have anything special in the way of infrastructure. So it would be quite an odd choice. Possible, but it's not the smoking gun the article makes it out to be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Those people are contractors.
I'll have to be explicit since this seems hard to understand: You're the NSA. Who do you trust more: A) (Perhaps the) CTO of a defense contractor that only works for you that you've had a 20 year working relationship with? B) The bright eyed young scientists working for that contractor in a building 3000 miles away? Or put another way, despite the Snowden leak, I'll bet you any amount of money that the NSA is still i…
In one paragraph, you seem to be saying that the NSA wouldn't trust the employees of contractors. In the next paragraph, you tell me that the NSA is still "really fucking tight" with Booz Allen. These two ideas seem completely contradictory.
But I think you might be suggesting that the NSA has given up on the low-level employees, and is now having the executives of these companies do the work directly. Which seems completely ludicrous to me, as no C-level at a company like this (even the CTO) is going to have the requisite skills, and even if he did he's not going to have the time.
You only phrase your headline as a question if the answer is No, but you really want it to be Yes.
It fits. The answer is almost certainly No (an honest mistake is far more likely, and nefarious activity wouldn't look like this anyway), and you can tell from the way they write (e.g. vastly exaggerating the import of the tracking info) that they deeply want this to be true.
The obvious explanation here is that the USPS fucked up. As the tweet says, you'd think the NSA program would be more subtle. Further, there isn't much in the way of intelligence presence in Alexandria. So what's more likely: that the NSA does this program in a secret location that's still right next to all the non-secret stuff, and they can't cover up the tracking data, or that the USPS accidentally sent a package t…
> Further, there isn't much in the way of intelligence presence in Alexandria. ARE YOU SERIOUS? Come. On.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It fits. The answer is almost certainly No (an honest mistake is far more likely, and nefarious activity wouldn't look like this anyway), and you can tell from the way they write (e.g. vastly exaggerating the import of the tracking info) that they deeply want this to be true.
Did they _actually_ write an article with a tweet as the _only_ evidence?
HEY, KIDS! Do YOU know what time it is?! [wild audience applause] THAT'S RIGHT, it's time for WHICH IS MORE LIKELY? ! [intro music] Today on Which is More Likely? , we're looking at a replacement Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard that was shipped to Alexandria, Virginia, instead of Seattle, Washington. What a blunder! [slide whistle sound effect] Now put your thinking caps on and ponder, WHICH IS MORE LIKELY? ! • The largest…
NOTE: In “War and Peace” - Tolstoy’s masterpiece - there’s a Russian officer (Prince Andrey IIRC) who realizes the insane tragedy of human history: While the Prussian and Russian army coalition (hundreds of thousands of men, with families and lives left behind…) is about to face the fiercest opponent of their era (Napoleon, is a legend among Russian military officials) the two Generals (Prussian and Russian) are fighting and sabotaging each other about who is going to lead the battle… Until it’s too late. They both get easily crashed, without putting up a fight.
So you can play naive, stupid, stunned or cunning all you like but human history is FULL of stupid people in position of power.
[1] Quora: “Does the NSA have better engineers than Facebook or Google?”: http://www.quora.com/Engineering-in-Silicon-Valley/Does-the-...
[2] “BlackHat USA 2011: SSL And The Future Of Authenticity”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA&feature=youtu.be
[3] “K. Alexander lies to congress” - http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-chief-lies-to-congress/5339...
Buy a new boxed computer with cash from a local supplier. I doubt the NSA has installed something on every single computer.
Some OS developers are sufficiently concerned that CPUs are NSA-modified to not trust, say, Intel's rdrand instruction anymore! It may very well be that every single Linux system running on a recent or semi-recent CPU has a rdrand instruction returning a number "nullyfying" (from the NSA's point of view) the previous entropy sources XOR'ing. You may call me "paranoid" but... Many people who were categorized as parano…